Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Raising Hare was published by Pantheon books in 2024; it’s a relatively new and short book (2024; 284 pages) by Chloe Dalton, who worked for the UK government as a foreign-policy advisor. But her regular work receded in importance when she came across a baby female European hare—a leveret—huddled in the bush in her country residence. Her decision to take in the orphaned baby changed her life and character in many ways, all recounted in this wonderful memoir which has won many prizes. I recommend it very highly.
The book is not mawkish at all, but observant and thoughtful. Most of it is devoted to her perceptions of the hare (which she never names), an animal that she lets run free indoors and out, though it usually spends most of its time in her house. The narrative lasts three years, during which the hare has six leverets of her own. Dalton becomes engrossed with its behavior and studies the literature on hares extensively in addition to her own constant observations. All this results in the reader becoming deeply educated about an animal that few see—except running away at a distance.
It turns out that hares are not only playful, but extraordinarily patient, sitting in one spot for hours. (The leverets are largely left alone after birth, huddled inconspicuously in the vegetation save for a brief daily period when the mother suckles them.) The adults, too, spend a lot of their time flattened in places where predators are less likely to attack them. After all, hares have been called “nature’s buffet,” for they are herbivores but are attacked by all manner of carnivores.
Dalton spends a fair amount of time in introspection, wondering what it’s like to be a hare (a question never answered) and seeing how she herself has been changed by the constant presence of a wild animal. (I have to say that I’ve gone through something similar with ducks.) At any rate, the writing is first-rate, the natural history is thorough, and this is one of the best human-and-biology books I’ve ever read.
Two friends who have good taste in books recommended Raising Hare, and I didn’t look up any reviews before I read it. Now I will, so I’ve just read the NYT review here. An excerpt:
Despite less-than-encouraging words from a local conservationist about the leveret’s chances of survival, Dalton committed. For anyone who has hand-fed an unweaned animal in the hopes of saving its life, her anecdote about desperately eye-droppering lamb formula into the leveret’s mouth on their first night together will spark an instant flashback.
As she found out, the internet is full of information about rabbits (the hare’s smaller domesticated cousin), but there’s not much on hares themselves. She dug deep into the research, even consulting the 18th-century poetry of William Cowper for clues on which solids to feed the leveret, and reports, “Porridge oats were the final revelation. When I sprinkled a few oats in a bowl, it swallowed them with every appearance of satisfaction.”
Dalton did not name, tame or cage the animal, turning her house into a free-range hare bed-and-breakfast. Its behavior began to change her own: “I was moved by the leveret’s dignity, the sense of well-being and calm it spread, and the simplicity of its life.”
Adapting her own work-driven existence to the daily rhythms and environmental awareness introduced by her furry new housemate, she had an epiphany: “I’d been waiting for life to go back to normal, but if I could derive this much pleasure from something so simple, what else might be waiting to be discovered?” The irony of learning to slow down from an animal known for its speed is not lost here.
. . . To divulge much more of the book’s arc would rob the reader of its most revealing moments, especially as the hare matures and her priorities shift. But Dalton’s clear, measured prose and Denise Nestor’s delicate drawings provide a gentle cottagecore vibe and a bit of solace in a world that has now returned to an even more frenetic state. In “Raising Hare,” nature, indeed, takes its course.
The review is, in my view, far less enthusiastic than the book deserves, so here’s a bit from the Guardian review:
The cover and endpapers of Chloe Dalton’s debut, Raising Hare (beautifully illustrated by Denise Nestor) at first seem to resemble these children’s books: there are no rabbits, but hares, doing what hares do: inspecting berries, leaping, boxing, feeding young and gazing outward, apparently, towards the reader. The story of this excellent book is in one sense familiar: a narrator, experiencing a rupture or crisis, is transformed through a magical encounter with a “wild” creature, a hare. But there is much more going on here. As hare and narrator enter into conversation, their strange dialogue begins to shed light on our relationship with our non-human neighbours, bringing into question assumptions about control, consent, boundaries and autonomy. Unlike my daughter’s books, this is a sustained and patient attempt to cross the species abyss, and to see the world through the hare’s eyes.
That’s more like it. Here’s the cover, and you can click on it to access the Amazon review.
The NYT gives a photo of Dalton’s hare attributed to Dalton, so I don’t think I’m violating any journalistic rules to show those photos. Isn’t she beautiful?
(From the NYT): The hare at the heart of Chloe Dalton’s memoir.Credit…Chloe Dalton
Here’s an 18½-minute video of Dalton reading from the book and discussing its contents, including the changes the hare wrought in Dalton herself.
By now the whole world–at least the world that reads the news–knows about Nicholas Kristof’s long NYT op-ed column accusing Israel of systemic, institutional sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners. For those who already hate Israel, his unsubstantiated allegations will serve only to reinforce their hatred and antisemitism. For those who are open-minded or sympathetic to Israel, well, they do have to admit that the allegations are unsubstantiated. But, as the saying goes, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Kristof is no dummy, and surely he knew that his claims would be snapped up by Israel haters and antisemites.
That is a good reason for Kristof to have verified all his sources and ensure that they had no history of bias (or at least the bias should have been made explicit)—something he did not do. This is in contrast to the Civil Commission on the October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children report, documenting Hamas’s sexual abuse during its invasion of Israel. The Commission has verification of all of its sources, including forensic evidence like photographs and bodies.
As most of Kristof’s critics have said, it is impossible to affirm that there was never any abuse of Palestinians by the IDF. But if you make an accusation that the abuse was both widespread and systemic, you’d better be able to back it up with evidence. Unfortunately, the NYT sees no need for that. relying on Kristof’s two Pulitzer Prizes and his claim that he interviewed witnesses brought forth by groups or people who can hardly be said to be unbiased. But yes, his claims should be investigated, but he would have to help the investigators by providing identities and documentation. I wouldn’t hold my breath until he does that.
In the meantime, it’s not hard to find criticisms online. I’ll just link to five new ones, showing an excerpt from each. I haven’t found people approving of Kristof’s claims, but then again I don’t read the kind of site that would do that. And those sites would have to independently try to verify Kristof’s claims, which nobody has done.
In [Kristof’s] piece, published curiously as an op-ed rather than a news investigation, Kristof accuses the State of Israel, its prison system, the IDF, and the Shin Bet of systemic rape of Palestinian prisoners—primarily men, but also women. These are serious accusations, and it is certainly possible, if not inevitable, that abuse, even sexual, occurs within the prison system, as it does in almost every prison system worldwide. Whenever there is real evidence of such acts, it must be properly investigated and the guilty punished. However, for accusations to be taken seriously, they must be backed by actual evidence. In this regard, Kristof’s column is an absolute failure.
The column falls short of almost any journalistic standard, according to [Hebrew University professor Danny] Orbach. He points out that the reporter relies on only 14 unverified and uncorroborated testimonies, lacking details that would allow for investigation, verification, or refutation, to claim that systemic sexual abuse is widespread throughout the Israeli prison system. For comparison, in 2020, approximately 16,000 complaints of sexual assault and harassment by guards against prisoners were recorded in the United States, with only a tiny fraction proven to be based on real incidents. Of Kristof’s witnesses, only two identify themselves by name or provide details that could help locate the case. One of them, Sami al-Sai, is presented by Kristof as a “journalist.” In reality, he is a Hamas propagandist who cheered the mass murders of October 7—hardly a reliable source. At the very least, Kristof owed his readers a disclosure regarding who this man is. Prominent journalists have already pointed out that the two identified witnesses provided Kristof with “reheated noodles”—versions that changed and became “more sophisticated” over time, adding new gruesome details every time they spoke to a different reporter.
If it ended there, one could dismiss Kristof’s article as merely a negligent op-ed, but Orbach stresses that from here, things deteriorate. He explains that a large portion of the anonymous testimonies come from Euro-Med Monitor, which Kristof presents as a “human rights monitor.” In reality, this is a Hamas front organization whose chairman, Ramy Abdu, cheered October 7 and spread debunked lies and conspiracy theories—such as massacres at Shifa Hospital, organ harvesting, or the claim that humanitarian aid contained only burial shrouds—claims not taken seriously even by most anti-Israel journalists during the war. Unsurprisingly, Kristof mentions nothing to his readers about this organization’s reputation. Furthermore, another “source” Kristof cited in a video interview as a “man in the know” is actually an Israeli Hamas supporter and delusional conspiracist who was dismissed from the university where he worked due to sexual offenses. A “man in the know,” indeed.
The interviewees, of course, were not found or selected by chance. This raises the question: who was Kristof’s “fixer”? Reporters who do not know the language almost always rely on local fixers, and Kristof claims he found the interviewees through “human rights organizations,” which Orbach suggests points to a pre-planned direction by Euro-Med or its ilk. In the Palestinian arena, there is a documented pattern of witness coaching and bias, a phenomenon rarely caught but exposed during the “Jenin Massacre” libel that never was in 2002.
. . . . So, what do we have here? A “respected war correspondent,” winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, accusing a state of systematic rape based on 14 testimonies—12 of them anonymous, two public but highly problematic—with zero disclosure regarding the witnesses or the biases of the organizations providing the information. Unlike the Civil Commission’s report on October 7, Orbach emphasizes that Kristof made no real attempt to cross-reference the testimonies, used no forensic evidence, and did not attempt to interview Israelis who served in prisons or civilian doctors. The only senior Israeli he did interview, Ehud Olmert, apparently never said what was attributed to him.
This is not Kristof’s first time. In the early 2000s, Kristof championed a Cambodian anti-prostitution activist, calling her a “hero” in column after column. When it turned out she was a fraud who staged the scenes that brought her fame, Kristof admitted the mistake and the paper apologized. His current column shows that his tendency to believe anyone who seems “just” to him, without critical source analysis, remains intact. He has learned nothing, Orbach concludes.
Nicholas Kristof raped my dog. At least that is what I have heard, from an anonymous source. A source who is intensely hostile to the New York Times columnist. And that’s good enough for me. Now I come to think of it, my pet pug has had a strange look on his face lately.
As it happens, the rumor that I have just attempted to spread is far less lurid and fanciful than the one that the New York Times chose to spread around the world this week.
In a piece which has already been widely debunked, Kristof claimed that Israeli prison guards routinely use rape as a method of torture on Palestinian prisoners. The piece portrayed Israeli prison guards and soldiers as rapists, sadists and akin to Nazi prison camp guards. Perhaps even worse.
. . . So here we get to the true question. Why would anyone make such a claim? And why would a purportedly serious newspaper publish it?
The reasons are several-fold. The first is that the New York Times story landed just a day before an anticipated report into Hamas’ use of sexual violence on October 7, 2023.
Many of us did not need further evidence of the crimes of that day. But the release of the commission of inquiry sets out in remorseless detail the “systematic, widespread” use of rape by Hamas on that day and the way in which sexual violence was “integral” to their attack.
It lays out the calculated way in which Hamas terrorists raped men and women on the day of the attack and raped Israeli hostages — men and women — while they were held in captivity in Gaza.
The findings include descriptions from footage, first-hand, eyewitness accounts and from mortuary photographs of the way in which Hamas members gang-raped women while killing them, and even raped their victims after killing them. It is impossible to think of crimes worse than those which Hamas committed on that day.
Unless you are Nicholas Kristof.
Because if you know that a report is coming out into Hamas’ use of sexual violence then it is clearly very important to invent a claim even more appalling than the real-life crimes of Hamas.
For the New York Times, it seems to have been crucial to throw a lie into the system in order to overwhelm or block any sympathy or understanding that might go in the direction of the Israelis.
The New York Times has leveled claims of antisemitism against a number of people in the past year. Sometimes accurately, sometimes not. But none of the worst things that Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes have ever said even comes close to the lie the New York Times has printed in its own pages. A paper that claims to be opposed to conspiracy theories has just mainstreamed the most disgusting conspiracy theory imaginable.
And just consider the effects of this.
The effect is to portray the soldiers and prison guards of the Jewish state as uniquely evil, uniquely disgusting and uniquely inhuman.
What wouldn´t someone do to express their disgust at such people? If Jews are the sort of people who can even turn dogs into rapists why shouldn’t a mob assemble outside the synagogues of New York? Why wouldn’t masked “activists” demonstrate their outrage by hounding Jewish children on the streets of this city? After all, the people they are going up against are uniquely evil. Right?
DS: You spent years inside the Associated Press bureau in Jerusalem. You know how sources are used, how the editorial decision-making works, and what the checks are on a reporter. Walk me through how a piece like this gets through.
MF:I was a correspondent for the AP from 2006 to 2011, and one thing that often isn’t clear to readers is the role NGOs play in creating the reporting readers actually see. The press corps is much weaker than it used to be—smaller staff, less experienced reporters, poor pay—and the demands of the 24-hour news cycle are much greater.
Into the vacuum created by that change come political NGOs, who have a lot of money and an interest in swaying coverage in their direction. When I was at the AP, I saw this happen. Big NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as smaller ones operating around this conflict, were mostly funded by European governments and progressive foundations. They became, essentially, the source of information for reporters. Human Rights Watch, for example, would come out with a report, and the AP would write it up as news.
When I read Kristof’s article, I saw this machinery right away. Kristof was handed a package by NGOs. He mentions Euro-Med [Human Rights Monitor], which has proven ties to Hamas and has openly claimed that Israel is using weapons to “vaporize” Palestinians and that Israel is harvesting organs. Relying on Euro-Med is a bit of a stretch even for the world of the mainstream press. Kristof also mentions an anti-Israel activist named Sari Bashi, who is based in Ramallah. So local activists handed him the story, introduced him to his sources, and fed him the inflammatory, unverifiable material.
Senor also says this:
When you read the piece, you have to use your own compass to decide which charges could plausibly be true and which charges come from the world of conspiratorial, anti-Israel fantasy. I think there is a plausible reason for concern about sexual assaults of prisoners. I don’t think we can dismiss every account of sexual assaults against Palestinian detainees.
. . . we have to be able to look at our prison system and our military and say we want our institutions to observe the highest standard, and we’re clearly failing. Terrible things are happening, as they are in the carceral systems in New York, or in Iraq. I wish Israel could say that we’re better than everyone else. I’m not sure that we can say that. We need to be able to address our own moral issues without participating in this kind of deranged discourse.
. . . Allegations involving sexual violation by animals do not enter political discourse as neutral facts. They belong to an old repertoire of dehumanising horror. They turn the accused into something beyond cruel: a corrupter of species, a handler of filth, a director of bestial desecration, and a violator of the most basic taboos around moral and sexual hygiene. Is the claim true, false, exaggerated, mistranslated, or planted? Kristof does not know nearly enough to employ the claim in the way that he does. He treats it as a detail within a larger moral picture. A responsible and competent editor would have stopped reading right there and demanded to know what, exactly, has been established.
. . .None of this excuses abuse. The Sde Teiman case, involving alleged abuse of a Palestinian prisoner by Israeli reservists, deserved investigation so that truth could be separated from rumour and accusation. Where Israeli guards, soldiers, interrogators, or settlers have committed acts of sexual violence, they should be exposed, investigated, tried, and punished. Any attempt by Israeli politicians or mobs to shield abusers deserves condemnation. A society at war must still guard its own standards.
But it must also guard the truth. Taking rape and abuse seriously does not require us to accept propaganda dressed up as sexual horror. Nor does it require us to pretend that anonymous testimony, activist reports, and humanitarian vocabulary automatically produce truth. The harder task is to investigate abuse without surrendering judgment. A serious press should be able to do this. It should also be able to honour Israeli victims without handing their suffering to those who spent months demeaning it.
A columnist like Nicholas Kristof may even believe he is writing in defence of Palestinian victims. But when his essay relies on the same information ecology that sought to excuse, minimise, and invert the atrocities of 7 October, it risks becoming something else: a mouthpiece for those who defended the events of that day, or who needed its victims to disappear beneath a more useful accusation. This is what divides moral inquiry from propaganda.
there does appear to be some level of sexual violence that goes on in Israeli prisons and, similar to the rest of the world, often the perpetrators are not held accountable. The fact that this goes on in prisons worldwide does not, of course, make it acceptable practice and Israel has taken a strong policy position against such activity.
But Kristof often relies on sources that themselves have been found to be unreliable. In a series of posts on X, the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting challenged Kristof’s journalism, noting that the most explosive accounts in his op-ed came from unnamed sources, while the stories of those named had grown “steadily more lurid over time, with dramatic new details added years later.”
For example, one of Kristof’s sources, Sami al-Sai, had taken to social media on October 8, 2023, to praise the Hamas onslaught one day after it occurred, and eulogized the leader of a West Bank terror cell as “our martyred prince.”
HonestReporting also noted that, about a year ago, Sai spoke to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem about his alleged assault, and did not mention several specific, graphic details that he provided to Kristof, including being sodomized with a carrot, having his genitals grabbed by a female guard, and discovering “other people’s vomit, blood, and broken teeth” in his skin.
It also pointed out that Issa Amro, who told Kristof in 2024 that he had been assaulted on the day of the Hamas attack, had earlier told The Washington Post that he had been “threatened with sexual assault” on that day, not that he had been assaulted.
None of this, of course, excuses illegal activity of prison guards or, here in Israel, members of the IDF. Nor does it give a pass to a government that drops the charges against the accused, as it did in the Sde Teman case, simply because of community pressure.
This kind of activity is certainly not in keeping with the values of a county such as ours, which promises in its Declaration of Independence: The State of Israel “will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture; it will safeguard the holy places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the charter of the United Nations.”
. . . Finally, Kristof engages in illogical overreach when he states: “Yet our American tax dollars subsidize the Israeli security establishment, so this is sexual violence in which the United States is complicit.”
Truth be told, the $3.8 billion of annual US military aid to Israel is used to purchase armaments from US defense manufacturers and, of course, has nothing to do with the prison system or its faults. A weapon used by an IDF soldier in Gaza cannot be linked to prison abuses. Actually, it is the weapons used against us on October 7th and afterwards, paid for by the Iranians and Qataris, that are more logically linked to the alleged abuses in Kristof’s piece.
The commonality of these stories is that they admit the possibility of sexual abuse of prisoners, but argue that, given the fact that interrogations are recorded and photographed, and Israel’s history of prosecuting those who violate its law, the likelihood of widespread and systemic abuse known to the authorities is low. The articles argue that Kristof’s sources are biased and that some of their stories have changed over the years. And they say that the dog-rape story is not credible.
What should happen now? Well, Israel should conduct an investigation of the allegations. And so should the NYT, making Kristof reveal his sources and check them itself. The former will happen; the latter won’t.
If anybody else had done this rather than Kristof, they would be fired by the NYT. Remember that editorial-page editor James Bennet was forced to resign in 2020 after a social-media outcry following the publication of an op-ed by Republican senator Tom Cotton. Cotton’s argument, that U.S. troops might be used to quell riots following the death of George Floyd, was at least worthy of discussion, but the editor who approved it became the victim of “progressive” ire.
Kristof won’t be fired, though his careless accusations were far worse than the argument made by Cotton. But at least some of the shine is off Kristof’s Pulitzers, and the sentient world now knows him to be a crappy journalist, willing to tar an entire country on the basis of unverified claims.
If you’re not familiar with Tickle v Giggle, click on the Wikipedia link above. Here’s the summary:
Tickle v Giggle is an Australian federal legal case regarding the legality of the membership policies used on Giggle, a social media app for women. Giggle excluded trans women in their membership policy, and withdrew membership from Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman from New South Wales, on that basis. In 2022, Tickle brought the case against Giggle, and in August 2024, the court found that Tickle had been indirectly discriminated against under Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act, and ordered Giggle to pay costs of the case and damages. That finding was appealed both by Tickle and by Giggle’s CEO, Sall Grover, with hearings on those appeals held in the Federal Court of Australia (NSW Registry) from August 4 to August 6 2025. The appeal judgment was delivered on 15 May 2026 at 2pm AEST. The court upheld the original judgment, dismissing Grover’s appeal and allowing Tickle’s cross-appeal, with the court finding two instances of direct discrimination against Tickle and awarding damages of $20,000, double the award at first instance. Grover has said she will appeal to the High Court of Australia.
Welcome to Friday, May 15, 2026, and Malcolm X Day, celebrated on the third Friday in May. Here’s a near-final scene from Spike Lee’s great movie “Malcolm X” (1992, my favorite of his). Malcolm drives to the auditorium where he’ll be assassinated, passing his killers in another car, and then walks–or rather rolls–to the venue. The music is the greatest of all soul songs: “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 15 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*At the summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi in Beijing, the priority for Trump is economic agreement, while for Xi it appears to be getting the U.S. to soften its support for Taiwan, which Xi wants to take over. The WaPo reports on the difference in emphasis.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping warned President Donald Trump on Thursday that “conflicts” could emerge if the two powers mishandle Taiwan, declaring that Beijing’s top priority in talks with the United States is the fate of the contested island long supported militarily by Washington.
Xi’s message — delivered behind closed doors in an hours-long meeting in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People — was all the more striking given Trump’s effort to warm up relations and deliver trade deals to boost the U.S. economy. It came after Xi welcomed Trump at an elaborate ceremony overlooking Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese military crushed pro-democracy protesters in 1989.
Trump brought dozens of top U.S. business leaders with him on the trip and has made deepened trade ties a focus, downplaying the military rivalry between the two nations. Although Trump said later that the meeting was “great,” Xi’s remarks, as reported bythe Chinese Foreign Ministry, made clear that the Chinese leader intended to focus on security at a moment when Trump has shown greater willingness to flex U.S. military might.
“The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U. S. relations,” Xi said, according to the Foreign Ministry readout. “If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”
. . .China has long claimed sovereignty over Taiwan, a democratic island territory that is a powerhouse manufacturer of semiconductors and other technology. The United States, while not officially recognizing Taiwan as an independent country, is the territory’s major military backer. U.S. war planning for east Asia envisions how to defend the island against a Chinese invasion aimed at reasserting Beijing’s authority.
“China’s military threats are the sole cause of instability for the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific region,” Taiwanese government spokeswoman Michelle Lee told reporters Thursday. “Our government views positively any actions that contribute to regional stability and help manage the risks posed by the expansion of authoritarian influence.”
The U.S,. has no formal defense treaty with Taiwan (we once did, but it was ditched in order to establish relations with China), but we do have nonbinding agreements to provide Taiwan with arms and other defense aid if it’s attacked. But we have no obligation to give military help. What this means to me is that it would be easy for Trump, if he wants better economic relations with China, to tell Xi that we’re not going all out to defend Taiwan against Chinese military action. The PRC has implied that “reunification” should occur fairly soon, but not necessarily by military means. But the Taiwanese will never assent to joining with China, so any “unification” would have to be done by force.
*In Amit Segal’s latest column at “It’s Noon in Israel,” the author speculates about how the Israeli elections, which have been moved earlier, might turn out, and reports on Netanyahu’s recent interview on 60 Minutes, where the PM “squirmed” when asked about Chinese involvement in the war in Iran. Segal then discusses that involvement:
China, unlike Qatar, does not support Iran out of love for the Ayatollahs, nor out of hatred for Israel. It does so because it needs chaos in the Middle East that will drain US resources and attention away from Taiwan and the South China Sea. For Xi Jinping, every dollar the US invests in interceptors for Israel is a dollar not invested in submarines in the Strait of Malacca. This quiet war is China’s way of buying time in the clash of titans against the United States. The Iran war is where the Chinese are testing American boundaries and their willingness to go all the way.
The event is only getting more complicated. Take the Strait of Hormuz, for example. The Iranians are trying to create a new equation and control the world through violent control over the straits. This might be good for the Iranians, but for the Chinese, it is terrible. Why? Because while transit through Hormuz is important to the Chinese, transit through the Strait of Malacca is much more important. This is a narrow strait between Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, practically controlled by the US. Eighty percent of China’s oil imports pass through it. If the method of blocking shipping lanes becomes a legitimate means, it means the US will acquire almost absolute control over the Chinese. And that is just one example.
Another example comes specifically from Israel: the amount of military knowledge and capabilities built and tested here over the past three years is historically unprecedented. Israel is considered today around the world as a formidable power with field-tested experience. The war is the world’s largest testing lab for artificial intelligence on the battlefield. When Israel disrupts UAV swarms or eliminates 20 scientists in Iran in a few seconds, it makes its superiority practical. Trump brings receipts showing that Chinese technology is inferior to the Israeli-American mind, clarifying to them that he holds the tap to the knowledge and the blockade against everything they are trying to achieve. In this battle, Israel is the US’s combat R&D department, and for Trump, this is a tremendous bargaining chip.
Trump knows that the one keeping Iran alive today, even if quietly, is the empire from the East. They are the ones still trading with the Iranians while bypassing sanctions; they are the ones providing them with intelligence and even certain types of weaponry. For the Chinese, for example, air defense batteries are considered offensive weapons, but ballistic missiles are somehow defined as defensive weapons. Go figure.
Just as Israel set a goal for itself to break the Middle Eastern axis of evil, Trump set a goal for himself to break the Chinese-Russian-Iranian-North Korean axis of evil. If he disconnects the Chinese from the axis—he will weaken it significantly and bring it closer to the goal he desires so much: an absolute and indisputable victory, in a short time, and with a relatively low number of casualties.
The talks in Beijing are ongoing, and so far not much has been leaked.
In response to the release of the Civil Commission Report on sexual violence against Israelis on October 7, and Nicholas Kristof’s ill-sourced column on Israeli sexual violence against and dg rape of prisoners, the WSJ has issued two editorials. The first is about the Report itself, “The truth about Hamas,” You can read about these examples in the Report (you can find it here).
Reading “Silenced No More,” the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, we were transported back to Oct. 27, 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas’s atrocities. The mouths of journalists were agape, but time dulls horrific reality.
The new report is a catalogue, for memory’s sake, of Hamas depravity. Testimony from site after site attests to rape and assault. Screams and pleas. Gunshots to the face and genitals. Mutilation. Burning. Bodies naked, legs spread. Grotesque scenes staged. All forming an evidentiary record, the result of more than 10,000 photos and video segments and more than 430 interviews, testimonies and meetings with survivors, witnesses and experts.
Yoni Saadon recounts another horror: “She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too. . . . I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologize to her, saying ‘I’m sorry.’” Later he saw “a beautiful woman with the face of an angel and 8 or 10 fighters beating and raping her.” The last one shot her in the head. Each example here is of a civilian non-combatant.
Why is this being published when the details are out in the open? Because many people don’t believe them or choose to ignore them. As the article says:
We regret having to relate such details, but it is crucial to remember when the understandable human impulse is to forget such horrors. All the more so because the sexual violence by Hamas has been aggressively denied by an antisemitic global left that wants us to forget. Everywhere denial serves the same purpose: to distort Israel’s defensive war as if it were wanton violence. Such deniers prefer anything to reminding the world why Israel has no choice but to fight for its life.
The other op-ed, “Kristof’s unbelievable tale” (subtitle: “The columnist publishes a poorly sourced, fantastical tale of torture and dog rape in Israel”), goes after the columnist’s (and the NYT’s) hamhanded piece:
A little‑known Geneva‑based NGO called Euro‑Med Human Rights Monitor published a report in June 2024 alleging that the Israeli military was using dogs to attack Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including to “sexually assault prisoners and detainees in Israeli detention facilities.” Quoting testimony attributed to Palestinian detainees, Euro‑Med claimed that the dogs, equipped with “surveillance cameras” strapped to their backs, were “let loose” on prisoners, torturing them “systematically and sometimes collectively.”
Euro‑Med’s report received no attention from mainstream outlets when it was released, and for good reason. Israel has linked the group’s leadership to Hamas. Euro-Med has a documented record of promoting wild allegations against Israel, including claims of organ harvesting of Palestinian detainees, mass executions in hospitals, and denials of well‑established Hamas activity at Gaza’s Al‑Shifa hospital. This week, Euro-Med’s far‑fetched allegations found their way into a New York Times opinion piece penned by Nicholas Kristof.
Mr. Kristof cites allegations by “Palestinian prisoners” and “human rights monitors” that Israeli police dogs have been “coached to rape prisoners.” He offers no evidence for this in the column, but later defended the claim on X, citing “three different medical journal articles” about rectal injuries from anal penetration by dogs. Yet the scientific literature describes human‑initiated bestiality, not dogs assaulting humans, which may not even be anatomically possible.
The more I read about Kristof’s defense the angrier I get. How dare he use evidence from bestiality to buttress claims of Israelis dog-torture? Anyway, the article goes on to debunk two of Kristof’s named sources as shill for Hamas propaganda, and ends this way:
Sexual assault in prisons is an unfortunate reality worldwide, and sexual violence in war is well‑documented. Hamas used systematic rape and sexual violence during its attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 as detailed in a comprehensive report released this week by the Israeli Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes. Such allegations are grave and demand proper investigations and rigorous reporting.
Mr. Kristof’s column doesn’t meet that standard. Instead, it relies on a patchwork of omissions, dubious sources and ever‑more lurid allegations, serving more to demonize Israel than to clarify what actually happened. Worse is that this kind of reporting erodes trust in journalism and makes it harder for genuine victims of sexual violence to be believed. They deserve better.
You don’t often see one MSM outlet go after another like this, but both Kristof and the NYT deserve it. I don’t often quote WSJ op-ed pieces as I find them too far on the right for my liking, but both of these editorials are sensible and, what’s more important, moral. The NYT’s actions here are both stupid and immoral, spreading undocumented assertions that will hurt Israel, as the paper and Kristof surely know.
The notion that liberal democracy is only for Westerners and is the product of specifically Western religious traditions has always been asinine, however plausible it may have seemed in the early twenty-first century. Japan and South Korea are part of ‘the West’, after all. Far from being a sign of democratic solidarity, Christian identity politics has become the friend of every enemy of Western democracy.
Before I go further and explain why, I need to introduce a plethora of caveats. I am not talking about, let alone criticising, the majority of European Christians, who are as likely to support liberal ideals as anyone else. I am not finding fault with this aspect of Lutheran doctrine or that Vatican pronouncement. Cultural determinism is as wrong when it is used to maintain that religion poisons everything (as the late Christopher Hitchens used to say) as it is when it is used to announce that Christianity blesses everything and has given us democracy, feminism, human rights, and all that is good and lovely in the world. Totalising explanations always fail. They cannot handle complexity.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently made my point for me. Last November, the former atheist announced her conversion to Christianity and unintentionally revealed the fatuity of Christian identity politics as she did so. Any genuine Christian reading the articles and interviews that accompanied her conversion would notice there was no embracing of the Nicene creed; no declaration that Hirsi Ali now believed in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father.
. . . . Citing Tom Holland’s claim in his 2019 book Dominionthat Western morality, values, and social norms are ultimately products of Christianity, the former atheist said that she had realised that Christianity was the source of Western safeguards for freedom and dignity. ‘All sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity,’ she continued. To believe in freedom and to defend it one ought to be Christian.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown extraordinary courage in standing up to the threats of radical Islamists. Tom Holland is the nicest and most intellectually generous historian I have met.
But this is hopeless stuff. In much of Europe the struggle for human rights, which Hirsi Ali presumably admires, was in part a struggle over state religion. The Enlightenment was a reaction against the bigotry and slaughter of the European wars of religion. To this day French liberals insist on defending secularism because they remember the arbitrary power of the Catholic church and fear the arbitrary power of Islam. The drafters of the US constitution wisely prevented the state from passing any law affecting religious worship and belief because they wisely feared the power of the religious persecution. It is not just that so many Western freedoms originated in the anti-clerical struggles of the Enlightenment – and it is ridiculous to say that they are nevertheless still somehow ‘Christian’ freedoms – but that the argument is circular. If everything comes from Christianity, even freedoms that were achieved in opposition to the constraints of state religions, then there can never be real change in the world. If everything comes from Christianity, then religion is stretched so thinly that it all but vanishes, as it clearly has in Hirsi Ali’s strangely faithless conversion. If everything is Christian, then nothing is Christian.
. . . Few people can go along with Hirsi Ali’s argument today. Those that do will be on the right or the extreme right. Liberal Christians or those who identify with the Christian tradition, such as Tom Holland, see democracy and human rights as flowing from Christian beliefs. But Christians with actual power are making a nonsense of their argument.
Extreme religious belief makes assaults on the Constitution easier. The faithful are obeying the Lord’s commands and they do not admit the right of any earthly constitution or ballot to restrain them. Hirsi Ali and many others fail to draw the parallels with the woke movement they deplore. To the worst type of progressive the West is the sole source of global oppression. Whiteness and Eurocentric beliefs are sins. And yet in the US Christian conservatives, who are spurred on by their opposition to progressive authoritarians, are no more willing to defend the West than their left-wing enemies.
This year will be a decisive year for the West. One way to get through it would be to end our self-serving and flattering cultural exceptionalism. The enemies of democracy are not only to be found in foreign tyrannies, they are among us. And the more devoutly they claim to uphold Western Christian values, the more likely it is that they are willing to subvert Western civilisation.
I suppose the thesis could be defended by arguing that “well, Christianity formed the good values, and they’ve being subverted historically by religion.” But that ignores the historical Enlightenment development of humanism as a reaction against Christianity and other religions.
As you may have heard, TheNew York Times revealed this week that Israel has a secret animal training program that literally teaches dogs how to waterboard prisoners. Scarily, that’s not all they’re teaching animals. Here are seven more shocking things that The New York Times has reported that Israel has coached animals to do:
Trained goldfish to only live for three weeks and make kids sad when they die: Horrifying.
Taught cats to be emotionally detached and self-centered: The evil is sickening.
Trained a chicken to make that mocking chicken noise, but only when it sees New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof: So mean.
Trained pigeons to fly around pooping on people: Unbelievably twisted.
Taught a guinea pig how to pilot an Apache attack helicopter: Okay, that is a scary image.
Trained a parrot to repeat whatever is said, slowly driving people insane: What kind of sick people are these?
Taught a golden retriever how to play basketball and ultimately lead a Midwest high school team to the championship: We could not be more appalled.
We hope this list wakes people up to the disturbing reality of what Israel is doing with these poor, innocent animals.
And here’s one from Facebook:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is smelling the flowers
Hili: The scent of wisteria reaches all the way here.
Andrzej: It’s a nice smell.
Hili: I prefer the smell of catnip.
In Polish:
Hili: Aż tu dociera zapach wisterii.
Ja: To miły zapach.
Hili: Wolę zapach kocimiętki.
From “Captain” Ella, with the English translation below:
Standing before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem… And upon the Holy Quran… An Arab Muslim fighter in the Paratroopers Brigade—swearing allegiance in the Israel Defense Forces Long live the State of Israel.
This Arab IDF member wouldn’t dare go near the Al-Aqsa mosque on top of the Western Wall, as he’d be killed. He’s thus forced to swear fealty before the remains of the Second (Jewish) Temple.
من أمام حائط المبكى في أورشليم القدس…
وعلى القرآن الكريم…
مقاتل عربي مسلم في وحدة المظليين – يقسم الولاء في جيش الدفاع الإسرائيلي
— Lieutenant Colonel Ella Waweya | إيلا واوية (@CaptainElla1) May 14, 2026
From Luana; NYU students are trying to get Jonathan Haidt, who wrote about the hypersensitivity of students, banned as a commencement speaker because he wrote about the hypersensitivity of college students. In fact, I can’t think of a better commencement speaker. The link to the article is here.
NYU student:
“Haidt’s selection is a gutting reminder that our institution is more committed to platforming speakers who won’t rock the boat rather than those who would encourage us to make a change for the better.”
And two from Dr. Cobb. First, the world’s most beautiful duck. Be sure to watch the video; that is some sexual dimorphism!
The Extraordinary male Mandarin Duck, the lighter one is the female is soft colours brown-grey with white and hint of blue at wing. They live in Eurasia. Life span is 3-6 years in the wild, and 10-20 in protected areas.
There have been a ton of articles criticizing Nicholas Kristof’s poorly sourced and dubious NYT column accusing Israel of widespread sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners (yes, with dogs, too)—most of the critiques noting that Kristof’s sources were unnamed, undocumented, and those that were named had histories of being pro-Hamas. You can easily find these critiques on social media, but Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, levels a different accusation: not so much at Kristof but at the New York Times itself.
He notes something I overlooked: the paper used to have a “public editor” whose job was to call attention to errors and misreporting in the paper, but the NYT ditched that position nine years ago. Now there is no public editor: their job has been sourced to—get this—social media and readers. The rationale is that social media itself, combined with reader reaction, will correct errors. But that’s completely bogus. Yes, readers and social media may point out errors, as they have in this case, but thety also can reinforce them. As you know, social media is a dumpster fire and there’s no guarantee that a clash of ideas and assertions will surely out the truth.
Beyond that, it is the responsibility of the paper itself to correct errors, apologizing for them and admitting guilt. The NYT won’t do that, for it’s pushed back on the criticism of Kristof’s delusions, defending them by asserting—get this again—that he won two Pulitzer Prizes. With two nods like that, how can he be wrong? Here’s all the NYT has said:
— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) May 13, 2026
In larger print; you can judge for yourself how extensive the “fact-checking” was, given that there was no public editor to describe it:
The deep-sixing of a public editor is almost an admission that a paper has no interest in correcting itself. You can see from the Times‘s doubling down in this latest case that the NYT is standing behind assertions of systemic sexual torture in the Israeli government, as well as in using trained dogs to rape prisoners. The fact that Kristof’s factual claims were made in an op-ed does not excuse the paper.
Click below to read:
Some quotes:
In 2014, the New York Times had a Public Editor. Her name was Margaret Sullivan. When it emerged that Nicholas Kristof had spent years platforming a fabricator named Somaly Mam, Sullivan wrote that Kristof “owes it to his readers to explain, to the best of his ability and at length, what happened and why.” Kristof did. He wrote a column titled “When Sources May Have Lied.” Editor’s notes were added to old work. The mechanism worked.
In 2017, the Times eliminated the Public Editor role. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced that “readers and social media followers collectively serve as a modern watchdog.” Liz Spayd was the last to hold the job.
This week, Kristof published a column accusing Israel’s security forces of systematic sexual violence, sourced from a man who celebrated October 7, an NGO whose chairman was designated by Israel as a Hamas operative in 2013, and a fourteen-person account that grows more lurid each time it migrates to a larger platform. The Times defended the column with a statement from a spokesperson named Charlie Stadtlander, citing Kristof’s two Pulitzers. There is no Margaret Sullivan inside the building anymore. There is only Charlie.
That is the story I want to tell. Not the column. The column has been dissected by a dozen outlets in 36 hours. The story is what the column reveals about the institution that printed it, and about the decision the institution made nine years ago that produced this moment.
Yesterday I wrote about the sources:
The piece is The New York Times Has a Source Problem. The short version: two of Kristof’s primary sources are a man who left UCLA after a 17-year-old said he sent her unsolicited photos, and an NGO whose chairman publicly mourned a senior Hamas commander as “our great commander” earlier this year. The same NGO has officially called Hamas’s sexual violence on October 7 a “propaganda tool.” Its board chair endorsed 9/11 inside-job conspiracies.
I asked yesterday how the Times missed any of this when two Google searches would have surfaced all of it.
Today I want to ask why nobody inside the paper is allowed to ask that question on the record.
This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:
“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”
This was what happened when there was a public reporter and Kristof got his tuchas smacked:
Somaly Mam was a Cambodian woman who became globally famous on the strength of a story she told about her own childhood in sex slavery, and on the strength of the brothel rescues she said she conducted. Kristof made her career. He called her a “hero” in column after column. He live-tweeted her brothel raids to over a million followers. He featured her in his documentary Half the Sky.
In 2014, Newsweek published a piece by Simon Marks showing that Mam had auditioned girls to lie on camera. Her own backstory was fabricated. The “rescues” were sometimes police raids that generated headlines more than they helped victims. Mam resigned. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple called for Kristof to audit his entire Cambodia archive. Kristof wrote that he wished he had never written about her, said he had been “hoodwinked,” and added editor’s notes to old columns.
His response when Margaret Sullivan and Erik Wemple pressed him was telling. He said it was hard to verify facts in Cambodia. He said he was “reluctant to be an arbiter” of Mam’s backstory. He said he didn’t know what to think.
This week, asked whether Palestinians might fabricate accusations to defame Israel, Kristof wrote that “to me that seems far-fetched.” That is the same credulity, twelve years older, applied to a higher-stakes accusation on a larger platform.
The Times has watched this reporter make this mistake before. In 2014 there was an internal voice with the authority to push him to answer for it. There is no such voice now.
There are other examples, but the point is that no such internal mechanism of correction exists. Instead, we get a defense, which Mazzig summarizes:
. . . The defense
This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:
“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”
The fuller statement credits Kristof for traveling to the region and says his article collects accounts in the victims’ own words, backed by “independent studies.” It does not name the studies.
Read it twice if you need to. Notice what it does not say. It does not address Euro-Med’s Hamas affiliation. It does not address Sami al-Sai’s October 8 Facebook post celebrating the massacre. It does not address Amro’s shifting account between the Washington Post and the Times. It does not address the absence of corroborating evidence in the column’s most explosive cases. It does not say what the “independent studies” are.
It says Kristof has Pulitzers and the Times stands behind him.
In 2014, the same paper produced a Public Editor’s column titled “When Mr. Kristof’s Sources Are Questioned” and an internal reckoning. In 2026, the same paper produces a press release.
Deborah Lipstadt, until recently the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, asked the Times publicly whether it had any sense of decency. Lipstadt is the world’s leading historian of Holocaust denial. She knows what a blood libel looks like. When she names one out loud, the line has been crossed.
Mazzig hastens to add that he’s not saying Kristof is an antisemite or the NYT decided to hurt Jews. Nor is he claiming that Israel has never mistreated a prisoner, nor attacked one with dogs (I’d ask for evidence for both such claims, though). What he’s saying is this:
I am arguing something more dangerous because it is more boring. The editorial standards of the world’s most important paper have drifted, and the institution dismantled the internal voice that used to flag the drift. The defense statement issued today is what accountability looks like in a building where Margaret Sullivan no longer exists.
And he winds up going after the paper again:
The Times will probably not retract, but the conversation has started. Longtime contacts of media reporter David Shuster told him this afternoon there are discussions up the masthead. We will see.
What moves the needle is the accumulated record. The Somaly Mam parallel. The shifting Amro and al-Sai accounts. The verification asymmetry between American prisons and Israeli ones. The headline change on the Eurovision piece. The Silenced No More report. Lipstadt’s question. Yesterday’s piece and this one. Every citation builds the file.
That file is what real accountability requires. The Times made that file harder to build in 2017, and we are watching what that decision produced.
We know that the Times staff is full of young progressives—people who helped push out Bari Weiss, Donald McNeil, Jr., and James Bennet. They are sensitive to social media and public opinion, and the combination of progressive staff and social media is toxic.
The paper needs to correct Kristof’s column, for it’s clear he will not do so himself.
UC Davis ecologist Susan Harrison has returned with some photos about serpentine ecology. Susan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them:
Serpentine ecology at The Cedars (Sonoma County, California)
“Serpentine” might be a familiar word if you live in a region with volcanos, earthquakes, and hot springs. It’s an informal term for ultramafic (very high magnesium and iron) rocks, mainly serpentinite and its parent rock peridotite, as well as the soils formed from these rocks. The common name comes from the often snakeskin-like appearance of serpentinite. These rocks are twisted and fractured bits of the Earth’s mantle, first extruded into the ocean crust in midocean spreading centers, then fully or partly metamorphosed by hydration, and finally scraped onto land during the sliding of one tectonic plate under another – this last process being what also produces “ring of fire” volcanos and earthquake zones around the world.
Serpentinite:
Partly serpentinized peridotite:
Botanists and plant evolutionists have long been drawn to the unusual flora of serpentine. Most plant species are intolerant of its harsh chemistry, especially the scarcity of calcium relative to magnesium, and space is thereby opened for hardier species to adapt and sometimes even speciate on serpentine. In California’s flora of around 5,500 full species there are just over 1,000 “tolerators” that can grow either on or off of serpentine, and an estimated 255 “endemics” entirely restricted to this difficult soil.
Serpentine endemic plants in California include multiple Jewelflowers (genus Streptanthus, Brassicaceae), which have been studied to understand soil-driven adaptation and speciation.
Serpentine tolerators, like the Sickle-leaved Onion (Allium falcifolium), grow on varied soils. Sometimes they show adaptive genetic differences between populations on and off of serpentine.
Sickle-leaved Onions:
Today’s photos are from a May 2026 excursion to one of the most remarkable serpentine sites in the world: The Cedars in western Sonoma County, California. This site was named for its vast stands of Sargent’s Cypress (Cupressus sargentii), a serpentine-endemic tree.
The Cedars:
Part of The Cedars’ magic is that it’s a large (30 square km) and well-isolated block of serpentine within a benign coastal climate. This seems to be a winning formula for promoting plant evolution, as witness four full species and three subspecies found nowhere else in the world. Here are two species discovered by botanist Roger Raiche, who devoted decades to exploring and protecting The Cedars.
A second charm of The Cedars is the surprising abundance of water in its austere landscape, probably because fractured serpentine rock masses tend to store rainwater and release it slowly, and also because many streams on serpentine have chemically cemented beds that create deep pools. Streambanks here are fringed by Western Azalea (Rhododendron occidentale), Serpentine Columbine (Aquilegia eximia), and the two showy orchids shown below.
Giant Stream Orchid (Epipactis gigantea var. rubriflorum; photo by Nishanta Rajakaruna): \
The piece de resistance, sine qua non, ne plus ultra of The Cedars is its mineral springs. Until geologists discovered the strange chemistry of these springs in the 1960s, it was not known that serpentinization, the hydration of mantle rock, could occur in near-surface terrestrial environments. Serpentinization supports anaerobic microbes that are collectively the most abundant life form on Earth; they are considered strong candidates for the origin of life, as well as for the possibility of life on other planets.
The spring known as Mineral Falls:
Part of the spring known as Wedding Cake:
Animal life is relatively scarce on serpentine. Here are two of only 8 bird species we saw in a full day at The Cedars.
Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) perched in the middle of a towering cliff:
JAC: I told Susan I couldn’t see the falcon, so she sent me a photo with the bird circled:
My friend Nishanta Rajakaruna has devoted his career to studying serpentine ecosystems around the world. On field trips like this one, he collects photos of people leaping.
Leaping on serpentine (photo by Nishanta Rajakaruna; that’s me on the right):
Welcome to Thursday, May 14, 2026 and International Dylan Thomas Day. (Curiously, the great poet was neither born nor expired on May 14, but Google tells me that “This date marks the anniversary of the first stage reading of his famous play, Under Milk Wood, at The Poetry Center in New York in 1953.) And it’s a very fine play, which you can read here.
Here’s a picture of Thomas’s house in Laugharne, Wales, with the preserved interior of his poetry-writing shack next door. Plus his only pair of cufflinks. I took these photos in June, 2010:
Where the poems were made:
Here’s Richard Burton reciting one of Thomas’s best poems, a childhood remembrance called “Fern Hill” (the recitation starts 15 seconds in):
The Trump administration’s public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities.
Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway.
People with knowledge of the assessments said they show — to varying degrees, depending on the level of damage incurred at the different sites — that the Iranians can use mobile launchers that are inside the sites to move missiles to other locations. In some cases they can launch missiles directly from launchpads that are part of the facilities. Only three of the missile sites along the strait remain totally inaccessible, according to the assessments.
Iran still fields about 70 percent of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile, according to the assessments. That stockpile encompasses both ballistic missiles, which can target other nations in the region, and a smaller supply of cruise missiles, which can be used against shorter-range targets on land or at sea.
Military intelligence agencies have also reported, based on information from multiple collection streams including satellite imagery and other surveillance technologies, that Iran has regained access to roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide, which are now assessed to be “partially or fully operational,” the people with knowledge of the assessments said.
The findings undercut months of public assurances from President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have told Americans that the Iranian military was “decimated” and “no longer” a threat.
This may be true; how could any of us know? But the NYT never gives any news about U.S. advances in the war and, truth be told, I think the paper secretly wants the regime to remain in Iran, and want the US to lose—simply because the war is being led by the hated Trump.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he does not consider the economic impacts the war in Iran is having on Americans, remarks that quickly drew criticism from Democrats and appeared to undermine his campaign pledge of addressing voters’ cost of living concerns.
“Not even a little bit‚” Trump said when asked to what extent “Americans’ financial situations” are motivating him to reach a deal to end the war. Trump spoke to reporters on the White House South Lawn before departing for his trip to China.
“The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody,” Trump said. “I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
The president doubled down on the sentiment when asked to clarify whether the economic impact on Americans was a factor in his decision-making. The U.S. inflation rate has risen to its highest rate in nearly three years since the start of the Iran war in late February, with increased prices largely driven by higher energy costs. Gas prices rose 5.4 percent last month and were up about 30 percent over the past year. Still, the U.S. stock market has continued to hit a series of records.
“Every American understands,” Trump said of economic issues related to the war, referencing an unnamed poll he said showed an overwhelming majority of people “understand that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
“Now if the stock market goes up or down a little bit, the American people understand,” Trump continued. “When this war is over, oil is going to drop, the stock market is going to go through the roof, and truly, I think we’re in the golden age right now. You’re going to see a golden age like we’ve ever seen before.”
Trump’s approval on economic issues, which were critical to his political comeback in 2024, has fallen since he launched the Iran war.
A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that his approval rating on the economy has declined by seven points, to 34 percent, as gas prices have risen. Trump’s approval on inflation has fallen five points in that time to 27 percent, and his lowest rating comes on perceptions of his handling of the general cost of living, with 23 percent of Americans approving vs. 76 percent disapproving.
No, most Americans don’t understand why Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. But they should, and not just because they want Israel to survive. They should care because they want the Middle East to remain peaceful and for Iran to stop exporting terrorism to other countries. And they should care so that Iran can’t do whatever it wants because it has the capability to destroy other countries. Trump will suffer for this stand, but I am with the minority of Americans who want to have this war brought to a successful conclusion. But I’m also one of those who don’t know whether and how it can be.
*One way of avoiding having to deal with Hamas’s atrocities of 2023 is to avoid looking at documentaries about them. It’s not squeamishness, but outright refusal to be convinced. This is what Maarten Boudy argues in his new Substack post, “None so blind as those who refuse to see.”
A while ago, I watched the infamous 47-minute video documenting the atrocities of October 7th — the one that is withheld from public release to protect the victims’ privacy. When the Israeli government invited European media to a private screening, several refused to attend, describing it as a “PR campaign” that “only serves to tilt the balance of proportionality” in the war. The Belgian parliament likewise refused to watch it, after protest from left-wing parties who dismissed it as Israeli propaganda. There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.
Some images are seared into my memory forever. I will never forget the two boys in their underwear, one with his eye socket hanging out of his face, asking his brother if he thinks they’re going to die — while the Hamas monster who had just thrown a grenade into their safe room helps himself to a drink from their fridge, taking a casual break from the slaughter.
Neither will I ever forget the terrorists playing football with a severed head. Or the throngs of Gazans crowding around pickup trucks loaded with the mutilated corpses of Jewish women, filming and spitting on the bodies. Or the terrorist coolly and methodically cutting off the head of an already dead victim, like a skilled butcher. Or the woman in Kibbutz Mefalsim, crouching and begging in vain for mercy. Or the Thai migrant worker whose head is viciously hacked off with a garden hoe — another “Zionist colonizer” getting what he deserved, right?
. . . But yes — there was rape. Not “rape” in scare quotes, as the apologists would have it, but sadistic, murderous sexual violence, documented in a damning new report by The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women’s rights NGO. The report, titled “Silenced No More”, is based on hundreds of formal and informal interviews with survivors and witnesses, more than 10,000 photographs and over 1,800 cumulative hours of video.
. . . As the Daily Mail reports, the “freedom fighters” from Hamas deliberately and systematically defiled female bodies: “the terrorists shot their eyes, their faces and their breasts, and even targeted their most intimate parts, to destroy their beauty and rob their loved ones of a final goodbye.” Genitals were stabbed with knives or riddled with bullets, breasts were severed, pelvises broken.
. . .And it was premeditated and organized. The terrorists crossing into Israel carried printed Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks with handy expressions like “take off your pants,” “lie down,” “spread your legs,” and “don’t make trouble.” I wonder why they expected to need those particular phrases?
I know one thing: no civilized country on earth would tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas on its border after October 7th. Not one. This includes every self-righteous Westerner currently lecturing Israel from thousands of kilometres away, without an inch of skin in the game.
But of course quite a few Europeans refused to watch it, not because it was gruesome but because it was considered “Israeli propaganda.”
*As I’ve argued (influenced by Luana, who thinks that AI will pretty much wreck higher education), honor codes will be among the things that will have to change now that the bots have taken over. And, sure enough, Princeton University has just changed theirs.
For more than a century, Princeton University prided itself on an honor code so revered that proctoring during exams was banned. Students’ pledge not to cheat was enough.
On Monday, faculty voted to require proctoring in all in-person exams starting this summer, reversing a policy set in place in 1893 when Princeton introduced its honor code. The change came after “significant numbers” of undergrads and faculty requested it, “given their perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread,” according to a letter from Michael Gordin, Princeton’s dean of the college.
AI has made it both easier for students to cheat and harder to spot, Gordin wrote. Students are loath to report cheating because they are afraid they’ll be called out on social media. Those who do make reports often file anonymously, making it difficult for the school to investigate.
Princeton had been among the few schools to use an honor code letting students take exams without a professor present. Students will still be required to attest: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.”
The code is embedded in the university’s culture and has long been a point of pride. It goes back to the 19th century, when students petitioned to eliminate proctors during examinations, according to the student newspaper.
The new policy means instructors will be present during exams and will document any infractions they observe. They will report those to a student-run honor committee for adjudication.
Nadia Makuc, a Princeton senior, chaired that committee during the past year. She said she thinks most students support the new policy because it alleviates pressure to report classmates. The committee received about 60 cases in the past year, an uptick, but she thinks most go unreported.
The ease of cheating has created a growing temptation, she said.
“If the exam is on a laptop, someone can just flip to another window. Or if the exam is in a blue book, it’s just people using their phone under their desk or going to the bathroom and using it,” she said.
In a survey of over 500 seniors conducted by the student newspaper last year, 30% reported they had cheated on an assignment or exam. Nearly half reported knowledge of an honor code violation but less than 1% had made a report.
Oy vey! 30% of the students reported cheating, and you know that’s an underestimate. Gone are the days of take-home assignments or term papers; how could one permit them given that AI could write a very good one? What about labs? Can you fake them? (I don’t think that would be easy.) I always monitored exams, simply because I myself was monitored throughout college, and I wanted the students to be tested based on their own knowledge, not that of a bot. (They didn’t have bots when I was teaching.)
For me, those were studying literature and becoming a famous writer.
. . .To me, then, the study of literature was by nature a traditionalpursuit—a discipline that believed in the preservation of beautiful things. It was a course of study that allowed us to probe the depths of our psyches and examine the questions that make us all human.
You can imagine my astonishment, then, when I learned that by some twisted perversion of fate, literature had become virtually synonymous with radical leftism in the contemporary literary academy.
. . .on the first day of my freshman English department seminar, we were given the writings of the so-called literary critic Edward Said.
The chapter in question—from his famous book Culture and Imperialism—was on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
That was strange, I thought. Why were we reading criticism of a book without first having read the book itself?
I had read Mansfield Park in high school, so I could at least follow Said’s entire argument: that Mansfield Park was a novel about colonialism and imperialism.
Had we read the same novel—or, like many of the other students here reading critique before primary source text, had Said simply made up an idea without once ever having touched the actual book?
That evening, we were asked to produce a paragraph response to the Said chapter to prepare for our discussion that coming Thursday.
“The argument that Mansfield Park can only be understood from a colonial standpoint seems entirely farfetched,” I wrote. “Fanny’s entrance into her home as a metaphor for some colonizing force at work is too great a stretch.”
The professor was not very impressed. I had not sufficiently understood Said’s argument, in her eyes, and besides—it didn’t matter whether Mansfield Park was about imperialism or not—what mattered was that Jane Austen was complicit in British imperialist expansion.
. . .With every seminar I took, the overall aim of the Columbia University English department became clearer and clearer: these professors collectively wished to use literature as a force of resistance against “illiberal forces” to make our society a more just world for all.
But to me—someone who grew up with parents who’d fled the Soviet Union—Marxism wasn’t synonymous with liberalismin the least.
Sure, there was nothing wrong with trying to make our world more just and equitable—and there were so many great writers who had worked toward that aim—Shelley, Ibsen, Orwell, to name a few. But the promotion of social justice was simply one possible outcome of engagement with literature—not its sole aim.
But if you asked anyone in my department, literature was inseparable from resistance and justice.
. . . With every seminar I took, the overall aim of the Columbia University English department became clearer and clearer: these professors collectively wished to use literature as a force of resistance against “illiberal forces” to make our society a more just world for all.
But to me—someone who grew up with parents who’d fled the Soviet Union—Marxism wasn’t synonymous with liberalismin the least.
Sure, there was nothing wrong with trying to make our world more just and equitable—and there were so many great writers who had worked toward that aim—Shelley, Ibsen, Orwell, to name a few. But the promotion of social justice was simply one possible outcome of engagement with literature—not its sole aim.
But if you asked anyone in my department, literature was inseparable from resistance and justice.
By the time Ms. Libes started grad school to get her master’s, the courses were all theory and no literature. Yet she still hopes others will join her in ” returning to aesthetics and beauty” thereby , ” [doing] our part in saving literature and restoring it to its rightful place in the humanistic tradition.” But that, I fear is a vain hope. The love of literature and beauty is an ex-tenet of English literature, and I do see it changing any time soon. Poor Liza! There are other good pieces at her site, many of them expressing disappointment with courses in English literature. Here’s a video of Libes on “100 books to read before you die”:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s going a-hunting:
Hili: I’m going hunting.
Andrzej: Be back before nightfall.
Masih meets and hugs the Kurdish woman protestor blinded by the Iranian authorities. For some reason this video makes me tear up. They have a long hug and Masih puts a flower in the blind woman’s hair.
This is the moment I met one of my heroes for the first time.
For years, we wrote about brave Iranian protesters from far away. We spoke about a young woman who lost both eyes after the Islamic Republic shot her for demanding freedom in the streets of Iran. Then one day, I… pic.twitter.com/dQQMoiuCPn
From Steve Stewart-Williams via Luana. I don’t really understand this huge disparity except that women get a break simply because they’re women:
“Drivers who killed women received substantially longer sentences than those who killed men. As we see in the table below, the average sentence for killing a woman was 9.7 years, whereas the average sentence for killing a man was 4.4 years.”https://t.co/8hjFM0Nzr5pic.twitter.com/CDJvnN5xb3
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) May 12, 2026
The Number Ten Cat shows an old tradition:
Before King Charles opened Parliament today the Yeoman of the Guard (his ceremonial bodyguards) searched the cellars of the Palace of Westminster to make sure there was no gunpowder, or mayors from Manchester. pic.twitter.com/nxCsA5EJzD
I love moles. One of the traumatic experiences of my youth was seeing a guy on a golf course force one out of its hole with water and then killing it by hitting it on the head with a pipe. I don’t care if it was on a golf course: it was alive!
Please Be Kind To Moles.
They are beneficial to soil health, acting as natural aerators and pest control by consuming lawn-damaging grubs, beetles, and larvae.
They do not eat plants, and their removal often leads to new moles occupying the vacant tunnel system, making it a… pic.twitter.com/MMoUgrmXev
— PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE (@Protect_Wldlife) May 13, 2026
This Hungarian girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was about eight years old, and would be ninety today had she lived. https://t.co/iNT0CZXooH
And two from Dr. Cobb. He told me, about the first one, “Read the article—it’s a hoot, and terrifying!” I did and it was: the Neanderthals did root canals with stone tools and obviously no anesthesia. Oy, that must have hurt! They were tough indeed!
My favourite phrases for when things go wrong…1. It’s a shitshow at the fuck factory (English)2. Now the turnips are cooked (Dutch)3. A donkey is inside another donkey (Persian)4. The Devil is loose in Salmonstreet (Danish)5. A finger in the ass and screaming everywhere (Brazilian Portuguese)
