Fat Bear Week is here! First vote is today.

September 22, 2026 • 8:15 am

Yes, it’s Fat Bear Week at Katmai National Park in Alaska. you can read all about it, see the bears and matchups, and vote for the winner by clicking on the site below:

About the contest, with the links. Note that you can vote TODAY between noon and 9 p.m. Eastern time (11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Chicago time).

Vote for the fattest bear of the year! Some of the largest brown bears on Earth make their home at Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska. Brown bears get fat to survive. Fat Bear Week is an annual tournament celebrating their success in preparation for winter hibernation. Matchups are open for voting September 22 – 29 between 12 – 9  p.m. Eastern / 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. Pacific / 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. Alaska.

This is a single elimination tournament. For each match-up, vote for the bear you believe best exemplifies fatness and success in brown bears. The bear with the most votes advances to the next round. Only one will be crowned Fat Bear Week champion.

Meet the bears, download and fill out your bracket, predict your fat bear winner, and campaign for your candidate.

You can vote in four contests today; click HERE to cast your vote. Two of the contests involve bear families, the other two individual bears. Remember, you’re voting for the bear with the most avoirdupois.  Today’s pairups:

The details:

How to Participate:
Vote by clicking or tapping on the photos of the bear. The bear you do not vote for will turn gray. Then enter your email where prompted. You have successfully voted when you see the total votes for each bear.

Voting Widget:
The poll registers one vote per email. To view updated results, please refresh the webpage. If the results do not display, then reenter your email and hit submit. The poll will not register it as a second vote. If the polls do not load, please refresh, and check that you do not have any ad-blockers or pop-up blockers enabled.

As you see from the bracket link above, the next vote is tomorrow.

For example, in poll 4 you will be voting for one of these:

You can read about Marshmallow, an 8-year-old female, by clicking on the link below. Look how fat she got from scarfing salmon!

And her competitor, Bear 910, a ten-year-0ld female. Remember, though it’s fun to do this, the bears are in a life-and-death struggle to lay on the pounds before they go into winter hibernation. If they don’t have sufficient resources to make it through hibernation, they may die. The problem is compounded for female bears, who give birth in midwinter and must also suckle their cubs until Spring.

The Champion Bear of 2025 was Chunk, and he won despite overcoming a broken jaw. Tomorrow Chunk will be running against Bucky.

Here’s a short video of the Champ:

Below is the live BearCam at Brooks Falls, the famous small waterfall where bears foregather to catch the salmon migrating upstream. When it’s dark, they show highlights.

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

September 22, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: September 22, 2026 and the day of my cataract surgery (I am iatrophobic). As you read this, I will be having the lens of my right eye emulsified and sucked out, then replaced with an artificial lens. I have to admit to some apprehension.

NOTE: Because I have to go home and rest after the surgery, I won’t have time this afternoon to prepare a Hili for tomorrow, and because tomorrow I must go downtown to have the eye patch removed, there will likely be no Hili on Thursday, either. Bear with me; I do my best.

In the Northern Hemisphere it’s also the first day of fall, known as The Autumnal Equinox. which begins at 6:05 p.m. Eastern time in the U.S.

The autumn equinox is one of two days when all points on Earth except the polar regions see the sunrise and set at due east and due west. With few exceptions, all latitudes see almost precisely 12 hours of daylight and 12 of darkness.

I understand it’s a public holiday in Japan.

It’s also Hobbit Day, celebrating the publication of the eponymous Tolkien book on this day in 1937, National Eat Local Day, National Ice Cream Cone Day, National White Chocolate Day, World Rhino Day, and National Elephant Appreciation Day. Here is a hornless rhino (de-horned by rangers to eliminate poaching) and a passel of elephants taken in or near Kruger National Park in South Africa when I visited two years ago. Notice the birds pecking insects off the rhino:

These elephants were digging for water in a dry stream bed:

A mother has hit water and allows a baby to get a drink:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 22 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Just when you think Trump can’t get any loonier, it happens! Now he’s proposed that his huge triumphal arch (the Arc de Trump) is also going to be a military complex, complete with drones and snipers!

President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post Sunday that he would convert plans for a Washington, D.C.-area “Triumphal Arch” to those for “a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch” at the request of the U.S. military, citing “national security.”

The new plan, he said, is to “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.”

Reached for comment, a Pentagon spokesperson said the department has “nothing additional to provide beyond the post.” The White House declined to provide additional information.

His post marked a significant change in plans that had already been in progress, as the Trump administration had announced earlier this month that it was preparing to break ground in the coming weeks.

The proposed 250-foot arch project, which would sit in a roundabout between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, has faced legal challenges from veterans and historians. The project area sits on the Potomac, across from Washington.

The arch proposal has already passed key hurdles, though it’s unclear how Trump’s announcement could affect the prior approvals. In April, the project obtained approval from the Commission of Fine Arts, which is now composed of the president’s allies after he fired previous members. In July, the National Capital Planning Commission, which is led by Trump appointees, approved the preliminary site and building plans. The arch, which would sit a few miles from Reagan airport, also passed the Federal Aviation Administration’s air safety standards last week, with the administration announcing that it “would not pose a hazard to aircraft.”

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., whose district includes Arlington National Cemetery and is adjacent to the proposed site, slammed Trump’s plan in a post to X.

Here’s the tweet:

And a bit more:

The project appeared poised to move forward imminently. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced on Sept. 3 that the administration was preparing to start excavation work “over the next two-week period.” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the Trump administration to provide 48 hours’ notice before it starts “any activity” on the arch, other than work to determine whether there are archaeological resources on the proposed site.

What can one say but “0y vey” (if you’re Jewish)?  Why turn a decorative arch into a weapons site, also making it a target for terrorists? Only if you want to justify the arch (like Trump justified the White House ballroom) as being of crucial importance to National Security.

*As expected, CNN, Politico, and MS NOW are suing Trump, who excluded the venues from the White House and deep-sixed them from its press pool. But the t.v. networks struck back, banding together to black out all television coverage from the White House:

The decision marks an escalation of tensions between the press and the Trump administration after the president announced last week that he would ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.

The three news outlets said earlier Monday that they were suing the Trump administration over the ban.

In a joint statement early Monday, the outlets said they were filing the suit to “protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes.”

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer representing CNN, MS NOW and Politico, called the ban “a direct assault on the First Amendment and a blatant violation of due process.”

. . . Major television networks agreed on Monday to suspend a rotation of broadcast journalists who cover President Trump after the White House removed CNN from a planned assignment covering the president’s trip to New York.

“Effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President,” Bryan Boughton, the Washington bureau chief at Fox News wrote in an email to pool members. “This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties.”

The White House press pool is a rotation of reporters, videographers, photographers and technicians who cover the president when he travels or when he conducts events in spaces that are too small for the entire press corps. Monday’s decision suspends—for now—the television press pool, which distributes video footage and reporting about the president to TV networks and other broadcast outlets.

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government,” White House television pool members Fox News, ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News said in a statement. “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

I don’t know whether other media, like print and/or radio, are part of the pool, and whether they’re still participating.  This will take some of the wind out of Trump’s sails as he delights in getting attention. Now he’s not getting it from television networks, at least in the pool coverage.

*The midterm elections are 42 days away, and so the NYT prognosticates: “Who’s winning the race for Congress?” (article archived here).

The Senate prediction is 3 states favoring Democrats, 2 favoring Republicans, and 7 states being tossups.

It’s a critical couple of weeks for Representative Mike Collins, the Republican nominee in Georgia, and Michael Whatley, the Republican nominee in North Carolina.

Both have consistently trailed in polls, and Republican strategists are actively discussing whether to cut bait, especially on Collins, as The Times reported last week.

At a donor meeting earlier this month in Dallas, Collins was notably missing from a slide presentation of the party’s top
“quality” recruits this cycle — though he was in the room as the presentation was made.

Republicans haven’t given up on Georgia or North Carolina. President Trump campaigned for Whatley last week in North Carolina. Vice President JD Vance will be there on Monday. And Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican majority leader, is headed to Atlanta on Thursday to headline a fund-raiser for Collins.

But as Thune said last week, Republicans “obviously make decisions when it comes to resources” on a stretched map.

Translation: Improve soon in the polls — or else.

For the House, 9 districts are leaning Democratic, 7 leaning Republican, and there are 21 tossups.

Republicans are seeing the same polls that the public is. The Times measured a nearly 9-percentage-point edge for Democrats on the congressional ballot last week — akin to the margin in the 2018 Democratic wave.

But Republicans are openly hoping those numbers are understating G.O.P. support.

“None of us should put any stock in polls anymore because they are wildly inaccurate; we all know that,” Speaker Mike Johnson said last week at the Capitol. “We know this is going to be a tight race. It is going to be decided by about 20 jump-ball swing districts around the country.”

His math is not wrong. The Cook Political Report currently rates 206 seats as leaning Democratic and 208 as leaning Republican. Democrats will need to win a majority of the 21 tossup seats to win.

I’m no pundit so I’ll refrain from predicting anything. But clearly the Republicans are going to lose quite a bit of Congress this time. If the Senate goes 50/50, it will effectively be Republican since VP Vance will be the tiebreaker.

*The WaPo has joined the chorus of media that recognize the value of standardized test in an editorial board op-ed called “A multifront war against educational accountability” with the subtitle, “New York drops Regents exam as a graduation requirement and conceals AP test results” (article archived here).

If teachers unions put as much effort into improving test scores as dodging accountability, students in New York’s public schools would have markedly better chances for success in life.

The New York State United Teachers union rallied again last week to pressure Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) to reverse her decision to opt into a federal tax-credit scholarship program that would benefit students. Union bosses fear it would boost enrollment in private and religious schools, where it’s harder for unions to collect dues.

No wonder NYSUT feels threatened by more competition: Only 48 percent of New York public school students in grades three through eight can read proficiently, according to preliminary assessments released last month by the state. Bad scores aren’t for lack of investment: New York spends more per pupil than any other state.

Instead of rising to the challenge, NYSUT would prefer the state water down standards. “More teaching, less testing” is the union’s mantra. Manhattan Institute fellow Jennifer Weber told us, “They don’t want the tests because they don’t want to be held to the data and the outcomes.”

Last week, the unions won a big battle in their crusade against accountability when the New York State Board of Regents voted to end the use of the Regents exam as a high school graduation requirement. Though students will continue to take the test, the board says it will develop a different set of graduation requirements, such as being a “critical thinker” and “effective communicator.” But how will those skills be measured?

. . .New York’s Education Department has joined the anti-transparency brigades by blocking U.S. News & World Report from gaining access to the state’s Advanced Placement scores. New York claims it’s protecting student data from being used for a “commercial product.” In reality, suppressing aggregate data on AP scores covers up the shortcomings of public schools while handicapping higher performing alternatives, such as the charter network Success Academy.

One of the network’s high schools was ranked 11th in the state last year when U.S. News factored in AP scores. This year, without the AP scores available, the school fell to 196th. Success Academy is suing the state and deserves to win.

I’ve come to realize that teachers unions are among the biggest opponents of merit as a metric for advancement in schools, but New York’s Education Department?  And they block AP scores so the shortcomings of the states’ schools aren’t evident (the “commerical product” argument doesn’t wash). Oy again!

*Over at The Free Press, journalist Ardena Schwartz, using a new book (below) as a prompt, asks “Israel won the battles. Did it lose the war?” Her answer is “yes”.

While that commission of inquiry may never come, a new book offers the most extensive analysis to date of the war, and the behind-the-scenes decisions and debates that shaped its trajectory. In the War Room, released this month, is a riveting—and at times infuriating—look inside the deliberations that drove Israel’s multifront war against the Iranian Axis from 2023 to 2025. Co-authored by Israeli journalist Yonah Jeremy Bob of The Jerusalem Post and American journalist Elliot Kaufman of The Wall Street Journal, the book takes readers inside the conversations—both within Israel and between the U.S. and Israel—that produced the war’s greatest achievements and failures.

. . .As the book progresses, a pattern becomes obvious: Litanies of stunning Israeli military successes are repeatedly offset by colossal mistakes and miscalculations, egotistical infighting, and a jaw-dropping failure to reassess assumptions about Hamas. Indeed, this is the first time it’s been reported that Netanyahu did not speak to the head of the IDF until four hours into the Hamas invasion.

The authors make it clear that the failures that led to October 7, and the disastrous mistakes made that day, belong to all involved. “Israel’s prime minister, cabinet, military, intelligence agencies, and opposition all wore the same blinders,” write Bob and Kaufman, referring to the belief that Hamas was incapable of a mass invasion of Israel and that it favored quiet over confrontation. Still, they add, “the buck must stop with the prime minister. On some level, he knows that.”

. . .According to documents retrieved by the IDF in Gaza, former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar planned the October 7 attacks with two overarching goals. The first was to thwart the Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement that the Biden administration was close to securing. The second was to lead Israel into a long and grinding invasion of Gaza that Hamas had long prepared for and Israel had not, and that Hamas knew would result in the deaths of many thousands of Palestinian civilians. The ensuing humanitarian crisis, Sinwar predicted, would turn Israel into an international pariah.

It is hard to argue with the fact that both of Sinwar’s goals were achieved. Israel’s international standing has seldom been worse, and Israel is now a bitterly divisive topic on both sides of the aisle in the United States. It is an open question whether the next American president—representing either party—will sever ties with the Jewish state. The prospect of normalization with Saudi Arabia, briefly revived by the Biden administration, was laid to rest by Netanyahu’s rejection of the conditions that agreement required. Today, relations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are frayed, with the U.S. rejecting Saudi requests for aid as the kingdom faces renewed attacks from the Houthis. Prospects for normalization are muddled at best.

As for the military successes achieved in this war, many have failed to stick. As the book explains, the same Hezbollah that was supposedly decimated in the 2024 pager attack rose from the ashes to terrorize Israelis in 2026, emptying northern Israeli towns and killing dozens of soldiers. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime—the benefactor of Hezbollah and Hamas—survived the unprecedented American-Israeli attacks, leaving its ballistic missiles and nuclear program largely intact.

There’s a lot more, and you can read it if you subscribe. Schwartz seems to think that the solution to the whole problem was to somehow replace Hamas with the Palestinian Authority.  That is dumb for two reasons: Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza prefer Hamas to the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian authority is still committed to terrorism.

The book (click the link to go to the distributor’s page):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili sees the despised Kulka outside:

Hili: Our neighbor pretends she doesn’t see me.
Andrzej: Use the same method of coexistence.

In Polish:

Hili: Nasza sąsiadka udaje, że mnie nie widzi.
Ja: Zastosuj tę samą metodę kohabitacji.

*******************

From Stacy, image by Chris Shapan:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Give Me a Sign (it refers to a horse):

From Masih, a heartbreaking voice message from an Iranian woman who may be about to be executed:

From Malcolm, cat moments from Facebook:

Ricky Gervais displays his cat:

Two from my feed. I couldn’t resist posting the first one:

I love time-lapse videos of birds nesting:

And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial. This brother was selected to work in the camp, but decided to stay with his ten-year-old sister. Both, Jews from Czechoslovakia, were then put to death in the gas chamber.

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, listen to the coyote chorus:

Sunrise song. You'll want the volume up for this one, but not too high. Every coyote within a half kilometre radius decided to make themselves known this morning while I was enjoying the sunrise from the kayak. A truly magical moment. #mammals 🌿

— Dr. Heather Hinam 🍁 🇨🇦 (@secondnaturemb.bsky.social) 2026-09-21T16:37:10.099Z

Matthew says, “That’s the way to do it.”:

Maarten Boudry on Jason Arday and academia

September 21, 2026 • 11:00 am

My friend Maarten Boudry, identified by Wikipedia as “a Belgian academic and skeptic,” was commissioned by Persuasion (the Substack founded by Yascha Mounk) to write a piece on Jason Arday. He did, but they ultimately rejected it. This was a while back, so I don’t think it was passed over because it was old news. It overlaps some with my piece on Arday and Nature at the Chronicle of Higher Education, but is not identical in focus.

At any rate, I read it and offered to post it here, and Maarten accepted. It apparently has three titles, and is indented below.

***************

The Cult of Saint Arday

The Perverse Incentives of Academic Martyrdom

Saints, Sinners, and Suspensions

A “scholar who inspired a generation,” writes the journal Nature of the late Jason Arday. Anyone searching this editorial for any admission of Arday’s extensive academic misconduct and fraud, will search in vain. If we are to believe the most prestigious journal in the world, Arday was simply a victim of “systemic racism in academia.” This editorial, which needs to be read to be believed, seems to be the apogee (so far) in the canonization of Jason Arday that has taken place since his apparent death by suicide on August 14. Not to be outdone, his own employer and chief enabler, Cambridge University, has launched an independent review this week—not to investigate how an obviously unqualified person like Arday was elevated to the highest ranks at such an august institution, but to ask, essentially, how Cambridge “could have and should have done more” to stand by Arday in the period after the accusations against him entered public discourse. Buried as an afterthought in the announcement is a vague reference to the “wider circumstances of Arday’s time at Cambridge.”

It is tragic that Arday lost his life, and it is also understandable that questions of academic misconduct should fade into the background now. But the complete denial of any wrongdoing, combined with the vicious attacks against journalists and fellow academics who were just doing their job and exercising due diligence, makes it impossible to just move on. Cambridge Chancellor Chris Smith denounced the “racist feeding frenzy” leading to Arday’s death. Celebrity academic Ibram X. Kendi described a “lynching,” while podcaster Owen Jones said Arday was “hounded to death.” A columnist in a prestigious medical journal invoked Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” and wrote that “they are trying to kill us [black people].”

At the risk of belaboring what should be obvious by now, the plagiarism accusation can be settled in a few minutes by simply reading Arday’s thesis side by side with an earlier thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers—with The Telegraph finding over 100 instances of overlap between the two. Arday even copy-pasted responses of subjects from earlier publications, attributing them to people he allegedly interviewed himself, which constitutes outright fraud.

As is also well known, his life story was held together by bizarre implausibilities ranging from world-class long-distance running with serious injuries to doing volunteer work in Brazil for an NGO that never sends volunteers abroad, to an appearance on an acclaimed television show that could only have occurred decades before his birth. For a period of over a year, multiple internal whistleblowers had provided Cambridge with evidence of plagiarism and fraud, but they decided to look the other way. Instead, they fed Arday’s delusions and praised him to the skies as the “best in the world in terms of the research that you do,” as the head of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education said in a BBC story about his appointment. And let’s not forget that Arday intimidated any journalist or academic who dared to raise questions about this misconduct, by hiring legal firms to threaten to sue them for libel, or just by leveling accusations of racism.

In fact, right before Arday decided to take his life, even his own defenders finally seemed to come to terms with these disturbing facts, as they gingerly dropped their support for him. Several prominent signatories of the Good Law Project open letter, which had expressed “unwavering solidarity” with Arday against racially motivated “malicious attacks”, withdrew their names in the days preceding Arday’s death. They must have belatedly realized that the evidence against him was simply too damning, and the risk to their own reputations simply too great. Indeed, Cambridge University itself, which had long dismissed all allegations as a “vile smear campaign,” eventually opened an investigation into Arday after all. Of all newspapers, The Guardian exposed his ludicrous stories about a severed pig’s head and a knife-wielding assailant. A day before his death, a Guardian columnist had accused Arday of “using his neurodivergence as an excuse for dishonesty.” If you’ve lost The Guardian, it’s over. In fact, this loss of support from his erstwhile defenders plausibly contributed to Arday’s sense of despair.

When the former professor was found dead in his London apartment, however, all his sins were instantly washed away. Across academia and the web, the entire mountain of evidence against him was either denied outright or downplayed as the kind of peccadillo every academic is guilty of. Definitions of plagiarism were retroactively modified to suit the purpose, with celebrated academic Jason Stanley arguing that plagiarism does not cover “the mere overlap of sentences.” Apart from the dishonesty, this way of sanctifying someone who took his own life and punishing those who had criticized him also sets up perverse incentives, as Jason Manning wrote in Quillette: “Just as we worry about the impact of social media mockery, so we should worry about the perverse incentives created by elevating a self-killer and punishing his enemies.”

My alma mater Ghent University unfortunately also played a leading role in this drama, because of the affiliation of the man who first set the ball rolling: the self-described “race realist” Nathan Cofnas. Although Cofnas’ controversial views on race and IQ made him the worst kind of messenger for this particular piece of bad news, his role was ultimately limited: he merely broke the silence around Arday’s fraud, after which the legacy media sank their teeth into the story, uncovering fabulation upon fraud. Days after Arday’s death, Ghent University made international headlines by suspending Cofnas, currently a postdoctoral researcher there. When a case of academic fraud comes to light, the Ghent rector must have concluded, the one to punish is the lone academic who had the audacity to blow the whistle.

Fully in thrall to the new cult of Saint Arday, hundreds of academics and students at Ghent University signed a petition claiming that the late professor had come under fire only because “Black scientists are not allowed to belong,” and because his enemies implicitly believe that “elite academic environments naturally belong to white people.” Two Belgian academics even dragged my name into the story, accusing me of “bullying a scholar to death” and “kicking a dead man”—all for having posted a few times about the affair.

In the letter from Ghent University suspending Nathan Cofnas, the rector, Petra De Sutter, accuses Cofnas of a “targeted campaign of professional elimination”—and in so doing entirely overlooks the exhaustive documentation of misconduct provided by Cofnas. De Sutter’s letter is, moreover, one drawn-out heckler’s veto: the justification for the disciplinary measure is not so much Cofnas’ actual violations as the flood of complaints received, the “tension and unrest” in the workplace, and the cancellation of lectures by third parties. (Cofnas remains today barred from campus and under disciplinary investigation for another three months.)

Rather than focusing on a single researcher with unsavory views on race, academia would do better to reflect on how its sweeping abandonment of standards of excellence and meritocracy is not just corrupting entire disciplines, but also harming the racial minorities it pretends to defend. For what is more demeaning to black scholars than the assumption that you need to lower the bar for them because they couldn’t make it otherwise? How does that land with genuinely brilliant black academics like John McWhorter, Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire, S. James Gates, Jr., Danielle Allen, Musa al-Gharbi, Thomas Sowell, or Kwame Anthony Appiah? Nothing is more condescending than white academics who treat black scholars like children, shielding them from all criticism and amending the definitions of “excellence” and even “plagiarism” to suit.

At this point, I’m more depressed than outraged about the state of academia. It was bad enough that an unqualified fabulist like Arday could rise to the very top of one of the best universities in the world. Worse still was how Cambridge tried to cover it all up and threw around accusations of racism until the bitter end. But the canonization after his death by large swaths of the academic left, and the wild accusations against anyone who has asked critical questions about his story, leave even me speechless. Most damaging of all, it reinforces all the perverse dynamics that led to his meteoric rise and tragic downfall in the first place: don’t you dare question what a black researcher says from his own ‘lived experience’ — because then you’re a vile racist (or a race traitor, if you happen to be black yourself) and complicit in a ‘lynching’ or ‘witch hunt’. Instead of learning vital lessons from what happened here, academia is already preparing the ground for the next Jason Arday

Maarten Boudry is a philosopher and independent author writing on human progress and human (ir)rationality. His upcoming book, The Betrayal of Enlightenment, will be published by Pitchstone Publishing.

More woo from the NYT

September 21, 2026 • 9:40 am

UPDATE: Here’s a comment that Wildman herself left after her piece.  Notice how she characterizes what scientists have found: “It doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks, but how the moment makes the bereaved feel, and where it places us in our grief.”  One could paraphrase that as “I don’t care if it’s true so long as it makes me feel better.”  It is of course tragic that Wildman lost her daughter at only 14, but that doesn’t mean that people speak to us after they’re dead.

***********************

I’ve banged on over the years about how the New York Times is soft on woo—this includes religion—as has Greg Mayer (see references here). The paper still has a weekly religion column, “Believing“, written by a nonbelieving ex-Mormon, albeit a writer extraordinarily sympathetic to faith.  There is no “nonbelieving” column, nor anything about why people reject faith.  In the introduction linked just above, author Lauren Jackson says that the paper’s readers were the impetus for this column:

Earlier this year, we published a series of articles about how people experience religion and spirituality now. In response, thousands of you told us you wanted more: You wanted us to expand our reporting on how ancient ideas are appearing in our very modern lives. You wanted a space for both believers and nonbelievers to share their stories. You wanted, above all, for us to take the subject seriously.

In other words, readers had a “woo-shaped” hole in their being.

The paeans to faith demanded by readers extended to faith in woo. After all, belief in woo—dowsing, mediums, astrology, reincarnation, facilitated communication, and so on—are, like religion, belief in unsubstantiated phenomena that is based on faith.  This is what the NYT readers want, perhaps as a palliative in these parlous times.

Now the NYT has done it again, in an essay by Senior Opinion editor Sarah Wildman. Greg, who has taught a popular course on “Science and Pseudoscience” at the University of  Wisconsin-Parkside, called the piece to my attention, and, sure enough, it’s a type specimen of faith.

The title says it all: mediums, who pass on messages from dead to living people, “may be on to something.”  Unfortunately, tests of mediums over the years show that there’s nothing to it save duplicity (including some mediums who have bought into the idea that they really can talk to the dead) and credulousness.  James Randi’s “million dollar challenge”, which ran from 1964 to 2015, offered a cool million bucks to anybody who could demonstrate paranormal powers under Randi’s rules designed to rule out fraud.  Thousands of people applied, but nobody passed the tests, including a medium.

Click on the screenshot to read the latest osculation of woo; you can also read it for free at this archived site.

There are two forms of “reading” that mediums use: “hot” and “cold”. In “hot” readings, the “psychic” finds out stuff about the client, her relatives, and her life in advance, and then spits it back during a session, claiming it came from the dead. From Wikipedia:

Hot reading is a technique used when giving a psychic reading in stage magic performances, or in other contexts. In hot reading, the reader uses information about the person receiving the reading (for example, from background research or overhearing a conversation) which the receiver is not aware that the reader already knows. Hot reading is commonly used in conjunction with cold reading (where no previously gathered information is used) and can explain how a psychic reader can get a specific claimed “hit” of accurate information

In “cold” readings, the psychic doesn’t know about the subject in advance, but uses a number of cues to confect a message that seems real:. From Wikipedia:

Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, and mediums.  Without prior knowledge, a practiced cold-reader can quickly obtain a great deal of information by analyzing the person’s body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. during a line of questioning. Cold readings commonly employ high-probability guesses, quickly picking up on signals as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not. The reader then emphasizes and reinforces any accurate connections while quickly moving on from missed guesses. Psychologists believe that this appears to work because of the Barnum effect and due to confirmation biases within people.

Neither of these are mentioned by Wildman in her article, nor does she talk about successful efforts to debunk mediums. This lacuna is expanded more because Wildman seems confused about her point. In places she states or implies that messages are really coming from the dead or the beyond, conveying “inexplicably specific knowledge.” In other places, though, she emphasizes that people’s belief that they’ve somehow sensed the presence of the dead, or contacted the dead, is simply a wonderful palliative for their grief; but she doesn’t state explicitly that what they’ve sensed is real.

This mixing of soothing faith and reality makes the whole article a mess.  Nevertheless, both kinds of belief are harmful (see below).

I’ll give some quotes. First, one that mixes both theses (bolding is Wildman’s):

. . . in recent years, researchers have spent considerable, serious effort to examine the psychological impact of perceiving a lost loved one after their passing, and the positive role that can play in what grief therapists describe as our ongoing relationship to those we have lost. Contact, for lack of a better word, can be sensory, auditory, visual, a sense of presence, or smell. It can be spontaneous, reached through meditation or directed therapy or even, sometimes, through mediums who, like this one, offer inexplicably specific knowledge. References to such experiences extend just about as far back in literature as the written word and are not limited by geography, or culture.

Some studies put the proportion of people who have perceived the presence or signs of their lost loved ones at around 60 percent. Sympathetic psychologists call these sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased or even “after-death communication.” (Others — perhaps less sympathetic — call them “bereavement hallucinations.”) The therapists I spoke to for this essay aren’t trying to determine the veracity of the supernatural. They are trying to learn how perceiving the presence of the lost can lift the bereaved from their darkest spaces.

In study after study, the sensation of contact with a deceased loved one plays a rather remarkable role in alleviating grief. In one recently published review of 14 psychological studies across seven countries, spanning over 1,900 participants, researchers found that a majority of those who reported experiencing the sensation of their lost loved one had had some sort of “emotionally restorative experiences that contributed to coping with their grief.” That doesn’t surprise me. It is bleak finality that leaves the griever reeling.

Note that she mixes the “inexplicably specific knowledge” (yes, inexplicable), with the palliative properties of simply perceiving signs from the dead or of the dead. Later in the piece she adduces more “evidence” that mediums are trawling up something inexplicable.

Here’s the one mention of doubt, but it expresses an anti-scientific attitude:

The study of these occurrences and their impact on grief has long been prejudiced by exactly what you’d expect: the surety of scientists and skeptics that all of it — mediums, sensations, signs — might be about as real as a dime-store Ouija board, a 19th-century séance or, worse, a momentary psychotic episode. William James, the philosopher and psychologist, who was himself sympathetic to the idea, published a study of mentally healthy individuals in 1890 and noted the peculiar insistence of the “hallucinations of the sane.” Sigmund Freud once called it “hallucinatory wishful psychosis.”

Oh, those cold, nasty scientists who are sure that psychic phenomena are delusions! How vicious they are to dispel comforting illusions! But I don’t think scientists have ever denied that mediums may be able to mitigate grief. Of course they do—that’s why mediums are in business! Scientists are concerned not with the psychological effect of mediums so much as with whether they are really doing what they say they’re doing.

Here is Wildman is on the frequency and therapeutic value of having experiences of the dead:

Nevertheless, researchers have long recognized how widespread the experience is. In 1971, Dr. William Dewi Rees conducted a study of 227 widows and 66 widowers in Wales in which nearly half — half! — reported what was referred to as “hallucinations” of their lost spouse. Most of them had told no one. Dr. Rees noted the episodes were considered “normal and helpful,” and nodded to the similar experience of widows in Japan.

Again, we’re not denying that people dream about, long for, and even experience the presence and feelings of the dead, just as we don’t deny that people have experiences of God. The question is this: do such experiences show real communication with dead people and that God exists?

Towards the end, Wildman becomes more and more invested in the reality of psychic contact with the dead:

In conversation, Mr. Ginsberg told me that, though he suspects a large percentage of mediums can’t offer what they promise, he has had too many inexplicable experiences not to believe in some form of continued communication with his daughter, both through mediums and on his own. It makes her loss a bit easier to carry.

After Mr. Ginsberg told me about a number of inexplicable occurrences, I offered him one of mine. Once I was sitting in a coffee shop, describing to a friend the lack of resolution I felt over Orli’s untimely death [Orli was Wildman’s daughter who died at 14]. When I got up, the song lyric playing as I entered the bathroom was “Find a way to make some peace / with how the story ends.” It was a song by the Midnight that I had never heard. It felt like magic.

I told several of the researchers I spoke to about instances like this that feel peculiarly transcendent.

To me it would feel like a coincidence, and these coincidences happen all the time.  Wildman has undoubtedly often grieved the loss of and thought about her daughter. How many different songs must she have heard before, during, or after such times? What are the chances she would find one at least vaguely relevant to her grief? Different kinds of songs are heard by grieving people, but they report only the ones that feel “transcendent.”

Finally, here’s the kicker meant to show that something weird and numinous is going on. Here’s what Wildman says after she had calls with the well known medium Laura Lynne Jackson and her press person. The “prediction” apparently comes from Jackson herself:

Ms. Jackson’s press person told me that when she does an interview she typically does not also offer a reading. Part of me hoped she might anyway. How could I not?

Just before we wrapped up our call, she asked me: Did Orli have a weird stuffed animal? “Not like a teddy bear,” she added. I laughed. Orli had an anteater stuffed animal, pillow-size, I said. It is still on her bed. Ms. Jackson mentioned her own spiritual signs are armadillos, aardvarks and anteaters. Receiving a sign of an unusual animal like this one, she said, was a wink to us both from Orli. She said I’d receive such a sign, and it would arrive as an image.

I didn’t tell anyone about this conversation.

Some weeks later, one of my old friends from college texted me out of the blue. It happened to be Orli’s birthday. “I just saw this,” he wrote. He attached an image of a belt buckle he said he planned to buy. It had, he said, made him think of us.

On it was a brass armadillo.

Oy! Orli had a stuffed anteater, not an armadillo. This is a classic example of how readers dupe their clients (and sometimes themselves). First, the medium asks a generic question, and, upon receiving the answer, feeds the answer  directly back to the client as though it was conveyed by the spirits, and not  just moments earlier by the client; Wildman just laps up this classic cold reading move. Then, when she hears about an armadillo, Wildman falls prey to what students of readings call “free interpretation”: she finds a way to turn a mention of one thing into a mention of something else, converting a psychic “miss” into a psychic “hit”. How far off from an anteater would an animal have to be before it was not considered a sign from the spirits? Would an elephant fit the bill, as it too has a long snout?

All we have here is the kind of coincidence that many of us have experienced. Or perhaps Ms. Wildman’s old friend knew about Orli’s stuffed animal and was sending a belt buckle in that knowledge. Who knows? What is clear is that closing the essay in this way suggests that Wildman was receiving the psychic “sign” predicted by the medium.

You might ask, sensibly, “What is the harm of making people feel good by telling them stuff about their dead loved ones, even if that stuff is made up or ‘cold read'”?

You know the answer. There are two palpable harms. The first is that people pay good money to psychics. Jackson doesn’t given prices on her site, but her waiting list is years and years long. But it’s big business. As the AP notes,

“The psychic services industry — which encompasses various specialties such as astrology, palm-reading, psychic readings and fortunetelling — generated an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2024 and employed 105,000 people, according to market research firm IBIS World.”

Since there’s no proof these people are doing anything that’s really psychic, though they may be soothing people, this is a form of therapy in numinous clothing.

The second harm is that, like religion, belief in the reality of psychic stuff weakens our skepticism, making us more liable to believe other unsubstantiated stuff, conspiracy theories, and other claims without evidence (“the election was stolen”).  Now I am not going to be the one to tell a dying relative that she’s not going to heaven, nor would I cast a cold eye on a psychic reading that soothed a widower.

But with this article, the NYT is buttressing the reality of psychic phenomena, and buttressing it with the imprimatur of America’s most authoritative newspaper.  The piece is irresponsible, as was the editor who let it go by. Once again the Paper of Record is meeting America’s demand for woo when it should be dispelling that woo with facts. Will there be an op-ed arguing that mediums are fraudulent? I doubt it.

Randi exposed many of the techniques of mediums and other psychics in the classic PBS Nova film, “Secrets of the Psychics”; it is well worth watching.

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

September 21, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, September 21, 2026: the last full day of summer and the second and final day of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur ends at sundown, and observant Jews who have fasted and refrained from drinking can start ingesting then.

It’s also National Chai Day. I’ve been drinking the stuff for decades, since I first went to India, but now it’s become very popular (in various forms, like lattes) in America. Here’s how the really good stuff is made in a street stall; note the high pouring from vessel to vessel (6:05) that cools the tea and foams the milk. The chaiwallas pride themselves on the height of their pour.

A nice cup of chai I had ten years ago in Bangalore (Bengaluru):

It’s also International Day of Peace, National Beef Stroganoff Day, National Pecan Cookie day, and National Sponge Candy Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 21 Wikipedia page.

Posting will be light tomorrow, and perhaps for several days thereafter, as I have to have the lens in my right eye pulverized, sucked out, and replaced with an artificial one. Such are the ravages of age.

Da Nooz:

*Trump has carried through on his threat to ban reporters for three liberal media venues from the White House (article archived here).

CNN, MS NOW and Politico said their journalists were denied access to the White House grounds early Saturday and that their press passes were confiscated, a day after President Donald Trump said he would ban them — and that other media organizations would follow.

Numerous press freedom organizations said the president’s attempt to ban journalists from reporting at the White House was an unconstitutional attack on Americans’ free speech and right to know what’s happening in government.

“The First Amendment extends to White House grounds as strongly if not more than pretty much anywhere,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation. “It’s the people’s house; it’s the center of government.”

The media organizations all said they would fight the restrictions and continue reporting on the president. CNN and MS NOW journalists began reporting across the street from the White House on Saturday.

“The White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars,” MS NOW said in a statement. “MS NOW intends to take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalism in our democracy.”

Trump abruptly announced Friday he would ban MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House, saying he disliked how they covered him. “They’re fake news,” he said.

Akayla Gardner, a White House reporter for MS NOW, described on air how she tried to scan her badge to enter the White House grounds but was told it was “disabled.” An MS NOW producer who was with her was able to enter, but a photographer “had their badge taken this morning,” she added.

It’s clear now that what Trump means by “fake news” is “news I don’t like”, even if that news is true.  But this decision will not stand, for it’s a clear violation of the First Amendment and, if it stood, would allow any President to exercise censorship over news he didn’t like.  Obama said yesterday, with a chuckle, something like “Imagine if I decided to ban Fox News from my press conferences.”

*In an article in the NYT Magazine (archived here), Nikole Hannah-Jones of “1619” infamy sent her daughter Najya to a so-so public school in Washington, D.C.: an attempt to improve the substandard system by participating in it. It failed; her daughter got a poor education up to middle school:

In an interview in the paper’s morning newsletter yesterday, Jones said this:

I asked her permission to report it in the first place, and then I asked if she wanted to be photographed for the story. She’s angry about the choices that my husband and I made, and she wanted to have her say. Did she really want people to know she had failed algebra after middle school? Her answer impressed me: “Well, it’s true.” But when I showed her a draft, she didn’t feel I was hard enough on myself. So I tried to capture the conflict. In the years since my original essay, I’ve moved through the world with the unearned valor of people commending me for the strength of my choice. Now I felt I owed it to her to tell the truth.

I could feel her looking at me. Her body slung in adolescent impertinence against the front passenger seat door, shoulders turned so she could face me fully. Usually when I picked up my daughter, Najya, from middle school, she’d tumble into the car and bombard me with the day’s escapades, chattering nonstop about her friend group or complaints about an annoying teacher or her wonder at the test she’d aced despite thinking she’d failed it. But not this day.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.

As they neared the end of her seventh–grade year, Najya and her closest girlfriends were thinking about their futures. Honors students, they searched the nation’s top colleges, and that led to a curiosity about New York City’s highest ranked public high schools.

Wondering about their chances of getting in, they decided to Google their own school and its ratings. And in doing so, Najya and her tight trio of Black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city’s deeply segregated educational landscape but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide.

By dismissal time, Najya’s shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me.

. . . So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools. Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.

. . .We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.

After much internal debate in our household, in 2015, we enrolled Najya in pre-K at Public School 307, a segregated, high-poverty school across from the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn.

. . .“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.

Luana has pointed out to me, though, that the school where Hannah-Jones sent her daughter was actually quite well endowed. Here’s a tweet from Wilfred Reilly.

But in the end, it remains a sad story. Ultimately Najya got to choose her own high school—a selective public school that was mostly white, but she was floundering (even in math, her favorite subject) because of a substandard education in lower grades. And Hannah-Jones is clearly overcome with regret.  What it goes to show is that you shouldn’t force your own values on your children, especially if it could hurt their welfare.  Jones ends with an indictment of racism and the “riches” of white people.

*The WSJ reports on “The twin sisters facing the wrath of Iran’s crackdown” (subtitle: “Romina and Taraneh Rahimi were detained in January after a wave of protests. One was sentenced to decades behind bars; the other condemned to death”).

Taraneh Rahimi was staying with friends on the night of Jan. 24 when masked, armed men barged into the house, put a bag over her head and took her away. They later came for her twin sister, Romina.

For months after that, their loved ones didn’t know where they were, or whether they were even alive. Their mother searched for her 20-year-old daughters everywhere, begging staff at hospitals, in courts and outside prisons for information about them, to no avail.

In April, she received an anonymous call, a family member said. “Your daughters are at Dowlatabad Prison. You can book an appointment to see them,” the caller told her.

When she finally saw the twins again, in Isfahan’s female prison, their mother could hardly recognize them. Their faces were puffy and there were bald patches where their hair had been ripped out. They recounted harrowing tales from their time in detention, where they were tortured and sexually assaulted, according to information obtained by relatives and lawyers who reviewed their case.

An Iranian government spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Their crime? Peaceful political protest, of course, and now one of them may die but both will be in a dire prison for a long time—for protesting, for crying out loud.

The Rahimi sisters were among 16 defendants detained over their alleged role in the unrest around Shohada Square in Isfahan earlier this year. The central Iranian city, known for its blue-tiled Islamic architecture, has emerged as a focal point of the continuing judicial crackdown.

. . . The twins spent the first three months in a detention center run by the intelligence arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, where they were tortured and sexually assaulted.

A lot of the torture was psychological, according to information obtained by relatives and human-rights lawyers familiar with the case. The sisters were held separately in isolation, but they could hear each other screaming and crying from a distance. They were made to watch male prisoners being tortured. Taraneh suffered severe physical injuries when she was repeatedly beaten with a baton on her leg, knee, hand and arm, according to the lawyers and relatives.

. . . . The twins turned 21 in prison. At the end of August, Taraneh, along with nine others, was sentenced to death. Romina received a 25-year prison sentence. The convictions could be appealed, but rights groups worry the executions could be fast-tracked.

Taraneh’s relatives fear she could soon be the first woman to be executed in Iran in connection to the protests. “Every night we fear it could happen,” said Masoud Nourmohammadi, a cousin of the twins who is based in the U.S. “It could be any time.”

Here’s a photo of the twins supplied to the WSJ by their family; the caption’s from the paper. They’ve already been beaten and sexually assaulted; this is what Masih keeps writing about in her twitter feed (see below).

Taraneh, wearing red, and Romina Rahimi, pictured a few months before they were taken away. Family of Taraneh and Romina Rahimi

*Over at the Times of Israel, Amit Segal describes “How Hamas stopped and started the presses,” showing how the terror group controlled all the news coming out of Gaza.

It’s Sunday, September 20, and the most revealing sentence spoken from Gaza’s press corps this year came on a podcast from one of its greatest stars. “If someone says something like this, many journalists lower the camera.”

That is Motaz Azaiza—one of TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2024, GQ Middle East’s man of the year—explaining how, when faced with dissent, the Gaza media complex fixes the narrative on Hamas’s behalf.

Speaking on the Palestinian podcast Taqarob, Azaiza described a WhatsApp group that “all the Gaza journalists are in.” For anyone picturing a professional association: its icon is a Hamas flag, and its administrator, he said, is the media director of the Rafah crossing.

Azaiza is no friend of Israel. TIME’s honoree celebrated October 7 and filmed hostages being beaten in a Gaza street, but then promptly buried the footage. When Yahya Sinwar was killed, he told mourners that anyone who had not answered Sinwar’s call to go out and engage the enemy had “no right to mourn and boast about the manner of his death.” Sinwar, he wrote, “wanted you in the field.”

That Gaza is an authoritarian hellscape is hardly worth stopping the presses for. Anyone thinking critically assumed Hamas controlled the narrative from the very beginning. Azaiza’s testimony is less an indictment of Hamas than of the media complex that lapped up its releases.

The Committee to Protect Journalists ran a feature in May of last year in which the head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate listed Hamas’s methods—summonses, interrogations, threats, beatings, arrests, publication bans, interference with content, surveillance—and his deputy conceded that most journalists in Gaza now censor themselves. One photographer, beaten unconscious by plainclothes police beside Nasser Hospital, told CPJ that when colleagues tried to intervene, they were informed that “the spy and the journalist are one and the same.” CPJ noted the violations were vastly underreported, because the victims were too frightened to say so.

. . .The foreign press has omitted Hamas control since 2008, when Hamas stopped the West Bank dailies at the crossing and told their editors, according to the head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, that they could enter Gaza once they signed an undertaking not to criticize Hamas. It broke cover once again in 2014, when, in a rare moment of lucidity, the Foreign Press Association condemned the “blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods” used against its members in Gaza. A Hamas information official then confirmed it on Lebanese television: the security services, she explained, “would give them some time to change their message.”

When the war began, Hamas already had years of evidence that the foreign press would take what it was served. That is how a single group chat, with no foreign members, set a global narrative.

This is one reason why I trust the IDF more than the press coming out of Gaza. Israeli journlists (many, like those at Haaretz, opposed to their government) don’t have to take an oath not to criticize Israel.

*Finally, the WSJ has an article by the U of C President, Paul Alivisatos, on AI: “Teach students to think with, without and about AI“.

Something different and far more optimistic is emerging at the University of Chicago, including a new, AI-adapted core curriculum. Campuswide work on this topic commenced in the fall of 2024, with the creation of an interdisciplinary group of faculty to consider reforms. The report of this working group provides a simple, principled framework that will guide our changes in curriculum and classrooms. The first goal is that our students should learn during their time with us to be ethical, skeptical and ambitious about the role of AI in their education and their lives. The second is that all students at UChicago should learn to think both with and without machines.

Here, we hold fast to our belief that a core curriculum is the foundation for a college education that supports a life enriched by a love of learning and ideas. In the past, anyone proposing a change in our core curriculum would have to be steeled for a decadelong debate. Yet the urgency of this moment is prompting beneficial changes in tandem at a pace commensurate with the technological transformation.

Our core curriculum—which students largely complete within their first two years—consists of humanities and social science, as well as the study of mathematics and biological and physical sciences, and the study of civilization and the arts. Soon all undergraduates will be required to take a class in writing, without the aid of any machine, and engage in the true struggle. Real writing. Blank page. Tough comments from instructor and peers. The humanities and social-science cores will also exclude technology from the classroom.

In line with the principle that it is important for students to learn how to think with machines, there is broad internal support for the notion that to be an educated person today and in the future, one must be able to use computational tools and concepts within one’s domain, and to reason critically about how computation, data and algorithms shape what can be known and built. Likely, this will result in a new core curriculum requirement for coursework in computational thinking within the next year.

The idea that learning to use AI should be an integral part of learning how to think increasingly cuts across the whole of the university. Earlier this summer, our law school declared that first-year students will be required to learn to write and reason without technology in the classroom or the use of AI. This will be followed by deliberate and thoughtful integration of AI tools and methods in years two and three.

I heartily applaud the course in writing, though I’m not so keen on a course about how to use AI. I suppose they need to know how to use it, but it’s dead easy to learn on their own. I still consider writing skills essential for reasons I’ve stated before.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s knowledge of art prompts a question:

Hili: Did Rousseau have a cat?
Andrzej: I don’t know, why do you ask?
Hili: I’m wondering where he got the idea of the noble savage from.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy Rousseau miał kota?
Ja: Nie wiem, dlaczego pytasz?
Hili: Zastanawiam się, skąd mu się wzięła koncepcja szlachetnego dzikusa.

*******************

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Bad Spelling on Signs and Notices; another salacious one:

From Masih, who argues that the Iranian government is not giving any “freedom” to its people.  Au contraire: they are training more authorities to oppress people.

From Science Girl. Look at the Milky Way!

From the parody account “AOC”:

.From Malcolm; photobombing cats (don’t miss the cat butt):

One from my freed; an excellent summary:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Doc Cobb. First, dinnertime for tortoises:

Dinnertime! #AGoodPlaceSource: http://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmil…

— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️ (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) 2026-09-19T11:26:18.850Z

Matthew posted this himself and says that I MUST see “Amadeus”:

Re-re-re-re-watched AMADEUS. Even better than I remembered. The editing – film and sound – is extraordinary and Abraham deserved his Oscar. A really fabulous, opulent production. As to truth? It’s a fantasy, very harsh on Salieri, but rightly shows Mozart as the voice of God. One of the great films.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-09-19T20:51:39.989Z

Here’s the frog!

September 20, 2026 • 11:30 am

Did you spot the frog in the photo by Bob Woolley this morning? I’ll put the original photo up first, and then the reveal:

When I asked Robert how he saw it in the first place, he responded this way:

I saw the frog only because it was at the surface as I approached, but quickly dived down into the mud before I could see any detail, so the movement caught my eye. If I had happened on the scene as you see it in the pictures, I never would have noticed it.

Here’s a larger photo with the reveal below it: