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.
In honor of Drink Beer Day, and following up on the offerings by Jerry and Andrew Berry, here are some beers I had on a trip to England in January. We of course must begin with Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, Jerry’s favorite.
This of course is the bottled variety, which was all they had at the aptly named Leopard Bar in Bloomsbury.
The lovely Radnor Arms in Coleshill, Oxfordshire, is a classic country pub.
But, unfortunately, I don’t recall what beers we had there; that’s them there, at the front of the bar.
At the Anchor, in Polstead Road in Oxford,
I had beers with both evolutionary
and naval connections (my father and daughter were/are in the US Navy, and our host was a former Royal Navy officer).
Swordfish is “very good“, fide Beer Advocate, but, as Jerry would appreciate, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord is “outstanding“! Just down the Road from the Anchor is the childhood home of T.E. Lawrence. Jerry and I are both Lawrence aficionados, and Jerry has shared his photos of Lawrence’s last home, Clouds Hill, so here’s where he lived from 1896-1921. (Note the Blue Plaque.)
In London, Punch and Judy in Covent Garden has a fine bar,
and fine food–beef & raclette cheese shortcrust pie–with accompanying pint, but, alas, I did not note what beer it was. (Note the HP Sauce.)
Besides traditional English pubs, London has many fine ethnic restaurants, and, at Oorja Indian Dining, the Indian beer Kingfisher was available. (It’s not great, fide Beer Advocate.)
Both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum have nearby pubs. In Kensington, near the latter, we found Timothy Taylor’s Landlord on tap.
Note the real pull handle.
Across the street from the British Museum, the Museum Tavern, adorned by an image of the Museum’s founder, Sir Hans Sloane,
had a fine bar (note the American style taps for Peroni and other beers at the near end of the bar, and the pull handles for English beers down by the gent who’s about to order),
where I had, of course, the house ale.
Finally, on the way out of England, I tried Aspall Cyder, made in Suffolk, at a hotel at Heathrow Airport.
At last I’m back from the eye doctor and I’m okay so far, having had a suprachoroidal hemorrhage during cataract surgery, a rare complication whose frequency is between 0.03% and 0.1%. (Mine was the first one my experienced ophthalmologist had ever seen.) Fortunately it was a small one, is contained, and while the clot will slow the healing process while it gets resorbed, so far it looks like eye #1 will be okay. For the time being I’ve canceled surgery on eye #2. But I looked up what I had, and here’s an object lesson—one I have not learned—never to look up symptoms on the Internet:
FEARED COMPLICATION! That put my kishkes in knots, and it was with a heavy heart that I dragged my butt to the ophthomologist. Fortunately, a retinal specialist had already told me that my hemorrhage did not turn out not to be so fearful, as it was small and contained. Today the symptom I developed yesterday—stabbing eye pain—was diagnosed as “part of the normal healing process.” One of Coyne’s Rules for Life is this:
Never look up your symptoms on the Internet, for everything eventually devolves to cancer.
But in this case it devolved to a guide dog and a white cane. Warning: do not discuss my hemorrhage or prognosis as it will make me grumpy. You can tender well wishes if you want!
On top of this, I was way late for my appointment because there was a deadly crash that shut down inbound Lake Shore drive. Some joker, probably drunk, drove his car south into the northbound lane, killing a poor woman in a head-on crash that also involved another car. Not a good start to the day.
But eye digress. The point of this post was to be that this is Drink Beer Day and my friend Andrew Berry has a British Ale to recommend. You’ll remember from this morning that he sent me a photo of an empty pint of my favorite session beer, Timothy Taylor Landlord. But he claims (wrongly, I think) that there’s a better beer. I got this photo in an email titled “The best pint IN THE WORLD.”
I emailed back saying, “What is the beer?”
He responded, “Harvey’s Sussex Bitter. The best beer in the world, according to A Berry. Brewed in Lewes, Sussex. You probably had some when you came to Down House with me and my summer school students. Harveys is served in both pubs in the village of Downe.”
That was a great trip, as the tour of Down House, Darwin’s home, was led by none other than Janet Browne, who wrote the definitive biography of Darwin (now in one volume, condensed from the original two).
I then wrote Andrew this, “You haven’t tried all the beers!!! Plus you must mean session pint.”
His response?: “And, yes, I’ve tried ‘em all. Every beer ever brewed anywhere ever. And Harvey’s Sussex Bitter is indubitably the Best of them All.”
When I asked if he was in Downe (the village where Down House resides, he answered, “Downe? Nope, this is Harveys pub in Sevenoaks, where my mother lives. The Bricklayer’s Arms.”
And he sent a photo (below). Look at that place! The genuine pubs of England—the ones with real ales cellared well and without music—are one of that country’s great contributions to the planet. Let us hope they endure.
What’s your favorite beer? Answers below, please. And I abhor IPAs as they’re too hoppy, so I can’t entertain suggestions in that genre.
And a beer that’s been drunk, sent to me from England by my friend Andrew Berry. He knows that Landlord is my favorite session beer, and was trying to taunt me:
President Donald Trump stood on the red carpet at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in December and declared his mission to fix the building, to “make it beautiful,” all but accomplished.
“It was falling apart, and now it’s pretty much back,” Trump told reporters as he stood beside FIFA President Gianni Infantino ahead of the World Cup draw. “We’ve done a really great renovation job on it,” he added, predicting that remaining work would be complete within three or four months.
By Trump’s telling, it was the culmination of a transformation he had set in motion shortly after returning to office when, vowing to end “woke” programming, he purged the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees and became its new chairman.
But less than two months after Trump’s victory declaration — after his name was added to the building, artists balked at performing there and income dropped further — his assessment of the center’s condition soured.
In late January he hosted a starry red carpet premiere for the documentary “Melania” but days later announced that the center was so “tired, broken, and dilapidated” that its main building would need to close for two years. The building was “sort of dangerous,” he added that week, though it was deemed safe enough for Trump and the first lady to catch a performance of “Chicago” about two months later. By the end of April, executive director Matt Floca was testifying about dangerous roofing conditions and electrical equipment that he said posed a risk of fire or, in the worst case, explosion.
Over the following months, the descriptions grew more dire. Trump said people entering the building were in “serious danger.” The center’s lawyers called it “structurally unsound” and “fundamentally unsafe.” This month, after a section of ceiling plaster fell in the Grand Foyer, Trump described the building as being in a “virtual state of collapse” and said the incident could have “killed” people.
Yet many of the underlying physical problems cited by management were documented years before Trump took control — when Kennedy Center officials and their engineering consultants were planning to repair the aging building while continuing to stage performances.
A dozen current and former Kennedy Center staff members interviewed by The Washington Post described a building that needed substantial repairs and routine maintenance but said they had not experienced conditions that led them to believe the building as a whole was unsafe.
Truth be told, I never thought of the Kennedy Center as a particularly attractive building, inside or out, nor a fitting tribute to JFK. If nobody wants to go there, or perform there, perhaps it should be allowed to die. But that’s different from Trump’s changing description about a building based on whether his name’s on the outside. All this behavior resembles that of a small, petulant boy. I suppose someone has pointed that out, but his whole Presidency resembles juvenilia.
*Oh, Lord, another despoliation. This time it involves a major league ballgame being held into a National Park. Guess who wants it? Yes, according to the WaPo, Major League Baseball approached the Trump administration to host a standalone game in a National Park. This may well not happen, and it shouldn’t, but a Park Service official is scouting locations in Grand Teton National Park.
Major League Baseball has approached the Trump administration about hosting a game at a national park, officials from the White House and MLB confirmed Saturday.
The administration has scouted locations in Grand Teton National Park to build a baseball park to host an MLB game, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Grand Teton is the country’s eighth-most-visited national park and is famous for its breathtaking views of the Teton Range of the Rocky Mountains. National parks are among the country’s most protected federal lands, and constructing a sports facility at Grand Teton could set a new precedent for the use of vast national park land in the Western United States.
An MLB official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the league approached the administration after the success of MLB’s other stand-alone events, such as the recurring Field of Dreams game in Iowa. The idea of playing a game in a national park is one of several that MLB is exploring.
The White House said in a statement that MLB asked the administration “if it was possible to host a game at a national park, similar to the Field of Dreams game.”
“This is not a Presidential directive, nor is it being directed by the White House. It’s also not being driven by the Department of Interior,” the statement said. “Therefore, this is not a White House or Administration priority.”
The White House said MLB has not made any decisions and the Park Service has not granted any permits. “If the MLB wants to go on site visits of national parks, that is their prerogative,” the statement said.
It referred additional questions to MLB.
National Park Service Deputy Director Frank Lands visited Grand Teton National Park in recent days and looked at three potential locations for a baseball park within the park’s boundaries, the two people familiar with the matter said.
Now wait a tick! You don’t have to build a permanent stadium there, but there will have to be some kind of stadium that holds many people, and that shouldn’t happen in a National Park. That’s not what those Parks are for! But if I know Trump, he’ll want to build a permanent grandiose facility there and call it Trump Teton Stadium. I’m hoping these plans fall through completely.
*If you thought the Free Press was objective in its news coverage—and you really shouldn’t have—you’ll be learning that it is soft on religion, putting it on the front page, like this (click to read if you subscribe). Yes, the lead story of yesterday’s FP was how two Princeton philosophy students, one an atheist (Joe Schmidt) and the other a lukewarm Christian (Noah McKay), while both are vegans, came to wholly embrace Catholicism. “What,” I asked myself, “Is the point of this.” The author, Suzy Weiss, a nepoemployee, write about culture for the site.
I’d taken the train to Princeton because I wanted to find out what’s in the water in New Jersey. I assumed philosophy was a field where reason trumps faith, and that anyone who thinks about it long and hard enough, in the halls of the progressive Ivy League, will come to the conclusion that there is no Creator. I thought postmodern academia had made everyone believe in nothing. Did these grad students study their way into believing in God, or was the intervention more divine than that? And does it have something to do with America’s much-vaunted “Catholic boom”?
Both these gentlemen were clean-cut—polos, khakis, a leather messenger bag—and clearly brilliant. They talked fast and opined on the finer points of magisterial doctrine from the 18th century, between bites of vegan corn ravioli. They’ve both been studying and debating apologetics for years, and met each other a few years ago at a conference, before they were students at Princeton together.
When McKay and Schmid met—it was in October 2022 at the Rutgers Philosophy of Religion Conference, also in New Jersey—they discussed what arguments might actually convince them to become believers, and they were in agreement: miracles. They weren’t talking about finding the image of the Madonna in a slice of toast. What they wanted to find was “strong empirical evidence” for miracles, and instances of “medical documentation, X-rays, hundreds of thousands of witnesses, including skeptical and hostile witnesses.” So, they got to work.
They studied the Marian apparitions, like the one in Fátima, Portugal, where three shepherd children reported seeing “a Lady more brilliant than the Sun.” They studied the miraculous healings at Lourdes, in southwest France, where the waters are said to have cured more than 7,000 people in the last 150 years or so. (The Pope is visiting this weekend.) The Catholic Church has verified 72 of these healings, and McKay was impressed with their rigor—anyone healed at Lourdes goes back each year for reexamination—and the canonization process, in which a Catholic considered for sainthood has to have at least two miracles attributed to them. “I still think miracles are rare, and I still think most miracle claims are false,” said McKay. But by the end of 2025, “I believed that Catholicism was true.”
For Schmid, the tipping point was studying Padre Pio, a Catholic saint who died in 1968, and was said to exhibit stigmata: wounds that appear on the same parts of the body where Jesus was nailed to the cross. “Naturalistic explanations don’t seem to account for their persistence, their character,” said Schmid. He was working on the case of Padre Pio with Ethan Muse, a philosopher at Rutgers, who had likewise been convinced that Catholicism is the one true faith, after spending years as an atheist, by studying miracles. (“This New Jersey corridor between the Princeton philosophy department and the Rutgers philosophy department is very sympathetic to philosophy of religion,” said McKay.) Muse had begun seriously considering Catholicism around Easter 2025, after studying the Shroud of Turin, and had enrolled in the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults program.
There are alternative explanations for Padre Pio’s stigmata (some have evidence behind them), but the fact is that we don’t understand how they got there, and we can’t test them now. Curiously, no existing priests have stigmata that could be tested. At any rate, the miracles did the trick.
Then, in early January, Schmid was sitting in the gym, when “a feeling in waves” came over him, and he got the message “You could be a saint” over and over again. “I just sort of was like, Okay, I give up, I’ve lost, God has won, and I’ve got to become Catholic,” said Schmid. A month later, on February 7, he went to a general confessional—because Schmid’s family is Catholic, he had been baptized and confirmed as a kid—and considered himself officially converted. “Big news. God exists. Christ is Lord and he established the Catholic Church,” Schmid told his followers, in a video he posted to his YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason, where he’d previously made arguments against the existence of God. In the video, Schmid added, “I’m not kidding.”
This kind of stuff is all too frequent in the Free Press, yet we never read about how someone became an atheist or gave up faith. And I don’t think we ever will.
After her triple-murder case ended in a mistrial, Lindsay Clancy will appear in court Tuesday for a status conference that should signal how the controversial case will proceed following a month of uncertainty.
At the hearing, prosecutors and the defense are expected to address pending motions from Clancy’s attorney to stave off another trial, the defense’s attempt to obtain more information about the holdout juror and – if prosecutors decide to retry Clancy – the schedule for a new trial.
Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the divisive case on September 4 after the jury sent several notes saying they were deadlocked and that a single juror was preventing the panel from unanimously finding Clancy not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility for killing her children.
At trial, Clancy admitted to killing her children – Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months – but argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she fatally strangled them and then attempted suicide in January 2023.
Prosecutors have not announced whether they will retry Clancy, but experts said both sides are likely considering whether another jury would reach the same conclusion, largely siding with the defense. At least one of Clancy’s jurors believes they would.
“If they tried the trial again the way they did, nine times out of ten, I think a jury would come back with not guilty by reason of insanity,” juror Nick Dargie told ABC News. “No doubt in my mind.”
I suppose that’s the verdict I’d find, for Clancy, if she was truly mentally ill (and it seems that way), should be given a chance for psychiatric rehabilitation, though I wouldn’t want to see her walk free in a year or so (that, of course, is a possibility). What I don’t understand are those people who want her found “not guilty”, period. It’s almost as if she’s become a hero for the murders. At any rate, it’s unlikely that the prosecution and defense can find a compromise solution that will avoid a new trial, as the defense wants no resolution that will result in jail time. This is a tough one.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, it’s raining, Hili is outside, and Kulka’s occupying the inside windowsill. That means trouble. As you know, these cats hate each other.
Kulka: I have a feeling it’s raining. Hili: I’m about to chase you out of that spot.
In Polish:
Kulka: Mam wrażenie, że pada deszcz.
Hili: Zaraz cię z tego miejsca wypędzę.
From Kitty Litterposting (I haven’t looked). You are looking not for the cat but for Waldo, who looks like this:
From Masih. This Iranian woman is going to be lashed 74 times because she sang.
One minute. That is all it takes to listen to this beautiful voice. One minute to become her voice.
Parastoo Ahmadi, one of Iran’s most beloved singers, has reportedly been sentenced to 74 lashes simply for singing. Her musicians and production team face the same punishment. In… pic.twitter.com/vuCXoKMBCO
Here’s Netanyahu’s speech at the UN last week (h/t Jez). The Times of Israel comments (not always favorably) on this speech, including this bit:
there were surprising omissions from the address, omissions that reinforce the sense that Israel does not have a clear and viable plan right now for countering the central threat to its national security: Iran’s nuclear weapons program, its ballistic missiles, and its rapacious, tenacious regime.
Several people have told me the speech is good, and I will watch it, but of course approving of anything Netanyahu does is like approving anything that Hitler did.
WATCH: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Speech at the United Nations General Assembly. 🇮🇱 pic.twitter.com/LSmn6uDDdF
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was four years old, and would be 89 today had he lived. https://t.co/bzvilhpCFj
Two from Matthew. First, the amazing reaction time of springtails:
Nature photographer 'pendra100legs' does these amazing macro shots of tiny bugs.This one is delightful (I'll link below to the full thing).It's a globular springtail in genus Sminthurides. These insect-relatives can launch themselves 60 times their height in 1.6 MILLISECONDS.*Voomp*. Gone.
For some reason the Telegraph has thrown in its lot with Intelligent Design creationism—and in the “News” section no less. The author of the piece below, ID creationist Stephen C. Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, has been hacking away at Darwin for decades, often declaring him dead. Sadly for Meyer, Darwin (represented here by Dawkins, the New Atheists, and naturalism), refuses to lie down.
And the arguments adduced by Meyer as “scientific” are nothing new, and have been rebutted over and over again. In fact, they’re pretty much the same arguments used by Ross Douthat in his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious to not only dispel faith, but to conclude that the TRUE faith is Catholicism, which just happens to be Douthat’s faith. (Meyer himself is a pretty devout Christian.) The only ID advocate I’ve found who isn’t religious, and I’m not sure he isn’t really, is David Berlinski. One would think that if the scientific evidence for Intelligent Design were so convincing, belief in it wouldn’t have nearly a 100% correlation with religion. And surely some scientists would have defected from Darwinism to the hogwash called ID, but I can’t name any (and naming one or two doesn’t prove anything, anyway).
The Torygraph should have rejected this lame effort not only on the grounds that its arguments have long ago been rebutted, but also because it says nothing that hasn’t been said many times before. Click to read an archived link. I’m not going to engage in rebuttals, but will point you to some of them so you can investigate for yourself. And shame on the Telegraph!
First, though, Meyer has to take a few obligatory slaps at Dawkins (in the title and first paragraph) and the New Atheists:
But now, two decades on, the influence of the New Atheists has waned. Former adherents, most notably Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have repudiated atheism entirely and embraced the Christian faith. Others, such as Alex O’Connor, the hugely popular atheist YouTuber and Steven Bartlett, the businessman turned podcaster, have moderated their outlooks too. Ironically, even Dawkins admitted in 2024 he feels “at home” in the Christian “ethos” – though he still firmly rejects the existence of God.
As many atheist philosophers (such as the eminent John Gray) have noted, the New Atheists’ philosophical arguments were never very good. Moreover, their arguments seemed strangely anachronistic following many of the great scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
Well, two atheists who have either become more moderate or become Christian, and Dawkins’s statement that his nurturing environment was Christian, don’t prove that the influence of New Atheists has waned. In fact, it you lump together atheists, agnostics, and “nones,” you see a rise from about 13% to 35%—nearly a threefold increase—between 2000 and 2020. And the “philosophical arguments” for atheism amount largely to the philosophical arguments for the Loch Ness Monster: hypothesis of huge, powerful being erected, evidence for said being not adduced, hypothesis rejected. As Victor Stenger wrote, the absence of evidence is evidence for absence [of God, too] if that evidence should be there. And it isn’t—not when it comes for God.
Here are Meyer’s tired old arguments, with links to rebuttals.
The Big Bang is evidence for God.
Consider first modern cosmology. Cosmologists have discovered that the universe, contrary to the expectations of those who long portrayed it as eternal, probably had a beginning. Multiple lines of evidence from observational astronomy support this conclusion. Developments in theoretical physics (such as the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which states that any universe that is expanding – as ours is – cannot be infinite in the past), also back it up.
Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, who helped make a key discovery supporting the Big Bang theory, noted the obvious connection between its affirmation of a cosmic beginning and the concept of divine creation. “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses…[and] the Bible as a whole,” he wrote in 1978.
You should know some of the rebuttals of this (multiverses, a cycle of expansion and contraction, physical explanations of the “big bang”), but just click here, here, and here.
And of course even if you think a divine being created the Universe, that doesn’t mean it was the Christian or Abrahamic God. It could have been Brahma or Zeus, or a giant, omnipotent squid.
The “finely-tuned universe” is evidence for God.
Second, physicists have discovered that we live in a kind of “Goldilocks universe”. In other words, the fundamental laws and parameters of physics are finely tuned against all odds to make a life-friendly universe. Even slight alterations of many independent factors – such as the strength of gravitational and electromagnetic attraction, the masses of elementary particles, or the initial arrangement of matter and energy in the universe – would render life impossible.
Not surprisingly, many physicists have concluded that this improbable “fine-tuning” points to a cosmic “fine-tuner”. As Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle, previously a staunch atheist, argued: “A common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics” to make life possible.
Again, you probably know some of the rebuttals, but go here, here, and here to see some.
The “digital code” of the DNA molecule, which are like letters in a language, prove God.
Third, discoveries in molecular biology have revealed digital code in even the simplest living cells. Francis Crick and James Watson elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. Crick then developed his famed “sequence hypothesis”. He proposed that chemical constituents in DNA function like letters in a written language, or digital symbols in computer code.
Computer code depends upon a precise sequence of zeros and ones. Similarly, the DNA molecule’s ability to direct the assembly of crucial protein molecules depends upon specific arrangements of chemical constituents (called “bases”) along the spine of the double helix.
As Dawkins has acknowledged: “The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.” Or as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates explains: “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”
This seems to me prima facie dumb: the DNA code comprises four bases (“rungs”) on a phosphate-and-sugar ladder, but it’s not zeroes and ones. It’s the way that nascent life found could help build proteins. Yes, it’s complex, but many aspects of life are far more complex than anything than humans can create, including a simple cell. But for better refutations of this idea, go here, here, and here (a video).
Th-th-that’s all, folks. No new arguments here. The Telegraph should have its tuches paddled.
This paragraph shows that the real object of ID, as stated in their founding document, is not evolution itself but materialism, of which evolution is one example. This program is laid out in the 1998 “Wedge Document,” long kept secret, that led to the foundation of ID and the antecedents of the Discovery Institute. IDers hate materialism and naturalism because they believe in the supernatural. If you don’t need the supernatural to explain the universe, their program falls apart.
Materialists also reject the idea of a designing mind because no such entity can be directly observed. Yet scientists often infer unobservable entities – physical fields, subatomic particles, past evolutionary events, subsurface geological features, the Big Bang – based upon the explanatory power of those postulated entities or events.
Welcome to Sunday, September 7, 2026, and Morning Show Hosts Day. Although “The View“, a talk show that made me cringe every time I saw it, isn’t exactly a morning show, it’s uber-woke (often with a token conservative), and Nellie Bowles has two items about it in her latest TGIF (Sunny Hostin is one of the passel of woke women who was on the show):
→ Sunny Hostin once served on a jury: This week on The View, Sunny Hostin said that when she was on a jury in the early ’90s, she was the holdout juror who prevented a good, if ill, man from going to prison. That’s right: She claims to have been the holdout in the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” trial (which might not be true but let’s go with Sunny). Here’s Sunny on his crime: “He did not mean to kill her and once he killed her, he panicked. He chopped up her body, yes, boiled her body parts, tried to commit the perfect crime,” she continued, talking over the other panelists to make one final important point: “And he fed her body parts to the unhoused.” So crucial. He fed her body parts to the unhoused. She really wants to be sure you heard that part. Because, well, that’s honestly admirable. The unhoused are famously hungry. If someone slaughters your mother but then feeds her flesh to the homeless, it’s morally neutral. What? You want to starve our unhoused community of human flesh? You’ve never panicked and accidentally chopped up, boiled, and served human body parts? Okay, Ms. Perfect! Speaking of The View:
→ In sickness and in murdering our children: I love The View, the beating heart of absolutely berserk American discourse. Because Sara Haines was also on the show criticizing Patrick Clancy for leaving his wife after she, uhh, strangled their kids. Haines said, “What bothers me is he talks about forgiving her, which I love, but he focuses on that and never jumps to what so many people struggle with. How did the marital love end so quickly?” Yes, Patrick, how? How did that love end so quickly? What changed? We’re all struggling to understand. You made a commitment!
The mule. . . .Old Rivers. . . and me. That last “me” is enough to make you weep, eh? We have a better song below.
Posting may be light until later in the week due to slow healing of my eye and a passel of doctor visits. Bear with me, though some people aren’t bearing!
President Trump has rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms, U.S. officials said.
Tehran’s proposal would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz and resumed nuclear talks in return for the U.S. lifting its blockade of Iranian ports, which is causing deep damage to the country’s economy. Trump says openly that Tehran is begging for a deal after the midterms that dismantles its nuclear program.
But privately Trump was skeptical Iran would meet his demands and has told his staff that he sees a renewed bombing campaign as likely, the officials said.
After this article was published, a reporter asked Trump on Saturday about the offer. “I’m rejecting their deal,” he said
Trump’s current position indicates the conflict’s stage—a liminal space between war and peace—is likely to tilt back toward hostilities. But the president, who has declared victory since the earliest days of the seven-month fight, alternates between pursuing diplomacy, ordering airstrikes and tightening sanctions around Iran. His views today could shift as the war drags over the coming weeks, officials said, and could be affected by the results of the midterms.
The level of strikes Trump is contemplating couldn’t be determined. He is reluctant to resume major combat operations, the officials said, partly because the U.S. wants to reserve dwindling munitions for other contingencies. But Trump has also announced massive attacks to push through diplomatic deadlocks in U.S.-Iran negotiations, sometimes following through but always stepping back from his most audacious threats, including wiping out the entirety of Iranian civilization.
Trump told the United Nations this week politics don’t enter his mind when aiming to pry nuclear fuel from Iran.
There was no mention of nuclear fuel in the proposed deal, at least so far as I know, and yes, Trump keeps flip flopping on war strategy. I keep saying that all he has to threaten to do is bomb Kharg Island, cutting off all of Iran’s oil supply to the West, and that might well turn the tide. But what do I know? I’m a biologist, not a pundit.
*Over at the WaPo, Henry Olson lists the ten Senate seats most likely to flip, and all, save the ones in Michigan and Iowa, he deems likely to flip to Democratic control. Given that there are 43 Democrats in the Senate (including independents who caucus with them) and 53 Republicans, a flip of just six of these seats would give Democrats firm control of the Senate.
North Carolina: North Carolinaunsurprisingly tops my rankings. The Tar Heel State leans Republican in federal elections and has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since Kay Hagan in 2008. But most statewide races there are close, and the Democrats nominated popular two-term former governor Roy Cooper, who has led in polling all year. Some of that lead — he’s ahead of GOP nominee Michael Whatley by eight points in the RealClearPolitics average — is certainly because Whatley is still largely unknown to about a third of voters. But RCP has Cooper at 49.3 percent, and as long as he remains around the magic 50 percent mark, it will be hard for Whatley to win.
Ohio: Democrat Sherrod Brown appears on track to reenter the Senate two years after he was defeated by Republican Bernie Moreno. Throughout his career, Brown has run ahead of the Democratic trend, and polling has consistently put him ahead in this race by three to eight percentage points. Like many states with large agricultural sectors, Ohio seems to be swinging against Republicans this year.
Maine: [Susan] Collins has survived in this blue state only because she attracts many Democratic voters. She certainly can win again, but Trump’s low popularity will be a barrier to the levels of ticket splitting she needs, and this week brought a bombshell ProPublica report that until 2025 she had been a subject of an FBI bribery investigation (her office strongly denied any impropriety by the senator). . . One to watch, but Democrat Troy Jackson is the favorite.
Michigan: Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s well-known weaknesses give Republican Mike Rogers a shot to pull off a blue-to-red upset. Michigan has not elected a Republican to the Senate since 1994, but Rogers came close in 2024. The big unknown: Will Michiganders who vote Democratic in other races abandon El-Sayed knowing his defeat could cost the party control of the Senate? It’s a good sign for El-Sayed that his support has been steadily rising since he won his primary on Aug. 4, but the race is far from over.
Alaska: It may surprise some readers to see Alaska this high on the list. But here’s another case of a good Democratic candidate combining with a good environment. Former congresswoman Mary Peltola beat a flawed Republican nominee and showed her crossover appeal by running five points ahead of Kamala Harris even when she lost in 2024.
Texas: Democrat James Talarico has been ahead in the last nine polls, but his lead still averages under three points. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the scandal-scarred GOP nominee, is flawed in the extreme. Will Republicans and GOP-leaning independents vote party over person?
Iowa: According to the polling, the race between Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson and Democrat Josh Turek is a dead heat. Hinson does not seem to be suffering as much GOP voter defection as other nominees, and she trails among independents by a smaller margin than her more endangered colleagues. It’s still a toss-up, but I join most raters in thinking Hinson is likelier to prevail.
New Hampshire: Republicans have reason to be excited about New Hampshire, where polls consistently show former senator John E. Sununu running ahead of expectations in this light-blue state. Three respected race raters have moved this one into their toss-up category. The fact remains, however, that New Hampshire is a highly educated, moderate state that has elected only one Republican to the Senate (Kelly Ayotte in the GOP wave of 2010) since President George W. Bush’s first term. It would be extremely strange if Sununu, who lost his reelection bid in 2008 to outgoing senator Jeanne Shaheen, can buck that trend in such a Democratic year.
Minnesota: Recent polling shows Minnesotaclose. The Democratic candidate, Peggy Flanagan, is very progressive, and as the sitting lieutenant governor she can be tied to the benefits-fraud scandal that destroyed Gov. Tim Walz’s career. Republican Michele Tafoya, a former NFL sideline reporter, is a talented campaigner, and one cannot entirely rule out an upset. But it’s very rare for a candidate from a party likely to do poorly in a midterm to capture a seat in the opposing party’s column.
Georgia: After a narrow runoff win in 2021, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff has turned himself into a fundraising powerhouse and dark-horse presidential contender. Meanwhile, Republican Rep. Mike Collins has had trouble raising money and has been stalked by a series of controversies involving problematic staffers. Georgia is Republican enough that the GOP is spending to try to elevate Collins, but don’t be surprised if he gets cut off — triaged, in political parlance — in October.
A lot of this sounds like wishful thinking.
*Roxane Gay, writer and NYT contributing editor, has a column that is mixed, “The W.N.B.A should take care of its own” (archived here; the WNBA stands for “The Women’s National Basketball Association”). She’s right about the dominance of drama over basketball, but dead wrong about wanting trans-identified males to play long with the women.
The W.N.B.A. is having a moment.
As the league celebrates its 30th anniversary, the audience is growing exponentially, and the number of teams is expanding. After years of fighting tirelessly for fair wages and a successful strike authorization vote, the players’ union earned a collective bargaining agreement; for the first time, star players in the league have secured million-dollar contracts; the league minimum salary is now $270,000; and there are higher salary caps for teams.
For anyone watching the W.N.B.A. blossom over the past three decades, this has all been a long time coming, hard-earned and richly deserved. But alongside the growth and increased public attention, the league is also facing a pair of crises, not necessarily of its own making: how to welcome trans women, if and when it becomes necessary, and a rise in racism directed toward Black players. How the league and the players navigate that will determine its future, one made possible by a loyal fan base that is largely composed of the very people most vulnerable to those ideological attacks.
. . .The league, however, does not exist in a bubble. The former N.B.A. players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, in a bid to be provocative, declared in August for the 2027 W.N.B.A. draft. In doing so, they stated that they were going to identify as trans women so they could be eligible to play. Freedom has continued this farce, appearing on conservative media, desperately seeking the attention he was unable to garner in the N.B.A.
Freedom has mostly pushed the league to provide a definition of “woman,” a tired conservative talking point, presumably because he and White think they are cleverly revealing some flaw in inclusive logic. The W.N.B.A. has indicated that neither Freedom nor White is eligible, but the question of how to craft a fair and reasonable policy for trans women remains.
The Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham was vocal earlier this year about her beliefs that trans women shouldn’t play in the W.N.B.A. “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” Cunningham said in an ESPN interview. Her claims exploit one of the most popular attacks against trans women — the idea that women and girls are not safe around trans women.
That’s not my reason for opposing trans women (“trans-identified men”) playing in the WNBA. It’s that they have an unfair advantage over biological women. I agree with Cunningham.
. . . Thus far, there has been only one openly trans W.N.B.A. player — the talented Layshia Clarendon, who retired after playing for 12 seasons, and also identifies as nonbinary. Thus far the controversy has been entirely manufactured by people with no real connection to the trans community.
The author goes on about the preponderance of black and queer women in the WNBA, but I don’t see a reason why that should cause concern. And yes, there’s a rivalry that sometimes becomes physical between Caitlin Clark, white, and Angel Reese, black, and watching the WNBA I think there’s too much concern over that, though the physicality is horrific. If the WNBA is to hold our attention, we’ll have to concentrate not on that drama but on the sport. Speaking of which, one of the author’s maladaptive recommendations is this:
The W.N.B.A., as a league, should lead the charge for making space for trans women in women’s sports.
Does that mean that trans women should be able to compete in all women’s sports? If not, why just basketball? Yes, there was once a trans woman WNBA player, but that should be the last one.
*And, if you need more stupid kerfuffles in the culture wars, read the Free Press‘s column by Liel Leibovitz, “Why you should care that Aslan is a woman.” (The voice of an upcoming animation of “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew,” has the voice of the Jesus-lion Aslan spoken by Meryl Streep. And there’s the rub: the subtitle is “The decision to have Meryl Streep voice the character in the new ‘Narnia’ film is neither a stroke of brilliance nor a microaggression against conservatives. It’s much more profound and dangerous.” Seriously? Profound and dangerous?
In case you’ve never stepped through that famous wardrobe door and into C.S. Lewis’s magical world, you should know that Aslan is a lion and the King above all High Kings in Narnia. Why, then, would anyone mind if Streep—a lioness and the Queen above all High Queens of Hollywood—gives the big cat a new purring sound?
The usual pop pugilists, still licking their wounds from the fight over Christopher Nolan’s casting choices in The Odyssey, rose to offer the usual arguments. Gerwig, growled the culture warriors on the right, is feminizing a quintessentially male figure; they could overlook her decision to turn Ken into a bumbling bobo in Barbie, her previous film, but giving the mightily maned lion a bit of gender reassignment surgery is a step too far. Relax, cooed their counterparts on the left, this is Meryl we’re talking about here and, really, there’s no one that woman can’t brilliantly portray.
But a woman can’t play a man if that man is JESUS!:
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who Aslan is meant to emulate. Any fifth grader could point toward Jesus—which is precisely what a class full of actual fifth graders argued in a letter to Lewis in 1954. The author, however, wrote back right away, telling the children they had it dead wrong.
“I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia,’ ” Lewis wrote from his office in Oxford Magdalen College. “I said ‘Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.’ If you think about it, you will see that it is quite a different thing.”
As is usual with C.S. Lewis, I fail to grasp the distinction there. But let’s proceed:
Which, Lewis wrote again and again to anyone who broached the topic, was the entire point of the Narnia novels. Aslan wasn’t an allegory for Jesus; he really was Jesus. All the author did was project Christ into a different world, where, he told another correspondent, “He would really have been a physical object. . . as He was in Palestine and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than His death on Calvary.” And if little boys and girls walked away from the books loving Aslan, then the faithful author would’ve achieved his goal, because the one they were really loving was Jesus Christ Himself.
. . . The problem, then, isn’t merely that a woman can’t or oughtn’t play traditionally male roles, a retrograde worldview which, thankfully, none but our grimmest guardians of tradition still hold. The problem is that, while imagining Jesus as a lion merely explores an image already present in the Bible, Jesus’s maleness is an essential aspect of his being. A woman can’t play Aslan because Aslan is Jesus, and Jesus, the son of God, is male. To alter that fact is to make him precisely what he is not: an allegory that may be repurposed and redesigned at will.
. . . And an attack like that isn’t about just another cheeky casting decision or wild artistic choice. It’s a bold step toward telling American believers that their culture rejects them and their beliefs. Gerwig’s film, then, may be fun and entertaining and even moving. But to Aslan’s loyal followers, it will never be more than a deliberate assault on their core beliefs. And if we’ve learned anything from our repeated visits to Narnia, such assaults rarely go unanswered.
O horrors! We can’t let this happen, even though some people say that Jesus was trans or bisexual. But there’s a far more pressing question here. Why did Leibovitz, who said explicitly that he’s a religious Jew, care so much about this? Presumably, religious Jews don’t see Jesus as a savior or the Messiah. And why did the Free Press deem this worthy of publication?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili vehemently denies she’s praying. And of course she isn’t: she’s an atheist cat.
Me: Are you praying? Hili: No, I’m talking to a spider.
In Polish:
Ja: Modlisz się?
Hili: Nie, rozmawiam z pająkiem.
*******************
From reader Michael Glenister, who saw this face in the back of a truck:
From Luana: What was really suspended was the American Psychological Association’s authority to give or withhold accreditation. And it was a federal panel’s recommendation, based on the APA’s antisemitism, not a final decision. What does that accreditation panel do? The City Journal says this:
While the APA does not possess a formal legal monopoly on psychology education, in practice it exerts near monopolistic influence on professional training across clinical, counseling, and school psychology. This includes control over doctoral education, internships, and hospital and medical-center placements. The accreditation standards of the APA disproportionately shape the values and practices of the mental-health workforce in the United States.
BREAKING: An advisory panel on accreditation has recommended that the Department of Education suspend the American Psychological Association (APA) for 12 months amidst concerns about ideological standards on DEI, gender-related treatment, and especially antisemitism.
From Jeff Maurer. Does this mean we can call them “Eskimo pies” again?
When I was a speechwriter, I was told by many American Indians that they call themselves “Indians”,* so I was constantly writing the word into speeches and then explaining my choice to disbelieving white people.
After following a sign to “follow the cat,” they were guided around the corner directly to a bar table where the cat jumped up like a proper host.. Bro really works there..🐈🐾😅 pic.twitter.com/RX5pPLGlPU
This French girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would be 89 today had she lived. https://t.co/wQn5uoQo7D
Music for the day: The Four Tops sing “Ask the Lonely” as performed in Paris. This, along with James Brown’s performance at the TAMI Festival, is in my view the most soulful music ever recorded on video. Look at Levi Stubbs sweat as he belts it out!
Rob K. Henderson is identified by Wikipedia as “an American writer and political commentator known for coining the term luxury beliefs.” These beliefs are said to “”confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”, and are said to include “defunding the police” and “getting rid of the SAT”.
Apparently one of Henderson’s “luxury beliefs” is belief in free will, as you can tell from the title of his Substack post below. But his thesis is not only wrong, but a dog’s breakfast of a meal. For one thing, he never defines free will. And he makes a ton of statements about it that are simply full of holes. I could write a substantive essay about how Henderson’s short piece is misguided, but it doesn’t deserve that. So what I’ll do is put his statements in bold, indented type, and put my responses in plain text flush left. Truly, I don’t understand why this guy doesn’t understand.
Let me start by saying that, as always, I conceive of free will as “contracausal” or “I could have done otherwise” free will, explained as the ability of a person in a given situation, with all the molecules of the universe poised at the moment of decision/action, to have done more than one thing. It does appear that Henderson has that notion, too, but he doesn’t say so.
And Henderson’s thesis is that the elites do think they themselves have free will, but propagate to the “lower classes” an idea of determinism, which harms those people by making them think they’re automatons.
Click the headline to read:
Here we go. Strap yourselves in, as it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in “Free Will” (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”
Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep and then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.
No determinist I know pretends that these two situations are equal. They’re “equal” only in that a man breaks his wife’s nose when she’s asleep. In one case it’s an accident, in the other a deliberate act. Although we may not be able to find out which is which, no determinist I know thinks that the situations are equivalent in how they should be dealt with. If we could find a way to distinguish them, then of course the abusive man should be punished.
Here Henderson paints a misleading view of what determinism is, and what the consequences of various actions are in light of determinism. A man who breaks his wife’s nose may be likely to abuse her further, or abuse someone else, and for that reason alone should be punished. This sanction does not apply to an accidental blow, which does not come from malice and isn’t likely to recur.
More confusion:
Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction. Determinists like Messrs. Sapolsky and Harris tell us that behavior can be explained through systems, incentives, trauma, inequality, neurochemistry and social pressure. Much of this is true. But a culture that speaks only this language teaches people that they are spectators in their own lives. The implication, rarely stated outright, is that no one really chooses anything. We are all the first man in the example above, thrashing in our sleep.
The determinists don’t deny that we have wills, or that our actions follow from them. Their argument is that will and action are themselves the products of deeper causes, such as genes, molecules and the environment, and so we can’t really be called free.
Well, we are spectators in our own lives, in that we know not the wellsprings from whence our thoughts and actions derive. But no determinist is trying to blur the consequences of disparate actions, arising in different ways, that have similar consequences. The rest Henderson gets right, but the bit about determinists “blurring” the causes of actions is dead wrong. And Henderson still hasn’t given us a cause of an action that does not ultimately rest on material objects like neurons. Does he believe in “ghostly” free will? Does he think that at a given instant, we can make more than one choice? He doesn’t tell us.
The psychologist Roy F. Baumeister has spent much of his career arguing against this type of thinking. In his recent book, “The Science of Free Will,” he claims that free will evolved because it was required to live in complex social systems. Culture works only if people can restrain themselves. They must follow rules when no one is watching. They must delay gratification. They must make plans. They must explain themselves. They must know that actions today bring consequences tomorrow.
Mr. Baumeister’s key move is to treat free will as a matter of degree. Some actions are freer than others. A man ordering dinner from a menu is freer than a man being robbed at gunpoint. A sober adult planning his career is freer than a drunk teenager in a parking lot at 2 a.m.
If free will “evolved”, then it must be material, for only material things are subject to biological evolution. Does Henderson mean that the feeling that we have free will evolved? I’m willing to believe that, but the existence of something immaterial affecting thoughts and “decisions”, which is what contracausal free demands, cannot have evolved.
As for degrees of freedom, that won’t wash, either. The man robbed at gunpoint is determined by his genes and environment to hand over his wallet, for he’s evolved to not want to die. And a man ordering dinner? At the moment he selects his entree, could he have chosen another? Not according to what we know of physics. Coerced action seems less free, but still involves determinism, just as with the man who chooses a burger rather than salmon (that would be me).
But hold on folks, for here comes the “luxury belief” part:
The determinists would have us drop these distinctions. But notice the asymmetry in their position. They rarely treat themselves as automatons. They also reserve agency for the educated reader, who is presumed to have the ability to redesign legal systems and reimagine institutions. Free will for me, but not for thee.
The deniers of free will haven’t improved society. They have merely produced a more forgiving vocabulary for those who damage it. The man who waits for his wife to fall asleep becomes harder to condemn, because somewhere in his past there is a reason. There is always a reason, but that isn’t the same as an excuse or justification.
Whaaaaat??? From what I know of Sapolsky and Sam Harris, the paragons of determinism, they do indeed see themselves as automatons. Sam Harris has even used the image of a puppet to represent a determinist, with genes and environment pulling the strings. Wherever Henderson got his idea that the “elite” determinists think they have free will while others don’t, it’s a blockheaded and palpably wrong idea.
Now why, you might ask, do the “elite” embrace free will for themselves but tell others that they don’t have free will? Apparently because all of us elitists want to parade their virtue by arguing that criminals should be treated more leniently—a consequence that Henderson sees as inevitably following from belief in determinism:
Arguments against free will often carry a hidden moral assumption. If no one truly chooses his actions, then no one deserves blame. Criminals should be treated more leniently because they couldn’t have acted otherwise. Judgment is redirected away from the criminal and toward the person who chooses to condemn him.
Notice, though, the asymmetry. The determinist grants agency to himself and a handful of other anointed beings. They can choose to become more enlightened. They can exert agency to redesign the criminal-justice system, revise social norms and build more compassionate institutions. Criminals and everyone else, meanwhile, are reduced to billiard balls.
This is presented as humane, but it’s condescending. It strips people of agency in the name of compassion. And once a person is no longer regarded as capable of governing himself, it becomes easier to justify governing him without his consent. If people are merely carried along by forces they can’t understand or control, then perhaps their preferences need not be taken seriously either.
The scientific and philosophical arguments about determinism are worth considering. But they should be separated from the moral conclusions that are so often attached to them. Too many deniers of free will smuggle in an exception for themselves. The unenlightened masses are automatons. The enlightened few, though, are free enough to decide what to do with them.
As I’ve said many times, and I believe Sam and Robert would agree, yes, people who do acts, injurious or meritorious, do deserve praise or blame. But that is simply a way of promoting good acts, discouraging bad ones, and reforming baddies or sequestering them away from society by locking them up. You don’t have to have free will to come to those conclusions; all you have to do is observe human behavior and decide what kind of society you want. (Note that the elites seem to be denigrated for designing a more humane justice system, which does follow from accepting determinsim, but also that Henderson thinks we reduce criminals to “billiard balls.” What happened to all the other non-elites who aren’t criminals?)
Determinists don’t strip people of free will in the name of compassion; they strip people of free will because what is what, as far as we know, the databsuggest. Compassion may indeed follow from realizing that nobody makes a free-will choice to do good or ill, but again I emphasize that this doesn’t mean that criminals should be free from punishment or treatment. And of course we have to take people’s preferences seriously, because those preferences are coded in their genes and neurons, put there by their inheritance or their environment (environment, of course, can change people’s preferences and their apparent “choices.” And it is disrespectful to ignore their preferences: “No Sam, you don’t want the steak; you want the sirloin. I know!”
This is all an attempt by Henderson, I think, to shoehorn free will as a “luxury belief”, a belief entertained by the “enlightened few” who are able to follow a scientific conclusion to its social consequences. But you don’t have to be “enlightened” to ponder the idea and, I hope, to realize that there is no such thing as contracausal free will. (There is of course “compatiblist free will”, but that is a semantic trick described by Sam Harris as the idea that “a puppet loves his strings.”)
And how, pray tell, does the rejection of free will promulgated by the elites “inflict costs in the lower classes”? And how does it stamp us as “elites”?
I swear, this is one of the most misguided and erroneous things I’ve read on free will. I suppose that because “luxury beliefs” are Henderson’s leitmotif, and apparently his Big Contribution to social discourse, he has to grab free will with his tentacles and drag that “luxury belief” into the Tent of Philosophy.
Why did I waste a couple of hours reading this stuff and trying to show its problems? Because I had no choice, of course.
