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.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has issued its yearly free-speech rankings of American colleges and universities, and I’m happy to say that, after a few years of hovering below the top rank, the University of Chicago is back at #1 among the 261 schools surveyed. We get an overall “green light” for free expression. The bad news is that the “grade” assigned to my school is a paltry “B-“. (No school got an “A”.) When I asked Grok why we got such a low grade, the bot said this:
FIRE’s composite score combines student survey responses (~63,000 students), written policies, and how schools handle controversies. Student perceptions of the climate carry heavy weight, which makes an A extremely difficult.
The drag [our B- grade] comes from student attitudes and culture, which FIRE measures in components such as self-censorship, comfort expressing ideas, disruptive conduct, and political tolerance. Even at the top school these remain well short of an ideal:
35% of Chicago students said they self-censored at least once or twice a month.
72% said shouting down a speaker is acceptable at least in rare cases.
29% said using violence to stop a speaker is acceptable at least in rare cases.
“Disruptive Conduct” is a relative weak spot (mid-pack nationally).
Absolute letter grades on several student-perception components are modest (D+ on comfort expressing ideas and self-censorship) even when the school ranks well relative to peers.
Nationwide, students report difficulty discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and abortion. FIRE treats the overall student climate as the main limiter: excellent policies and a clean controversy record cannot produce an A when a large share of students still self-censor or condone disruption. Chicago’s administration and formal commitments outperform almost every peer, but the survey data on student culture keeps the composite score in B- territory.
Those statistics on Chicago bespeak a country-wide problem. Shouting down a speaker or using violence to stop a speaker are never acceptable practices, and are inimical to free speech. Yet 72% of our students thought that shouting-down is okay, and 29% said that violence to stop speech can sometimes be okay. Both of those figures should be o%
You can read the whole article with links to specific schools, their ratings, and FIRE’s written summaries, by clicking on the link below:
The searchable database is here. You’ll want to look up your school. As for my college and graduate schools, William & Mary gets a respectable rank of #28 and Harvard ranks #74, up a hundreds points for its score last year when it was rock bottom, the worst school in the lot.
The best and worst schools:
The highest-ranked colleges for free speech:
1. University of Chicago 2. Claremont McKenna College 3. Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus 4. Michigan Technological University 5. Vanderbilt University 6. Dartmouth College 7. Purdue University-Main Campus 8. Appalachian State University 9. University of Virginia-Main Campus 10. George Mason University
The lowest-ranked colleges for free speech:
252. Howard University 253. University of Miami 254. Loyola University Chicago 255. Boston College 256. Indiana University-Bloomington 257. Rutgers University-New Brunswick 258. Northeastern University 259. Texas State University 260. University of Washington-Seattle Campus 261. New York University
From their announcement:
The University of Chicago takes the top spot, while Texas State University, the University of Washington, and New York University sit at the bottom
Most difficult topics for students to discuss on campus include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and abortion
Some schools fall in rankings following Charlie Kirk-related controversies
121 of the 261 schools ranked got an “F” for their speech climate
Here is some more information from FIRE:
One hundred and twenty-one of the 261 schools ranked got an F for their speech climate, while only 24 schools received a speech climate grade of C or higher. The lowest-rated schools have restrictive speech policies and some of last year’s most shocking anti-free speech moments. Several incidents cited in the report include:
The terminations of Thomas Alter, a tenured professor of history, and Idris Robinson, a professor of philosophy by Texas State University, for off-campus protected expression.
Multiple disruptions, attempted disruptions, and event cancellations — six in totalsince 2024— at the University of Washington.
The cancellation of a planned lecture by Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and genocide scholar, after the Northeastern University Police Department demanded a list of names of all the registered attendees.
. . . Encouragingly, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s seventh annual College Free Speech Rankings found the percentage of students who said it was acceptable to shout down a speaker, block entry to a campus speech, or use violence to stop a campus speech declined slightly from last year’s record highs.
Here’s the graph, over the last seven years, of the percentage of students who think it’s okay to impede or stop speakers they don’t like. It’s pretty depressing, as all three forms of impediment are unwarranted if you favor freedom of speech. And they’ve all gone over this period, with the okaying of violence rising nearly ten points: from 18% to 30% nationwide.
Self-censorship is also way too high, but of course students are timorous, so I’m less likely to criticize a monthly rate of 35% self-censoring than I am to criticize any approval of blocking, shouting down, or using violence against speakers. But remember, the same factors that make students think it’s okay to impede speakers are the factors that make students reluctant to express opinions on difficult topics.
It is the chilling of student and University speech that prompted the University of Chicago to become the nation’s first school to make a policy of institutional neutrality—as embodied in our Kalven Report of 1967. The number has grown a lot recently, and now 50 schools follow a version of the Kalven principle. Since there are 5600 higher-education schools in the U.S., however, that is only 1% of all schools. And among the Kalvenists you won’t find Williams College, whose President refuses to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality, something I’m always harassing Luana about.
A week ago I wrote a critique of a really misguided (and unsigned) editorial in Nature, blaming the death of Jason Arday on his hounding by a racist press as well as “systemic racism” in academia. You can see that editorial by clicking the screenshot below:
The “deep reflection” that Nature demands involves us examining our souls for our complicity in Arday’s death, as well as realizing the harm caused by the press’s reporting of the Arday affair, as well as by Cambridge University’s announcement that they were investigating accusations against him. (That announcement itself was said by Nature to violate Arday’s confidentiality, perhaps also leading to his suicide. But if you read the actual announcement, it’s nothing that’s sp unusual when a university announces a public accusations.)
Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of the Nature piece is that it almost completely ignores the lies, fraud, and fabulism issued by Arday, as well as the palpable fact that a man with almost no qualifications, and a background of duplicity (including probable research theft and fraudulent assertions on his c.v.) was appointed and lionized as a full professor of sociology at Cambridge. What Nature construes as “racism” is really “antiracism” by Cambridge: putting Arday’s ethnicity and claimed disability above his merit. If there’s any silver lining to the Arday tragedy, is that the outrageous claims by Arday touted have now made it okay to discuss how race-and-disability-based hiring can conflict with merit—that the term “inclusive excellence” might be an oxymoron. (There are of course very good black scholars, but Arday wasn’t one.)
At any rate, it was both misguided and even shameful for Nature to advance such a dumb argument, and I took it apart in my post. That post caught the eye of folks at The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), and they asked me to rewrite it for publication on their site. I did that, with the help of an excellent editor, and it was published yesterday. You can read it by clicking on the screenshot below. (You may have to “subscribe” by giving the CHE your email, but they do not send out promotional emails, and you can read a couple of articles a month for free.
I will not reproduce the whole piece I wrote there, but have put a few excerpts (indented) below. I should be able to put it somewhere free, and in toto, next week.
A few excerpts:
One of the more distressing changes in science is its infection by politics and ideology, a change visible in what I call “journal creep.” Until recently, the primary function of scientific journals was to disseminate research. Now, however, many journals have adopted an additional mission: promoting ideological, moral, or political positions. This newer mission, which endangers not only the reputation but also the practice of science, is seen clearly in a recent editorial in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, Nature.
The Nature editorial centers on the tragic story of Jason Arday, a sociologist who at 37 became the youngest Black full professor ever appointed at the University of Cambridge. In July, it was revealed that Arday had plagiarized significant portions of his Ph.D. thesis at Liverpool John Moores University. This in turn prompted extensive investigations by the press. What they found was not pretty: more evidence of plagiarism, falsified research, fabricated claims on his curriculum vitae, and, most striking, a breathtaking record of biographical fabulism.
. . . Nature’s editorial is titled “The Death of Jason Arday Must Prompt Deep Reflection.” Unfortunately, the reflection Nature demands does not involve asking how someone with such a thin academic record and a history of exaggeration and lying managed to secure such a prestigious position. Rather, Nature is concerned with assigning blame for Arday’s downfall and death, and the blame falls on everyone but Arday himself.
Most at fault, says Nature, was “persistent media attention” largely fostered by racism. Cambridge also deserves blame both for participating in the “systemic racism in academia” that supposedly made Arday’s life intolerable, and for announcing that they would investigate him, which, says Nature, was a violation of “confidentiality.” But all Cambridge announced was that it was investigating Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments” as well as allegations of “academic misconduct”— nothing more. Since the media was already intensively focused on Arday, announcing an investigation without giving details doesn’t seem out of line. American universities do it all the time, saying things like: “We are not commenting pending an investigation of these accusations.”
Oddly absent from Nature’s editorial is any serious acknowledgement of Arday’s apparent fabulism, plagiarism, errors, and lies. Nor is there any attempt to grapple with the fact that Arday’s decision to publish a memoir with a major commercial publisher further drew the media’s spotlight.
. . . Disparaging merit in favor of equity, shifting research funding towards progressive topics, misrepresenting science by skewing citations towards researchers having approved backgrounds, censoring papers, controlling language, and distorting accepted science so that it conforms to certain narratives while proscribing research on topics considered taboo — such symptoms of ideological pollution are present in journals across the sciences. Here are three examples, all involving Nature journals.
I then give three examples. Nature, like many journals (I’m looking at you The Lancet, as well as at Science) has gone “progressive” (a polite word for “woke”), and the examples show that clearly.
. . . A scientific journal, like a university, should remain ideologically and politically neutral, with the possible exception of matters that directly affect the mission of the journal itself. Pinning blame for the death of Jason Arday on the press and on the University of Cambridge, and flippantly characterizing science as ridden with “structural racism,” are not issues within the remit of Nature. Although Arday was the author of his own tragedy, Nature asks all of us to search our souls for traces of the racism that, they claim, make us coauthors:
It is incumbent on all of us in the media and academia to reflect on our roles and responsibilities. Both research and media organizations have an obligation to communicate information fairly and accurately — and to avoid causing harm to the people they employ or report on. We can and must learn from this tragedy.
Welcome to Thursday, September 10, 2026, and National Hot Dog Day, celebrating Chicago’s most famous foodstuff. As all Chicagoans know, the best version is the one called “dragged through the garden”, as this short video explains (you don’t have to make them yourself: they’re on sale at many places). The dogs are made by Vienna Beef with natural casings, and the buns are Rosen’s poppy-seed buns. The “sport peppers” are small hot peppers. The combination of meat and vegetables (and MUSTARD, never ketchup) is ethereal.
It’s also National Port Wine Day and TV Dinner Day, celebrating those pre-bought dinners in partitioned aluminum containers that you ate on individual fold-up tables while watching television. I had many of these as a kid; here’s a Swanson TV Dinner ad from 1963 (unfortunately, it lacks dessert). If you’ve eaten one of these, you’re old; I don’t even know if they have them any more.
*The Times of Israel reports that the UAE told Netanyahu days before the October 7 attack that Hamas was “planning war”, but Bibi ignored it (h/t Norman). Israel denies it all:
Some 10 days before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was personally warned by the leader of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive move against Israel, but did not update Israeli security leaders and did nothing with the information, according to a report on Tuesday.
An Emirati source familiar with the conversation confirmed the Haaretz newspaper’s report to The Times of Israel later Tuesday, and said the warning came during a phone call between the two leaders.
The UAE itself declined to confirm or deny the report, issuing a statement that noted “open lines of communication” with Israel through which “all relevant intelligence has been and continues to be communicated.”
Netanyahu’s office issued a statement Tuesday evening saying that “the press reports are false. No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates before October 7. If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.”
The Haaretz report cited a new book, “Kidnapped: 843 Days of Abandonment,” by journalists Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, based on interviews with dozens of sources including senior officials in Israel and around the world. It said three senior foreign officials were updated on the contents of the 45-minute phone call at the end of September, and it cited a Palestinian adviser to Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed who emigrated from Gaza to the UAE and had direct knowledge of the conversation.
But over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal dismisses this, in an article called “What did Bibi know?”, as an unfair indictment of the Prime Minister.
But let’s assume every word of this dramatic report is correct—who cares?
People excited by more ammunition to fire at Netanyahu forget that the problem was never a lack of information. The Hamas plan—kibbutzim, hostages, GoPros and all—was captured the year before; three months before the attack, an army analyst warned her superiors that Hamas had rehearsed precisely that over a full day. At the fence, the observation-post soldiers, the infamous tatzpitaniyot, had spent months reporting the drills but were similarly ignored. Most illustrative of all, on the night itself, the Shin Bet detected dozens of Israeli SIM cards activated simultaneously inside Gaza—and made the decision to send in the Tequila team—a small counterterror element meant to repel small raids, not an invasion.
The fundamental problem was never a lack of signs, but a lack of understanding.
The overused but precise term for this is conceptzia—a rigid, overriding paradigm, shared by political and military leadership, that traps them into thinking the status quo is immutable. Before October 7 it referred to the prevailing atmosphere preceding the surprise attack of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Those familiar with the history might recall that 11 days before that war, King Hussein of Jordan did significantly more than call: He helicoptered in secret to a Mossad safe house near Tel Aviv and met Golda Meir, warning her that Egypt and Syria were planning a joint attack. The day before the war, Israel learned that Moscow—patron of both Syria and Egypt—was pulling the families of its officers out of Damascus and Cairo—and did nothing. Meanwhile, a junior intelligence officer in Southern Command put in writing that the Egyptian deployment was preparation for a real war, not a drill. Israel’s leadership read the reports and then dismissed them—after all, Egypt wouldn’t dare attack the militarily dominant Israel; besides, why risk escalation or a false alarm, especially when mobilizing the reserves would paralyze the economy?
In 2023, Israel had even more information, and faced virtually no cost to blunt the threat. Any of the security chiefs could have picked up a phone at any point and told a battalion: listen, something is moving, get ready, there might be a war tomorrow. Not one did, including Netanyahu.
So spare me the search for the single leader who ignored the obvious signs or the one warning that would have changed history. From the chief of staff to the prime minister, all were trapped in a conceptual prison guarded by their own presumptions and upkept by groupthink that none escaped.
In late October Israeli voters will choose the members of the parliament (the Knesset), and that vote will determine who becomes Prime Minister. Netanyahu has said he’ll be in the running again, and it remains to be seen whether this latest report, which I haven’t seen in American MSM, will affect any votes. But if he’s deposed, I predict that the worldwide hatred of Israel, often based on Netanyahu’s presence, will not lessen.
*There’s endless psychologizing of President Trump with respect to what he is trying to do in Iran, and Middle East expert Michael Doran weighs in at The Free Press with his view (a siege) in an article called “Trump is charting a new course on Iran.”
Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump agreed on the objective: an Islamic Republic stripped of its nuclear program and of the power to hold the region hostage. But they frequently disagreed about how to make Tehran yield. Graham never wavered. More force, he recommended.
Three weeks into the war, the senator revealed the advice he had given the president: “Keep it up for a few more weeks, take Kharg Island. . . [and] let this regime die on the vine.” In May, he put the theory plainly: “Hurt them more. Maybe they’ll make a deal if you hurt them enough.” And in June, three weeks before his death, he predicted that if Iran contested the Strait of Hormuz, “We will obliterate them.”
Since last Easter, Trump has repeatedly threatened Tehran in accordance with the late senator’s advice. During the summer, the U.S. military prepared what reportedly would have been the largest strike of the war. At the urging of regional allies, however, the president again gave the military the order to stand down. Graham did not live to accept that rejection, but many of his political allies, my friends among them, reached what they considered to be an obvious conclusion: Trump had lost his nerve.
. . . [Trump’s] actions reveal a president steering between what he considers to be two wrecks. The first is George W. Bush’s regime-change war in Iraq. Trump called that war possibly the “worst decision” in presidential history and promised his voters never to repeat it. The second is Barack Obama’s Iran policy. After Iraq, Obama concluded, America’s only remaining course was to retreat, pay Tehran for quiet, and call it peace.
. . . Trump’s critics can imagine only these two headings, so each camp accuses him of steering toward the one it hates. But the president is attempting something harder: He is applying enough force to change the calculus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) without tipping into the war of conquest toward which the dynamic of the conflict is pulling him. The bombing has proved insufficient, so he is tightening an economic siege in its place. Whether that middle course can succeed is the real question of the stalemate. Answering it begins with the military balance, which Graham’s theory took for granted.
. . .Graham’s theory held that enough bombardment would eventually produce capitulation. Six months on, Trump appears to have found another way to apply the pressure he prescribed: not simply by escalating the bombing, but by shifting the contest onto terrain where American advantages are greater. Iran created local overmatch in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States is answering with naval power, economic warfare, and control of the global financial system.
The stalemate has therefore changed shape. It is no longer a question of whether a course exists between Bush’s war and Obama’s retreat. Trump is attempting to create one: suppress Iran’s disruptive capabilities enough to keep Gulf commerce moving, deny Tehran the same privilege, and use America’s global economic power to impose costs that airpower alone could not. Whether this strategy will compel Iran remains unknown. Five days of financial warfare do not settle a six-month war. But the experiment is now underway. Graham wanted to hurt Iran until it wanted a deal. Trump is trying to do precisely that.
In response to this I can only utter the immortal words, “We shall see.”
*Tomorrow will be the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist airplane attacks in the U.S., and the news is preparing a big spate of articles. This one, in the Washington Post, and by former Justice Department prosecutor David Raskin, is very good: “The 9/11 trial that never happened“, with the subtitle, “President Obama’s wavering and Congress’s fear killed the court case Americans deserved to hear.” (You can see the article archived here.) The trial, of course would have been that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the main architect of the plane attacks. Mohammed has been held by Americans since 2003, and then was transferred to Gitmo, where he’s spent the last two decades. A trial date in the U.S. is scheduled for June, 2028. From the article:
As the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks approaches, I still think about the case that never happened.
In 2009, I was preparing to help lead what would have been the most important criminal prosecution in American history: the trial in a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators for orchestrating the murder of 2,977 people. It would have been a civilian trial, in open court, before a federal judge, held only a few blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.
Had it gone forward, it would have been the Justice Department’s finest hour.
The case was to be tried before Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York, a no-nonsense jurist with deep experience handling complex, high-profile terrorism cases. Kaplan presided over the 2010 trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo detainee charged in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. From arraignment to sentencing, that case took a little more than a year and a half.
I can imagine how Kaplan would have responded had Mohammed tried to grandstand in court — with swift, unsentimental control, enforcing the rules of his courtroom without theatrics or indulgence. It would have been orderly and dignified. The public deserved to see such a trial, the victims were entitled to see it, and the Justice Department could rightly have taken pride in delivering it.
The evidence would have spoken for itself. Critics of civilian trials in the case warned that jurors could not bear to relive the horror of Sept. 11 or that classified evidence could not be handled safely. That was wrong. Federal courts had already convicted dozens of terrorists — including Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, and Zacarias Moussaoui, once called the 20th hijacker — using lawful, tested procedures designed to balance the public’s right to see powerful evidence, the defendant’s right to a fair trial and the nation’s interest in protecting intelligence-gathering sources and methods.
In the Mohammed case, we would not have relied on statements tainted by torture. Unlike the military commissions underway at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which planned to use so-called clean team FBI interrogations conducted after years of abusive detention until a military judge recently suppressed them in Mohammed’s case, a civilian prosecution would have had no need to flirt with legal gray zones. The admissible evidence was overwhelming. It included financial records, communications, co-conspirator testimony, physical evidence, Mohammed’s own uncoerced admissions and some surprises that have never been made public.
That trial would have ended in conviction long ago, as the evidence demanded. The defendants might have received death sentences, or they would have been condemned to spend the rest of their lives in the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. I have been there. It is the last place on earth any convict wants to end up.
But none of this happened.
The moment Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November 2009 that Mohammed would be tried in Manhattan, a chorus of opposition erupted. Some critics insisted that Sept. 11 was not a crime but an act of war, and that the perpetrators therefore deserved the “rough justice” of a military commission, not the protections of the Bill of Rights. Others spun up security fantasies, generating ridiculous fears the New York police commissioner used to justify an outlandish estimate of security costs. Still others complained about the inconvenience of it all, lamenting the burden of street closures and traffic jams.
Shame on all of them.
They did not understand how broken the military commissions already were. Our push to move the case to federal court was not ideological. It was about getting the job done. The commissions were a brand-new, untested system, plagued by endless litigation over their legality and procedures. And, ironically, they turned out to be more defense-friendly than civilian courts, reflecting the military justice system’s traditional role in protecting the rights of accused U.S. service members. Far from being the instruments of swift justice many envisioned, the commissions became a defense lawyer’s dream.
Nor did critics understand the detention conditions at Guantánamo. Mohammed and his co-defendants were not desperate to leave. Pretrial detention at the now-closed Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan was far less appealing. Yet the White House wavered. President Barack Obama, who entered office pledging to close Guantánamo and end the commissions, announced in May 2009 that instead they would continue, albeit with reforms. That equivocation proved fatal. It signaled weakness and emboldened opponents of civilian trials in Congress and elsewhere.
At the height of the backlash, what was needed was a clear, unequivocal statement from the Oval Office: “Knock it off. I stand by my attorney general. We are doing this.” But that never came. Congress stepped into the breach, eventually barring the transfer of Guantánamo detainees to the mainland for civilian trials. The plan to try Mohammed and the others in New York faded.
The trial, says Raskin, will never occur: “I predict there will never be a completed military commission trial for Mohammed and the other Sept. 11 defendants. The case is now before its fifth judge. ” But he’s secure in the knowledge that the perp will never be free, incarcerated according to military rules. The problem, says Raskin, is that the “law of war” detention lasts only as long as we’re at war with al-Qaeda, while the verdict of American justice is permanent. As Raskin concludes:
All Americans must reckon with the fact that the Justice Department missed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to demonstrate the strength of American law. That failure haunts me. And it should haunt the country.
Amen. This case should never have been put into the hands of the military, and now it’s too late to undo that. And Gitmo is far more comfortable, I’m told, than where Mohammad is likely to end up if he’s tried here: an American Supermax prison.
The latest sign of the organization’s growing clout came Monday, when likely 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom became the latest Democratic establishment figure to welcome the DSA into a prominent role in the party. The California governor told Politico he’s “not alarmed” by the rise of socialism and that “it’s where a lot of the energy in the party is.”
As one DSA member joked to me this summer: “How insane is it that we’re in a political moment where the Democrats are so discredited that a knucklehead organization like DSA. . . is getting courted by all these national politicians because our brand is so good?”
But the DSA’s sudden success has also inflamed its long-standing internal debates. The struggle is between avowed Marxist-Leninists who want to abolish the Pentagon and refuse to condemn Hamas, and a more practical kind of socialist who believes prioritizing police and prison abolition is the wrong way to go about amassing electoral power.
One side of the fight—call it the pragmatic wing—is betting that socialists will succeed by continuing to rack up victories in Democratic Party primaries and gaining influence within that old husk. This approach requires the DSA party faithful to let candidates make occasional compromises on policy and put up with sometimes out-of-step officials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former beau ideal of a socialist lawmaker who has drifted somewhat from the DSA over her four terms in office.
The other side, the purist wing, views any efforts to meld the socialist project with the Democratic Party as a betrayal of the coalition’s revolutionary roots. Their goal is to overthrow the two-party system, not to partake in it and risk their own corruption.
How this tension resolves in coming months may determine whether the DSA carves out a durable political presence on the mainstream left or reverts to what it’s long been: a fringe movement more interested in ideological purity than winning power.
As far as I’m concerned, the DSA is in no way beneficial for the Democratic Party. If it’s successful, the Party becomes woke and extremist, as well as more antisemitic. The DSA platform is largely insane, though there’s no way Americans are going to get rid of the Presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the cop, or that will open our borders fully. But besides corrupting the Democratic Party, they’re also splitting it, making it harder to beat Republicans. All they have to do, with a candidate like AOC or Mamdani (who, fortunately, is ruled out as President), is to quote some of what they’ve said.
Many veteran correspondents and producers left or were ousted during a shake-up in which some departing talent accused Weiss of putting a political thumb on the scale. Weiss denied those charges.
Since then, [60 Minutes head Nick] Bilton and his team have been rebuilding its roster of correspondents and lineup of stories. His leadership faces its first test when the show returns Sunday for its 59th season.
CBS leadership gave Bilton the option to wait to premiere the new season until October, according to people familiar with the matter. But he decided to go ahead. “We’re ready,” he told the network, the people said.
Technology, particularly artificial intelligence, will be a theme this season, people familiar with the matter said. Bilton sees AI as the kind of defining story “60 Minutes” tackled in previous eras, including the Vietnam War, the fight against Big Tobacco and the Sept. 11 attacks.
He has also promised a renewed emphasis on original investigations, long a hallmark of “60 Minutes.”
People close to the show say that 35 stories are being shot or edited and 60 more are in development.
I just haven’t watched the show for ages, and this doesn’t make me want to start. Seriously, AI as a “defining story”? I’m so sick of AI stories, and there’s a lot going on in the world besides the rise of AI. I just don’t have the interest any more.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is getting quite philosophical while Andrzej retains his sense of humor:
Hili: The present fades away, the future is unknown, the past is nothing but a story now.
Andrzej: Even an atheist will sometimes say – amen.
In Polish:
Hili: Teraźniejszość mija, przyszłość jest niewiadomą, przeszłość jest już tylko opowieścią.
Ja: Bywa, że i ateista mówi czasem – amen.
*******************
From Meow Incorporated; I think this is a real photo of a cat loose on a playing field:
From Masih; in Iran, a woman is refused medical care because she’s not wearing a hijab. This is one of the reasons that America should prioritize changing the Iranian regime.
This is what enforced hijab looks like.
In a clinic, a woman refuses to provide medical care to another woman because she is not wearing a hijab.
“I’m in charge here. You have to wear a hijab,” she tells her.
From Luana. The comment is right on—how can you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone did not have an episode of mental illness when they committed a crime? The burden of proof should be on on the person who asserts that his/her crime is the product of mental illness.
This is opposed to federal law, which puts the burden on the defendant to establish insanity by clear and convincing evidence.
So no one on this REPUBLICAN staff knows baseball enough to say “Sir, you swing like an old lady with rickets trying to swat a spider web with a broom”? https://t.co/01kYyz8QOI
One from my feed. Sand cats (Felis margarita) are gorgeous small cats and well adapted to a very arid environment, getting most of their water from their prey.
In Morocco’s, remote Sahara, wildlife photographer Rémi Vacher, encountered one of the world’s most elusive wild cats: the sand cat.
TWO I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial; one who survived and one who did not.
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed when she arrived in Auschwitz. She was four years old, and would have turned 86 today had she lived. https://t.co/aoetTuH70X
And two from Doctor Cobb. Look at this cunning bird!
A #bird following a #stingray to catch #fish startled from their hiding place in the sea grass as the stingray passes over them. Cormorants also follow kayaks & paddleboards in this part of #florida to catch fish startled from their hiding places by the kayaks shadows. #nature #animals #wildlife
Over the years I’ve posted several of what I call “Coyne’s Rules for Life”, giving advice that I’ve learned can be useful. Here are two I remember (I haven’t written the list down anywhere):
When taking a shower or running a bath, turn the cold water on first and only then the hot water, adding the hot to the cold until the desirable temperature is reached. This prevents you from burning yourself.
When buttoning your shirt, start from the bottom up. This makes it much easier to avoid mis-buttoning, which can be time-consuming to rectify.
There are others, but I’ve forgotten them. As I was doing the “readers’ wildlife” this morning, one of Coyne’s Rules ofLife came to me—and then I remembered two others. I had thought of these years ago, but they were buried in my neurons and somehow emerged spontaneously. In contrast to the rules of life, which are prescriptive, the rules for life are simply my observations about humanity and human nature. These three are all about people’s self-images, not about the reality of their character:
1.) Most people think that they’re a little bit crazy (in a good way). What I mean is that everybody thinks that they have one or more lovable eccentricities or peccadillos. Nobody wants to think they’re normal and boring, which is why people have this self image. My observation is that the “eccentricities” that people think make them adorable are often either mundane or seriously disturbing. If you want an example of someone who reveals an adorable craziness on a regular basis, I give you Sarah Silverman.
2.) Most people think they have a good sense of humor. Again, humor is a much appreciated characteristic in people—just look at the personals ads, which show you that everyone wants someone like that. People without a sense of humor are seen as mundane, serious, solemn, or even dour—in other words, people who are no fun to be with. However, most people do not have a good sense of humor. They may have a sense of humor in that they try to makes jokes or they laugh at other people’s jokes, but they’re not people who make you laugh regularly. The apogee of a good sense of humor is seen in people like Robin Williams.
3.) Nearly everyone thinks they’re a nice person. In other words, nobody thinks they’re a bad person, a jerk, or an asshole. How often have you heard somebody say, “You know—I’m a real jerk” and mean that. they are a real jerk pretty much all the time? (Larry David plays a real jerk on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”)
Of course nearly everyone is capable of being nice or a jerk on occasion, but I’m talking about real jerks—the people you avoid being around because they’re constantly annoying. Because almost nobody thinks they’re a jerk but observation shows that the world has plenty of jerks, we are forced to conclude that there’s a lot of self-deception going on. (See Robert Trivers’s book The Folly of Fools for more examples.)
Needless to say, I fancy myself falling in all three categories, but is it true? Who knows? That’s why I’m prone to introspection about my interactions with others and tend to beat myself up if I think I’ve acted badly.
Please add other “rules of life” if you have some.
Today I’m stealing (with permission) some photos from Professor Scott Ritchie of Cairns, Australia. Scott’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. (Scott’s Facebook page is here.). I’ve inserted the Latin binomials and links to the bird page.
Welcome to a Hump Day (“Puckeldagen” in Swedish), Wednesday, September 9, 2026 and it’s National Teddy Bear Day. Here is my teddy bear, whose name you should know if you’ve read this site for a while (put it below if you remember0. The first person to send a photo of their teddy along with a few words of description will have it posted below. I got this bear when I was born, and here he is nearly eight decades later, battered, head sewed back on, new eyes, and nearly devoid of fur. That makes two of us (save for the head part).
Reader Normansent a stuffed doggy, but it’s close enough to Toasty that I’ll post it. His comments:
Not a bear, so this may not count, but this is Sooty. My cousin Michael, exactly 15 years to the day older than me, gave this to me when I was born. I’ve had it ever since and now have it in a display case. Its eyes are gone. Its stuffing is gone. But it’s still Sooty to me.
Again I note that posting will be light for a while. Not only do I have a writing assignment, but my insomnia has returned big time. And I’m still anxious about the ducklings, though I think they’ll be all right.
New Canadian tariffs targeting roughly $20 billion in U.S. imports officially snapped into place on Tuesday, the latest escalation in an increasingly costly trade war that has ensnarled two longtime allies.
For now, the economic effects of the tit-for-tat may be limited because the tariffs encompass only a small portion of the annual trade between the United States and Canada. The more pressing concern is a potential cycle of retaliation, one that results in even higher and more exhaustive duties that harm families and businesses on both sides of the border.
In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney has sought to position himself as a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s trade aggression, describing his nation as “at war.” Canadian officials generally have pledged to respond “dollar for dollar” to any U.S. duties.
In Washington, the president and his aides have repeatedly mocked their Canadian counterparts and the size of their ally’s economy and military. Mr. Trump has already threatened additional tariffs on auto imports from Canada, and on Friday, he even suggested he could try to halt bilateral trade outright.
Then, hours before Canada’s new tariffs took effect, Mr. Trump took to social media to continue his attack. He singled out Bombardier, a Canadian plane manufacturer, claiming there would be “NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!”
Bombardier said in a statement that aerospace products are a top American export and that the company makes crucial components like wings in California and Texas. “Bombardier is a strong contributor to the sector, creating tens of thousands of jobs across the United States,” it said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The spat with Canada offered the latest evidence that Mr. Trump remains as committed as ever to his disruptive strategy of trade brinkmanship. Despite nearly two years of blistering court defeats, vicious international disputes and mounting domestic blowback, tariffs remain the president’s preferred tool to try to boost domestic manufacturing and broker better trade deals.
Trump is not only dead wrong about tariffs, but is also alienating our friendly neighbor to the north. It galls me that Canadians may think that most Americans are anti-Canadian, but in reality most Americans have taken a dim view of Trump’s tariff rampage. This is not going to be good for Trump or the Republicans in the midterm elections.
*There’s a new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the now jailed creator of the blood-testing company Theranos. The documentary, called “You Can See Everything”, is are somewhat secret as even the NYT doesn’t want to give away the spoilers, the film doesn’t open until October, and the trailer, below, is just over one minute long. (In 2023 Holmes was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in the federal pen.) An excerpt from the NYT piece, which is archived here.
Thirty-four days before Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the medical testing company Theranos, reported to prison to begin her 11-year sentence for defrauding investors, she invited a camera crew into her rented home in Southern California in an effort to clear her name. Yet the two people she chose to chronicle her life were Nathan Fielder, the absurdist comedian behind “Nathan for You,” and the documentary director Lance Oppenheim.
That decision turned into a three-year odyssey for the filmmakers and a three-hour documentary called “You Can See Everything” that may upend the documentary genre itself. The film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in a secret screening on Sunday night that was not revealed until audience members took their seats. It will make its theatrical debut, courtesy of A24, on Oct. 16.
The movie features long, intense conversations between Fielder and Holmes with extreme close-ups. It also reveals that while Holmes serves her time at the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, she and her partner, Billy Evans, are making plans “to launch a new and improved Theranos,” the company that collapsed after its deceptive claims about blood-testing technology were exposed in The Wall Street Journal in 2015.
What can’t be featured in on-camera interviews is depicted in innovative recreations. Two weeks before she leaves for prison, Fielder moves into the home and is there for moments many would consider off limits. There’s also a surprise plot point that shouldn’t be spoiled.
“I don’t know why I’m there,” Fielder said in a post-screening question-and-answer session at Telluride. Throughout the film he gives the couple many opportunities to turn off the cameras, he noted. “I’m really struggling to this day to understand what I experienced,” he added. “I’m excited for this movie to come out and for people to help me with what I experienced.”
That’s a plenty weird documentary, and the trailer, below, is equally weird. I don’t believe for a minute she’s telling the truth; what she has to gain is burnishing her image:
As for “launching a new and improved Theranos, Holmes should forget about it. I think she may be forbidden to do that kind of stuff for a while, and who, in view of her deception and crimes, would invest in it?
*Here are the results of yesterday’s poll on Lindsay Clancy. There were some good comments, too. The votes weren’t numerous—another sign of the dying of this site—but to my surprise the most votes went to “guilty” with “not criminally responsible” in second place (as you can see from the yellow bar, I voted “no opinion or unsure” as I wasn’t on the jury and really don’t have an opinion). As I note below, I think the jury was going to render a verdict like “not guilty by reason of mental illness,” which still would have put Clancy in jail for a long time.
It had looked like the end of deliberations in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy.
Eleven of twelve jurors had agreed not to convict Ms. Clancy. Then the one holdout “admitted he had reasonable doubt,” the jury’s forewoman, Roni Carlson, said in an interview with the television station NBC10 in Boston on Tuesday.
According to the judge’s instructions, if jurors had considered all the evidence but still had reasonable doubt about the charges against Ms. Clancy, they had to acquit her.
So Ms. Carlson, a retired teacher, started to fill out the three verdict forms, she said in the interview. She got as far as writing her signature on each sheet. But then, Ms. Carlson recalled, the holdout juror said, “I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”
In the first public statements by jurors since the monthlong trial, Ms. Carlson and two other jurors opened up about the grueling week of deliberations in which the jury of nine women and three men were deadlocked, prompting Judge William Sullivan to declare a mistrial
Now I’m not sure whether “not guilty by reason of insanity” equates to “not criminally responsible for murder,” but I
Apropos, over at the City Journal Christina Buttons describes the effect that housing criminal defendants has had on psychiatric facilities (a lot more violence and assaults on staff). She favors a hybrid jail/treatment option:
States should take a different approach. Manhattan Institute senior fellow Stephen Eide argues that they should invest in psychiatric care inside jails rather than continually moving offenders into state hospitals. Jails already have legal obligations to provide health care, and competency restoration often consists of psychiatric stabilization along with teaching defendants enough about the legal process to participate in their cases. States can fund specialized restoration programs within secure correctional settings while reserving hospital transfer for defendants whose conditions actually require hospital-level treatment. The ACLU has opposed this approach, calling jail-based competency treatment “inhumane” and arguing that defendants should instead receive restoration in a therapeutic setting.
Eide’s proposal recognizes that treatment and criminal accountability can coexist. A defendant can suffer from serious mental illness and still belong within the criminal-justice system. Improving psychiatric care in jails would allow states to provide treatment without turning ordinary psychiatric hospitals into de facto correctional facilities. It would also preserve scarce civil beds and reduce the burden on staff and patients when hospitals are asked to manage forensic populations they were not designed to house.
The debate over Lindsay Clancy reflects the same tendency to treat compassion for the offender as incompatible with criminal accountability. Much of the public response has centered on her suffering rather than on the three children she killed. The same priorities appear in policy when the needs of offenders take precedence over crime victims, hospital workers, and psychiatric patients who committed no crime.
*The head of the Smithsonian Institution is stepping down, though he denies that Trump’s efforts to reshape the Institution’s message had anything to do with the premature retirement:
The Smithsonian Institution’s top official, Lonnie G. Bunch III, is retiring, ushering in a seismic transition at the nation’s museum and research organization just as President Donald Trump intensifies his campaign to influence its portrayal of American history.
Bunch, the 73-year-old historian who founded the National Museum of African American History and Culture and then became the Smithsonian’s first Black leader, publicly announced Tuesday that he is stepping down after more than seven years in the institution’s top job.
Bunch plans to depart by the end of the year, the Smithsonian said in a statement.
Bunch’s resignation comes at one of the most politically fraught moments in the Smithsonian’s 180-year history. Since March 2025, Trump has sought to purge what he calls “improper ideology” from its museums, while his administration has threatened the institution’s federal funding, tried to fire a museum director and challenged its authority over personnel and exhibitions.
But the president does not choose the Smithsonian secretary. That power belongs to its governing body, the Board of Regents, which is made up of high-level government officials, members of Congress and citizens appointed by Congress. As vice president, JD Vance sits on that 17-member board, which currently includes two vacant seats.
Bunch said in an interview with The Washington Post on Monday that the administration’s pressure played no role in his decision and that he was still ready to do battle to protect the Smithsonian’s autonomy.
“We’re at a time when people are challenging that independence,” he said, “but I feel very strongly that it is as independent as we were before, and that I will continue to fight — for as long as I’m in this chair — for the independence of the Smithsonian.”
Bunch said he had been contemplating retirement for about a year and settled on leaving after spending several weeks this summer with his children and grandchildren. He originally planned to serve five years as secretary but eventually decided to stay into the nation’s 250th anniversary year and through the approaching 10th anniversary of the African American history museum.
Well, I’m not sure whether Bunch’s statement that he’s fighting for the Smithsonian’s independence has nothing to do with Trump. Who else is threatening that independence?
President Trump appeared to suggest on Sunday that New Mexico should be renamed “New America,” prompting swift backlash from the state’s Democratic leaders over his latest effort to put an American stamp on geographic names.
On social media, Mr. Trump shared an image of a map of New Mexico with the word “Mexico” crossed out with a red X and replaced with “America.” The White House re-shared the image shortly after on its official X account.
The president posted again several hours later, with what appeared to be an A.I. video of him placing a label with the word “America” over “Mexico” on a “Welcome to New Mexico” road sign.
Mr. Trump has no legal authority to rename any state, which in New Mexico’s case is written into its Constitution. Any proposed change would have to originate within the state, a prospect that New Mexico’s Democratic leaders rejected forcefully on Sunday.
“New Mexico’s name isn’t up for debate — it’s been ours since before the United States existed,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham wrote on social media.
Representative Melanie Stansbury was more blunt: “Oh hell no!” she wrote on X, adding, “Our state’s name carries generations of history, culture, and family — and it belongs to us.”
Here’s the map Trump posted, though the El Paso Times notes that it originated at a parody account:
The “New America” map was previously posted on Sept. 1 on the parody account Daily Noud, which posted a fake image falsely claiming Trump had signed an executive order renaming New Mexico. Daily Noud account on X states, “These are fake stories.”
And the AI video showing Trump posting the new name. Are we taxpayers funding someone in the White House to make these videos?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili demands attention.
Hili: Did you really forget I was here?
Andrzej: Sometimes, when I’m reading, I even forget about you.
In Polish:
Hili: Naprawdę zapomniałeś, że tu jestem? Ja: Czasem, czytając zapominam nawet o tobie.
From Bryan, two views of Chicago from space (“LED vs sodium vapor”) showing our famous grid street design:
Chicago, USA 2024 vs 2003
The grid street layout of Chicago is immediately recognizable from orbit, and characteristic of many North American cities, and emphasize the change in color intensity. pic.twitter.com/JO1uRZBUyq
From Luana, three minutes of academic insanity, this time involving “body fascism”:
🚨 Da’Shaun L. Harrison at Socialism 2026 argues that the policing of “Black fat flesh” is foundational to broader “entire systems of governance.”
“Without a population to discipline, there would be no BMI, no obesity epidemic, and no medical or scientific institutions organized… pic.twitter.com/GP4foaTgUJ
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was about six years old, and would be 88 today had she lived. https://t.co/WGOn13jthS
I just published a brief account of Jim Watson’s life, aimed at students. It leans heavily on the insights of @nccomfort.bsky.social, whose biography of Watson will be out next year. Free link here: rdcu.be/M91CnnE3N4wa
By now most of you know about the Lindsay Clancy case, but I’ll briefly reiterate it. Clancy, then 32 years old, says she was afflicted with postpartum psychosis after the birth of her youngest child, and in 2023 strangled her three children, eight months old, three years old, and five years old. Then, attempting suicide, she jumped out of a window, managing to paralyze herself from the waist down.
The article below from Northeastern Global News (click headline to read) clarifies what an “insanity defense” constitutes in Massachusetts (note that Clancy did not please “not guilty by reason of insanity,” but simply “not guilty.”
An excerpt:
Once the defense raises the issue of the accused’s mental state at the time of the crime, prosecutors bear the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was criminally responsible, said Daniel Medwed, a university distinguished professor of law.
“In Massachusetts, we don’t typically use the term ‘insanity defense,’” Medwed said, citing the stigma that attaches to the word “insanity.” Instead, it’s referred to as “lack of criminal responsibility.”
. . .Once the defense raises the issue of the accused’s mental state at the time of the crime, prosecutors bear the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was criminally responsible, said Daniel Medwed, a university distinguished professor of law.
“In Massachusetts, we don’t typically use the term ‘insanity defense,’” Medwed said, citing the stigma that attaches to the word “insanity.” Instead, it’s referred to as “lack of criminal responsibility.”
But what constitues “criminal responsibility”? Psychiatrist Sally Satel answers that in a Free Press article:
Massachusetts uses the McHoul standard for insanity. It allows for a determination of “not criminally responsible” if a person with a mental disorder or defect (which every expert agreed Clancy had) lacks either the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or the capacity to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law. If the defendant presents evidence to support her lack of responsibility, the prosecutors bear the burden to prove her responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. Some thought the prosecutors did not carry this burden; others thought they did.
My response to this as a hard determinist is that no criminal has the ability to change their mind about whether their conduct be right or wrong, regardless of whether they had a diagnosis of being mentally ill. As I’ve said before, since I don’t believe in retributive punishment, if Clancy did the killings, and is thus physically responsible—which she admitted she was—then there are three reasons to either put her in jail or hospitalize her:
To sequester a dangerous person from society. I’m not sure how dangerous Clancy is. Both her age and her physical condition militate against her having further children, but one could argue, I suppose, that she could harm other people’s children, or constitute a danger in other ways.
To cure her of her illness. This is manifestly possible, I’m told, but we don’t know how long it will take. However long it takes, that’s how long Clancy should be confined. But the moment that several reputable and objective therapists pronounce her as cured, that’s the moment she should walk free.
At any rate, I’ll take a nonscientific poll here, but regardless of whether or how you answer, I’d appreciate any comments below on what you think could happen to Clancy, even if you didn’t listen to six weeks of evidence. Or tell us your thoughts on this very difficult case.
What verdict would you have rendered if you were on the jury judging Lindsay Clancy?
