An artist writes a companion piece to my “Truth vs. Beauty” essay, both in Quillette

March 13, 2026 • 11:51 am

At the end of last year I wrote an article in Quillette called “Can art convey truth?” (archived here). I contended that while the object of science is to find the truth about the universe (including humans, of course), the goal of much of the humanities—the arts—is not to find truth; humanities have other aims. As I said,

The real value of art, then, is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Because of this, we can’t say that the purpose of universities is to “find and promulgate truth” so long as universities teach the visual, literature, music, cinema, and so on. That doesn’t diminish the value of universities, but slightly changes what we see as their mission.

I was prompted to write this because at a Heterodox Academy meeting in Brooklyn last year, I was roundly criticized by scholars like John McWhorter and Louis Menand, who maintained that there was indeed agreed-upon “truths” to be found in art (McWhorter later recanted a bit). I think they were wrong, perhaps wedded to the idea that admitting that art isn’t “truthy” would be an admission that it’s inferior to science. (It isn’t; they are simply different.) And reader of this site will know of my respect and admiration for art.

Now an artist has weighed in on this argument, (also in Quillette) and she’s on my side. The artist is Megan Gafford, who is quite accomplished, and I like her work (see examples here).  I will first show her view that, in general agrees with mine, and then discuss a few reactions I have to her contentions. I am not saying where she’s wrong, but merely commenting on her commentary.

You can read Ms. Gafford’s article by clicking on the title screenshot below, or, if you can’t see the original, find it archived here. Her piece also contains one of her lovely drawings.

Here’s her opening, which I was pleased to read (I took a lot of flak for saying that art does not uncover “truths”):

In a recent Quillette piece Jerry Coyne argues that “unlike science, the literary, visual, and performing arts are not about truth.” When he made a similar assertion last June at a Heterodox Academy conference, it “resulted in Louis Menand and John McWhorter telling me, in so many words, to stay in my lane,” he writes. Wary that people might perceive him as “just another narrow-minded disciple of the science-as-hegemony school,” Coyne writes about art from a defensive crouch—but because I’m an artist, and well within my lane, I have no such qualms. Coyne is correct when he writes:

The real value of art … is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Would-be defenders of art make a serious category error when they insinuate that beauty is inferior to truth—as if beauty were an insufficient goal. But it is impossible to champion art effectively unless you believe that beauty is its own justification. Coyne offers examples of poems and paintings that he admires for their beauty. But he does not go far enough. Beautiful art can guide us through places where scientific truth can’t help us.

One comment I have on her piece is that she never really defines “beauty”.  It can of course be construed in several ways, including the most common interpretation: something that pleases the aesthetic senses (especially sight). This would include music you find appealing, paintings by Johannes Vermeer, literature that is appealing to the ear (for me that would be Yeats or Joyce’s “The Dead”), and so on.

But one could argue that much great art is not “beautiful” in that sense, for many works of art are upsetting and distressing, or conveys emotions that are not pretty.  I’ve thought of a few, including Dante’s Inferno, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 1984, art depicting war (“Guernica,” Goya’s paintings), or upsetting art like Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or Munch’s “The Scream”. I’m a fan of Jackson Pollock, but it’s unclear whether the artist intended his “drip paintings” to be beautiful, and certainly many people don’t find them so.  By concentrating on “beauty” as the goal of art, Gafford herself doesn’t go far enough—unless “beauty” and “what I consider great” are taken as synonymous. That makes the argument tautological, though.

I will now give a few quotes from Gafford along with my response:

Beautiful art can guide us through places where scientific truth can’t help us.

I’ll use my favourite novel as an example. John Steinbeck recasts the Cain and Abel story in his 1952 saga East of Eden, and his wisest character ponders different English translations of that Bible story with mutually incompatible interpretations. He wants to understand the precise meaning of what God told Cain after he slew Abel, so he consults the original Hebrew to sort out what it really means:

I won’t reproduce Gafford’s argument, here, but her example from Steinbeck doesn’t seem to me to convey “beauty” unless it’s seen as s proper (and therefore more meaningful) translation of the Hebrew for the Cain and Abel story, which itself was a model for East of Eden.

Another:

Physicists have long tried to figure out whether we’re living in a deterministic universe, a question with obvious implications for free will. But for now, we don’t know—and maybe we cannot know. Reality can be inscrutable. It is the task of scientists to answer questions like “do we live in a deterministic universe?” And it is the task of artists to summon beauty that helps us bear the uncertainty. These roles are equally important. They are not interchangeable.

I won’t argue about free will here (except to say that I don’t think we have it in the libertarian sense, and there’s strong evidence for that contention), but rather would note that art has a wider purpose than “summoning beauty to help us bear the uncertainty” (of life and thought, I presume). Again, great art may not alleviate our distress, but exacerbate it. There is a lot of great art and literature that is simply disturbing. Do you think the painting below is beautiful?  It’s  “Head VI”by Francis Bacon (from Wikipedia), one of the versions of Bacon’s famous “Screaming Pope” series. Those paintings are not beautiful in any conventional sense, but they’re mesmerizing and, I’d say, great art. This resembles Munch’s “The Scream”, and I doubt that Bacon meant it to convey beauty. Rather than soothe our anxiety, it heightens it:

Fair usage, Wikimedia.

Gafford also notes that writers and artists talk about revealing “truth”, for example:

Artists often treasure the truth, as when Paul Cézanne wrote to a younger painter, “I owe you the truth in painting and I shall tell it to you.” By this he meant an authentic impression of nature grounded in immediate perception, rather than any inherited formulae or conventions. Likewise, Ernest Hemingway claims in his memoir A Moveable Feast that “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Clearly Cézanne and Hemingway are talking about subjective rather then objective truth: they are talking about expressing their own views or feelings clearly.

Finally, Gafford talks about how scientists themselves speak of the beauty of their fields, for example a “beautiful experiment” (the Meselson and Stahl experiment comes to mind) or a “beautiful equation”:

Just as artists treasure the truth, scientists frequently extoll beauty. Ulkar Aghayeva argues that “every practicing scientist has an intuitive sense of what a beautiful experiment is.” She details different reasons why scientists have called experiments beautiful. The aesthetic sensibilities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists were “centered on nature unveiling its innate beauty,” she writes, while contemporary theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek regards a beautiful experiment as one where “you get out more than you put in” because “beautiful experiments exhibit a strong information asymmetry between the input from the experimenter and the output of the system under study.”

I’m not sure how much of a role aesthetics plays here, compared to cleverness and simplicity that yield decisive results (Meselson and Stahl experiment) or E = mc², which is “beautiful” in its simplicity and its economy. But there are lots of important equations that are not nearly as simple or economical.

Finally, while of course appreciating science, Gafford seems to see art as a way to give us a respite from science, which is conceived of as wearing and tedious. Gafford first quotes the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen:

“The tightly structured and highly collective nature of scientific work seems to arise from our desire to actually get things right. We use experts and inferential reasoning in science in order to cope with the vast, sprawling nature of the world. Our separate minds just aren’t large enough to do it on our own. So scientists create a vast store of publicly accessible data, and then use this collective database to make accurate predictions. This methodology requires a radical degree of trust. Scientific conclusions are based on long chains of reasoning, which cross different specialties. Engineers rely on chemists, who in turn rely upon statisticians and molecular physicists, and on and on. And much of this involves trusting others beyond one’s ability to verify. A typical doctor cannot vet, for themselves, all the chemistry, statistics, and biological research on which they rely. The social practice of science is oriented towards epistemic efficiency, which drives us towards epistemic dependence. Scientific conclusions are network conclusions. …

Our artistic and aesthetic practices offer us a respite from that vast, draining endeavor. We have shaped a domain where we can each engage with the world with our own minds—or in nicely human-sized groups. We have shaped a domain where we can return to looking at particular things directly, instead of seeking general principles. This form of aesthetic life functions as a relief from the harsh demands of our collective effort to understand the world. Our aesthetic life is a constructed shelter from science.”

. . . and adds this in her own words:

And so, no matter how well beauty and truth complement each other, we should not conflate the value of art with that of science, lest we weaken both. Can scientists reach their full potential without art as a shelter from the psychic cost of surrendering autonomy? Can artists summon beauty into the world if they do not value it as an end unto itself?

I agree with her conclusion about conflation, but disagree with her claim that doing science incurs a “psychic cost of surrendering autonomy”, meaning that we have to dissolve our egos into the collective enterprise of science to do it properly.  But I’ve never felt that to produce a psychic cost: I find it joyful to do my science  in a community, for that is where you get many of your ideas. Only a few scientists, like Einstein, do their work in isolation, and presumably like it that way.

This is just a commentary on a commentary, and, as I said, not a critique of Gafford, but a scientist’s expansion on her ideas—part of a continuing dialogue on science and art.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 13, 2026 • 8:15 am

Abby Thompson, a UC Davis mathematician, is back with more photos (and a video!) from the intertidal of northern California. Abby’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Jellyfish!

I thought I’d throw some jellyfish into the lull between the great winter tides and the great summer ones.

The reproductive cycles of the tidepool creatures are wildly varied, with behaviors ranging from maternal (see Epiactis prolifera from my last post), chancy (see mussels), through incessant (see nudibranchs).   But for sheer baroque complication, I vote for the jellyfish.    Many who stroll on a beach will see the quivering gelatinous masses of jellyfish stranded by the tide, and the less fortunate will have encountered their stinging tentacles while in the water.  This describes, a little, how they get there.

There are several jellyfish species common on the Northern California beaches; here are some of them:

Aurelia labiata (Greater Moon Jelly):

Chrysaora fuscescens (Pacific sea nettle):

Chrysaora colorata (purple-striped sea nettle) These are big, about a foot across:

Another Chrysaora colorata (handsome creatures):

Genus Aequorea (crystal jelly):

Polyorchis haplus:

Scrippsia pacifica (giant bell jelly):

The Chrysaoras and Aurelia labiata are in the class Scyphozoa; the rest are in the class Hydrozoa.

For all of these, males and females get together in the same vicinity, and release eggs and sperm (see “chancy” above), which form little “planulae”.    Then things get complicated.     Because (usually) the planulae settle down and attach themselves to something, and become polyps.  Like these tiny things:

Genus Sarsia:

Hydrocoryne bodegensis:

But how do they get from here (e.g. something like Sarsia) to there (e.g. something like Polyorchis haplus)?   Well they don’t, always, and sometimes they don’t get from there to here, either, but here’s an illustration of the process when it goes through a “typical” complete cycle:

And in fact if you look closely at that photo of H. bodegensis, you can see a little medusa just budding off, circled in the photo below:

Here’s a video of a set of newly-formed “baby jellyfish” (they look excited) which swam into my microscope view.    I didn’t know what I was seeing, so don’t have a photo of the polyp from which they likely emerged.   This means I have no idea of the genus (or even the class- if these are Scyphozoa then these are really ephyrae which will turn into medusae).

There seem to be many species for which the complete reproductive  process is not documented –  for example, if you search for the polyp stage of Polyorchis haplus, the answer is that we don’t know what it is, nor where it can be found.

 

A final oddity of this elaborate reproductive process is the existence of the so-called “immortal” jellyfish. (not found in the cold waters of Northern California).  If damaged at the medusa phase, this one can revert to its earlier (genetically identical) polyp phase- and so on ad infinitum, apparently.  As though, when things go wrong in your life, you could go back to your childhood and try again.

I’m grateful for help with IDs from experts on inaturalist and elsewhere.    All mistakes are mine.

Friday: Hili dialogue

March 13, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, March 13, 2026: another Friday the 13th.  It’s Donald Duck Day, celebrating the pantsless mallard who first appeared in a cartoon in 1934.  The link says this:

In a 1941 biography of Donald Duck, Walt Disney’s The Life of Donald Duck, it says that Donald was born on a Friday the 13th. The 1949 short film “Donald’s Happy Birthday” celebrates his birthday on March 13. The license plate of his car is the number 313, likely a reference to his birthday.

Here’s the cartoon, from my birth year. It will keep playing over and over again as you read this post, so press the “stop” button if you’ve seen it or don’t want to hear it, but I recommend your watching, as it’s classic Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, with his nephews conspiring to buy him a box of cigars on his birthday.

It’s also K-9 Veterans Day, National Chicken Noodle Soup Day, National Coconut Torte Day, National Ginger Ale Day, National Riesling Day, and World Sleep Day (oy, could I use some!)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

**Breaking news. From the Everyone Hates the Jews Department, there was an attack on a synagogue in Michigan. A guy drove his explosive-packed ehicle into a synagogue and then exchanged fire with security guards. He was killed. Apparently he tried to ignite the explosives, but they failed to go off.

An attacker is dead after plowing his vehicle into a synagogue on Thursday outside Detroit and then exchanging gunfire with security guards in what the authorities described as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.”

Federal officials said the attack was carried out by 41-year-old Ayman Mohamad Ghazali. Officials were still searching for a motive.

Give me a break!  Fox News says this:

He reportedly targeted the Jewish community after suffering family losses in Lebanon during the country’s conflict with Israel, Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun said, adding that Ghazali was a resident of the city.

The NYT doesn’t like to deal with “motives” when it comes to synagogues.

And there was another terrorist attack in Virginia that left the attacker, an ISIS supporter, dead, but also one ROTC candidate:

When a convicted ISIS supporter stepped into an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion University on Thursday and opened fire, the group of students inside barely hesitated before leaping up to subdue their attacker.

By the end of the struggle, the shooter was dead, but so too was one of their peers.

The FBI is now investigating the Thursday morning attack as an act of terrorism, identifying the shooter as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a former Virginia National Guard member who has served prison time for attempting to aid the Islamist militant group a decade ago.

Before the attack began, FBI Special Agent In Charge Dominique Evans said Jalloh shouted “Allahu Akbar” — or “God is greater.”

The religion of peace my tuchas.

*War news from the WSJ.  Mojtaba Khamenei, the next target Supreme Leader of Iran, is keeping a low profile because he knows that he’s the Most Likely Iranian to be Targeted now. But yesterday he issued a public statement that shows that the new boss is the same as the old boss.

Iran’s new supreme leader, in his first official message since he took over from his slain father, said his country would keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. Shipping on the crucial oil route and nearby waters suffered a rise in attacks.

Mojtaba Khamenei also raised the possibility of opening new fronts in a war that the International Energy Agency said is causing the biggest-ever disruption to oil supply, according to a written statement attributed to him.

The U.S. military has turned down requests to escort tankers or other civilian ships through the strait, with defense officials saying it won’t do so until the threat of Iranian fire has eased. The head of U.S. Central Command said its focus remains on destroying Iran’s missiles and drones.

. . . Khamenei said Iran would open new fronts in the war. Iran has responded to U.S. and Israeli strikes by broadening the conflict, including hitting civilian infrastructure and energy facilities in Arab nations across the Gulf. He said Iran sought good relations with its neighbors, but that they over the years had allowed the U.S. to establish bases on their soil.

Buckle up: this fight is going to take longer than we thought. I can’t imagine what it would take to cause regime change and give freedom and democracy to the beleaguered Iranian people, who totally deserve it. That seems no longer to be a goal of the American/Israeli attack.

*The NYT reports that the frequency of Iran’s “retaliatory” strikes is slowing.

Nearly two weeks of U.S. and Israeli strikes have battered Iran’s arsenal, and now, the pace of Tehran’s retaliatory attacks appears to be slowing.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday that Iran had fired the lowest number of missiles in a 24-hour period since the war began.

“Our strikes mean we’ve made significant progress in reducing the number of missile and drone attacks out of Iran,” he said.

Across the Gulf countries alone, Iran has launched more than 2,100 drones, 500 ballistic missiles and 20 cruise missiles since the war began on Feb. 28, according to a New York Times tally of reports from defense ministries and regional officials. More strikes have hit Israel, but the government is not sharing data about the quantity of weapons coming in.

But there are mounting signs that Iran has had to curb its attacks, according to experts, either because of depleted stockpiles or to conserve weaponry in case the war is prolonged.

Here’s what we know about Iran’s weapon capabilities.

Signs grow that Iran’s weapons are degraded. 

In the first two days of the war, Iran launched about 100 attacks on Israel, according to data compiled by the independent Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. That number has since fallen to a handful each day, the data shows.

The slowdown is reflected in figures from some Gulf countries, which Iran has targeted for their alliances with the United States and, in some cases, for hosting American bases.

“Ballistic missile attacks continue to trend downward 90 percent from where they’ve started,” Mr. Hegseth said in his remarks on Tuesday. “And one-way attack drones have decreased 83 percent since the beginning of the operation, a testament to our air defenders and our air-defense systems.”

There are more figures, and of course an alternative explanation is that Iran is simply hoarding its reserve of missiles and drones in case the U.S. should actually put boots on Iranian ground. If this period of U.S./Israel attack doesn’t do what Trump wants it to do, I wouldn’t put it beyond him to actually invade the country.  Such an idea would require careful consideration, for there’s nothing like dead U.S. military to turn both Congress and the American public against this incursion.

*In a post called “The heretics list“, the LGB Courage Coalition website reports about petition in which a group of scientists summoned up their own courage to sign a statement saying that women produce eggs. (h/t Loretta). The statement itself and its signatories was apparently the work of our own Emma Hilton with help from Colin Wright. Emma reports on “Project Nettie” on her Beetlebomb website.  Here’s the statement on Emma’s site:

Male and female are scientific descriptions of the two sexual reproductive functions evolved to produce two specialised types of sex cells: small, mobile gametes (e.g. sperm or pollen) and large, immobile gametes (e.g. eggs).

In humans, there are two classes of individuals, each with a molecular and anatomical developmental pattern corresponding to adult reproduction via either sperm or eggs.

This division of the two reproductive functions across two classes of individuals is a simple outcome of our species’ evolutionary history.

In humans, anatomical developmental patterns are fixed during early embryonic development, and sex does not change throughout the individual lifespan.

While (rare) individuals have medical conditions that affect their anatomical reproductive development and/or function, not one of these individuals represents an additional sex class. One’s inability to produce gametes (e.g. those who are infertile or post-reproductive) does not change sex from that defined by reproductive anatomy.

Attempts to recast biological sex as a social construct, which then becomes a matter of arbitrarily chosen individual identity, are wholly ideological, scientifically inaccurate and socially irresponsible.

The project is explicitly modeled after “Project Steve“, in which scientists named Steve were asked to affirm their acceptance of evolution. In this case the model is Nettie Stevens (1861-1912) the American woman geneticist who discovered sex chromosomes.  Emma is thinking of reactivating it; if you’re an academic or biologist and would sign it, put that in the comments and I will see what I can do.

From the website:

The signatories

The list of signatories found on Hilton’s Substack is worth reading in full, not for the prominence of those who have signed (although some names are well known), but for the depth of their professional commitment. These are not retired academics with nothing left to lose; they are active clinicians at the peaks of their careers. The list spans emergency medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, endocrinology, pathology, and general practice.

Notable signatories include:

William Malone, an endocrinologist at the forefront of the debate over the use ofcross-sex hormones and puberty blockers on children and adolescents

Melanie Newbould, a pediatric pathologist and Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists

David Curtis, a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists with a PhD in genetics from Cambridge

Ryan Clark, a consultant in emergency and pediatric emergency medicine

Lord David Triesman and Lewis Moonie, both members of the House of Lords with backgrounds in epidemiology and psychiatry.

These are not fringe figures. They are credentialed experts in fields where misdefining biological sex has direct, negative consequences for patient care.

. . .The existence of such a list is a symptom of an ailing scientific community.

Such declarations do not appear in healthy environments; they emerge only when institutional capture by ideologues and frauds is so near-total that stating the most basic of biological truths requires a formal act of defiance. This list is not merely a record of consensus, but a map of the resistance—a ledger of those willing to tether their professional reputations to material facts within an environment threatened by enforced delusion.

That courage has costs. Hilton herself has faced professional hostility for her public positions on biological sex. Others on the list have faced similar treatment. The signatories know what they’re doing when they add their names, which makes the list more than a record of who believes what, but who also had the courage to step forward.

In observance of Women’s History Month, it is imperative to reclaim the legacy of the woman who provides this project with its name and its moral anchor: Nettie Stevens.

There are more signers; the ones above are just the “notables.”  I wasn’t asked to sign it at all (an oversight, I’m sure).

*A WaPo op-ed by writer/reporter James Kirchick describes how two Representatives were guilty of false accusations in the wake of Epsteingate, “How Ro Khanna turned a sex trafficking scandal into a campaign stunt.”

Last month, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-California) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) held a news conference outside the Justice Department. Co-sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, they had just reviewed a collection of unredacted documents from the FBI’s investigation into the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and were assailing the government for withholding the names of six men who appeared in a collection of mug-shot-style photographs. “There is no reason in our legislation that allows them to redact the names of those men,” Massie declared. If the department would not release the names, the pair said, they would do it themselves.

The following day on the House floor, Khanna made good on that threat, reading the names of “six, wealthy, powerful men” into the congressional record “to hold the Epstein class accountable.”

It took the Guardian three days to discover that four of the men Khanna named had “no ties to Epstein.” A car mechanic from the nation of Georgia, an information technology specialist, the owner of a home improvement store in Queens and a man Massie later admitted to misidentifying who shares a name with an Italian former member of the European Parliament — none of them are “wealthy” and “powerful.” A more accurate description was provided by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who referred to them as “completely random.”

Rather than apologize to the public he deceived and to the men he smeared, Khanna blamed the Justice Department. Acknowledging that the innocent men “were just part of a photo line up and are not connected to Epstein’s crimes,” Khanna said that the department nonetheless “failed to protect survivors.” Less than two weeks later, having evidently learned nothing, he claimed that the files showed that Epstein had visited CIA headquarters. A Washington Free Beacon report demonstrated that Khanna was likely referencing a photo of Epstein at a Hermès design studio. (When asked for comment, Khanna acknowledged that “the photograph which had online buzz about being at CIA headquarters was apparently at Hermes.”)

Ever since appointing himself chief congressional inquisitor in the Epstein investigation, Khanna has been deceiving the American people with conspiracy theories. Last summer, the FBI released a memo debunking the two primary components of what independent journalist Michael Tracey, who has done more than anyone to expose the mainstream media’s sensationalist coverage of this story, refers to as the “Epstein mythology.” According to the bureau, there’s no evidence that Epstein possessed a “client list” of people he subjected to sexual blackmail, nor is there any information “that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” Nothing in the 3.5 million files that the department released in January at the urging of Khanna and others changes that assessment.

It’s a shame, as Khanna has many stands I agree with, and I used to consider him a viable dark-horse Democratic for President, though I’m not keen on this (from Wikipedia):

In November of 2025, Khanna was one of 20 Democratic congress members who cosponsored a resolution introduced by Representative Rashida Tlaib to officially recognize Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

Aligning with Tlaib on this is inexcusable, as is the dumb “genocide” accusation.

*Finally both the AP and UPI’s “odd news” features a red fox that crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway.  This is from the UPI:

 This stowaway truly was sly as a fox.

A red fox somehow slipped onto a cargo ship that traveled from Southampton, England, to New York, where the animal is now in the Bronx Zoo’s care.

The zoo said Wednesday that the 11-pound (5-kilogram) male fox appears healthy after early examinations.

“He seems to be settling in well,” Keith Lovett, the zoo’s director of animal programs, said by phone. “It’s gone through a lot.”

It’s not clear how the animal got on the ship full of automobiles, which left Southampton on Feb. 4, according to the zoo. The ship arrived Feb. 18 at the Port of New York and New Jersey, and officials brought the fox to the zoo the next day. He’s estimated to be 2 years old.

Zoo representatives weren’t sure how and when the fox was discovered. Messages seeking those details were sent to government agencies involved with the port.

The species, formally named Vulpes vulpes, is widespread in Europe, Asia, North America and parts of Africa. A long-term home for this fox will be found once he clears some more health screening.

For now, he’s in the zoo’s veterinary center. Being an omnivore, he’s getting a diet of produce, proteins and some biscuit-like items.

Here’s a new report on the fox. I want to know if his “new home” will be in England versus America. It’s an illegal immigrant, and should be deported:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej and Hili are both carping the diem (but Hili wants beef, too):

Hili: Carpe diem, my dear, time is running away.
Andrzej: You are right, I will have some wine, and I will give you some cream.
Hili: There are more interesting options as well.

In Polish:

Hili: Carpe diem, mój drogi, czas ucieka.
Ja: Masz rację, ja napiję się wina, a tobie dam śmietanki.
Hili: Są również ciekawsze opcje.

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

First, yesterday’s NYT front page is still giving all negative news about the war. Again, I swear it wants the U.S. to lose, and isn’t hiding it. Click to enlarge:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Stacy:

From This Cat is Guilty:

From Masih, more warning from Iranian authorities that protesting equals death:

From Luana. I had forgotten that the mayor of Seattle is the daughter of evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. Looks like she’s going the way of Zohran Mamdani in NYC.

From Barry. Sound must be up on this one!

My cat sleeps all day and then keeps me awake all night so this gave me a good laugh. Credit – @dagnylill on Instagram

— Brian Gormley D7 (@bgormley.bsky.social) 2026-03-11T20:52:12.668Z

From Cate; animals having fun in the wild (see the scientific paper here):

One from my feed; Elica is reliable:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial: a grim fate for this priest:

This Polish priest, in his early thirties, met a grim fate: he was severely beaten and then drowned in a barrel of fecal matter because he refused the Nazi order to step on a rosary. He was beatified by Pope John Paul IIen.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3…

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-03-13T10:24:37.371Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a dad joke (he loves those, but of course he’s a dad):

 

Does this surprise you? I can’t wait for the next polio epidemic. . .

This is RFK, Jr.'s MAHA Institute's recent meeting in D.C.Slide presentation titles:“The Polio Fraud” and “The flu shot has given 1,900,000 Americans Alzheimer’s,” and “VACCINES ARE GREATEST SCAM IN MEDICAL HISTORY.” (capitals, theirs)www.notus.org/health-scien…

— Jan Kirsch, M.D., M.P.H. (@drjanicekirsch.bsky.social) 2026-03-11T03:23:20.547Z

 

Pinker vs. Douthat debate: Do we need God?

March 12, 2026 • 11:15 am

The Free Press and CBS News (Bari Weiss is involved in both organizations) is hosting an ongoing series of “town hall” interviews and debates, the topic being “Things that matter.” The series is sponsored by the Bank of America.

A few weeks ago the series included a episode of interest to many of us, a debate between Steven Pinker and Ross Douthat on “Do we need God.” These gentlemen should need no introduction, save to add that this debate probably arose because of Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, a book that he promoted widely (see some of my takes on it here). The video of that debate went online yesterday.

Here’s part of the website’s intro to the debate:

Today, nearly a third of Americans claim no religious affiliation, which would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

But the story of religion in the West is much more complicated than simple decline. In the past few years, we’ve entered what feels like a religious revival, or at least a leveling off in the decline of faith. Even as our society becomes more technologically advanced, many people are searching more intensely for meaning, purpose, and moral clarity. In other words, the question of faith hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it is even more urgent.

For years, intellectuals predicted that as religion receded, society would become calmer, more rational, and more scientific. Shed religious superstition, the theory went, and we would inherit a more enlightened public life. Instead, many societies haven’t become less fervent so much as differently fervent—driven by conspiracy, tribalism, and forms of moral conflict that often feel almost cosmic in intensity.

The premise of our Things That Matter debates, sponsored by Bank of America, is simple but essential. We want to revive the tradition that has long made the United States exceptional: our ability to argue openly across deep divides while still remaining part of the same civic community. Disagreement does not have to mean contempt. And since religion is one of the most politically charged topics in public life, it felt fitting to begin here.

Where does morality come from without God? Are our ideas of human dignity, moral obligation, and human rights ultimately grounded in a transcendent reality—or are they products of human reason alone? Are the apparent benefits of religion simply the community and rituals it nurtures, rather than the truth of its claims?

To explore these questions, we brought together two formidable public intellectuals: cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

You can hear the 57-minute debate by clicking below (I hope). It’s moderated by lawyer and commentator Sarah Isgur, who seems to be a secular Jew. It begins with summaries by Douthat and Pinker (about 4 minutes each), and then Isgur asks questions to Pinker and Douthat, questions that were clearly given to the debaters in advance (they have notes to answer them).

My take: Pinker wiped the floor with Douthat. Of course I’m biased, but Douthat’s arguments were lame, and he didn’t even dwell on the “science-y” arguments he made when touting his book (fine-tuning, consciousness, etc.). (Steve could have rebutted those, too.) Instead, Douthat says that “God self-evidently exists” and doesn’t rebut Pinker’s arguments showing the well-known negative correlation between religiosity of countries (or American states) and their well being. Douthat also makes quasi intelligent-design arguments, one of which is that our minds were created by God to help us understand the universe. I guess he doesn’t understand evolution.

Audience questions, chosen in advance, begin about 19 minutes in (the debaters apparently knew the selected audience questions, too). They’re interspersed with more questions from the moderator.  The best of her questions is at the end (55:15): “What is something that each of you would concede tonight—a point that the other made that you found compelling—that made you perhaps question some of your own positions on this?”

I would have preferred more of a slugfest, one in which Pinker and Douthat addressed each other, as they often do in Presidential debates (there’s a bit of that). This is all polite and respectful, but that detracts from what I like to see in a debate. But that’s due to the organizers, not the participants. And, sadly, there are no before-and-after votes. In my view, humanism won hands down over religion.

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 12, 2026 • 8:15 am

And we have more photos. Today’s come from Jan Malik, documenting the birds of Barnegut Inlet in New Jersey. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

My previous batch from the Barnegat Inlet covered geese and ducks. It’s time for some of the other coastal birds now.

Immature Double-crested Cormorant (Nannopterum auritum). In contrast to diving ducks, these birds have no buoyancy problem and submerge easily.

Common Loon (Gavia immer). Judging by the slightly pinkish gape at the base of its bill and the fuzzy transition between black and white, this is an immature bird that stays on coastal bay waters before maturing and returning to quiet inland lakes to breed:

Another loon, this one with a mangled crustacean that I suspect is an Atlantic blue crab (Callinectes sapidus). I wonder if a diving loon preferentially picks a freshly molted crab the way we select ripe fruit:

Not a great loon picture, but we can see enough of the prey’s fins to identify the fish as an Oyster Toadfish (Opsanus tau), a species in which males provide parental care to eggs and young. The fish was big and bony, so the loon struggled a bit to swallow it. That fish would be a terrible choice for performing the Fish Slapping Dance. For the loon, it would be preferable to swallow its catch underwater, because at the surface it may be stolen by gulls, who know where a bird has dived and circle above waiting for it to reappear:

A couple of Savannah Sparrows were hopping on the rocks. I suspect that this pale bird with very little yellow in its brow is an Ipswich Sparrow, a subspecies (Passerculus sandwichensis princeps) that breeds on the sand spit of Sable Island off Nova Scotia:

Three species of shorebirds are common in winter at the Barnegat Inlet, all quite similar at first glance in size and plumage, but each occupying a different ecological niche. First, the Ruddy Turnstones (Arenaria interpres), here trying to sleep—probably using only one half of their brain to watch for predators, in unihemispheric slow-wave sleep. Their bills are short, stubby, and slightly upturned, adapted for—just as their name suggests—turning over beach debris to search for invertebrates hiding underneath:

Next, the Dunlins (Calidris alpina). They feed, roost, and migrate in large flocks. Unlike Turnstones, their bills are long, slender, and sensitive, used for probing tidal mudflats for worms and crustaceans:

Last, there are the Purple Sandpipers (Calidris maritima). Their bills are more “general purpose” than those of the other two species. Their covert feathers do show a purple sheen in the right light:

Purple Sandpipers and Dunlins are not very afraid of people on their wintering grounds; they may rest a few meters from a quiet observer. But the slightest hint of danger can trigger the whole flock to take flight in an instant—only to land nearby a moment later:

Purple Sandpipers are adapted to rocky coasts, where they feed on mussels exposed during low tides and on other invertebrates. The undersides of their feet must have a texture that allows them to walk sure‑footed on slime‑covered, slippery rocks:

 They have also evolved Silly Walks:

A distant Harbor Seal (Phoca vitulina), a frequent sight in the Inlet, always seems to look at the jetty with disappointment when it notices that this prime haul‑out spot is occupied by people:

As I was about to leave, the colors of the sunset behind a distant house caught my attention, so I took a picture, thinking little of it. Only back home—rather like the character in Antonioni’s Blowup—did I realize that the picture hides a predator the sleeping shorebirds must be on guard against. To be honest, I can’t be sure this was a flesh‑and‑blood predator and not one made of polystyrene, but the impression remains:

Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 12, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, March 12, 2026, and National Milky Way Day, celebrating my favorite American candy bar. From the link:

There are actually two versions of the Milky Way. The Milky Way known in the United States is sold as the Mars bar around the world, while the global Milky Way bar is similar to the American 3 Musketeers bar and doesn’t have the caramel topping. There also have been a number of variations besides the original Milky Way, such as Milky Way Midnight (previously Milky Way Dark) and Milky Way Cookie Dough. The original Milky Way and its variations are celebrated and enjoyed today on National Milky Way Day!

I have had a deep-fried Mars bar (battered and fried in fish oil) in Edinburgh, and it was good! Here from the Wikipedia entry is a comparison of the U.S. (left) and global (right) Milky Ways with different fillings:

Milky Ways were advertised as appetite-curbers to eat between meals, resulting in a famous ad:

Once marketed as a snack food that would not intrude on regular meals, modern marketing portrays the Milky Way as a snack reducing mealtime hunger and curbing the appetite between meals.

A widely known advertisement was debuted in 1989, featuring a red 1951 Buick Roadmaster and a vehicle that resembles a blue 1959 Cadillac Series 62 (lacking its dual headlights) racing, with the former eating everything in sight and the latter eating a Milky Way. The advertisement ends with the bridge to Dinnertown being out and the now fat red car being too heavy to jump the gap while the blue car makes the jump. The advertisement returned albeit edited in 2009, removing the claim that the Milky Way is not an appetite spoiler.

The ad:

It’s also National Alfred Hitchcock Day (neither his birthday nor deathday), Girl Scout Day (the organization was founded on this day in 1912 in Savannah, Georgia, where I’ll be travelling shortly), National Baked Scallops Day, and Popcorn Lovers Day (that’s all of us).

Remember this intro to the Hitchcock television show? If you do, you’re a geezer!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 12 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

First a discussion by NYT writers you may want to read (it isn’t archived yet, but click on it if you have a subscription):

*And here’s the top front page of the NYT from yesterday afternoon, highlighting its biggest stories, and I can see nothing but opprobrium towards the U.S.  Yes, we now are pretty sure that the U.S. screwed up and hit a girls school, killing many children, but I swear that the NYT seems almost gleeful about that, at least about it being the fault of the U.S. and not Iran. (Would it have been the headline story if it were a misfired Iranian missile?). Click page to enlarge. If you want any articles and don’t subscribe, go here , click on an article, which you won’t be able to read, and then look for its URL on one of the archive sites.

Here are the op-eds, all of a similar tenor. Can you spot the heterodox column? See the next item.

I swear that on my grumpier days I see the NYT as a useful idiot for progressives who hate America, and in the case of the war I have a dark fantasy that the NYT newsroom would erupt with glee if Trump’s attack on Iran wound up not accomplishing anything.  Today is one of those days.

*Okay, here’s an excerpt of Bret Stephens’ column, which you can also find archived here: “How does this end? Four scenarios for what comes next with Iran”.  Here are Stephens’s four scenarios (bolding is mine):

Regime change is the most optimistic one. Some imagine it will take the form of the resumption of the mass demonstrations that the regime bloodily stamped out in January — millions of Iranians marching in dozens of cities, joined by police officers and soldiers and commanders from the conventional army, emboldened by American and Israeli air support, rising to tear down their rulers’ enfeebled apparatus of repression.

Nobody should discount this scenario, especially if Iran continues to be battered militarily and politically, perhaps with the loss of additional echelons of leadership. Nobody should count on it, either, at least not in the short term. . .

Regime modification — that is, a regime that stays in place but complies with U.S. and Israeli demands — is another optimistic scenario. It’s doubtful that Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, will agree to surrender Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and cease support for regional proxies like Hezbollah. But the new Khamenei’s reign may be very short-lived. And whoever runs the regime next will have to come to grips with its vulnerability and isolation.

That isolation will be especially pronounced if U.S. forces seize Kharg Island, 15 or 16 miles off the Iranian coast in the Persian Gulf, which serves as the terminal for roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports. American control would give the administration the whip hand over most of the regime’s remaining revenues, including its ability to pay salaries for soldiers and civil servants alike.

But perhaps the regime refuses to yield and the war carries on in much the same way for another two or three weeks before some sort of mutual cease-fire declaration, probably before President Trump’s planned visit to Beijing on March 31.

In this third scenario, all sides declare their own sort of victory and none of them quite believe it. . .

Reality, however, will catch up. The sanctions that have already crippled the regime economically will not be lifted. It’s hard to imagine the war ending before the United States and Israel attack Iran’s remaining nuclear sites, including its buried (but accessible) stores of highly enriched uranium. And any efforts by Iran to conduct spectacular terrorist attacks in the vein of Libya’s 1988 Lockerbie bombing, or to mine the Strait of Hormuz, will only result in another war. The era in which Iranian leaders thought themselves invulnerable is over.

This scenario has an ugly cousin: not regime change, but state collapse. The most worrisome form it could take would resemble Syria during its 13-year civil war, in which the regime would survive in some areas of Iran, fall in others, invite foreign intervention and lead to killing on an epic scale. Along with that killing would come waves of refugees throughout the Middle East and into Europe and Australia.

And Stephens gives his recommendation about what we should do:

What, then, should the Trump administration do? My prescription: Seize Kharg Island. Mine or blockade Iran’s remaining ports. Destroy as much Iranian military capability as possible over the next week or two, including a second Midnight Hammer operation to destroy what’s left of Iran’s nuclear capacity and know-how. And threaten the regime with further bombing if it massacres its own citizens, mounts terrorist attacks abroad or returns to nuclear work.

That constitutes the most realistic path to victory at the lowest plausible price in lives, risk and treasure. And for all its admitted dangers, it gives Iran’s people their best chance of winning their freedom. Not bad for a one-month war its critics warned would be another Iraq.

I am a fan of Stephens. He may be labeled as a conservative, but I think both his analysis of wars  (both Iran and Gaza) and his recommendations are sensible. Of course, he’s Jewish, probably, like me, of the secular variety. There is, however, one problem with his recommendations above: how can we tell if Iran returns to nuclear work? Will there be unannounced inspections? Otherwise, his recommendations seem solid.

*Every night on NBC the lead news is, as it should be, about the war with Iran. But very quickly the latest news turns into a report on how the price of gas is going up. Granted, this affects nearly every price in America, because everything is delivered, but there are lives, freedom, and the fate of the Middle East at stake. I know I don’t use much gas, but I do buy stuff, and still I can’t really worry about price increases (farmers, of course, can). Still, it’s in all of our interests, as Stephens recommends above, that the Strait of Hormuz be open for transport of oil (it carries 20% of the world’s oil). Bombing Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf, as Stephens recommends above, will raise oil prices even more, for 90% of Iran’s oil flows through pipelines to that bit of land.

And as I write this on Wednesday afternoon I see that three commercial ships have been attacked in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran is laying mines there. From the WSJ:

Three commercial ships were struck around the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday as Iran stepped up its efforts to halt traffic through the critical oil conduit.

U.S. forces said they had destroyed 16 Iranian mine-laying vessels. The head of U.S. Central Command said that its focus remains on destroying Iran’s missiles and drones and degrading its ability to interrupt shipping in the strait.

The International Energy Agency said its member countries would release 400 million barrels of oil, the largest reserves distribution in history.

Other news tacked onto the above by the WSJ:

  • French President Emmanuel Macron is hosting a video conference call with leaders of the Group of Seven advanced economies to discuss ways to mitigate the energy crisis.
  • The U.S. told Israel that it was “not happy” with recent attacks on Iranian energy facilities and told Israel not to do it again unless approved by Washington.
  • Citigroup evacuated several buildings in the U.A.E. on Wednesday, after Iranian authorities said banks linked to the U.S. and Israel in the region were now targets.
  • One of the seven members of the Iranian women’s soccer delegation who were granted humanitarian visas by Australia has changed her mind.

*More from The World Hates Jews Department: Reader Bill sent some data from The Polarization Research Lab about Americans’ reactions to a Jew being killed for being a Jew, and the data aren’t pretty (bolding is theirs):

For six weeks our national polarization tracking survey included an item measuring public support for an explicitly antisemitic murder—an act motivated by a victim’s Jewish identity. Our data include 6,000 interviews from YouGov (May-July 2025).

Direct support for antisemitic murder is low but meaningful at 2.8%–a level comparable to what we measure for political violence. However, the key finding is the alarmingly high level of public indifference. Our study shows that 8.3% of Americans are indifferent to an explicitly antisemitic murder. This figure is four times larger than the indifference we observe toward other types of political murder. Together, 11.1% of Americans either support or are indifferent to the murder of a Jew simply because the victim was Jewish.

. . .The results presented in this report on support and indifference for antisemitic violence reveal that polling simply on support for political violence may mask deeply concerning patterns of indifference for hate-based violence. Our results are similar to those found in recent work by the Anti-Defamation League, where polling found that 87% of Americans disagree with recent acts of antisemitic violence and 85% disagree that violent acts were necessary. These data highlight the importance of asking unambiguous survey questions about political violence so that we can collect the most accurate data on what is driving hate in America and allocate resources with precision.

Survey design

The survey item was designed according to best practices for measuring political violence, ensuring high-quality data by confirming that:

  1. The crime’s motivation was unambiguous.
  2. The perpetrator had been adjudicated guilty, removing any doubt about the facts of the case.

Data were collected from high-quality samples using attention checks to ensure data integrity.

Survey question: “Alan Whitle was convicted of murder. He was arrested by police after surveillance footage was found showing him stabbing a prominent member of the local Jewish community to death. Whitle targeted the victim because the victim was Jewish, driven by opposition to the war in Gaza. Do you support or oppose Whitle’s actions?”

Reader Bill, who sent me the link to that report. , added in his email, “”I can’t believe this. . . .well perhaps, I can”

I told you that nobody likes the Jews! (Which reminds me of a joke that I’ll spare you right now.)

*And some light news (with a video) from the UPI’s “odd news” section: Four cheetah cubs were just born in the San Diego Zoo.

The San Diego Zoo Safari Park announced the births of four male cheetah cubs, the first of their species to be born at the facility since 2020.

The zoo said first-time mother Kelechi gave birth to the cubs on Jan. 24.

“Just as they do in native habitats, Kelechi and her cubs are bonding in a private, behind-the-scenes den at the Carnivore Conservation Center,” zoo officials wrote in the announcement. “The cubs are now emerging from their den, giving guests an opportunity to see them as part of an Ultimate Safari.”

The zoo said cheetah mothers are very attentive to their babies.

“During these vital early months, Kelechi spends much of her time grooming her cubs and keeping them close. As they continue to grow more curious and active, they play and climb all over her as she keeps a close eye on them, chirping to call them closer when needed,” the announcement said.

The brothers are expected to form a lifelong bond.

“Male cheetahs, like these four brothers, form groups called ‘coalitions’ that will hunt and travel together for life, a unique trait for this primarily solitary species,” officials said.

Here’s an adorable video. Listen to those babies squeak (adult cheetahs don’t roar, but chirp:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej have an amusing interchange:

Hili: When chaos starts to prevail, we need stable points of orientation.
Andrzej: Some search for the path by looking at the stars, others by inspecting the bowls.\

In Polish

Hili: Kiedy chaos zaczyna dominować potrzebujemy stałych punktów orientacyjnych.
Ja: Jedni szukają drogi patrząc w gwiazdy, inni sprawdzając miseczki.

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

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Things With Faces:

Jango is in love with Hili, but the Princess spurns him:

From Masih: an Iranian official threatens all potential protestors. Oy!

From Colin: another journal falls by the wayside:

From Emma, going after an anti-HPV-vaxer. Christ on a bike, indeed!

Two from my feed.  First, another great post from Science Girl:

This is not abnormal in Istanbul. If you’re a cat lover, you must go there! English translation:

In Istanbul, cats aren’t “strays”—they’re full-fledged citizens.  There’s an unwritten law of collective care where shops and restaurants welcome them as part of the family. This little kitten isn’t begging for scraps; it’s savoring its rightful place at the table. A shining example of coexistence for the world! 

Or, “I’m Mehmet and I’ll be your server tonight.”

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Dr. Cobb. Take this first color test (I did 0.015, better than average):

For those who want to test their perception of colour, I made a little game called "What's My JND"www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd…

— Keith Cirkel (@keithamus.social) 2026-03-10T09:58:08.322Z

. . . and weasel words:

This is hilarious.Also, completely enraging.

— Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 (@joshuaeakle.com) 2026-03-11T01:56:44.249Z