Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In the past few years these contests often lacked winners, so I’m increasing your chances this year by eliminating the sciences and economics from the guesses (two science prizes have already been awarded). The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced Thursday, October 8, and the Peace Prize on the next day. I’m asking you to guess the winners of both, to wit:
Guess the names of the winners of the Nobel Prizes for Literature and for Peace
Here are the Roolz:
a.) One guess per person in each category. If you name more than one person or group for each prize, your vote will be summarily discarded.
b.) Remember that organizations can be awarded the Peace Prize.
c.) To win, you must guess both correctly. But since the Literature Prize is almost never guessed correctly, if nobody gets both I will name as winner the first person to correctly guesses either of the two winners. If there are ties, the first guesser wins.
d.) DEADLINE: Wednesday, October 7 (tomorrow) at 5 p.m. Chicago time.
THE PRIZE: A mint paperback copy of either WEIT or Faith Versus Fact, autographed by the author and with a cat drawn in it to your specifications. (There is some flexibility here if you prefer another animals, but remember that I’m not an artist.) Since I cannot mail books internationally, they will be sent to a U.S. address of your choosing.
Note: if there are fewer than 20 people guessing, the contest is null and void due to lack of interest.
I completely missed the Nobel award in biology yesterday, but I see that one has been awarded this morning in physics. The former involves three scientists, the latter a lone physicist.
The Medicine or Physiology prize release is here. It describes advances in “optogenetics,” the use of optical signals to detect how neurons work. It’s very clever, based on an algal protein, rhodopsin, that is activated by light and, when put in a nerve cell, will create an impulse when the cell is illuminated by blue light.
There’s a clear discussion of the Prize-winning research at The Conversation (click below to read):
A summary:
Scientists who worked out how to control brain cells with light have won this year’s Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel were honoured for their research into “light-gated ion channels and optogenetics”.
Peter Hegemann, at Humboldt University of Berlin, and Georg Nagel, at the University of Würzburg, wanted to understand how a tiny, single-celled alga called Chlamydomonas senses light. Light-sensing is not unique to animals with eyes: organisms throughout the living world use light to detect their surroundings and respond to changes in their environment. Even single-cell organisms have proteins that respond to light. These proteins are used to move towards or away from light, to generate energy and to respond to the various demands of a 24-hour day.
Hegemann and Nagel discovered that Chlamydomonas has a beautifully ingenious mechanism of light detection that relies on a single protein called channelrhodopsin.
Channelrhodopsin is built into the outer membrane of the algal cell. Part of the protein faces the water outside the cell and part faces the inside. The protein also contains a small molecule called retinaldehyde, which is able to absorb light.
When light hits the retinaldehyde inside channelrhodopsin, it changes shape. This makes the channelrhodopsin protein change shape too. That change opens a tiny passage through the cell membrane. Positively charged particles, including sodium, can then flow from the water outside the alga into the cell. This movement of charged particles sends a signal inside the alga that helps it swim.
The researchers realised that if they could put channelrhodopsin into nerve cells, they might be able to switch those cells on simply by shining a light on them. That is exactly what Hegemann, Nagel and the third Nobel-prize winner, Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and bioengineer at Stanford University in California, went on to do.
. . . and how it’s used, with a cool example:
The ability to control nerve cells with light is called optogenetics. It has become a powerful research tool because scientists can use it to switch specific groups of nerve cells on and off and see what happens.
First, scientists deliver the gene for channelrhodopsin to the nerve cells they want to study. The gene is usually carried into the cells by a virus that has been altered so that it cannot cause disease. The cells then make the channelrhodopsin protein, which makes them respond to light.
In animals such as mice, scientists can shine light into the brain through a thin optical fibre. When the light reaches the cells, channelrhodopsin opens and the cells become active. Nearby nerve cells that do not contain the protein are unaffected.
Light can be aimed at a very small part of the brain and switched on and off extremely quickly. This makes optogenetics a powerful way to investigate how the brain works. For example, if scientists want to know whether a particular group of nerve cells is involved in memory, sleep, sensation or movement, say, they can switch those cells on with light and see what happens.
In one experiment in 2012, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave mice a mild electric shock in a particular cage. They used optogenetics to tag the nerve cells in the brain’s memory centre that were active during that the fear-conditioning experiment. Days later, in a different cage, they switched those cells on with light. The mice froze in fear, as if they remembered the shock.
Mice that were not shocked did not freeze, which showed that the light was reactivating a specific memory. Deisseroth was one of the study’s authors.
***************************************
And the press release for the physics prize is here. An excerpt:
Francis Halzen realised that ice at the South Pole could be used to track particles known as neutrinos. His vision and scientific leadership have been fundamental for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory – a cubic kilometre of ice that is equipped with light sensors. Using IceCube, researchers can capture neutrinos from extremely energy-rich processes in the distant universe.
Neutrinos are everywhere, but they do not make themselves known. They pass all the way through the Earth and through our bodies without us noticing. Very rarely, a single neutrino will interact with an atomic nucleus, which makes it possible for someone with the right equipment to discover them.
Scientists have long known that the cosmos contains natural particle accelerators, which fire out particles with energies up to a million times more than can be achieved in laboratories on Earth. Much about these sources is mysterious: what are they, where are they, and what are the main processes inside them?
Neutrinos with extremely high energies are created in the same environments as other types of particles. However, unlike other particles, neutrinos reach us without changing direction or losing energy. This means they can provide information that is not available in any other way.
Francis Halzen first presented his vision for capturing neutrinos at the South Pole in 1988. When a neutrino collides with an atomic nucleus, it produces a flash of light that can be tracked by sensors in the clear glacial ice. The South Pole’s ice has many advantages, as it is free from various types of interference and the area is geologically stable, with no earthquakes. Halzen and his idea soon gained the support of other researchers and, just a few years later, preliminary testing was conducted on sensors in ice.
Cosmic neutrinos with extremely high energies are very rare, so an enormous volume of ice is needed to observe an adequate number of collisions. IceCube covers an entire cubic kilometre and was finished in 2011. Researchers soon discovered the first high-energy neutrinos and, a few years later, could publish their discovery of neutrinos that must originate far outside our solar system. The search for the universe’s neutrino sources could begin in earnest.
“Francis Halzen has led an international team of researchers and engineers who have provided us with a fantastic instrument. His tenacity and scientific vision has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy,” says Mark Pearce, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
The neutrino interactions that are continuously collected by IceCube will provide researchers with novel knowledge about the violent settings in which high-energy neutrinos can be created – and could even reveal previously unknown cosmic phenomena.
Here’s the apparatus and how it works, taken from the Nobel Prize press release. See if you can read it by clicking to enlarge. The observed ice and detectors are buried way underground. Just getting this damn thing set up at the South Pole would merit a prize by itself!
Now perhaps some reader with expertise can tell us in the comments why high-energy neutrinos from outside the solar system are so important compared to lower-energy neutrinos from, say, the Sun.
Welcome to The Cruelest Day, Tuesday, October 6, 2026, and National Noodle Day. Here’s a bowl of hearty beef noodle soup that I had in Hong Kong ten years ago. It’s a famous dish there, and I went to a place that specialized in it:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 6 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The Supreme Court’s new term began yesterday, and it’s expected to adjudicate about 60 cases in this session. The NYT morning newsletter describes three important ones:
First up, with arguments today, is a major environmental case about whether state law can be used to hold companies liable for the costs of climate change. It pits the city and county of Boulder, Colo., against Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil, companies those government entities say concealed the risks of climate change.
If the justices agree, the companies would have to reimburse Boulder for damages from wildfires, floods and other extreme weather. If they don’t, the ruling would have wide impact — dozens of other cities, counties, states and tribal governments around the country have filed similar suits seeking billions of dollars from energy companies.
St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy
In November, the court will hear a case brought by the Archdiocese of Denver that challenges Colorado rules requiring preschools that receive public funding to accept the children of gay and transgender parents.
The archdiocese and two Catholic schools argue that doing so would be at odds with church teachings — but that excluding its schools from public funding would violate the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.
Lower courts have upheld the Colorado law on the grounds that the state could require participating schools to abide by its anti-discrimination rules, so long as the requirements are applied to all schools and without regard to religion. And so here we are.
Viramontes v. Cook County
This one’s a blockbuster dealing with the question of whether state and local laws banning semiautomatic rifles violate the Constitution, a subject that the court has avoided for years.
The case, slated for oral argument on Dec. 2, concerns Illinois and Connecticut, but the decision could seal the fate of similar laws around the country aimed at restricting the ownership of military-style rifles, such as the AR-15.
It’s a deeply polarizing subject. AR-15-style rifles are among the most popular long guns in the United States. People hunt with them, shoot them for sport, derive comfort from having one in the name of personal safety. They’ve also been used in mass shootings, including in both the Sandy Hook and Uvalde elementary school massacres.
Those who support the bans point to those catastrophes, and characterize the rifles as unusually dangerous. They argue that their restriction is an important use of governmental power to ensure the safety of the public.
Opponents say such bans violate citizens’ right to bear arms. They cite a judicial precedent of “common use” to argue that a gun that tens of millions of Americans use lawfully cannot be banned anyway.
My quick take on these three cases in order: 1. seems unworkable, 2. schools getting publis funding should accept those children, and 3. military-style rifles should be restricted. If not, how can they restrict automatic weapons, grenade launchers, or tanks? You could argue that all of those are permissible under the Second Amendment since they might be useful in a “well regulated militia”.
The U.S. removed all its B-1 bombers from the U.K.’s RAF Fairford air base, a decision made because of security concerns over suspected plots to attack the facility, American officials said Sunday.
The decision represents a shift for the U.S., which has used the military base northwest of London as a hub for launching bomber strikes in Iran. Until their recent departure, a dozen B-1s had been stationed at the base.
“While operational security precluded us from confirming the movement of our assets and forces in real-time, we can acknowledge now that all U.S. bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have redeployed to their home stations in the United States,” the Pentagon said in a statement, adding that the U.S. bombers remain ready to carry out attacks from the U.S. The U.K. Ministry of Defense declined to comment.
The decision follows the arrest of six suspects in connection with a suspected attack on the base that U.S. and British officials said was foiled last Sunday. U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said there were “strong indications” that Iran played a role in the incident, which was shrouded in mystery after the U.K. released the suspects on bail but continued to investigate the situation.
U.S. officials were aware of an Iran-linked plot to attack the bomber aircraft and kill personnel at the base, The Wall Street Journal has reported. A branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had recruited U.K. nationals to carry out the plot, which involved multiple steps including a diversion in the neighborhood nearby, according to a senior U.S. official.
In the U.K., authorities are still trying to piece together what happened, and some U.K. officials question the level of sophistication of the planned attack.
And here’s what the WSJ says in the link above about the plan, which in fact does seem to have involved attacks on the bombers:
U.S. officials were aware of an Iran-linked plot to attack the bomber aircraft and kill personnel at the base, according to an official familiar with the intelligence. A branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had recruited U.K. nationals to carry out the plot, which involved multiple steps including a diversion in the neighborhood nearby, an official said.
I’m glad the plot was foiled, though information has been notably slow in coming. Why were the suspects released if they were planning acts of terrorism?
*To its shame, the Green Party of the UK has adopted a motion that Zionism is racism, that Israel is committing genocide, and, worst of all, there should be a “one-state” solution, which of course means the elimination of Israel. By Party protocol, these now become official positions of the Green Party. (Bolding is mine):
Britain’s Green Party voted on Sunday to class Zionism as a form of racism, drawing criticism from British Jews and from the Israeli government which said it now viewed the party as “a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism.”
The party – which received 6% of the vote in national elections in 2024 – said it regarded Zionism as “an ethnonationalist political project” and repeated its call for Britain’s Labour government to end all arms trade with Israel.
“The motion also restates the Green Party’s backing for the right to self-determination and calls for the establishment of a single democratic state throughout historic Palestine,” the party said in a statement.
The definition of Zionism – which inspired the foundation of the modern state of Israel in the 20th century – and what it implies for the rights of non-Jews in Israel and neighbouring territory, is contentious. Jewish groups sometimes define it as a right to Jewish self-determination.
The Green Party motion passed by a majority of 1,022 to 813 despite opposition from many senior figures. Party leader Zack Polanski, who is seeking election to Parliament on Thursday in former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s now-vacant London constituency, did not vote.
The result was condemned by British Jewish groups.
“The Green Party has made antisemitism party policy and become a racist party,” the Movement for Progressive Judaism said, adding that the support of some Jews for the motion did not mean it would not be used to discriminate against others.
. . .Mothin Ali, deputy leader of the Green Party and a supporter of the motion, told Sky News on Saturday that the heavy Palestinian death toll in Israel’s conflict with Hamas – which followed the Palestinian militant group’s deadly 2023 attack on an Israeli music festival – was the key context for the vote.
“The motion defines Zionism quite clearly. It defines it as an ethnonationalist movement. It defines it as ethnic cleansing. It defines it as genocide,” Ali said.
This is all complete lunacy, especially calling for the effective elimination of Israel via a one-state solution. We’ll see how many UK politicians or public figures will condemn this vote. According to the Guardian, four of the five Green Party members of Parliament oppose this policy. If you’re a Green, defend the policy, and its implicit call for the elimination of Israel, in the comments. If you can’t, you shouldn’t be a Green.
It’s Monday, October 5, and a few days ago, we believed that without the heroism of the passengers on Flight 1073, the almost 180 people aboard, 27 of them children, would have been killed. Now we know that without the bravery of Capt. Smit Machchhar, Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans and Assaf Rajuan, we would be facing a catastrophe likely worse than October 7.
Under interrogation, Hamam al-Hammami, the Omani co-pilot, confessed that after killing the pilot his plan was to fly a normal landing approach and, in the final seconds, when interception was no longer possible, crash the plane into Ben Gurion Airport. That is why, rather than striking at the outset, he attacked the captain only once the plane was over Jordan.
The flight was due to land around 9:30 a.m., at the height of Sukkot, when traffic through the airport peaks. Tens of thousands of travelers would likely have been in the terminal when it arrived, and the death toll could easily have run into the thousands. Under interrogation, al-Hammami admitted that on previous trips to Israel he had “gathered information,” perhaps on where a crash would claim the most lives.
Had he managed to crash the plane into the Saudi desert, as we originally believed was his intention, the aftermath would have been catastrophic. The day would have gone down as the second-deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history, with nearly five times the death toll of the third. The central artery of the Abraham Accords, the 30-flight-a-day corridor, would have been severed, and the steadily warming relations between the Emirates and Israel would have frozen.
Had his original plan succeeded, it would have been, by a wide margin, the worst attack in Israel’s history, and it would have closed far more than one flight corridor. Even if the physical damage at Ben Gurion could be quickly repaired, no airline would risk flying to Israel. The country would face an aviation isolation worse than anything it experienced even at the peak after October 7.
. . . The most obvious and striking parallel is that Israel almost had its own 9/11, nearly exactly 25 years after the first. Not in the loose, figurative sense in which the phrase is so often used, but literally: a plane turned into a weapon, with a death toll that may have been comparable to that disaster, and far greater relative to Israel’s population. And the effect would have been even more disastrous. The World Trade Center was a symbolic target, while Ben Gurion is the heart of Israel’s connection to the outside world. It would have done more to isolate Israel from the world than any single Hamas attack.
I guess al-Hammami will be tried in the UAE and I hope he gets a stiff sentence. Israel has requested extradition because of the destination, but the UAE refused to send the suspect to Israel. The UAE does have strict laws against terrorism, though, and given that he’s likely to be convicted, his sentence wouldn’t be light.
Christa Pike has remained unconscious and on a ventilator at a hospital in the four days since her failed execution in Tennessee, and her prognosis might not be known for days more, one of her lawyers said Sunday.
Little has been released about Pike’s condition since Wednesday night’s execution attempt. She has since remained hospitalized under guard as doctors try to get the massive dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital out of her system.
When asked whether she ever regained consciousness after the execution attempt, Assistant Federal Defender Stephen Ferrell, Pike’s lawyer, said on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “Not that I am aware of.”
Pike, now 50, was 18 when she and her boyfriend tortured and killed a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, in a jealous rage in 1995. She became one of the youngest women to be sent to death row.
Tennessee prison officials gave Pike two doses of the lethal injection drug on Wednesday night. The pentobarbital didn’t kill her, but her lawyers said her arms were burned and blistered from the caustic drugs.
Pike gave someone her medical power of attorney and that person is protecting her privacy, Ferrell said.
This was the second time this year Tennessee has not been able to execute a prisoner who was seemingly moments away from death. In May, Tennessee stopped the execution of Tony Carruthers after staff placed an IV into his right arm but couldn’t get a secondary IV line.
. . .It is unclear what will happen in her death penalty case. Pike’s lawyers have asked the governor to commute her punishment to a life sentence.
“If she recovers, she may not fully recover. And there may be issues about her competence,” Ferrell said.
The governor has suspended all executions, but only for the rest of the year. And if Pike remains comatose, the execution would turn out to be a life sentence under intubation, unless her medical guardian decides to pull the tube. The sick part of all this is that if she manages to revive, the state may well decide to kill her anyway. That is in fact what happened in the case of Robert Breechen in Oklahoma in 1995. Breechen tried to kill himself with an overdose of sedatives shortly before his scheduled execution. They rushed him to the hospital, revived him, and then executed him, only two hours behind schedule. I vehemently oppose state-sanctioned executions on several grounds, but if they are going to kill somebody, they should use a tried and true method, like the firing squad or guillotine. But that’s too gory for the government!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,
Hili: Don’t make me laugh now. Andrzej: Why?
Hili: Because I’m trying to look really serious.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie rozśmieszaj mnie teraz.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Bo próbuję wyglądać bardzo poważnie.
From Masih; a heartbreaking execution of an Iranian protestor. Just before he was to be hanged, he had a heart attack. They put him back in a cell, and then he got married over the phone. They then hanged him the day after his wedding:
They married by phone from separate prison cells. They executed a groom the morning after his wedding.
Alireza Sepahi and Mahshad Kashani were engaged before they were arrested during Iran’s January uprising. Mahshad, just 22, was sentenced to five years in prison. Alireza was sentenced to death.
The day before his execution, they were married over the phone. Their fathers listened as the vows were read.
No embrace.
No kiss.
No holding hands.
Just two voices saying “I do” through a prison telephone, while the Islamic Republic was preparing the gallows.
This was not the first time they tried to kill him. In July, Alireza was taken to be publicly hanged. Minutes before reaching the gallows, under enormous psychological pressure, he suffered a heart attack. They rushed him to hospital.
Then they sent him back to prison.
Today, they came back for him.
This morning, the Islamic Republic hanged Alireza Sepahi.
He was 25 years old.
For one day, he had a wife.
He never got to hold her as his wife. He never got to kiss her goodbye.
Think about the cruelty of a regime that is so terrified of young people that it cannot even tolerate their love.
💔
This four-year-old Dutch Jewish girl, along with her mother and little brother, were gassed to death as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. Klara would be 87 today had she lived.
We have a new branch in the family tree of animals: Atreyea- a previously unrecognized lineage among the closest unicell relatives of animals.Led by @konsmitsi.bsky.social & @freejakoba.bsky.social together with a fantastic team of collaborators.🔗 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers….#protistsOnSky
Today’s song was chosen by my friend Tim, who knows his soul songs. This Motown number, “Since I Lost My Baby,” is performed by the Temptations but was written by Smokey Robinson and Peter Moore. Tim likes it because, he says, it shows what life is like: what a spurned lover would really feel—even though the bosses are paying. It came out in 1965, and here’s a bit from Wikipedia:
Longing and melancholy, “Since I Lost My Baby” tells a story about the pain of losing a lover. Temptations lead singer David Ruffin, portrays the song’s narrator, bass singer Melvin Franklin is also heard out front after each of Ruffin’s first two lines on the first verse. It was Ruffin’s third straight lead on a Temptations single.
Cash Box described it as a “tender, slow-shufflin’ pop-r&b tearjerker about a lad who has been singing the blues since his romance went kaput.”
Remember the “Dire Wolves” that Colossal Biosciences pretended to have brought back from extinction? (See all my posts on this ruse here.) Although Colossal said it had “de-extincted” the dire wolf, which vanished about 10,000 years ago, what they really did was put 20 edited bits of DNA into 14 gene regions of a gray wolf genome, and then put the edited wolf nucleus into a dog egg. A surrogate dog then produced three puppies deemed “dire wolves.”
Since gray wolves and dire wolves differ by 12 million DNA bases, the edits comprise only 0.0002% of the dire wolf genome. In other words, what Colossal produced, as anyone with neurons knows, is a grey wolf with a few morphological changes. (One of these is white color, which comes from loss-of-function mutations occurring in either domestic dogs or wolves.) This is by no means a dire wolf, or anything close to it. But Colossal needs to convince its investors that it’s on the road to de-extincting many things, including the dodo and the woolly mammoth, with the latter originally scheduled to appear in 2028. (The firm has since pushed back the mammoth date to 2030 or so, but I wouldn’t put money on that, either.)
What angers me about this stuff is the pretense of Colossal’s saying they had brought back an extinct species. At first they admitted that they hadn’t in this New Scientist article (click to read).
Then, realizing that this looked bad for the public and investors, Beth Shapiro, the chief scientific officer of Colossal, did a 180°, saying that they had brought back an extinct species, because they redefined “species”. Anything that looked like a dire wolf, she asserted, really was a dire wolf, no matter how superficial the resemblance.
No biologist with brains would agree with that, because you could produce such a “dire wolf” simply by artificially selecting a dog to be big and white. This duplicitous redefinition of species will, I suspect, be used in all their “deextincted” species, including the “woolly mammoth” which isn’t much more than an Asian elephant in a fur coat. (See my op-ed in the Boston Globe about this colossal bait-and-switch.)
I haven’t heard much about the three dire wolves lately, but Colossal just sent out a video to keep the excitement going. Here’s their announcement (note the “with it” jargon of bringing the wolves back from extinction “for a minute”):
The dire wolves have been back from extinction for a minute. We thought it was high time to rank the highlights.
Welcome to the Colossal Top 10. For our first-ever countdown, we’re ranking the 10 greatest moments from Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, the world’s only three de-extinct dire wolves.
The “greatest moments” are lame, and Colossal continues to pretend that the dire-wolf is “de-extincted”, building on the dire wolves shown in Game of Thrones. Note that it’s called a “prehistoric hypercarnivore” and a “predator from the Pleistocene.” Normal dog and wolf activities are fobbed off as activities of extinct dire wolves, and the whole thing is childish and embarrassing—especially when you realize what they’re trying to sell. There’s nothing here that a gray wolf wouldn’t do.
The video says, “It’s hard to put into words what it feels like to watch an extinct species return after thoursands of years. . .” I’d be embarrassed to work for a company that distorts the truth so strongly, but of course there is mucho dinero involved.
You heard it here first, and only now, nearly three years later, the Free Press has reported on this.
When I was in Israel in September of 2023, I met Yigal Carmon, the head of MEMRI. He’s described this way by Wikipedia:
. . . . the president and co-founder of MEMRI, an organization which monitors and translates Arabic and Persian publications, radio and TV broadcasts, and religious sermons into many languages and circulates them over the Internet.
Carmon was a colonel at Aman, the Israeli military intelligence service, and later counter-terrorism advisor to Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir.
Malgorzata, who translated over 5,000 articles from English into Polish for MEMRI, gave me an introduction to Carmon, and I spent a lovely day with him in and around Jerusalem. After our “security tour,” (see below) we had a fateful lunch.
Yigal is an email friend of Malgorzata, and she put me in touch with him before I went to Israel last September. The second day I was in Jerusalem, I visited MEMRI, and Yigal took me to lunch, along with a reporter named Benjamin Weinthal (name given with permission). During that lunch, Yigal said offhandedly, “You know, I think there will be a war between Hamas and Israel in September or October.” I was stunned, but the reporter wasn’t taken aback and in fact was the first journalist to report Yigal’s prediction. I said “How do you know this?” Apparently the buzz that MEMRI got from the Arab world had given him a hint. Yigal added that there might be a terrorist attack, and if, say five or fewer IDF soldiers were killed, there probably wouldn’t be a war. But if it were ten or more, he added, Israel would probably go to war.
Of course at that time Yigal had no idea that the attack would be on Israeli civilians, not IDF soldiers, and far more than ten would die.
Later, Yigal gave us a “security tour” of the Jerusalem area, pointing out spots of interest in the Arab/Israeli conflict. When I returned to America, I sent his wife (who also gave me several great tours of Jerusalem) a copy of my two trade books as a token of gratitude. They were sent to the MEMRI offices. [JAC: They were returned six months later. No packages got into Israel at that time.]
On October 6, I informed Yigal that I mailed the books, and wrote this email (I’ve bolded the interesting bits):
From: Jerry Coyne Sent: Friday, October 6, 2023 1:32 PM To: Yigal Carmon
Hi Yigal,
I am sending two of my books, as per your wife’s request, to MEMRI, so if the package below comes, please sign for it. They are autographed.
Hope all is well in Israel. Where is that war you predicted?
best, Jerry
And Yigal answered the same day. Here is what he said:
From: Yigal Carmon To: Jerry Coyne
Fri 10/6/2023 12:43 PM
Thank you , Jerry. We will read at least significant parts of them.
Give me some 3 weeks more – as I predicted. I said Sept. or October….
As you can see, that exchange was on October 6. The very next morning when I woke up, I learned that all hell had broken loose. Hamas had attacked Israel, killing 1200 people, almost all civilians. Yigal was right, but the toll wasn’t 10 or 100, but 1200, and more then ten IDF soldiers. A war, according to Yigal’s prognostication, was then inevitable. Yigal’s prediction had been previously published in MEMRI, but apparently the Israeli government paid no attention.
Of course that day changed everything. It was the beginning of the war and its concomitant rise in Israel and Jew hatred in the world—something that I never could have predicted—as well as the beginning of my own awareness of antisemitism and the onset of my sympathies for Israel (“the more they hate us, the Jewisher we get”).
Now the Free Press is late to the party (see the article by Weinthal), but still accurate, with this article published today). If you’re a subscriber, click to read it:
A few excerpts:
In August 31, 2023, Yigal Carmon, a counterterrorism adviser to Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin more than a generation ago, published a warning on the website of his think tank, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “Signs of Possible War in September–October,” said the headline of the article, written from Jerusalem in Carmon’s succinct, often brusque style.
Carmon, MEMRI’s 80-year-old founder, didn’t predict specifically that Hamas would instigate the war, or that it would begin on Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. But he stressed that there were increased rumblings and threats of a major operation coming from the militant chiefs in the Middle East that he and MEMRI constantly monitor through Arabic- and Persian-language media channels. “The leaders of the terror organizations have recently increased their threats of a comprehensive regional war, in response to Israeli threats to assassinate terror operatives and those who dispatch them,” wrote Carmon.
Carmon’s warning proclaimed that Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other Iranian-backed proxy groups were acquiring and deploying increasingly sophisticated weapons and tactics that would compel a major Israeli reprisal. Those weapons “can cause a large number of Israeli fatalities,” Carmon wrote.
But that didn’t cause alarm in Jerusalem or Washington—or cause much reaction at all. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the week before Hamas’s attack that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
And those in Israel’s national security establishment who did respond to Carmon’s prediction of doom resolutely dismissed it. “At this time, I believe that neither Hezbollah nor Hamas have an appetite for a full-blown confrontation with Israel, because they understand how devastating it would be for them,” retired Israeli general Amir Avivi told Iran International on September 5, 2023.
. . .Three years later, Carmon’s credibility has been bolstered by a string of recent reporting by the American and Israeli media claiming that he was not the only one sounding the alarm, and that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu received advance warnings about a possible attack, including from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. According to The Atlantic, Egypt’s intelligence chief flew to Tel Aviv less than two weeks before Hamas’s attack to report that the group seemed to be preparing for a major assault. Netanyahu’s office has denied that claim.
When I spoke to Carmon, he told me that Israel’s government didn’t need secret intelligence from Egypt or anywhere else to see that a catastrophic war could be coming. “It was all open-source. We’re not dealing with secrets,” he said about himself and MEMRI, the NGO that he started in 1998 and still leads, and that’s headquartered in Washington but has offices in Jerusalem and a number of European and Asian capitals. “We believed them. We didn’t dismiss it as bullshit,” he said of the threats issued by Israel’s enemies.
This week, Carmon is expanding on his warnings with the publication of a new report titled Chronicles of a Disaster Foretold and shared exclusively with The Free Press. In it, he lays out in much more detail the Arabic-language media and social media posts that pointed to Hamas’s preparations for an attack in 2023. The report also outlines evidence that the Palestinian militant group was channeling outside aid into weapons development.
I won’t describe the rest of the piece, which you can read for yourself (a subscription is worth it), but here are two more bits:
Particularly alarming in retrospect was a large Hamas military drill staged in Gaza in September 2023. MEMRI reported on the military drill at the time, and Carmon now believes it was essentially a “final walkthrough” for what occurred a month later.
. . . So how did Israel fail to better anticipate an attack? Carmon now believes that Netanyahu and his government were lulled into a false sense of security by their views that Hamas’s leadership was focused on this economic growth and that Qatari-supplied cash flowing into Gaza was essentially buying peace. That money was easily diverted into Hamas’s military growth, such as “building Hamas military power and its labyrinth of underground tunnels,” according to the new report by MEMRI.
I remember asking Yigal, after hearing him and the reporter, why the Israeli secret services (there are three) didn’t pay attention to MEMRI. I don’t recall his answer, but it was something along the lines of “the security services are jealous of their own information and don’t pay attention to stuff coming from other sources.” Pity, that. Imagine if Israel had beefed up security at the border with Gaza before October!
Welcome to another work week, with classes in full swing at the University of Chicago: it’s Monday, October 5, 2026, and Global James Bond Day, celebrating the “Bond franchise and is held on the anniversary of the date on which the first Bond film, Dr. No, premiered in London in 1962.” Ursula Andress was the love interest, and here’s a trailer (Ursula shows up at 2:01). I still think Sean Connery was the best Bond ever.
President Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency, setting in motion a $20 million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter.
The ads have run across cable and network television — on Fox News, CNN and MS Now, with football games on Fox and with national newscasts on CBS, ABC and NBC, including “Meet the Press,” which Mr. Trump is known to watch.
Mr. Trump was eager to see the laudatory ads on the air and told Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to come up with the money from within the government, the people said. Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s counsel, and Will Scharf, the White House counsel, both said it would be legal to use D.H.S. funds. The president and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, both spoke with Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, about the ads.
The taxpayer-funded ads have been criticized by Democrats and even some Republicans as a possible violation of federal laws against using taxpayer dollars for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” And they come as the president is also directing spending from his super PAC — MAGA Inc., which entered the fall with $400 million — for which he has been raising money since he won re-election in 2024.
It was not clear why taxpayer funds, and not money from the super PAC, were used for the spots.
The White House has called the ads public service announcements and said they are appropriate because there is no “call to action” to vote for any candidate. Some of his aides also noted that Mr. Trump is not running for office now, in an attempt to blunt criticism of the ads as violating federal laws about the use of public money.
When pressed by a reporter on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said: “If somebody said that that’s wrong, I’ll gladly pay the money.”
“But these are ads for the country,” he added. “You have to understand. I’m not promoting a candidate. I’m not promoting myself because I’m not running for office. I’m promoting the country.”
I saw the second one the other day and about fell off my seat when I read “Paid for by the U.S. Government” at the end. These are the first two released:
Somebody should sue; these are clearly campaign-related ads and therefore a violation of the law. I won’t have my dosh supporting Trump’s narcissism.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal calls the upcoming week “The most dangerous week of 2026. ” What he means is that Iran has to figure out what to do, if anything, between the Israeli elections on October 27 and the U.S. midterms on November 3. Either action or inaction on Iran’s part will, says Segal, have big consequences.
It’s Sunday, October 4, and if the Islamic Republic could vote, whom would it choose: Benjamin Netanyahu or Donald Trump? It sounds like an abstract problem, but the choice facing Tehran is the same one Citizen Change posed to American voters in 2004: “Vote or Die.”
With the U.S. blockade plunging Iran into an ever-deepening economic crisis, Tehran must break the status quo. The question is when. Escalating before the Israeli election and the midterms would send the markets into an inconvenient panic and Israeli jets to Tehran. Any conversation outside of security would be quickly stifled, burying some of Netanyahu’s other indiscretions while bringing gas prices and Trump’s failures to the front of American voters’ minds on November 3. A war before October 27 is a vote for Bibi and against Trump.
Tehran, reluctant to boost Netanyahu’s security credentials, could wait until both elections are over, but that is casting a vote for Trump.
The conduct of the war in the near term won’t depend on what happens during the midterms, even if Democrats win both houses of Congress, for Trump, as Commander-in-Chief, still gets to dictate the conduct of the war. And if by “escalation” Segal means “military escalation,” Iran doesn’t stand a chance.
. . . Observant readers will notice that there is a gap between the two trips to the ballot box. Tehran has a single week, between October 27 and November 3, in which it can launch a war without helping either candidate.
There is also the risk that, unlike winter, election season makes war more likely. Trump is currently holding back to give Republicans a chance of holding the Senate, telling reporters the war will be brought to a conclusion “right after the midterms.” While I struggle to imagine a fate worse than the hell on earth Trump has already threatened to unleash multiple times, if Iran extinguishes whatever electoral hopes are constraining the president, the response is unlikely to be the controlled escalation Tehran may be hoping for.
Despite declaring at the United Nations that “the resistance of the Iranian people will only increase in the face of sanctions,” President Masoud Pezeshkian reportedly approached Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, with an Iranian compromise the same day. Like an Iranian moderate, an Iranian compromise exists mainly by comparison.
That compromise didn’t fly, and I still don’t think there will be one unless Iran meets, at least on paper, Trump’s demand that it cease production that could lead to nuclear weapons. The ending:
The truth is Iran has a larger problem than timing: its vote doesn’t matter. Trump still has months before a Democratic-controlled Congress could begin impeachment proceedings, and even while trapped in endless inquiries, he still holds the power over the military and foreign policy. Meanwhile, whoever becomes the next Israeli prime minister, in the increasingly unlikely event the election produces a definitive outcome at all, Jerusalem is not going to turn pro-Tehran. No matter who they vote for, nothing will change in time for Iran to survive.
I’ve stopped trying to predict what’s going to happen in the Middle East. The Israeli elections are uncertain and Trump is unpredictable. But I think it would be disastrous to simply pull our troops out and declare victory. Disastrous for us and disastrous for the good people of Iran.
Hamam al-Hammami, identified by people familiar with the matter as the co-pilot on FlyDubai Flight 1073, posted a paean to flying in a now-deleted social-media post from June 2022 written in Arabic.
“What makes aviation and flight training so beautiful is that it’s anything but routine,” the post said. “There are moments you never forget—like your very first solo flight, or your first time landing an aircraft with passengers on board.”
Investigators are now trying to understand why the Omani national took a radical turn and ended up repeatedly slashing his captain with an onboard ax before trying to crash an airliner with more than 170 people aboard, the people familiar with the investigation said.
They also want to know how he got hired by FlyDubai, those people said. His first aviation employer, state-owned Oman Air, banned him from flying after authorities became aware of his interest in browsing extremist websites, people briefed on his background said. Hammami was sent through a deradicalization program and given a desk job, but later found his way to a new job in the United Arab Emirates, they said.
Oman received no requests for information from other countries to vet him for employment, the people said. The U.A.E. and FlyDubai declined to comment while the investigation is ongoing.
The U.A.E.’s attorney general said Saturday morning that the co-pilot on Flight 1073 tried to carry out a terrorist act, echoing a conclusion drawn earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and another Emirati official.
An Emirati security team brought Hammami back to the U.A.E. on Thursday morning. He is currently undergoing questioning after having been interviewed earlier in the week in Saudi Arabia, where the flight he was co-piloting made an emergency landing Wednesday after the incident.
A Saudi official briefed on the interrogation said Hammami acknowledged that he wanted to intentionally crash the plane and that he wasn’t afraid of death.
What is more surprising that this is terrorism is why FlyDubai hired the copilot without vetting him. I wouldn’t be surprised (and would be pleased) if FlyDubai revenues dropped sharply after all this. I suspect Israelis aren’t going to fly on that airline simply because the company screwed up big time, and in a way that endanger Israeli lives.
*The Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle is treading perilous ground in her new piece, “Cornell raises an uncomfortable question about consent” (article archived here). We all know about the alleged Cornell gang rape, and the legal machinations around it have been convoluted, with New York governor Kathy Hochul replacing the local D.A., whom Hochul doesn’t trust, with state attorney general Letitia James. And yet many people, despite the “presumed innocent” stipulation of justice, have already convicted the perps in their minds. McArdle doesn’t think the case is so cut and dried.
There is no question that something terrible happened at a Cornell University fraternity in 2024. The question is what. Was it a brutal gang rape? Or was it something messier and more complicated, a sexual encounter that was unwise but nonetheless consensual?
What facts we have are not enough to distinguish between the two possibilities.
. . .What we cannot ascertain — and may never be able to — is whether she was too intoxicated to be able to consent. So we are now fighting over this as we have fought over so many accusations over the last few decades — the Duke University rape hoax, the allegations that Christine Blasey Ford made against Brett M. Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, and the endless horrors unearthed by #MeToo. But why? Why is it so hard to agree on something that seems, to both sides, as though it ought to be obvious?
One answer is that sex between people who know each other is hard to adjudicate from outside, especially when one or both parties have been drinking or using drugs, thereby lowering their inhibitions, impairing their judgment and blurring their memories. Another is that different people can genuinely view an encounter differently, especially in hindsight, after regret has set in.
But I’d argue the reason these fights are so fraught is mostly that we are trying to believe too many contradictory things.
We want sex to be simple and sexual assault to be simply unthinkable. We want there to be bright lines that obviously shouldn’t be crossed so we can shout “J’accuse” at anyone who does.
But we want to proclaim that men and women are fundamentally the same, aside from socialization. We want to declare that anything goes, as long as both parties have consented. And then we want to set 18-year-olds free to live out this liberation theology.
The result is predictably disastrous. We demand that young people with poor judgment respect boundaries, and then we refuse to establish any.
I know the retort that will spring to many readers’ minds: Consent is a clear boundary. It is certainly a boundary, and sometimes it is clear. If you force yourself on someone who is screaming and pushing you away or who is trembling on the edge of unconsciousness, that person must be left alone. If you do not, we can and should put you in jail.
. . . When two people who are both extremely drunk have sex — as I believe may sometimes happen — did they rape each other? Or was the woman obviously the victim?
The author will get demonized simply by asking these questions, as guilt is often judged these days by ideology rather than by facts that dispel any “reasonable doubt”. Since most rape accusations are accurate, that puts the weight on “guilty,” but there are seven men involved, and their stories conflict. The last question is a good one for those who say there are no differences between men and women, when clearly men are stronger. Once again, as in the Lindsay Clancy case, I’m glad I’m not on the jury (there certainly will be one).
If you look at the paper in Evolution, they measured the amplitude of song in only 123 bird species from two places:
We made recordings between December 2018 and January 2025 in the United States (Commonwealth of Massachusetts) and Brazil (states of São Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, Roraima, and Amazonas).
Now the paper itself doesn’t say that the birds are the world’s loudest; it’s the NYT author Taylor Mitchell Brown who says that. And since they haven’t measured the other 11,000 species of birds, the claim has no weight. Sure, we know lots of birds that are quieter, but the proclamation will not stand until the world is scoured for louder birds.
An excerpt from the article:
Deep in the Serra do Mar mountains of Brazil, a curious call echoes from high in the jungle canopy. The sound is practically deafening, a loud metallic pang that cuts through the forest’s thick foliage.
The bare-throated bellbird, which produces such calls to attract female mates, is no larger than a dove. And yet his song is louder than a jackhammer or a chain saw. It’s louder than an elephant’s trumpet.
It is, according a new scientific study, one of the loudest birdsongs ever recorded.
“They can even exceed elephants and lions and wolves and bison,” said João Menezes, an evolutionary biologist and lead author of the study, recently published in the journal Evolution.
Joining the bellbird at the top of the volume charts, the researchers found, is another Brazilian species: the red-legged seriema.
The two birds now join a previously identified bellbird species as the loudest avians known to science.
The study also uncovered a few of the anatomical traits that allow these birds to belt such powerful songs, answering many of the questions underlying the mysteries of birdsong.
. . .Bellbirds have a distinct metallic chirp, while seriemas sing elaborate, melancholic songs that have been the subject of poetry. Both birds produced tunes that registered between 121 and 122 decibels
“The bellbirds are really super interesting,” Dr. Podos said, “because not only are they that loud, but they make those loud sounds with that small body size.”
Birds are capable of singing with such volume in part because they have a uniquely evolved organ called a syrinx, which takes air from the lungs and projects it through the long tube of the trachea.
Yes, “loudest known to science” may be accurate because science hasn’t measured the call volume of more than 1% of all birds. It sounds as if they are looking for adaptive explanations, and there may well be some. But it’s early days, and I’m betting there are louder birds to be found. In the meantimes, here are two videos showing the calling species:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, neither Andrzej nor Hili can turn off their minds:
Hili: Sometimes I just can’t stop thinking. Andrzej: I have a feeling I know what you mean.
In Polish:
Hili: Czasami nie mogę przestać myśleć.
Ja: Mam wrażenie, że wiem, co chcesz powiedzieć.
*******************
From Kitty Litterposting:
From Stephen:
From Stacy:
From Masih: an Iranian protestor whose “heart gave out at the gallows” was. revived and now is due for execution again:
🚨 STOP THE EXECUTION OF ALIREZA SEPAHI
Do you remember, a 25, protester who was taken to be hanged in public alongside his own cousin and his heart gave out at the gallows?
The regime in Iran took him out of hospital, patched him up, and sent him back to death row.
He was shot with pellets during arrest, tortured for 26 days, and now sits in a security wing of Dastgerd prison, waiting to die. His mother is in prison too.
Every hour counts. Raise your voice before they hang an innocent young man.
From Maarten Boudry via Luana; why Europe needs a First Amendment:
• A French writer (@doramoutot) was criminally convicted—and faces possible prison time—for saying that a trans woman is “a man, a transfeminine man.”
• An American academic living in Belgium (@nathancofnas) is being taken to court by Belgium’s official equality agency for claiming that there are racial differences in IQ.
• A German woman was jailed for a weekend for calling a man who raped a 15-year-old girl a “disgraceful rapist pig”—a harsher sentence than the rapist received.
• A British assault victim was convicted of a hate crime for calling her attacker a “faggot” in text messages.
But please, tell me again that Europe doesn’t have a free-speech problem. That there’s nothing to worry about. That it’s all a right-wing invention—as claimed by @lemondefr and many other newspapers.
For heaven’s sake, can someone give us a First Amendment already?
It must be so frustrating to be a Conservative politician and to have all these ideas for how to make the country better so soon after having 14 years in power when all they did was make the country worse.
Today’s music: “What Does it Take (To Win Your Love)“, a great soul song by Jr. Walker and the All Stars that hit #1 on the R&B charts (#4 on Billboard). Recorded in 1969 and released by Motown, the son is notable for its saxophone solos by Walker (real name: Autry DeWalt Mixon Jr.). This is a “live” video but the music you hear is recorded, so there’s lip-synching.
“TMZ” of course, is an entertainment news network, including a TV show and a website. The reference is to kids of this generation being filmed and photographed all the time, which is said to cause anxiety and paranoia. One example is his reference to the Wall Street Journal article, “Suddenly everyone is scared to dance at concerts and clubs.” But the whole culture has turned voyeuristic, making everybody afraid to be themselves.
This is not a particularly good episode, as the point is not that earthshaking, but I post it for the record.
