Readers’ wildlife photos and videos

July 17, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today we have photos and videos of the California intertidal taken by math professor Abby Thompson of UC Davis. Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Just a few more great low tides for the summer. By August the kelp is so lush, it becomes harder to find interesting creatures, so I’m enjoying June and July.  These photos were taken during the full moon at the end of June.

Amblyosyllis anae (marine worm- it seems to be a summer of worms). This genus is relatively rare (or at least hard to find) here.   I had picked up a piece of sponge to look at under a microscope, and this guy crawled out, so I was lucky.  It was about ¼” long, and lively, as you can see in the video which follows.

Amblyosyllis anae video:

Megalorchestia corniculata (beach flea)- part of the beach clean-up crew.

Dirona picta (nudibranch):

Genus Eudendrium (hydroid):

Class Hydrozoa; this is the medusa (baby jellyfish) form of a hydroid, possibly of the Eudendrium in the previous picture (they were in the same dish). I don’t know what the yellow blob it’s attached to is; in the video following you can see it trying to detach itself:

Hydrozoa video:

Family Phoronidae– yet another type of marine worm, a “horseshoe worm”:

Genus Haliclona (sponge) – it takes an expert and/or a microscope to determine species for sponges. This type is very widespread, and a great color:

Ancula pacifica (tiny nudibranch):

Dendraster excentricus (Sand dollar) This is the “test” (internal skeleton) of a kind of flattened sea urchin. The live urchins stay below the low tide line, and they live in big clusters, sometimes propped up perpendicular to the sand.      Sort-of like the drawing of the oysters in Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, but underwater, and without the little shoes.

Mussel tracks- not tracks, of course, but for some reason mussels release droplets (presumably seawater?) when they’re exposed at low tide:

Anthopleura artemisia (moonglow anemone):

Moonset over Tomales Point. Moonset on June 30 was just before sunrise, making for some cool lighting:

Friday: Hili dialogue

July 17, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the end of another week, and a sad one given the duckling situation. (I have now been apprised of yeat ANOTHER nesting hen hearby.)  It’s Friday, July 17, 2026 and National Tattoo Day. For some reason many soccer players are tattooed, including Lionel Messi, who didn’t have this tattoo a while back but showed up with a heavily tattooed left arm. The caption below: “Messi celebrating after scoring against Egypt in the 2026 FIFA World Cup round of 16.”

Bryan Berlin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Peach Ice Cream Day and Wrong Way Corrigan Day, celebrating a famous ruse:

[Today] commemorates the day in 1938 when Douglas Corrigan made a transatlantic flight. He had recently purchased a 1929 Curtiss Robin plane and rebuilt and modified it. In July of 1938, he flew it from California to New York. He then applied for permission to make a transatlantic flight but was denied. On July 17, 1938, he flew out of Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, with the supposed intention of flying back to California. He instead started heading east and flew all the way to Dublin, Ireland. As he disembarked from the plane he said, “Just got in from New York. Where am I?” He claimed his flight had been an accident and he had gotten lost after his compass failed to work. His pilot’s license was suspended but was soon reinstated. He became a celebrity and gained the name Wrong Way Corrigan. Until his death in 1995, he maintained that his transatlantic flight had been done on accident. In 1987, in Long Island, he was honored on the 49th anniversary of his flight. Beginning in 1992, his hometown of Galveston, Texas, began celebrating Wrong Way Corrigan Day. Corrigan has since been celebrated across the country on Wrong Way Corrigan Day.

Corrigan never admitted thet he planned this wrong way journey. Here’s the New York Post‘s famous backwards headline announcing the flight:

No copyright known

Yesterday the smoke from Canadian wildfires finally hit Chicago, causing a dense smog that limits vision as well as a yellowish tinge to the air, a smell of woodsmoke, and dangerous air conditions. Here’s the view from my crib; normally you can clearly see the skyscrapers of downtown, six miles away. Yesterday you could barely see a block. This is not fog: the sky was clear except for the woodsmoke:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Footy news, from a NYT op-ed written by Matthew Rose, identified as  “an Opinion editorial director and a long-suffering England soccer fan”: “England defeats itself. Again” (archived here). Remember that England last won the World Cup was 1966:

Little good comes when a country measures itself by looking backward: Misty nostalgia makes the real problems of the present harder to tackle. Ever since 1966, the English soccer team, like Britain itself, has been burdened by the dead weight of impossible expectations, yearning for past glories while failing to grasp why things, in general, are not glorious. In political terms, that helped usher in Brexit, economic stagnation and six prime ministers in 10 years, all of whom tried and failed to restore Britain to something like its former self.

The sporting equivalent comes every four years, when England somehow convinces itself, despite a pile of evidence to the contrary, that it ought to win the World Cup. And every four years, this ends badly.

It started with the 1982 cup, famous for Maradona’s two goals, one brilliant and one involving a handball and cheating.

Then 1990 was Germany on penalties in the semis. No one talks about 1994. Four years later was another tragic blowout against Argentina. And 2002 was grim. I’d moved to New York by then and watched the loss to Brazil in a sticky pub on Third Avenue surrounded by my gloomy, pale compatriots. On to 2006: quarterfinals, again; lost on penalties, again. And 2010 was a 4-1 drubbing by the old enemy, Germany. The less said about 2014 the better. In 2018, the team somehow ended up fourth. In Qatar four years ago, England lost to its other, older enemy, the French.

There is an undeniable pattern here, in addition to not winning. England is stuck in some kind of middle rank — not the best, not the worst, always flattering to deceive, usually grinding it out until the gravity of reality takes over. This isn’t the cheery optimism of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ “Wait ’til next year.” This is deeper — an aching sense that things just won’t work out.

. . .In the 1990s, The Sun, a spicy tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, superimposed the head of a particularly hapless England soccer manager onto a turnip. In 2000, the newspaper lobbied for a donkey called Jack Ass to take the job. And yet after England’s June win over Croatia, even it fell victim to the ancient habit. “Spooky omen is good news for England fans,” the paper intoned. What was this spooky omen? The final score, 4-2, was the same as the final score in ’66.

For a month, England clawed and grimaced its way to the semifinals, accompanied by fans chanting “IN-GER-LAND” to the tune of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The Sun, changing its tune, said the team was “one-dimensional.” The Guardian called it “turgid.” England edged the Democratic Republic of Congo, defeated Mexico in a match that resembled the siege of Leningrad, and somehow didn’t lose to Norway. Finally, the agony of hope was mercifully extinguished by Argentina (yet again).

Maybe by the 2030 World Cup, Britain will be back in the European Union, just one country among many. Maybe England’s undeniable stars will function as a team. Maybe the country will embrace its position as a midtable perennial, and be just fine with that. And perhaps then it might be able to win.

I don’t dare comment on this as I’m neither a Brit nor a footy expert, but the piece does use Brexist as a touchstone of why England can’t win at soccer. I will let the Brits comment.

Meanwhile, from the NYT daily newsletter:

What’s next? Argentina will play Spain on Sunday with a chance to become the first country in 64 years to win back-to-back men’s World Cups. It will be a something of a peculiar reunion for Argentina’s national hero, Lionel Messi, and Spain’s teenage sensation, Lamine Yamal. In 2007, when Messi was a rising star, he gave a bath to a 5-month-old Yamal for a charity calendar. Read the remarkable back story.

*My affection for James Carville is well known; I love the old curmudgeon, though sometimes he’s misguided, as when he enthusiastically endorsed Kamala Harris rather than calling for a quick convention. Over at The Hill, though, Carville is on track when he indicts far-left Democrats—”progressives”—as being a serious problem in the Democratic Party. And he doesn’t omit the swearing.

Democratic strategist James Carville recently said far-left Democrats are a “part of the problem” within the party, slamming candidates for critiquing it during their campaigns instead of uplifting the collective messaging.

“Is their solution to beat Republicans to run against Republicans? No,” Carville said in the Friday episode of his “Politics War Room” podcast.

“Their solution is to beat Democrats like they’re part of the problem. You are part of the problem because you’re a f—ing idiot,” he added.

He pointed to Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat vying for the party nomination for Senate in Michigan, as an example of one far-left candidate bucking the party.

“He’s running for Senate … and he’s running against both parties. Oh, so it’s both parties’ fault. No, it’s not both parties’ fault,” he said during the podcast.

“One party expanded health insurance, all right? Another party destroyed it. One party balanced the budget and created economic prosperity. The other party destroyed it,” he continued.

The Democratic strategist said far-left candidates are pushing voters toward Republicans.

He said, “in this century, if it wouldn’t be for the Democratic left wing, we might not have even had a Republican president. We sure wouldn’t have had one in 2000. And we sure wouldn’t have had one in 2016.”

Carville said he was proud to brand himself as a “liberal” but noted the identity should be separated from being on the far left.

“I am a proud liberal. I am not a leftist. I don’t believe you ought to break the thing up. I think the role of government is to help people, to be a partner with people, to help them get educated, to help them have retirement security, to make them secure in this world, and make them secure in their homes,” he told listeners.

“And if you believe that, blame the left wing of the Democratic Party for the catastrophe that we’re facing right now, because as much as any group, it’s their fault.”

We’ll see. The Democrats seem impervious to any formerly Democratic principles, espousing the “progressive” views of the the DSA. The party seems to be catering to young voters, which means that candidates must diss Israel to be viable. The saddest thing I’ve seen lately (besides waterlogged ducklings)  is the pandering of Rahm Emanuel and the silence of J. B. Pritzker and Josh Shapiro on Israel. See the next piece:

*This is very sad: a NYT article titled “Almost half of House votes to end aid to Israel” (archived here).

The House on Wednesday rejected a measure to eliminate U.S. aid to Israel, but almost half of Democrats supported the move, reflecting a rapid and dramatic shift within the party away from decades of unequivocal support for the Jewish state.

The measure, which sought to cut all $3.3 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Israel from a foreign affairs spending bill, failed by a vote of 104 to 314, with 10 voting “present,” and all but one Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a sponsor, voting no.

But more Democrats supported it than opposed it, including many who said they voted in favor despite their opposition to the cuts to humanitarian aid. It was the latest and starkest evidence of a major divide over backing Israel within the Democratic Party, which is grappling with a groundswell of hostility in its ranks toward Israel and its conduct of the war in Gaza.

Supporters said the measure was their only way to register their opposition to the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and their desire for a fundamental change in course in the U.S. relationship with Israel.

“While I wish we could vote on an amendment targeted just to military aid, and of course support humanitarian programs, we do not have that option,” Representative Greg Casar, Democrat of Texas and the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote in a letter to his members, in which he urged all 98 of them to follow his lead in backing the proposal. “The American people are crying out for an end to U.S. tax dollars subsidizing Israel’s military.”

The vote even split Democratic leaders.

Representatives Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, and Pete Aguilar of California, the No. 3 Democrat, voted against the measure, while Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the minority whip, voted in favor.

. . . In the final tally, 103 Democrats voted to cut off aid while 98 opposed doing so, with another 10 voting “present,” declining to register a position. That amounts to more than half of the Democratic Caucus unwilling to reject a measure that would terminate U.S. assistance to Israel.

It took me a while to find the votes broken down by individual; I failed using Google but Grok took me to the site. You can see how your representative voted here. I guessed correctly that everyone in the “squad” voted “aye”—to cut off aid.  The Democrats who voted that way probably want to cut off all ties with Israel, but certainly don’t want to support the only democracy in the Middle East.  And they’d probably want a two-state solution—so long as the Palestinian State was right next to Israel and was controlled by either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.

*And Amit Segal’s take on the vote above from It’s Noon in Israel:

“The tide is changing,” Representative Thomas Massie declared last night after his attempt to zero out Israel aid failed 104-314. What made it a shift in tide wasn’t the outcome—a doomed show vote from the start—but the Democratic split: 103 Democrats voted yes, 98 voted no, and ten voted present. Massie was the sole Republican in favor.

The good news: that’s well short of the 150 some predicted—a figure inflated precisely because the measure was certain to fail, letting members vote against Israel at no policy cost. The bad news: it’s 66 more than two years ago, when the House faced a similar vote, and 99 more than 2016, when the chamber passed the memorandum of understanding 405-4. According to sources, another 60 Democrats might have joined the provision without leadership pressure holding the line.

More bad news: those 98 who voted no are not, by and large, Israel hawks. Congressman Hakeem Jeffries called the amendment “overly broad,” warning it would gut humanitarian aid, refugee resettlement, and the ability to confront Hamas and Hezbollah—then conceded that “there are more decisive ways to achieve the urgent change necessary when it comes to the far-right Netanyahu government,” and that “a meaningful change in direction is needed” ahead of the new memorandum of understanding. Congressman Sam Liccardo, who opposed the underlying funding through a separate vote, drew the line others left implicit: no to 3.3 billion dollars in offensive weapons, yes to defensive systems like Iron Dome, and a new memorandum of understanding treating Israel “as an important ally, not a supplicant.” The no column was against the vehicle, not the destination.

. . .Good news: there aren’t 103 Zohran Mamdanis in Congress. Representative Katherine Clark voted yes “not because I agree with the entirety of the amendment, or the GOP’s cynical motivations for its consideration, but because I believe we must change course”—the status quo, she said, “is not tenable.” Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was blunter, calling the amendment “ill-conceived” and voting yes anyway “for the message that it sends.” Clark even swiped at the mechanism she was endorsing, dismissing it as “more stunts from Congressional Republicans who would rather score cheap political points than lead.”

Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, captured the hedge: many yes-voters “haven’t turned their back on Israel, recognizing there’s a distinction between the people of Israel and the current Israeli government.”

The problem is how much longer that distinction holds; one suspects that the anti-Israel passion in the Democratic party is not simply directed against the current makeup of Israel’s governing coalition, no matter how much moderate Democrats wish it were.

I agree with the last sentence: blaming everything on Netanyahu is identifying a scapegoat for disliking all of Israel, and I suspect that any Prime Minister, be they right- or left-wing, could be substituted for Bibi.  Democrats either changed their minds on Israel, are Jew-haters anti-Zionists like the Squad, or are pandering to the young electorate.

*It’s not often that a new species of primate is discovered, but LiveScience says we have one (h/t Nicole).

Scientists have identified a new species of monkey that has orange lips and makes unique roars and snorting sounds. The distinctive monkey lives in a remote region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

It is only the fifth new monkey species to be identified in Africa in the past 75 years, and there might be more unknown monkey species in the region, scientists behind a new study suggested. Researchers named the newly identified species of monkey Colobus congoensis, after the region, and it is known by the common name “lik­weli” in the local Kilanga language.

DNA sequencing showed that this species is distinct from any primate known that could be a potential relative. Here’s a video of the creature making its strange calls:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is cogitating:

Hili: You’re playing solitaire again.
Andrzej: Yeah, sometimes I need to sort out my thoughts.

In Polish:

Hili: Znów układasz pasjansa.
Ja: Tak, czasem muszę uporządkować myśli.

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

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Things With Faces:

A good one from The Grammar Police:

From Masih: Another peaceful protester executed in Iran:

From JKR via Luana: another objection to Amnesty International’s stand that a “woman counselors only” rape crisis center is a violation of “rights.”

From Jeff Maurer, and yes, the stuff about the Jamestown founder John Smith is true:

Two from my feed. Isn’t this calf cute?

Otters like ice cubes?

And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Doc Cobb. Wait for the end of this chick video:

WAIT FOR ITWAIT.FOR.IT! 🪶 🐣

— Brett "Solidarity 2026" Banditelli (@banditelli.org) 2026-07-08T01:51:19.000Z

Ghost cat:

Purranormal activity . 😍🤣

— omgisme (@omgisme.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T02:20:51.796Z

Anthropology bigwig defends her field against attacks that it’s moribund, but actually proves it’s moribund.

July 16, 2026 • 9:30 am

On June 8 I posted about the “Boghossian Report,” in which ten scholars argued that the humanities are becoming overly politicized—to the detriment of universities and their ideals. The politicization came, they said, mostly from the Left, and involved the promotion of “progressive” social justice rather than a search for truth. Click below to read it:

This was not a scientific survey but a warning based on a collection of observations and anecdotes. Nevertheless, the report has received considerable pushback from humanities professors who cannot accept that their discipline could possibly be politicized. One maintained that because the humanities were in disarray in the first place, it is that disarray that led to their politicization, not the other way around. At any rate, the report was particularly hard on anthropology, singling it out for special opprobrium:

In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.

and:

In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise.

For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that “anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences … because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism” (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that “the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,” but rather to “serve the interests” of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that “all ethnographies” — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology — have as their goal “not voyeurism but advocacy” (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.

Note that one of the authors of the Boghossian et al. report is anthropologist Joseph Henrich at Harvard. More on him below.

Well, Carolyn Rouse, the president of the field’s biggest scholarly group—the American Anthropological Association—couldn’t let that rest, but has been firing back at the Boghossian report. Stephanie Lee interviewed Rouse for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it wasn’t a puffball interview: Lee pressed Rouse hard, and it turns out that Rouse either ducked the questions, was ignorant about the author in her field, and how the Boghossian report was written, and even maintained that science showed there were not two biological sexes.  In the end, all Rouse reveals is that the accusations about anthropology in the Boghossian report are substantiated by one who tries to refute them.

You can read the article by clicking below (the photo is of Rouse), or find it archived here:

All text from the article is indented:

From Lee’s introduction:

But one field was singled out as “the most extreme case” — anthropology. Compared to philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, the discipline showed “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” The authors cited writings from several anthropologists, a speech by a recent president of the American Anthropological Association, and an AAA panel about biological sex that was canceled in 2023, among other things. The report described itself as a summary of reports, specific to each field. (Only one, on literary studies, has been released; it was posted after this interview was conducted.)

Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.”

Rouse is an anthropology professor at Princeton University who researches race and inequality in religion, medicine, education, and economic development. In 2016 and 2017, she went viral for leading a walkout of a speech by the political scientist Charles Murray, and for delivering a lecture titled “F%*# Free Speech,” in which she argued that free-speech absolutism does not exist. Rouse was elected president-elect of the AAA in 2023, and assumed the role last year. The Chronicle asked her about her views on the Vanderbilt report and the questions it raises about her field. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lee’s questions are in bold, and Rouse’s answers in plain text.

First, Rouse says that the Boghossian report was written using AI (not just for research but  “used an LLM to write this”. When pressed for evidence, she quotes an article in the Chronicle  of Higher Education, with Rouse saying, “Anthony Appiah says that they used AI.” But in that article, improperly cited in this report, Appiah actually says this:

We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on. My report will come with six appendices of such material, not produced by me but produced by the researchers that we were able to hire with the money that was given to us by the chancellors.

This does not say that the authors of the Boghossian et al. report used AI to write the report; it implies that they used AI to survey the bodies of text. It’s completely unfair for Rouse to accuse the authors of writing the report with AI.

To see what really happened, I contacted someone connected with writing this report who characterized that this accusation was “completely bonkers” and that the piece was a “most bizarre interview.”  This contact told me that while the report used various analytical tools (including LLMs) to get lists of syllabi, prizes, and so on, this was just the background research. The data were then debated heavily among the authors and the report was, as I expected, written entirely by humans. Rouse has come close to libel in her unfounded accusation. ​

Then Rouse ducks a question about an address given by Akhil Gupta, the previous AAA President:

Let’s talk about some of the specific critiques that were raised in the Vanderbilt report regarding anthropology, perhaps as a way of talking about these broader issues you have with its conclusion. So, in 2021, then-AAA President Akhil Gupta gave a presidential address where he said anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism,” and the Vanderbilt report said that this kind of remark is an explicit rejection of “the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.” Do you share Dr. Gupta’s conception of anthropology?

Anthropologists love to disagree with one another, so I’m not gonna say I agree or disagree with Akhil. Here’s the thing that I think they don’t understand: We are the instrument for data collection in the same way a Geiger counter detects radiation. We have to do a lot of refining of our instrument, our way of thinking, what we’re doing it for, how we’re seeing it, in order to collect data that we know is, of course, subjective, but uncover some truth. So that’s why we teach our students to be self-reflexive — why you’re doing this, what motivates you, what presumptions did you go into the field with, what do you think this information is going to do for the world?

That’s a non-response. Rouse says that the previous president was misquoted. Lee keeps on pressing Rouse, saying that she (Lee) saw Gupta’s published address and the quote is in there.  Caught out, Rouse bobs and weaves:

This is from his presidential address, or the written version of it. Not to be repetitive, but the report highlights this remark and says this remark is a rejection of the idea that “scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.”
It’s a cherry-picked quote. They misquoted him, that’s what he says.
I mean, I wasn’t in the audience for this speech, either, but he published a version of this address —
I’ve read it, I’ve quoted from it.
So that quote is in there, you know.
But just because something’s quoted, there’s a whole context. There’s so much more than that. This is the problem with absolutist free speech. We talk in contexts. Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else. . . .

 

There’s that “context” defense, saying that Gupta’s quote didn’t mean what we think it did.  Also, everyone knows that free speech is never 100% free: even the First Amendment has its restrictions. Rouse’s example of speech being “connected to something else” is neither an example of the violation of the First Amendment nor does it have anything to do with Gupta’s claim. It’s evasion, pure and simple.

Here Rouse denies that the anthropologist on the report has any reputation:

Can I ask what you think about Joseph Henrich, the sole anthropologist on this commission? Had you heard of him? Were you aware of him having some kind of reputation or something prior to this?

No.

You’d think that Rouse would have looked up the only author of the report who was in her field, but she apparently didn’t.  He’s not obscure, either. He’s 57, has published five books (including two trade books) and roughly 200 papers. He’s a cultural anthropologist like Rouse, and according to Wikipedia is “a recipient of the 2003 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers[4] and the 2022 Hayek Prize.”  I think he has “a reputation”. 

There’s a lot more, but I want to get to the part where Rouse denies there’s two sexes.

In 2023, the AAA canceled an accepted panel at its annual conference, titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology.” The AAA said at the time that the panel would have harmed members’ “safety and dignity,” and that its premise contradicted “settled science.” The Vanderbilt report cited this incident to argue that when politically charged questions “are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent.” You were elected president-elect of the AAA shortly after that incident. Do you regret today the fact that the AAA canceled that panel, or the justification that it gave for canceling it?

Rouse thinks that whether sex is binary is a non-issue: it’s settled that there are more than two sexes!

There’s a point in that Vanderbilt report where they talk about astronomy departments becoming astrology departments. All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually, that there are different types of “sexes” and “genders.” You can have XY and you present as a woman, you can have XXY — they’re all variations, genetic variations. So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that. You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world. And then we have people who identify with genders that don’t match to their chromosomes, and people like Anthony Appiah, who are gay, and so I don’t know what they want, why they want us to teach in that way — that’s the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.

The second question: It should never have been accepted. At this point, we are demanding that people do good peer review, because that’s what happened — they slacked on the peer review.

Here Rouse is defining sex by karyotype: the chromosomes that someone has. And since there are several chromosomal types (XXY, XO, etc.), sex surely can’t be binary. But sex is defined as whether the individual has a reproductive system designed to produce large vs small gametes, not an individua’s chromosome complement. (These two things, however, align nearly perfectly.)  And even if you use chromosomes, 99.8% of people are born either XX or XY. Finally, what is this “maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world”?  Who wants to kill these babies?  This is just pure confusion and ignorance mixed with performative assertions and accusations of eugenics.

But Lee, who’s done her homework, won’t let this assertion rest, either, and presses Rouse, who issues a lame response, dismissing a survey of the very organization she heads:

OK. So on the question of this particular idea being “settled science,” as the AAA said at the time, there was a survey in 2022, published in the journal Forensic Anthropology, that asked forensic anthropologists about this question, and 42 percent of them said they agree that sex is binary, and 56 percent disagreed that it’s binary. So that ratio would seem to indicate that, in the field, the question hadn’t actually been settled, and I was wondering how you explain that.

 

I don’t believe in opinion research. Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they’re coroners, they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling. Things are in the air. I just don’t trust opinion polling. That’s from just being an anthropologist and spending a lot of time with people in the field. People don’t know a lot.

Had enough? I won’t burden you further, but this is a sample of how Rouse refuses to give straight answers, lies about the use of AI in the Boghossian et al. report, and completely gets biological sex wrong.  She is an ideologue who twists the truth to suit her ends, and that’s exactly what Boghossian et al. see about anthropology (another person Rouse praises is her Princeton colleague, sex-is-a-spectrum miscreant Agustín Fuentes, who’s appeared often on this site for his obtuseness about the sexes.

Rouse’s interview is nothing short of embarrassing.  Over at his website Leiter Reports, my law-school colleague Brian Leiter said this:

The CHE reporter Stephanie Lee does a really good job trying to get Professor Rouse to actually answer questions, but Professor Rouse’s responses mostly serve to confirm the doubts expressed about her field in the Boghossian Report.

Brian wrote a lot less than I did above but he has a way of distilling things into pithy but true assessments.

Duckling disaster (five saved)

July 16, 2026 • 8:15 am

As you read yesterday, I was all happy and hopeful that the new brood from hen mother Margot would thrive and grow in Botany Pond.  Well, once again it was not to be.  Sometime in the morning, only a few hours after they entered the pond, they all disappeared. I had no idea what had happened, but kept watching the pond.

A few hours later, an undergraduate named Gabby, who loves the pond, emailed me that four ducklings were huddled together on a rock in the channel, and one was floundering in the thick algae in the channel.  I ran down to the pond with my net and a “duck box”: a small box lined with old but clean teeshirts which I keep ready to harbor rescued ducklings.

Sure enough, I found five ducklings. Four were standing on the rocks in the channel, completely sodden. Another was nearby, trying to swim through a thick mat of algae and failing.  Two others we later found dead on the rocks in the main pond.

What happened? I think the ducklings simply got mired in the thick algae floating on the pond surface, or dove and surfaced within it, coating themselves with algae and becoming wet (ducklings have no inherent oil in their feathers as they get it from being underneath mom).  All the live ones were completely soaked, and I feared for their lives.

The next six photos are by Gabby, the undergrad who discovered the mishap and emailed me. The first is the duckling mired in algae, which I picked up and dunked underwater to free it from the stuff:

Four completely soaked ducklings:

It was pitiful:

They were so wet that their skin was visible:

These were only one-day-old babies, and I had to get them dry immediately. I put them in a “duck box” and took them to my office, where I had to dry them off. The box was put by a space heater underneath my desk, which keeps them warm and helps them dry off.  This is before drying:

It took me an hour and a half to dry them off. I alternated among the ducklings so I didn’t handle each one for a long time. I used the lab equivalent of Kleenex—Kimwipes—to gently stroke them and blot them. Those who looked poorly I put in the rolled-up tee-shirt, making a pouch to keep them close to my body.

I then left them for an hour, giving them a little shallow dish of water into which I crumbled baby duck food. When I looked again, they were all pretty dry, fluffy, and also vigorous. None of them looked close to death. At 2 p.m., right before the World Cup Game, I drove them to Dorothy, the local representative of the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, who would keep them until they go to the Willowbrook Wildlife Sanctuary, where they’ll be tended well. I was satisfied that none of them had been fatally soaked.

I saved five but two died before I could get to the Pond. That makes seven, and Margot had nine or ten. I don’t know what happened to the others; I did a sweep of the pond several times and they’d all disappeared.

I blame the algae for this one. Without it, I think the brood would have grown up fine and fledged in September. Nearly the entire bottom of the pond is covered with a thick mat of algae, and much of the surface is, too, which I’ve circled in this photo:

The reason there’s algae is that the sun beats heavily on the pond, facilitating the plant’s growth. If there were trees to shade it (several were removed) or water lilies to float on top (they planted a few in pots, but they are not going to spread as the bottom is gravel), we wouldn’t have this problem.  Every two weeks, at great expense, the University has to pay for two guys to go into the pond and haul up great armfuls of algae, but it’s a losing battle. They can never remove more than a fraction of the growth.

One of the algae-removal guys told me that this was predictable and the University should have known this beforehand; and I think that’s true. Whoever decided to put a gravel bottom on the pond, and then plant a few measly containers of grass and water lilies thinking they’d spread, was completely out of their depth.

I don’t know if they can get rid of the algae and prevent its future growth, but this design error cost the lives of four or five ducklings yesterday, not to mention the separation of Margot from her brood and the great joy that a brood of ducklings brings to the University community. I am angry and very sad at the same time. The three previous broods were either saved and rehabbed (one brood) or walked out of the pond when Mom was harassed by drakes (two broods). That could not be helped, but the algae could have been.  I am powerless to do anything about it, but yesterday marked the end of an annus horribilis for ducks. I’m not looking forward to next year.

The ducklings yesterday before disaster struck:

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

July 16, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, July 16, 2026 and National Cherry Day. Here’s a bowl of pie cherries from Andrzej and Malgorzata’s orchard, next to a pie that Malgorzata made in 2016: my first cherry pie in Dobrzyn:

It’s also Guinea Pig Appreciation Day, National Corn Fritter Day, National Fresh Spinach Day, and World Snake Day. Here’s a snake I photographed in 2015; can you guess the species?

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Footy news: In a fantastic comeback, Argentina, behind by 1-0 at the 55th minute,,scored two goals within 7 minutes in the second half to beat England 2-1. I was happy because Argentina is my team. I wanted Messi to go out on a World Cup win, and if they beat Spain on Sunday they will (Messi assisted in both of Argentinas goals yesterday).

Argentina sealed a dramatic semifinal fightback against England at Mercedes-Benz Stadium with two goals in the closing minutes to clinch a 2-1 win and book a World Cup final clash with Spain on Sunday.

The reigning world champions, who won their third title in Qatar four years ago, looked set to be eliminated with England leading well into the dying stages following a second-half goal from Anthony Gordon.

But as so often in this tournament, Argentina responded and Enzo Fernández leveled the scores with a stunning shot from 20 yards in the 85th minute.

Lionel Messi, who assisted the first goal, again played supplier for the second. His cross to the far post was met by substitute Lautaro Martínez, who headed the winning goal into the net from close range in the second minute of stoppage time.

“This is incredible, it’s truly incredible,” Martínez said. “I dreamed it, I swear. I told Alexis [Mac Allister] I was going to score a goal; I told Facu Medina that I was going to come on and win the match.

“We stretched the team and went all in. We got the goals in the end, and after three-and-a-half years, we’re back in a World Cup final.”

Messi now has 10 assists in the World Cup knockout stage, at least six more than any other player in at least the last 60 years. And the 39-year-old has recorded a goal or assist in 11 straight World Cup games dating back to 2022, extending the longest such streak since at least 1966.

England’s failure to hold onto their lead means the 1966 world champions’ wait for a second World Cup final appearance goes on.

Here is a video of the highlights; the goal-scoring play are at 5:46 (England), 10:15, and 11:47 (during stoppage time).

*In a “news analysis” piece, the NYT argues that the war with Iran has entered a new phase—one centered not on nuclear weapons, but on the Strait of Hormuz and who controls it:

The Trump administration has lurched back into a war against Iran that had never really ended.

When the war started more than four months ago, U.S. forces targeted Iranian military bases, missile launchers, ships and naval facilities. Israel, fighting alongside the United States, hit leadership targets, hoping to bring down Iran’s hard-line government.

Their record of success has been mixed, at best. Israel killed the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but the leaders who succeeded him were even more hard-line. U.S. forces struck thousands of targets, but did not destroy Iran’s ability to control the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil typically flows.

For roughly 90 days beginning in April, an on-again-off-again cease-fire prevailed. And then it was over.

The United States now appears to be entering Round 2 of its military campaign. This round has a new focus — but not necessarily a clearer strategy.

Iran’s ability to control the strait, despite the pummeling its navy took, is by far the most important lesson of the first phase of the war. So it is no surprise that the Trump administration is focused on trying to loosen Iran’s grip on it.

Last Tuesday, in retaliation for attacks on tankers, President Trump ordered airstrikes on dozens of targets in Iran, including coastal radars, anti-ship missile launchers and a fleet of small Iranian attack boats.

After a short lull, the United States hit 140 military targets in the first of three consecutive days of heavy bombing this week.

U.S. forces carried out new rounds of attacks on Iran throughout Tuesday and resumed a naval blockade of Iranian ports, a strategy that showed some success in the earlier phase.

The strikes are intended to open the waterway to shipping. The purpose of the naval blockade is to put economic pressure on Iran by choking off its trade and to flex American military might.

Well, the last paragraph outlines a strategy that’s pretty clear, even if the NYT doesn’t approve of it. The “memorandum of understanding” was hopeless from the start, not only because it was ambiguous but because Iran would never agree with it. This conflict is going to go on for a while unless Trump loses it and declares victory, stops all fighting with Iran and leaves (which amounts to the same thing), or intensifies its pressure on Iran, squeezing it until the theocracy declares “uncle.”

*A new article in the WSJ reports widespread abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli officials.  No, there is no dog rape, but there are claims of beating, starvation, medical neglect, and yes, anal penetration with a stick. The treatment began, says the WSJ, after the October 7 attacks of Hamas. This is a serious report with Israeli sources.

. . . . the thousands of Palestinians held at Lavi prison in the Negev and other prisons across Israel now faced harsher conditions. Thousands more joined them, swept up in raids amid the ensuing war.

Auditors from Israel’s Ministry of Justice and United Nations agencies later found that detainees were subjected to beatings, particularly during transfers and searches, and starvation. Autopsies of some Palestinians who died in custody showed signs of physical assault, medical neglect and malnutrition. Doctors and rights groups described instances of sexual violence.

In addition to those reports, The Wall Street Journal interviewed a dozen Palestinians released from Israeli prisons since 2024, mostly as part of ceasefire agreements with Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. All said they experienced physical abuse, such as being bound in stress positions and beaten, and severe hunger. Two men said they were sexually assaulted in front of other prisoners.

“Every day, three times a day, someone was being beaten,” said Iyad Omar, 44, one of the men held in Lavi (formerly known as Ketziot), who had been imprisoned since 2002 and was convicted of attempted murder. “This kind of thing never happened before Oct. 7. Back then, we only faced this type of abuse if there was a hunger strike or a riot.”

. . .Physicians for Human Rights Israel, an Israeli medical-advocacy nonprofit that monitors prisons, said it has visited 59 detainees since February, with all reporting insufficient food and medical treatment.

About 9,300 Palestinians are in Israeli custody for alleged security offenses, up from about 5,200 before the war, according to Hamoked, an Israeli nonprofit that has access to prison population data. Most of them are held without charge, the group says.

Government officials in Israel have said they intentionally made life harder for detainees after Oct. 7, including reducing food rations and banning visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which are standard in conflicts around the world.

The changes were designed to toughen punishments for terrorists and enhance deterrence against extremism, some officials have said. They say basic standards of care are met, and deny allegations of systematic abuses.

“The allegations described are false, recycled, and entirely without factual basis,” a spokesperson for the government’s Israel Prison Service said in response to questions from the Journal. It said that all detainees are held in accordance with the law, with full regard for their basic rights, including medical care, and that complaints or allegations of abuse are investigated.

Pressure is building on Israel to provide a more thorough accounting of its prisons since the Oct. 7 attacks, as more reports of alleged abuses come to light. Some in Israel and many abroad are calling for greater accountability.

. . . There have been only a handful of investigations into alleged crimes against Palestinians in Israeli detention, with one known conviction since the start of the 2023 war in Gaza.

And the sexual abuse accusation:

Mohammad Mardawi, 47, said he was imprisoned in 1999, and official records show he was later convicted of membership in a militant group and shooting toward people. He told the Journal that while he was held in Lavi, he was put into a small, single-person cell in April 2024 with two other men, and watched through a sliver of space beneath the door as Israeli soldiers fired guns at the feet of a group of new detainees, then beat them.

Later that day, he said, guards came into the cell and bound him and the other two prisoners and told them to kneel on the floor with their heads to the ground.

“That’s when they put the stick inside me,” Mardawi said. He gestured to explain how a guard slipped an object into his pants and penetrated him anally.

“I wished that I would die,” he said.

This investigation is far more credible than Nicholas Kristof’s “dog rape” column, one reason being that the Israeli organization Physicians for Human Rights weighed in on “insufficient food and medical treatment.” If this stuff happened it is unconscionable, unworthy of Israel’s democracy, and needs to be thoroughly investigated and any perps punished. The individual allegations of beatings and rape may be hard to substantiate, as there are probably no records, but they should be investigated as far as humanly possible, and anybody participating in this treatment punished heavily. And if the treatment is systemic—known to and okayed by higher ups—they should be punished, too.  It’s a pity for the NYT that they didn’t find Kristof’s piece sufficiently credible to do a full news piece on it.

*Over at the Free Press, Douglas Murray discusses the recent refusal of both Turkey and Egypt to allow an LGBTQ+ cruise to dock; the ship, named The Scarlet Lady, had 2000 passengers Murray says the media have distorted the reasons for the refusal, which are really religious but interpreted as political and the results of colonialism.  Murray, of course, is openly gay.

Talk about a big gay scandal. This week brought news of a gay Virgin cruise ship called Scarlet Lady, which, by my count, is at least a triple entendre. In recent days, the ship was barred from docking in both Turkey and Egypt. To make it even more of a gay hate crime, the Scarlet Lady was carrying not just 2,000 gay Americans but also Patti LuPone.

The mainstream media, and what remains of the gay press, swiftly framed this as a pattern-example of anti-LGBT discrimination. Indeed, CNN ran the story under the headline: “Twice-Rejected American Cruise Puts Spotlight on Rollback of LGBTQ Rights, Passengers Say.”

The story CNN and others ran with was drawn in part from the testimony of one Kyle Olsen, the owner of an LGBT travel company who claimed that the ban reflected a “broader global trend.” He added that “We’re seeing a rise in right-wing governments and increasingly conservative political movements, and in many places LGBTQI+ rights are being rolled back as a result.” According to Olsen, “The decisions by Turkey and Egypt don’t exist in isolation.”

The strong insinuation of these reports is that the spurning of Scarlet Lady is a result of a world in which Donald Trump has been reelected and right-wing populism is on the march worldwide.

. . . Not for the first time, the commentariat is desperate to avoid the obvious and singular cause of Scarlet Lady’s woes: Islamic countries do not tolerate gay and lesbian people, nor recognize their rights. These countries actually do exist in a type of isolation from the rest of the world.. . .

In reality, Turkish authorities rejected the vessel’s landing because, they said, the passengers were “known for behaviors incompatible with the fabric of our society and our moral values.” Passengers hoping to dock in Egypt and take in a quick tour of the pyramids were brushed off for the same reason by authorities in Cairo. The vessel was forced to sail to Greece—ironically, a birthplace of the ancient gay tradition.

Obviously, these countries have not suddenly cracked down on gay rights. In 2001 there was a famous trial in Egypt—known as the Queen of the Nile trial—in which more than 50 Egyptian homosexuals were prosecuted after the cruise ship they were on was raided by police who beat and arrested the ship’s passengers.

. . . In other words it is no news that the Egyptian authorities, like their Turkish counterparts, hold on to the same laws and moral code that they have kept for centuries. These mores are not the result of colonialism—one of the great excuses claimed by apologists, such as Joseph Massad in his book Desiring Arabs. Rather, Islamic norms are derived from the traditions of Islam and upheld by reference to Islamic scripture. As Muhammad is recorded to have said in one famous Hadith, “Whoever you find doing as the people of Lot did”—homosexual relations, that is—“kill the one who does it and the one to whom it is done.”

. . . But alongside what we might describe as Western “neo-orientalism” is a second oddity. It is a question that some feminists and a small number of gay rights activists have mulled for years: Why does the battle for progressive rights always stop at the borders of Islam?

Instead, the Western rights movements largely chose to focus on encouraging mastectomies on minors, abortion rights up to the month of delivery, pronouns, micro-aggressions, and the addition of ever more letters and categories to the LGBT alphabet soup. While Western activists were focused on micro-aggressions, they ignored the macro-aggressions being practiced on their counterparts in other countries.

My suspicion is that this failing will be judged harshly by history. It will be explained by the fact that in the aftermath of colonialism, post-colonialism persuaded Westerners that we had no right to impose our own moral norms on other societies. But what will bemuse historians of the future is how we were able to run both the thoughts mentioned above at the same time: the presumption that we know the rest of the world, especially the Islamic world, while making no serious effort to understand it or affect it.

All I can say is “amen.”  Muslims, despite their huge numbers and big megaphone—even in Western countries—are still perceived as “people of color” and thus the moral failings of Islamic doctrine must be excused (Israelis are considered “white adjacent”). And the voyatge of the Scarlet Lady shows how pathetic the “gays for Palestine” movement is. It’s also humorous, if you consider arrant ignorance of reality funny.  Somebody should give this article out to Greta.

*A T. rex fossil was sold to a private collector for $50.1 million, setting a record for dinosaur-skeletong sales (article archived here).

Sotheby’s sold a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil at auction on Tuesday for $50.1 million, with fees, topping records set in recent years amid a surging market for prehistoric specimens.

The towering skeleton, nicknamed Gus, was sold after a nearly 10-minute bidding war. The auction house declined to name the buyer, or even reveal the person’s location.

“Try a bigger bite,” said Phyllis Kao, an auctioneer at Sotheby’s during the live sale in New York, which included seven bidders. “It’s a T. rex after all.”

The sale allowed the T. rex to reclaim its title as the most valuable on the commercial fossil market. Two years ago, it had been unseated — by an herbivore, no less — when a stegosaurus fossil was auctioned for $44.6 million.

The record continues a trend of climbing prices for dinosaur bones, which has delighted commercial fossil hunters while drawing criticism from paleontologists at universities and museums who worry that they are being priced out of the market.

The 12½-foot-tall T. rex fossil was excavated from private land in fossil-rich South Dakota in a multiyear process that started in 2021. At that time, the fossil industry had just been supercharged by the sale of another T. rex skeleton — known as Stan — which sold for $31.8 million, driving fantasies of buried treasures out West.

The winning bid was taken by Cassandra Hatton, a Sotheby’s executive, who said in a statement after the sale that “Gus is not only an exceptional find but a specimen that’s been excavated, documented, prepared and cared for with real excellence.”

I appreciate that the finder should make some money from the skeleton, but private bidding drives the prices up beyond the ability of museums to afford them. This removes them from the ambit of scientific study and thus of knowledge about this species. (This specimen apparently bore traces of injuries.)

The prices given in this video differ from those in the NYT article.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the flowers make Hili and Andrzej despondent, because the roses were Malgorzata’s favorites in the garden:

Hili: So many flowers, and so little joy.
Andrzej: Sometimes even beauty can make you angry.

In Polish:

Hili: Tyle kwiatów, a tak mało radości.
Ja: Czasem nawet piękno może gniewać.

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

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Stacy:

I will have only a few tweets today as yesterday I had to deal with the Duck Disaster (see the next post).

From Masih: pro-regime Iranians call for Trump’s head (see English translation):

From Luana; the UN makes a rare admission:

Maarten Boudry sent a post about cats and his alma mater:

Larry the Cat, rooting for England in footy, was happy before the game. . .

. . . and then sad (the quote is from Oasis’s “Wonderwall” album):

One from my feed; this was on the news last night. I don’t know if the guy got his clubs back:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Dr. Cobb, who thinks that Argentina plays dirty soccer and was rooting for France in their game with Spain:

How France played last night #WorldCup2026

— Reading Museum (@readingmuseum.bsky.social) 2026-07-15T17:23:37.243Z

We have ducklings!

July 15, 2026 • 9:49 am

I can’t believe it! New ducklings on July 15, and likely to be the hottest day of the year.

I’ve been watching the pond regularly, but haven’t seen a hen for at least ten days. I believe it was Margot, named after Margot Fonteyn the ballerina, for the hen had a long, graceful neck. Her partner, the drake Rudolf (Nureyev, of course) hasn’t shown.  This morning I looked on the pondcam and, to my surprise, I saw a hen followed by a bunch of blobs. Ducklings! I ran down to the pond and, sure enough, there was a new brood.

You can see them below in a picture taken at high zoom, so I can’t seem them well enough to know if it’s really Margot, nor do I know how many there are–I think9 or 10.

This is by far the latest brood we’ve had: more often they show up the first two weeks of May.  But Margot hested before and lost her brood to harassing drakes that drove everyone away. Now that we have no drakes, there’s a good chance that this brood will survive to fledging (if they’ll eat), which should be mid-September.  That is not too late to fly, and the weather will be good.

Now you tell me: how many ducklings?