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.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani dined at a Palestinian restaurant chain blasted for being “openly genocidal” against Jews on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.
Hizzoner ate dinner at Ayat Hinds Hall on the Upper West Side — part of a chain whose sister restaurant in Brooklyn was blasted for featuring a menu section entitled “From the River to the Sea,” in the wake of the 2023 attacks.
The restaurant is named after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian child who was killed by IDF forces in Gaza in Jan. 2024, and also pays homage to the anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University, who renamed Hamilton Hall “Hind’s Hall” when they took over the building.
Yesterday, New York City’s Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, issued a statement commemorating the October 7, 2023 attack of Hamas on Israel. The problem for me and many others was the the commemoration was more about the depravity of Israel than of Hamas, and more sympathetic to the Palestinians to the Israelis. Here’s the statement as given by the Mayor’s Office:
This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them—all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.
Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.
There you have it: 49 words devoted to Hamas’s attack, and 163 words on the crimes of Israel, including an erroneous statement about the death toll as well as inclusion of the Three Big Lies about Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide.
And it’s not that different from the statement he made on October 7 of last year:
Yesterday’s small-beer “commemoration” was decried by Jews and Jewish organizations, but what is surprising is that Mamdani was booed for it—by supporters of Palestine! When I first saw the headline below in the NYT, I thought, “Well, of course the Jews harbor anger and bitterness”about the statement, but then I learned that, no, it was supporters of Palestine who were angry and bitter. Click to read, or see an archived version of the article here:
An excerpt, and I have to say it brought me a frisson of pleasure:
It seemed inevitable that the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks would touch off tensions for Zohran Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel and the first Muslim mayor of a city that is 12 percent Jewish.
But Wednesday erupted with such anger and emotion that it seemed to overwhelm any efforts to solemnly mark the deadliest day in Israeli history.
Mr. Mamdani began the day shortly before 9 a.m. by issuing a statement that was meant to acknowledge the Oct. 7 anniversary but almost immediately caused an uproar among some Jewish leaders, who said it minimized Israeli suffering in the Hamas-led attacks.
It took a turn roughly 12 hours later at a vigil organized by Israeli peace activists in Union Square in Manhattan, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupted the event to jeer the mayor. He appeared ashen and upset as he left, without addressing the crowd, flanked by his security detail as he walked to a waiting S.U.V. at 8:50 p.m.
The events raised questions about whether Mr. Mamdani, who energized his campaign with his embrace of the Palestinian cause and ardent criticism of Israel, can now, as mayor, unite New Yorkers whose emotions remain inflamed over the issue.
“This is a moment when people are looking to see if we have the kind of leadership that brings people together, lowers the temperature and makes everyone feel respected,” said Mark Treyger, the chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council. “And today was just not it.”
The mayor, who is known for his broad, effervescent smile, seemed especially stung by the opposition to him expressed by the pro-Palestinian crowd in Union Square, given his consistent support of their cause.
During the vigil, he stared stone-faced, and at times looked crestfallen, as the activists chanted in support of Hamas, called for the deaths of Israeli soldiers and denounced him as a “traitor,” many citing his meetings with President Trump or his efforts to build ties with Jewish leaders.
“Zohran, you coward!” someone yelled from the crowd, which numbered in the hundreds. Others yelled, “Zohran is a sellout!”
The chickens have come home to roost: now Mamdani, who’s tried to walk a fine line between the Jews and Muslims, is being booed by his own ilk—and it bothers him.
I have no doubt that Mamdani is not only anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, but also suspect he’s an Islamist and may even be anti-Semitic.
There are more Jews than Muslims in NYC: Grok estimates about 960,000 Jews and between 250,000 and 700,000 Muslims.)Yet about a third of Jews who voted for Mayor in 2025 voted for Mamdani. Granted, they may have been “progressives” taken in by Mamdani’s promises of free daycare, free public transportation, and subsidized grocery stores, but in the end they’re like chickens voting for KFC. You just know that when Mamadani goes home at night to his antisemitic wife Rama Duwaji, they don’t sit around and praise Israel!
Here’s a news clip showing some of the booing at the candlelight vigil.
Just about an hour ago, the Nobel folks gave the 2026 Literature Prize to Canadian writer and poet Anne Carson, and I admit I’d never heard of her. I should have: as Wikipedia notes,
With more than twenty books of writings and translations published to date, Carson has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters. In 2026, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
She’s produced over twenty books, including translations.
The official award by the Nobel Foundation gives this rationale:
“for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.
And the Nobel’s “biobibliography” adds this:
Carson once described boredom as her arch-enemy, and it is a state she confronts with drastic humour and wit. The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, published in 2001, tells of a cutting and sardonic row with a deceitful husband, its twenty-nine episodes each opening with lines of verse by the romantic poet John Keats. Keats’s sublime words about beauty being truth are, in brutal yet playful fashion, juxtaposed with this exhausting relationship drama.
An unforgettable work of Carson’s is Nox (2010), written in memory of her brother Michael, who was mysteriously absent prior to his death in Denmark in 2000. Palpable here is a deep sense of loss that works its way up from below. The result is a creation as sculptural as it is literary, an epitaph in the form of a box containing an accordion-fold-out of pictures, letters and other written texts dedicated to her dead brother. There is moreover a third voice that provides temporal depth in the shape of the Roman poet Catullus, with his famous elegy 101 in honour of his own departed brother, who like Michael died on foreign soil. Present also is Carson’s moving translation of the poem.
Throughout her entire authorship, Carson with a light touch explores the possibilities of writing, a process by which the literary sketch has become of particular value to her. Bearing witness to this is Float (2016), a work consisting of twenty-two chapbooks on different subjects, capable of being read in any order. Another is Wrong Norma from 2024, a diverse combination of texts with a strongly performative aspect in which Carson crosses over into various artistic and academic fields. Her collaborations with visual artists and choreographers and with opera and theatre directors demonstrate the freedom with which she relates to literary expectations and rule systems. It is this that lies behind the outstanding importance her work since the 1990s has had for the international art and literature scene.
Renée Szostek guessed Carson in our contest, and if there’s no earlier winner for the Peace Prize, awarded tomorrow, Szostak will be the winner.
There will be a shortish version of Hili today as I’m not feeling that well (yes, the eye, which is ok but focusing makes me nauseated).
Welcome to Thursday, October 8, 2026 and National Pierogi Day. I eat a lot of pierogi in Poland, and here’s some blueberry dessert pierogi I had in a restaurant:
There is a Google Doodle today honoring World Space Week. Click to see where it goes:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 8 Wikipedia page.
As I have mentioned several times before, this website seems moribund: comments are few, and the content doesn’t seem to appeal to potential readers. This is depressing, and it can’t continue at the present rate. I am not seeking reassurance here, as I write what I want. This is just a notice. Few people send in readers’ wildlife (it used to be a daily feature), and comments are waning. All the signs are that the website’s life is moving peacefully to its close.
Once upon a time, the idea that the world was growing stupider was mostly confined to the realm of dyspeptic reactionary polemic. But nowadays, the idea is increasingly mainstream. The belief that smartphones are “rotting our brains” is a widely repeated cliché. Data seems to corroborate this feeling, too: Studies have shown declines in IQ over the past two decades, with the sharpest drops among age brackets that use their phones the most. Students themselves have reported since the 2010s that they have difficulty concentrating and remembering. One study found that even having a phone turned off on a table nearby may be enough to impair a student’s academic performance.
But perhaps another reason that people feel this way is that cultural output — not just short-form videos or Instagram posts but films, television, music and books — is becoming simplified, too. The smartphone’s constant distraction and hostility to complex thought is reshaping almost every aspect of culture. Entertainment and the arts are undergoing what might be termed a Great Simplification.
Take the Netflix film “Irish Wish,” which ranked No. 1 on the streaming platform following its release in 2024. The film stars Lindsay Lohan as an American book editor named Maddie, who travels to Ireland dreaming of marriage to a hunky best-selling author (a genre of person more common in films than in life). As writer Will Tavlin observed, as you watch, you may notice that the characters are explaining what is going on, as if you are too slow to understand. In one scene, Maddie says to her lover, “We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” He replies, “Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”
In a world of constant distraction, scriptwriters can no longer rely on audiences to pay attention. Executives at Netflix have reportedly demanded simpler scripts in which characters repeatedly announce what they are doing, so that scrolling viewers can keep track of what is going on.
According to actor Matt Damon, filmmakers are told: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” The result is the inverse of the traditional creative writing advice “show, don’t tell.” It is hard to sustain interiority or nuance in a film in which every action must be clearly signposted. Not every Netflix film needs to be a masterpiece of insinuation and subtext, and good, challenging films are still being made — but nonetheless, complexity seems to be rapidly draining out of culture.
. . .The same relentless pressures toward simplification are at work in almost every creative industry. A 2024 statistical analysis of more than 350,000 songs between 1970 and 2020 found that lyrics are becoming simpler, more repetitive and less rich in their vocabulary. Another study suggests that melodies are becoming less complex, too.
. . . Equally striking is what is happening in the publishing industry. Books are getting simpler and easier to read. An Economist analysis of New York Times best-selling books from the 1930s to the 2020s found that “sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.” Long sentences are not easy to grapple with in an age when, according to one estimate, the average American checks his or her smartphone 186 times per day. The audiences for serious nonfiction and literary fiction have declined steeply in recent decades. Sales of books about economics, current affairs and politics have fallen particularly sharply. [JAC: If the average American is awake 17 hours, then the average rate of phone-checking is 11 times an hour, or about once every 5.5 minutes!]
By contrast, best-selling books of the 1960s included Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” Saul Bellow’s “Herzog”and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard.” In 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling’s collection of essays “The Liberal Imagination” was a bestseller in the United States, with more than 100,000 copies sold.
It is not easy to imagine such books commanding mainstream audiences today.
. . .Getting to grips with a new book, film or song requires a special and sometimes painful effort of concentration.
I think this attention may partly explain why studios opt for remakes, franchises and “extended universes.” Before the turn of the millennium, only about 25 percent of top-grossing films were spin-offs or sequels; by the 2020s the figure had risen to 75 percent.
. . . Not everything can be said simply, and understanding requires sustained concentration from readers, viewers or listeners. If they are distracted and unfocused, culture risks being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.
The statistics speak for themselves. (Don’t forget the “reading time” put before many printed articles so you can see if they are too long to read!) The good news is that I can read or watch whatever I want, and, fortunately, good books and good movies are still available.
*Matthew sent this video about the sentencing of a military soldier to death by firing squad—the first such sentence since World War II. Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured 32 others in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009, and has been on death row ever since. The sentence, signed by Donald Trump, is to be carried out on December 1. While firing squad is probably among the most humane methods of execution, I oppose it, as does Matthew, who labeled his email, “Barbarians.” He’s right. Life without parole is sufficient.
Since you last thought about math, the people who think about math every day have been freaking out.
A month ago, when OpenAI announced that one of its powerful internal models had cracked a notoriously difficult Millennium Prize Problem, it looked like the most spectacular demonstration yet of AI’s progress in mathematics.
Then mathematicians revolted.
The backlash from the math world coincided with a global reckoning about Silicon Valley labs racing to build technology that could spiral beyond their control. On the same day that OpenAI published its landmark proof, a researcher quit Anthropic over safety concerns. Within hours, the AI breakthrough was overshadowed by fears that AI could destroy humanity.
Meanwhile, mathematicians were dealing with existential questions of their own.
But as they publicly debated the future of their ancient field, OpenAI’s model kept churning out new proofs behind closed doors. This left the company with a problem for a bunch of humans to solve: what to do with all that AI-generated math.
On Tuesday night, OpenAI published hundreds of proofs for mathematicians to wrap their minds around.
An unprecedented number of answers that had eluded mathematicians for decades arrived in a single night. The deluge included AI solutions to more than 300 problems across number theory, algebraic geometry and other fields with names that could give anyone haunted by high-school math a migraine. Among the major findings in a collection of 722 papers were advances related to three of the five remaining Millennium Prize Problems, including the Riemann hypothesis.
“If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked,” Alex Kontorovich, a Rutgers University distinguished math professor, wrote on X about the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis” proof.
The understated rollout of such monumental results marked a shift in OpenAI’s approach to publishing scientific discoveries, part of an effort to win back mathematicians who have become allergic to AI hype in recent months. On late Tuesday and early Wednesday, many of them reported feeling a sense of awe.
As stunned math experts scrolled through the results and began to absorb them, even a researcher inside Anthropic called the release “obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history.”
. . . Instead of dripping out findings one by one, OpenAI dropped them all at once. The company released 372 groups of results and said the model attempted roughly 4,000 problems in total. It also provided summaries of the model’s “chain of thought” and estimated the average result required only a fraction of the computing power that went into the Millennium Prize triumph.
Mathematicians are naturally flummoxed by this, as AI is doing what they can’t do. Further, they can’t kvetch that AI is stealing their results, because if it’s using published work to get a head start, well, that’s what regular mathematicians have always done when solving hard problems. Perhaps they’re beefing because this AI work threatens to put a lot of them out of business.
*Here are adjacent articles in yesterday’s (Oct. 7) New York Times. This is a pathetic attempt to be objective in their reporting. I’d blame those bodies on Hamas. The NYT has become hopelessly slanted in its coverage of Israel, and not in favor of Isael.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej engage in badinage:
Hili: I’m walking into the future, leaving the present behind. Andrzej: At my age, I prefer to do that sitting down.
In Polish:
Hili: Idę ku przyszłości i zostawiam za sobą teraźniejszość.
Ja: Jestem już bardzo stary i robię to na siedząco.
From Masih: “Aimless strolling” is now verboten in Iran:
Believe it or not: walking is now a crime in Iran.
A police commander in Isfahan ordered police deployed and destroyed the flowerbeds, green spaces and beautiful benches of Sanai and Iranshahr streets. His justification? Young people were “aimlessly strolling.”
He says: “I went there myself and asked a young man, what are you doing here? And even he didn’t know!”
So let’s write this down. If a street is pleasant and peaceful, we must not walk there. Because if police stop you and ask what you are doing, and you say “Nothing, just walking,” you are a criminal. Your own two feet become instruments of the crime.
In 21st-century Iran, a woman walking unveiled is a crime but hanging people in public is treated as a blessing under Sharia law.
Shame on you. You cannot even stand the sight of people taking a walk. Fine, ban walking too. You are not banning anything. You are only turning yourselves into a joke, in front of everyone.
Although compulsory hijab, is it still a law and you force even seven year-old schoolgirls to cover her head to toe in order to get an education, but you cannot control millions of women who say NO to Islamic republic’s barbaric laws.
#WalkingUnveiled
#StopExecutionsInIran
*Here’s the odious NYC Mayor pretending to honor dead Jews when in fact he accuses Israel of occupation, apartheid, and genocide, while Hamas gets accused of none of these, but is the subject of 3/4 of the Mayor’s tweet. I detest this man and still can’t believe that New Yorkers—including many Jews—voted for him. But just wait until they get their subsidized grocery stores and free daycare!
This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.
Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.
From Steve Stewart-Williams via Luana; the “gender equality paradox for STEM. Fewer women go into STEM fields in nations that have greater equality between men and women. This holds for other counterintuitive indices of “accomplishment”.
Nations with greater gender equality have a *lower* percentage of female STEM graduates.
The 85-year-old who chose to die to save his family.
On October 7, Hamas terrorists went from house to house in Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
Shlomo Ron, 85, understood what was happening – but he had a plan.
He told his wife, two daughters, and grandson to hide in the safe room. They tried to convince him to come inside with them.
He refused.
Shlomo believed that if the terrorists entered and found an old man sitting alone in the living room, they would assume he lived alone, kill him, and move on without searching the rest of the house.
So he sat down in his armchair and waited.
The terrorists entered.
They saw Shlomo alone.
They shot him dead—and moved on without searching the rest of the house.
Exactly as he had hoped.
His wife, daughters, and grandson survived.
Shlomo Ron, one of the founders of Nahal Oz, was 85 years old and unarmed.
His final act was to give his life to protect his family.
And one from Doctor Cobb, urging people to read this paper about Rosalind Franklin and”photographs 49 and 51″, and giving his take on the whole issue:
A lot of excitement on here about the article in Science summarising the discoveries of @alistairsponsel.bsky.social and Brian Sutton, just published in the Journal of the History of Biology. Some people have asked, so here is what I think they show, and what are the implications:
Today’s music is from a group that readers either have forgotten or are too young to know about: the Kingston Trio (all the members of the original group have expired). This is one of the old folk songs they rearranged: “The Wagoner’s Lad,” first recorded in the 1920s. It’s a sad song about young lovers forced to separate because the lad drives wagons. The first verse is an paean to first-wave feminism.
From the link just preceding:
One of the things that I have always loved about folk music is its capacity to surprise. You can be humming along through all the wonderful chanteys and cowboy songs and ballads and love songs…and then stumble unexpectedly on the surpassingly beautiful (like “Shenandoah” or “The Mountains of Mourne”) or the darkly tragic (like “The Sloop John B”) – or amazingly modern sentiments in a very old song, like “The Wagoner’s Lad.”
The very first verse of the song, which is known in a host of variants including “My Horses Ain’t Hungry” (recorded famously by Peter, Paul and Mary as “Pretty Mary”) and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and which dates to the early nineteenth or even late eighteenth century, tells us that we are not in the standard folk universe in this song, where women are usually the objects of either romantic desire or borderline misogynistic humor or scorn. Instead, “Wagoner’s Lad” opens with a plaint as old as time, one that remains distressingly true for a really unthinkable percentage of the world’s women today – in the Middle East, in most of South Asia and much of East Asia, and in large parts of Africa. Perhaps half of the women in the world today do not choose their husbands freely, making that opening verse perpetually relevant:
The link to the song’s name will take you to several recorded versions, including ones by Joan Baez, Sarah McQuaid, John Denver, and one by Burt Jansch and John Renbourn, which I finally found on YouTube.
Here are three videos and several articles on October 7 that are worth watching and reading.
First, one from Coleman Hughes: “Inside Israel’s war room: what really happened after October 7.” (Subtitle: “Israel’s leaders hated one another. They fought a war anyway. Elliot Kaufman takes us inside the room where it happened.”) Kaufman is an editor of the Wall Street Journal, and imparts a number of facts about the war (and subsequent “peace”) that haven’t been widely reported. It’s a long conversation, and I haven’t yet finished, but Kaufman is eloquent, Hughes asks good questions (as usual), and you’ll learn a lot.
Click to watch it (now on YouTube):
Free on YouTube: “Israel regained deterrence. The U.S. lost it.” Bret Stephens is interviewed by Times of Israel editor deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan about all manner of Israel-related items: the war, why Israel won despite losing world approbation, the Democrats vs. the Republicans on Israel, is the New York Times anti-Israel?, and so on. The one bit that irritated me was when Borschel-Dan asks Stephens whether the NYT is anti-Israel. It of course is, but Stephens weasels a bit, which he probably has to do to keep his job. Otherwise, it’s a good conversation.
A short video of Natasha Hausdorff being interviewed on October 7 by Julia Hartley-Brewer. Note the two big truths that Hausdorff says have been neglected by the media but which we must recognize.
The front page of the Free Press is loaded with articles appropriate for this day. You’ll have to subscribe to read any, though. Note the ones at upper left and lower right, which go against the prevailing narrative.
As the grim third anniversary of October 7 befalls a decimated Gaza Strip, the state of the discourse among many in the so-called “pro-Palestine” movement remains as embarrassing, dismal, and disastrous as it was when Hamas initiated the attack in 2023. Over the past three years, I have seen countless posts by self-described Zionists criticizing the conduct of Israel’s government, the behavior of Israeli officials, and the excesses of the Israeli reaction to October 7. And yet, I have struggled to see even a dozen posts by “pro-Palestine” activists, advocates, or organizations explicitly condemning Hamas for triggering the most catastrophic chapter in contemporary Palestinian history.
And let’s be clear: That’s exactly what this is. Three years after October 7, the Palestinian people face their greatest crisis of the modern era.
I begin on the ground, in Gaza itself. The majority of Gaza’s buildings are partially or fully destroyed. Tens of thousands have lost their lives, including entire families wiped out by ferocious Israeli bombardment. People will argue to the moon and back about who was ultimately responsible for the level of devastation in Gaza. I personally believe Israel killed far too many civilians, including dozens of my own family members. Israeli air strikes destroyed both of my childhood homes. I will never not be angry or upset about this.
But I will also forever be furious at the fact that Gaza would still be standing had Hamas simply kept its terrorists at home on October 7. I will forever be rageful at the fact that Hamas not only weaponized every aspect of Gaza’s infrastructure but also held Israeli hostages in a manner that was inevitably going to invite more devastation and suffering for Palestinian civilians. I will forever be resentful of the useful idiots who ignored Hamas’s sadistic tactics, hiding behind vacuous appeals to “international law” despite there being no legal framework to justify a terrorist group entrenching itself in medical facilities, educational spaces, markets, and areas meant to shelter the displaced.
. . . In other words, three years after the October 7 attacks on Israel, Palestinians have seen their homes decimated, their reputations destroyed in both Israel and the Arab world, and the actions of their supposed allies in the West amount to nothing. Yes, this has been the most catastrophic three years in modern Palestinian history.
However, a narrative shift is of paramount importance. To promote a fundamentally different future for the Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond, we must acknowledge that within the massive power differential between Israel and the Palestinians, there exists an immense margin for Palestinian agency, responsibility, and accountability. Recognizing that is far from “blaming the victims,” as many of my detractors allege; it is, in fact, the first step toward empowering the Palestinian people.
Each day’s news is filled with declarations of defeat. The online world is filled with shrill declarations that Israel has lost this war.
But as we approach the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, I stand by what I wrote here this time last year: that Israel and her allies have been winning the war on the ground even as they have lost the PR war around the world. The PR war matters. But it matters less than the war itself. Better to win the ground war and lose the PR war than the other way around.
Three years after the attack that Yahya Sinwar started, it is worth reiterating the successes of the nation he tried to defeat—and the utter decimation of the people who started this war.
. . .Once the mullahs [in Iran] had deliverable nuclear weapons, they believed they would be invincible—effectively able to continue repressing the Iranian people for the indefinite future and hold not just the Middle East but also the wider world by the throat. That was, effectively, what their mouthpieces in the Western media wanted. Only one great miscalculation prevented them from getting there: Sinwar’s launch of the October 7 attacks.
With the hindsight of three years of war, we can now see more clearly how complete the devastation of Iran’s plans has been. Piece by piece, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu took apart the Iranian axis.
First, they took apart Hamas in Gaza. They did this despite constant attempts to make them stop, which came not just from the negligibly important “allies” in Europe but from President Joe Biden’s White House. Throughout the years during which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attempted to finish its mission in Gaza, the Biden administration consistently tried to pull it back. But the Israeli government refused. Even as Kamala Harris declared that she had “studied the maps” and the hashtag “All eyes on Rafah” went global online, the IDF went into Hamas’s last stronghold. There they cornered Sinwar and killed the mastermind of the attacks. There was no “massacre” in Rafah, as the online world had predicted. There was simply another Israeli victory.
People will beef at Murray’s praise of Netanyahu, but there’s a nice ending, referring to last week’s failed hijacking attempt of a FlyDubai airplane:
Sinwar was a psychopath, and so he probably would have launched his war anyway. But by any analysis, what he started on October 7 was one of the greatest military missteps in history. Everybody alongside and above him in the chain of command is now dead. Neither Hamas, Hezbollah, nor the Iranian regime has a noose ready to pull around Israel’s neck anymore. Three years ago, this set of victories would have seemed unthinkable. Today, it is an average day’s news. That a large share of the Israeli hostages who Hamas claimed on October 7 were eventually returned alive is an additional victory worthy of scripture.
Only one part of the war has been lost, and that is the war for public opinion—especially among the young. That is both concerning and unsurprising. The terrorist-linked regime in Qatar, among others, has been superb at using its mouthpieces at Al Jazeera and other, more covert propaganda channels to influence global opinion. These outlets started making false claims that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza beginning in October 2023. Sadly, large parts of the world have believed this lie, and weak governments like that of the UK have decided to pander to a part of their domestic political base by repeating and feeding it.
In the years ahead, that will be their problem. But for the time being, what happened in the skies above Saudi Arabia on Wednesday morning stands as a metaphor for three years of war. The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course. The rest of the West will have to decide whether it will follow the Israeli model or let its own future be dictated by terror and the hijacking of its entire society.
*****************
From It’s Noon in Israel; click the headline below to read. Tatarka and Segal paints two worlds: the “Nova world” described this way:
The Nova world is a world of good and evil. Evil is the entity that raped and pillaged its way through the Gaza envelope, kidnapped 251 people and sacrificed Gazans on the altar of its deity, death. It is the militia that fired on the north and drove tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes. And it is the regime in Tehran that armed and funded them both, the Great Satan of this world.
and the “October 8 world”, in which Israel is the evil and hapless entity:
The other world dates its birth to October 8, omitting the day its ideology won its greatest victory and its goals were realized: October 7. This “October 8” world has even fewer shades of gray than the Nova world. Its black is Israel, the unholy nation, the spearhead of Western colonialism and the last obstacle to the world’s redemption. Its white is the Gazans, victims of oppression and genocide, who have replaced Jews as the archetypal persecuted other. It has adopted the jihadist’s categories: “settlers” and Israelis are one and the same, as are terrorists and civilians.
An excerpt:
Reality conforms to neither narrative entirely.
The hostages have come home. Hamas is shattered, Hezbollah decapitated, Assad gone, and Iran struggling for breath. By almost any military measure, Israel has never been stronger. And yet France, the U.K., Canada and Australia have recognized a Palestinian state, and visitors to the Netherlands are having their bags rifled through for products from Judea and Samaria.
That does not make the two worlds equally wrong. The October 8 world’s distortions are too many to count. The most fundamental is its refusal to see non-Westerners as actors in their own right. In its telling, every event is written in Jerusalem or Washington. Hamas didn’t choose to attack; it was provoked. Hezbollah didn’t choose to open a second front, and Iran didn’t choose to build an axis; they were simply defending themselves from Israeli aggression.
The Nova world’s error is subtler, and for Israel, more dangerous. Before October 7, Israel fell for a conceptzia of safety: the belief that Hamas was deterred, contained, and bought off. Three years later, it risks the opposite, a conceptzia of unsafety, in which every threat is existential and every problem is answered with force. Israel has become a hammer in search of nails. This complicated region is fluent in the language of force, but it is not monolingual, and those who insist Israel speak only that language will miss the larger opportunities its military victories have created.
Criticizing the Nova world is not the same as doubting it. On the question that matters most, it was right: evil is real. Today, three years on, a letter by an officer of Shayetet 13, the Israeli Navy’s special forces unit, has been published. I will let it speak for itself.
Just recently we were talking about chirality (“handedness”) in the molecules of life: organisms use only L amino acids in proteins and D sugars in the DNA ladder, although opposite-handed molecules exist. Why is this? For a while chemists have been trying to create a preference in “one handed” molecules via chemical reactions. And the two who just won the Chemistry Nobel Prize, Kenso Soai and Henri Kagan, succeeded. The Nobel Prize site gives a brief explanation:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.”
Henri Kagan discovered a new way of manipulating chemical reactions, allowing a greater excess of one of the mirror images to be created than was previously assumed possible. His discovery has been revolutionary for chemists who develop reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, flavours, scents and new materials.
Kenso Soai designed the first chemical reaction in which only one of the potential mirror images was formed. Other than life itself, no one had ever achieved this feat. The Soai reaction is one of the most spectacular chemical experiments ever conducted.
Molecules can exist in mirror images of themselves—left- and right-handed versions. Yet the stuff of life, from the amino acids in our proteins to the sugars in DNA, has evolved a preference for one-handedness, or chirality. Why this asymmetry arose has long been a mystery, because ordinary chemical reactions tend to produce equal amounts of the two mirror images.
Today’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors Henri Kagan of the University of Paris-Sud and Kenso Soai of the Tokyo University of Science for discovering how chemistry can break that symmetry—and for providing clues to how life’s one-handed chemistry might have emerged.
“Their discoveries led to a chemical reaction that spontaneously, without the involvement of other chiral molecules, creates only one mirror image,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Prize Committee for Chemistry, said at a press conference this morning where the award was announced. “This is the first time this had happened since the processes that led to the chirality of life billions of years ago.”
For decades, drugmakers had struggled to create chemical reactions that would produce a one-handed form of a drug—a problem because mirror-image forms of the same drug molecule can have very different biological effects. For example, the right-handed drug Darvon is an opioid painkiller, whereas its left-handed form, Novrad, is a cough medicine. (The names are mirror images of each other as well.)
Chemists had long assumed that the handedness of a catalyst—a compound that speeds up a chemical reaction—would be transferred linearly to the molecules it produced. But in 1986, Kagan showed that wasn’t necessarily so. When left- and right-handed versions of a catalyst were mixed, he found, they formed combinations that behaved differently: Some barely drove the reaction at all. As a result, a small imbalance in the catalyst could produce a much larger imbalance in the product—a phenomenon known as a nonlinear effect. The discovery gave chemists a new way to drive reactions with a preference for one particular molecular handedness.
Soai put the idea into practice. In 1995, he showed that a reaction could amplify a tiny initial excess of one mirror image. Starting with just 2% excess, he ended with 87%. He continued to look for ways to improve, and in 2003, he demonstrated a reaction that could snowball on itself, amplifying a tiny, chance imbalance between the two mirror images, until more than 99% of the product had the same handedness.
“Taken together, the groundbreaking discoveries by Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have reshaped our understanding of molecular chirality, how it is created, amplified, and transmitted,” prize committee member Peter Somfai said at the press conference.
We don’t yet have a theory why, say, L-amino acids predominate in life, but it could have been due to an initial tiny asymmetry that was amplified in the way described above, making one kind of amino acid more available for protein synthesis. As we discussed recently, “mirror life” made of opposite-handed molecules, like D amino acids, might pose dangers to the planet.
Here are the two mirror-image forms (called “isomers”) of the amino acid alanine, which cannot be superimposed on each other.
By the way, we don’t yet have 20 entries in our guess-the-Nobels-in-Literature-and-Peace prize, and if we don’t get to that limit before the deadline (5 p.m. Chicago time today), the contest is canceled. What a sad site this has become!
Welcome to Wednesday, October 7, 2026 a Hump Day (“Dita e mesit të javës” in Albanian), as well as Random Acts of Poetry Day. Here’s my appropriation of a real poet; do you know who it is? It is a fragment of a longer poem, but this fragment is about the writer’s cat. It’s long, so skip it if you’re ailurophobic. Answer at the bottom of the post.
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.
It is also, of course, the third anniversary of the genocidal attack on southern Israel by Palestinian terrorists, killing at least 1,195 people, including 828 civilians. You can expect widespread celebration by the haters today. This Times of Israel article gives the gist (click to read):
From the article:
As Israeli and Jewish communities around the world mark the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led invasion and massacre in southern Israel, 262 pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests and events have been identified in 37 countries, the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry said.
The events are planned through October 14, with 121 scheduled for October 10-11, the ministry said, citing data from its J-SOC (National Center for Combating Antisemitism). On October 7 itself, 75 demonstrations are planned worldwide.
. . .The United States has the largest number of planned events, with 45, followed by Spain with 40, the ministry said. Australia expects to see 21 protests, the UK 19, and Italy 16. Germany and Canada each will have 14, while France will have 10, and the Netherlands eight.
Of the 262 events, 21 have been classified as high-risk and 66 as medium-risk.
And just to remember what these morons are celebrating, here’s one of the Jewish victims from October 7. Be sure to read the whole message from Libi:
OCTOBER 7, 2023: SHE KNEW SHE WAS GOING TO DIE.
Libi Cohen-Meguri, a 22-year-old infantry officer, went to the Nova music festival.
She was shot while fleeing the party. At 8:11 a.m., she called her parents and said:
“I’ve been shot in the stomach, I’ve been shot in the arm, I’m losing blood. I’m going to die.”
Calmly, quietly, she understood; these were the last minutes of her life.
She asked her parents to call Tomer, her twin brother, and Maya, her little sister, and said:
“I’m going to die. I just want you to listen to me.
I love you, Yariv. You’re the best father I could have asked for.
Mom, stop screaming. Just listen to me. You are the best mother we could have ever had. Don’t forget to be a good mother to Tomer and Maya after I die.
Tomer, how lucky we were to live this life together. I love you.
My Maya, never forget—you are the treasure of my life.”
When she finished speaking, her parents told her to get out of the car, lie down on the road, and pretend to be dead.
With her last bit of strength, she got out of the car and laid down on the road.
“Mom, they’re coming to shoot me again,” Libi said after lying down.
While her mother listened on the phone, shouts in Arabic could be heard, and then a barrage of gunfire.
It didn’t stop.
It kept going, until the call was disconnected.
And that’s how Libi died—with demonic beasts from the pit of hell standing over her and emptying a full magazine into her body.
Libi died with LOVE on her lips: love for life, love for her family, and love for her people.
Her memory will forever be a blessing.
NEVER FORGET.
NEVER FORGIVE.
NEVER AGAIN IS NOW.
Israel is hunting down every single Palestinian and Hamas terrorist who participated in the October 7th Massacre—to kill them all.
They’re living on “borrowed time,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Sooner or later, every one of these monsters will be found and eliminated.
Eva Marie Saint, who starred in Elia Kazan’s 1954 On the Waterfront and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 North by Northwest, died Tuesday at 102 years old.
Saint grew up in Albany and Delmar, New York. She was a delicate, porcelain beauty. She attended the Actors Studio in New York, performed on Broadway and did live television in the late 1940s. But Saint didn’t do a film until she was almost 30, after director Elia Kazan suggested she screen test with a guy named Marlon Brando. They did a scene from On the Waterfront in which Saint is supposed to keep Brando out of her house.
In 2000, Saint told WHYY’s Fresh Air, “I don’t know what happened, but … [Brando] came in the living room. We were dancing, we were laughing, I was crying. He was taking my skirt and … whipping it around, and the sparks flew. And Kazan saw that. And suddenly I was in On the Waterfront.”
In that film, Saint plays Edie, a Catholic schoolgirl who finds herself in the middle of union corruption in Hoboken, N.J. When her longshoreman brother is murdered, Edie wants justice. Saint won an Oscar for performance.
Below is one of the very famous scenes from that movie, one in which Brando and Saint have their first date. Brando, playing failed boxer Terry Molloy, was partly responsible for the death of Joey, the sister of Edie Doyle, played by Saint, but she doesn’t know it. The acting in this scene is unparalleled. Watch Brando look around, play the tough guy, and then melt when Saint puts her hands on his face. The whole movie comprises such acting (including the “I could have been a contender” scene), and, according to Wikipedia,
On the Waterfront was a critical and commercial success and is considered one of the greatest films ever made and is said to revolve around the subject matter of alienation at the lowest social level. It received twelve Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, Best Supporting Actress for Saint, and Best Director for Kazan. In 1998, it was ranked by the American Film Institute as the eighth-greatest American movie of all time; in AFI’s 2007 list, it was ranked 19th. It is Bernstein’s only original film score not adapted from a stage production with songs.
Demonstrations swept across France on Tuesday as labor unions rallied in solidarity with high school students who have spent two weeks blockading schools to protest understaffing, overcrowded classrooms and dilapidated buildings.
Marches were held in more than 40 cities, from Caen in the north to Marseille in the south, as activists, teachers, parents and university students joining swelling protests that have spread to hundreds of schools across the country. Tuesday’s marches drew roughly 256,000 people, according to the Interior Ministry; a major union said the figure was more than twice that many.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu signaled that the government had heard the protesters’ demands and was taking them seriously. He also said regular classes would be “completely suspended” on Thursday and Friday so that principals could host sessions with students.
The protests on Tuesday were mostly peaceful, but a fire was started in Lyon and police officers unleashed tear gas in Nantes. The biggest march was in Paris, where the Interior Ministry said there were 56,000 demonstrators.
The demonstrations are a litmus test of the longevity of a protest movement that began late last month in the suburbs of Paris and quickly spread to hundreds of schools across France.
While the causes of the chaos may appear disparate, they can be traced to a common root: France’s two-decade-long struggle to fund its state, now exacerbated by high borrowing costs, surging fuel prices and political uncertainty, with jockeying underway to replace President Emmanuel Macron next spring.
French public finances, already fragile, continue to deteriorate, fanning fears in financial markets that France could be the next European country to tumble into a full-blown financial crisis. The fiscal jitters were amplified by recent polls that show the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, would beat all her rivals in presidential elections that will be held next spring.
On Tuesday, teachers and other public workers plan rallies against proposed wage freezes as the government labors to pass a budget. They will join thousands of students who have blockaded schools to protest underfunding that has led to crumbling facilities and a shortage of teachers.
As far as I can determine, immigration has no direct connection with this save that the school protests began in areas that were relatively poor and had a high proportion (about 30% of immigrants.
On Monday afternoon, Taylor was one of about a dozen speakers at a “Justice for Survivors” protest blasting Cornell for perpetuating a culture that allows rape to go unpunished.
Their fury was on behalf of Jane Doe, the anonymous student who filed a September 14 lawsuit alleging that seven male students gang-raped her at a fraternity house in 2024. The student, then 20 years old, initially described the evening—including her drinking and use of a dissociative drug called ketamine—as voluntary and consensual. Then, more than two weeks after the alleged incident, with rumors about her in full swirl on campus, Jane Doe requested a rape kit at a local emergency room. At the time, the Tompkins County district attorney declined to bring charges in relation to the case based on a statement Jane Doe had given to university police, finding the description of her participation to be “voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”
The case has since exploded far beyond Ithaca, dividing the country as it wrestles with some of the thorniest questions that remain nearly a decade after #MeToo: What happens when a woman comes to understand a sexual encounter as rape in retrospect? How relevant should a woman’s alcohol and drug consumption be in determining consent? And should the names of the accused men be public given they have not been charged with a crime?
That nuance was hard to come by from the speakers at the rally, which at times felt like a mash-up of the left-wing causes of the last decade—from Black Lives Matter to the anti-Israel movement that roiled college campuses during the spring of 2024. One Cornell attendee banged on a drum while wearing a ski mask and hoodie reading “Viva Palestina Libre.” Protesters chanted “no justice, no peace.”
Athena Holloway, a senior majoring in public policy, took the stage to detail the ways that Cornell had not only failed her, but humanity. When she first came to the university, she was excited, she said.
“I believed I had found a place where every person could belong, where any person could be protected,” she bellowed, as protesters raised signs with messages like “I DON’T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL WITH RAPISTS.” “So imagine the disappointment of discovering what can happen when that any person needs help,” Holloway continued.
She then harked back to moments in the school’s past where she believed the institution had stood on the wrong side of history, including in 1969, when black students wielding guns took over a campus building to demand a stronger black studies program. Holloway, who described herself as a “low-income, first-generation” student, encouraged students to think of their struggles as connected.
“Race matters!” she blared. “Gender matters! Sexuality matters! Class matters! Disability matters, immigration status matters! Power matters!”
This was not a crowd that used the terms accused or alleged. To almost all attendees, the seven men named in the lawsuit—and not yet tried in a court of law—were guilty.
The last part is what bothered me—the rush to judgment, declaring all seven accused men of being guilty. It’s clear that the University didn’t perform due diligence on the accusations, but what exactly went awry in the reporting process is not clear to me. It’s a sign of the times that for many an accusation equals guilt equals conviction, but as far as I know, no matter what people think, guilt must still be established by the justice system, and withstand reasonable doubt.
Before ascending the ranks of academia, Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff demonstrated against the Vietnam War and earned a literature degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Weeks before he graduated in 1973, women occupied the school’s College Hall to protest leaders’ response to a series of reported rapes.
Now at another Ivy League university, Kotlikoff finds himself in the midst of rising uproar over campus sexual-assault allegations—and this time, he is the leader in the hot seat.
Kotlikoff, who at 75 is the oldest president to lead Cornell, has spent most of his two-year tenure battling crises. His predecessor stepped down in 2024 amid controversy over elite schools’ handling of pro-Palestinian protests. Then came the Trump administration’s accusations of antisemitism and liberal excess, and the disruption of federal funding.
Now, a lawsuit alleging an undergraduate was gang raped and drugged at a Cornell fraternity house in 2024—and that the school didn’t do enough to protect her—has ignited a new crisis on campus.
Monday afternoon, hundreds of Cornell students gathered near the school’s famous clock tower and marched through campus in protest. On Tuesday, the gender and sexuality studies program is sponsoring a town hall. Wednesday, Cornell’s chapter of the NAACP is asking students to boycott classes and join a seven-hour sit-in, the duration of time for which Jane Doe says she was sexually assaulted.
Members of the Faculty Senate are preparing a vote of no confidence in the ability of central administration “to effectively address the ongoing crisis of sexual assault,” according to a draft resolution.
Kotlikoff addressed the Cornell community in an eight-minute video over the weekend. “I want to acknowledge something that can be difficult for an institution to say,” he said. “We don’t have all the answers.”
He called this time a “defining moment in Cornell’s history” and pledged to be more transparent about the investigation. He promised a serious look at campus Greek life: “We owe it to Jane Doe.”
With a vote of no confidence passing, Kotlikoff is toast, regardless of what happens to the accused rapists. Of course if he played any role in keeping the case away from the local authorities, then things would be much clearer. One thing is sure: we can’t let student unrest adjudicate this case.
*As you know, Britain’s Green Party voted a big anti-Israel motion, deeming Zionism “racism,” accusing Israel of genocide, and, worse, calling for a “one state solution” to the Israel/Palestine problem, which would lead to a huge genocide—by Hamas. The Guardian reports that this had led to ostracism of the English and Welsh Greens from the European Greens. (Four of the five British MP’s in the Greens opposed the hateful policy.)
The English and Welsh Greens are facing international ostracism after adopting a policy declaring Zionism as a form of racism, which has drawn dismay from the group representing European Greens.
The co-leader of the German Greens separately said the policy was “intolerable and unacceptable”, running contrary to its belief in the right of Israel to exist.
The policy says Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, should be “treated as any other form of racism”, and backs a single democratic Palestinian state across historic Palestine “with equal rights for all”.
The European Green party, which represents 47 parties, including the Green party of England and Wales (GPEW), said it supported a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and the new motion went against this.
The alliance “will immediately demand clarity from the leadership and parliamentary group of GPEW, to understand the official party policy of GPEW, how they position themselves towards the self-determination of Israelis and Jews as well as the protection of Jewish people and members in the party”, it said in a statement.
Felix Banaszak, the leader of the German Greens, known formally as Alliance 90/the Greens, told a press conference the motion was “intolerable and unacceptable”.
“It runs counter to everything that Alliance 90/the Greens stands for in Germany, and it also runs counter to what the European Green party stands for,” he added.
Banaszak said: “There is a widely held view within the European Green party that Israel has a right to exist and that this right must not be undermined.” His party would “approach our partner parties in Europe to clarify how to deal with this”.
Sandy Ruthven, the chair of Amnesty International UK’s charitable trust and a longstanding Green member, resigned over the motion and accused the party of failing to confront antisemitism.
Frankly, I’m very surprised at this given the growing antisemitism in Europe. But it’s not clear if the European Greens object only to the “one-state” policy (yes, in the British Greens a members’ vote is policy), or also to the Zionism = racism and the Israeili “genocide” lie.
Large language models are diffusing rapidly into science, raising concerns that delegating research writing to AI may undermine the development of expertise that scientific training is supposed to build. We measure AI-generated writing in the dissertations of a near-census of US STEM PhD graduates from 2019 to 2026 and link graduates to their subsequent employment. AI writing is absent before 2023, present in 29% of dissertations filed in 2026, and rapidly growing. Use is more common among students from non-English-speaking countries and at lower-ranked programs. Among graduates in the same program and cohort, those whose dissertations contain AI writing are less likely to enter academic research careers and more likely to enter non-tenure-track roles or industry, with this pattern strongest among US-origin students. At the same time as AI may increase research productivity, it thus appears to also be displacing a potentially important portion of the work through which scientific expertise is developed.
Here are some tweets showing, first, the growing number of STEM dissertations that have AI writing. Remember that the importance of a Ph.D. in STEM is research results and not writing, but it’s still unethical to have AI write part of your dissertation:
My findings have replicated!
A new paper found basically the same result I did: somewhere between 1-in-4 and 1-in-3 dissertations are now written with AI! https://t.co/h8kuznE0kF
And the graph showing, for both foreign (red) and American (green) Ph.D. graduates, the higher probability of going into industry than academia if you have a dissertation containing AI writing. (There is less of a disparity for foreign students.) It’s substantial, and I have a couple of theories for it, but you can think of your own:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the editor and Andrzej are messing around:
Hili: You look very tired. Andrzej: You’re right. I think I need to stop pretending I’m working.
In Polish:
Hili: Wyglądasz jakbyś był bardzo zmęczony.
Ja: Masz rację, chyba muszę przestać udawać, że pracuję.
From Masih. This brave Iranian woman risks her own freedom by relating what she sees:
A woman who runs a small shop near an Iranian prison sees two worlds unfold at its gates every day.
She sees families embracing loved ones who have finally been released, smiling through tears of joy. And she sees families summoned for one final visit with someone sentenced to death, holding back tears as they face an unbearable goodbye.
Behind those prison walls, people lose months and years of their lives in a system where fair trials, independent lawyers and even the most basic rights of defendants are routinely denied. Forced confessions, torture and closed-door trials have been documented time and again.
The people of Iran are being held hostage by this brutal and terrorist regime. They need the world to stand with them.
A Canadian man who had two rats as pets learned that letting them drive a miniature car reduced their levels of stress, so he gave them an electric miniature car and taught them to drive.
Every once in a while I like to reread this statement by the DSA and specifically one Zohran Mamdani, on October 7, 2023. Never forget. https://t.co/rfVv6CZ84C
And two from Doctor Cobb. First, a baby bobcat rescues itself. You can see some video here.
Not your typical 'cat stuck in a tree' call. A baby bobcat got stuck on the top of a power pole in Kelowna. He waited until the rescue man reached him in the lift and said, "No thanks, I got it," and shimmied down himself. 😂🤣www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/ar…
The poem at the top is a fragment from Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart (1722-1771). Smart wrote this while confined in a mental asylum, but it’s none the worse for that. It is in fact, one of the two best poems ever written about a cat.
