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.
Did you spot the frog in the photo by Bob Woolley this morning? I’ll put the original photo up first, and then the reveal:
When I asked Robert how he saw it in the first place, he responded this way:
I saw the frog only because it was at the surface as I approached, but quickly dived down into the mud before I could see any detail, so the movement caught my eye. If I had happened on the scene as you see it in the pictures, I never would have noticed it.
Of course newspapers are allowed to have editorial opinions, usually expressed in op-eds written by the editors, but good newspapers are supposed to remain ideologically and politically neutral in their coverage of the news itself. And in America the supposedly best newspaper, the New York Times (NYT), expresses its philosophy in a famous motto: “All the news that’s fit to print,” put on the masthead 119 years ago by the paper’s founders.
Now you can debate whether the paper includes all the news that is good to know about (the motto), or whether it includes trivial news of little interest (the latter is, formally, within the ambit of the motto). But the “paper of record,” as it’s called, should surely at least be objective about the news, not slanting it one way or thee other.
If you’ve followed the paper as this site has done, you’ll see that I don’t believe in the objectivity of the NYT’s news coverage. It is strongly anti-Israel—the subject of this article—and also strongly anti-Trump (see below, and remember I’m talking about the news, not the editorials). While I’m no fan at all of our narcissistic President, I do expect objective coverage in terms of both content and balance. I really do believe in my heart that the NYT hopes that Israel will disappear, and that America will lose our war with Iran.
Gerald Posner, a very formidable figure, has arrived at the same conclusion. If you haven’t heard of Posner, you should have. He’s an investigative journalist who has written 13 books, although the list in Wikipedia comprises 14:
Mengele: The Complete Story (1986)
Warlords of Crime: Chinese Secret Societies – The New Mafia (1988)
Bio-Assassins (1989)
Hitler’s Children: Sons and Daughters of Leaders of the Third Reich Talk About Their Fathers and Themselves (1991), ISBN 978-0-394-58299-3
Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993), ISBN 978-0-679-41825-2
Citizen Perot: His Life and Times (1996), Random House, ISBN 978-0-614-05801-7
Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998), ISBN 978-0-375-50082-4
Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 (2003), ISBN 978-0-375-50879-0
Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power (Music of the Great Lakes) (2003), Random House, ISBN 978-0-375-50062-6
Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-U.S. Connection (2005), ISBN 978-1-4000-6291-1
Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power – A Dispatch From the Beach (2009), ISBN 978-1-4165-7656-3
The Third Man: Was there another bomber in Oklahoma City?(2013),ISBN 978-0-9891-4210-6
God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican (2015), Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4165-7657-0
Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (2020), Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-1-5011-5189-7
I’ve read the last one, Pharma, and found it a very good and thoroughly documented indictment of Big Pharma (don’t mistake it for Empire of Pain, the story of the Sackler family). At any rate, as Posner himself notes in the tweet below, he’s also written 11 op-eds for the NYT. And lately he’s been disappointed in the paper.
Posner is half Jewish and half Catholic; but, as Grok says, with some links, “Gerald Posner is not a practicing Jew and does not consider himself Jewish. He has said so directly and repeatedly.” That’s relevant because of his indictment of the NYT below.
You can read Posner’s piece at his Substack for free; just click here. The gist of it is in the tweet above, but I’ll quote a bit:
This week gave us a small, almost clinical example of a much larger problem.
Correspondent Isabel Kershner was reporting on NAZA, the wildly controversial Israeli film about IDF conduct in Gaza that received a 25-minute standing ovation and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. In the original version of her story, Kershner wrote that Israelis “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”
Not that they were victims. Instead, that they “view themselves” that way—as though there were another serious way to describe the people murdered, raped, wounded and kidnapped in the Hamas-led assault. Would the Times ever write that Americans “still largely view themselves as the victims” of 9/11?
After a furious online backlash, the Times removed the sentence and attached an Editors’ Note. It blamed “an editing error,” saying the language had been intended to convey Israeli perceptions of the government’s military response but had “inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception.”
I have written corrections in my career. I have had editors save me from my own inaccurate or clumsy phrasing. What I know from decades of reporting is that a sentence casting doubt on whether the roughly 1,200 people killed in Israel and 251 taken hostage on October 7 count as victims does not just materialize on the page. A reporter wrote it. Editors read it but it did not set off an alarm until readers outside the building made enough noise.
That is how a worldview leaks through an editing process.
Now people have lauded the NYT for making that “correction,” but in truth the paper was probably lying: the original wording was not an “editing error”, for the meaning of the original is quite clear. Nor was the correction explanatory: what does it mean to say the phrase was “intended to convey Israeli perceptions of the government’s military response”? The military response was clearly based on the government and IDF viewing themselves as victims of a Hamas attack.
Then there was Nicholas Kristof’s May 11 opinion column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” I have written about its description of serious allegations of sexual abuse in Israeli detention, including the claim that dogs had been trained to rape Palestinian prisoners. That extraordinary claim was built largely on anecdotal, Hamas-adjacent sourcing that no other serious outlet had independently corroborated or agreed to publish.
The Times’s Opinion editors said the column had been fact-checked and that they found no errors. Executive editor Joe Kahn later said the news department “wouldn’t have done that exact piece,” while also expressing confidence that his Opinion colleagues had done their due diligence, a process he wasn’t part of. Kahn did not repudiate Kristof’s column but his distinction still exposed something readers are entitled to find troubling. A piece the news side would not have done appeared beneath the same New York Times banner, fortified by the same institutional authority.
Inside the building, News and Opinion may be separate countries. To the public, they share a flag. The paper had given its imprimatur to that flawed claim.
Well, I would cut the paper a little slack here, but it’s telling that an op-ed was really a news piece, and a news piece that would not have run as regular news. For one thing, the sources were anonymous. I have looked for verification of Kristof’s claims and haven’t found any, but Israel is probably still investigating them, which were made in May.
What is telling to me are the statistics—the number of articles, which is what eventually convinced me that the NYT is biased (see also the headlines below):
The case is no longer merely anecdotal. It now has data behind it and the data needs to be described with some care.
Edieal Pinker, a professor of operations research at the Yale School of Management, analyzed 1,559 Times news articles published from October 7, 2023, through June 7, 2024. His paper was peer-reviewed and published in *Studies in Conflict & Terrorism*—an academic journal, not an advocacy website.
Pinker found that 1,423 of the 1,559 articles mentioned neither Israeli casualties after October 7 nor Hamas combatants killed in the ensuing war. “Israel” appeared 27,205 times, compared with 8,499 mentions of “Hamas.” Personal accounts of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering appeared, on average, two out of every three days, while there were nine stretches of at least a week with no mention of Israeli casualties after October 7. During one period, six Hezbollah rocket or anti-tank attacks that wounded Israeli civilians went unmentioned across 25 Times articles about fighting on the northern border.
Those are not merely impressions but countable editorial outcomes.
Pinker himself does not claim that his study proves bias or intent but rather that it documents imbalances that give readers an incomplete picture of the war.
Since the war was between Israel and Hamas, one would expect roughly equal coverage rather than a threefold difference in mentions of Israel versus Hamas. And the lack of mention of Israeli casualties inflicted by Hezbollah is also telling. The view one gets is that Israeli casualties simply aren’t important compared to those of Palestinians, which of course include Hamas terrorists (something that isn’t often mentioned, as they almost invariably are lumped in with “civilians”).
Posner notes this:
The Times responded to Pinker’s newly published study by accusing advocates of “cherry-picking” data and pointing to its own body of work—more than 23,000 articles, photographs and videos since October 7, 2023. It said its reporting had exposed atrocities by Hamas as well as alleged violations of international law by Israel.
That is a defense of volume and range, not a rebuttal of Pinker’s method or findings. The 23,000 figure also covers a longer period and mixes articles with photos and videos, while Pinker studied 1,559 news articles from a defined eight-month window. The two numbers are not competing samples. Invoking the larger one may sound impressive, but it does not answer what Pinker measured inside the smaller one.
But if this was a scientific assertion, reviewers would reject it because it’s trying to refute statistics by simply citing a large mass of articles in which you can find some indictments of Hamas as well as of Israel. And that is cherry picking. The question is how often is one cited versus another. Posner then clarifies his accusation:
I want to be precise about what I am contending. I am not alleging a conspiracy, and I am not saying every Times reporter on this beat acts in bad faith. Still, the imbalance is documented. Whether one labels it “bias” depends partly on the baseline used and partly on a judgment about intent—something a word count cannot establish. My own judgment comes not from one table or one sentence, but from the way the numbers, editorial choices and recurrent lapses fit together.
Israel-Gaza is the sharpest example right now, but it is not the only one. I have seen on other subjects a similar tendency: reporting that lands consistently on one side of a contested question, then treats challenges to its framing as evidence of bad faith rather than legitimate pushback. Israel is simply the case where the evidence this month is hardest to wave away—and where the human stakes are highest.
Posner ends by citing a damning figure about how the public trust in mass media has plummeted:
My own disillusionment is part of a much larger collapse. In 1972, when Gallup began asking Americans whether they trusted the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, 68 percent said they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence. In Gallup’s 2025 survey, the figure was 28 percent—the first time it had fallen below 30. The Times did not cause that collapse by itself. But the country’s most influential newspaper cannot pretend to be merely a bystander to it.
I still read the Times. I also read and watch outlets on all sides of the political spectrum, from Al Jazeera to Fox News. I learn from the different ways they cover the same issue. The Times is different because it continues to trade on the authority of an institution that is supposed to do more than validate the worldview of its core audience.
Indeed. Of course the pro-Palestinians will deny his claims, but all I can say is that I was never a defender of Israel until October 7 happened and people started saying that Israel brought the Hamas attacks upon itself—and deserved them. Then I began noticing that the NYT seemed to come down on that side.
And there is the biggest lie—that of Israeli genocide. That lie is easily refuted by looking at the food Israel sent into Gaza (how many armies give sustenance to their opponents?), the polio vaccines sent to Gaza by Israel during the war, and all the warnings that the IDF gave civilians to get out of the way before an imminent attack. For crying out loud, if Israel wanted to wipe out Palestinians as a whole, why didn’t they attack the West Bank after October 7?
If you want to read a scathing indictment of the Big Genocide Lie, read Maarten Boudry’s piece, “They don’t believe it either.”
But I digress. To show more biased coverage, here’s a screenshot of the headlines from the Saturday NYT. This is not at all unusual, and I haven’t edited it:
This is going to be a hard one. Reader Bob Woolley emailed me on Saturday with photos and the following information:
I was hiking yesterday at the “Blue Wall Preserve,” a joint project of The Nature Conservancy and various other private and public entities. It’s in South Carolina, just a stone’s throw from the North Carolina border. “Blue Wall” was the Cherokee name for what we now call the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I came across a pond and noticed this frog. I have no idea what species it is, because what you see in these pictures is all that I saw—far from enough detail to try to make a proper identification. But still, the critter’s effective camouflage might make a challenging “spot” puzzle for your readers.
So, do your best! But please don’t say where it is in the comments; just note if you did or didn’t see it. The reveal will be at 11:30 a.m. Chicago time.
Welcome to Sunday, September 20. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, begins at sundown tonight. If you’re an observant Jew, you can’t drink or eat (not even water), nor can you ykiss your wife. And if you’re really observant, you can’t brush your teeth, either, as you might accidentally swallow water. Below you can see a painting of the holiday, labeled “Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1878) by Maurycy Gottlieb”.
Wikipedia says this about the painting:
The artist Maurycy Gottlieb appears in the painting three different times, depicted in different stages of his life. In one self-portrait, he is an adult, in another he is a young child, and in the third self-portrait he is depicted as an adolescent. Ezra Mendelsohn writes, “Maurycy himself stands, in a colorful, exotic-looking talith, with head in hand. On the left, we have the artist as a small boy, wearing a medallion with his initials written in Hebrew. On the extreme right is a young male figure, perhaps again Maurycy, reading from the prayer book alongside a man who might well be his father. Malinowski assumes that this is the case when he says that the painting presents ‘an account of [the artist’s] whole life’.”
It has been suggested that the artist placed his fiancée Laura [see below] among the female worshippers, at the right of the column, whispering to another woman (perhaps her mother), and to the left of the column, holding a prayerbook in hand. In the painting, many of the figures are people who are close to Gottlieb or people he knew at the time. As said by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Maurycy Gottlieb created this work of art at the young age of 22 years old; a year later, Gottlieb was dead.
The painting was exhibited in Lviv in 1877, and in 1878 at Zachęta in Warsaw and widely acclaimed. Gottlieb based Jessica’s face on that of Laura Rosenfeld, to whom he had proposed marriage. However, Laura rejected his proposal and wed a Berlin banker. According to one biographer, when he heard about Rosenfeld’s marriage, he purposely exposed himself to the elements and died of complications from a respiratory illness. Others cite different reasons for his death, including suicide.
Anthony Bourdain hated brunch, and he explains his aversion to this meal in the last bit of this short video (it will replay, so stop if after listening). It’s also only two days until a guy cuts into my right eye, sucks out the clouded lens, and replaces it. Oy!
An airborne attack targeted jet-fuel storage at the airport in Saudi Arabia’s capital Saturday, marking the first direct assault on Riyadh in months as Yemen’s Houthi rebels squeeze the kingdom’s Red Sea route for its oil exports.
Black smoke could be seen at King Khalid International Airport, in the latest escalation in the attacks targeting the kingdom.
The strike hit jet fuel facilities at the airfield, three officials with knowledge of the incident said. It wasn’t immediately clear if a drone or a missile caused the damage. The Saudi government didn’t respond to a request for comment.
No one immediately claimed the assault, but Iran and its allies have been looking for ways to slow Saudi Arabia’s exports to increase the pain on the U.S. and the world’s economy. Saudi Arabia has been targeted over the last weeks in attacks launched from both Iraq, where Iranian-backed Shiite militias operate, and Yemen, home to the Houthis.
The Houthis didn’t immediately claim the attack. However, there had been a series of alerts sent early Saturday morning by authorities over likely incoming fire, including in Riyadh.
The Houthis have targeted Riyadh’s airport in the past. In 2017, the Houthis launched a ballistic missile at the airfield that Saudi Arabia said it intercepted. They also targeted the airport in 2018 in an attack that killed an Egyptian, as well as in 2020.
In recent years, a tentative ceasefire had held as Saudi Arabia paid the salaries of Yemeni government officials, including those in San’a. That came as the Houthis attacked Israel and struck ships in the Red Sea during the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
. . . U.S. Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of the American military’s Mideast-based Central Command, said in a video statement Saturday that more than 1 billion barrels of crude oil from American allies had made it out of the Strait of Hormuz despite Iranian attacks.
Cooper didn’t provide specifics behind the 1 billion-barrel figure, and the number is difficult to compare directly with outside estimates.
Although Saudi Arabia is a repressive theocracy, it’s not as bad as Iran, and in this war, despite the Saudi assassination of dissidents in other countries, we should take all the allyship we can get in the Middle East so long as we don’t compromise American values (well, with Trump that’s inevitable). Iran has decided to go after other Middle Eastern countries, and in the end I don’t see that it does them any good; in fact, it does them bad.
Trump in a social media post announcing the deal said the emerging agreement “gives the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns.”
He added that with the agreement his administration would “immediately” begin the process of developing a larger military presence on the mineral-rich Danish territory.
The deal came after officials from U.S., Greenland and Denmark quietly negotiated for months behind the scenes, searching for solutions to address some of Trump’s security concerns about a territory of roughly 56,000 residents.
AD
For Trump, the Greenland issue had largely been put on the back burner as he launched a military operation to oust former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power and joined with Israel to start a war against Iran.
With the announcement of the pact, Trump is able to tout a foreign policy achievement ahead of the midterm elections. The six-month-old Iran conflict has reshaped the race, undermining Trump’s campaign pledge to steer clear of foreign conflicts and challenging Republicans as they cling to narrow majorities in Congress.
This is not an achievement that will outweigh the mishigas that has devastated Trump’s approval ratings so much in the last year, for hardly any Americans care about who’s in Greenland. Greenland is allowing this because it’s worried that Russia and China may be moving in on Greenland (granted, with ships and submarines), but with Denmark being a member of NATO, this buttresses an alliance and avoids the rift that would have occurred had Trump continued to demand that the U.S. own Greenland completely.
*In the Washington Post‘s “Awakenings” column, its weekly paean to the virtues of faith (the NYT has one, too, a cloying column called “Believing“), Byron R. Johnson and Thomas S. Kidd tell us that despite the increase in “nones” (people who don’t identify with a given faith), “Believe it or not, religion isn’t declining.”
One of the most persistent news stories about religion in recent years has been the decline of Christianity and the rise of the “nones,” or people who have no religion in particular. The nones narrative suggests that American Christianity is in free fall. One headline in recent weeks announced that even young Latinos, part of what is often regarded as one of the most religious ethnic groups, are “abandoning churches to be ‘nones.’”
Look closer, however, and you can find data suggesting that Christianity is flourishing. Some signs indicate that young American men are attending church more than they did in previous generations. High-profile intellectuals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was one of the leading figures of the New Atheist movement, have publicly announced their conversion to Christianity. And even the Pew Research Center, a chief promoter of the nones story, has admitted that the nones have plateaued at less than 30 percent of respondents.
Here’s the plateau from the Pew page. But “stabilizing” assumes what’s going to happen in the future, and the plateau has occurred only since the pandemic began, while the decline starts 13 year for that. And if you look at the longer term (graph below that), it’s hard to see anything but a long-term decrease in religion:
The summary of a longer-term survey shown on the Calvin College website, summarizing data from all over America. The only thing that’s shot up is the “nones”, and “mainlines” (Protestants, I presume) are a third of what they were in 1970!
(from the site): Graphic by Jacob Baylor
Back to the Panglossians:
What is really happening? Rather than experiencing simple growth or decline, American religion is in a state of churn. Some sectors are falling fast, while others show phenomenal growth.
Throughout history, Americans have routinely misinterpreted religious change as decline. Headlines about the demise of faith may be attention-grabbing, but they conceal a more complicated and interesting reality.
What are the key factors behind the confusion about religious change? One is an overreaction to the rise of the nones. Today, more Americans claim adherence to no religion than did in the late 20th century. A generation ago, more adults would have said they were Christians even if they had no connection to a church.
Today, people are more candid about their religious identities. Outside of the Bible Belt, there is little shame in telling a pollster that you simply aren’t religious.
This does not mean that the nones are atheists or agnostics, though they are often labeled as such. Treating atheists, agnostics and nones as a unit allows observers to tout the blockbuster headline that “religious ‘nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S.” This strained math obscures the fact that the number of self-identified Christians today remains more than twice the combined total of nones, atheists and agnostics.
This is the kind of nonsense that heartens the faithful but misleads everyone else. The fact is that fewer people go to church than ever before, the “nones’ have shot up (granted, there is a six-year plateau), and “mainline” Christianity has dropped like a rock in the last fifty years. It’s telling that faithheads like the authors here are so eager to seize on the “plateau” as a sign that religion isn’t going away. I have news for them: if they look over the last half-century, or even more over the last 150 years, religion has largely vanished. In another century, it will be a mere shadow of itself—and a good thing, too. Sadly, you don’t see any mainstream news outlet having a column called “Nonbelieving”.
*I’m getting plenty tired of AI-composed prose masquerading as something written by a human being. One of my ideological heroes, Rawan Osman, an ex-Muslim Syrian who is strongly pro-Israel and a self-described Arab Zionist who’s becoming Jewish, turns out to have written quite a few Twitter posts, Facebook posts, and posts on her blog at the Times of Israel that, according to the reliable AI-detection program Pangram, are wholly or substantially written by AI (example here). I am so put off that I no longer read her, and when I pointed it out, fellow Jews and Israel sympathizers piled on me, saying “It doesn’t matter.” But it does.
Another example. Maarten Boudry wrote me: “A literary First Prize has been awarded to a short story that is 100%. AI. Do you know Moth Magazine? Never heard of them, but they have 12K followers on X and have a Wikipedia page, so it’s not completely fringe.” Maarten’s tweet gives the story, “The Shoulder,” by Jeffrey-Michael Kane, and it’s still up. When I told the magazine (and another one) that Kane was using AI to write his fiction, I was blown off (the reply was “Although we avoid publishing AI-generated work, ultimately the responsibility for this rests with our authors, who we trust to submit original work.”) Maarten is also peeved that his own rector at Ghent University gave an AI-generated speech as her inaugural address, with three out of the four quotes in it purely fabricated by AI.
Over at Maarten’s Substack site, he’s reprinted a Quillette article about his own disaffection with AI: “Show us the prompts” x
The good news for anyone recruiting an AI ghostwriter is that the odds of public mortification are falling. Fabricated quotes and references are just about the only way to catch a lazy author out, since there is virtually no innocent explanation for them. But as Large Language Models have improved, hallucinations like these have grown rarer. And without those dead giveaways, we are left with AI detection tools, which are irreducibly probabilistic. The best of them is Pangram, which boasts a false-positive rate of one in 10,000, given a long enough chunk of text and some reasonable assumptions. Writers accused of AI plagiarism routinely deny it, and there is no way to prove the charge conclusively.
Writing in the Free Press, Tyler Cowen predicts that before long hardly anyone will care whether or not a text was written by a human. Cowen describes the humbling experience of being impressed by an author’s knowledge and scholarly chops, only to discover that there was no author at all. After he was burned a few times, he got better at spotting the signs. In a recent essay, Richard Hanania goes a step further. Suppose we are impressed by the writings of some brilliant young thinker and then discover that every word was machine-generated. “It shouldn’t really matter,” Hanania contends, “and we should hope that this person continues to do the same kind of work.” With the possible exception of memoirs, which are inherently personal, he does not care one way or the other.
But something bugs me about all this. As a writer and non-native speaker of English, I am grateful for Claude’s proofreading help when I am drafting an essay. And as a reader, I have come across AI-generated poems, short stories, and jokes that I have really enjoyed— sometimes I knew their provenance from the start, sometimes I discovered it only later. Far from diminishing my enjoyment, this realisation often heightens it, out of sheer fascination with the technology. But argumentative non-fiction feels different. For some reason, I resent belatedly discovering that an essay that tries to persuade me of something was machine-written, and I lose interest at once. [This is what happened with me and Osman’s writings.] Why is this?
I don’t mind if people use AI to proof, revise, or polish an essay, or even to flesh out a paragraph. But if you let AI compose the piece from beginning to end, there is no author taking responsibility for the views it develops. There is nobody there with whom to have a conversation, nobody who holds the beliefs and attitudes on display. Ask Claude for an eloquent rebuttal of the “Death of France” essay and the result might look every bit as compelling from the other side of that culture war. Perhaps that would go viral, too.
The solution? “Show us the prompts”; that is, disclose what you did and what you fed into AI to let it write. That still doesn’t satisfy me:
There is nothing wrong with using AI to generate text per se, and I do it myself if I am drafting a reference letter, writing a legal defence, or answering a long email. The prompt is usually based on a short list of bullet points and instructions, or on things I have written before. LLMs are extremely good at catching your drift, especially when they have been trained on your earlier writing. It is fine, too, wherever the pleasure is in the artefact rather than the argument: jokes, poetry, perhaps some kinds of fiction.
But if you ask AI to compose an entire argument, then sign it with your name and send it to the Guardian, it behoves you to disclose it and leave your readers to decide whether or not they are still interested. That hardly any writer does this, unlike many creators of AI images and video, suggests a degree of guilty conscience. These people want to preserve the illusion that an actual person produced the text, because they rightly suspect that we would stop reading if we knew the truth.
And, indeed, I’ve stopped reading Osman. As an exercise, you can enter some suspect prose into Pangram (here; you get three tries per day for free), and see what you get. Try, for example, putting in some fiction or poetry by Jeffrey-Michael Kane.
*The NYT reports that the heirs of a woman who, as a prisoner in Auschwitz, did paintings of “Death Doctor” Josef Mengele’s subjects, are suing to get the paintings back (article archived here).
When Dina Gottliebova Babbitt was a prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the 1940s, she stayed alive by painting watercolors on a rickety easel for Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician known as the “Angel of Death.”
Throughout her life, Babbitt tried to retrieve seven of those works from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland. “I want to hold them in my hand,” Babbitt said in a 2009 video just months before she died at 86. “I want them here. I need them.”
But the museum refused to turn them over, asserting that the historical and educational value of the paintings superseded her right of ownership.
Now, Babbitt’s two daughters — Michele Babbitt Kane and Karin Wendy Babbitt — are suing the museum for the return of the watercolor portraits that their mother created while struggling to survive as a Jew in a Nazi death camp.
“Dr. Mengele then took the completed portraits from her,” says the complaint, filed on Monday in United States District Court for the Central District of California. “Dina Gottliebova Babbitt never voluntarily sold, assigned, transferred or relinquished the Watercolors. Yet more than 80 years later, all seven of the Watercolors remain in the possession of the Museum, which claims that it — not Dina Gottliebova Babbitt’s heirs — owns them.”
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, at the former death camp in Poland, defended its decision to hold on to the paintings, describing them as important records of Nazi persecution.
The NYT article shows several of Dina Babbitt‘s paintings (she lived from 1923 to 2009), and here’s a photo from Wikipedia showing her holding a copy of one of her portraits.
This seems to be a no-brainer. The work is that of Babbitt herself and so would seem to belong to her heirs—her daughters. If they want to donate the paintings to a museum, that’s fine, but the work is theirs to have, regardless of its historic interest. The paintings are very good, but I think that reproductions are sufficient to show at Auschwitz. Or do you think otherwise?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is asking Andrzej increasingly difficult questions. I asked Andrzej what this was about, and he replied, “Chimera – an illusion or fabrication of the mind. Idea separated from reality, which is often pushing (or dragging) people into calamity.”
Hili: Is it possible for a chimera to be a draft animal?
Andrzej: In politics, unfortunately, yes.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy chimera może być zwierzęciem pociągowym?
Ja: W polityce, niestety, tak.
From Luana: Justice in Canada for a man with 43 prior convictions:
And the final update to this saga:
I was just at his sentencing. The prosecution had asked for 15 months in prison because of the randomness and aggression in his assault on me and his extremely long history of violent crime (43 prior convictions).
I’m with the Number Ten Cat on this one. Trump simply cannot ban from the White House those news outlets he doesn’t like. The courts will back up Larry and me!
Can’t wait for their next lecture on the importance of freedom of speech https://t.co/LDs9FQSsLZ
Two from my feed. First, “journalists” at Al Jazeera were fired en masse:
A few key revelations related to Gaza coverage in last few days:
– Almost all of the media in Gaza were in a Hamas-run WhatsApp group that dictated and coordinated coverage. Including contributors to major western news organizations.
Yes, my friends, it is that time of year: the leaves begin to change colors, the temperature cools, and the time-honored tradition of rooting for your favorite chonky bears at Katmai National Park & Preserve begins.
I comb my cat every Saturday morning. And then he always feels the need to wash me back. I’m sure he thinks I’m a cat too. Cute but gross 😂 So always comb him pre my morning shower. #caturday
We have three items this week, though Caturday Felids is moribud because of lack of interest. If comments are not in the two figures here, I’m giving up, and for real.
First, we have a short report from Canada of two “adventure cats”, Fitz and Vlad. These are now becoming so common that I think that many cats can, with proper training, can become Adventure Cats.
The adventures of these cats are documented on the Facebook site Fitzcapades, which has 631,000 followers. Here’s a photo of the two cats kayaking taken from the site. And don’t tell me they don’t enjoy it!
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I’ve written many times about how medieval artists were unable to paint or draw cats, although they did pretty good with humans. Frequently they’d put human faces on cats, but they’d always screw them up completely. Cheezburger has a hilarious collection of bizarre medieval cat paintings here, and I’ll post five for your amusement:
Now, for only $40, you can buy 24 figurines of bizarre medieval cats. It would make a perfect present to give an ailurophire, art lover, or connoisseur of the bizzare. If you give it to someone on December 1, they’ll have a weird cat every day until Christmas Eve. Go to the link above or see the Facebook post below (click on it). I’m not sure if the figures are based on real drawings of medieval cats, but who cares?
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And here’s a treat if you like cat-themed entertainment: a whole two hours of a documentary on cats narrated by British actress and presenter Joanna Lumley. There are two parts to this “Catwoman” series, and I’ve watched bits of both. It’s very good and full of information and entertainment. Distributed by ITV studios, it was first made in 2009 but of course is still current, as cats haven’t changed. I’ve put the two parts, each 45 minutes long, in order below:
Part 1 (Lumley goes to Chicago at 2:45 to see our Cat Circus):
This week’s “New Rule” bit on Bill Maher’s Real Time show is about the financial apocalypse that might result from the American national debt now being $40 trillion. And despite that, Trump keeps increasing it, despite his promises to cut it. He also says that he’ll give every American $5,000, which will add another trillion to the debt.
And the Left, as exemplified by the Democratic Socialists of America (but also “progressives”), tells us that in the future the government will pay for everyone’s housing, health insurance, food, daycare, medicine, and transportation. (Maher says the DSA promises will cost the government between $72 trillion and $212 trillion.) On top of this we have a growing rate of unemployment, defined as “people who are looking for work but can’t find it.” Maher’s conclusion about what this assumes: “Money is free (to be given away) and consequences don’t exist.”
And he’s right—we do have a problem. Although the problem will not afflict my generation so much, it will squeeze future generations: raising interest rates, reducing government benefits, increasing inflation, and reducing purchasing power.
The panel guests are Democratic political strategist Jessica Tarlov and conservative political activist Christopher Rufo x
Welcome to shabbos for Jewish cats, Saturday, September 19, 2026, with Yom Kippur beginning at sunset tomorrow and lasting 24 hours. It is the Day of Atonement—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. You cannot have any food or water during the entire period, or even brush your teeth (you might ingest water!). And you’re not allowed to touch or kiss your wife/husband, and must sleep in separate beds. You can see the other rules here, though most Jews aren’t that observant and won’t follow them.
It’s also National Gymnastics Day, and in honor of that I present the first perfect 10 score in gymnastics, Romanian Nadia Comǎneci on the uneven bars in the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Wikipedia also has a list of “perfect 10 gymnastics” performances for both men and women. Here are the top five performances on the parallel bars in Montreal, with Comǎneci’s performance last, starting at 2:31:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plans to campaign across New York in the weeks before the midterm elections, and she has donated $300,000 to help boost the Democratic ticket in her home state as speculation has swirled over whether she will run for Senate or president in 2028.
In an interview, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said she would be “traveling across the state to boost turnout in many different areas,” including planned stops in Buffalo, Syracuse and Ithaca in the coming weeks.
“New York,” she said, “has become increasingly relevant to whether we have a majority or not in the House of Representatives.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will donate the funds to a pool of money for Democrats statewide that is being overseen by Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is seeking re-election this year. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has earmarked the funds for voter organizing rather than advertising, with a specific proviso that half of the money be devoted to Spanish-language outreach.
“This investment is really not just about throwing money around and putting points on the board,” she said. “This is actually about transforming the way Democrats go about building a coalition.”
Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hochul, said that the statewide effort, known as a coordinated campaign because it helps candidates for various offices, would be “prioritizing communities that are too often overlooked and written off.”
The sum is more symbolic than financially significant in a state as expansive and expensive as New York. It is also more money, though, than any other member of the New York delegation has contributed, according to two people familiar with the donation. Ms. Hochul had asked Ms. Ocasio-Cortez for the contribution, which had been under discussion for several weeks.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is one of the Democratic Party’s top fund-raisers nationwide and has raised more than $32 million since the start of 2025. She entered the summer with $15 million in the bank.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, whose district includes parts of the Bronx and Queens, suggested that there should not be much reading of tea leaves into her announcement as she weighs a political future with at least three options: re-election, a New York Senate race or a presidential run in 2028.
“I’ve been pretty open about the fact that I’m going to be weighing this decision, but I’m going to be weighing it after the midterm elections,” she said.
The fact that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez previously clashed with Jay Jacobs, the state party chairman, appears to at least partly explain why she chose to direct the money to the Hochul operation.
I’d be willing to bet that AOC, who has ambitions as big as her record is thin, will run for Senator, given that (I think) her chances to win the Presidency is small. But even as a Senator she’d have more power than she deserves, as she’s accomplished little in the House save promote herself. Yes, she’s good at that, and she’s a Democratic Socialist, so the kids like her, but as a politician, she’s a disaster for someone of my stripe.
*Reader Peter N. called my attention to a piece on slime molds in the Guardian, a piece that makes you question the notion of intelligence, and whether it can be seen in amoeba-like organisms that have no neurons: “‘This is dangerous: slime molds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence.” Because I’ll give a few quotes at length, I am giving only four news sources today.
Forty years ago, as an undergraduate in Hokkaido, Toshiyuki Nakagaki came upon a lemon-yellow stain in a petri dish. That encounter turned him into a doyen of slime mould research – and fed a storm of biological and philosophical debate about the meanings of life and intelligence that persists to this day. Before, no one would have called a slime mould “intelligent”; the popular adjective, in fact, was “simple”. “A simple mass of protoplasm,” one 1895 description ran; “among the most simple of organisms”, said another. And it was hard to argue otherwise. A slime mould can appear to be just a small cell, capable only of feeding and reproducing. Simple is as simple does.
Of that first meeting, Nakagaki said: “I was just impressed with how fast it moved.” Physarum polycephalum, the slime mould species in that petri dish, has a top speed of 1cm an hour. For amoebic organisms, that’s gold-medal standard. At first glance, Physarum seems to spread as irregularly as ink on blotting paper, but in fact it senses its meals of bacteria or other microbes and reaches for them with a long, thin finger of protoplasm – which not only digests its food but then forages further or pulls back into the rest of the mould. It’s impossible to watch a slime mould over many days without sensing some deliberation at play.
. . . .In 2000, his astonishing research began to surface in the media. “Slime mould solves maze puzzle,” one headline ran, summarising an experiment in which Nakagaki induced a Physarum to find the shortest route through a maze in search of food. (In labs, slime moulds are reared on oat flakes, a convenient diet that can double as a researcher’s breakfast.) In 2010, the New York Times wrote about Nakagaki’s most famous experiment – the canonical study that scientists offhandedly call “the Tokyo railway one”. Nakagaki placed oat flakes to resemble the map of Tokyo and 35 of its satellite towns. Then he let the Physarum loose from the centre of “Tokyo”. From that one metropolitan oat, the mould spread outwards seeking the others, stretching towards them with its tubules. Then, putting out more branches, it linked up with itself, from one suburban oat flake to the next.
In doing all this, the mould displayed such a verve for efficiency – no wasted motion, an optimal pursuit of its food – that it ended up nearly retracing the route map of the greater Tokyo area’s railway system. Nearly, Nakagaki said – because, in fact, free of human bias or politicking, Physarum may have improved the design of the network. Later, when Nakagaki twice won the Ig Nobel – the prize for research that is both amusing and thought-provoking – the first award cited his maze paper in the field of “cognitive science”, but the second, cheekily, hailed the Tokyo railway study as a breakthrough in “transportation planning”.
. . . For more than a century, scientists were sure that cognition and intelligence required neurons, the cells that make up brains and nervous systems. These neurons form and reform connections between themselves to create pathways for thought and memory. This understanding of intelligence was an implicit argument that animals occupy a special place within the living kingdom – separate to plants and microbes – and that humans are most special of all.
But since the 1980s, more and more scientists have argued that traits such as cognition are intrinsic not just to animals but to all life – a stance that Pamela Lyon, a philosopher at Adelaide University, calls “biogenic”.
. . . . Given that the mould has no brain, slime is evolution’s way of “storing” memories of spaces. One of Reid’s experiments suggests Physarum uses its slime as an aide-memoire to recognise the paths it has travelled and those it hasn’t. The yellow slime, sticky but more watery than human mucus, is a soup of sugars and proteins. Its presence, Reid believes, tells a mould that it has already foraged in these parts and consumed any food there was to be had. When Reid’s team harvested slime from a mould, coated one route in a maze with it, and introduced the mould into this set-up, it nearly always chose to traverse the dry, un-slimed areas. More impressively, the Physarumcan distinguish between its own slime and that discharged by of other species – as if Hansel could tell his breadcrumb trail apart from Gretel’s.
Over the past three decades, as the study of intelligence has broadened beyond humans, slime-mould research has gathered speed. We know now that Physarum is made up of thousands of tiny oscillators that sense their environment. If they pick up the chemical markers of a meal, these units oscillate faster, in turn causing the cell’s protoplasm to flow more thickly towards that area. This is how the mould moves.
But how these oscillators, so minuscule and seemingly so rudimentary, manage to sense so much – proteins, salts, acidity, light, heat, humidity, perhaps even gravitational and magnetic fields, and masses looming at a distance – is still unclear. In 2008, Nakagaki and his colleagues subjected a Physarum to cold, dry air streamed at regular hourly intervals, prompting it to slow its locomotion. After three such gusts, the mould spontaneously slowed on the top of the fourth hour – even when the mistral didn’t blow. No one can figure out how the slime mould keeps time.
. . .The truths are rooted in semantics. Unlike, say, the word “haemoglobin”, terms such as “cognition” have been around for so long that they’ve been coded into colloquial use in phrases such as “cognitive decline” and “cognitive bias”. To freely stretch the word beyond its wider connotation of the workings of a brain – to apply it to brainless beings such as slime moulds – “misleads the public”, Alex Kacelnik, a zoologist at the University of Oxford told me. “It hollows out the word itself.”
Kacelnik, who has studied the New Caledonian crow’s nimble use of tools, pointed out that “even an oak tree ‘decides’ – in inverted commas – how many acorns it will produce, what size each acorn is going to be, and when it will shed them. But when people say they’re going to cognitive therapy, they mean something different from what the oak is doing, right?” Misusing the word, he said, is counterproductive. By likening the tree’s function to cognition, “you haven’t solved the problem of how the oak does what it does – you’ve just trivialised it, or defined it out of existence”. He uses the term “cognition” in his own writing only when he can show that it involves “some kind of internal algorithm, with some kind of concept formation, in some kind of ‘language’ – in inverted commas”.
IU agree with Kacelnik in that we’re projecting when we ascribe “intelligence” to a creature like a slime mold, regardless of how highly evolved it is to do cool stuff. It doesn’t use neurons, but chemical cues, and to ascribe “cognition” to it—something I think is key to “intelligence”—is misguided. In fact, to argue whether it is “intelligent” or not seems to me the wrong path to take. What we can do is marvel at, and figure out, how this protist can do all this stuff, and even do experiments to see how it evolved. Even tiny organisms like these are the products of millions of years of evolution, and can show adaptations that boggle the mind (think of all the amazing things ants do with a brain the size of a dot made by a pencil).
There’s a lot more to this article, and a lot of word-parsing and philosophizing. In the end, I think the problem is semantic, but I’d prefer to think of “intelligence” as requiring cognition—an ability to reason.
Here’s ZeFrank’s segment on slime molds:
*The NYT reports that the new Merriam-Webster dictionary is “Wordsmaxxing with 1400 new definitions” (article archived here). As you know, you have to be au courant with language, so here are some new words:
Merriam-Webster, the venerable dictionary that traces its roots to a time before looksmaxxing and yacht rock, has added those words along with chili crisp, shapewear and cuffing season, to its comprehensive accounting of the English language.
The company, based in Springfield, Mass., announced on Tuesday that it had added those five terms and 1,395 other new definitions to its online dictionary, Merriam-Webster.com. Many will also be added to upcoming editions of the print dictionary.
Merriam-Webster is the oldest dictionary publisher in America. It traces its start to 1843, when the brothers George and Charles Merriam bought the rights to the 1841 edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary. The company emphasizes that the dictionary is not a static catalog, but a reflection of the many different ways words are used by real people.
That includes food-related words that have become more commonly used in the United States like superfood, “a food (such as salmon, broccoli, or blueberries) that is rich in nutrients,” and shishito, “a slender usually mild chili pepper of East Asia.” On the sweeter side, the dictionary added cake pop, “a compressed ball of cake crumbs and icing that is dipped in a usually chocolate or sugary coating,” for the uninitiated.
Anyone who dreads going to work or school might be familiar with the Sunday scaries, the “feelings of anxiety or sadness that arise on Sunday from the knowledge that the weekend is almost over.” And people who know Braden Peters, the proudly vain social media influencer known as Clavicular, might be familiar, for better or worse, with looksmaxxing. Merriam-Webster calls it “the practice of taking one or more sometimes extreme or dangerous measures intended to increase one’s physical attractiveness.”
Yes, we discussed that odious word last week. But wait! There’s more!
. . . .Fans of Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald might be pleased to see that yacht rock made the cut. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a style of soft rock music originating in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Also clearing the bar was cuffing season, “a time of the year when people who are not married or in a relationship begin looking for a short-term romantic partner to spend the colder months of the year with.”
Merriam-Webster also added parasocial, “a one-sided emotional connection with someone (especially a celebrity or fictional character) whom one does not know personally,” and Rickroll, “to trick (someone) into hearing the song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by English singer Rick Astley.”
The only one I know of these, save “looksmaxxing”, is Rickroll, and I like that one.
*As always, I’m stealing a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column at The Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Experts fear worse ahead.”
→ Ed Sheeran debacle: Ed Sheeran decided to have Macklemore as his tour opening act, and the rapper took the stage to give a “Free Palestine” speech, like he was kicking off a course at Columbia or something. In the long debate about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, Macklemore leaves little doubt, in that he once performed wearing a fake beard and an oversized prosthetic nose in what was widely seen as a Jewish caricature. Anyway, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft then pressured Ed Sheeran’s promoters to drop Macklemore, and Macklemore was dropped. You can imagine what happened next. Macklemore has become even more of a hero, gaining hundreds of thousands of followers, bringing more attention to the cause. All of Ed Sheeran’s other opening acts backed out of the tour, as did his own backing band. For a sense of the public tone, comedian Mike Recine posted: “Robert Kraft is a pedophile and someone should kill him.” So it’s all going really well, temperature’s nice and low out here. Recine deleted his initial, um, joke? and posted: “Hey everyone I’d like to apologize for the post I made last night when I said ’Children deserve to have legs.’ I didn’t realize that statement was offensive to the Jewish community and I will choose my words better moving forward.”
The idea here being, I guess, that Jews love to kill children, or at least blast their legs off, so telling people to assassinate Robert Kraft is the same as saying you want to save children. So, by extension, then, being pro–Robert Kraft’s life equals wanting to remove Palestinian children’s legs.
All the former pro–cancel culture people are suddenly screaming “free speech,” which is always just so funny, and they point out the same hypocrisy in the anti–cancel culture people, who are suddenly saying deplatforming is a private company’s decision. Fair critique of both sides. But it’s all word games. The fact is, antisemitism is popular right now, and the Bob Krafts of the world cannot win. You either host the man who hates you and wants you in a work camp—or you make him even more of a star. Those are your options, Bob. Choose wisely, and if I were you, I’d probably stay away from your own venue for fear of the mobs.
→ Quote of the week: Here’s the latest scandal from Hasan Piker, the top political influencer on the left and a frequent campaign buddy for Dems.
Because I’m in the United States of America, the most dogshit country on the fucking planet, the absolute worst country on the planet, straight up, bar none. A capitalist shithole. The absolute worst fuckin’ place on the planet, just a horrific, monstrous, awful, dogshit country that I fucking despise. The absolute fuckin’ worst country that has the most—the most—wealth throughout history, throughout time, the wealthiest nation on the planet, and we don’t have a fraction of the dedicated broadband speed that you can get in a fucking village on the countryside of France. Okay? I just—the worst fucking infrastructure, the absolute biggest shithole on the planet, I fucking despise this nation. I despise this country with my entire fuckin’ heart. Okay?”
Okay! That’s right, while livestreaming from his gorgeous West Hollywood home, the Wi-Fi got a little wobbly, and so Hasan went nuclear. America is his mom, and she’s being a total bitch. This is what young people love shooting directly into their veins. “Dogshit country that I fucking despise.” Get this guy a swear jar and he might end up as poor as the people he pretends to advocate for!
In late-breaking news, Piker also sat down with Alex Thompson of Axios: “Do you think America then is worse than al-Qaeda?” Piker: “Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes.” Perfect.
→ Testing, testing: New York State’s Regents exams are three-hour tests on subjects like English, math, and science. Students need a score of 65 on multiple exams to pass and get a high school diploma. But now New York’s planning on dropping the requirement. Here’s New York Board of Regents member Felicia Thomas-Williams on the change: “Maybe you’ve seen the cartoon where you have a fish climb a tree? You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees.” If the Regents exam asked students to breathe underwater, then Felicia’s argument might track. But the exam asks students to read, write, and solve math problems—skills that are standard for most educated human beings. Or should be? Of course this test was dropped as a requirement for vaguely anti-racist reasons that no one bothered to really explain. But now: What will New York high school students have to prove in order to graduate? Will they just fill out a feelings wheel? Are they going to play Go Fish for 40 minutes and call it a day? That’s insane for the public school system. Playing games at school costs at least $50,000 at a private school in Santa Monica.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being bribed with beef:
Hili: Sometimes even a cat has had enough of everything.
Andrzej: Do you want a piece of beef?
Hili: That’s psychological manipulation.
Carl Friedrich Gauss, often called the “Prince of Mathematicians,” famously described mathematics as the “queen of the sciences” and number theory as the “queen of mathematics.”
I think prime numbers are the oxygen of number theory. They are the fundamental building blocks of… pic.twitter.com/F0WLsEyaMS
Tw0 from my feed. I think the Democrats are finally realizing that Hasan Piker is a liability. What a dumb party we are! Here’s Rahm Emanuel:
Now that he won’t stop talking, the folks who told us Hasan Piker is a serious voice who should be listened to ought to let us know which of these positions we’re supposed to take seriously:
1. That “pound for pound,” America is worse than al-Qaeda – a ridiculous statement on a…
And one from Herr Dr. Professor Cobb, which he calls, “Nearly a caracal”:
It's amazing that perhaps the world's best place to see an awesome wild cat – the caracal – is right on the edge of a big city. Climbed #TableMountain today from #CapeTown with a tiny hope of seeing one, & was delighted to find some poo. Half the joy of #MammalWatching is just knowing they're there
