The bizarre tale of Cambridge University professor Jason Arday

August 4, 2026 • 9:30 am

UPDATE: I just saw this, and I’m not surprised:

 

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This is the most egregious example I know of someone advancing to a high position in academics while constructing an apparently fraudulent past, as well as having committed multiple instances of plagiarism. The amazing thing is that Cambridge University is apparently not investigating sociology professor Jason Arday despite a complete lack of evidence for his unbelievable claims about his past.

That, perhaps, is because Arday is one of the few black professors at Cambridge, and has argued strenuously that his critics, and those who pointed out his plagiarism, are motivated solely by racism. Besides the accusations of using other peoples’ words (and committing other errors) in both his Ph.D. thesis (granted at Liverpool John Moores University) and in published papers, Arday argues that his achievements come in the face of severe disabilities: he is, he says, autistic, did not speak a word until he was 11, and couldn’t read or write until he was 18.  Despite that, he managed to attain his full (tenured) professorship in 2023, at the age of 37 or 38, and was the youngest black professor in the UK. (He had previously had positions at at the University of Rothampton, Durham University and the University of Glasgow.)

The story or Arday, and how his claims unraveled (or now look unbelievable) has been told widely in the press. The fact that the Guardian has the most comprehensive summary of his apparent behavioral fabulism (e.g., apparent lying) is telling, for the Guardian, being very woke, would be the one “mainstream” paper I would expect to defend Arday, or at least to avoid reporting on the issue. To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, “If you’ve lost the Guardian, you’ve lost the progressives.”

You can read three of UK articles below by clicking on the headlines. The Guardian and Times of London articles are particularly informative.

From the Guardian (photo by Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian)

Interview with the Times of London  (archived here)

From the Spectator:

I just found a NYT article here.

Here, in bold caps are the areas in which Arday has made dubious claims or committed apparently unethical acts:

AUTISM AND LATE DEVELOPMENT: I’ve mentioned these claims above, and, as far as I know,there is no evidence presented for any of them. Surely if he didn’t speak until age 11 and did not become literate until 18, there would be some evidence or testimony to that effect. Wikipedia says he got “his undergraduate degree in education studies with physical education at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree validated by the University of Surrey in 2008.”) In other words, he got his undergraduate degree five years after he became literate, which means that he began university only two years after becoming literate.

PLAGIARISM: Initially the instances of Arday’s accused plagiarism were turned up by two people who have reputations for “race realism” (whatever that is), but since then other people have examined the evidence.  Here’s a small part of it.  This is the report from Grok when I asked it to give examples of Arday’s purported plagiarism. Grok gave references, but I’ve left them out.

PhD Thesis (2015, Liverpool John Moores University) Titled “An exploration of peer-monitoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research,” this is the most prominently cited case. Analyses (including by Cofnas using plagiarism detection software like Copyleaks, and by The Telegraph) identified extensive textual overlap with the 2009 PhD thesis of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers (Brunel University), on a closely related topic of reflective practice and student teachers in action research.

  • Reports cite more than 100 passages (or in later analyses, around 180–188 sentences) that are identical or nearly identical, often with minimal editing (sometimes retaining copy-editing errors from the source). Zwozdiak-Myers is cited about 17 times in Arday’s thesis and appears in the bibliography, but the overlapping passages frequently lack quotation marks or clear in-text attribution for the specific wording.
  • Additional overlaps were noted with other sources, including a 2013 paper by April G. Douglass, Dennie L. Smith, and Lana J. Smith; a 2007 paper by Semiyu Adejare Aderibigbe, Laura Colucci-Gray, and Donald Gray; and works by Muhammad Athar Hussain et al. (2011) and Peter Kahn et al. (2008).

Critics (including Harris and biochemist David Sanders, who reviewed related evidence) described this as a pattern of close paraphrasing or near-verbatim copying beyond isolated passages. LJMU and Cambridge stated investigations cleared him on this point.

2018 Paper in Social Sciences “Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University?” (claiming focus groups with 32 minority students). A 2023 correction was issued to add citations and clarify where ideas were adapted from prior research (particularly Memon et al. 2016 in BMJ Open, on mental health services in Black and minority communities).

  • Accusations include substantial unattributed textual and structural overlap with Memon et al., plus interview quotes presented as from Arday’s own subjects that closely matched (or appeared patched from) those in the earlier paper. The correction notice focused on citations, but Retraction Watch reported additional undisclosed post-publication changes: alterations or removal of multiple quotes (e.g., 12 of 31 reworded/trimmed, 6 cut), removal of claims about using NVivo software for iterative coding and independent verification by a second researcher (replaced with simpler “review and reflection”), and participant numbering inconsistencies.
  • Harris and others flagged “puzzling similarities” in 2023, leading to the correction.

Other Papers: Cofnas and others examined additional publications from Arday’s listed works and reported issues in several:

  • A paper in Educational Philosophy and Theory (around 2020/2021, “Attempting to Break the Chain…”) was corrected for text overlap with the Memon paper and Arday’s own prior work (citations added in methodology).
  • 2018 paper in Whiteness and Education (“Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity…”): Reported overlaps with Nicola Rollock (2012) and Payne Hiraldo (2010).
  • 2022 papers (e.g., in Higher Education and British Journal of Sociology of Education): Minor instances such as sentences matching Wikipedia, reused/altered quotes from prior work, and methodology descriptions closely tracking the Memon-derived approach without full citation.
  • Harris had notified journals of concerns about solo and co-authored articles, resulting in at least two corrections.

Experts like Sanders stated there was “no question that there is extensive plagiarism” based on dossiers of comparisons. Some analyses noted that certain overlaps might not trigger basic software checks focused only on exact matches.

You can see Nathan Cofnas’s initial report with examples here. I’ll reproduce just a few:

From his Ph.D. thesis. Cofnas says:

I ran Arday’s 2015 PhD dissertation through the plagiarism-detection program Copyleaks. It found substantial overlap with previously published work, particularly a dissertation submitted by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers in 2009.

This is clearly not coincidental, nor are there quotation marks to indicate the prose was taken from elsewhere. There are many more examples.  Regardless of Cofnas’s background or motivation, this appears to be plagiarism pure and simple. Cofnas also notes this (I give one example):

Arday appears to borrow from other sources without attribution. I won’t go through all of the examples detected by Copyleaks, but here are two more.

First, he copies and paraphrases from an obscure article by Muhammad Athar Hussain et al. published in the Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education in 2011.

Again, there are others.

Did Arday get punished for this? Apparently not. He attributes the accusations to racism of others determined to destroy him, to not being told what plagiarism consists of, and to ‘inadequate supervision and support” as an undergraduate. From the Times:

Concerns were first raised privately in 2023 (Harris to Arday, Cambridge, and LJMU; also involving Martyn Hammersley). Journals issued corrections; universities said they investigated and found no misconduct (Cambridge noting standard practice of deferring to the PhD-granting institution for thesis issues and describing the public claims as a “vile campaign”). Times Higher Education prepared a story in 2025 but did not publish after legal correspondence from a firm retained by Arday. Cofnas’s 2026 post (prompted in part by internal Cambridge concerns) brought wider attention.

Arday has said errors occurred due to insufficient support given his autism and disabilities, that he supports proper investigations, and that panels concluded the issues were honest/reasonable errors within standards of the time for some overlaps. Supporters have framed the scrutiny as racially or ideologically motivated. Critics argue the scale of unattributed near-verbatim material, quote issues, and pattern across works indicate serious problems with academic integrity, independent of the accusers’ views.

Arday’s defense, taken from a BBC article:

He told the newspaper: “There has been, since I arrived at Cambridge, a very well orchestrated and co-ordinated campaign to unseat me from my position.”

He argued this was “racially motivated” and that he had become a “lightning rod” for criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy.

Arday said some errors in his early academic work was because of his autism, as he relied on using mimicry to make sense of information, and that similar scrutiny would find similar errors in work by other academics.

“We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody. I think the cruelty that I’ve experienced and the positioning of me as this kind of liar and fantasist is totally unacceptable,” he told the newspaper.

Mimicry? That’s also bizarre. Did nobody ever impart to Arday the problem with copying? Was he completely unaware that this is a no-no in academics?

The Times notes that the Liverpool John Moores panel cleared Arday of plagiarism:

The panel concluded in March that the citation issues were a result of “honest and reasonable error” and also detailed that the text overlap with Zwozdiak-Myers was “well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time”.

That’s absurd.

You can find more about the plagiarism at Aymenn’s Monstrous Publications and at Bathetic Fallacy. Even Retraction Watch, while bending over backwards to give Arday a big break, winds up concluding that the investigation should go further, also implying that Arday  should be punished if he committed plagiarism.

There’s no doubt that these allegations were made because of political and ideological reasons. There’s no coincidence that they initially were made public by a long-time critic of both the school and DEI broadly. There’s also no coincidence that the story has been largely carried by publications that share those ideologies.

But the coverage in Retraction Watch, the increasing number of academics expressing concerns and the evidence itself indicate, to me, that this shouldn’t just be dismissed. It needs a public, transparent investigation.

While I understand Cambridge’s reluctance to investigate a dissertation that was submitted elsewhere, Arday was hired on the basis of those credentials. If they are dubious, the school should want to know. Similarly, Liverpool John Moores University should want to know if their PhD was granted on false pretenses. If they have performed a thorough investigation and it does clear Arday, then releasing details would only help both him and the school.

PHYSICAL FEATS:

Arday claims that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, falling on the 20th marathon and sustaining a hairline fracture in his fibula. The Guardian asking doctors, deems this nearly impossible, but Arday says his finished with “his right leg swelling to twice its normal size.”  This may include his claim that he ran 300 miles in three days and 600 miles in six days.

CHARITY WORK:

Arday says that he raised 5 -5.5 million pounds for charity over 20 years.  Challenged on this, he explained that this was not personal fundraising, but as part of a larger group,whose identity he cannot divulge because of nondisclosure agreements.  There is thus no evidence about this, either.

PERSONAL THREATS:

Arday claims a history of threats, and though I don’t doubt that some of them are real, he makes wild claims that have not been substantiated. From the Guardian:

In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.

The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.

The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.

He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.

Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.

In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.

When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.

When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.

Again, there is no evidence to substantiate Arday’s claims. We see a pattern of apparent fabulism.

APPEARANCE ON “SEVEN UP!”:

Arday claims that he was in the well-known BBC documentary series Seven Up!, which tracked a group of children born around 1957 over many years. This could not be true because Arday was born in 1985.  The Daily Fail of August 3 (here and see reference below) notes that Arday has since backtracked:

Last night Professor Arday said that when he talked of ‘Seven Up’, he didn’t mean ‘Seven Up’ the famous TV series, which followed children at seven-year intervals in the format he described. He says that in fact he was referring to ‘a local community and parent-led initiative developed around the Ubuntu principle that “it takes a village to raise a child”.

A tweet about it:

Two things struck me about all this. First is the eagerness of both Cambridge and his Liverpool unis to exculpate Arday despite what seems to be arrant plagiarism. This surely has to have something to do with Arday’s ethnicity as well as his claimed learning disability, which would appear to make him a double victim.  And he leans heavily on the victim trope, arguing that the accusations are motivated by his blackness and a desire to bring him down.  Perhaps some of that inheres in this fracas, but as the size of this scandal became apparent, as well as the failure of universities to do anything about it, lots of reputable people have become involved. Some black people have claimed that if Arday’s missteps are excused, it will diminish the real accomplishment of black British scholars.

Second, as far as I can see, there’s a complete absence of evidence for any of Arday’s claims, whether they be about his disabilities, his marathons, his charity donations, the threats he claims he received, and his appearance on television. And there’s simply no credible accusation for his plagiarism. We’ll have to hang on and see if Cambridge does anything about this.

Here’s a lecture by Arday: “I know what I know: The story of Graceland”. I’ve just found it and have listened only to the beginning. I can see that Arday’s genial demeanor could make people less willing to come down hard on his missteps and misstatements. In the short bit of the lecture I heard he’s very critical of Paul Simon, accusing him of racism and taking credit for other people’s music. As far as I know, none of that is true, either.

h/t: Luana

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

August 4, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, August 4, 2026, and National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day. The cookie as we know it arose in the 1930s; according to Wikipedia:

The most common account of the creation of the chocolate chip cookie credits the American chef Ruth Graves Wakefield in the 1930s, though such accounts agree that chocolate had appeared in cookies earlier. Such earlier cookies contained chocolate in grated and melted forms, lacking the discrete pieces of chocolate that define chocolate chip varieties. These early cookies evolved from jumbles, a cookie popular in the late 1800s that was made by dropping unshaped dough onto a sheet pan. Bakers flavored jumbles with what was at hand, sometimes including chocolate. By the 1870s, chocolate jumbles emerged as a distinct form rather than a simple variation, helped by the price of chocolate dropping. The ingredient ratios in these cookies closely resembled those of modern chocolate chip cookies, and through the 1880s and 1890s, chocolate jumbles were very popular in America.

. . . .Ruth Wakefield created her recipe for chocolate chip cookies in the 1930s, although sources differ on the specific year. With her husband Kenneth, Wakefield owned and ran the Toll House Inn, a hotel and restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts, that was well-known in the region. Several accounts exist of how Wakefield created her recipe for chocolate chip cookies, with older versions describing an accidental invention and more modern versions arguing that Wakefield created it intentionally.

In the most popular version of an accidental creation, Wakefield is said to have been preparing a cookie studded with nuts but realised she had run out, either due to poor stock management or Depression shortages. On the spot, Wakefield substituted the nuts for chocolate, chopping a bar of chocolate into pieces. In other versions, the chocolate was added to provide cocoa butter when the Toll House Inn was out of butter, in a frugal effort to use up excess stock, or in the hope that the chocolate would melt during baking when there was not the time to melt it ahead of time. One ex-employee, dissenting from the narrative popular among her colleagues that it was created during a nut shortage, describes vibrations from a mixer causing chocolate to drop into cookie dough, with the ex-employee crediting her father with convincing Wakefield to bake the cookies regardless.

The Toll House Inn is gone, having burned down in 1984, and it was not rebuilt. But Wakefield’s recipe still appears on each package of Nestlé Toll House Morsels. Here’s a video about how to make them, with the narrator asserting that the story above is bogus.

Speaking of cookies, my friend Michelle, who made lovely cat cookies for me at CSICon in Las Vegas about two years ago (see some photos here) has started a cookie business in California and I wanted to give her a boost by giving her details, which I tweaked a bit.

f you’re looking for a truly exceptional way to celebrate your next occasion, I highly recommend Malibu Cookies by my friend Michelle Appelbaum.

These are premium sugar cookies made with quality ingredients, topped with fondant, and beautifully decorated with edible printing for any event—weddings, corporate gifts, holidays, or just because.

What sets them apart is the attention to detail and the joy they bring. Perfect for gifting or sharing at your next celebration. Nationwide shipping available.
Check them out at www.malibucookies.com and tell Michelle I sent you.

Here are two of her cookies made for companies, but really, she can make anything, and it’s all edible. And you can have them sent via UPS:

It’s also Assistance Dog Day and National White Wine Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The U.S. peace talks with Iran supposed to have occurred yesterday didn’t take place, and Iran denied there were any plans to have them. They also said that the Strait of Hormuz will never return to its “everyone-free” state that existed before the war.  Trump is fuming and cursing at Iran.

Less than 24 hours after voicing optimism a deal was close to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, President Donald Trump swung back to lashing out against the Iranian regime, casting doubt on its ability to strike a meaningful deal to end the war.

“Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday morning. “They ask for a meeting, some would say ‘beg,’ talks begin, with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say, openly and proudly, that they’re not having any discussions, that nothing is being talked about, and they’re only dealing with ‘Oman.’”

It was a harsh assessment of the diplomacy that only a day earlier Trump appeared confident would prevail. He told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening that “there’s a deal on Hormuz and then there will be a deal on the nuclear,” and suggested negotiations with Iran on the latter would commence on Monday afternoon.

Iran quickly denied it was negotiating with the United States, and said instead it was in talks with Oman to establish a safe, “temporary” route for vessels through the critical waterway.

Trump alluded to those claims in his post, saying Iran was offering “their usual blather in saying, the Strait of Hormuz will be operated powerfully by them, when it is already completely controlled by the United States Navy.”

He said the US blockade of Iranian ports would continue “unless a Deal, or Total Surrender, is accomplished.”

“Whether Iran wants to admit it or not, we are, in fact, talking of a solution to a problem that they have caused, for decades. It is very simple, IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” he wrote.

Well, we shall see. .  .

*A big Senate primary is being held today in Michigan, pitting a “progressive” and antisemite against a moderate Democrat (there’s also a story at the Free Press). The NYT characterizes the whole Demoratic-party mess like this in its morning newsletter:

Democrats are focused on Israel. There are plenty of other big, thorny issues at play this primary season — health care, taxes, immigration. But for many voters, the candidates seem to come in two flavors: Israel supporters and Israel detractors.

So far, the supporters are getting crushed. Voters in Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey and New York have rejected them in favor of progressive candidates who have called the Gaza war a genocide and campaigned on stanching U.S. military aid to Israel. Each rebuke seems to deepen the sense that the party is drifting leftward.

But these tests have taken place mostly in deep-blue districts. So tomorrow, when Democratic voters in Michigan — a swing state that went for Donald Trump in 2024 — pick their candidate in a do-or-die Senate race, the entire party will be watching.

On t0 Michigan. From the NYT:

Democrats’ nastiest, most expensive Senate primary will culminate on Tuesday in Michigan, a pivotal midterm battleground where an insurgent progressive is looking to defeat an establishment-backed moderate in a contest serving as a referendum on the party’s future.

The race between Representative Haley Stevens and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, is charged by tensions over Israel, how to fight President Trump and the G.O.P., and what makes a candidate electable. The result will factor into the fight for Senate control in November, and may have ramifications that extend to the next presidential contest.

While polls conducted the last month have shown uncertainty in the competition, several recent public surveys showed Dr. El-Sayed leading, and he is increasingly seen by Democrats as the favorite as voters prepare to make their picks. In the final stretch, the candidates are speaking about each other in sharply critical terms. Their supporters can be even more severe.

The FP reminds us that black voters also are captured by these “progressives”:

This race has been a closely watched test case for how black voters take to a new kind of Democrat like El-Sayed: under 50, never before in office, and offering a vision of socialism lite. Though not an official member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), El-Sayed shares their grievances against billionaires, data centers, the rising cost of living, and Israel. He’s promising Medicare for All, fair wages, and getting “corporate and special interest money out of politics”—even though he’s accepted more than a million dollars from a collection of anti-Israel PACs, including American Priorities.

Since the DSA’s emergence as a bona fide political force, the Democratic establishment has taken solace in the belief that minorities—particularly black voters—wouldn’t fall for its lofty promises. For years, moderate Democrats have seen black voters as a steadying force in the party and a bulwark against radical candidates touting unpopular ideas. In the 2020 presidential primary, black voters in South Carolina dashed Bernie Sanders’s presidential hopes. In the run-up to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s historic win last November, former governor Andrew Cuomo often campaigned on the message that his opponent’s agenda fell flat with black New Yorkers. In the end, Mamdani trounced the former governor in most demographics—except for black voters over 65 years old.

About a third of Democrats and Democrat-leaning Americans now identify as democratic socialists, according to a CNN poll conducted late last month. And Michigan, a purple state won by President Donald Trump in 2024, will show just how far this wave has penetrated beyond urban bubbles.

. . . Michigan is among the most competitive states in the country. The state has changed hands in the last three presidential elections, from Trump to Biden to Trump, all by razor-thin margins. When Trump took the state in 2024, he improved nearly two points upon his tally from the previous presidential election. But the loyalty Davis feels toward the Democratic Party is no longer universal among black voters. Trump’s support among black voters nearly doubled between 2020 and 2024, climbing from 8 percent to 15 percent support. The next test is whether the GOP can hang on to these voters in the midterms—a feat that’s looking harder to pull off, given recent data showing that black voters might have a stronger pull to the insurgent wing of the Democratic Party than expected.

When I asked Grok to tell me some of El-Sayed’s anti-Israel statements, it regurgitated the following (with references):

  • Calling Israel a “rogue state” that committed genocide and practices apartheid: In a July 2026 CNN interview with Manu Raju (“Inside Politics Sunday”), when asked whether the Israeli government should be designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S., El-Sayed replied, “It’s certainly a rogue state.” He continued: “I mean, they did a genocide… What about doing a genocide is not evil in your book? At baseline they do apartheid.”
  • Equating the Israeli government with Hamas as “evil”: Reporting on his comments (including from the same CNN appearance and related coverage) notes that he described the Israeli government as just as “evil” as Hamas.
  • Rejecting or reframing questions about Israel’s “right to exist,” and prioritizing the question of U.S. tax dollars: He has repeatedly declined to answer standard “Does Israel have a right to exist (as a Jewish state)?” questions on their own terms.

Ceiling Cat help the moderate Democrats! If this guy wins, he’ll be bringing his antisemitism to the Senate.

*Speaking of thye previous item, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), now riding the Red Ball Express to Wokesville, has once again eschewed academic neutrality by endoring a political candidate. And wouldn’t you know it—it’s  the antisemitic Democratic Senatorial candidate Abdul Al-Sayed from Michigan.

This year the American Association of University Professors is endorsing a candidate in Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, in what the group’s president says is the first instance leaders could find of the national-level AAUP making an endorsement. It’s another sign that AAUP has become a political organization, at a time of hyperpoliticization of higher ed more broadly.

Todd Wolfson said Michigan arms of the AAUP asked the national organization to consider the endorsement. AAUP polled Michigan members, finding roughly 80 percent of those voting favored making an endorsement, and about 97 percent specifically favored Abdul El-Sayed, Wolfson said. The AAUP’s national council then signed off. Wolfson signaled there likely will be more endorsements ahead of the midterm elections.

In a news release, AAUP has trumpeted its “First-Ever National Political Endorsement” going to El-Sayed, a past AAUP member who’s on the ballot in Tuesday’s primary. The organization is also hosting a virtual rally today. The release called El-Sayed “a fierce champion for debt-free and tuition-free higher education” who “will be an invaluable ally for academic freedom and higher education as a public good in Washington.”

“He has vowed to stand up to the Trump Administration’s ideological assault on the sector and defend the rights of students and faculty to speak out on political issues, question authority, and engage in peaceful protest without fear of retribution,” the release said.

The move continues the AAUP’s evolution from its beginnings as a professional association that wrote seminal definitions of academic freedom and tenure to also becoming a left-leaning faculty union, now affiliated with the much larger American Federation of Teachers. Some faculty have said this change in the 111-year-old group has eroded its historic importance as a politically neutral defender of academic freedom. But Wolfson told Inside Higher Ed Wednesday that engaging in “politics proper” is needed nowadays to defend academic freedom and other traditional faculty rights.

“Higher ed is under threat,” Wolfson said. “And the threats are coming from the government.”

The AAUP has also rescinded its previous refusal to endorse academic boycotts, and although the I-word wasn’t uttered, everybody knows at whom the boycott was aimed. It’s further defended DEI statements for hiring and promoting professors, and criticized those who say that viewpoint diversity is essential for a university. The organization has long ago parted from its original goals. It pains me to have to report this wokification of one organization after another, but that’s what’s happening.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal explains why Israel won’t “move forward” on Gaza, meaning why won’t it stop assassinating Hamas officials.

It’s Monday, August 3, and “these are the results of eight months of negotiations aimed at demilitarizing Gaza. Why continue the targeted killings now and give them an excuse to back out?” The senior American official seems genuinely surprised by Israel’s recent strikes on Hamas targets. By his account, Israel had agreed to the terms—including a halt to the targeted assassinations—so that Hamas would be bound to the next step: handing over its weapons.

. . .If the plan holds and Hamas surrenders its arms as the peace board insists it will, this is the best shot at lasting quiet for Israel’s south that Israel is ever likely to get. Killing three more Hamas officials is thinking small when the disarmament of Hamas is on the table.

Israel has three problems.

The first is the fine print. The deal mandates the surrender of heavy weapons and the disabling of tunnels, but it leaves “personal” arms to be regulated under “Palestinian law”—which Israel is convinced means, in practice, a blanket waiver: Hamas keeps its rifles with a technocrat-approved stamp. The agreement stipulates that all weapons held by the Hamas-run police pass to the U.S.-backed technocratic committee, though that could simply be a matter of paperwork in changing their affiliation.\

. . . The second is the withdrawal. Per the BBC, the plan requires Israel to pull back to the yellow line within 24 hours of accepting it—surrendering around 20 percent of the strip it currently holds. Israel’s preferred sequence is the reverse: disarmament first, withdrawal second. Give up ground before that, and you give up leverage over Hamas.

The third, and the one underwriting the other two: Israel does not trust Hamas.

. . . Then there is the less technical concern. Israel is under 90 days from an election, and radical, potentially dangerous steps for peace are somehow even less palatable now than before. This election is a game of inches, and inches surrendered in Gaza translate easily into inches surrendered in the Knesset. Ironically, it is the left that is waiting for Netanyahu to slip on one of the fronts—so it can attack him from the right.

Segal believe that Israel should hold off the assassinations and fighting (though of course I think that Hamas should disarm, too):

. . .Nobody believes words—they believe actions—and justifying dramatic moves for peace comes easier against a backdrop of progress. That progress is impossible if Israel keeps working against the deal, and the working-against, the source argues, is what costs Israel its credibility in the region. Gaza, he adds, is where the sharpest shift in global antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment began. Neither will turn until the picture coming out of Gaza does.

My take: Israel should not be the reason this plan fails. As long as Israel’s actions remain reversible, they should proceed. Though the odds of anything moving in election season are slim.

*The AP’s “Odd News” describes a Canadian city stunk up for two decades by abandoned tanks of rotting fish sauce. Now, after years of a pervasive stench, the city will stink no more!

The townspeople of St. Mary’s can breathe a sigh of relief. They are finally getting rid of the foul smell of rotten fish that has for years — when the wind blows their way — wafted over their tiny community in Canada ‘s easternmost province.

And the culprit for the unpleasant odor that has vexed the picturesque town of about 300 people in Newfoundland and Labrador?

About 110 tanks that were left behind — each holding 3,000 gallons of fermented fish sauce — when the Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company was abandoned more than 20 years ago.

The place was left to ruin: windows got broken, the roof blew off, a January storm knocked out a wall. The sauce kept on fermenting as the bacteria did their job — and the townspeople could smell it.

St. Mary’s volunteer mayor, Steve Ryan, says it’s hard to describe just how bad the smell was.

“The worst rotted fish you ever smelled in your lifetime, times 100,” he told The Associated Press by phone on Wednesday.

. . .Over the next few months, workers will drain the vats of left-behind fluid and mix it with peat moss, which will absorb the liquid, he said.

Trucks with giant hoses will then suck up the material and transport it to a pit that has been dug out over three weeks and lined with high-density polyethylene used in landfills. At the end, the pit will be covered with topsoil.

Glenn Sharp, owner of Sharp Management, the company overseeing the task, called it a “unique job.”

[Ryan] hopes that when it’s all over, the memory of the foul smell will fade.

“We’re such a small town and we were left on our own,” he said. “For so many years nobody had our backs.”

But we “kept fighting and fighting,” he added, “because we knew we were right in what we were fighting for.”

Here’s a video!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili not only sees a mosquito, but knows its scientific name:

Hili: Culex pipiens.
Andrzej: Where?
Hili: It’s sitting on a leaf, absorbed in thought.

In Polish:

Hili: Culex pipiens.
Ja: Gdzie?
Hili: Siedzi zamyślony na liściu.

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

From Stacy:

From TherionArms:

From Kitty Litterposting:

From Masih; two more young Iranians executed:

The Number Ten Cat makes fun of Trump:

From Maarten, who is appalled by not just the deeds of Cambridge sociology professor Jason Arday, but by the academics (including his own University) defending him. More on Arday later today:

Apparently Jo Rowling got some social-media “presents” on her birthday (two days ag0:

Two from my feed. This first one amazes me, but surely the chimp knew the guy with the food:

Yes, they’re d*gs, but they’re also hilarious:

From Malcolm: I’ve always maintained this (sound up):

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Molding “progressive” children with books

August 3, 2026 • 9:15 am

When I moved to Chicago I became a member of 57th Street Books, a well known store between my crib and my work, and I’d often stop in to browse. I no longer do that much, and for two reasons. First, because I have no more room for books on my bookshelves, so I rarely buy any books (I get them from the library).  Second. the store has become uber-woke, catering to buyers with “progressive” agendas.  Books featured in the windows and inside cater to the oppressor/victim narrative, often with the sacralization of the oppressed.  Here is just one example I photographed this morning: a window featuring children’s books about ethnic food.

If you look them over, you’ll conclude two things.  First, they celebrate books about groups characterized as oppressed minorities. In other words, they hew closely to an “identity culture” mindset designed to sacralize various ethnic groups.  I guess the intent in these children’s book is to make you feel proud of your group. That’s not necessarily so bad, but it seems to be not only a theme, but a ubiquitous theme.  It’s as if kids can be interested only in the food of their group. But there is more to life than identity, and kids need to know that.  (I hasten to add that I still haven’t found a publisher for my book about the Indian sweetmaker Mr. Das and his fifty cats, and that’s only because I’m not Indian; I presumably cannot write about India as an American.) Children’s and young-adult fiction are the two areas of publishing most affected by identity culture.

Second, the books (I’ve looked at some of them) stay away from the painful or unpleasant parts of life. You can tell by the titles that they are all sunshine and happiness, with plenty of exclamation marks.  Again, you don’t want to traumatize kids with literature, but neither do you want to teach them that life is all peaches and cream. At the bottom of this post I’ve listed some children’s and young-adult books that have sad parts. Some of them, like Charlotte’s Web (1952) and Old Yeller (1956) have endings so sad that they’ll make you cry (at least they did for me). Could those books even be published today?

Oh, and I’ll add one more thing. If you look at the cultures represented below, you find African-American, African, Indian, Persian (Iranian), Hispanic, and Japanese.  But one oppressed group culture is conspicuously absent.  Can you guess what it is given the “progressive” nature of the display?

It’s not that children’s books about Jewish food don’t exist; they’re just not represented above, and I doubt they’ll ever be. As a joke, I invented one of my my own:

Actually, though, Grok found for me a list of children’s picture books about Jewish food. There are even two intersectional books!

Picture books (great for younger kids):

  • Do Not Eat This Book!: Fun with Jewish Foods & Festivals by Beth Kander, illustrated by Mike Moran — A playful, interactive book full of Jewish holiday foods, Yiddish words, humor, and simple recipes kids can try.
  • P Is for Pastrami by Alan Silberberg — An alphabet book that introduces classic Jewish foods like latkes, matzah, and hamantaschen in a fun, diverse way.
  • 1, 2, 3, Nosh With Me by Micah Siva and Joshua Siva, illustrated by Sviatoslav Franko — A colorful counting book featuring Jewish foods associated with different holidays.
  • Bubbie & Rivka’s Best-Ever Challah (So Far!) by Sarah Lynne Reul — A warm story about a girl and her grandmother baking challah together, with themes of love, persistence, and imperfect (but delicious) results.
  • The Bagel King by Andrew Larsen, illustrated by Sandy Nichols — A sweet tale about the connecting power of bagels.
  • Jalapeño Bagels by Natasha Wing, illustrated by Robert Casilla — A boy blends his Jewish and Mexican heritage by creating spicy jalapeño bagels.
  • Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas by Pamela Ehrenberg, illustrated by Anjan Sarkar — An Indian-Jewish family celebrates Hanukkah with dosas instead of (or alongside) latkes.
  • Chik Chak Shabbat by Mara Rockliff, illustrated by Kyrsten Brooker — Neighbors come together to help make a traditional slow-cooked cholent for Shabbat.
  • The Matzo Ball Boy by Lisa Shulman, illustrated by Rosanne Litzinger — A lively Passover twist on the Gingerbread Man story, featuring a runaway matzo ball.
  • Hanukkah Cookies with Sprinkles by David A. Adler, illustrated by Jeffrey Ebbeler — A story of making and sharing special Hanukkah cookies (and showing kindness).
  • The Borrowed Hanukkah Latkes by Linda Glaser, illustrated by Nancy Cote — A girl “borrows” potatoes (and invites a lonely neighbor) so the family can make latkes for Hanukkah.

And here are some other children’s books with dark, sad, or depressing parts, again from Grok and with its descriptions. I had forgotten about The Yearling, which is a fantastic book intended for older children and adults. It is a must-read, and garnered a Pulitzer Prize for author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

  • Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson — A close friendship ends abruptly with a sudden death, leaving deep grief and lasting impact.
  • Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls — A boy and his two hunting dogs share a powerful bond that culminates in tragic loss.
  • The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings — A boy raises a fawn amid hardship; the ending involves painful loss and maturation.
  • Black Beauty by Anna Sewell — Follows a horse through years of kindness and cruelty, with many scenes of suffering (though it has some redemptive notes).

Picture Books and Shorter Works

  • The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein — A tree repeatedly gives parts of itself to a boy throughout his life until little remains; widely seen as poignant or melancholy.
  • The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams — A toy rabbit longs to become real and faces abandonment before a bittersweet transformation.
  • City Dog, Country Frog by Mo Willems — A seasonal friendship ends with the implied loss of one character; the remaining friend processes loneliness and moves forward.
  • The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen — A poor girl freezes to death on a cold night after lighting matches for warmth and visions; the ending is tragic yet includes a note of release.

Other Notable Mentions

  • Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt — Explores immortality versus the natural cycle of life and death, with a reflective, poignant close.
  • Watership Down by Richard Adams — An epic rabbit adventure filled with danger, death, and loss (including for key characters).

But no, you won’t see these in the window of 57th Street Books because they are neither uniformly joyful nor identitarian, and they don’t buy into the victim/oppressor narrative. They are, one might say, inclusive.

Monday: Hili dialogue

August 3, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to another damn work week: it’s Monday, August 3, 2026, and National Watermelon Day. Here’s a ten-minute video I found when looking for the ancestor of the modern melon. It’s shown here, along with the story of the plant’s domestication.

Guinness notes that “The heaviest watermelon weighs 159 kg (350.5 lb) and was grown by Chris Kent (USA) of Sevierville, Tennessee, USA, as verified on 4 October 2013.” I wonder if anyone ate it.

It’s also Grab Some Nuts Day and Clean Your Floors Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In his new NYT column, “Whatever this is in Iran, it isn’t winning” (archived here), David French thinks that Trump may have put us on a path leading to a new world war.

On Friday, Trump said he was ordering a new round of airstrikes. And what was his reasoning? “You know at some point,” Trump said, “they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’”

On Saturday, he’d changed his mind. “We have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

“I have agreed,” he added, “for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL.”

But the problem we face right now is something well beyond deals. America has been so powerful for so long that we are accustomed to being in control of events. We start wars when we want and — crucially — we believe that we can end them when we want.

In both conflicts, the fighting was brutal, and we can and should debate the wisdom of both wars. But our great-power rivals were largely absent.

There is no such thing as a safe war — any war can spin out of control — but the combination of American power, enemy weakness and Russian and Chinese restraint meant that Americans could sleep secure in the knowledge that the chances of a catastrophic escalation were extremely remote.

That is no longer the case. The world is walking a path toward a world war, and no one — including the president of the United States — seems to be in command of events.

French goes on to mention that Saudi Arabia, the Houthis in Yemen, Ukraine, and perhaps Russia and China have entered the conflict directly or indirectly.

Iran has taken grievous losses, including much of its top leadership. But the crucial difference with the United States is that the Iranian regime simply doesn’t care about losses in men or matériel in the same way we do.

Both the United States and Israel have repeatedly decapitated the leadership of jihadist organizations, with little lasting effect. Iran has shown again and again that it will expend the lives of its citizens to retain power or to secure a strategic advantage. In fact, the regime seems to relish slaughtering the almost impossibly brave citizens who do rise up in protest.

Second, we’re running out of interceptors, such as our Patriot antimissile systems, and other advanced munitions.

. . .But we can analyze the events and trends of the moment, and right now all the momentum is toward greater escalation. And we absolutely cannot do what Trump asks, which is to “just sit back and relax” and trust that “it will all work out well in the end.”

I do not think that world war is inevitable, nor do I think it is probable. But it is more possible now than it has been at any time since the end of the Cold War, and the American government is led by the worst rulers in the modern history of the United States.

In the end French sees the only remedy is American voters giving Congress “a spinal transplant,” i.e., electing Democrats. Only this way, he avers, can we clearly “see the catastrophe coming and act decisively before a terrible war swallows the world.” He does have a point when he asks us to look back before the beginning of WWI or WWII and think about how people didn’t realize the looming catastrophe.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal discussed the latest Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Iran in “MoU2?“.

It’s Sunday, August 2, and Donald Trump has called off a major attack on Iran because “the perimeters of a deal had been agreed to”—one that would open the Strait of Hormuz and end Iran’s nuclear threat. The phrase about “fool me once” comes to mind. I’m just not sure yet who should feel shame.

Before sorting the candidates, let’s examine the deal.

The attack meant for this weekend was to be the coup de grâce—a large joint U.S.-Israeli strike on the one area that has enjoyed immunity so far, Iran’s energy infrastructure. Now, perhaps, it won’t be needed. Resting on Trump’s declaration alone—a reopened Strait of Hormuz and a denuclearized Iran—the deal amounts to near-total victory.

I’m skeptical. Two weeks was floated as all that remained of April’s bombing campaign, but the two weeks since strikes resumed have been light by comparison—too light to have forced the Islamic Republic into its first diplomatic defeat. More likely, Trump is running a Beetlejuice strategy: summoning the terms of a deal into existence by saying its name enough times.

. . . According to officials cited by Channel 12, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi agreed overnight to a compromise proposal drawn up by Qatari and American mediators to reopen the Strait. Under it, vessels entering the Gulf through Hormuz would transit Iranian waters; those leaving would transit Omani waters. It resembles an Omani proposal built on “voluntary transit fees or tolls” that Iran rejected three days ago for failing to “address Iran’s concerns.” The concern likely being that Iran wanted 100 percent of the Strait, not 50.

. . .Still, one should remember that before the war, traffic crossed freely between the two coastlines. If the compromise is that both the Iranians and the Omanis now impose tolls, we are further from freedom of the seas and closer to legitimizing Iran’s hold on the Strait.

Which brings us to the first candidate for being fooled a second time: Trump. If the president is conjuring a deal from thin air, the reason is plain: he bit off more than he could chew. As with his April threats of civilizational destruction, he has grasped that his latest promises of escalation were unlikely to bring the Republic to heel, and is hunting for an offramp that still points roughly where he wants to go. If this is de-escalation by any means necessary, then he has indeed been fooled a second time, and the shame is his. Then again, Trump might have learned caution from the MoU’s death, and so far he has said nothing about loosening the blockade or unfreezing assets.

. . .Worth remembering here is a senior Israeli intelligence official’s estimate that, should the economic pressure hold, the Islamic Republic would not survive 2026. That was before the MoU and the several-billion-dollar reprieve the regime banked in the interim—yet he remains confident that a few more months would be enough to burn through those limited funds.

In which case, the one fooled may be the Islamic Republic. A standing blockade and a half-share of the tolls won’t begin to cover its deficit. And if it imagines Trump’s signature will shield it from American bombs the next time it fires on the Strait, it should find sturdier shelter. Then again, the other provisions of this agreement—an end to the blockade potentially among them—have not been forthcoming. As Trump used to say, “Iran has never won a war or lost a negotiation.”

The most likely candidate is us if we take Trump’s words on faith. After the oceans of ink spilled on clauses 7 through 9 of a now-binned deal, we should hesitate to treat another bargain between a fundamentalist regime and the most fickle president in memory as carved in stone. Otherwise, the shame is on us.

Any deal struck should not allow Iran to have any control over the Strait of Hormuz, as that would leave it better off than before the war.  And in these few months of war, we’ve learned not to take any prognostications about a deal seriously.

*The WSJ lays out the figures to support their contention that “The Democrats’ biggest donors have gone on strike.” The donors are fatigued!

George Soros and his son Alex donated more than $400,000 to the Democratic National Committee during the 2018 midterms. They gave more than $1 million during the 2022 midterm election cycle, campaign finance records show.

This year, they have yet to give the DNC a dollar.

The Soroses aren’t alone—other high-profile donors have given little or no money to the Democrats’ central committee this year. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, wrote steady checks to the DNC for years but during the midterms has yet to give money.

In a sign of the party’s challenges, a running joke among some donors is that the DNC stands for “Do Not Contribute,” said one Democratic strategist who advises major party donors.

Months ahead of pivotal midterm elections, the Democratic fundraising apparatus has a big donor problem.

While many Democratic elites still feel bullish about taking back the House and are willing to throw big money at their favorite candidates, institutional fatigue—and in some cases, full-on drama—have set in among a number of the party’s biggest donors. Like voters, donors say they feel disillusioned with Washington and the party establishment they have long supported.

The DNC isn’t the only problem spot for Democrats—other Democratic committees and super PACs lag behind Republicans across the board. It is common for a party that is out of power in Washington to struggle, but Democrats are increasingly concerned it will hurt their chances of winning this fall as Republicans stack up significantly more money in committees and PACs that can organize door-knocking efforts and air TV ads.

Here’s the WSJ’s graph of funds for Democratic and Republicans PACs and party committees. I would have thought that Democrats would be ginning up more money in an effort to take back the Congress, but it just ain’t so.

. . . and, indeed, in individual tight races, Democrats are outspending Republicans (see below), but PACs and committees support the parties in general.

A bittersweet closing:

“I think it’s always a very tough job,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) said of the DNC chairmanship. “The amount of money is certainly concerning, but at the same time, we’re not necessarily losing elections these days because candidates don’t have enough money. It is because [Republicans] have billionaires.”

*The latest antisemitic news: Some people are blaming the Jews for the huge influx of immigrants into the Spanish city of Ceuta on the African mainland! How did we engineer that?

Following Spain’s migrant crisis in Ceuta last week, posts accusing Israel and Jewish people of orchestrating the crisis spread quickly on social media, reaching an estimated 103 million people on X within 72 hours, according to an analysis by the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center (ARC).

The report examines 173 high-impact posts from 119 influencer accounts published after more than 50,000 migrants crossed into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta on July 30.

Together they generated 57.5 million views, an estimated reach of 103.1 million, 1.9 million likes, and 368,400 shares in two days, ARC calculates.

Posters falsely claimed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed migrants into Spain due to its policies regarding Israel. In one, viewed 5.3 million times, an AI-generated image shows Netanyahu with a line of migrants filing from his open mouth onto a Spanish beach, ARC says.

Another account claimed Israel had “admitted” engineering the migration through Mossad.

“This is not a story about a few bad actors,” says CAM CEO Sacha Roytman Dratwa. “It is a story about a platform whose design rewards the fastest and most inflammatory explanation available, and on X that explanation is increasingly a Jewish conspiracy.”

Here’s one of those posts, and if it’s not antisemitic, I’ll eat my hat (I have no hat). The first Community Note is hilarious: “There is no evidence that the nation of Israel has any kind of official or covert transport vessel done up to resemble the head of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

*Only in Florida: “Meet the literature professor fired for teaching literature.” (There’s also an article about this at Inside Higher Ed and another at FIRE.)

Most people have had anal sex. Don’t look so surprised.” Those two sentences, spoken by a heavy-drinking, drug-using high school teacher to her students in a short story, never caused professor Vinita Prabhakar any trouble. She’s been teaching it for nearly a decade.

But in February, a staff member apparently complained about the assignment, and the story was forwarded to South Florida State College (SFSC) president Fred Hawkins, a Republican former Florida House member who is an ally of Governor Ron DeSantis. “I don’t ever want to see this story again,” Prabhakar said she was told by Hawkins, adding that he wouldn’t want his college-age daughter reading it. The college president also said the story was “political.” The next day, she was suspended and told that her contract wouldn’t be renewed.

On Wednesday, Prabhakar sued SFSC and Hawkins in federal court. She alleges that what happened violates Florida’s Campus Free Expression Act, signed into law by DeSantis in 2021. The law says that state colleges in Florida “may not shield students, faculty, or staff from expressive activities” and protects “faculty lectures, writings, and commentary.” Prabhakar is seeking to get her old job back, as well as compensatory and punitive damages, and is being represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Hawkins and SFSC could not be reached for comment.

The short story “Bettering Myself” by Ottessa Moshfegh is certainly racy but not expressly political, and Prabhakar says that she taught it for three years at SFSC before the spring semester class that led to her removal from the classroom. But the lawsuit is yet another collision between free speech and DeSantis’ campaign to excise concepts of sexism and racism from the curricula of public schools, including higher-education institutions. In early July, a federal appeals court struck down the higher-ed provisions of one of DeSantis’ weapons in that fight—the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, signed into law by the governor in 2022.

Prabhakar was an instructor, not a tenured professor, so there is no protection of tenure here. But of course there is freedom of speech and the fact that she taught this story for nearly a decade without trouble. You can find the lawsuit in full at this site. There’s an interview with Prabhakar, but I’ll add a brief excerpt from FIRE’s report:

Now, represented by FIRE Legal Network Member Gary Edinger of Benjamin, Aaronson, Edinger & Patanzo and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Prabhakar is filing a federal lawsuit against Hawkins and the South Florida State College board of trustees seeking to vindicate her First Amendment rights.

“President Hawkins firing a professor for teaching a work of literature isn’t just a betrayal of every principle that a university is supposed to embrace,” said Edinger. “As a state employee, he also trampled over our client’s constitutional rights. The First Amendment doesn’t let public officials suppress ideas by firing the people who teach them.”

Prabhakar has been an English professor for close to two decades. After stops at several upstate New York colleges, she relocated to Florida in 2023 to be closer to her elderly parents and took a position at SFSC’s Avon Park campus.

In spring 2026, Prabhakar assigned the students in her Freshman English II course the short story “Bettering Myself” by Ottessa Moshfegh.  Prabhakar had assigned the story in her classes for nearly a decade. “Bettering Myself”tells the story of an alcoholic and directionless teacher at a Catholic school who engages in self-destructive behavior and makes inappropriate sex jokes to her teenage wards. The winner of the 2013 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, “Bettering Myself” is commonly taught in English courses across the country, including at the University of Florida, West Virginia University, and NYU.

I hope she wins. But of course like others in her situation, her relationship with the college will have been spoiled, and if her suit is successful she may take a settlement rather than return to the College. But I’m glad she’s fighting like hell.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej discuss wokeness:

Hili: Intellectual trends are merciless.
Andrzej: That’s true. The penalty for nonconformity is stoning with words, a boycott, and physical aggression.

In Polish:

Hili: Mody intelektualne są bezlitosne.
Ja: To prawda, karą za nieposłuszeństwo jest ukamienowanie słowem, bojkotem i fizyczną agresją.

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

From Bill (note the error in Darwin’s name, as it implies that evolution is progressive, if not unidirectional):

From The English Language Police:

From: My Cat is an Asshole:

From Masih, another Iranian protester secretly executed. His last statement made me tear up:

From Luana: A debater at the Oxford Union was censored by the Union for his speech in a debate about whether one should be suspicious of Islam. (Guess which answer he was giving!).  He put up his own self-filmed speech:

I am no a fan of the racist “Tommy Robinson,” but this kind of statement is ridiculous, especially at an Oxford Union debate:

From Jeff Maurer:

Poor kid. The English translation of the Spanish is, “When you have a bad year, remember Paco.”

But the Community notes say this: “The kids name is Gabriel. The author of the post also doesn’t give credit to the original creators of the videos.” 

Anyway, the kid had a horrible year! He gets one chayote after another, and that’s about the world’s worst vegetable (I could never eat it when I spent the summer being served it in Costa Rica):

From Simon: a ducky staircase!

 

One from my feed. I love these nestcam videos (this one has music, too). What’s the species?

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial.  Regina Jonas was the first woman ever to be ordained as a rabbi. And then she died in Auschwitz:

And one from Doctor Cobb. Go read the tweets of what he liked and didn’t. Favorite is BUTTER TARTS!

Overnight, a masked bandit broke into our kitchen. Armed with opposable thumbs, he proceeded to sample everything on offer. I’d just visited the farmers market, so the menu was extensive.I can now share a highly specific peer-reviewed list of what this particular raider did & did not enjoy. 🧵

— Katharine Hayhoe (@katharinehayhoe.com) 2026-07-29T16:52:43.466Z

 

“Lonesome Dove”: the Great American Novel?

August 2, 2026 • 9:30 am

I just finished a long (843-page) novel in my two-person book club with my friend Wendy. (We alternate choosing propitious books, read them at the same time, and discuss them online.) This one, Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry, turned out to be not only a page-turner, but also one of the finest modern novels I’ve read (it won a Pulitzer for fiction). In fact, I’ve put it in consideration with a few others as The Great American Novel.

What, you ask, are the characteristics of a candidate for the Great American Novel? This is purely subjective, but I’ll give my criteria. It has to be set in America, of course, and display diverse aspects of America and Americans themselves. It has to be epic (i.e., longish and involved), not hew too closely to a heavy-handed theme, contain tragedy and sorrow as well as joy, along with a soupçon of humor.  It has to be so American that it could not be set in any other country. And when you finish it, you will have not only a sense of what America was like at a given time, but also a need for your own time to process what you’ve read.

Another novel that I’ve considered as a possible Great American Novel is The Great Gatsby, which we’ve all read in high school. (It’s short, has well-delineated themes, and portrays American ambition.) But it’s not a good candidate as it portrays only a small slice of American life (rich people and obsessive love) and is not an epic, having as it does only a few characters. Another, also by Larry McMurtry, is The Last Picture Show (1971), a fantastic book and an equally fantastic movie—in fact, I think the eponymous movie is the best American or English-language movie ever made. Below is one scene from the movie, which I see as not only archetypically American but full of low-key but intense emotion. (McMurtry co-wrote the screenplay with director Peter Bogdanovich.)

Here Sam the Lion (played by Ben Johnson), who runs the picture show, restaurant, and movie theater in the tiny oil town of Anarene, Texas (modeled on Archer City, pop 1070, where McMurtry lived), takes young Sonny (played by Timothy Bottoms) fishing along with Sam’s mentally disabled son Billy. Sam reminisces about his love for Lois Farrow (played by Ellen Burstyn), who was married when they had an affair.

I think this is the modern and American equivalent of Shakespeare. No, the language isn’t fancy, but the emotions are real and deep. I can’t imagine any non-American equivalent. Johnson won the Oscar that year for Best Supporting Actor:

But I digress, except to say that one of the themes of this movie is similar to that in the novel Lonesome Dove: the attempt of people to stave off loneliness by trying to connect with others, and their inevitable failure to do so.

The plot of Lonesome Dove (which was also made into a 6-part t.v. miniseries) can be seen in extenso at the Wikipedia page. In short, it’s about a group of cowboys who run a livery stable and a horse- and cow-selling operation in the eponymous Texas town. (Time: mid-nineteenth century.) The leaders of the group are a pair of retired Texas Rangers, Captain Woodrow F. Call and Captain Augustus “Gus” McCrae, played respectively in the miniseries by and Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones (great casting!). There’s a shortage of women in Lonesome Dove, and the men patronize :Lorena, the town’s only prostitute—the word in the book is always “whore”—when they need a “poke.”

There are a number of adventures, including a cattle-stealing jaunt to Mexico, but the meat of the plot comprises delineation of the characters, which include a black cowboy, Deets, the moral center of the book and the only man who is wholly admirable. Gus and Call decide to take a big herd of cattle to the distant but lusher plains of Montana, where they envision building a ranch. They take with them all the Hat Creek outfit men, as well as Lorena, who eventually falls in love with Gus. Along the way several other women appear, all having, like the men, frustrated relationships.  One woman, Clara, who lives in Nebraska, is the female equivalent of Deets: a moral center, though she’s immensely unhappy.

At any rate, tons of adventures ensue: there are fights with bears and Indians, murders, hangings of horse thieves, duststorms, locust plagues, and moments of happiness. If nothing else, McMurtry shows us that the life of a cowboy was far from romantic. It was hard, dirty, and exhausting.

There are also tragedies and some very sad deaths. The ending just sort of tapers off. .  there is no satisfying denouement, and that is good. (McMurtry wrote three other books in the series with prequels and sequels to this book, but I’m not interested in reading them.)

It’s a good candidate for the Great American Novel because, first, you can’t get more American than cowboys depicted at the height of Cowboydom in the mid- to late nineteenth century. But much more than that is the diversity of emotions and characters that make the book as rich as a novel by Dickens—if he wrote a novel with Americans rather than Brits.  As my friend Wendy wrote about Gus and Call, “They all were so human, deeply flawed, stubborn, and yet had their own standards and principles. And they kept going, which I think is the American bit of it.” 

All I can do is recommend that you read this book, pronto. Its length may overwhelm those who can’t read even short books, but it’s involved, engaging, and wonderful, right up there with All the Light We Cannot See (another Pulitzer winner) as the best piece of modern fiction in English I’ve read in years.

Are there other candidates for the Great American Novel? Yes, Huckleberry Finn is a good one, embodying the characteristics of the genre shown above.  I have heard that East of Eden, by Steinbeck, another wholly American epic, is another one, and I plan to read it soon.

Here’s the book that you must read:

Here is McMurtry talking about the book. Note that the cowboys in Lonesome Dove were older than McMurtry describes as typical of the era, with Gus and Call being seniors.

If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to a short video showing Robert Duvall claiming that the role of Gus was his favorite—and he had many great roles. Note that he compares Gus to a Shakespearian character.  There’s also a scene from the miniseries showing Gus and Call, in which, curiously, Gus reminisces about his lost love Clara.  (I haven’t seen the miniseries.) There are parallels with the Sam the Lion scene above.


Now I’ve made my recommendation, but I’m sure I’m missing candidates for the Great American Novel. What would you recommend as the book who takes the title?

August 1 ducks

August 2, 2026 • 8:15 am

“How is the Duck Family doing?”, you ask.  They’re peachy—couldn’t be better. Today is the two-week anniversary of when they came to Botany Pond, and Miss Duck and her Brood of Four are healthy, happy (as far as I can tell), vigorous, and certainly well fed.  You’ll see below how the babies have grown: they now have pointy tails, are at least twice as large as when they came to the Pond, and soon will enter their awkward teenage phase as their feathers start to come in.

All the ducks know me and come to me when they see me at the pond; I don’t even have to whistle for them. I am their Human Food-Vending Machine.

For two of the last three mornings, they were waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs leading from my building to the Pond, and when they saw me they came waddling and strutting up. As you can see below, the babies were peeping and Miss Duck was making soft quacks because she wasn’t quite sure of my intentions. I herded them to the water in the channel, as I always feed them in the water—it makes less mess if there is uneaten food. (The fish and turtles get it quickly in the water.)

Miss Duck, unlike other hens I’ve tended, is frightened of the large turtles, quacks when they approach (the babies don’t care), and swims away from them. She feints at them with her bill, and sometimes at the fish as well. But I manage to get enough food in them all to keep them fat and growing. (They get fed three or four times per day).

So here’s what greeted me yesterday morning when I came to the Pond about 6:30 a.m. You can hear me speaking to them, as a duck expert told me that they will also recognize my voice. Although my vocal timbre changes, I don’t speak to them like one who speaks to a child, for I think animals should be addressed as adults.

Sound up on all videos.

After breakfast in the channel, the family invariably swims back to the main Pond, deciding to settle on one of the three or four rocky spaces where they can dry off, rest, and digest. Here they first try the “Sacred Rock” in the NW part of the pond, and then settle on the big flat rock between the benches.

Look how they’ve grown!

Yesterday morning there were fairly heavy rains, but the ducks were all dry when they came for food after the rain stopped. I have no idea where they go to stay dry, as when it rains heavily you simply can’t look over the Pond in person without getting drenched. Here they are after the rain in a screenshot from thePondCam. Can you find Miss Duck and her ducklings?

Finally, a first yesterday: a rabbit appeared at the Pond. Though Hyde Park is full of Eastern Cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus), I have never seen one at Botany Pond. If it hangs around I may try to feed it, though I’m wary of that Cooper’s Hawk who sometimes comes by.  The arrow points to the bunny.

I’ll do my best to provide updates, but I just changed Big Computers and that always causes problems and stress, in this case with uploading pictures and videos. Stay tuned: you will not miss the ducklings growing up!

Sunday: Hili dialogue

August 2, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, August 2, 2026 and National Ice Cream Sandwich Day, a treat appearing in its American form (chocolate wafers enclosing a vanilla ice cream sandwich) in the 1890s.  But my favorite subspecies is California’s “It’s-It”, devised in 1928. Here the ice cream is sandwiched between two oatmeal cookies dipped in chocolate. There are now many varieties.  If you can buy these in your area, feel lucky, for I can’t get ’em!

It’s also Dinosaurs Day, Sisters’ Day, and World Four Leaf Clover Day. Who hasn’t looked for them as a kid? But how rare are they? Well, Wikipedia has an entire article on four-leaf clovers, (and 5- and 6-lear clovers) and says this:

A 2017 survey of approximately 5.7 million clovers in six European countries found the frequency of 4-leaf clovers to be around 5000 to 1 (one 4-leaf clover for every 5076 normal 3-leaf clovers), almost twice the commonly stated probability of 10,000 to 1. According to this survey, the frequency of a 5-leaf clover is 24,390 to 1, and that of a 6-leaf clover is 312,500 to 1.

Here’s a rare six-leaf clover (pressed and dried) of Trifolium repens, the common white clover:

User:Dænča, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

UPDATE: Trump has called off the attack on Iran reported right below. The man cannot make up his mind, though this may be a strategy (I think it’s dithering, though):

President Trump called off a new attack on Iran on Saturday night, saying “the perimeters of a deal had been agreed to” that would open the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic and end Iran’s nuclear threat.

The abrupt announcement on Truth Social de-escalated the rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran over control of the strait, Iran’s attacks on U.S. troops in recent days, and Trump’s own threats to rain more American bombs and missiles on the Islamic Republic.

He said Iran and other Middle Eastern countries had asked him to pull back on the strikes, which he ordered Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported, to bring Tehran back to the negotiating table.

“Based on this request, I have agreed, for the further benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL,” Trump said on Truth Social.

DEAL!  I don’t buy it.

*The WSJ reports that Trump is once again ready (or says he is ready) to attack Iran big time.

President Trump has ordered the military to launch a fresh attack on Iran that could begin as soon as this weekend and last a few days, U.S. officials said.

Earlier Friday, he told reporters that he planned to resume heavy military strikes to force the regime to come to the negotiating table. He predicted that if the U.S. hit Iran hard enough, the hard-line regime would eventually “peter out.”

“We will be hitting them very hard,” Trump said Friday at a televised cabinet meeting at Camp David. “And you know at some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’”

Trump authorized the new attack plan presented to him at the presidential retreat, U.S. officials said. But, they noted, any immediate progress on the diplomatic front could convince Trump to halt the planned strikes and return to negotiations. He also could simply change his mind.

“As President Trump said at his cabinet meeting today, the United States will win, and Iran will not have a nuclear weapon under his watch,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

Trump’s threats Friday contrasted with his insistence earlier this week that “very friendly negotiations” were under way, enabling a pause on military operations. Since then, Iran launched a surprise attack on troops in Jordan, triggering a U.S. retaliatory attack on Wednesday.

For weeks behind closed doors, Trump has been telling aides that the Iranians are “crazy,” according to U.S. officials. He also has complained to confidants that the interim peace deal was ultimately meaningless, officials said, and that he always knew it wasn’t going to work.

His frustration was on full display during the meeting at Camp David when the president accused Iranian diplomats of being “very dishonorable” to deal with and suggested more violent military strikes were needed to break Tehran’s will.

This just goes back and forth endlessly, with Trump hinting that negotiations are proceeding smoothly, and providing hope for peace, and then he seems to realize that the Iranians are mendacious (surprise!). It may just be a ruse on his part to destabilize Iran, but I don’t see how pausing attacks would destabilize Iran, and we know by now that either attacking or pausing will not affect what that regime does. I still think he should attack Kharg Island heavily.

*Surprise! Trump backtracked on two statements this week. The first was his claim that the Reflecting Pool renovation in Washington, D.C. was sabotaged by vandalism, causing an Olympic athlete to be arrested.  The other was that he’d allow Ukraine to make Patriot missiles. He now admits that the Reflecting Pool job was botched by contractors (the accused felon had his charges dropped), and he says he’s reneging on his promise to Zelensky.

Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.

In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.

In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

Earlier this month, Ms. Pirro herself had echoed the president’s claims, calling a news conference to announce Mr. Hearn’s indictment on July 2. She said that she had “tremendous evidence” that Mr. Hearn had committed a felony, and noted that he faced up to 10 years in prison.

But on Friday, Ms. Pirro said that her prosecutors had been misled by the Interior Department, which had awarded a no-bid contract to a first-time government contractor to repair the iconic landmark.

Someone is asleep at the wheel at the Interior Department. A felony? What was the previous “evidence”?  As for those missiles, here are a couple of paragraphs:

President Trump backtracked on Friday from a promise earlier this month to let Ukraine make Patriot missiles, weapons that were sorely needed as a defense interceptor against Russia’s deadly ballistic missile attacks.

On July 8, Mr. Trump had unexpectedly assented to sharing technology behind the missiles to allow Ukraine to build them, saying that “we’ll give them the right to make Patriots” during a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on the sidelines of the NATO summit meeting in Ankara, Turkey. He added: “We’ll show them how to do it.”

When asked about the agreement during a meeting with his cabinet on Friday, Mr. Trump said “we have not agreed to that,” suggesting that he had changed his mind because “it is a hard thing to give away that kind of technology” and because of the risk that “those people you give the technology, they could someday turn on you.”

Yeah, right; I’m really worried about Ukraine firing missiles at U.S. troops in Europe! How many countries have we already shared that technology with?

*I doubt that many of us read about the invasion of Ceuta by Moroccans without thinking, “This is going to happen all over the West,” though it won’t happen on this scale in many places. Douglas Murray has warned for years about how Western values could be changed for the worse by massive immigration, and he does so this week in The Free Press in a piece called “Europe’s borderless dream becomes a nightmare.”

Eleven years ago, almost to the day, Europe was experiencing a migration wave that threatened to make the continent buckle. In the space of a matter of weeks, more than a million people from Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East made their way into Europe, principally by crossing to the islands of Greece and Italy: “the soft underbelly of Europe.”

As various European countries started to panic, it was German chancellor Angela Merkel who decided to control the day. “Wir schaffen das,” she said in August 2015. “We can do this.” Merkel and some of her counterparts in the EU effectively suspended normal immigration procedures and opened the borders of Europe to anyone who wanted to come.

. . .This week, Ceuta finally did explode—and into a wider global awareness. Footage of migrants pushing by the thousands to get into the territory has caused many people to say that the subject of my 2017 bestseller, The Strange Death of Europe, seems to have been made into a film. In reality, it didn’t need to be. What I wrote about in that book was based on what I had seen with my own eyes. In a way, it is a good thing that the wider world is getting an opportunity to see again what I tried to describe and warn about. By late Friday, Spanish authorities claimed that most of the migrants had either left willingly or been pushed out by security forces. They were much less forthcoming about the many ways their government invited the crisis.

The immediate cause of the crisis in Ceuta is a decision by the Spanish government to normalize the status of migrants who have already broken into Spain illegally. The far-left Spanish government—which receives far less international attention and criticism than it deserves—has been stoking this situation for years. As well as corrupting and politicizing the Spanish justice system, the government of Pedro Sánchez has advertised itself as open to illegal migration. Perhaps Sánchez, like many left- and right-wing leaders in Europe, underestimated the number of people who wanted to come into his country. But by failing to deport illegals and, in fact, normalizing their status, he has done as much as any European leader could have done to increase the draw and thus the flow of people into Spain and therefore the rest of Europe.

. . .As my repeated trips to southern Europe have proved to me, most of the migrants who arrive in Greece, Italy, and Spain will not stay in these countries. They are merely a doorway into Europe. Most of the migrants want to head north for the larger welfare payments. Germany and other northern European countries will therefore be the ones who will end up paying the most for the decisions made by Pedro Sánchez.

The situation is, of course, unsustainable. Like many other European countries, Spain has a national debt that exceeds its annual gross domestic product. It cannot afford to pay to house illegal migrants. The migrants themselves will never put back in taxes what they take out in welfare. The vast majority of those who arrived illegally in the past decade remain a net drain on the state. And that is before you even begin to address the social and civilizational challenges that such movement brings. But Spain—like the rest of Europe—will continue to try to sustain the unsustainable. Something that I have come to realize can go on for a very long time. It has gone on for more than a decade already. Only four days ago in these pages, I described the spate of terrorist attacks conducted in Europe by Islamist migrants. And just as every week’s news includes stories of the worst effects of Europe’s illegal migration, so each week’s news ignores the long-term unsustainability of the economic migration model Europe has put in place.

Pro-migration activists like to talk about figures. Figures which, as I showed in my book, they either invent or actively lie about. But Europeans know that the official figures are baloney. They use their eyes and see what is going on. And they have long come to the conclusion that, in fact, “We can’t do this.” Whether the political leaders in Europe catch up with what the voters can see with their own eyes will decide no less a question than whether the continent of Europe lives or dies.

People will say—and said this about Murray’s book—that he was grossly exaggerating. And immigration itself isn’t inherently bad: it’s been great for the U.S. But unrestrained immigration, particularly from areas where the cultural is refractory to integrating in the West, is not good; and that’s what will degrade Europe.  No-go zones, grooming gangs, economic burdens, and so on: these things are already affecting the quality of life in Europe.

*Bari Weiss has inserted her metatarsals into her mouth again: she’s hired conservative op-ed columnist Ross Douthat, formerly of the NYT, as a correspondent for “60 Minutes” (remember that Weiss was hired a chief news editor at CBS).

In media circles, this week’s hire of a prominent New York Times columnist as a correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes was greeted with disbelief.

The collective response went something like this: “What?!”

Ross Douthat would not have been high on anyone’s list to replace the likes of Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, all experienced reporters who were let go in recent weeks from the venerable news show. Or the likes of Anderson Cooper, who left of his own accord amid the months-long tumult and internal complaints that political bias was being injected into 60 Minutes news reports.

Yes, it seemed downright odd. After all, Douthat has no broadcast television experience and he is – in the journalistic vernacular – an opinion guy, not a news guy. He’s certainly not a practitioner of investigative journalism, the longtime calling card of 60 Minutes.

Douthat is known for his lofty takes on national politics and religion – not for the usual reporting skills of grilling reluctant sources with tough questions and digging out information that somebody important doesn’t want you to have.

His Times boss, the top opinion editor, Katie Kingsbury, had kind words for Douthat in a staff memo, according to a Times article.

As a columnist, Douthat argued for “a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism”, Kingsbury wrote. “He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring.”

Terrific qualities in an opinion writer, certainly, but not exactly a great fit for a job defined decades ago by the bulldog tenacity of the investigative reporter Mike Wallace.

. . .But at the all-new 60 Minutes, the hire is being positioned as a coup. And, in fact, it lines up surprisingly well with the new leadership.

It all began when CBS News’s new ownership – led by the billionaire scion David Ellison – appointed Bari Weiss as editor in chief last October.

Like Douthat’s hire, it didn’t seem to make much sense on the surface.

She too lacked television experience, and she too had made her name on the opinion side of journalism, where she leaned right. She founded the Free Press, a successful digital media company that concentrates on opinion journalism, especially with an “anti-woke” flavor. Before that, she’d been an opinion editor at the New York Times, where she and Douthat had overlapped. Weiss quit the Times, complaining about its internal culture.

Her conservative profile, and her disagreements with legacy media, was just what Ellison wanted, as he tried to cozy up to Donald Trump and others in the administration. After all, Ellison was trying to get big corporate mergers approved and needed federal approval.

When it came time for Weiss to appoint a new executive producer for 60 Minutes, she chose Nick Bilton – another surprising hire who had no TV news experience and who shared roots at the New York Times.

If broadcast networks are judged by ratings, things aren’t going well so far. They have plummeted at CBS News, including at its evening news show, where Weiss had quickly installed a new anchor, Tony Dokoupil, to great fanfare.

Douthat has neither television experience, nor, perhaps more important, any experience in investigative reporting. Most of the times I’ve discussed him is to criticize his credulous defense of his Christianity. And really, how good can an investigative reporter be (for that’s what “60 Minutes” is about) is they can’t even question a belief in unevidenced superstition.  I have taken a wait-and-see attitude towards Weiss at CBS, but right now, in light of Douthat and the lower ratings of CBS News, I’m not optimistic.

*Although I no longer subscribe to Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish, I still get emails containing an excerpt from his main post. This week it’s on Fauci, and called “Neither Saint nor villain,” with the subtitle, “The all-too-human story of a masterful operator, Tony Fauci.”  From the excerpt:

By the looks of him, Tony Fauci is broken. His expression in this week’s hearings was flat, a little haunted, done. The man who once leapt at every chance to testify in public as “Mr Science” suddenly found himself mute, humbled even, leery of “perjury traps.” You’d think a whopping, unprecedented, retroactive pardon might have the benefit of at least liberating the man to tell us everything, good and bad. But nope.

This is life in a broken republic.

Senator Rand Paul bears some of the blame. He’s been engaged in a campaign not just of public accountability but recklessly spittle-flecked demonization. Fauci is not responsible for “probably more deaths than any other individual in the medical world.” Please. There is no context in which any senator should ever be saying “Who the fuck do you think you were?” to a public servant who had been tasked with handling a once-in-a-century plague. And the meretricious leaking of Fauci’s private diary — to add to his public humiliation — is another appalling, gutter low.

But the media and Democratic lionization of Fauci — the near worship of him — may have hurt Fauci more in the end. The diary reveals a truly decadent Washington dynamic: journos and public figures in a mutual “resistance” tongue-bath of dinners and book parties. Yes, it’s fine to maintain contacts, even transactional friendships, with sources. But the chummy to and fro between Fauci and Tapper, for example? Very late republic.

Fauci, on the other hand, seemed to be huffing it:

After being honored at a gala at the National Portrait Gallery (“it was the highest level of AAA list you could imagine in Washington DC”), he writes about hanging out with Venus and Serena Williams, Clive Davis and the celebrity chef Jose Andres. “We were invited to go across the street by Jose to his restaurant Zaytinya for after hours champagne.”

Fauci, for all his academic achievement, was still, beneath it all, an insecure, dorky science nerd from Brooklyn whose life was finally made whole by a call from Barbra Streisand. All too human. The obsession with Hollywood celebrity in DC still amazes me, and the nerd prom, of course, is its apotheosis. But et tu, Fauci? You kind of hope a generationally great scientist would be above that kind of thing. But nah:

A FEW DAYS AGO, Julia Roberts sent me beautiful flower arrangement. mailed her my thanks. Scott Atlas still causing problems with his “herd immunity” issue.

It would have been perfectly ok, for example, if Fauci had simply said from the very beginning, “We don’t know the virus’ origins.” Because we didn’t. In fact, most of the scientists looking at the virus first thought it was “friggin’ likely” engineered. Why? Because it was a bat coronavirus with something called a “furin cleavage site” inserted, and “they were already doing this type of work” at Wuhan, a lab with a woefully inadequate security regimen. Hence one scientist’s dry, subsequent remark to Matt Taibbi:

If someone proposes to insert a furin cleavage site in a bat SARS coronavirus in Wuhan, and then one year later we see a bat SARS coronavirus with a furin cleavage site in Wuhan, that is highly unlikely to be a natural event.

And yet almost immediately, Fauci corralled these same scientists into publishing a paper casting a possible lab leak as definitively debunked and a fringe conspiracy theory. Why that certainty so fast? You might well ask.

Yes, I was somewhat appalled by Fauci’s celebrity worship, but a bit of narcissism isn’t a crime. But his twisting the arm of scientists to support one’s favored hypothesis is unethical.  Fauci isn’t a god, but neither is he malicious. He’s human, and he just got called out for his failings. In his case, though, some of his failings affected a lot of people.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili sees “vanity of vanities,” but Andrzej doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Andrzej: What do you see there?
Hili: Vanity of vanities.

In Polish:

Ja: Co tam widzisz?
Hili: Marność nad marnościami.

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

From Kitty Litterposting:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From The Grammar Police:

Masih criticizes the Spanish Prime Minister for cozying up to Islamists.

From Luana. Yep, the American Association of University Professors endorsed a “progressive” candidate: Abdul El-Sayed for US Senate in the Michigan Democratic primary. The AAUP has become a complete joke, abandoning all pretense of institutional neutrality.

From Larry the Cat, who, a Senior Cat at age 19, still has moxie:

Two from my feed. First, reuniting mother and joey. Sound up to hear the baby wail:

And the wonders of evolution:

And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Professor (retired) Cobb. First, clay feet of one of my evolutionary heroes, Ernst Mayr:

Another example: Ernst Mayr not being happy with sharing the Crafoord Prize with George Williams. Remembered by David Haig.

— Arvid Ågren (@arvidagren.bsky.social) 2026-07-30T18:59:14.642Z

. . . and this is a most excellent tweet:

Finally a toilet for people who just want a quiet place to pet their duck.

— Matthew Highton (@matthighton.bsky.social) 2026-07-29T17:59:53.957Z