Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The old Groundhog Day trope is this, “As the tradition goes, if the groundhog sees his shadow, we will have six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t, an early spring is coming.” The holiday is celebrated on February 2, and over the years the tradition has come to center on Punxsutawney Phil, a groundhog who lives in the eponymous Pennsylvania town.
Every year on February 2, a group of top-hatted men called the “Inner Circle” haul the hapless rodent out of his hibernation, slap him down on a lectern like a pancake, tap him with a cane, and then wait a bit. Then they lift the groundhog into the air and proclaim, via a poem, whether or not he saw his shadow. Here’s this year’s prediction: Phil did see his shadow (so they surmised) so we’re in for a long winter:
Of course the exercise is ludicrous, and Phil’s record of predictions is abysmal: about a 35%-40% accuracy. But I can prove from first principles that this exercise is futile from the get-go.
Here:
To determine if the groundhog sees his shadow there must be
1.) The possibility of a shadow (i.e., the sun must be shining), and
2.) If there is a shadow, the groundhog must have the ability to see it, and we have to know if he did or did not.
But if there is no shadow, as when the weather is overcast like this year, then the groundhog has nothing to see or not see, so he clearly cannot see his shadow whether or not he looks. Thus, if the weather is overcast (as it was this year), you don’t need a damn groundhog: there will be an early spring. (As you see above, he is said to have seen his shadow! Oy!)
If there IS a shadow, then you have to determine whether the groundhog saw it. I doubt that we’re able to do this, as Punxsutawney Phil is not trained to indicate whether or not he saw his own shadow. Thus if it’s sunny, the prediction becomes indeterminate.
Therefore there is only one possible predictive outcome, and that depends solely on whether the weather is sunny or not. The sole prediction is this (here it comes): no shadows possible, therefore an early Spring. That is, of course, bogus as well.
You could diagram this with a decision tree, but I think my logic here is impeccable given our inability to detect qualia in groundhogs. And this indicates why Phil’s bogus “predictions”, based on what the top-hatted men say, have been so inaccurate.
Humans have the ability to do “secondary representations”: that is, to pretend that one object or action is actually different from a real one. This can also be called “pretense”. Examples are children’s “tea parties” in which they use empty pots and toy cups, pretending to drink from the empty cups while knowing they are empty. Then they can pour pretend tea into one of two cups, and when asked to drink will drink from the “pretend full” cup. Or they can have sword fights with sticks, pretending that the sticks are real weapons while knowing they are not.
Secondary representations of states that are only imagined start early (some experiments suggest at 15 months), and the ability to imagine things that haven’t happened, or aren’t real, surely underlie much of human behavior involving planning for the future or imagining what someone might be thinking. The authors of a new paper in Science (see below) argue that no such abilities to “pretend” or have secondary representations are known from any species save humans. (I am not sure about this. As I recall some birds caching food are known to unhide it and re-cache it elsewhere if they see other birds looking on: something that seems like an ability represent another bird’s state of mind.)
And there is anecdotal evidence that chimps can do this. For example, female chimps have been seen to hold and carry sticks as if they were their babies; this involves imagining that the stick is a real baby (that only females do this suggests sexually differentiated behavior). Or if chimps have played with blocks, sometimes they’ve been observed to drag around imaginary strings of blocks. This and other data suggest that some primates can have imaginative representations, but the existing data, say Bastos et al., don’t rule out other explanations.
They thus did three experiments on a single, human-acclimated male bonobo at a facility in Iowa. The bonobo, named Kanzi, was 43 years old and died the year after the experiment (no, he didn’t pretend to be dead!). Kanzi has his own Wikipedia page, which notes his abilities:
Kanzi is well known for his noteworthy cognitive abilities. He had a very well-documented linguistic understanding of the human language. He is believed to be the first non-human great ape to understand and comprehend spoken English. In addition, he was also heavily documented for his understanding and usage of symbols to communicate, usually through lexigrams and partial ASL. The vast amount of information that researchers gathered from Kanzi created a significant impact for the fields of linguistics and cognitive science. Kanzi’s behavior and abilities have been the topic of research published in scientific journals, as well as reports in popular media. He died in 2025, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Click below to go to the paper (pdf here), or you can read a summary of the study in the NYT, written by Alexa Robles-Gil, here (archived here)
Three experiments were involved, but the second was really a control for the first.
First, Kanzi was prepared for the pretense test by letting him learn about a real object: fruit juice that could be poured into glasses from a pitcher. In 18 trials, real juice was poured into one of two cups from a pitcher. Kanzi, who had been trained to point at what he wanted to have, was then asked, “Where’s the juice?” He was successful in all trials.
Then the pretense experiment began. The same pouring was done, but from an empty pitcher into both of two empty cups. Then one of the pretend-filled cups was poured back into the pitcher, so it would be pretend-empty while the other was pretend-full. Again, Kanzi was asked “Where’s the juice?” In 50 trials, involving no reinforcement of any kind for making the correct choice, Kanzi chose the pretend-full cup 34 times and the pretend-empty cup 16 times, a highly significant deviation from an expectation of 50:50 under the null hypothesis. This showed that Kanzi could track where pretend juice was.
The second experiment used a cup of real juice next to an empty cup, and the empty cup was pretend-filled from an empty pitcher. Then Kanzi was asked, “Which one do you want?” Kanzi wanted the real juice in 14 out of 18 trials, again, a significant deviation from 50:50 under the null hypothesis. This showed that Kanzi didn’t simply believe that there was real juice in the empty cups in the first experiment, for he was able to distinguish real juice from pretend-poured juice.
The third experiment was like the second, except involving grapes. First, Kanzi was “trained to indicate the location of a real grape in one of two transparent jars after observing the experimenter sample a grape from a plastic container and place it into one of the jars and perform a control action on the other jar.” When asked to choose one jar to get the grape, he was successful in every one of 18 trials.
Then Kanzi was given pretend grapes to choose. From the paper;
In probe trials, the experimenter pretended to sample a grape from an empty container, then placed it inside one of the two jars, before repeating the same action on the other side. Then, one of the jars was pretend-emptied, and Kanzi was asked, “where’s the grape?” Kanzi succeeded at this conceptual replication even more quickly than in the first experiment. He correctly indicated the location of the remaining pretend grape above chance, in 31 out of 45 unreinforced probe trials
Again, Kanzi was highly successful at the juice and grape trials, able to recognize a pretend action of pouring and emptying juice, and determining which of two jars containing pretend-grapes had had the grape removed. In other words, he was playing tea party, and highly successfully.
This one chimp, then, was able to conceptualize pretend actions as real ones.
There are a number of possibilities not involving secondary representation that the authors say could be happening here. For example, apes like Kanzi who have been trained to recognize symbols to represent objects (as he was), might be better at communicating their wishes than are wild apes. Or symbol training could actually create the ability to do secondary representation. It’s hard to rule out these possibilities since to do such experiments an ape has to be “enculturated” by interaction with humans, and Kanzi was surely highly enculturated.
But if the authors are right that these experiments show that apes can have secondary representation, playing along with “pretense”, that opens up a world of possibilities of thinking about the cognitive abilities of apes (and other animals). The authors dwell on this at the end:
Secondary representations underlie many other complex cognitive capacities, such as imagining future possibilities (20) and mental state attribution (13). Our results may therefore help to interpret other bodies of data that have been hampered by an apparent logical problem (32). Finding that a bonobo can generate secondary representations in pretense contexts increases the likelihood that these representations are available for other cognitive functions. This finding reinforces growing evidence that apes track decoupled mental states, such as beliefs, rather than simply reading behavior (25, 28, 31). It also increases the likelihood that secondary representations could subserve future-oriented behavior (24, 35, 50–53), whose underlying representations have not yet been established.
In conclusion, our findings suggest that some nonhuman animals can generate secondary representations that are decoupled from reality, and that this capacity was likely within the cognitive potential of our last common ancestor with other apes, which lived 6 to 9 million years ago.
It is no surprise that our closest relative (along with chimps) could do this. As Darwin posited in 1871, our own behaviors and mental states evolved from those present in our common ancestors.
Kanzi died suddenly the year after the experiment, simply collapsing. He apparently suffered a heart attack, as he had a history of heart issues and had previously been obese. You can read about his other training in representing objects with keyboard symbols at the Wikipedia site.
From Wikipedia, here’s Kanzi in 2006 (he died in 2025):
William H. Calvin, PhD, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Today we have some flower photos from reader MichaelC. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Sri Lanka Flora!
Recently I sent WEIT some photos from the Dambulla cave temples in Sri Lanka. My wife and I took a “pre-honeymoon” there (we took our honeymoon before the wedding; we’re olde so rules don’t apply to us!) and I have a large number of photos of Sri Lankan flora. [Today we have the flora.]
I hope some of the ones I’ve selected are new to readers. I have tried to identify them, some I’m sure of, others not so much, and some I don’t know at all. The countryside in Sri Lanka is bursting with color; there are flowers everywhere. And birdsong! If you don’t like singing birds, Sri Lankan is not a place for you. Most of the flowers are probably familiar to people – I’ve seen many myself. These were mostly taken at the Royal Botanical Gardens or on the estate of the Dilmah Tea Plantation.
Welcome to another cold, gray day, at least in Chicago: it’s Friday, February 6, 2026 and Bubble Gum Day. Here’s a large bubble blown by Chad Fell, who holds the world record for bubble size: a 20-inch-diameter (50.8 cm) behemoth bubble blown in 2004. He specializes in this stuff: the record required three pieces of gum. Here he blows a 15-incher and tells you how to blow big bubbles.
The Google Doodle is apparently chaging every day, depicting a new sport, now that the Olympics have begun. Today is ice hockey (click screenshot below to see an animated page with today’s schedule (the games, in Milan, run through February 22):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 6 Wikipedia page.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday afternoon cleared the way for California to use a new congressional map intended to give Democrats five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. In a one-sentence order, the justices turned down a request from a group of California Republicans that would have required the state to continue to use the map in place for the last several federal elections in the state while their challenge to the map moves forward.
There were no public dissents from the court’s ruling.
The court’s order came exactly two months after the justices, over a dissent by the court’s three Democratic appointees, granted a request from Texas to allow it to use a new map intended to allow Republicans to pick up five additional House seats in that state. In Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens, the lower court had agreed with the challengers that the “legislature’s motive was predominantly racial.” But the majority put that ruling on hold in its Dec. 4 order, with Justice Samuel Alito – who penned an opinion (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorusch) concurring in the ruling – stating that “it is indisputable … that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”
California’s path to the enactment of its new map was slightly more complicated than in Texas. The California Legislature adopted the new map in August, but under the state constitution an independent redistricting commission – rather than the Legislature – normally has the power to redistrict. The legislation adopting the new map therefore proposed a ballot initiative, known as Proposition 50, that would amend the constitution to allow the use of the new map from 2026 through 2030. By a roughly two-to-one margin, the state’s voters approved the initiative in a special election on Nov. 4.
Three days later, the challengers went to court to try to block the use of the map. They argued that the map violated the Constitution because it relied too heavily on race in drawing 16 congressional districts that impermissibly favored Latino voters.
A divided three-judge district court – which Congress has tasked with hearing congressional redistricting cases – turned down their request, leaving the new map in place. Writing for the majority, U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton concluded “that the evidence of any racial motivation driving redistricting is exceptionally weak, while the evidence of partisan motivations is overwhelming.” Staton also rejected the challengers’ contention that even if the voters had partisan motives when they approved Proposition 50, “they were simply dupes of a racially-motivated legislature.”
. . . On Wednesday afternoon, with five days remaining before the Feb. 9 deadline requested by the challengers, the court turned down the challengers’ request to intervene.
Apparently it’s ok to gerrymander to favor a political position, but not to include or exclude membrs of different ethnic groups. As NPR noted,
The “impetus” for adopting both states’ maps was “partisan advantage pure and simple,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito in a concurring opinion, which fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined.
I don’t like this whole idea of politically-motivated redistricting. As we see with Texas and California, it leads to Gerrymandering Wars. There are procedures to create districts of equal representation without preference to the identity or politics of voters.
The television news anchor Savannah Guthrie said in an emotional video on Wednesday night that she and her siblings were ready to listen to ransom offers from whoever might have abducted their mother, but that the family would first need proof that she remains alive.
In the video, Ms. Guthrie, an anchor on the “Today” show, tried to hold back tears as she sat between her older siblings, Annie and Camron, and read from a piece of paper. She said that her family had heard about purported ransom letters that had been sent to news outlets seeking money in exchange for the release of their mother, Nancy.
“We are ready to talk,” Ms. Guthrie said in the video. “However, we live in a world where voices and images are easily manipulated. We need to know, without a doubt, that she is alive, and that you have her.”
The plea for proof of life was a dramatic turn in the mystery of what happened to Nancy Guthrie, 84, after her son-in-law dropped her off at her home in a quiet neighborhood just outside of Tucson, Ariz., on Saturday night. She did not show up for church the next morning, prompting a large-scale search that has grown only more desperate.
The Guthries and police officials have said that Nancy Guthrie is mentally sharp but has trouble moving around and requires daily medication.
“She needs it to survive,” Savannah Guthrie said in the video. “She needs it not to suffer.”
Chris Nanos, the sheriff in Pima County, Ariz., has said that investigators have no suspects and do not know how many people might have been involved in the kidnapping or what their motivations might be. The sheriff’s department is expected to hold another news conference on Thursday at 11 a.m. Mountain time.
President Trump spoke with Ms. Guthrie by phone earlier Wednesday, and he said on social media after her video was posted that he had directed all federal law enforcement to be at her and the local police’s disposal.
“The prayers of our Nation are with her and her family,” Mr. Trump wrote. “GOD BLESS AND PROTECT NANCY!”
The pain of the family (and their religiosity) is clear from the video below. This story is still leading the NBC news every day, but I do wonder if other people who have loved ones missing are jealous because when a celebrity is involved the case gets a lot more intention. The statement “we are ready to talk” implies that the Guthries are willing to pay to get their mother back, but who wouldn’t?
Here’s a news video including the complete plea of the Guthrie family. There were two ransom notes, but the deadline for the first one passed without any word from the kidnappers.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the plannedWhiteHouse ballroom will be the same “height and scale” as the existing mansion, signaling his ambitious plans for the project despite concerns from a federal judge, members of two review panels and historic preservationists that it will be too big and will spoil the centuries-old symbol of American power and democracy
The planned 90,000-square-foot addition, which Trump has said is necessary to host VIP events, represents the most significant change to the White House complex in decades. In a Truth Social post Tuesday, he defended its appearance and size.
“It is totally in keeping with our historic White House,” he wrote. “This beautiful building will be, when complete … The Greatest of its kind ever built!”
In the roughly 130-word post, Trump also unveiled an architect’s rendering of the building: a towering neoclassical structure adorned with stately columns and an imposing pediment — the triangular structure above the portico — whose apex, according to Trump, matches the main mansion’s North Portico. The rendering was prepared by Shalom Baranes Associates, the firm handling the project, according to the White House.
Trump’s announcement came as construction crews continued their work on the underground infrastructure needed to support a building of that size — and as opponents awaited a decision from U.S. District Judge Richard Leon on whether to order that work to stop.
The president’s administration is also in the middle of a nine-week push to win approval for the project from two federal review committees. The goal is a green light by early March and a start to aboveground construction as early as April.
“This space will serve our Country well for, hopefully, Centuries into the future!” Trump wrote.
With historic preservationists saying they’re worried the 90,000-square-foot structure will overshadow the iconic main mansion, Leon and members of the two committees have asked whether the administration can reduce the building’s size.
I’m wondering what would happen if the project were stopped by the courts? Would they rebuild the East Wing? That doesn’t seem to be in the cards because Trump. Here are projections of the former East Wing and the new one with the ballroom, both appearing (uncredited) in the Post article; I’m not sure whether these are Trump’s renderings, but the East Wing is suddenly GIANT.
Old:
New (note that it’s nearly as high as the main building):
*In a WaPo editorial (I’m trying to quote them before the paper disappears), two law professors at NYU, Richard Epstein and Max Raski, criticize singer Billie Eilish’s “progressive” land acknowledgements at the Grammy Awards: “No Billie Eilish, American are not thieves on stolen land,” (Article is archived here.) I noted recently when I read the book Empire of the Summer Moon that the Plains Indians, at least, had no notion of “owning” land, and that roughly a half dozen tribes could use the same land for hunting, squatting, and making war.
Billie Eilish brought the house down at the Grammy Awards on Sunday when she declared, “No one is illegal on stolen land.” While the first half of the statement was a fan favorite aimed at President Donald Trump and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the second half was a throwback evokingpopular land declarations this past decade that consider all land stolen if not derived from an original indigenous title. But it’s time to put Eilish’s theory of property out to pasture: Americans are not thieves who built on stolen land.
In 2022, Los Angeles County unanimously adopted a land acknowledgment proclaiming “that we occupy land originally and still inhabited and cared for by the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples.” Accepting generational guilt, the county further “acknowledge[s] that settler colonization resulted in land seizure, disease, subjugation, slavery, relocation, broken promises, genocide, and multigenerational trauma.” What the resolution fails to mention is that some of this mayhem was inflicted by one Native American tribe on another. Consider the fierce conquest of the southern Plains by the Comanche or the prevalence ofNative American slavery before the European arrival. It also fails to mention that “we” — presumably White people — inflicted similar harms on one another across centuries of war, displacement and conquest.
Los Angeles inserts no time dimension into its denunciations, thus implying this principle applies identically to dispossessions that took place 1,000 or 10 years ago. Thankfully statements of apology, however sincere, don’t transfer title backward to the original owners, for if they did, civilization would collapse.
he land long ago taken from X, has in the interim centuries been conveyed to Y and Z, and countless others who then have built, torn down and built again homes, hospitals and schools for millions. The effort to undo the past would involve trillions of dollars in transfer payments and coercedtitle shifts that would unsettle every home mortgage, every mining and oil lease, and every graveyard in the United States.
To prevent this social catastrophe, every nation has always adopted a bifurcated view of property, poetically articulated in the Harvard Law Review by the influential California jurist Henry Ballantine in 1918. Principle No. 1 reads: “For true it is, that neither fraud nor might/Can make a title where there wanteth right.” From this it looks like all titles remain perpetually subject to challenge.
But every society also understands that people should be allowed to enjoy security in their purchases and not have to worry about what happened centuries ago. Thus, a second principle to protect these interests, as Ballantine writes, imposes strict limitations on when to sue, for “the great purpose is automatically to quiet all titles which are openly and consistently asserted, to provide proof of meritorious titles, and correct errors in conveyancing.”
. . . . Fortunately, Eilish does not actually practice whatshe preaches, for otherwise anyone would be free to squat in her mansion, by asserting the property belongs to the Tongva, not her. But the same legal doctrines that protect her also protect Americans against sweeping claims that they live on stolen land. Performative politics usually ends when celebrities get off stage and become, however briefly, ordinary people.
I’m wondering whether the Tongva even had a concept of private land ownership. The authors don’t deal with that question, which becomes less important in light of present property law that the authors discuss (see archived article for details).
Maj. Ella Waweya was selected on Tuesday by the military to replace Col. Avichay Adraee as the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic-language spokesperson.
Waweya, 36, who is known as “Captain Ella,” is among the most senior female Arab Muslim officers in the military.
She was born in the central Arab town of Qalansawe and joined the IDF voluntarily in 2013, initially hiding her service from her family.
Currently, Waweya serves as Adraee’s deputy and boasts more than half a million followers on TikTok and 170,000 on X.
Adraee, who served as the Arabic-language spokesman for the past 20 years, was set to retire.
Waweya would be promoted to lieutenant colonel, and a handover ceremony was expected to take place in the coming weeks.
Adraee had become a familiar face during the ongoing war, particularly due to the military’s use of his social media pages to issue evacuation warnings ahead of strikes in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Yemen, and even Iran.
With millions of followers across his social media accounts and hundreds of interviews on Arabic-language media channels, including Al Jazeera, Adraee became the IDF’s face — and somewhat of a celebrity — in the Arab world.
Now Lt. Col. Ella will run the Arab-language communications for the IDF. Here’s a video of the new spokeswoman, and a bit about her story. I seriously doubt that there are any Jews in Hamas, and those who call Israel an “apartheid” state don’t know what they’re talking about. Do you ever hear them calling Palestine an “apartheid territory”? This is one tough woman! Follow her on her (X) Twitter page.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili seems unaware that thousands of people hear their conversations. But Andrzej reminded me that they have a lot more conversations that aren’t reproduced.
Hili: We’re very lucky.
Andrzej: What do you mean?
Hili: That no one hears all our conversations.
In Polish:
Hili: Mamy dużo szczęścia.
Ja: Co masz na myśli?
Hili: To, że nikt nie słyszy wszystkich naszych rozmów.
.@NYCMayor, while mass killings are unfolding in Iran, you have chosen silence.
I invite you to engage with me, to listen, and to educate yourself so you can be a mayor who truly represents all who call this city home, writes @AlinejadMasih. pic.twitter.com/oKNCKTHT3f
. . . and one I retweeted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Hungarian Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was five years old and would be 87 today had he lived. https://t.co/Dh2mRzZ9qL
Our armadillos take their exercise very seriously. Happy belated #ArmadilloDay from our Ambassadors, Chaco and Willow the three-banded armadillos, and Dillon the nine-banded armadillo!🎥: Behavioral Husbandry Manager, Heather G.
There are a fair number of newbies coming on to the site, which is great, but a couple of them are hateful, like the one who tried to refer to your host yesterday as a “kike faggot who runs this site” with “a fine hooked nose as any other degenerate kike”. Needless to say, that person has been vanquished to the hinterland for antisemites for committing a big-time Roolz violation. But I wanted to let other new readers/commenters know that there are guidelines for commenting here, called, in Chicago argot, “Da Roolz“. You can find them on the left sidebar or at the preceding link. They may seem long, but I find them useful for ensuring civility and reasonable discussion on this website. If you haven’t read them, please do before posting.
And if you want to send me wildlife photos (I welcome good ones), read the sidebar post “How to send me wildlife photos.”
Well, I still have no new wildlife photos, but so you can see your daily organism, I’m stealing another batch of photos from Scott Ritchie of Cairns, Australia. Scott’s captions are indented and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. You can find Scott’s Facebook page here.
And please send in your own pictures!
The first leg of my Melbourne to Sydney tour is finished. While I dipped on the Lyrebird (winter is their season!), I did see many other cool birds. Here is the 1st leg on the Victoria Gippsland trip, birds captured on a brief stopover and walk in the Dandenongs. It was amusing stumbling across a Swiss nature photographer that I follow on Youtube. I’m sure Fabian Fopp was equally alarmed that some old fart came out of the blue and said “You’re Fabian Fopp!”
Anyway, it was fun chatting, and photographing parrots with him. I’ll get the lyrebird next winter!
Welcome to Thursday, February 5, 2026, and National Optimist Day. This is NOT my day! Here’s a Jewish joke about the stereotypical mindset:
What’s the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist?
The Jewish pessimist says, “Things can’t possibly get any worse.”
The Jewish optimist says, “Sure they can!”
I first tasted Nutella last year. It was okay but a bit too sweet when spread on toast (I’ve had variants from other countries that are better). But I’m aware of its immense popularity; Here’s how it’s made commercially (note that it contains palm oil, which is not only bad for you, but whose production contributes to deforestation).
And there’s a new Google Doodle honoring the Olympic games: click to see where it goes. Curling!
Posting may be light until next Tuesday as I have paperwork to do and talks and debates to hear. Some retirement!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 5 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Sadly, I hoped this wouldn’t happen, but massive layoffs at the Washington Post suggests that the renowned paper is now circling the drain (h/t Thomas).
The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.
The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.
The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.
Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said on a call Wednesday morning with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.
“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Mr. Murray said. “And after some years when, candidly, The Post has had struggles.”
Mr. Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying The Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative A.I., had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that The Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”
“Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” he said.
The Post’s sports section will close, though some of its reporters will stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports. The Post’s metro section will shrink, and the books section will close, as will the “Post Reports” daily news podcast.
Mr. Murray told the staff that while The Post’s international coverage also would be reduced, reporters would remain in nearly a dozen locations. Reporters and editors in the Middle East were laid off, as well as in India and Australia.
This is ineffably sad; For man years the Post was almost co-equal to the New York Times as the Paper of Record. It was the Post that tracked down the Watergate scandal thanks to Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting, and also played a key role in publishing and publicizing the Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. Those papers helped bring an end to the useless Vietnam War. Now the Post is a shadow of its former self, and I wonder if it will survive. Blame Jeff Bezos, if you wish. I myself don’t really understand why great papers fall apart like this.
Matthew sent several tweets about PostGate. The first one live-tweets the downfall of the Post, section by section, including sports and books:
Speaking to WaPo employees, editor Matt Murray says cuts are about “positioning ourselves to become more essential to people's lives, and what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape, and after some years when, candidly, the Post has had struggles to do that."
In addition to sports, the Washington Post is killing its book section, suspending its Post Reports podcast, restructuring its metro section, and shrinking its international footprint.
*Bret Stephens, who is rapidly becoming my favorite NYT columnist, has an op-ed giving Democrats further warning about nominating California’s governor as a Presidential candidate: “Will Newsom be the Democrats’ next mistake?” Another op-ed I highlighted a day or two ago another op-ed criticizing Newsom for his waffling, while Stephens points out that his record as governor won’t impress many centrist Americans.
Gavin Newsom has a memoir coming out this month, “Young Man in a Hurry” — another heavy hint that he intends to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. To judge by some of the more fawning media profiles (Vogue describes him as “lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque”), he’s practically already won.
Democrats should be careful whom they crush on. Newsom’s record as governor of California is a Republican strategist’s perfect foil. Among the more salient points:
Some of the points (there are others):
Affordability. That’s supposed to be the Democrats’ magic word against Republicans amid persistently high prices, especially for first-time home buyers. Yet U.S. News & World Report ranked California dead last in 2025 in its affordability rankings. The California Legislature’s own Analyst’s Office noted that “Prices for mid-tier homes are about $755,000 — more than twice as expensive as the typical mid-tier U.S. home.” And in 16 California counties, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Alameda, a six-figure salary can still be deemed “low-income” for a family of three, according to the state’s housing department.
Poverty and income inequality.The U.S. Census Bureau reported last year that California is tied with Louisiana for the country’s highest “supplemental” poverty rate, which takes account of cost-of-living calculations over a three-year period, with roughly one in six Californians living in poverty. In Pennsylvania, by contrast, the number is about one in 10. California also has one of the country’s highest rates of income inequality: In 2022, the average income of the top 5 percent was nearly $600,000 higher than the average income of the bottom 20 percent.
Education.To its credit, the University of California system remains one of the jewels of American higher education. K-12? Not so much. U.S. News ranks California 38th in the country, behind Mississippi and Louisiana. Cal Matters found that while the state had increased “per pupil spending by 102 percent since 2013, reading comprehension has remained flat while math skills have dropped.”
. . .Wokeness.Newsom understands that Democrats’ obsession with progressive social justice causes, and the censorious spirit that goes with it, hurt the party in 2024, which is why he has gone out of his way to engage with right-wing influencers on his podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom.” Last year, he made waves when he seemed to break with progressives on the question of trans athletes, calling the participation of biological males in women’s and girls’ sports “deeply unfair.”
Then again, Newsom signed SB132, the law that allowed a biological male, Tremaine Carroll, serving 25 years to life for violent offenses, to transfer to a women’s prison, in which Carroll is alleged to have raped two female inmates. Newsom signed another bill that forbids educators from being required to tell parents that their children have changed their names and pronouns. That won’t be easy to defend in a general election where the race will hang on tens of thousands of votes in states like Georgia, Michigan and North Carolina.
As the early swooning over Newsom suggests, some voters’ hearts are fluttering over the prospect of his candidacy. Democrats who take the 2028 stakes seriously should stick to just using their brains.
The other issues not mentioned here include a high rate of people moving out of the state (the fastest rate in the nation), people fleeing high taxes and unaffordable housing. .
Well, these would be negatives so long as voters in the rest of the country know about them. But Republicans are savvy enough to glom onto them in campaign ads, and Newsom will have to defend them in any debate. He’s too slick for me, and his latter-day pretense that he’s really a centrist is unconvincing. I still see no viable Democratic candidate on the horizon.
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommended on Tuesday that its members refrain from performing gender transition procedures on young patients until they reach age 19, a shift that comes at a time of mounting opposition to such care at the state and federal levels.
The group’s new position stands in contrast to those taken by most major medical associations in the United States, which endorse a range of treatments for adolescents and teenagers struggling with gender dysphoria. The treatments include puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapies and, in rarer cases, surgeries.
In its statement, the society said the new recommendations were prompted by what it described as a lack of quality research on the long-term outcomes for young people who had undergone surgical interventions like mastectomies and cited “emerging evidence of treatment complications and potential harms.”
The announcement drew praise from the Trump administration, which issued a statement commending the group for “disavowing pediatric sex-rejecting procedures.” In the statement, Jim O’Neill, the deputy health secretary, said, “Today marks another victory for biological truth in the Trump administration.”
Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, a social scientist who studies transgender medicine at York University in Toronto, said the medical group’s new position reflected the growing political backlash over gender-affirming care as well as liability concerns for practitioners in the field.
Last week, a jury in New York State ruled in favor of a woman who claimed a mastectomy she received as a teenager had left her disfigured, making it the first malpractice verdict against providers of gender transition care by a patient who later came to regret the decision.
The ASPS is not a tiny organization: it represents 11,000 American and Canadian physicians. Wikipedia has just added this to its entry: “In February 2026, the ASPS became the first major medical association in the U.S. to change its guidance on gender transition surgery for minors, recommending to its members that chest, genital, and facial surgeries not be performed until age 19.”
I agree with this decision: 19, which is between the two ages I suggested (19 and 21) is about the right age to allow people to make their own decisions about surgery, which have been rushed by rah-rah parents, friends, and doctors for too long. You can read their new 9-page position statement here.
*Mayor Mamdani is deep-sixing programs for gifted and talented students in NYC kindergartens. He’s also facing blame for that, as well as for the deaths of 16 homeless people who froze to death in recent weeks (Hizzoner decided not to force people into warming centers; see Luana’s tweet below). From the Free Press article by Maud Maron:
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism for his plans to phase out the public school system’s gifted and talented (G&T) program for kindergarten, starting next year. This feels like Groundhog Day for public school parents like me who fought former mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to end G&T, abolish entrance exams for the city’s prestigious specialized high schools, and root out, in the name of “anti-racism,” any honors program that smacked of academic excellence.
The same tired arguments about the racism of meritocracy are still unconvincing and are still unsupported by data or evidence, yet tenaciously hang on like land acknowledgments, “hands up, don’t shoot” chants, and the idea that socialism will actually work this time.
No matter what happens to the New York City school system, which had 906,248 students during the 2024–25 school year and is the largest in the United States, Mamdani’s first month as mayor will be forever marred by the deaths of 16 people who “passed away outside during this brutal stretch of cold,” as he put it on Monday. The new mayor reversed a policy by predecessor Eric Adams that would have allowed the police to get the homeless inside. Mamdani’s brand of progressivism essentially handcuffed the police in order to “protect” the homeless from the very people who might have saved their lives.
About 18,000 elementary school students in the city are enrolled in G&T, with about 2,500 admitted for kindergarten each fall.
Abolishing the program shares with anti-policing policies the cruel consequence of managing to do the most harm to those who are cited most often as deserving of help. In a study of student data from 2010 to 2019, black and Hispanic students in G&T programs showed the largest increases in academic proficiency scores. About 90 percent of the city’s 148,000 charter school students are from black and Hispanic families who have chosen to leave the one-size-fits-all equity education offered by the “abolish G&T” crowd to whom Mamdani panders. (That number does not include the roughly 50,000 children who are on waiting lists.)
When Mamdani was running for the New York State Assembly in 2020, he told the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club: “New York State continues to uphold policies that perpetuate educational and residential segregation, mass incarceration, and economic disenfranchisement. As a graduate of Bronx Science, I have personally witnessed just how segregated New York City public schools are, especially our specialized high schools. I support measures to integrate our public schools and fully fund our education system, including the abolition of the SHSAT.”
Under Mamdani’s brand of communism democratic socialism, all shall get the same education, even if children as a group are better off with “segregation”, as Hizzoner calls it. It’s clear that I’m no fan of the Mayor, who I see as an antisemit who makes promises he can’t keep. Well, all politicans do that, but his promises are what got him elected: free daycare, free public transportation, city grocery stores, and the like. I’d eat my hat if he manages to keep them, though I don’t have a hat and have nothing to lose. He’s slick and said to be charming, but he’s not good for NYC or its Jews. Fortunately, he can’t do much damage to the rest of the country, and Ceiling Cat help us if he runs for another office (like a Representative) after his term as mayor.
Ms. [Khrystyna] Yurchenko is among a growing number of Ukrainians who say they would hand over the part of the Donbas still controlled by Ukraine to Russia if that would end the war.
This represents a notable shift for a war-weary Ukrainian population. Giving up territory that Russia has been unable to capture has long been considered a red line. But what once seemed impossible now appears less so, as the Kremlin insists that U.S.-backed peace negotiations will advance only if Ukraine agrees to walk away from the Donbas.
“For me, peace is the priority, and if there would definitely be no war after we give away the Donbas, I would be ready to leave,” she said. She would support surrendering the territory, she said, only if Ukraine’s allies offered strong guarantees for the country’s postwar security.
The future of the Donbas is among the thorniest issues as Ukraine, Russia and the United States continue talks in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, on Wednesday.
Ukraine has spent years fortifying cities in the Donbas, and has lost a huge number of soldiers defending the industrial region. The territory covers parts of several regions, including Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine still holds about 20 percent of Donetsk but has lost all of Luhansk.
. . . In public statements, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Ukraine remains opposed to a unilateral withdrawal from the Donbas. But he has also occasionally hinted at flexibility, saying that both Russia and Ukraine must be prepared to compromise as Ukraine comes under pressure on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.
Polling reflects a growing openness to territorial concessions.
. . . Still, a majority of Ukrainians remain opposed. Many say they are prepared to continue enduring hardships, including Russia’s campaign to knock out the country’s energy infrastructure during a bitterly cold winter.
This is as sadder than the downfall of the Post. Although many Americans seem unconcerned with the war between Russia and Ukraine, it is a just and moral war for Ukraine. The bloody Russians just invaded and took whatever land they wanted in a latter-day Anschluß. It’s not right, but there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Will Russia do this with other countries? Who knows?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pondering the past.
Hili: What did garden look like like ten thousand years ago? Andrzej: It had a thicker layer of ice.
In Polish:
Hili: Jak nasz ogród wyglądał dziesięć tysięcy lat temu.
Ja: Miał grubszą warstwę lodu.
From Masih. Yep, Mamdani’s office issues a “Hijab Day” celebration announcement. Masih doesn’t like it:
Mr. @ZohranKMamdani, really? Right now?
To be honest, I feel tortured in my own beautiful city of New York, watching you celebrate “World Hijab Day” while women in my wounded country, Iran, are being jailed, shot, and killed for refusing the hijab and the Islamic ideology behind… https://t.co/EW0GLq9I5n
This Hungarian Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was about four years old, and would be 86 today had he lived. https://t.co/jNRXo2TSNv
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a fish wearing a jellyfish coat. But what is this “partly” immune to its sting stuff?
Imagine wearing a #jellyfish as a helmet!?!Well, that’s exactly what this juvenile jack is doing! Mostly immune to its sting, the jack has taken the jellyfish prisoner. Shot using #scuba, out over the deep abyss, drifting at night. #blackwater #blackwaterdiving #scubadiving #gug
After a month of careful study, I have been able to identify the key times when kittens go nuts:- Just after food- When hungry- Just after a poo- When needing a poo- Night time- Day time- Misc
