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.
Susan Harrison of UC Davis is back with some nice photographs of birds, including Barred Owls. Nearly half a million of these owls are scheduled to be shot in what I see as a misguided attempt to save the Northern Spotted Owl. I think Susan agrees with me here, but I won’t speak for her. At any rate, her IDs and captions are included and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Large birds of the Oregon Coast, August 2026
One fog-bound morning on the central Oregon coast, a fellow camper hailed me with “There’s an owl by the outhouses!” This wasn’t a total surprise since, in the middle of the previous night, the distinctive “who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you” call of a Barred Owl (Strix varia) could be heard. We watched as the large grey specter glided along the edge of a meadow, perching here and there in classic hunched-owl position to look and listen for camper-attracted rodents.
Barred Owl:
Sadly to me, the US Forest Service has announced plans to kill large numbers of Barred Owls in a desperate measure to save endangered Northern Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis caurina). It’s a complicated issue upon which reasonable people (i.e., owl lovers) disagree, and you can read and decide for yourself here and elsewhere. But I will not reveal the location of any Barred Owl!
JAC: Let me add that the Northern Spotted Owl is a subspecies of the Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis) and is not itself a distinct species. There are in fact several subspecies of Spotted Owls.
A nearly full-grown Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) begged incessantly to be fed by one of its parents; the other sat silently in a neighboring tree. The juvenile finally flew off to preen, but was quickly displaced from its perch by a Red-Shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) that repeatedly chased the young Osprey around the meadow.
Red-Shouldered Hawk:
At the nearby coast, Elegant Terns (Thalasseus elegans) and Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) held a bathing party, and the preening pelicans stretched their unearthly pouches:
Welcome to Thursday, August 27, 2026, and National Burger Day. Here’s a bacon cheeseburger I had in Hawaii (Oahu) in 2019 and, as is common with Hawaiian plate lunches, the vegetable was macaroni and cheese. Note that there’s also pineapple on the burger.
To celebrate the last holiday above, here’s my latest hero, basketball player Sophie Cunningham, playing Rock Paper Scissors with a young fan, with an athletic shoe being the prize:
And, apropos, here’s the famous moment when Cunningham pointed at an opponent (DeWanna Bonner) for 22 seconds, indicating that Bonner should have received a foul along with Cunningham’s teammate Caitlin Clark. Cunningham got a foul for pointing, too. This is destined to become a historical meme on the Internet. Cunningham pulls no punches (except when she’s retaliating on the court), has a potty mouth, but most of all, I admire her for insisting that only biological women should be competing in women’s athletics.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 27 Wikipedia page.
In early July, terrifying shrieks were heard across Kyiv. As part of a wider attack on the Ukrainian capital, Russia had launched cheap one-way drones powered by turbojet engines instead of propellers.
The Shahed drones, now more like missiles, were capable of flying up to around 300 miles an hour—roughly three times as fast as older versions. Some 30 people were killed in the attack, which also included ballistic and cruise missiles.
It was the latest innovation in one-way attack drones and, like others, it only became possible thanks to China, whose factories provided the engines, according to Ukrainian officials who examined some of them.
Washington’s main strategic rival has long served as arguably the most important clearinghouse for Shahed components, including engine parts, servomotors and gyroscopes, according to current and former U.S. officials and analysts.
It is part of a complex global supply chain that analysts say enabled an isolated country—Iran—to pioneer and share one of the most transformative military innovations of the era: cheap, flying, killing machines that have bedeviled the U.S. and its allies, added to the civilian toll in Ukraine and undermined America’s military edge in the Middle East.
China’s foreign ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment. It previously said it strictly regulates the export of “dual use” components, which can serve both civilian and military purposes. It rejects unilateral U.S. sanctions that punish unauthorized trading of such parts, saying they violate international law.
The Shahed—a deceptively simple and destructive flying wedge of fiberglass, microchips and explosives costing as little as $20,000—helps show how weapons proliferation has changed, and why tapping global supply chains is now so important.
In the past, technological innovations in warfare tended to come from major powers that had their own industrial bases, enabling them to produce their weapons at scale. The AK-47 rifle is a good example: It was developed by Russian designers, influenced by a German assault rifle, then mass-produced by the Soviet Union’s sprawling factories.
In today’s world, however, any country with an idea for a weapon—even a middle power such as Iran—can turn to cheap parts suppliers abroad, especially in China.
To develop Shaheds, Iran employed a design pioneered by the U.S. and West Germany. To actually make them, however, Tehran had to source parts from across the globe, including Western nations as well as China. Yet even the Western parts tended to get moved through shell companies in mainland China or Hong Kong to disguise their origin, and over time, many were replaced by components made there, according to former U.S. officials, Ukrainian officials and analysts.
. . . The Shahed and its variants continue to wreak havoc. Shahed drones helped devastate a U.S. base in Bahrain at the start of the war with Iran, fueling Navy logistics problems. Ukraine’s air force says Russia has launched Shaheds each night this month. Such drones have also forced the U.S. and its allies to burn through pricey interceptors.
Here’s a vido about the Shaheds, which are bigger than I thought:
The use of drones has revolutionized warfare; they are are kamikaze bombs that can kill without endangering the “pilots”.
The thing about Dolly—the reason Annie and I loved her so much, and from the very beginning—was that that woman could sing. She could really, really sing. If you don’t know what we fell in love with, stop everything and listen to her recording of “Mule Skinner Blues (Blue Yodel No. 8).” Any questions you might have about how she got so far in her life will be answered. At the root of that massive career that came to stand for so many things was a great voice and a childhood drenched in one of the great American art forms: bluegrass music.
. . . She was also a great songwriter. She wrote her two most famous songs, “I Will Always Love You” (which was made famous by Whitney Houston in the film The Bodyguard) and “Jolene” on the same day in 1973. Parton had performed duets with country and western singer Porter Wagoner on his regional television show for seven years and suddenly it was over and she never explained why. But those two songs—about begging another woman not to steal her man and about undying love for someone who has left her—explain all you need to know about that foundational experience.
. . . Her 1977 album, Here You Come Again, included a song called “Two Doors Down,” which became a tremendous hit and won her a Grammy. And with that, America gave up any inclination to marginalize her, and she was accepted into the select group of celebrities who are welcome anywhere and recognized by just about everyone. She wore them down with her talent and her willingness to be in on the joke of her own persona. As the years passed, sh
It’s tempting to recognize the entirety of her public performance as a kind of drag: the huge wigs and elaborate costumes, her enormous bosom, in combination with her playful willingness to engage with talk show hosts on the level of her obvious, and in some ways ludicrous, sexuality. And yet, there never, ever seemed to be some other, more authentic side of her. Like a great star of the past she never, ever appeared without being fully made-up and extravagantly dressed.
Dolly Parton was a pure product of America. She was Scots Irish, part of a population that came to this country very early in its history, the majority during the 18th century, and she maintained a great pride in that heritage—of the Great Smoky Mountains and of surviving poverty and of helping to preserve its customs and products.
Try to think of anyone who has made as deep and long-lasting a mark on American culture as Dolly Parton. She was a child of the Deep South who was pro-gay; she assiduously avoided getting caught up in anything “political,” so it was easy to ascribe to her whatever opinions you had about the country; and as far as I know, she never got caught up in public fights of any kind.
You never realize how influential someone really is until they die and their contributions are trotted out in obituaries. As far as I can see, Parton never made a misstep, and the press is all laudatory. That’s not just because she was careful in how she behaved; it’s because she was a genuinely good person.
*The NYT obituary of Dolly Parton reveals that, as many suspected, she died of cancer or its complications (article archived here). I’ve put in a few bits from the (very good) obituary, clearly prepared in advance, that might be new to you, as they were to me:
Dolly Parton, a rags-to-rhinestones daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music and beyond with an outsize personality and down-home wit that enshrined her as one of America’s most cherished originals, died on Tuesday in Nashville. She was 80.
Her death was announced by her family. A spokesman said that she died after a brief battle with cancer and that she had been admitted to the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville on Friday. Concerns about Ms. Parton’s health arose last year when she postponed a Las Vegas residency, and intensified to the point that she took to social media in October to announce, “I ain’t dead yet.” This May, she canceled the residency but said that she had responded well to treatment after her immune and digestive systems had, as she put it, “got all out of whack” in recent years.
And, like Brian Wilson, she simply had to write, and was doing it constantly:
“Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast,” she told The Times in 2002. “I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder. I write every day, even when I’m on a plane, in the tub or on the bus. It burns in me.”
She continued: “Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out. Not everything I write is good, but it’s all good for me — like therapy.”
. . .The Partons were so poor that Dolly’s father had to pay the doctor who attended her birth with a sack of cornmeal. Ms. Parton may have grown up without plumbing, heat, electricity and other modern conveniences, but she always insisted that she also grew up happy, and that music offered her a refuge from want.
. . . When she was 5 or so, she wrote her first song, a ditty about a corncob doll with corn-silk hair called “Little Tiny Tasseltop.” She started singing on radio and on TV at 10, on the “Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour” in Knoxville, securing bookings with the help of her uncle Bill Owens, who also bought her her first guitar. The two would go on to write many songs together.
. . . Endowed with a surfeit of creativity and an unflagging work ethic, Ms. Parton admitted in interviews to sleeping as few as three hours a night. She was nominated for more than 50 Grammy Awards, 10 of which she won, along with being recognized for lifetime achievement by the Recording Academy in 2011. A show about her life, “Dolly: A True Original Musical,” is scheduled to open on Broadway in early 2027.
There are nearly four thousand comments on her obituary, and the NYT even posted a few at the end of her obituary:
If only humans were more like starfish. Oyster farmers learned the hard way that if you slice up one of these ocean dwellers, some of the pieces will regenerate into entirely new animals. Imagine harnessing that superpower to regrow diseased or injured body parts at will. This is not entirely in the realm of science fiction. Scientists have already made extraordinary progress in manufacturing tissue for medical purposes. I’d put money down on this frontier producing multiple breakthroughs in the next decade.
Damir Marusic: Advances in robotics
While many of the headline-grabbing medical stories recently have focused on artificial intelligence, I’m more intrigued by the strides being made in robotics — particularly the prospect that machines might soon be aiding us both inside and outside our bodies.
Stanford researchers are developing a millimeter-scale micro-robot that could be injected into the bloodstream, swim through arteries and treat strokes. Guided magnetically, the prototype can compress clots down to a fraction of their original size, potentially bringing a lifesaving treatment to hospitals that lack specialized stroke surgeons. Meanwhile, robotic exoskeletons are becoming lighter and cheaper. Originally built mainly for rehabilitation, they could eventually help people with paralysis, weakened muscles or simply aging knees move more naturally and independently.
Jim Geraghty: T cell immunotherapy
Back in 2025, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists for their work in identifying and defining regulatory T cells. Those are white blood cells within your immune system that control your body’s response to foreign substances; the Nobel committee summarized T cells as your “immune system’s security guards.” If you have high-functioning T cells, your body does a good job of identifying cells that are potentially harmful, and you tend to not get cancer and live for a long time, even past 100 years.
. . . But this summer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Orca-T, the first immunotherapy based on regulatory T cells, to treat adults with certain high-risk blood cancers. If we can harness the power of these high-functioning T cells, everyone could have a healthy immune system.
Leana S. Wen: GLP-1 drugs
It’s impossible to have a conversation about transformative health innovations without mentioning GLP-1 drugs. They have already revolutionized the treatment of diabetes and obesity, which is no small feat considering that about 40 percent of American adults have obesity, a condition that increases
But what excites me most is that we are still at the beginning of understanding what these drugs can do. Researchers are studying their potential to treat conditions ranging from addiction to neurodegenerative diseases. And their success is catalyzing conversations about optimizing health as we age so that people don’t just live longer but extend the years they can live well.
Dominic Pino: Investment in future breakthroughs
I am excited not just by Moderna’s melanoma vaccine, which looks like it could save lives, but also by last week’s enormous surge in Moderna shareholders’ wealth. Hear me out.
The pharmaceutical company’s stock price more than doubled on the news that the vaccine had succeeded in a clinical trial. That should encourage other companies to develop even more cures and medical breakthroughs going forward.
Pino’s isn’t really a medical breakthrough, but to him it disproves the notion that “big pharma” doesn’t really want to develop cures because it makes more dosh selling treatments. I suppose for my part I’d add mRNA vaccines.
The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.
These directives have come about because growing numbers of children are showing up to school unprepared to use the toilet. And U.S. schools aren’t the only ones confronting this issue. In the United Kingdom, the nationally representative School Readiness Survey found that last year, more than a quarter of children were not toilet trained when they began primary school (which most children do the September after they turn 4). Felicity Gillespie, the chief executive of Kindred Squared, the organization that commissions the annual survey, told me this means that teachers “can never really get into the curriculum, because they’re constantly having to take kids out and change their nappies.”
. . . The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time. And the sources I spoke with pointed to a few factors driving it. One is that easy access to disposable diapers—which reduce the mess involved in having a child who can’t reliably make it to the toilet—has made the need for training less pressing. Another is that many families with working parents are short on the considerable time needed for monitoring trips to the bathroom. But from Gillespie’s perspective, the root of the issue is that parents are taking a child-led approach to what should be a “100 percent parent-led activity,” she said. “You don’t sit and wait for a child to say, ‘Do you know what? I think I’d like to try wearing pants today.’”
A desire to empower children as decision makers in their own lives, as well as an underlying wariness about parental authority, manifests in many trending parenting philosophies—and is perhaps most recognizable in “gentle” or “respectful” parenting, which emphasizes guidance and persuasion over rules and instruction. Broadly, this approach is rooted in an admirable desire to respect children as humans. The author of The Sovereign Child, a 2025 book that advocates for rules-free parenting, describes a general philosophy of “taking children seriously.” What it amounts to, though, is going to great lengths to avoid just telling your kid what to do.
Potty training offers a strong case study in how easily the child-led approach can break down amid the realities of modern life.
The rest of this scatological explains a rising philosophy of letting the kid tell you when it’s ready to use the toilet: “child-led toilet training”. This is the result:
According to data from the 1950s, a large majority of kids, 80 percent, had completed bowel training by 24 months; only 5 percent were still bowel training after 34 months. Even within a sample of 1950s children whose parents were advised by Brazelton to use his child-oriented approach, 98 percent were daytime potty trained by age 3. Over the next few decades, this timeline was pushed back. A 2001 study found that close to zero percent of kids had completed potty training by 24 months, and only about half had done so by 36 months. Still, that study found that almost all kids had started training before their third birthday. These days, only 21 percent of kids begin potty training before they hit 2—and about a quarter do not begin until after they turn 3.
I can’t remember when I was “bowel trained”, and my parents aren’t around to ask.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s in the way:
Andrzej: Darling, you’re blocking my view of the calendar.
Hili: And what about it?
In Polish:
Ja: Kochanie, zasłaniasz mi kalendarz.
Hili: I co z tego?
From Masih. Let’s be clear, she has no beef with Iranians cutting their hair in grief, as this woman does. Masih just doesn’t like performative Western feminism around Iran:
A woman cuts her hair at her sister’s funeral in #Iran, because the regime shot her sister in the head for the crime of peacefully protesting and demanding freedom.
Her name was Melika Dastyab.
She was 21, a musician, economics student and she was dead by security forces while… pic.twitter.com/jJz8G65OgL
You guys realize that the leftist reaction to the Jason Arday case is going to incentivize more and more people to just “self-ID” as autistic or neurodivergent right?
Why? Because it instantly unlocks two-tier judgment. There will be massive upside to identify as…
Finally, one from Doctor Cobb; a storm, a sunrise, and an aurora from the ISS (you can see a longer version here). Click on the screenshot to see the video tweet, as I can’t embed it:
My two-person book club, in which a friend and I alternately choose a book for both of us to read, recently finished an excellent novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, writtten by Oscar Hijuelos and published in 1989. Wikipedia puts it in the genre of “magical realism,” but I wouldn’t call it that, as the “magic” consists only of the main characters having fantasies that might have occurred but didn’t.
At any rate, it’s a longie—407 pages in my library version—but a goodie, recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990. The story contains at least one huge spoiler that I won’t describe, but it’s a spoiler that divides the book into two parts, and that bipartite structure helps make the book so good.
“Mambo Kings” is the name of a Cuban-music band organized by two brothers, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who immigrated from Cuba in 1949, hoping to achieve musical fame in America. They find both living in America and finding gigs tough, and one of the best parts of the book is the vivid description of problems faced and lives lived by Cuban immigrants. As my book-pal emailed me, one of these aspects was
” . . . . the fact that the book never left the world of the Cuban Americans or a made any concessions except indirectly to events exterior that world.”
There are five dominant elements in the lives of Cesar and Nestor: music (always mambo, rumba, and other Hispanic stuff), love, sex (often but not always separable), booze (a solvent for the brothers’ troubles), and memories. I don’t know how Hijuelos learned so much about Cuban music, but it permeates the book, with dozens of musicians named and recognized. Hijuelos, the son of two Cuban immigrants, must have either been inundated with the music of his parents, or learned it for the book—or both. You too will learn a lot, and you’ll surely have heard of at least one Cuban musician who appears repeatedly in the tale: Desi Arnaz of the “I Love Lucy” television show. (I take this back: you have to be of a certain age to know him and the show.) In the book, Arnaz invites Cesar and Nestor to play on his show, which makes them briefly famous, and then befriends the brothers for life.
Nestor is hopelessly and fruitlessly in love with a woman he left behind in Cuba, while Cesar, justifiably proud of his pinga, beds an army of women but never finds real love, perhaps impeded by the memory of his beloved mother left behind in Cuba. And both the brothers are ridden with memories of their youth on the island, so you’ll also learn quite a bit about the lower rungs of Cuban life (they grew up in a poor farming family). The sex is frequent and graphic, perhaps surprisingly so for a Pulitzer winner, but it’s integral to the fruitless search for love. My book pal added this:
“despite all the sex (and there’s a LOT of it), it’s at its heart a book about the love between two brothers.”
It’s a colorful, fast-paced, wonderfully inventive and well-written story, and well deserved its acclaim. In the NY Times review of the book in 1989, Michiko Kakutani, a notoriously harsh critic, lauds Mambo Kings. A few excerpts to give an opinion besides mine:
Indeed, Oscar Hijuelos’s remarkable new novel is another kind of American story – an immigrant story of lost opportunities and squandered hopes. While it dwells in bawdy detail on Cesar’s sexual escapades, while it portrays the musical world of the 50’s in bright, primary colors, the novel is essentially elegiac in tone -a Chekhovian lament for a life of missed connections and misplaced dreams.
. . . With his sympathetic, yet uncompromising portrait of Cesar, Mr. Hijuelos has created a character who will continue to inhabit readers’ imaginations long after they have finished this book; and with his sharply sketched supporting cast of characters he has also succeeded in fashioning a colorful fictional world. Nestor’s wistful wife, Delores, who dreams of bettering herself through books; Vanna, Cesar’s flamboyant mistress, who eventually settles down to life in Co-op City with a postal worker; his shady business partner, Perez, who has made a fortune through prostitution and drug-dealing, and his sensible friend Manny, who has saved all his money to buy a small bodega – together, these friends, lovers and family members give us a portrait of a tight-knit immigrant community struggling to survive in the promised land of New York.
By turns street-smart and lyrical, impassioned and reflective, ”The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” is a rich and provocative book – a moving portrait of a man, his family, a community and a time.
If Kakutani liked it, that’s another reason to read it. “Rich” is an adjective that is absolutely accurate, while the sometimes graphic descriptions of sex are no longer so “provocative.”
Click below to see the Amazon site. A paperback is only ten bucks.
Daniel Diermeier, previously the Provost of the University of Chicago, moved to Vanderbilt University in 2020 where he became the Chancellor (i.e., the Boss). I wish he’d stayed here, for he might have become President after Bob Zimmer died, and I admire a lot about Diermeier. For example, he has no truck with coddling protestors or allowing violations of campus regulations: he had illegal “sit-in” protestors arrested at Vanderbilt, something that the University of Chicago never did and never would do.
And he’s been controversial, most recently for commissioning a group report on the “State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” which called out these fields for the erosion of scholarship promoted by ideology (see my post here). Humanities scholars went wild in response, many denying that there was such erosion or, even if politics invaded the humanities, it was what was desirable. Anthropology took the biggest hit: here’s a sentence from the report:
In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.
Them’s strong words, and woke anthropologists like Agustín”Sex Is a Spectrum” Fuentes got their knickers in a twist. Note that Diermeier was not among the ten authors of the report, but he did commission it and presumably helped suggest the authors, and for sure he agrees with most of the report’s conclusions. And yes, ideological erosion of scholarship is a danger, not just in the humanities but also STEM fields.
One of Diermeier’s biggest projects has been the promotion of ideological neutrality in universities, i.e., the principle that universities should not take stands on moral, political, or ideological issues unless those issues involve the very mission of the university (scholarship, teaching, etc.). The University of Chicago was the very first university to adopt ideological neutrality, now embodied in our Kalven Report that was created in 1967. As Provost at Chicago, one of Diermeier’s responsibilities was ensuring that Kalven remained intact, and since then he’s both talked and written about the importance of ideological neutrality. I won’t repeat the rationale here, as you can see it at the preceding link, and Diermeier has both talked and written about it.
Below is a recent 2.5-minute interview Dieremeier did with Fox News (of course). Although the report and Diermeier claim that more than 150 universities have adopted institutional neutrality, I’m not sure where that figure comes from. The FIRE list of colleges that have adopted institutional neutrality lists but 50 schools (the list is growing rapidly), but there’s a Heterodox Academy (HxA) report that lists about 150 schools. Some schools on the HxA report, like Reed College, do not appear in the FIRE report, and I’m wondering if there are different standards used by HxA and FIRE
Regardless, it’s true that institutional neutrality—something anathema to the woke, many of whom demand that colleges and universities take stands—is spreading. I remember not too long ago when FIRE had only about a dozen schools on the list.
But I think the case for institutional neutrality is virtually unassailable, for it is a way of ensuring that the university community can speak freely without fear of retribution from bucking an “official” university position. This holds University-wide at Chicago, and also for departments, schools, subunits, and so on—even for the University’s Lab Schools that run from kindergarten through grade 12. (The Lab Schools are a perennial problem, as the teachers and administrators have often insisted on taking political positions and have to be repeatedly reminded that they’re violating University policy in so doing (the Lab Schools are considered part of the University).
But I’m not sure I understand it. There is the usual theological back-and-forth, and Mo is right about what many Christians believe, but what is going on about the night? Did Jesus make it beautiful or something?
Welcome to a Hump Day (“Аҳамп амш” in Abkhaz): Wednesday August 26, 2026 and Women’s Equality Day, which, as the site says (my bolding)
. . . commemorates the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibits denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. Prior to its adoption, women were not guaranteed the right to vote on the national level. The first time an amendment dedicated to women’s suffrage was introduced was in 1878, and similar amendments were introduced numerous times over the next 41 years until the House and Senate both approved the amendment in 1919. Then it needed to be approved by two-thirds of the states, and it was lobbied for by suffragists. On August 24, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state—and final state needed—to ratify it. On August 26, 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed a proclamation that added the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
You can see the time line for this amendment, beginning in 1848 with the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, here. And here are the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments that came from that convention, with the prime movers among “ladies” listed first:
Twenty years of experience as an American diplomat has made me realize that no amount of diplomatic ingenuity can contain Iran. The United States should keep pushing until it gets the best outcome for American interests, the region and the Iranian people: the shattering of the illegitimate regime in Tehran.
Earlier in my career, in 2008, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah urged U.S. officials to “cut off the head of the snake” by attacking Iran’s nuclear program. The more I learned about the region, the more I agreed with the king’s characterization: The regime in Tehran bears overwhelming responsibility for the mayhem and misery in the Middle East since 1979, and its hold on power is a dire threat to regional stability.
. . .During my next assignment as the “Iran watcher” in Paris, I was privy to the Obama administration’s determined — and at times desperate — effort to sign a nuclear accord with Tehran. Iran’s negotiators were (and remain) savvy and cunning interlocutors who extracted U.S. concessions that concerned our French counterparts. My experiences in Paris and the Persian Gulf made me see the logic of Trump’s exit from the nuclear agreement and, during postings in Qatar and in the White House on the staff of Vice President Mike Pence, I witnessed the benefits of the president’s “maximum pressure” campaign. However, a variety of diplomatic considerations tempered the efficacy of the campaign, and the policy failed to yield to new talks, let alone a comprehensive deal.Uranium enrichment and missile production carried on.
Iran continued to sow havoc in the region. The mullahs might not have orchestrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, but IRGC know-how and hundreds of millions of dollars of funding over two decades enabled the rampage across southern Israel that killed more than 1,200 people, including 46 Americans. The Hamas attack marked an inflection point in the Middle East’s evolution: It ended tentative moves by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others to improve relations with Israel, and it transformed long-standing tensions in the Levant and Persian Gulf into inexorable and overlapping cycles of violence.
. . . The current showdown in the region is an inevitable result of the Iranian regime’s efforts to dominate the region through bullying, blackmail and terror. Iran’s rulers have shown time and again they will not accede to an arrangement that constrains their hegemonic aspirations.
The best outcome for the region — and for core U.S. interests — is the regime’s collapse. The Islamic republic is in terminal decline: Iran’s economy is in free fall, its leadership is in disarray, and the government does not have legitimacy with the people. A patient, sustained campaign of economic and military pressure, coupled with hard-nosed diplomacy supported by our regional partners, can strike a mortal blow to a regime that grows more brittle with each passing day.
But the American people don’t want a “patient, sustained campaign of economic and military pressure,” nor do our regional partners agree even with the diplomacy we’re supposedly exercising. The problems with this op-ed are twofold. First the American people don’t want a strategy like this and Trump doesn’t either given its effect on the midterms. Second, how do we exercise “military pressure”? Boots on the ground? That won’t work, so an important way of exerting leverage is out. Yes, I think this is a just war, but the U.S. strategy appears to do things that help Trump rather than bring down the Iranian theocracy and free its people.
*A group of grocers has sued New York City over Mamdani’s plan of low-price city-subsidized grocery stores, saying that it will actually hurt an important group of relatively poor people:
A local business group sued New York City and Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday over the mayor’s plan to open five government-owned grocery stores around the city.
The Multicultural Business Coalition, a nonprofit that represents supermarkets, grocery stores and bodegas, filed the lawsuit in the New York County Supreme Court, arguing that the plan would introduce unfair competition to a struggling local industry already dealing with slim profit margins. The coalition says that the plan will particularly harm immigrant- and minority-owned businesses.
Many members of the coalition “cannot compete with the municipal grocery stores, and therefore, will be put out of business,” the complaint reads.
At a news conference, the mayor said the subsidized stores reflect a cost-of-living crisis that has seen grocery prices increase by about 30% over the past few years.
“I am confident both in the legality of this, that it will stand up in court, and the importance of delivering it,” Mamdani said.
Mamdani floated the stores on the campaign trail as a part of his affordability agenda, arguing that subsidized supermarkets focused on cheap, healthy foods would help New Yorkers adapt to rapidly rising food costs. The stores, run by external operators but overseen by the city, would offer a core basket of staples at a 30% discount to market rates. Operators would get free rent and subsidies.
“For many, that 30% discount is the difference between an evening spent around the dinner table with family or working another double shift to make ends meet,” Mamdani said last month as officials announced the details of the proposal.
The mayor has allocated $70 million toward the stores. The city’s Economic Development Corporation says the city has roughly 1.5 square feet of grocery space per capita, compared with roughly 5-10 square feet elsewhere in the country. Mamdani says the plan might save New Yorkers $1,000 a year.
Officials are soliciting proposals from operators willing to run the stores. Applications are due in October, and the city has been leading tours of the facilities.
This is not good optics for Mayor Mamdani, what with the reasonable claim that they are going to put minority-run grocery stores out of business. What he is proposing is a form of grocery socialism, and he has not responded convincingly to that claim.
*In a Quillette article called “The beautiful and banned,” Josh Allen points out the difference between “the banned books promoted by celebrities and genuinely transgressive and provocative writing.” The celebrity he has in mind is singer/songwriter ua_Lipa.
. . . According to the American Library Association, “A book is banned when it is entirely removed from a collection in response to a formal or informal challenge.” The trouble with this definition is that it is generously inclusive; all it takes for a book to be classified a victim of institutional censorship—and for pundits across the world to raise a chorus of condemnation—is for it to be removed from one school library, as we saw in the case of a secondary school in Manchester late last year. The ALA definition does not include texts that booksellers refuse to stock, or the publication of which has been halted or made impossible by social pressures. Nor does it account for all the bold, daring, “unborn books” that will never see the light of day owing to the risk-averse—if not outright censorious—nature of modern publishing. In reality, book-banning in schools is generally an (ill-judged) attempt at safeguarding, not dissimilar to age-gating films, video games, or social media. That is very different to making a book unavailable to adults and children alike. By shifting the blame on to governments and educational authorities, publishers and bookshops are deflecting from their own role in narrowing the range of “acceptable” literature.
Dua Lipa’s latest project, the Manifesto Library, appears to perpetuate a similar misunderstanding of “banned books.” The collection is a partnership between Service95, Lipa’s online book club, and Livraria Lello, the bookshop in Porto where a hundred selected books will be displayed and sold. The Manifesto Library is described as:
[A] space that brings together titles that have been subject to public debate, some that take censorship itself as their subject and others that have provoked sustained, uncomfortable debate about race, gender, identity and political power.
Banned books are only one part of the collection, but the definition of a banned book manages to be at once hopelessly expansive and conveniently restrictive, including books that “have been prohibited from publication, stripped from school curricula or removed from library systems in an attempt to stop someone, somewhere from reading them”. So while One Hundred Years of Solitude has sold over 50 million copies and been translated into forty languages, its removal from a handful of libraries in America earns it the status of a “banned book.” The same goes for The Catcher in the Rye (65 million copies), Animal Farm (twenty million copies), and The Handmaid’s Tale (eight million copies), all of which were once banned by someone somewhere but are now taught on school syllabi and sit atop bestseller lists.
Have a look at the books at the link, many of which I’ve read, and they simply don’t fall into the class of books that have been widely banned and removed from many libraries. At the Quillette link, there’s a photo of Dua Lipa looking like a cat that swallowed a canary (and making a “fish face”), holding up a copy of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (go see for yourself).
Did I really expect to see Dua Lipa pose for a selfie with The Camp of the Saints clutched in her hand? Or Renaud Camus’s Le Grand Remplacement? Or William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook? I didn’t, no. I would be surprised to see books like these within a mile of an anodyne collection like this one, compiled for casual readers and pop aficionados. The problem is not that Lipa is not promoting genuinely subversive material; it is that she is claiming to. The publishing world has always been proscriptive, as Vladimir Nabokov, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller—all absent from Lipa’s list—would attest. The difference today is that it likes to pretend it isn’t.
Now this may be making a mountain out of a molehill, but I think the author has a point. What banned books should represent is a widespread violation of the First Amendment: prohibition of books because they say something that “offends” people. The bestsellers above can hardly be said to fall in that class.
*At least two of my friends will no longer watch professional football because they consider it too brutal. And it is, especially with the new announcement that at least a quarter of NFL players get CTE, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy: a progressive degenerative brain disease (article archived here).
Since the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, and as hundreds of former professional football players have been diagnosed with the disease after their deaths, a haunting question has lingered:
Just how many N.F.L. players will end up with C.T.E.?
New data provides a sobering indication: At least one in four of all the people who have played in the N.F.L. might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.
Researchers considered every former N.F.L. player who died from 2016 to 2021. There were 878. Some died in their 20s, some in their 80s, most in between.
The study’s main finding was simple math: At least 215 of those 878 former players — 24.5 percent — had C.T.E.
The actual prevalence could be far higher. The roughly 25 percent rate does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Some of those, maybe many of them, likely had C.T.E. too.
C.T.E. is a progressive neurological disease caused by repeated impacts to the head. It can be definitively diagnosed only by examining the brain after death.
Studies have shown that the rate of C.T.E. in people who have not sustained repeated impacts to the head is nearly zero.
If the new study’s statistics were applied to today’s players — 1,696 on the league’s 32 regular-season rosters, not including more than 500 members of practice squads and those ineligible due to injury — at least 400 of them would be diagnosed with C.T.E.
. . .“We know what’s causing it,” said Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, the lead author of the study, the chief of brain injury rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “It’s a neurodegenerative disease where we know and have complete control over the risk. And understanding the extent of that risk is one of the steps into making sure that we can mitigate and decrease that risk.”
Dr. Daneshvar said that the biggest predictor of C.T.E. is the cumulative force of hits to a head over a lifetime — including those sustained before reaching the N.F.L.
“We can change that cumulative force without changing the game of football,” he said, suggesting that children refrain from playing tackle football and that teams at all levels eliminate hits during practices.
I don’t know how they can change the cumulative force unless they eliminate head hits during games, not just in practice. Better helmet? Perhaps, but I don’t know which ones. Sadly, players now know the risk but go ahead and play, as many love the game and all love the money in the NFL. (It’s also a problem in rugby.) What’s the solution to the deadly side effects of a game that many Americans love to watch? I don’t know.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is serving as a reminder:
Hili: Don’t forget that you have to be at the doctor’s. Andrzej: Okay, remind me tomorrow.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie zapomnij, że masz być u lekarza.
Ja: Dobrze, przypomnij mi o tym jutro.
From Masih, two Kurdish women flogged and imprisoned for protesting:
Heartbreaking news from Iran.
TWO KURDISH WOMEN FLOGGED AND IMPRISONED IN IRAN
Two Kurdish women, Neda Dadejani and Setayesh Sarabi, detained during Iran’s January 2026 nationwide protests, have now been flogged and sent to prison.
From Malcolm, an AI video that people love. I don’t get all the cultural references, so perhaps someone can explain a few to me. (I know the Titanic ones.)
Well if we KNOW about the secret White House bunker, then obviously we need a SECOND one that nobody knows about. And since we’re talking about the second one: Draw up plans for a third. pic.twitter.com/QQUoKRYvtB
And one from Doctor Cobb; a crazy snake. Who knew?
HahahahahahaThe small end is the headThese sea snakes poke around crevices in reefs so their pinheads are excellent for getting at hiding fish. But they also look ridiculous.Hydrophos melanocephalus📷 Arne Redsted Rasmussen
