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.
Here a woman on Facebook, “CircuitCindy” designs and manufactures a treat-dispensing slot machine for her cat, who catches on quickly. My only question is whether the machine dispenses treats on every pull, regardless of whether the three designs match. If it does, then the cat will become addicted to gambling.
This is one talented woman, and you can see her website here. Her self ID is this:
Hi I’m Cindy! I like to make cute and mildly useful things to make my life more whimsical 😀
The machine:
Cindy explains in this video that there was a huge demand for these machines (of course), and if you want one you can put your name on a waitlist/information list by clicking on the screenshot below and then clicking on “notify me”. I’ve signed up, though I don’t have a cat; I will let readers know any updates.
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This article comes from The Washington Post, and reports on a poor kitten stuck in a car’s grille. It was disovered. . . well, I’ll put an excerpt below. Click on screenshot to read:
An excerpt:
On a sweltering day, an unusual call came into Central Iowa Towing and Recovery: A tiny kitten was trapped inside the grille of a car that was in line at a drive-through, and the cat seemed to be suffering.
“I’ve never gotten a call like that in my life,” said Jordan McKnight, 38, an employee at the tow company in Ames.
McKnight and his co-worker Cole Denning rushed to Scooter’s Coffee on July 27 and found people crowded around a car. A woman was in the drive-through line, they said, and after placing her coffee order, said she heard an animal crying from inside her car. She looked around and realized a tiny cat somehow was stuck behind the front grille of her Honda.
“You could hear the cat crying out,” said Kathy Pike, an animal services officer with Ames Animal Shelter, who arrived at the scene after a Scooter’s employee called and reported the situation. “We didn’t know how to get it out. I tried to crawl under and figure out where this little thing got into the small spot.”
A group of people waiting at the drive-through gathered around the car, trying to figure out how to free the cat. The driver of the car, who did not reply to an interview request from The Washington Post, told Pike the cat was not hers, and she did not know how the animal could have gotten into the body of her car.
. . .But they were running out of time to save the cat, who was panting and holding out her bright-red tongue.
“I was almost certain it was not going to make it,” Pike said, noting the 96-degree temperature that day that felt like 118 degrees with the humidity.
Pike was able to get only a few fingers through the grille before deciding she needed help. She called Central Iowa Towing and Recovery, figuring the front of the car would need to be taken apart.
“We rushed over,” Denning said.
Denning and McKnight raised the front of the car off the ground to get a better look underneath.
“We both came to the conclusion that the only possible way to get her out was to disassemble the whole front clip of the car,” McKnight said.
They worked quickly, removing panels around the hood and headlights, until there was enough of an opening for Denning to reach in and scoop the cat out. It took about 15 minutes to free the kitten.
Pike drenched the cat in water to cool her down and brought her directly to the vet.
“I wanted to get her as quickly as possible to the medical experts,” she said.
. . .The kitten, believed to be about 2 months old, is a domestic shorthair. She had a fever and a blister on one paw but was otherwise well after the rescue. She weighs just under two pounds.
Pike named her “Fika,” a Swedish word that describes a coffee break. She thought it was a fitting name.
“We all took a break from our lives to help this animal in need, and it was related to coffee,” she said.
Fika is being cared for at the Ames Animal Shelter and has become a favorite among staff.
Fika is okay, and there was a rush to adopt her. Here’s a news report showing the kitten.
From nicenews.com, we have another area besides Turkey where the residents are cat lovers. This time it’s Dubrovnik, a lovely town in Croatia that I visited in 1972. Here’s an article and some videos below.
An excerpt:
Coastal Dubrovnik in southeastern Croatia was originally founded over 1,400 years ago, but one demographic that’s been there for centuries had nothing to do with its incorporation. The city is home to a thriving stray cat community, and likely has been since the Middle Ages.
Today, photos of Dubrovnik’s felines are all over social media, and there’s an entire souvenir store dedicated to them in the ancient seaport. Locals and visitors can even take part in the SOS Dubrovnik Cat Safari 2026 this summer, a campaign encouraging people to snap pics of the kitties and share them online. Five winning shots will be selected for a charity postcard collection, with proceeds supporting an animal rescue that helps care for the cats.
But even before they were tourist attractions, the city’s cats played a very important role in its prosperity: pest control. While hard facts about their history are hard to find online, locals refer to the four-legged mainstays as Dubrovnik’s “oldest citizens,” suggesting they were brought there around the 13th century to hunt rats, which were believed to carry the bubonic plague and other diseases.
Indeed, a medieval manuscript from Dubrovnik marked with inky, feline paw prints made headlines over a decade ago. Photographed in 2011 by then-graduate student Emir O. Filipović, the manuscript dates back to the 1400s — capturing a cat quite literally “walk[ing] through history,” as National Geographic put it.
The cats now stick primarily to Dubrovnik’s Old Town, a seafront neighborhood largely encircled by medieval walls that once fortified it against attacks. Visitors list the Church of the Holy Annunciation, a Serbian Orthodox church at the center of the neighborhood, as a prime spot to see them, though they can also be found near restaurant doorways and lounging around the harbor.
, . .“They are very patient and rarely beg; they know that a small fish is usually coming their way as a ‘tax’ for their presence,” reads a post by local company Cava Tours.
Residents care for the kitties, and SOS Dubrovnik Cats, which is based outside of Croatia, assists from afar. The organization collects donations and arranges for medical care and foster homes where injured cats can recuperate.
Here are a few videos about Dubrovnik’s cats from social media. Sound up on all of them
Finally, lots of lagnaippe today—four items, to be exact. Click on screenshots to go to the originals, but these aren’t videos.
An ancient standoff:
And a ham-guarding moggy:
From Facebook with the caption:
A classic milk bar in Krakow, one of the old canteen-style spots, has a cat named Pierog who patrols the room like a floor manager and sits at the end of the counter watching the pierogi go out. He does not beg. He inspects.
The staff hung a small hand-written Polish sign by the register that reads: “The cat is on duty.” Regulars say he has a route – counter, then the window table, then back – and that he does it in the same order every day. He has never been fed at the counter, on principle, and disapproves of everyone who tries.
Below: from Fat Cat Art with the following caption:
The famous Belle Époque ad poster of a black cat sipping absinthe was created in 1902 by the renowned industrial designers Mourgue Frères (brothers) for the Bourgeois distillery in the French town of Pontarlier. They say there was no absinthe in the glass, but milk, to make the cat pose for the poster. The artwork was so popular that it is used as decoration in many bars and homes till nowadays. The story behind the poster is a hilarious cat art story. The cat’s surroundings are heavily based on a painting by Charles Maine, a local artist of the Pontarlier region. Maine’s painting depicted a table with an absinthe bottle, a decanter of water, glasses, and a folded copy of a Pontarlier newspaper. The painting was very popular and used for Émile Pernot distillery advertising. Evidently, Mourgue Frères, ironically remade the painting, including the cat, to beat the Bourgeois distillery’s competitors! And they succeeded with their art, which became much more popular than the original painting. Cats make everything better!
Interesting that you can still find the cat in advertising, but now on their former competitor’s heirs, Les Fils d’Émile Pernot’s absinthe bottle label
Today we have mostly videos of the ducks (I’m waiting for my photos to transfer to a new computer, and changing computers is always a horror). Photos will be coming. But in many ways the videos (about 1 minute each) give you a better idea of what the ducklings are like.
In short, the four ducklings are peachy, and growing very fast! You’ll see from the videos and two photos below that they have just started growing feathers on their tails, on their little stubby wings, and on their sides. In about ten days they’ll be in their awkward, scruffy teenage stage: half duckling, half adult. But I love them all. They are fat, happy (I think), and lively, and Miss Duck is taking great care of them. But look for yourself:
The caption of this video tells the tail; it’s the end of their mealtime when they get freeze-dried mealworms as dessert. That is their favorite nosh. Miss Duck looks on, supervising but also eating on her own. When ducklings are around, she always ensures that they eat before she does. She’s a great mom.
After a meal the family often repairs to what I call the Sacred Rocks, a place where they can nap and preen in the shade. Miss Duck is always watching over the brood, usually from above:
Sometimes they repair to another rock: a flat one at the north end of Botany Pond. This is quite close to a pair of benches where people sit to watch them (as well as the turtles, who occupy the rocks when the ducks are absent).
The caption:
Look at this fat little duckling, crop distended with food! (I feed them well.) His/her little black foot is sticking out, like duckling yoga. In the past two or three days, their feet have changed color from black to the adult orange. Botany Pond, the University of Chicago, August 6, 2026
Here’s the caption I gave this video. Be sure to listen for Miss Duck’s soft quacks meaning “Go away, turtle.”
Miss Duck does not like turtles, though they are harmless to her and her brood. My guess is that she has an instinct to avoid them, as in the wild some turtles, like snappers, can hurt or kill ducklings. You can hear her quack from time to time as a response to the red-eared slider sharing this rock. (The brood pays turtles no mind.) Botany Pond, The University of Chicago, August 6, 2026.
The caption:
The ducklings love to dabble (root around) in the dirt, especially in the plant pots whose contents have died. (The ducks do not eat the plants.) Here you can see their feathers developing, mostly on their stubby little wings, as patches of brown. Their tails are getting feathers, too, and resemble little paintbrushes. Botany Pond, the University of Chicago, August 7, 2026.
Here’s one shot showing the incipient feathers. It’s so exciting: they’re not even three weeks old. I think they’re past the vulnerable stage now, which makes me happy. Can you see the tiny brown feathers on their wings and on their sides? Notice also the orange feet.
Finally, I noticed that when I was feeding the brood from the bridge, a sparrow was picking up little duck food pellets and broken mealworms, feeding them to her importuning baby. Life is burgeoning at the pond.
Welcome to the Sabbath for Jewish cats: it’s CaturSaturday, August 8, 2026 and National Whataburger Day, celebrating the opening of the first store on this day in 1950. There’s a AA minor league ballpark for the Corpus Christi Hooks, a subsidiary of the Houston Astros. The stadium is called Whataburger Field (sign below):
Christopherhegg, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I saw a bunny (an Eastern cottontail) on my way to work this morning. It was dark so the resolution isn’t large with my iPhone, but it let me walk right by it without being spooked. It’s good luck! I think it is a young one.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 8 Wikipedia page.
President Trump signed two executive orders on Thursday aimed at limiting the number of people who are eligible for birthright citizenship and cracking down on “birth tourism,” in which women give birth in the United States to get automatic citizenship for their newborns.
The new orders came weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, rejected the president’s previous efforts to end birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants through executive orders.
During an Oval Office event, Mr. Trump told reporters that the June 30 Supreme Court ruling was a “very, very unfortunate decision.”
“This was done right after the Civil War,” Mr. Trump said of the constitutional amendment granting automatic citizenship to infants born in the United States. “This was for the babies of slaves, and what’s happening now? People are building businesses around it.”
By “businesses,” he means “birthright tourism” outfits, who get pregnant women to pay to come to the U.S. to have their kids. This confers no immediate visa or citizenship benefits on the parents, but when the child becomes 21 he/she can petition for the parents to jump the queue and apply for a green card. But I digress; there’s more:
It was not immediately clear how the twin orders could realistically be enforced. They would restrict those who could qualify for birthright citizenship, to exclude children of staff working for foreign governments but serving in the United States, and the babies of mothers who lie about their intentions for visiting the country while pregnant. There is a third category, for babies born in U.S. territories, but that would first require congressional action.
And then there are children whose parents are tagged by the government as being part of known terrorist groups or who are “alien enemies.”
Mr. Trump has criticized birthright citizenship for years, using it as a political tool as he has repeatedly tried to restrict legal immigration. He has talked about trying to end it since his first presidency. And in an unusual move, he attended oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case at the Supreme Court, a presidential first.
Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser and the architect of much of his immigration platform, and Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary, described the orders as important correctives to the current system.
The court will probably rule this a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, as it did before, but I have to admit that deliberately coming to the U.S. to have a kid so you can benefit rubs me a bit the wrong way (I knew someone who did that and I didn’t find it wholly kosher). Still the benefits are a long way down the line, and I prefer to let the Supreme Court rule on this—if it hasn’t already.
A federal appeals panel ruled Friday that President Donald Trump must halt most construction of his planned White House ballroom, saying that he had exceeded his authority by moving ahead with the planned $400 million, privately funded addition.
In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with a federal judge’s April ruling requiring construction to halt until Congress expressly authorizes the project.
“Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence,” Judges Patricia A. Millett and Bradley N. Garcia wrote in their majority opinion.
They stayed their ruling for 14 days to allow the White House to appeal to the Supreme Court.The White House did not immediately say Friday whether it would do so.
Trump relied on private donations to begin the project without seeking an appropriation from Congress, touting the arrangement as a boon to taxpayers. But the courts have found that private financing did not allow him to bypass the separate requirement that Congress authorize major changes to the White House grounds.
Trump announced the 90,000-square-foot addition last year and swiftly demolished the White House’s East Wing without warning to make space for the project. He has said presidents have long needed a ballroom to host VIPs.
The project has drawn scrutiny from congressional Democrats, who have opened investigations into whether Trump has made promises to donors in exchange for their gifts. The ballroom has also been generally panned by the public, with polls finding that most Americans are against the project.
The Congress could, of course, pass a law allowing this demolition to take place, but what if it does and then the Supreme Court rules it unconstitutional? Then the building would have to be stopped again. At any rate, I don’t approve of this at all, and if either Congress or the Court stops the construction, what is to be done? Will they have to rebuild the East Wing that has already been torn down? It’s an unholy mess.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal reports on a shakeup at Israel’s prime intelligence agency: “The Mossad admits failure.”
It’s Friday, August 7, and Yitzchak Rabin once remarked that the future Mossad Chief Meir Dagan had “the unique capacity to invent antiterrorist operations that look like movie thrillers.” But what happens when the movie doesn’t have a happy ending?
Presumably, consequences for the writers.
Current Mossad Director Roman Gofman has removed the two officials most closely associated with the agency’s plan to topple the Iranian regime. One had run the Mossad’s intelligence directorate since December; the other headed the Iran division. This follows the ouster of the deputy director last month, who was similarly linked to the operation.
Their plan centered on Iran’s minority populations, built on the theory that armed pressure at the periphery would revive the mass protest movement at the center and finish the job. Removing the architects of this strategy amounts to acknowledging the obvious: the plan failed.
It appeared to start successfully. Israel conducted strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps positions along Iran’s border with Iraq, timed to open a corridor for Kurdish fighters to cross into Iranian Kurdistan and push toward northwestern cities. Thousands of young Kurds were expected to join them. They were slated to advance eastward while armed militias from other minority groups struck Iranian territory from all directions, pushing toward Tehran. The U.S. had armed these proxy forces, but the plan unraveled when Fox News reported the attack was imminent. Turkish President Erdogan phoned Trump and, in a furious call, talked him out of U.S. backing for the operation.
A pivot to military capability targets, several ceasefires, countless threats and reversals later, we are left with the Supreme Leader still alive and kicking, though only on one leg.
, , ,The dismissals are also part of a larger organizational shift inside the Mossad, which is facing significant internal resistance. Gofman is the first outsider to be appointed head of the agency since Dagan in 2002 and is attempting a similar internal reform; unsurprisingly, an organization founded on secrecy with a notorious and somewhat deserved ego is not a fan of people outside the family taking the reins. According to Dagan, 300 people quit after his appointment—so far, Gofman has only fired three, and only those with whom he reportedly had little to no chemistry.
Ultimately, Dagan was one of the most successful directors the Mossad has ever had, running it longer than anyone else in history except the legendary Isser Harel. That’s because he got results. Gofman’s tenure will be measured in exactly the same way.
Look! It’s Fox News that caused this plan to unravel! Trump was going to support a plan for the Kurds to topple the oppressive Iranian theocracy, but Fox News scuppered the whole thing. I hope they’re happy, for they foiled the once chance the Iranian people had to get their freedom. Of course it’s possible that this plan would not have worked, but now we’ll never know. And how does Segal know that Mojtaba Khamenei has only one leg now? I didn’t even know if the guy is still alive. ‘
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: With the exception of Pearl Harbor.” The first item gives the column its title:
→ Trump on the state of U.S.-Japanese affairs:Quote of the week (said on Sunday but we’ll count it):
Reporter: Mr. President, why is the U.S. intervening to support the Japan yen at this time?
Trump: To support who?
Reporter: To support the Japanese currency.
Trump: Because we have a good relationship with Japan. We’re very strong, very, very strong financially, and they are, you know, they have a weakening yen, and they wanted a little bit of help. And we’re always there for Japan. Japan’s been very good to us, with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor. They were not good.
The man never lets go of a grudge, and frankly, that’s not the worst quality in a president!
This is an excerpt from Nellie’s take on Jason Arday, now an ex-professor who sings with the Choir Invisible:
→ Jason Arday, a star: I’m sure one day, elite institutions will not allow themselves to be conned so thoroughly by hustlers that everyone, including the con man, is humiliated. Today is not that day. Jason Arday—professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge, the youngest ever black professor there—has resigned amid scandal, and it is a doozy, folks. He appears to have been a serial fabulist of the classic variety, but because he was black and had beautiful dreadlocks that fell below his hips, everyone around him just took what he said as The Truth. Those who looked askance at Arday and his dumbfounding achievements were clearly jealous and motivated by bigotry. It was the easiest, silliest con of all time. His story began to unravel with simple plagiarism claims, which I didn’t care about last week because all sociology professors just copy-paste their fake studies, back and forth. For me, it doesn’t matter if “A history of the London fashion scene through a transracial lens, 1914–1916” was plagiarized because it actually doesn’t matter at all. But this week things escalated: First, it looks like Arday truly just invented his research, and quite clumsily (read this from a University of Toronto professor digging through it, or this from the UK Times). Then it snowballed. People started looking into his super believable bio: He says he has autism and didn’t speak until he was 11, then at 18 he learned to read and write and went to university. Seems odd. Kind of miraculous. The claims go on. He says he did volunteer work overseas for a particular water charity (the charity says it never sends volunteers abroad). He says he ran 600 miles between Edinburgh and London in six days. Oh! Also that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, adding that he did the last nine marathons on a broken leg. Right. Prior to his Cambridge appointment, he claimed he was a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and an honorary professor at Durham University. All of these institutions have deniedthat he held such positions. The man is freestyling extracurriculars. The list goes on. Was he even a mute? How much of this is a lie? And how come I had never heard of Arday, who is apparently one of the most accomplished athletes of all time?
When people started to question all this, the defenses were robust, with a group of famous professors, politicians, and other luminaries writing indignantly: “We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.” I’m not sure you want to stake all of black academics on Jason Arday and these broken-leg marathons.
→ Can Israelis listen to music? Definitely no: Current Affairspublished a piece arguing that Israelis like dance festivals because they’re distracting themselves from their unique and evil crimes. “For decades, a combination of EDM and drug culture have helped to numb the horror of occupation, apartheid, and genocide,” the article says. This logic is used to justify the attacks on Israelis at the Nova Music Festival on October 7, since that music festival was part of their numbing genocide dance, I guess. Here’s how the author describes the attacks on those unarmed young people at the festival:
Palestinians “fight through another smaller festival” as though the dancers at Psyduck are a group of combatants. People have gotten mad about this take, which the author thinks is odd considering that this is her moderate take: “Already, thousands of Zionist hasbara comments have flooded Instagram for an article which isn’t even as #FreePalestine as I am in everyday life.” Oh, honey; we can imagine what you say at dinner! That’s the whole point. You’re telling me that #FreePalestine is just a palatable stand-in for “I want to do unspeakable things to the Jews”? No way!
*Clickbait: Robert Lynch, a bio-cultural anthropologist and postdoc at Penn State, takes on his own discipline in a Quillette article called “What is the point of anthropology?” He sees a huge gap between biological anthropology and cultural anthropology, with the latter field by and large peddling garbage.
The founding premise of anthropology was audacious: that you could actually go and find out what humans are like, rather than simply assume it from the comfort of your own tiny corner of the world. Franz Boas, the discipline’s American founder, rejected the racial hierarchies earlier scholars had simply assumed instead of testing, and he demanded that anthropologists spend years in the field before making any claims about another culture.
. . . My postdoc advisor at the University of Missouri, Napoleon Chagnon, came straight out of that tradition. He spent more than a decade among the Yanomamö in the Venezuelan Amazon, testing fundamental questions about kinship, violence, and reproduction. He once told me that he awoke in his hammock to find the village headman standing over him with an axe raised over his head ready to strike. Do more violent men have more wives and children? It turns out that—in Yanomamö villages, at least—they do. I spent three years working and publishing with Chagnon, and in his day he was one of the most famous anthropologists alive. Because that’s what anthropologists did in the 1960s and ’70s. They asked the most interesting questions they could think of about people and their cultures, then they conducted field work in an attempt to answer them. Today, asking those same questions can get you labelled a racist or colonialist, and studying small-scale societies at all is dismissed as cultural voyeurism.
. . .What are universities for? They used to be places where humans would search for truth. “It is well worth searching for truth,” the philosopher Karl Popper once remarked; “and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them.” My cultural anthropology classmates believed that people like Chagnon, Trivers, and Popper had it backwards. Truth is not an empirical matter of correct or incorrect, it is a moral matter of right and wrong. Objective truths cannot be sought, relative truths can only be defended. And those who demand empirical support for assertions are attempting to destabilise moral truths, usually in the interests of some powerful interest or other.
Carolyn Rouse is the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Earlier this year, a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter offered her the chance to respond to a report that alleged an extreme politicisation of anthropology. The authors of that report found “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.” By the time of the interview, Quillette had already published most of the report.
Rather than reckon with these findings, Rouse doubled down on the very claims the report had flagged as most absurd. No criticism that I could offer—not this essay, not the report itself—was as damning as simply letting the discipline’s most prominent member speak for herself. In 2023, her organisation cancelled a panel discussion at its annual conference about the importance of biological sex as an analytic category in anthropology on the grounds that it might have harmed members’ “safety and dignity”, and that its premise contradicted “settled science”. Asked if she regretted that decision, Rouse said:
All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually, that there are different types of “sexes” and “genders”. You can have XY and you present as a woman, you can have XXY—they’re all variations, genetic variations. So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that.
Rouse goes on to call the belief that biological sex is binary “nonsensical” while admitting, in the next sentence, that she doesn’t actually know what people mean by the claim, or “why that matters to people so much”. The whole thing, she says, is “very strange”. The field of anthropology was built to understand unfamiliar beliefs and worldviews, but here was its president dismissing one of the most widely held convictions in human history as “nonsensical.”
Rouse’s response was the culmination of a process that had been gathering momentum in social-science departments for the past two decades. In 2006, I was at a colloquium at Rutgers where the primatologist Ryne Palombit was giving a talk on infanticide in Chacma baboons, a lot of which was devoted to sex differences in baboon behaviour. When it came time for questions, the chair of the department, a cultural anthropologist, raised his hand like someone about to blow a gaping hole through the whole talk and asked, “What exactly do you mean by these so-called males and females?” It is dismaying to hear a question that ignorant in a forum like the one in which it was asked when the scientific answer is so simple and well established.
Note that the deeply misguided sex-is-a-spectrum activist Agustín Fuentes was one of three people who wrote the Society a letter that helped get the sex panel cancelled. That’s news to me, but I’m not surprised. Lynch’s conclusion:
What is the purpose of a field like anthropology? The people who trained me were some of the most curious people I have ever known. They were people like Robert Trivers, whose observations of pigeons jockeying for position on a railing outside his Cambridge apartment window led to deep insights into parental investment and sexual selection—and why the categories of “male” and “female” were never a matter of chromosomes. They were people like Napoleon Chagnon, who at the age of 26 crawled through a low gap in a palisade wall into a shabono of “burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring … down the shafts of their drawn arrows,” and lived with them for more than a decade. Anthropologists never used to need to be reminded that this curiosity was the very heart of their discipline. The Vanderbilt report accused them of losing it. An hour with its president was the only confirmation anyone needed.
Cultural anthropology, at least now, seems totally captured, but there is hope for physical anthropology. Or is there? The studies of human fossils, their genetics, and their meaning, at least, continues.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having a moment of wonder:
Hili: What is wonder? Andrzej: That moment when you stop meowing and just stare.
In Polish:
Hili: Co to jest zachwyt?
Ja: Moment kiedy przestajesz miauczeć i tylko się patrzysz.
From Masih: three men scheduled to be executed. Two were hanged, but the third had a heart attack before being executed. (Masih breaks down in the middle of the segment.
English translation:
The painful story of Alireza Sepahi, who suffered a heart attack before being taken to the gallows, on CNN…
The world’s media remained silent about the execution machine in Iran; let’s not allow that.
I will do my utmost to stand against this silence and censorship of the killing and execution of Iranian youth.
قصهی پر دردِ علیرضا سپاهی که قبل از رفتن پای چوبهیدار سکته قلبی کرد در سیانان….
رسانههای جهان در مورد ماشین اعدام در ایران سکوت کردند، اجازه ندهیم.
در حد توانم تلاش میکنم در برابر این به سکوت و سانسورِ کشتار و اعدام جوانان ایرانی بایستم. pic.twitter.com/dP0UgqMKs3
From Malcom: a cat gets loose on the field at Yankee Stadium. Poor thing! I hope it was not only rescued, but adopted. You can see a longer video here, but with no indication about what happened to the kitty.
Two from my feed. First, the Jason Arday saga: a gift that never stops giving:
This is wild. The Atlantic has obtained a copy of Jason Arday’s book proposal. In it, he claims to have:
– Experienced ‘locked-in’ syndrome for several months after being hit by a car. Doctors advised his family to have the life support machine turned off, but he awakened…
As if we needed proof that crows are wicked smart. Translation from the Chinese:
A guy feeds four cookies to a crow all at once, to see how the crow takes them all away. After watching, you can’t help but feel that crows are just too smart!
This French Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was five years old, and would have been 89 today had she lived. https://t.co/x4Rnch5aGY
From Matthew. I prefer to watch ducklings nap on a rock:
Sometimes in life it is necessary to spend an hour (maybe even two) doing nothing but sitting and watching a baby newt eat worms on top of a waterlily leaf. 🪷
Of. course I’ll get raked for putting up this post, but I’m frankly sick of people denigrating others as “Zionists”, which in most cases is simply a euphemism for “people who are pro-Israel” or even “Jews”, so that “anti-Zionist” becomes a euphemism for “anti-Israel” or “antisemitic”. My contention, echoed by Natasha Hausdorff and Douglas Murray in a fairly recent Munk debate, is that, at present, “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”.
Why do I say this? Well, look at the definitions of “Zionism” and “anti-Zionism” in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), my touchstone for language.
Here’s anti-Zionism in the OED:
So you have to look up “Zionism,” and when you do, you get this:
Note that “anti-Zionism” does not mean “opposition to some of Israel’s policies” or “opposition to Netanyahu”. Rather, it means “opposition to the sovereignty of Israel and the right of the state to exist and defend itself against attacks.” (You might add “the right of the state to exist as, in part, a place for Judaism to thrive”,: but then all the Muslim nations of the Middle East are also places for Islam to thrive. In fact, Christianity and Judaism are not tolerated in most Muslim states, which, unlike Israel, criminalize the practice of other faiths. Note too the existence of official names like “The Islamic Republic of Iran” and “The Islamic Republic of Pakistan”.) There are a gazillion states in the Middle East where Islam is the official religion and other religions aren’t tolerated.
But I digress. Israel was established as a sovereign state by the United Nations in 1948. Before that, Palestinians were offered their own state but rejected it, and have rejected it nearly a half-dozen times since. As Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf argue in a 2020 book, The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace, the Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution. Rather, they want a one-state solution: a single state in which all descendants of Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 would be allowed to return to the present country of Israel, which would then become a Palestinian state. (The “right of return,” which is unique to Palestinians among all who fled their land in the past, is their key demand that they know, if exercised, would lead to the disappearance of Israel. Read the book, a meticulous and scholarly history of this neglected concept.)
A “Zionist,” then, is someone who believes that Israel, now established, should be allowed to remain a sovereign state on territory considered the Jewish homeland but also the homeland of the Arabs who are Israeli citizens. As Natasha Hausdorff argues below, the state of Israel is a fait accompli. To argue against its existence now is to argue that its Jews should either be expelled or—more likely if the “right of return is exercised”—killed.
Since other groups have sovereign states, too, so singling out the Jewish people as the only group undeserving of an established sovereign state in their ancestral land is anti-Semitic because it’s discriminatory. Remember that Israel is to a large extent a secular state in which there is freedom of religion: about 20% of its inhabitants are Arab Muslims, who have full rights as citizens.
If Netanyahu disappears as Israel’s Prime Minister, as I hope he will, it’s certain that anti-Zionism will remain, for it is really opposition to Israel, not Israel’s politics.
The video below eloquently expresses the equivalence of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. In this Munk debate, the claim that they are equivalent did indeed “win”, changing the minds of the audience more towards equivalence than to non-equivalence. Have a listen to Hausdorff’s short but telling argument:
I have lost friends, and will probably lose more, for being sympathetic to Israel and its right to exist. (Only a handful of American Jews—around 7%—say they are “anti-Zionist”, though there is disagreement about the term’s meaning.). One friend, an excellent scientist with whom I had a good relationship, told me he wanted to unsubscribe to this website because of my views on Israel. (I don’t have the ability to unsubscribe people.) Another, an old paramour whom I still care about, told me she doubted we could get along because of “the Israel thing.” And of course Maarten Boudry and I were disinvited to a biology discussion at the University of Amsterdam because of “our views on Israel,” which are simply that it has a right to exist and defend itself when attacked.
I’m not beefing here, as I regret nothing I’ve said. I just want to reiterate the point once again that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, for it is the view that Israel should not exist and should be eliminated. The sentiment will persist regardless of what Israel does or who is Prime Minister.
This Jesus and Mo strip, called “wrong” is a Friday flashback that appeared twenty years ago. Here Mo explains why he is absolutely adamant about his beliefs.
Today’s photos come from Miriam Meyerhoff, who responded to my call for readers to send it photo. (That call, by the way, still exists!). Miram’s captions are indented and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
In June we spent a week in Orkney (Mainland and Westray) to see neolithic sites and some wildlife. I’m not good at photographing birds (and I just have an iPhone) so I have photos of puffins, some fulmars and lots of plants.
On the Mainland of Orkney, we visited Skara Brae and various stone circles. Skara Brae was first inhabited about 3100 BCE. The homes had built-in furniture (kind of like Frank Lloyd Wright did with his houses) with a dresser of shelves opposite the door and beds built into the walls on the right and left walls:
On Westray, we walked for about an hour with a local guide, Megan of Wild Orkney Walks. Megan was extremely knowledgeable about plants and wildlife and is deeply concerned about the impact of over-fishing on the Orkney sea birds.
It turns out puffins (Fratercula sp.) are not at all scared of people and will let you come very close:
They nested alongside fulmars on the cliffs. Fulmars (Fulmaris sp.) are not gulls, they are in the same family as albatrosses and petrels. Apparently, fulmars can defend themselves by spewing up a foul smelling oily mess and spitting it at you. The first syllable ful- is cognate with the word foul on account of this habit:
The clifftops we walked along had many plants that were new to me. Sea thrift (Armeria maritima, aka sea pinks) and red campion and sea campion as well as meadowsweet [flowers in order]:
There was also an impressive selection of different thistles. I think this was a cruel thistle (Cersium ferox):
Wild roses (Rosa rugosa) were also in bloom. I didn’t know you can eat the petals. They taste a bit like glycerin to me:
Back on the mainland, the oddest plant I saw was Cottonweed. The seed heads do produce something very like cotton wool:
But the most beautiful (to me) was the smallest flower on a clifftop near Yesnaby, sea milkwort. I gather it is quite common in the northern hemisphere, but I didn’t grow up here. I loved how simultaneously tough and dainty it manages be.
Welcome to the first Friday of the month: August 7, 2026, and International Beer Day. I’ve always maintained that the best session beer (not the best overall beer) in the world is Timothy Taylor Landlord, brewed in Britain, and readers keep sending me welcome photos of their pints, although I cannot get any in the U.S. Here’s one sent by Gregory from the Woolly Sheep Inn in Skipton, owned by the brewery:
But Gregory reports on a new Taylor beer, too:
“I’ve now sampled seven of their brews and while I will always enjoy the Landlord, the others are also quite good. (Although the Dark Mild is VERY mild, so maybe I wouldn’t have another of those.). Anyway, Landlord Dark is excellent, although the regular Landlord is a better bitter. But without a doubt, their Boltmaker Bitter is even better than Landlord itself, hard as that may be to believe.”
THAT is a chellenge, so, I’ll have to try this, whose existence I wasn’t aware of. You don’t take the “Champion Beer of Britain” award lightly!
Iran and Oman are close to finalizing an agreement on an acceptable route for ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said, according to state media reports on Wednesday.
The two countries, which sit on opposite sides of the strategic waterway, have been in talks to find a formula to reopen the strait. Iran effectively closed the strait, used to transport a significant quantity of the world’s oil and gas supplies, in retaliation for attacks by the United States and Israel this year.
Iranian officials have insisted they will not give up on some measure of control over the strait, which before the war was an open international waterway.
“The geographic coordinates of the route envisioned by both sides have been agreed upon,” the spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Esmail Baghaei, was quoted as saying by Iran’s state news agency. “If certain third parties do not obstruct the process, a joint statement by the two countries, containing the principal considerations and points of agreement, is currently in the final stages of review and drafting.”
Officials familiar with the emerging accord had earlier told The New York Times that under its terms, vessels heading into the Persian Gulf would transit a channel controlled by Iran and close to its coast. Ships leaving the gulf would travel on a channel near Oman.
Mr. Baghaei said nothing about charging fees or tolls for ships passing through the strait, according to the reported comments.
A regional diplomat with knowledge of the ongoing talks said the negotiators were working hard and hoping for the best.
The Omani government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Iranian officials have said that while there will be no tolls charged in the strait, the agreement includes a “service fee” to cover the environmental effect of the shipping, security for the cargo ships and tankers, and staffing. Revenues would be divided equally between Iran and Oman, Iranian officials said.
Give me a break: a “service fee” is no different from a toll. And they didn’t need “service fees” before the war. The U.S. should not stand for any solution that changes the condition of passage from what it was before the war, i.e. free.
The left beat the establishment, but the results showed its limits.
Dr. El-Sayed campaigned hard against the Democratic political establishment. That was enough to win, but enough voters backed Ms. Stevens to suggest that the establishment still has plenty of influence
The ground has shifted under pro-Israel Democrats.
But Dr. El-Sayed’s primary success in Michigan was arguably the most remarkable victory yet for the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States — and maybe the biggest setback for pro-Israel Democrats.
D.S.A. candidates had a mixed night.
The primaries on Tuesday had the biggest stakes for progressive Democrats of any night on this year’s political calendar.
Dr. El-Sayed was the headliner, but three House candidates with ties to democratic socialism also faced primary voters.
Republicans are going to go after El-Sayed hard.
Ms. Stevens said throughout the final weeks of the primary that Mr. Rogers and his fellow Republicans were itching for Dr. El-Sayed to win the primary because they thought he would be easier to beat in November.
Now Republicans will get their chance to prove Ms. Stevens correct.
Michigan was another defeat for Schumer.
Before this year, it had been a long time since a Democrat backed by Senator Chuck Schumer lost a Senate primary. Now it has happened twice this summer.
Mr. Schumer’s endorsement of Ms. Stevens may have signaled to donors to get behind her, but it cemented her position as the establishment candidate in a year when Democratic primary voters are furious with the establishment.
But winning a primary isn’t the same as winning the general election in a swing state like Michigan. Mr. El-Sayed will face Mike Rogers, a one-time FBI agent and former head of the House Intelligence Committee. Mr. Rogers is a strong candidate who lost to Democrat Elissa Slotkin two years ago by fewer than 20,000 votes out of more than 5.4 million cast. He has shown he can unite the moderate suburban and MAGA wings of the state GOP.
It’s a new political landscape, but we’ll see how the “progressives” do in red or purple states. We don’t have any running here, though Mayor Brandon Johnson comes close. But in general voters don’t like him, and he hasn’t announced whether he’ll run again for mayor.
Democratic primary voters in Michigan just made it harder for their party to flip the Senate.
Abdul El-Sayed struggled mightily with the working-class voters he claims his policies will help. The Bernie Sanders acolyte badly underperformed pre-primary polls to eke out a victory in Tuesday’s Senate primary with less than 50 percent. A win is a win, but he carries heavy baggage into the general election.
El-Sayed benefited from the strongly anti-establishment mood in the Democratic ranks to defeat Rep. Haley Stevens. Other Michigan races showed that this cycle remains perilous for incumbents: Rep. Shri Thanedar lost to a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He is the sixth Democratic congressman who has been toppled by a primary challenger.
Stevens had support from outgoing Sen. Gary Peters and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. El-Sayed campaigned with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and live-streamer Hasan Piker, who has said “America deserved 9/11.”
. . .Because Vice President JD Vance can break 50-50 ties, Democrats need to net four Senate seats. Losing Michigan would require them to find another state to flip. Democrats see opportunities to pick up GOP-held seats in North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa and Texas.
Trump is so unpopular right now, and the national environment is so favorable for Democrats, that El-Sayed might win despite himself. If he loses and the GOP controls the Senate for the last two years of Trump’s term as a result, it could teach Democrats an important lesson heading into 2028. Pragmatism, not radicalism, offers the best path out of the wilderness.
So what are the chances that El-Sayed will win in November? Prediction markets and pollsters make it a narrow race, with perhaps El-Sayed having a slight advantage over his Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers. But El-Sayed underperformed in the polls for the primary, so I’m not making any bets. As an anti-Zionist, he rejects Zionism, construed as “the movement supporting the self-determination and continued existence of the State of Israel.” If you oppose that, you want Israel gone, and that, ladies and gentlemen, friends and comrades, is antisemitism.
A Republican-led Senate committee voted Thursday to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer lawmakers’ questions about his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, escalating a yearslong GOP effort to scrutinize one of the nation’s top former health officials.
Senators voted 8-5 on the resolution, along party lines, which was brought by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.). It seeks to refer the case directly to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, bypassing a vote from the full Senate, where Republicans would be unlikely to meet a 60-vote threshold to advance the resolution.
“Seeking the truth is not a witch hunt,” Paul said before the vote. “Accountability is not vengeance. Accountability is what stands between the American people and a repeat of the mistakes and the very real consequences of the past.”
. . . It is unclear how the Justice Department, which has shown a willingness to investigate President Trump’s political adversaries, would approach the contempt issue. Fauci, 85 years old, received a pre-emptive pardon from President Joe Biden, who sought to shield him and other officials from anticipated prosecution by Trump and his allies. During the pandemic, Fauci was serving as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a role he held for decades.
The vote comes as legal and political pressure on Fauci builds, with top Republicans in Washington pressing for additional documents and at least four Republican-led states launching their own investigations.
. . .For now, Fauci and his team are preparing for the political and legal battles ahead while maintaining confidence that none of the investigations will yield credible charges. They have portrayed Paul’s yearslong pursuit of Fauci as evidence that the investigation is politically driven, while privately noting that Paul’s previous referrals of Fauci to the Justice Department for potential prosecution—including one under the current Trump administration—didn’t result in charges.
The congressional effort is unfolding alongside a push by Republican officials to pursue Fauci through other legal avenues. This week, Oklahoma became the latest state to launch an inquiry into whether Fauci’s actions during the pandemic violated state law, following similar investigations announced in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana.
I’d bet against Fauci facing any kind of conviction, though he may find his golden years occupied with fighting various legal charges. I haven’t seen anything in the record that rises to the level or criminality, but we’ll have to see what the Republican bloodhounds dig up.
A small organ in eastern Germany is the headliner of the world’s slowest concert. It has been playing the same piece of music by composer John Cage at a glacial pace for nearly 25 years.
A rare chord change on Wednesday — from seven notes to eight — represented the completion of about 4% of the 639-year endeavor of the John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt.
It was a historic moment inside the medieval Burchardi Church, in Halberstadt, Germany, that reflected the past, present and future of the project, as well as those who are following its — albeit very slow — progression.
. . .While the project commenced in 2000, the performance began Sept. 5, 2001 — Cage’s 89th birthday — with a silent pause that lasted until Feb. 5, 2003, when the first chords could actually be heard.
The composition — called “ORGAN²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)” — is scheduled to finish on Sept. 4, 2640.
An electric-powered blower system sends wind into the organ to create a continuous sound. A chord change, done manually, means that the sound of the organ pipes changes either because new sounds are added or existing sounds end.
More than 150 people squeezed inside the church Wednesday to witness what was the piece’s 17th chord change, with dozens more watching a livestream outside.
For three minutes, the crowd listened to the “old” chord with its seven pipes. Then, an eighth pipe was slotted into the small organ, bringing with it a new sound that reverberated throughout the church. The spectators listened for another three minutes — some filming with cellphones, others taking it all in with their eyes closed and heads bowed — before breaking out into applause and cries of “bravo!”
The chord change is supposed to be in this video, not the one below, but it’s hard to hear. I think it’s at 11:30 in the previous link.
I ask you, is this artistic music? I call it a trick designed to impress people who think that a urinal is art. Get off my lawn!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a fancy-pants way of telling Andrzej that her bowl is empty:
Hili: I looked into my bowl just a moment ago. Me: And what did you find?
Hili: Abstract cognitive categories suspended in a subtle void.
In Polish:
Hili: Zaglądałam przed chwilą do mojej miseczki.
Ja: I co tam znalazłaś?
Hili: Abstrakcyjne kategorie poznawcze zgromadzone w subtelnej pustce.
Cats will square up with a bear like they’ve got something to prove, but the minute the vacuum comes out, they act like the end of civilization is here.
That cat looked back like, “You boys got this on tape?” 😂🐈⬛ pic.twitter.com/b5lehxYLXn
The Botafumeiro is one of the most spectacular traditions of Santiago de Compostela Cathedral: eight tiraboleiros swing a 53 kg giant censer through the nave at speeds of up to 68 km/h.
Matthew gave this one an exclamation mark. It’s taken from a real picture of Mitch McConnell celebrating his recovery. Will he return to the Senate? He has not told us.
The famous Belle Époque ad poster of a black cat sipping absinthe was created in 1902 by the renowned industrial designers Mourgue Frères (brothers) for the Bourgeois distillery in the French town of Pontarlier. They say there was no absinthe in the glass, but milk, to make the cat pose for the poster. The artwork was so popular that it is used as decoration in many bars and homes till nowadays. The story behind the poster is a hilarious cat art story. The cat’s surroundings are heavily based on a painting by Charles Maine, a local artist of the Pontarlier region. Maine’s painting depicted a table with an absinthe bottle, a decanter of water, glasses, and a folded copy of a Pontarlier newspaper. The painting was very popular and used for Émile Pernot distillery advertising. Evidently, Mourgue Frères, ironically remade the painting, including the cat, to beat the Bourgeois distillery’s competitors! And they succeeded with their art, which became much more popular than the original painting. Cats make everything better!
