Wednesday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to a Hump Day (“uroe bonggol” in Acehense): Wednesday, February 11, 2026, and National Latte Day, the drink I have every morning to get me going. Here’s a photo of the one I’m drinking now, all homeofficemade, with a sprinkle of cinnamon on top, The picture on the mug is that of Hili drinking from a cup on which is pictured Hili drinking from a cup.

It’s also International Day of Women and Girls in Science, National Peppermint Patty Day, Promise Day (today you reinforce your relationships by making promises), and National Make a Friend Day.

Today’s Olympic Google Doodle celebrates ice hockey, and if you click on it below, you can see how the different shots are made:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Luana has been telling me this for a long time, but it was only yesterday that the NYT posted about the three American states that represent the greatest educational successes in America.  Perhaps the NYT didn’t want to write about them because, contrary to the narrative, they’re all southern red states: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. But as recounted by Nicholas Kristof in the NYT, the educational achievement in these states has been remarkable:

A ray of hope is emerging in American education.

Not among Democrats or Republicans, each diverted by culture wars. Not in the education reform movement, largely abandoned by the philanthropists who once propelled it. Not in most schools across the country, still struggling with chronic absenteeism and a decade of faltering test scores.

Rather, hope emerges in the most unlikely of places: three states here in the Deep South that long represented America’s educational basement. These states — Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi — have histories of child poverty, racism and dismal educational outcomes, and they continue to spend less than most other states on public schools.

Yet, consider:

• Louisiana ranks No. 1 in the country in recovery from pandemic losses in reading, while Alabama ranks No. 1 in math recovery.

• The state with the lowest chronic absenteeism in schools is Alabama, according to a tracker with data from 40 states.

• Once an educational laughingstock, Mississippi now ranks ninth in the country in fourth-grade reading levels — and after adjusting for demographics such as poverty and race, Mississippi ranks No. 1, while Louisiana ranks No. 2, according to calculations by the Urban Institute. Using the same demographic adjustment, Mississippi also ranks No. 1 in America in both fourth-grade and eighth-grade math.

• Black fourth graders in Mississippi are on average better readers than those in Massachusetts, which is often thought to have the best public school system in the country (and one that spends twice as much per pupil).

I wrote about Mississippi’s educational successes in 2023, but many of my fellow liberals then scoffed at the notion of learning from a state so tainted. Skeptics, mostly on the left, have made many critiques of the gains, including that they fade in upper grades, that the states are cheating, that this is all a temporary blip and that any progress is simply a result of holding back weak readers.

The critiques have been effectively rebutted — for starters, they can’t explain the continuing gains in Mississippi or the magnitude of the gains. Just as striking, the Mississippi gains increasingly are being replicated in Alabama and Louisiana, as they follow similar approaches. That’s enormously encouraging, for it suggests that other states can also lift student trajectories if they are willing to learn from Southern red states they may be more accustomed to looking down on.

So I traveled through Mississippi and Alabama with the photographer Lynsey Addario to understand the lessons to be learned. Perhaps the most important is an insistence on metrics, accountability and mastery of reading by the end of third grade. And while reading gets the attention, just as important is getting kids to attend school regularly.

. . . In classrooms and offices, teachers and administrators frequently mentioned the motivating power of report cards — not the letter grades given out by schools, but those they receive. Alabama gives its schools report cards, based in part on student performance and attendance, with grades that are widely noted in local communities, and these are one more reason to track down missing children.

. . . In Mississippi, where the four-year high school graduation rate is now 89 percent, the State Department of Education each year must approve a “dropout prevention plan” from each school district. The state education department “office of accountability” publishes lists that shame the 10 school districts with the lowest graduation rates.

. . . The gains in these states suggest that that critique is wrong. Mississippi and Alabama haven’t fixed child poverty, trauma and deeply troubled communities — but they have figured out how to get kids to read by the end of third grade.

In retrospect, I’m afraid that in some parts of the country — particularly blue states — we succumbed to the idea of lowering standards in hopes of improving equity. With warm and fuzzy hopes of reducing race gaps, for example, Oregon reduced graduation requirements and San Francisco for a time stopped teaching algebra to eighth graders. Some schools embraced “equitable grading” practices such as refusing to give zeros, ending penalties for turning in assignments late and allowing repeated retakes of tests.

These strike me as examples of what President George W. Bush called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Our liberal leniency went off the rails in other ways, including grade inflation and a general coddling of students: Recent cohorts of high school students have simultaneously had rising G.P.A.s and falling A.C.T. scores, and at Harvard, 60 percent of grades in the last academic year were A’s. Colleges have accepted dubious claims of disability so that students can, for example, get extra time for tests. The Atlantic reports that 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability.

I have given more extensive excerpts than usual here because I think the article and its conclusions are important: emphasize reading, emphasize regular school attendance (important!), grade the schools, and avoid lowering standards and weakening the emphasis on merit. Sadly, Kristof says that both Republicans and Democrats have ignored these lessons.

*Ghislaine Maxwell, serving 20 years for child sex trafficking in the Epstein case, was questioned (virtually) by a House Oversight Committee yesterday, but pleaded the Fifth (refused to talk) unless she was given clemency from President Trump.

Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who is serving a federal prison sentence on sex-trafficking charges, refused on Monday to answer questions during a deposition before the House Oversight Committee.

Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the committee’s Republican chairman, said that Ms. Maxwell, who appeared virtually from a prison in Texas, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to every question asked.

“It was very disappointing,” Mr. Comer said. “We had many questions to ask about the crimes she and Epstein committed, as well as questions about potential co-conspirators.”

He also said that Ms. Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus, told lawmakers in his opening statement that Ms. Maxwell “would answer questions if she were granted clemency” by President Trump.

Democrats in the deposition condemned that stance.

“She is campaigning over and over again to get that pardon from President Trump, and this president has not ruled it out,” said Representative Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia. “And so that is why she is continuing to not cooperate with our investigation.”

In a copy of his statement posted on social media, Mr. Markus said that “Ms. Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if

Maxwell has put the Administration—and everyone who wants the truth about EpsteinGate—between a rock and a hard place. Trump doesn’t want to give clemency to a pedophile and sex trafficker, but it’s also clear that Maxwell could spill the beans on lots of people, and everybody wants to see who’s guilty.  She’s already been moved, without explanation, from a regular prison to a minimum-security prison.  I don’t know what the answer is: should you free one pedophile to indict several more? If they decide to do that, could Maxwell provide enough evidence, besides hearsay, to convict several people who participated in the abuse and sex-trafficking scandal.  Give you own opinion below.

*Guess which historical figure has now been canceled. According to Andrew Doyle (aka “Titania McGrath”) writing in the Washington Post, Samuel Pepys is “Another ludicrous canceling of  a name from the past” (h/t Wayne). Pepys, of course, is most famous for the informative diary he kept for about a decade, a valuable source of information about the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London and, of course, his numerous extramarital affairs, often described in juicy detail. It’s apparently the last fact that has gotten people to start removing his name from things, including a house at the place he went to school:.

Samuel Pepys was, famously, an extraordinary diarist, offering a vivid first-hand account of life in Restoration England from 1660 to 1669. He was an eyewitness to the Great Fire of London in 1666 and recorded fascinating details of the ravages of the bubonic plague. His diaries were also intensely personal, with entries that echo familiarly across the centuries, whether recounting his rivalries and triumphs in his job as a naval administrator, his frustrations (can’t find a coach in the rain!), his delight in friends or boredom with dull sermons.

But anyone expecting infallibility will be disappointed. These diaries are not objective accounts of historical events, but history filtered through a singular and unmistakably human temperament. This quality explains their flaws, but also their enduring fascination. It also accounts for frequent discomfort over Pepys’s diaries, because they are the work of someone with apparently little sexual restraint. They were routinely censored by those transcribing from his shorthand in the 19th century. An unexpurgated version, including licentious episodes that he had disguised by using French and sometimes Spanish, wasn’t published until 1970.

This squeamishness over the diaries has never gone away. Recently, Hinchingbrooke School in Cambridgeshire — where Pepys was an alumnus — decided that one of its pastoral houses should no longer bear his name. This is just the latest example of an institution rewriting or minimizing aspects of its own history to fulfill the moral expectations of the present day.

Up until now, Hinchingbrooke School has been proud to advertise its association with the great writer. They have yet to name a replacement for Pepys House, but they may struggle to find a figure of unimpeachable virtue. And if moral purity really is to be the standard, they might want to reconsider the name of Cromwell House, given that Oliver Cromwell was responsible for the massacre of thousands of Catholics in the 17th century during his Irish campaign. But I suppose I shouldn’t give them ideas.

The shaming of the dead is one of the most asinine pastimes of today’s culture warriors. We have seen their shrill demands enacted in the renaming of streets and buildings, the removal of statues and the “decolonization” of curriculums. At the University of Liverpool, a student housing block named after the prime minister William Gladstone was rebranded in 2020 because of his father’s slaveholding in the Caribbean. Yet Gladstone himself became an advocate of emancipation, calling slavery “by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind”; apparently speeches early in his political career and the sins of his father were enough to see him condemned.

In the United States, countless episodes of colleges and institutions removing now-disapproved of names include Princeton University’s scrubbing of President Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school in 2020. His racist views, repugnant today, were unexceptional in his time.

Indeed, not to mention the geneticists like Ronald Fisher in the U.K. who advocated a form of class-based eugenics, though he never had any influence in British eugenics because there wasn’t any.  The last bit is pure Doyle, of course, a contrarian who’s recently written one book on free speech and another on “the new Puritans“, criticizing social justice warriors. But regardless of that, to go after Pepys is ludicrous. If you canceled everyone who had a wide-ranging sex life, extramarital or not, many of history’s great figures would disappear from the scene.

*The BBC has reported on a mushroom in China that has a specific hallucinatory effect on people who eat it when it’s not fully cooked: it makes people see tiny little people!  This is the first psychedelic substance I know of that produces specific and similiar qualia on different people (h/t Susan). The syndrome, found in several different Asian countries, is called having “Lilliputian hallucinations.”

Only recently described by science, the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions.

Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture.

The hospital treats hundreds of these cases every year. All share a common culprit: Lanmaoa asiatica, a type of mushroom that forms symbiotic relationships with pine trees in nearby forests and is a locally popular food, known for its savory, umami-packed flavor. In Yunnan, L. asiatica is sold in markets, it appears on restaurant menus and is served at home during peak mushroom season between June and August.

One must be careful to cook it thoroughly, though, otherwise the hallucinations will set in.

“At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, ‘Don’t eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'” says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica. “It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there.”

But outside of Yunnan and a couple of other places, the strange mushroom is largely an enigma.

Domnauer is on a quest to solve the decades-old mysteries about this fungi species and identify the unknown compound responsible for its unusually similar hallucinations – as well as what it can potentially teach us about the human brain.

Domnauer first heard of L. asiatica as an undergraduate from his mycology professor.

“It sounded so bizarre that there could be a mushroom out there causing fairytale-like visions reported across cultures and time,” Domnauer says. “I was perplexed and driven by curiosity to find out more.”

Understanding this mushroom will be no easy feat, Domnauer says, but as with studies of other psychedelic compounds, the scientific research it produces could end up touching on the biggest questions of consciousness and the relationship between mind and reality.

It could also provide important clues about what causes spontaneous lilliputian hallucinations in people even when they’re not consuming L. asiatica. The condition is rare, and as of 2021, only 226 non-mushroom-related cases had been reported since lilliputian hallucinations were first described in 1909. But for those relatively few people, the outcome can be serious: a third of those patients who came down with non-mushroom-related cases did not fully recover.

This is totally bizarre, but also fascinating. Once they identify the compound or the brain region that causes hallucinations to specifically see tiny people, scientists might be able to figure out how the brain causes these consistent delusions. That it’s part of the brain is supported by a similar condition in people who haven’t eaten mushrooms. I wondered immediately if, say, the mushrooms would have the same effect on mice, but making them see tiny mice. At first I thought that experiment that would be impossible, but my friend Peggy Mason, a neuroscientist who worked on mice and rats, said that it’s potentially testable. She suggested that you first train mice to tell us whether they are seeing pictures of tiny mice as opposed, for example, to tiny elephants. You would do this by showing them pictures of each one, and rewarding them with a treat when they go to a correct port (there would be two) associated with elephants or mice. Then you give them the mushrooms and see if the mice, seeing hallucinatory tiny mice, would preferentially go to the port associated with seeing a mouse (the ports don’t have pictures themselves, but mice learn ports based on color, location, etc.).  Peggy wanted me to add that she didn’t think the experiment would work!

*Finally, Ginger K. pointed out that I was mentioned in a Grammarphobia post explaining the meaning of the word “osculate,” which, as you know, I regularly use to describe some people’s behavior towards religion.

Q: Here’s the title of a post on a blog I follow: “More osculation of religion by the NYT and Free Press.” I’m not aware of this figurative use of “osculation,” but it could be ignorance on my part.

A: “Osculation” is being used here to mean “kissing,” the original sense of the English noun and its Latin ancestor. However, the noun is now used humorously in its kissing sense, or used as a mathematical term for the point at which a pair of curves or surfaces touch.

The evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne, a religious skeptic, is using “osculation” satirically on his website Why Evolution Is True to say The New York Times and The Free Press are kissing up to religion by taking it seriously.

English borrowed the noun “osculation” and the verb “osculate” from Latin in the mid-17th century. Both terms ultimately come from osculum, Latin for a “kiss” (literally, a “little mouth,” the diminutive of os, or “mouth”).

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “osculation” as “the action of kissing; a kiss.” The earliest OED citation is from The New World of English Words (1658), by Edward Phillips: “Osculation, a kissing or imbracing.” Phillips was a nephew of Milton and educated by him.

As for the verb, the OED defines it as “to kiss (a person or thing), to salute with contact of the lips.” It labels the usage “now archaic or humorous.” The dictionary’s first example is from a dictionary of difficult words:

Well, that’s a mere scintilla of fame, but I’ll take it.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is once again peckish, like Winnie-the-Pooh:

Hili: At last you pulled yourself away from the computer.
Andrzej: So what?
Hili: It’s time for a little something.

In Polish:

Hili: Nareszcie oderwałeś się od komputera.
Ja: I co z tego?
Hili: Czas na małe co nieco.

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

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Jesus of the Day, a Joe Pesci cat:

Masih on a child “protestor” who was killed:

I kept looking at Taha’s photos, every single one filled with smile, life, joy…

Taha was only 12 years old.

Khamenei’s soldiers shot him from behind with live ammunition, chanting “Heidar, Heidar.”
A bullet that destroyed this beautiful face, this pure smile, and an entire… pic.twitter.com/y2soNk57Be

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) February 10, 2026

From Muffy, Islamicat fakes victimhood.  (That account is a hoot.)

The problems in Middle East pic.twitter.com/JurjKgis8Z

— Islamicat 💣😾🕌 💥 (@_Islamicat) February 9, 2026

A dad joke from Simon, who’s a dad:

This is a hilarious one on cat names! 😀😛😂 #CatsOfTwitter @DrDeepakKrishn1 pic.twitter.com/Un5ilBMSj4

— Ananth Rupanagudi (@Ananth_IRAS) February 7, 2026

From Malcolm; scene at a Chinese festival (sound up):

Kid dressed up as a Chinese dragon meets some grown up dragons. pic.twitter.com/e3k3ZO8eT3

— The Best (@Thebestfigen) January 31, 2026

One from my feed; a good and faithful cat:

The doctors had to treat a sick man and his cat was there watching everything, all worried about what was happening.pic.twitter.com/GJp1GWLzJm

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) February 10, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she got to Auschwitz. She was ten years old and would be 92 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-02-11T11:20:50.665Z

Two from Dr Cobb. First, the Grasshopper that Ate New York:

I love this one, which Matthew calls “fate.”  It is true that whales probably evolved from ancient terrestrial artiodactyls, possibly like Indohyus.

— Chris DeLeon ⓥ DevPods.gg gamedev collabs (@chrisdeleon.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T03:27:32.297Z