Welcome to a Hump Day (“Haftanın Ortası” in Turkish): Wednesday, March 25, 2026, and Manatee Appreciation Day. There are three living species of the critter. Wikipedia says this:
There are three accepted living species of Trichechidae, representing three of the four living species in the order Sirenia: the Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis), the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus), and the West African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis). They measure up to 4.0 metres (13 ft 1 in) long, weigh as much as 590 kilograms (1,300 lb), and have paddle-like tails.
Another sirenian is the dugong, found in the Indo-West Pacific. Here’s a video about them telling you what you need to know!
I have seen them in Florida, and I love these gentle giants. They’re completely herbivorous and keep getting injured or killed by powerboats.
It’s also the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (a UN holiday), International Waffle Day, National Lobster Newburg Day, and Pecan Day. Here’s Anthony Bourdain visiting a Waffle House with chef Sean Brock. At first disdainful, Bourdain is won over. And he eats pecan waffles, which is a celebration of two ot today’s holidays. This is, I think, one of Bourdain’s better videos.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 25 Wikipedia page.
Oh, I need advice. I want to unsubscribe from Andrew Sullivan’s site, and I don’t care if I have to pay for the rest of the year. Could someone tell me how to do it? I’m tired of the rantings of that old curmudgeon.
Da Nooz:
*Yesterday’s war news summary from It’s Noon in Israel (I recommend that you subscribe; you can get a bunch of news for free here):
- Trump extended his deadline for an Iran deal to March 27, saying Tehran has agreed to cease uranium enrichment, relinquish existing stockpiles, and remain “low-key on the missiles.” Netanyahu said Trump told him the U.S. sees an opportunity to “leverage the military achievements of the war” to secure all strategic objectives through an agreement. Meanwhile, Iranian parliament speaker Ghalibaf publicly rejected reports of U.S.-Iran negotiations on X—despite reportedly being the official leading Iran’s diplomatic engagement with Washington. The denial may say more about internal Iranian politics than about the state of the talks: Ghalibaf has quietly consolidated enormous influence since the war began, making him both the man most likely to be negotiating and the man with the most to gain from denying it.
- Vice President JD Vance will be joining U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff in Pakistan to pursue indirect talks with Iranian officials, specifically Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi, with Islamabad serving as both mediator and summit venue. Markets responded immediately—oil retreated below $100 a barrel on news of the pause. Tehran is demanding guarantees, base closures, and compensation, while Israeli officials are warning that negotiations could either buy Iran time or fall short of U.S. red lines.
- According to the AP, Israel used one of Iran’s oppression apparatuses—its extensive system of street cameras—to track and kill Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. According to intelligence officials briefed on the operation, nearly all of Tehran’s traffic cameras had been hacked for years, with footage streamed to servers in Israel. Algorithms mapped the daily movements of senior officials—their routes, parking spots, and security details—allowing Israel to plan the strike months in advance and expedite it once it was confirmed that Khamenei and his top officials would be at the leadership compound that morning. The irony is stark: the instrument of Iranian oppression ultimately became the tool to end its dictator.
- Three suspects have been arrested and indicted following the near-fatal lynching of a Jewish teenager in Huwara in January. On January 25, the Shin Bet received intelligence that the teenager had entered the Huwara area and been violently attacked by local residents—left unconscious, with his attackers believing he was dead. There has been a notable uptick in settler violence; to see my take on it, watch the end of the CNN interview at the end of the newsletter.
Now, on to the details
A very senior Israeli official told me last night, “It’s highly doubtful that the Iranians’ minimum will meet Trump’s maximum.” To put it simply: expectations in Israel for a negotiated end to this war are currently close to zero—and here’s why.
Trump has said something consistently about Iran for years: they have never won a war, but they have never lost a negotiation. So why would he suddenly leave his home field—the battlefield, where he is the strongest player in the world—to play an away game, negotiations, where the Iranians are world-class operators? He would only do so if there were a great deal to gain.
I think the negotiations will wind up either noexistent or nonproductive. Trump’s erratic behavior about the war really is disturbing.
*The Wall Street Journal reports on a series of closed-door meetings in Riyadh involving Middle East diplomats, those meetings that supposedly led to Trump putting a hold on his threatened strikes on Iran (article archived here).
Foreign ministers from Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan gathered before dawn Thursday in Riyadh for talks aimed at finding a diplomatic off-ramp to the war in Iran.
But there was one big problem, according to Arab officials involved in the discussions: finding a counterpart in Iran to negotiate with. Earlier that week, Israel killed Iran’s national security chief, Ali Larijani, who had been considered a viable partner who could engage with the West.
Egyptian intelligence officials managed to open a channel with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the paramilitary group that protects the Iranian regime and is the country’s most powerful security and political entity—and put forward a proposal to halt hostilities for five days to build confidence for a cease-fire, some of the officials said.
Those discussions laid the groundwork for an abrupt reversal more than 7,000 miles away in Florida.
On Saturday night, President Trump, who spent the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago club, gave Iran an ultimatum to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours or the U.S. military would “obliterate” the country’s power plants. Two days later, as word of the discussions in Riyadh made its way to the White House, Trump reversed course, embracing diplomacy with Tehran and putting his threatened strikes on hold.
Trump’s shift Monday morning followed a series of closed-door discussions—through Middle Eastern intermediaries—that U.S. officials said gave them hope an agreement to settle the conflict was possible. It also reflected a growing desire by Trump and some of his advisers to bring the war to a close, according to people familiar with the matter, as the president faces political and economic fallout from the conflict.
“These are sensitive diplomatic discussions, and the U.S. will not negotiate through the press,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “This is a fluid situation, and speculation about meetings should not be deemed as final until they are formally announced by the White House.”
. . . But Arab mediators privately expressed skepticism that the U.S. and Iran could quickly reach an agreement, noting that the two sides remained far apart. Trump’s assertion that the talks were productive was met with pushback from Iranian officials, who denied that the discussions were taking place.
What’s not clear is whether the U.S. has even had any negotiations with either the Middle Eastern foreign ministers or with Iran. If so, who is negotiating on the part of the U.S. This is all we have:
Messages continued to be exchanged, with Qatar, Oman, France and the U.K. working their back channels, European and Arab officials said. Among the proposals bandied about was Pakistan hosting a meeting between U.S. and Iranian senior leaders, the officials said, adding that the U.S. quickly warmed to that idea.
The U.S. could be represented by special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, although there was also a possibility that Vice President JD Vance could come if a deal was close, a U.S. official said.
It we negotiate, I think we’ll lose, for the regime will stay in power (do you think Iran would agree to regime change?), and so will the uranium enrichment program. Yes, Trump’s approval rating is tanking, so perhaps that’s pushing him to end the war, but will it be a Hamas-like end to the war, with the terrorists still in power? (Nobody seems to think about what’s going on in Gaza any more. Well, Hamas, sworn to destroy Israel still controls much of the territory, despite having supposedly promised to lay down their arms. LOL.
*Curiously, according to the NYT, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been urging Trump to continue the war with Iran as a way of remaking the Middle East. What? Read the article right above,
Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been pushing President Trump to continue the war against Iran, arguing that the U.S.-Israeli military campaign presents a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East, according topeople briefed by American officials on the conversations.
In a series of conversations over the last week, Prince Mohammed has conveyed to Mr. Trump that he must press toward the destruction of Iran’s hard-line government, the people familiar with the conversations said.
Prince Mohammed, the people familiar with the discussions said, has argued that Iran poses a long-term threat to the Gulf that can only be eliminated by getting rid of the government.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel also views Iran as a long-term threat, but analysts say Israeli officials would probably view a failed Iranian state that is too caught up in internal turmoil to menace Israel as a win, while Saudi Arabia views a failed state in Iran as a grave and direct security threat.
But senior officials in both the Saudi and American governments worry that if the conflict drags on, Iran could deliver ever more punishing attacks on Saudi oil installations and the United States could be stuck in an endless war.
In public, Mr. Trump has swung wildly between suggesting that the war could end soon and signaling it would escalate.
Saudi Arabia, with its oil, is probably the most important country involved in this conflict besides the U.S., Iran, and Israel, and its thinking ahead about its oil. Israel is think ahead about whether Iran will pose an existential threat after the war is over. And Trump, what is he thinking about. Probably Trump himself, and how the world views him. But how can Saudi Arabia be involved in pushing the U.S. to topple the Iranian regime on the one hand and negotiating a non-toppling cease fire on the other?
*An article by Milan Singh at The Argument site makes “The liberal case for voter ID,” which does not support the SAVE Act but does support the use of IDs (h/t Reese). The SAVE Act is a Republican-sponsored House Bill, HR 22, which requires people who register to vote have proof of U.S. citizenship. It’s controversial because people suspect that Republicans are doing this because people who would vote Democratic, namely blacks and the impoverished, could not vote because they don’t have access to the documents necessary to prove citizenship. (Presumably you’d have to provide proof of citizenship only once, and from then on just show proof of who you are with a “voter ID” like a driver’s license or state ID card.)
. . . .at its core, this is an argument about election administration: Republicans say the bill is necessary to prevent immigrants from voting illegally. Democrats say this kind of voting fraud is so rare as to be a non-issue and that it will make it more difficult for American citizens to cast their ballots.
But the article argues that in 2024, those who didn’t vote leaned towards Trump and that voters with higher socioeconomic status, and thus more likely to have proof of citizenship, are more likely to vote Democratic. There’s more: studies show that voter ID laws don’t really suppress many votes, and that voter ID laws are very popular in the US (over 2/3 of people support them).
The upshot is that a strict voter ID law designed to suppress turnout among low-SES voters would probably net votes for Democrats. Specifically, higher-income voters are more likely to own a valid passport, which is one document the SAVE America Act could require people to present when registering to vote for federal elections (the alternative is to present a birth certificate and valid driver’s license).
And taking the sports and youth transition issues off the table [Trump’s trying to make these part of the bill] would also help Democrats, since the party’s stances on both issues are incredibly unpopular.
I do not believe that we should “nationalize elections” or end mail-in voting.2 But I do think there is a case for Democrats to embrace voter ID laws (though not the SAVE Act itself, which is now chock full of poison pills). Not because these laws would suppress Republican votes, but because they might restore trust in the electoral process.
And to the extent that Democrats are resisting voter ID out of concern that it will skew the electorate in a MAGA direction, that’s a fear they should get over.
. . .The final point about conspiracies is important. Voters having faith in the system matters, just as making voting broadly accessible matters.
That doesn’t mean Democrats should swallow the existing SAVE America Act as written; among other things, it would make it harder for married women who changed their last names and students who move out of state for college to vote. But it would make sense for Democrats to work with Republicans to enact voter ID laws that are popular with the public, allow all eligible voters to cast a ballot, and bolster faith in elections.
. . . it’s worth saying that the call for voter ID is defensible, and it’s simply not true that enacting it would give Republicans a daunting advantage — or even any advantage at all — in elections.
Rhetoric from Democrats like Chuck Schumer comparing the legislation to Jim Crow suggests something so abhorrent as to be beyond dealmaking, and it gives a false impression of the stakes — both moral and in terms of electoral outcomes. Democrats should instead give the people what they want on voter ID and start rebuilding faith in the integrity of the democratic process.
I understand the difficulties of getting proof of citizenship, but, really, you have to be a U.S. citizen to vote in U.S. elections. Period. Shouldn’t you have to document that at least once? After that, once you’re in the system, all you have to do is prove that you’re the same person who’s a citizen, and that can be done with driver’s licenses or other documents. And that’s what 36 states already do: after you prove citizenship once, you just have to show who you are. I may have had to get a copy of my birth certificate to register in the first place (I can’t remember, but I do have a copy), and that required just my name, date of birth, and a few dollars sent to Missouri (I was born in St. Louis). Once I did that, I was good to go, and never had to show proof of citizenship again. So what’s the big deal? Is it all about getting votes for Democrats or Republicans? If so, that’s not a good motive. But you have to be a citizen to vote, and if you don’t have to prove that at least once, it’s pretty bad.
*Antisemitic attack of the day. Both the BBC (archived link) and CNN report a case of four ambulances from a London Jewish aid service being set on fire on Monday Morning. From CNN:
Several ambulances belonging to a Jewish volunteer rescue organization were set on fire outside a synagogue in a neighborhood home to London’s largest Jewish community early on Monday, in an antisemitic attack.
Flames lit up the night sky and residents of the northern suburb of Golders Green were woken by loud explosions, as dozens of firefighters rushed to the area.
Counter-terrorism police are leading the investigation into the attack even though it has not yet been deemed a terrorist incident, police said during a press conference on Monday morning.
An Islamist group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia has allegedly claimed responsibility for the attack. It posted a video on Telegram showing the location of the incident and footage of the ambulances in flames.
. . .However, this has not been confirmed by police. At the press conference, Detective Chief Superintendent Luke Williams said: “We are aware of an online claim from a group taking responsibility for this attack. Establishing the authenticity and accuracy of this claim will be a priority for the investigation team, but it is not something we can confirm at this point.”
Earlier, police said the attack was being treated as an “antisemitic hate crime,” adding that some residents had been evacuated as a precaution.
Security camera footage shared with CNN showed three masked people approach an ambulance belonging to the Hatzola Northwest organization and set it on fire.
Note that the BBC calls it a “suspected antisemitic hate crime” while CNN apparently has laxer standards for proof of hate crimes. Regardless, the level of antisemitism in Britain is increasing. Some of that may be due to Muslim immigrants, but there are plenty of homegrown Brits joining the protests (though they probably aren’t enacting this kind of violence. The explosion at the only Orthodox Jewish school in the Netherlands on March 14 has also been claimed by an Islamist group (nobody was hurt, and the claim hasn’t been verified), and that was after an explosion at a synagogue in Rotterdam the day before. Again, how many times have you heard of Jews in Europe attacking mosques or other Muslim-associated buildings or schools? This all raises the questions about whether we can stop the attacks and the hate without limiting immigration.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is worried about the upstairs d*g:
Hili: It’s spring, don’t let the dog go out.
Andrzej: The dog also needs its freedom.
In Polish:
Hili: Jest wiosna, nie wypuszczaj psa.
Ja: Pies też potrzebuje wolności.
*******************
From Things With Faces:
From Now That’s Wild:
From Terrible Maps:
An un-embeddable tweet reposted by Masih (click to go to the original). The execrable Mehdi Hasan accused Masih in the second tween of being partly responsible for the war against Iran:
From Barry. Oy!
Elsie was hands down the most affectionate cow at the petting zoo.
— Runs with scissors in the dark (@tevistickles.bsky.social) 2026-03-24T14:49:33.010Z
From Luana, a nonpolitical tweet. She says that as a child she had a cat who did the same thing to her pet rabbit.
Fun fact: In cat world being the one that grooms the other one means they’re the boss.
In bunny world it’s the other way round – the one being groomed is the boss.
So they both are thinking they’re the boss. pic.twitter.com/8yaQMg9y1V— The Best (@Thebestfigen) March 23, 2026
Two from my feed. The first one is freaking amazing:
The power of a dog’s nose is so extraordinary it can detect even the faintest trace—just a few molecules in the air.
— Science girl (@sciencegirl) March 23, 2026
This cat likes veggies with his meat. I thought cats were afraid of cucumbers.
He likes to eat his cat food with cucumber pic.twitter.com/gLhZ1trdFb
— We don’t deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) March 24, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was eleven years old. https://t.co/rHGmWutKVl
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) March 25, 2026
And two from Dr. Cobb. First, the Internet being funny.
Matthew made this one. The point is that Sagan thought that there might be nocturnal Martian creatures whose footprints you could see in the daylight but you couldn’t see the perps because it was too impractical to put lights on the lander.
Sagan's nightmare was that because they had been unable to put lights on the lander (weight), they would get photos back each Mars morning showing lots of tiny footprints in the sand around the machine… Sadly it didn't happen.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-03-24T13:00:40.653Z
PCC(E):
“Shouldn’t you have to document that [citizenship] at least once? After that, once you’re in the system, all you have to do is prove that you’re the same person who’s a citizen, and that can be done with driver’s licenses or other documents. And that’s what 36 states already do: after you prove citizenship once, you just have to show who you are. [..] you have to be a citizen to vote, and if you don’t have to prove that at least once, it’s pretty bad.”
[ GIF of Orson Welles clapping in Citizen Kane ]
The Viking Lander in-situ photograph of the Martian surface is a reminder to me that after my childhood and early teen years having the best views of the moon and planets as photographed through Earthbound telescopes, I was amazed by the resolution of “being” there provided by our first lunar and planetary landers. I always had a framed series of photos of the moon’s surface from Surveyor and Apollo, and the Martian landscape much like the one provided by Matthew today, from the first Vikings, on my office wall…and in our mid-century modern living room at home.
And thanks for the waffle house review. Never been to one, but I may now have to join the other old codgers at our local waffle house and try some selections from Sean’s tasting menu.
So true about the Viking lander photograph. I’m still amazed by that picture.
And, I went to a Waffle House once. The waffles were amazing—so many options! But the carbs! OMG. Once in a lifetime is enough.
I read an article suggesting that the negotiations are just a ruse to spin out time while a second Marine MEU gets to the theater. Maybe. I wonder, if we go in to capture the coast opposite Hormuz to capture the sites from which Iran is threating to attack ships, whether Saudi Arabia would contribute troops?
I would say getting ID is sometimes annoying, but not difficult. It is certainly not vexatious enough to interfere with anyone’s right to vote.
The thing with the cat eating cucumber is interesting, if you’ve seen any of the videos where people put cucumbers behind a cat and it spazzes out (presumably because it thinks it might be a snake).
Here’s a manatee-related Jacques Cousteau comedy sketch from the old Ben Stiller show readers might enjoy:
Thank you for the link to Amit’s “It’s Noon in Israel” site. I have been concerned about the Jewish Settler violence toward Arabs on the West Bank for some time now…it reminds me of the 1930’s attacks by Arabs on Jews in Palestine. Amit is asked about the violence in the last couple of minutes of the CNN video embedded in the Noon in Israel link – I recommend watching it.
One of the lesser known, human caused, mega faunal extinctions: Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) was a sirenian of the far north, found by Georg Wilhelm Steller in 1741, in the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia. Visually, somewhat similar to a manatee, but much larger at up to 33 feet, and 11 tons. It feed on the sea surface on kelp beds. It was unable to submerge, so easy to hunt, it was extinct by 1761. The only skeleton I know of is in the Finnish Museum of Natural History. I’ll attempt tp insert a photo: Didn’t work, but you can look it up.
“can be done with driver’s licenses” Untrue, drivers licenses can be obtained by noncitizens, and in most cases if they indicate citizenship (not all do), it is not determined in a way acceptable in the Republican bill.
The Democrats should support voter ID. Not only—as described above, which I didn’t know before—would voter ID favor the Democrats. But voter ID would eliminate the perennial Republican claim that elections are rigged and/or that many votes are fraudulent. Adopting voter ID would make that entire play from the Republican playbook go away. It would be a win for the Democrats.
Yes, some people would have trouble getting their ID cards. Whatever bill is passed should include a program to help people get their voter ID cards quickly and easily. This is a problem that can surely be solved.
The republicans will always whine about rigged and fraudulent elections, Norman….likely updating their complaints to rigged and fraudulent ID’s. Their playbook is an eigenvalue in STEM parlance…invariant.
Oh well. I tried. 🙂
Regardless, the level of antisemitism in Britain is increasing.
There’s an excellent article about this here: https://archive.ph/Y9LE8
My own linguistic progression during 3.6yrs living in Sweden, starting from the 6 or so months that it took to be able to say much of anything in Swedish.
*Ask in Swedish, reply in English
*Ask in Swedish, reply in Swedish that I couldn’t understand. Learned how to say please speak slowly, my Swedish isn’t so good.
*They guess that I’m from the US
*They ask if I’m Canadian
*They ask if I’m British
*They ask if I’m Norwegian
I was getting ever-closer!
Being a lifelong language student I’ve thought about the issues on that map for a long time.
I have a personal metric whereby the appreciation of the locals goes up in proportion to the(ir perceived) difficulty of the language (Swedish vs Finish for eg) and its… remoteness. That’d be number of speakers and insularity of the culture. Plus how many foreigners bother to learn.
The map above is pretty good I think, esp with French. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
From the map: “Nice Try, but Why Brother?”
Does the map creator not know his own language?
Once I found out how different Finnish was from Swedish, to the point that the numbers are different from everything else, I made a goal of learning to count from 1-10 in Finnish. That was even more satisfying after I learned from DNA that I’m 1/8 Finnish.
There have been numerous reports on why the SAVE act is not a good measure and would disenfranchise or greatly inconvenience many people. It may have been easy for you to get a birth certificate, but that’s not always the case. Several reporters have pointed out that there are approximately 69,000,000 women in this country whose married name is obviously not the same as the name on their birth certificates. That involves going through legal hurdles that are even greater if the women live in states different from those in which they were born or married. Older people who were born in rural areas do not always have birth certificates–or the births were registered days later.
Even though my name has never been changed, I had difficulty getting a passport several decades ago because my birth certificate had been lost in a series of moves. It took several months to go through all the red tape to get a copy from Walter Reed Army Hospital–and then the copy did not have the raised stamp to prove it was authentic, so the U.S. Dept. of State would not accept it. Back to square one.
Here is an article from the Brennan Center for Justice about why this particular bill is not a good one:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting
Carl Sagan helped design the Viking camera, which took a very slow scan to get an image. This was deliberate, since anything that moved would be blurred or would leave multiple images. He really hoped that there would be Martian critters roaming about.
The first images of the Martian surface were a big let-down to those who hoped for evidence of life. Nothing but rocks. I remember a newspaper cartoon (sorry, couldn’t find it now) that showed Viking on Mars, with a couple of rocks off to the side. One rock is saying to another rock: “if we stay still, do you think they won’t notice us?”
Does anyone know of a Western Democracy that does not demand photo ID and something more, like prior registration? Certainly Western European countries do, Israel does, Japan does (via family registry).. Even Switzerland has a process.
It is a way of preserving national identity.
Back in the early 1990s, my Republican and Libertarian friends opposed a National ID, not just for voting. (I strongly favored it, and still do.) When I asked them why, they said that requiring people to show ID is a means of Federal government control—as in “papers please..” Later, my friends switched (except the extreme Libertarians.) When I asked them why, they all replied that they realized that foreign governments were more dangerous to the American people than the US government.
In US states registering to vote has always been required. Being a US citizen, and for most categories of voting being a resident of the relevant jurisdiction, has always been a requirement. Despite many investigations over the years there have been only a tiny number of documented cases of non-citizens illegally voting. So tiny as to be entirely inconsequential. The various voter registration systems of the various states in the US and the oversight tools they have available seem to be at least good enough, because in reality there is no issue. Here is one source for a good overview of this (non)issue.
Update: Review of Claims of Noncitizen Registrants and Voters
This raises the question, why do Republicans spend so much effort acting as if there is a significant problem with non-citizens illegally voting and trying to pass a bill to supposedly address the issue?
When you also add the clear history of Republican efforts at voter suppression the real question I have is why anyone believes what the Republicans are trying to sell here. I wonder how anyone would give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt that this issue is real and that this bill is really intended to honestly address that (non)issue.