Welcome to Thursday, May 14, 2026 and International Dylan Thomas Day. (Curiously, the great poet was neither born nor expired on May 14, but Google tells me that “This date marks the anniversary of the first stage reading of his famous play, Under Milk Wood, at The Poetry Center in New York in 1953.) And it’s a very fine play, which you can read here.
Here’s a picture of Thomas’s house in Laugharne, Wales, with the preserved interior of his poetry-writing shack next door. Plus his only pair of cufflinks. I took these photos in June, 2010:
Where the poems were made:
Here’s Richard Burton reciting one of Thomas’s best poems, a childhood remembrance called “Fern Hill” (the recitation starts 15 seconds in):
It’s also “Stars and Stripes Forever” Day, honoring the John Philip Sousa march first performed on this day in 1897, National Brioche Day, and National Buttermilk Biscuit Day, celebrating the apotheosis of American baking.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 14 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Count on the NYT to give us only bad news about Iran; the latest is a piece called “U.S. Intelligence shows Iran retains substantial missile capabilities.”
The Trump administration’s public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities.
Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway.
People with knowledge of the assessments said they show — to varying degrees, depending on the level of damage incurred at the different sites — that the Iranians can use mobile launchers that are inside the sites to move missiles to other locations. In some cases they can launch missiles directly from launchpads that are part of the facilities. Only three of the missile sites along the strait remain totally inaccessible, according to the assessments.
Iran still fields about 70 percent of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile, according to the assessments. That stockpile encompasses both ballistic missiles, which can target other nations in the region, and a smaller supply of cruise missiles, which can be used against shorter-range targets on land or at sea.
Military intelligence agencies have also reported, based on information from multiple collection streams including satellite imagery and other surveillance technologies, that Iran has regained access to roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide, which are now assessed to be “partially or fully operational,” the people with knowledge of the assessments said.
The findings undercut months of public assurances from President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have told Americans that the Iranian military was “decimated” and “no longer” a threat.
*To the consternation (and perhaps glee) of Democrats, Trump has declared that American economic hardship is not a factor in how he conducts the war with Iran.
“The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran — they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody,” Trump said. “I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
The president doubled down on the sentiment when asked to clarify whether the economic impact on Americans was a factor in his decision-making. The U.S. inflation rate has risen to its highest rate in nearly three years since the start of the Iran war in late February, with increased prices largely driven by higher energy costs. Gas prices rose 5.4 percent last month and were up about 30 percent over the past year. Still, the U.S. stock market has continued to hit a series of records.
“Every American understands,” Trump said of economic issues related to the war, referencing an unnamed poll he said showed an overwhelming majority of people “understand that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
“Now if the stock market goes up or down a little bit, the American people understand,” Trump continued. “When this war is over, oil is going to drop, the stock market is going to go through the roof, and truly, I think we’re in the golden age right now. You’re going to see a golden age like we’ve ever seen before.”
Trump’s approval on economic issues, which were critical to his political comeback in 2024, has fallen since he launched the Iran war.
A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that his approval rating on the economy has declined by seven points, to 34 percent, as gas prices have risen. Trump’s approval on inflation has fallen five points in that time to 27 percent, and his lowest rating comes on perceptions of his handling of the general cost of living, with 23 percent of Americans approving vs. 76 percent disapproving.
No, most Americans don’t understand why Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. But they should, and not just because they want Israel to survive. They should care because they want the Middle East to remain peaceful and for Iran to stop exporting terrorism to other countries. And they should care so that Iran can’t do whatever it wants because it has the capability to destroy other countries. Trump will suffer for this stand, but I am with the minority of Americans who want to have this war brought to a successful conclusion. But I’m also one of those who don’t know whether and how it can be.
*One way of avoiding having to deal with Hamas’s atrocities of 2023 is to avoid looking at documentaries about them. It’s not squeamishness, but outright refusal to be convinced. This is what Maarten Boudy argues in his new Substack post, “None so blind as those who refuse to see.”
A while ago, I watched the infamous 47-minute video documenting the atrocities of October 7th — the one that is withheld from public release to protect the victims’ privacy. When the Israeli government invited European media to a private screening, several refused to attend, describing it as a “PR campaign” that “only serves to tilt the balance of proportionality” in the war. The Belgian parliament likewise refused to watch it, after protest from left-wing parties who dismissed it as Israeli propaganda. There are none so blind as those who refuse to see.
Some images are seared into my memory forever. I will never forget the two boys in their underwear, one with his eye socket hanging out of his face, asking his brother if he thinks they’re going to die — while the Hamas monster who had just thrown a grenade into their safe room helps himself to a drink from their fridge, taking a casual break from the slaughter.
Neither will I ever forget the terrorists playing football with a severed head. Or the throngs of Gazans crowding around pickup trucks loaded with the mutilated corpses of Jewish women, filming and spitting on the bodies. Or the terrorist coolly and methodically cutting off the head of an already dead victim, like a skilled butcher. Or the woman in Kibbutz Mefalsim, crouching and begging in vain for mercy. Or the Thai migrant worker whose head is viciously hacked off with a garden hoe — another “Zionist colonizer” getting what he deserved, right?
. . . But yes — there was rape. Not “rape” in scare quotes, as the apologists would have it, but sadistic, murderous sexual violence, documented in a damning new report by The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women’s rights NGO. The report, titled “Silenced No More”, is based on hundreds of formal and informal interviews with survivors and witnesses, more than 10,000 photographs and over 1,800 cumulative hours of video.
. . . As the Daily Mail reports, the “freedom fighters” from Hamas deliberately and systematically defiled female bodies: “the terrorists shot their eyes, their faces and their breasts, and even targeted their most intimate parts, to destroy their beauty and rob their loved ones of a final goodbye.” Genitals were stabbed with knives or riddled with bullets, breasts were severed, pelvises broken.
. . .And it was premeditated and organized. The terrorists crossing into Israel carried printed Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks with handy expressions like “take off your pants,” “lie down,” “spread your legs,” and “don’t make trouble.” I wonder why they expected to need those particular phrases?
I know one thing: no civilized country on earth would tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas on its border after October 7th. Not one. This includes every self-righteous Westerner currently lecturing Israel from thousands of kilometres away, without an inch of skin in the game.
But of course quite a few Europeans refused to watch it, not because it was gruesome but because it was considered “Israeli propaganda.”
*As I’ve argued (influenced by Luana, who thinks that AI will pretty much wreck higher education), honor codes will be among the things that will have to change now that the bots have taken over. And, sure enough, Princeton University has just changed theirs.
For more than a century, Princeton University prided itself on an honor code so revered that proctoring during exams was banned. Students’ pledge not to cheat was enough.
Those days are over—largely because of AI.
On Monday, faculty voted to require proctoring in all in-person exams starting this summer, reversing a policy set in place in 1893 when Princeton introduced its honor code. The change came after “significant numbers” of undergrads and faculty requested it, “given their perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread,” according to a letter from Michael Gordin, Princeton’s dean of the college.
AI has made it both easier for students to cheat and harder to spot, Gordin wrote. Students are loath to report cheating because they are afraid they’ll be called out on social media. Those who do make reports often file anonymously, making it difficult for the school to investigate.
Princeton had been among the few schools to use an honor code letting students take exams without a professor present. Students will still be required to attest: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.”
The code is embedded in the university’s culture and has long been a point of pride. It goes back to the 19th century, when students petitioned to eliminate proctors during examinations, according to the student newspaper.
The new policy means instructors will be present during exams and will document any infractions they observe. They will report those to a student-run honor committee for adjudication.
Nadia Makuc, a Princeton senior, chaired that committee during the past year. She said she thinks most students support the new policy because it alleviates pressure to report classmates. The committee received about 60 cases in the past year, an uptick, but she thinks most go unreported.
The ease of cheating has created a growing temptation, she said.
“If the exam is on a laptop, someone can just flip to another window. Or if the exam is in a blue book, it’s just people using their phone under their desk or going to the bathroom and using it,” she said.
In a survey of over 500 seniors conducted by the student newspaper last year, 30% reported they had cheated on an assignment or exam. Nearly half reported knowledge of an honor code violation but less than 1% had made a report.
Oy vey! 30% of the students reported cheating, and you know that’s an underestimate. Gone are the days of take-home assignments or term papers; how could one permit them given that AI could write a very good one? What about labs? Can you fake them? (I don’t think that would be easy.) I always monitored exams, simply because I myself was monitored throughout college, and I wanted the students to be tested based on their own knowledge, not that of a bot. (They didn’t have bots when I was teaching.)
*On her Substack site Pens and Poison, Liza Libes beefs about Columbia University: “I thought I was going to study literature at Columbia. I was wrong.” The subtitle is “English departments teach ideology rather than literature.” Are you surprised?
I’d always been encouraged to chase my dreams.
For me, those were studying literature and becoming a famous writer.
. . .To me, then, the study of literature was by nature a traditionalpursuit—a discipline that believed in the preservation of beautiful things. It was a course of study that allowed us to probe the depths of our psyches and examine the questions that make us all human.
You can imagine my astonishment, then, when I learned that by some twisted perversion of fate, literature had become virtually synonymous with radical leftism in the contemporary literary academy.
. . .on the first day of my freshman English department seminar, we were given the writings of the so-called literary critic Edward Said.
The chapter in question—from his famous book Culture and Imperialism—was on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.
That was strange, I thought. Why were we reading criticism of a book without first having read the book itself?
I had read Mansfield Park in high school, so I could at least follow Said’s entire argument: that Mansfield Park was a novel about colonialism and imperialism.
Had we read the same novel—or, like many of the other students here reading critique before primary source text, had Said simply made up an idea without once ever having touched the actual book?
That evening, we were asked to produce a paragraph response to the Said chapter to prepare for our discussion that coming Thursday.
“The argument that Mansfield Park can only be understood from a colonial standpoint seems entirely farfetched,” I wrote. “Fanny’s entrance into her home as a metaphor for some colonizing force at work is too great a stretch.”
The professor was not very impressed. I had not sufficiently understood Said’s argument, in her eyes, and besides—it didn’t matter whether Mansfield Park was about imperialism or not—what mattered was that Jane Austen was complicit in British imperialist expansion.
. . .With every seminar I took, the overall aim of the Columbia University English department became clearer and clearer: these professors collectively wished to use literature as a force of resistance against “illiberal forces” to make our society a more just world for all.
But to me—someone who grew up with parents who’d fled the Soviet Union—Marxism wasn’t synonymous with liberalismin the least.
Sure, there was nothing wrong with trying to make our world more just and equitable—and there were so many great writers who had worked toward that aim—Shelley, Ibsen, Orwell, to name a few. But the promotion of social justice was simply one possible outcome of engagement with literature—not its sole aim.
But if you asked anyone in my department, literature was inseparable from resistance and justice.
. . . With every seminar I took, the overall aim of the Columbia University English department became clearer and clearer: these professors collectively wished to use literature as a force of resistance against “illiberal forces” to make our society a more just world for all.
But to me—someone who grew up with parents who’d fled the Soviet Union—Marxism wasn’t synonymous with liberalismin the least.
Sure, there was nothing wrong with trying to make our world more just and equitable—and there were so many great writers who had worked toward that aim—Shelley, Ibsen, Orwell, to name a few. But the promotion of social justice was simply one possible outcome of engagement with literature—not its sole aim.
But if you asked anyone in my department, literature was inseparable from resistance and justice.
By the time Ms. Libes started grad school to get her master’s, the courses were all theory and no literature. Yet she still hopes others will join her in ” returning to aesthetics and beauty” thereby , ” [doing] our part in saving literature and restoring it to its rightful place in the humanistic tradition.” But that, I fear is a vain hope. The love of literature and beauty is an ex-tenet of English literature, and I do see it changing any time soon. Poor Liza! There are other good pieces at her site, many of them expressing disappointment with courses in English literature. Here’s a video of Libes on “100 books to read before you die”:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s going a-hunting:
Hili: I’m going hunting.
Andrzej: Be back before nightfall.
In Polish
Hili: Idę na łowy.
Ja: Wróć przed nocą.
*******************
From Funny and Strange Signs; they want you to pay the server’s hourly salary, too!:
From The Dodo Pet:
From Stacy:
Masih meets and hugs the Kurdish woman protestor blinded by the Iranian authorities. For some reason this video makes me tear up. They have a long hug and Masih puts a flower in the blind woman’s hair.
This is the moment I met one of my heroes for the first time.
For years, we wrote about brave Iranian protesters from far away. We spoke about a young woman who lost both eyes after the Islamic Republic shot her for demanding freedom in the streets of Iran. Then one day, I… pic.twitter.com/dQQMoiuCPn— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 13, 2026
From Steve Stewart-Williams via Luana. I don’t really understand this huge disparity except that women get a break simply because they’re women:
“Drivers who killed women received substantially longer sentences than those who killed men. As we see in the table below, the average sentence for killing a woman was 9.7 years, whereas the average sentence for killing a man was 4.4 years.”https://t.co/8hjFM0Nzr5 pic.twitter.com/CDJvnN5xb3
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) May 12, 2026
The Number Ten Cat shows an old tradition:
Before King Charles opened Parliament today the Yeoman of the Guard (his ceremonial bodyguards) searched the cellars of the Palace of Westminster to make sure there was no gunpowder, or mayors from Manchester. pic.twitter.com/nxCsA5EJzD
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) May 13, 2026
I love moles. One of the traumatic experiences of my youth was seeing a guy on a golf course force one out of its hole with water and then killing it by hitting it on the head with a pipe. I don’t care if it was on a golf course: it was alive!
Please Be Kind To Moles.
They are beneficial to soil health, acting as natural aerators and pest control by consuming lawn-damaging grubs, beetles, and larvae.
They do not eat plants, and their removal often leads to new moles occupying the vacant tunnel system, making it a… pic.twitter.com/MMoUgrmXev
— PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE (@Protect_Wldlife) May 13, 2026
I hope they get fed, too:
Mini shelters made in Japan to protect cats during rainy weatherpic.twitter.com/dxK7f2TYcF
— Nature Unedited (@NatureUnedited) May 13, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Hungarian girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was about eight years old, and would be ninety today had she lived. https://t.co/iNT0CZXooH
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) May 14, 2026
And two from Dr. Cobb. He told me, about the first one, “Read the article—it’s a hoot, and terrifying!” I did and it was: the Neanderthals did root canals with stone tools and obviously no anesthesia. Oy, that must have hurt! They were tough indeed!
Tough bastards.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-05-13T18:16:19.154Z
And screwing up internationally:
My favourite phrases for when things go wrong…1. It’s a shitshow at the fuck factory (English)2. Now the turnips are cooked (Dutch)3. A donkey is inside another donkey (Persian)4. The Devil is loose in Salmonstreet (Danish)5. A finger in the ass and screaming everywhere (Brazilian Portuguese)
— Adam Sharp (@adamcsharp.bsky.social) 2026-05-13T16:12:33.034Z
As far as I’m concerned the finest of Dylan Thomas’s works is A Child’s Christmas in Wales. But a trigger warning for our host: it involves the desire (frustrated) to throw snowballs at cats.
I am not usually fond of short stories, but One Warm Saturday is superb.
I agree on the absolute need to finish the Iranian regime once and for all, along with their nuclear arsenal. The Iranian people deserve to live normal lives, and the rest of the world, especially the surrounding countries of the middle east, needs to be free of Iran’s evil support of terrorist groups. It was Iran who funded Hamas and provided the training for October 23, no doubt including the edict to inflict such horrific sexual abuse. Any suggestion that we walk away now and leave this government in place is baffling and quite frankly insane to me. As for those who refuse to believe what Hamas did to women or somehow excuse it, I honestly have no words.
If only what one desired was always within one’s reach. I think it important to separate some elements you have mingled. First, one can separate capability from will. If it is possible, for instance, as some believe it is, for repeated strikes to keep Iran’s nuclear program in a state of operational irrelevance, then it really doesn’t matter whether the regime desires nuclear weapons—nor would it matter if the regime stayed. A neutered tyrant is of little threat to other nations. But do we have the resolve for prolonged commitment?
Then we have your larger goal: freedom of the Iranian people. It is laudable as aspiration, but the reality presents potentially insurmountable operational difficulties even if the resolve were there. A country of 90 million people, tens of millions who side with the regime. Mountainous terrain. Urban warfare. There are some things that are beyond the capacity even of the world’s strongest military. One is not insane to doubt the feasibility of forced regime change. Indeed, one can make a credible claim that putting large numbers of boots on the ground would be the mark of insanity.
There are still many things the US and Israel could do to eliminate Iran’s nuclear materials and try to force the regime from power. We have largely refrained from legal strikes on dual-use infrastructure: power plants, highways, bridges, refineries, etc. because of the pain that would cause the country’s innocent people. Perhaps they need to go through that pain to be free. Then again, the attempt could fail. As to Iran’s nuclear program, we always have our nuclear arsenal. Iran’s materials are buried deep in hardened facilities. Will you countenance nuclear strikes to finish the job? How far are you willing to go “to finish the Iranian regime once and for all, along with their nuclear arsenal”?
I would endorse nuclear strikes to destroy the nuclear program in its hardened sites. Using nuclear weapons against a state that doesn’t (yet) have any to retaliate with is rational. The United States has already done this, twice, and the rationale was much the same: invasion of an implacable enemy would be excessively costly and civilians of the rogue state just had to bear what they must.
There was little fallout in Japan because both weapons were air bursts. Both cities were re-populated and vegetation returned promptly. Neither today remotely resembles the dead zone of Chernobyl.
An attack on Iran’s nuclear project would have to be subterranean penetration, not air burst. Such nuclear weapons have been built and with precision delivery could be quite small. One could hope that the remote mountainside might collapse (as the site in North Korea threatened to do after repeated tests) after the contents were turned into glass without blowing massive amounts of radioactive fission products into Tehran or neighbouring countries. But they will still benefit in the long run, just as Japan did. The dire effects predicted from fallout were from an all-out war featuring saturation ground bursts of huge Soviet warheads against ICBM silos on the Great Plains. By far the bigger threat was wreckage of cities and infrastructure, which you wouldn’t do to Iran just to get its nuclear program.
One caveat. Gas centrifugation is a mature technology. It now requires surprisingly little space to make a few bombs a year, a much smaller footprint than Oak Ridge occupied, where several other avenues for enrichment were also being hedged. The basement of a typical large building on a university campus would do. It would be undetectable. Spontaneous decay radiation from bomb-grade uranium is trivial (until a fission chain reaction occurs. Then you know.) One suspects the reason the Iranians hardened theirs rather than hiding it is that their program is so thoroughly penetrated by Israeli intelligence that its location(s) would be known and targeted almost immediately. Take comfort, but the hour is still late if Iran is never to get a nuclear weapon.
Yes, Loretta. I’m loathe to follow the back and forth “We’ve WON!” vs “We’re screwed!” dynamics.
War is not a football match where the “winner” marches home happy. It is a process of tradeoffs, considerations to larger issues (the px of oil, killing millions of Iranians, boots on the ground etc) vs larger goals.
We’ve attritted and savaged by far the most evil dictatorship of our era whose generational tormenting of its own citizens is as outrageous as its destruction of 4-5 foreign countries (Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and “Gaza”). Before we even start on accounting for its slaughter of Americans/French/Italians/Lebanese in the 80s.
We might not “regime change” this time, but any damage we can inflict is a win.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
The problem is: how to get rid of them without a land war? There’s simply no support for that in the US.
I saw a piece the other day doubting the CIA report on Iran’s capabilities. It points out that the DoD’s estimates of weapons destroyed and expended completely flip the numbers. I find it easy to believe that the CIA is on the anti-Trump side of the house.
I am not a big literature fan. I read mostly non-fiction and fiction that is not in the “Literature” section of the bookstore. I’ve read only fifteen of the 100 (and one of the twenty-five not to bother with. Damn you Walden!). Now I know what books to avoid to stave off death, though. Miss Libes story, however, makes it clear why Humanities are dying at colleges.
Going to have to work “Now the turnips are cooked” into my speech.
Re. ”returning to aesthetics and beauty” thereby, ”[doing] our part in saving literature and restoring it to its rightful place in the humanistic tradition.”
Surely good literature has always been about much more than aesthetics and beauty, but about all aspects of the human experience, from politics to psychology, from the base to the divine. And who says that literature must only portray the beautiful? Surely it can (and should) portray the horrid as well.
Still steamed about (MANY!) people believing idiot Nick Kristof’s dog rape stories yesterday, mined from the Palestinian Victim Industrial Complex.
Aside @swipewright colin Wright’s biological argument about dog’s dicks… consider history: We’ve had dogs about us – getting in our hair like mine now – for 10-20K years. Rape is old also. And yet THIS, TODAY, the IDF are the first to discover the combination?
This moral panic is stupider even than R-tar**d Epsteinology.
Also… just Bayesian wise: Stories and intuitions of Nick K. for the past decades show a man almost aching to be wrong, in everything he touches. Kristof is a human symphony playing nothing but tunes of his naive love of his Arab brown pets: the sacred Palestinians of Upper East Side cocktail party fame. (sigh)
D.A.
NYC 🗽
PS – *Thx to Starwolf for his expose yesterday, if you will, on Israel “organ harvesting” of Pals. Its important b/c the same “IDF Canine Rape Squad” credulous cretins now, believed the Israeli Organ Factory myths of yesteryear.
The Israelis did NOT invent training dogs to anally rape Muslims. The Great Satan – the USA – invented that, according to Muslim prisoners of US troops during the invasion of Iraq. It is a fantasy fetish accusation that naturally arises from the Islamic view of dogs as the most unclean of animals. And I’d guess it goes back well before the US invasion of Iraq.
Trump says we decimated Iran’s missiles. Intelligence says 90% of the missiles still exist. These two points are consistent, since decimate means destroying (killing originally) 10%.
Iran probably does have some remaining missile capability, maybe even a substantial amount, some of it recently unearthed from the rubble.* But if the vaunted New York Times knows about it, so do the U.S. and Israeli militaries. These remaining—or newly disinterred—missile sites are in the crosshairs. I’d prefer that the U.S. and Israel act now to destroy these installations, now that Iran is severely weakened, as it would push the regime further into debt and further test its willingness to fight. But, alas, Trump seemingly has other ideas.
*The NYT wasn’t the first to claim that our bombing campaign has been ineffective. I’ve read that claim quite a few times in recent days. Yes, the media is actively doing its part to deem Trump a failure.
Israeli intel has an estimate of the range of the numbers of long-range missiles and launchers. I am not sure if this is public information, so I cannot post that range, but I can say this: They still have enough missiles to make life difficult for their neighbors, including us. But those numbers have indeed been significantly reduced, and moreover, the infrastructure to produce more has been severely impacted.
However, Iran is a technologically advanced country, and replacing that infrastructure, especially with help from the axis of evil, will take far less time than we would hope.
Bottom line: while this war so far did not defeat Iran or destroy its offensive capabilities, it did weaken them significantly.
I empathize with Liza Libes. I majored in English at a non prestigious public university in the 1980s because, like her, I loved literature and hoped to pursue graduate studies. The climate then was an earlier version of what she experienced. True love of literature was a risible notion; the only purpose in studying dead white authors was to expose the worthlessness of western civilization. I eventually abandoned my graduate studies aspirations and went to law school, partly because of my disillusionment, but also because I was worried about job prospects. I thought that I was setting for a less fulfilling career. Now, seeing how much worse that climate is, I realize that I was dodging a bullet.
Lives has probably seen the 1990 movie Metropolitan, if not, she should. The character Tom has never read Mansfield Park or any other novel because he thinks fiction is useless. He reads literary criticism, which he feels gives him the story and the interpretation. He dismisses MP as trite moralism, because that’s what Lionel Trilling wrote about it. The character Audrey soundly defends MP and its protagonist, Fanny Price.
Honor codes are foolish. AI is no more a problem than the internet. Educators, do your job and monitor tests. Frankly, the more work done in the classroom, the better. My experience is honorable people have no problem with being monitored.
I was a non-academic university trustee for 7 years. I was ostracized when I advised my fellow trustees and university leadership not to associate academic credentials with honor. When problems arose, it was usually because of the lack of oversight by the board and/or leadership of an “esteemed” individual who either through naivete or nefarious reasons, mismanaged a program. The fall of Boston University’s Center of Anti-racist Research is a prime example. Regardless of what thinks of Dr. Kendi’s scholarship, it didn’t take a genius to conclude he didn’t demonstrate the skills required to lead an academic center. It’s failure should come as no surprise.
Honor codes and trust are not a substitute for accountability.
Thank you for sharing your experience as a trustee. I found your comments reassuring, because I never would have guessed that university trustees can and do get to see that level of program and personal detail. I’d expected that our ‘esteemed’ individuals managing programs, together with those others in their thrall, would mostly be able to keep trustees in the dark. It’s a comfort to know that trustees, even one lone trustee, can see it and call it.
That Neandertal dental work with a stone drill is beyond astonishing. Here’s a piece on it with pix of the actual tooth.
Adding to Gray Tabby above. The corruption of English departments reviewed by Liza Libes (and by Reynolds Cotter in “Broken English Departments”) began with the entry of a cohort who in fact had no strong interest in literature. Post-colonial “theory” and the like (searching texts for connections to race-class-gender) was so much easier than any kind of literary analysis; Edward Said and his votaries had already spelled out the correct answers, which had only to be copied. The elevation of “theory” over literature was intensified by academe’s elevation of gestural “scholarship” over teaching, as William Deresiewicz recounted in “Why I Left Academia (Since You’re Wondering)”. Quillette. 2022-08-17).
Times readers are like battered women who can’t leave their abusers.
The vehicular homicide data does not show that “drivers who killed women received substantially longer sentences than those who killed men,” as Steve Stewart-Williams claims. For female victims, the standard deviation (SD) for the male drivers is larger than the mean. This means that the distribution of prison sentences for male drivers is highly skewed. There are a small number of drivers (maybe even just 1) who received very long sentences.
Moreover, the SD for male drivers is 4 times as large as the SD for female drivers, indicating that only the male drivers’ sentence distribution had extreme outliers.
So the large difference in mean sentences between male and female drivers is due to a few (maybe even a single) extreme sentences among the male drivers. In fact, the difference in the mean sentences between male and female drivers is not statistically significant.* A comparison of medians, which are not affected by outliers, would have been more informative.
*p=.07 (Welch’s test, 2-tailed)
Thanks for picking that apart. The claim of the study (or at least the person citing it) is that female victims caused their killers to get longer sentences than male victims did, regardless of the sex of the driver. Yet the data as presented are for four groups: MM, MF, FF, and FM. The appropriate test is an analysis of variance (ANOVA), not a t-test of the single cherry-picked comparison that looked interesting to the authors when they inspected the data. (Just for fun, I did that inappropriate t-test, with Welch’s correction, and it is indeed statistically significant. t=2.3078, p=0.03. But like you I’m skeptical.)
In the linked article about bias in the justice system, the vehicular homicide study is beyond the pay-wall. No statistical test is presented in the table in the tweet. But the mention of standard deviations implies to me they inappropriately used multiple t-tests. You can’t perform ANOVA with SDs. You need all the raw scores (sentence meted out to each driver) to determine if any inter-group comparison — ANOVA won’t tell you which one — contributes more than by chance to the total variance in the whole sample. But like t-tests, ANOVA is queered by skew.
Your larger point is well-taken. The mean sentence of the male drivers who killed women is certainly skewed by a few men who received harsh sentences, perhaps under particularly heinous circumstances. I would just add that women who get killed by automobiles (in this sample 24 of 27 times driven by men) were perhaps more likely to have been pedestrians or cyclists, or drivers with children in their cars (who might have been injured too), or be killed in a manner that made the judge think it might have been deliberate (even if the charge wasn’t murder), such as an estranged boyfriend being the driver in a hit-and-run. All these factors could motivate a judge quite reasonably to throw the book at the driver — 24 of 27 times it was a guy — without displaying bias against men in general. And finally, wombs are precious, testicles aren’t. Maybe killing a woman through recklessness is inherently more heinous. A woman runs over a man, he probably had it coming, right? …kidding!!
My testicles are! At least to me.
Well, this website is called Why Evolution is True. Small cheap gametes produced in their billions and billions are part of what makes that tick. I feel as if I should give a nod to it every now and then.
ANOVAs, to be appropriate, must fulfill at least one of 2 conditions.
1. equal n’s in the groups
2. normally distributed data within each group. To test this, a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is ideally used. And of course, there is a minimal n necessary in each group. If not, modified nonparametric tests should be used, which of course will reduce the power of the test.
If these criteria are not met, it reduces the validity of the test, so any p values obtained should be regarded with suspicion, as you both are seemingly doing. I image that you did a 2X2 ANOVA–it is interesting to know the interaction values (if any).
We should not discuss this further, though, for fear of hijacking the thread.
Either one of us made a mistake, or we used different versions of the test. I got t=1.98 with 13.17 degrees of freedom, p(2-tailed)=.07. Assuming we used the same 2-tailed test, your results suggest your degrees of freedom were around 20, quite different from what I calculated.
And, although I question your assertion that ANOVA would be “the appropriate test” (or even an appropriate test), you can perform a 2-way ANOVA, and calculate specific contrasts, from just the cell means, sample sizes, and SDs.
I don’t think you made a mistake. You did your t-test on your hypothesis that men are punished more severely than women and found p<0.05. I did my t-test on my cherry-picked hypothesis that male drivers who kill women get longer sentences than men who kill men do. (Intuitively I didn’t want to lump female drivers in with men because their driving behaviour is so different.) When I re-did it to test the hypothesis advanced by tweet author Stewart-Williams: women as victims generate longer sentences regardless of the sex of the guilty driver, it was still significant p = 0.025; t = 2.38, df = 27. The numbers involved in the two orthogonal hypotheses — yours and Stewart-Williams’s — are just different enough that his gives a significant t-test statistic and yours doesn’t. There is no reason to favour his over yours except that his was statistically significant a posteriori and therefore newsworthy, if bogus.
Where he fails here is that there are four cells (2 x 2), not two. The raw source data report sex of both driver and victim. So six possible unique comparisons. It’s cherry-picking for him to glom onto the larger mean sentence for killers of women (male and female drivers arbitrarily summed together) than for killers of men when there is no statistical test presented in the tweet at all. Perhaps he first summed male and female victims together and, like you, got no significant difference between sentences for male and female drivers, so he did the orthogonal sum and found what he wanted to tweet out.
I’ll defer to you on ANOVA. When I learned to do it with pencil and paper many years ago, we had to start with individual data points. Computing SDs first would be extra painful work extracting square roots. The main thing is that the table quoted in the tweet doesn’t mention any statistical test of significance at all.
The sentences are clearly not normally distributed. Medians and non-parametric tests would be better, yes. There is a necessary cut-off at zero, even though an SD greater than the mean should have >16% of sentences less than zero!
This study could be junked except that it features in a Substack about bias in the justice system. It’s worth kicking the tires on it. And PCC(E) was puzzled by it. Hoping to be helpful.
I’m fine with moles, they are so cute (and don’t exist in Southern California, as far as I know).
What’s the verdict on gophers?