Welcome to Thursday, May 21, 2026, and Hummus Day (the third Thursday in May). Didn’t we just have one? Well, it’s good stuff, and I ate a ton of it when I visited Israel in 2023. Here’s a nice plate from Jerusalem with plenty of tahini in it:
It’s also American Red Cross Founder’s Day, International Chardonnay Day, International Tea Day, National Apéritif Day, and National Strawberries and Cream Day.
While traveling, reader Bill sent me this photo of a handmade metal mallard he saw on sale in a shop. I wrote, “I WANT IT!”, and he asked if I wanted to buy it through him. Of course I did, and he bought it, wrapped it carefully, and sent it to me. (I reimbursed him.) It now reposes on a cabinet overlooking my office. Isn’t it beautiful? All the feathers are metal, too, forged separately:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 21 Wikipedia page.
Oh, I had a dream last night, and again it was a weird one. This time I was walking in the middle of two long, long rows of Army tents. Between the rows of tends were two long rows of picnic tables, all occupied by soldiers. And all the soldiers were eating–tins of mussels! The tins were flat and had to be opened with a key, like sardines. But the contents were not just the meat of mussels, but the entire gastropod, shell and all. As I walked down the row of soldiers, all I could hear was the opening of tins and crunching of shells: a real cacophony. Why I had this dream I had no idea.
Da Nooz:
*I can’t believe this has happened. Trump made a deal with the Internal Revenue Service that he would give up his lawsuit against the IRS but, in return, gain immunity from being investigated and prosecuted FOR ALL TIME for any tax dealings. Further, the government agreed to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to be used to compensate people who, Trump thinks, were wrongly persecuted or investigated (read: January 6 insurrectionists). Oy gewalt! Read and weep (article is archived here):
The Justice Department has granted President Trump, his family and businesses immunity from ongoing inquiries into their taxes, a potentially lucrative arrangement that could shield the president from significant financial liability.
The provision, quietly inserted on Tuesday as a supplement to a remarkable deal that also created a $1.8 billion fund aimed at benefiting Mr. Trump’s allies, protects the president, his relatives and his businesses from pending audits and tax prosecutions.
The one-page document, signed by the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Mr. Trump, his family members and businesses.
The provision invited immediate criticism as tax experts raised the possibility that it was illegal.
That the addendum to the deal was posted, without fanfare, on the department’s website belied its bare-knuckled audacity. It revealed the determination of Mr. Trump and his appointees to ram through maximalist measures with minimum outside scrutiny at a moment when they still have uncontested control of government.
The provision was the latest in a series of maneuvers this week that blurred the all-but-vanished boundary between official department business and the private interests of a president intent on using his power to extract financial gain from the federal government for himself and his allies.
A day earlier, Mr. Trump agreed to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the I.R.S. in exchange for the establishment of a fund for people he believes were wronged by federal investigations or prosecutions.
Justice Department officials had in part defended the creation of the fund by pointing to the fact that Mr. Trump and his family members would not be paid by it.
But protection from audit could be quite financially beneficial for Mr. Trump, who has always said that there was no wrongdoing in his tax filings. In 2024, The New York Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.
It is unclear if that examination has concluded or if Mr. Trump, his family members or affiliated entities are under other audits. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president’s tax returns annually.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal ponders the ethics and efficacy of assassinating leaders like the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Much like the movie Groundhog Day, Washington and Jerusalem—from the think tanks to the command bunkers—are once again grappling with the exact same question they have faced before: Should Khamenei be assassinated? This time, however, it’s Mojtaba, not Ali. Other than that, almost everything is exactly the same.
In the heat of events, the fact that Israel had—for the first time in its history—killed the leader of an enemy state was overshadowed. The country had rehearsed the assassination of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 1992, but ultimately, due to an operational disaster, the mission did not materialize. It also toyed with the targeted killing of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat in 2002. Uri Dan, a confidant of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, recounted asking him if Arafat had died naturally two years later. Sharon replied: “It’s better not to talk about it.” The United States had imposed an absolute veto on an overt assassination.
In 2026, the United States coordinated with Israel on the assassination of the leader of a country with nearly one hundred million residents, hoping to destabilize the regime’s foundations. That hope was partially fulfilled, or partially disappointed, depending on how you look at the glass. On the one hand, the undisputed, top-down control vanished. Iran sank into an internal battle, evident in attacks on the Gulf states that completely defied the political echelon’s position. The replacement son is pale, corrupt and wounded; it is doubtful whether he is leading or merely being dragged.
On the other hand, there is still a command structure; there is still someone to lean on. As long as there is an ayatollah named Khamenei, Iran maintains the facade of a functioning state. President Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Araghchi do allow themselves to deviate slightly from the supreme leader’s rigid line on the nuclear issue—something they would never dare do during his father’s time—but they do not dare deviate much.
So in the war games, here is the dilemma: On one hand, Mojtaba is the last survivor, the only remaining natural heir. If he is assassinated, Iran could sink into leadership chaos that might help the more moderate wing secure an agreement. This is what Israel attempted in the Doha strike last September. It fired advanced missiles at the building housing the more recalcitrant wing of Hamas, the faction that had thwarted a hostage deal.
On the other hand, it’s not as if there are true moderates in Iran. If there is no Khamenei, no Anwar Sadat is waiting in the wings. Without him, there is the danger of securing an agreement that looks good on paper but is not fundamentally different from Barack Obama’s. Mossad Director David Barnea used to tell his American counterparts how, in the previous decade, the administration allayed his fears by arguing, “Who knows what will happen in the long term, in 2026, when the agreement begins to expire.” Well, here we are in 2026—welcome to the long term. Even if a different leadership agrees to freeze the nuclear program for 15 years, 2041 will eventually arrive just the same.
In short, a severe dilemma.
But it’s not clear whether Mojtaba is even alive, as he hasn’t been seen since the airstrike that killed his father on Febraury 28. Or he may be in a coma, or simply staying out of sight. But it would have been possible, if he were sentient, for him to release a video whose location could not be identified. I think he’s out of action, whether dead or comatose. Segal does, however, characterize the dilemma aptly. Even if Mojtaba is dead, there are no “moderates” to replace him. If they can pretend a dead man is still alive, they can pretend there’s still an Ayatollah calling the shots. Israel would not only have to kill him, but also prove that they did, which is very difficult.
*This tweet by Maarten Boudry called my attention to a new NYT op-ed by Bret Stephens, “Hatred of Israel and the degradation of the West” First the tweet
No matter how biased the @nytimes is against Israel (#dogrape, anyone?), they still publish columns by unapologetically pro-Israel voices like @BretStephen_NYT. You will never read anything comparable in a Belgian or Dutch newspaper. Occasionally, papers with syndication… pic.twitter.com/UdFBanW8vq
— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) May 20, 2026
Excerpts from Stephens, a good palliative to the odious Nicholas Kristof, which he alludes to at the beginning:
[Israel] is not a country of saints. As is true of every other country, the United States not least, plenty of sins past and present can be laid at Israel’s door. They include allegations, by Israelis and others, regarding cases of abuse of prisoners in Israeli jails. Those cases should be thoroughly investigated, just as in the United States the 8,628 allegations of staff-committed sexual misconduct victimizing adult inmates tallied in 2020 alone by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics need to be deeply investigated.
Yet this kind of good-faith criticism of Israeli leaders and policy has for years been giving way to something darker. It’s a hyperbolic and often conspiratorial hatred of the country. It’s a belief that Israelis are perpetually out for the blood of their enemies, even when it comes at the cost of the blood of their friends. It’s the sense that it’s socially acceptable to boycott, assail and sometimes assault Israelis for the supposed sins of their government. It’s a conviction that Israel, alone among the nations, was a mistake to begin with and has no right to exist now.
None of these impulses are justified indictments of Israel. They are indictments of the indicters. More broadly, the fashionable frenzy that is today’s loathing of Israel, coming from the far right but especially from the far and not-so-far left, is a sign of the degradation of the West. Societies that value critical thinking and reasoned moral judgment do not make a fetish of demonizing one small country and its people while imagining that peace, justice and freedom would somehow be achieved if only the country and its people were made to disappear.
I’ve been closely covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for over 25 years. It’s given me something of a front-row seat to this degradation.
This is a declaration of war on Kristof by Stephens, implying that he is making a fetish of Israel-hatred and abandoning critical thinking. Stephens then gives a lot of stories in which unjust accusations were leveled at Israel, and the stories were later corrected by journalists. I’ll quote more than usual here, as this is an important take on accusations like those made by Kristof, but also by many others:
The common thread in these and many other stories is that they all involve strenuous, if ultimately embarrassed, efforts to prove that Israelis deliberately seek to kill the innocent and maim the vulnerable, apparently for no other reason than gratuitous cruelty. This isn’t a matter of reporters’ impartially trying to expose wrongdoing wherever they find it — if that were the case, the errors wouldn’t invariably lean in the same ideological direction. It isn’t speaking truth to power. It’s feeding narratives to the credulous.
Over time this does at least three kinds of damage.
The least of it is damage to Israel, which has been living under the endless drizzle of orchestrated propaganda and media hostility over the course of its 78 years while still managing to transform itself into a military, technological and economic powerhouse — as well as one of the happiest countries in the world.
A more serious form of damage, paradoxically, is to Palestinians. Israelis have become so inured to the tide of tendentious allegations about their supposed perfidy that they can too easily shrug off real scandals, as it is with West Bank settler violence. And the endless parade of anti-Israel stories too often means the Western media pays too little attention to the domestic tyrannies that are Hamas’s rule in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority’s rule in the West Bank.
But the gravest damage is to Western institutions, particularly those entrusted with the dissemination of hard truths.
That goes not only for journalism, but also once-admired organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which in recent decades have turned themselves into factories of anti-Israel invective. “Major human-rights groups’ shift toward overt opposition to Israel has had the unusual effect of sidelining many of Israel’s own activists, who historically are among the sharpest critics of the Israeli government’s behavior in Gaza and the West Bank,” noted Michael Powell last year in The Atlantic.
It’s a similar story with much of academia, in which the anti-Israel furies stirred by the attacks of Oct. 7 were both a symptom of the broader intellectual rot within them and an invitation to the political and legal blowback from which they are still suffering.
. . . this obsession has contributed to the relative neglect of the region’s other fundamental problems, above all the abiding grip of authoritarian politics in places like Cairo and Ankara and totalitarian religious fundamentalism in Gaza and Tehran. When was the last time you heard of an American campus protest against the treatment of Kurds by Turkey (a NATO ally and longtime beneficiary of U.S. security guarantees), or the genocide in Sudan? Why is this year’s arts biennale in Venice being roiled by the inclusion of Israel, but not of China? Why has the recent report detailing the extensive documentation of systematic use of rape and sexual torture by Hamas and its collaborators received little attention?
These aren’t just questions of hypocrisy or double standards. They are evidence of minds that have lost the capacity to think dispassionately and critically. What we should really be worried about isn’t the future of Israel; it’s the fate of the West.
I can’t help but read this as a critique of his colleague Kristof. Of course Stephens will face all kinds of accusations for this piece, but note that he does call out Israel for things that he really thinks are wrong, like the treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank. But Stephens is right that this kind of mindless and obsessive accusation of Israel hurts Western institutions, which are already assailed by assucations of genocide, apartheid, and the mindless blatherings of protestors like “Globalize the intifada” that we hear regularly.
*Both the Harvard Crimson and the Wall Street Journal report that, completely against my expectations, Harvard has voted to curb grade inflation by capping the number of A grades in each course. Glory be!
From the Crimson:
Harvard faculty voted to impose a roughly 20 percent cap on A grades beginning in fall 2027, approving the College’s most aggressive attempt in decades to reverse grade inflation and reshape academic standards.
Faculty voted 458 to 201 for the first plank of the three-part proposal, which will limit A grades in undergraduate courses to 20 percent of enrollment, with flexibility for up to four additional A’s.
The measure passed with 69.5 percent of votes cast.
Faculty also approved a companion measure to use average percentile rankings, rather than GPA, to determine internal awards and honors. That measure passed 498 to 157, with 76 percent of participating faculty in favor.
But faculty rejected the proposal’s third plank, which would have allowed courses to petition to opt out of the A cap if they were graded on an unsatisfactory, satisfactory, and satisfactory-plus basis. That measure failed 292 to 364.
This is unclear; my inquiries at Harvard have revealed that what was rejected was a plan that would allow courses now graded either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” to add the grade “satisfactory plus”. That was turned down. Back to the Crimson
Together, the votes represent a sweeping intervention in Harvard College’s academic culture — one that will sharply reduce the share of A’s and place new constraints on grading decisions traditionally left to individual instructors.
The decision marks a major victory for Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh and the faculty subcommittee that designed the plan after warning that Harvard’s grading system had become too compressed at the top to distinguish exceptional work from merely strong performance.
It also signals that faculty were willing to endorse a mandatory cap despite months of objections from students and professors who argued that the proposal could heighten competition, discourage intellectual risk-taking, and infringe on faculty autonomy.
Students overwhelmingly disapproved of the proposal. Nearly 85 percent of respondents to a February survey administered by the Harvard Undergraduate Association said they disapproved of the proposal.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Harvard spent years researching ways to fight grade inflation, including examining prior efforts at Princeton and Wellesley.
A Harvard committee looked at 25 years of grades to model a range of possible remedies, including introducing A-pluses, according to Claybaugh.
Their conclusion: “Anything short of a cap doesn’t work,” she said.
Campus debate increased in the fall, when Claybaugh released a report noting that about 60% of grades were A’s during the 2024-25 school year, a jump from about 25% in 2005-06.
Note that the cap is on straight-out “A” grades, and does not include “A-” (“A minus”) grades. This means that there is nothing preventing professors from giving 20% As and 80% A-s. It turns out that my colleagues at Harvard get beefed at by students who get an “A-“, as that
Here’s the graph of the inexorable rise in percentage of “As” (the unadorned “A”) at Harvard, Look at the greater-than-10% increase in 2020, attributable to the pandemic and, I think, the desire of Harvard to reward students who, they thought, were being forced to get a substandard remote education. At any rate, the mean grade at Harvard is no an unadorned A. What will happen when As are capped at 20% in 2027? Who knows, but I think this is a good move.
Today there’s a op-ed on these data: “60 percent of grades were A’s. Enough is enough.” The authors are two professors who teach economists at Harvard. They say that capping As is not a perfect solution (and don’t mention that 80% of the students who don’t get As could get A-s), but add this:
When a school’s transcript stops distinguishing students from one another, employers and graduate schools fall back on what they can: connections, internship pedigrees, the polish of a personal essay (increasingly written with artificial intelligence). Grade inflation doesn’t just devalue an A; it also quietly hands more weight to factors other than what a student actually learned. That is true at Harvard and every other school that has let its grades drift upward. Bringing inflation down is hard. The alternative is worse.
There will be only four news items today as I’ve quoted at length from Stephens’s piece.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili the editor is policing Andrzej’s behavior:
Hili: What are you doing?
Andrzej: I’m cleaning my desk.
In Polish:
Hili: Co ty robisz?
Ja: Sprzątam moje biurko.
*******************
From Band Director Jokes:
FromTherionArms, ancient script:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
Masih is quiet today, but here’s a comment on how Australia is policing extremist gender ideology; it was posted by JKR:
“There appears to be this organized plan to punish anyone in the country for not adhering to gender ideology. So is it worth fighting that? 100%. Because if we can’t look at a man & say that’s a man we literally don’t live in a free society.” pic.twitter.com/Ycr5AGRRgV
— Sall Grover (@salltweets) May 20, 2026
I probably posted this one before, but listen to those seagulls meow!
Everybody wants to be a cat… https://t.co/TFPd4jCPL6
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) May 17, 2026
Three from my feed. First, a robot “tries” to imitate Michael Jackson:
This is the greatest video I’ve ever seen. No notes. The lifeless clanker carcass just laying there. No crowd reaction, anything. Just Billie Jean. Until its lifeless shell is shamefully dragged off. Purely amazing. pic.twitter.com/4WSUwZr7nO
— Tatum Turn Up (@tatumturnup) May 20, 2026
Allah didn’t help this time:
Still the best video of all time,
hands down. 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/FKmDIK2TLj— Ahmed Khalifa (@_A_khalifa) May 20, 2026
The Old Man and the Ray!:
For years, an old man has been caring for this ray ever since it was a baby, feeding and looking after it.
The ray recognizes him as its human grandfather and approaches him like a giant friendly sea pet. pic.twitter.com/vKSbYzRwgf— The Figen (@TheFigen_) May 19, 2026
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This Belgian Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would have been 89 today had she lived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-21T09:55:27.941Z
Two from Dr. Cobb. First, a flatulent symphony:
Well, I missed the 11th anniversary of this on Sunday, which was an appalling dereliction of duty, but good morning anyway
— Odd This Day (@oddthisday.bsky.social) 2026-05-19T06:10:23.889Z
A beautiful grouping of drakes in flight:
Today's #BirdOfTheDay theme is #DucksInTheAir. Mine today is mallards.#bird #birdphotography #mallard
— Tor Berg (@torbergen.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T17:03:48.003Z
I love that metal duck. I can see why you went to some trouble to get it. Great snag!
My nephew has been collecting ducks of all sorts (except live, of course) since he was about 3 years old. He has hundreds, ranging from rubber duckys to artistic decoys.He has now graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering engineering, and something like that would be the centerpiece of his collection. He will be wildly jealous when I show him the pic.
In Munich, on the square, there is a store that sells amber—anything from raw pieces to elaborate carvings. They had there a marvelous carving of a duck. You could see individual feathers and everything, which was cool since the duck was the size of a finger joint. I really was enchanted, but the price was about 900 euros (not a typo) and that was in the pre-covid era. Not for someone on a professor’s salary.
That is indeed a top notch duck/sculpture. I imagine the boss’ apartment has some choice pieces, plus lots of live plants like ferns and triffids (I think). 🙂
Still waiting on the 3D printed drosophila fly we saw here lately though. THAT was very cool indeed.
D.A.
NYC
It’s probably rhetorical, so as not to dilute his main point, but I find it odd that Stephens treats the view of Israel he describes as a natural and inexplicable development. It is 100% part of a concerted propoganda effort by Israel’s foes (or in many cases foes of Capitalism, since Israel is often a proxy). I suppose that that is natural. What is not is the complete buy-in by Western media and many Western politicians.
Yes, Dr. B. – that’s something I think a lot of people miss: First they come for the Saturday people, THEN they come for the Sunday people.
So… kill all the Jews (“where ever you may find them” – Koran) and then the larger enemy is the “cross worshippers” or just kuffirs in general.
There’s only one (temporary) border in the world: that between the Dar al Harb and the Dar al Islam (Islsmosphere vs non). It is.. erasable. Because the whole planet must be Muslim. Must. Jews are just the first obstacle.
D.A.
NYC
By the way, awesome duck! Good job, Bill.
Unsettling news from Germany: The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office has brought charges against two men who are alleged to have plotted to murder two prominent Germans on behalf of Iranian authorities. The attacks were planned against Volker Beck, a former Member of the Bundestag and President of the German-Israeli Society, and Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and Vice-President of the World Jewish Congress and the European Jewish Congress.
https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/id_101264416/iran-soll-mord-an-volker-beck-und-josef-schuster-geplant-haben.html
Is there anything educators can’t screw up, particularly when it comes to education?
Grades are measurement against a standard. The percentage of students making that standard is irrelevant and tells an employer (and everyone else) nothing.
If you lay out good money to buy a Prime cut of beef, you expect it meet the standards of the grade, not the cattle demographic.
It looks as if a) you don’t believe in grades and b) if they are to persist, you should get an “A” if you pay a lot of money to get an education, as at Harvard.
If grades are curved, or there are caps, it does tell the employer something: hoe you perform relative to other people in the class (transcripts might add the median grade in the class to give further information.
But the “standard” varies between Universities/Schools, between departments, and between individual teachers. The article states, “Grade inflation doesn’t just devalue an A; it also quietly hands more weight to factors other than what a student actually learned.” This presumes grades are better because of the standard. Perhaps it is time to admit that grades, like the other factors, does not reflect what has been learned. IMHO
I can understand the issue with grades. I remember being my advisor in college telling me to avoid several classes outside of my major that I thought were interesting because “they are very hard and could jeopardize your GPA.”
This is what creates an environment where students try to figure out the easiest path to a 4.0, which is not necessarily the same as challenging oneself.
But…is there a better system? Would a simple “Pass/Fail” be better?
There are some unexpectedly deep waters in (a). Obviously grades do exist, and they perform some useful functions more or less well. But IMO much of the “belief in grades” — that they they are virtuous or necessary or the best means of performing those functions — is not evidence based but tradition and faith based. And I say this as someone who in my adjunct academic career was often considered inconveniently and unreasonably hard-nosed in matters of assessment and cheating¹.
My unapologetic view is that the current system of grading and credentialing is past its best-before date. If that makes me an unbeliever then so be it.
…………
¹ By both students and faculty, including exam proctors. Which probably contributed to the brevity of that career.
Slight taxonomical correction: Mussels aren’t gastropods. They are in a different class, Bivalvia.
Beautiful piece, superb craftsmanship, exquisite coloring – hmm.,.. I don’t think a speculum is displayed .. that’d be extremely difficult to work into that pose…
What a fun, thoughtful idea – glad to see it!
Now to look for a hen counterpart!
🦆[ hen emoji missing ]
Saaay, if IRS is to be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” tax charges against the Dear Leader and his clan, and this being USA with all of us equal before the majesty of the law and whatnot, does not this mean that IRS is also “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” tax charges against any of us?
Just askin’.
Why would anyone whose financial affairs are always above board need such an agreement?
Speaking of exotic birds, I saw a peacock in the front yard of a home near Buffalo Bayou in Houston, Texas yesterday . This was the third one I have seen in the past eight years. I saw all three on the west side of Houston while I was out and about driving.
How did these exotic birds indigenous to India and Sri Lanka end up in Houston, Texas???
https://www.khou.com/article/news/news-explainers/the-why/why-peacocks-houston/285-5a34c4dc-9f1a-497e-8baf-fda4f4afdf0f.
Over the past month, I have encountered at least two on-line discussions involving Thomas Jefferson and his military efforts to quash the Barbary Pirates, who were known as “Musselmen”. Perhaps the origin of Dr. Coyne’s dream?
Regarding Bret Stephens’s piece, yes, the west has turned on Israel. Decades of propaganda, errant reporting that goes uncorrected, indoctrination of our young people by Israel-hating professors. But is it Israel they hate? Or is Israel merely a convenient proxy for Jews? For 80 years since the Holocaust it was unfashionable to profess hatred for Jews openly. But the hatred was surely there and the pressure to release it has only grown over time. Israel—and, in particular a successful Israel, provides that opportunity for release.
Götz Aly’s eyeopening 2020 book Europe Against the Jews documents a centuries-long Europe-wide hatred of the Jews, of which the Holocaust was the culmination. It strains credulity to believe that hatred of Israel has nothing to do with the Jews.
Just yesterday it was asserted that Trump’s corruption is just marginal – a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. Now Trump not only dumps all his tax debt through the sheer application of power, but also pushes through perpetual exemption from taxes for him, his clan and their businesses. If this stands, the US can kiss their tax collection good bye, since every larger business will seek a deal where they make one of the Trumps the nominal owner of the business for a casual million dollars or so per annum and then proceed not to pay taxes.
I sincerely hope, that the courts kill this – for Trump’s sake. Because if the courts let this act stand as valid, the only way for future administrations to avoid rampant tax dodging is to eradicate the blood line. Not saying I want this to happen, but I can see this as a logical end. The other is that it’s the first step to the Trump clan actually becoming US royalty – the King and his family obviously don’t pay tax.
Some very interesting unintended consequences points!
An apt comment about the king and his favoured nobles not paying taxes.
But I’m sure it won’t require a Louis XVI solution. Executive branch policies by themselves can not bind future administrations or Congress. What can be decreed forever-and-ever-amen can just as easily be de-decreed.
So, I have a question regarding the whole concept of grade caps. First, I do agree that grade inflation over the years is a problem that needs to be fixed, so please do not accuse me of thinking otherwise. Also, I do have two undergraduate degrees (one is in biology, yay!) and a teaching license, so I am familiar with teaching pedagogy and assessment.
Here’s my question: From my experience (I didn’t go to Harvard), most courses use a combination of exams, quizzes and papers and/or projects to determine final grades in a course. Papers and projects usually always have a rubric of some sort, while exams and quizzes have various question types, we all know this. If you put a 20% cap on A’s for your course, but more than 20% of students happen to meet the conditions the rubrics set out for earning an A on papers and projects as well as the conditions set by the scoring system(s) for the exams and quizzes, what do you do? Just randomly choose some students to get a lower grade even though they fairly met the conditions that all the other A earners did? How is that not unfair and arbitrary?
If one were to argue that the exams, quizzes, papers and projects should be made more difficult so that only around 20% of students get A’s, then isn’t the solution to the problem of grade inflation tweaking the difficulty of assessments and not simply grade caps? There just seems to be something logically amiss with the concept of grade caps to me. Please enlighten me if I’ve missed something!
Ideally, the grade cap pushes professors to make tests difficult again. Evaluation of courses is a huge issue and the easiest way for a professor to get a good evaluation is to make an easy test and hand out tons of As.
I’m in charge of course evaluation at a college and the first thing I implemented was that evaluation closes 24h before the test. That way there is no chance for students to evaluate based on the test and no incentive for teachers to give an easy pass.
The grade cap also pushes professors to make the test more difficult, because else you run into problems when everyone gets full marks on a test – how do you give A- to someone who aced the test? Given that the was significant resistance to the cap and anti-inflationary measures in general, the cap is required since it ensures that everyone has to put a more difficult test to the students in order to avoid the “too many students have full marks” problem. No professor can become a student darling anymore by making the test really, really easy.
Ahh, closing the evaluations before the test is a superb idea! More schools should definitely adopt that strategy. And I can see now how the cap will push professors to make tests more difficult, as you say.
I suppose my only other concern would be what happens if you make testing appropriately difficult, and yet you still end up with just over 20% legitimately earning an A in accordance with all rules and regulations? I know the article said Harvard allows for an extra 4 A’s to be awarded, but what if 5 extra students (or 6 or 7?) ended up legitimately earning A’s? Does one student get screwed? If so, then we are back to the unfairness and arbitrariness question/problem I asked earlier.
One or a couple students may not be significant relative to the entire student body, but that legitimately earned A IS significant to them. I think there needs to be some sort of flexibility or mechanism in place for such instances because these kinds of problems will almost surely arise. And if schools are as concerned about accurate grades and assessments as they claim, then this kind of situation should matter to them.
There will be grading on a curve to meet the criteria. The professor can set the percentage you need to score for a straight A. If too many reach this level, then you just adjust the threshold. That’s why there is only really a problem, when the test is so easy that too many score perfect marks (though even then you could chip away at that number on open questions).
Now the 4 extra A’s make sense, when you look at the typical course types – at least as I see them in German university/college education. You have the large basic courses often with more than 100 students. There you usually have a very mixed bag of test preparation and ability and any test that produces more than 20% full marks is definitely too easy. There 4 extra As won’t do much in terms of numbers but might allow for more lenient grading.
Then you have the specialty courses where the typical course size is 8-20 students. Those students have chosen that particular subject and are typically capable and interested and thus will prep. There even a quite tough test might result in a significant amount of students acing the test. But when you have just 10 students, you can give 60% (20%+4) a straight A.
So if administered properly, the rules make sense.
Thanks so much for that explanation! That makes very good sense and eases those concerns that I had.
Re “I’m in charge of course evaluation at a college” —
How many old Gypsies did you have to annoy to deserve that curse? My friend the former Dean has told me some of his tribulations with AI and cheating (as it used to be called). And it’s getting steadily worse.
The reason I had to take the job was that I married a successful scientist and had to move when she accepted a professorship. I had to ditch my own science in favor of science management / coordination so we could live together and when we moved, due to legal reasons here in Germany, I could not be hired on a non-permanent position at a public uni.
Thus I ended up at a private college and I do all kinds of dirty, dirty admin in science and education.
I truly regret my attempted humour. I figured it was safe, Gypsy curses not being real. But I now see that the very real curse of bureaucracy can be just as damaging and arbitrary. Sorry.
At least you have authority to introduce some much-needed rationality to the usual headless-chicken dancing. Best wishes.
Excellent piece by Stephens. Not enough to get me to resubscribe to the Times, though.
Grading is always a sensitive matter. When I was a professor, I used to grade on an absolute scale. If everyone aced all the exams, everyone got A’s. (That never happened.) Conversely there were times when students earned relatively few A’s. Some year’s classes were better than others.
For some reason I can’t recall, a couple of my colleagues raised questions about my grading, seeming to believe that grades should follow a certain distribution. When questioned about my grading, I argued that it was my job to determine whether a student earned a A, B, etc. Applying a standard distribution to the class effectively meant that the grades were determined by the students. In a class of poorly performing students, for instance, forcing a distribution would mean that I would be assigning grades that weren’t deserved. I would be shirking my responsibility.
As I said, grading is a delicate matter. I will assume that Harvard has studied the matter thoroughly, and has determined they have a systemic problem under which too many students who receive A’s didn’t earn them.
Love the duck! I’m a real fan of metal sculptures.
The Stephens article is on point, but it’s still not nearly enough to redeem the NYT for publishing the Kristof article, which was not just an antisemitic atrocity, but a violation of every tenet of good journalism. I wish I had a subscription to the NYT just so I could put some muscle behind my objections by canceling it.
On a lighter note, for me, almost every day is Hummus Day since I make it all the time (although I often substitute cannellini beans for garbanzos, which middle-easterners may object to). In fact, I had it for breakfast.
Regarding Bret Stephens’s piece, it may be the retired lawyer in me accustomed to making fine distinctions, but isn’t there an argument that the reason Americans focus almost exclusively on alleged bad behavior of Israel and ignore and do not demonstrate against all the other horrible governments and terrorist groups in the world is because the US gives Israel billions of dollars in aid ($3.8 billion)? In the other hot spots: e.g. Iran, Sudan, Congo, China, Russia, etc., the US is not actively supporting either side (at least not publicly). Since we are giving Israel so much aid, some of it military, that presumably the IDF uses in Gaza, doesn’t that make it a public issue that Americans should weight in on? I recall that Biden banned giving Israel some heavyweight bombs so they wouldn’t be able to use them in Gaza. Citizens can feel that their opinion will have an effect on aid to Israel, but would not have any effect on any of the other conflicts. Of course, I join the condemnation of anti-semitism and agree that many anti-Israeli protests may be motivated by that.
You may be making the logical error of assuming what you need to prove, that Israel is (“allegedly”) engaging in “bad behaviour.”
Allegedly bad behaviour parses into three parts:
Besides, Israel’s not in Court. It’s on a battlefield.
Destroying Israel will assuredly reduce the total good in the world if Israel’s alleged Samson policy is real.
I think you missed my point. I was not commenting on other’s allegations of “bad behavior,” simply noting that some do make those allegations. I agree that Israel is on a battlefield, but the Israeli government should recognize that it, like all nations, are in the court of public opinion all the time.
Well, if it’s just public opinion, it’s up to Israel how much weight to give it. It’s not for us to criticize Israel for not paying it enough attention. Opposition to arms sales is not over the weight of bombs permitted. It’s about weakening Israel’s ability to make war in the hopes that it will be eradicated. Why would Israel let its war policy be influenced by that? Counteract it by lobbying in secret, sure. Hell, bribery if necessary in a good cause.
The connection between public opinion in foreign countries and what the executive state in those countries does foreign-policy-wise is tenuous at best. International diplomacy is carried out out of public view as much as possible. The mob has a poor grasp of what it’s state’s interests truly are. The Deep State really is a thing, not necessarily malign. It prevents public opinion from causing foolishness.
I don’t think the Abdullah post by Velle is true. I find no other mention of it on line.
Yes, you seem to be right. I did a pretty extensive check and all I see are these social-media rumors and probably fabrications. I have thus removed the post and I am glad that the hero remains unsullied. Thanks for checking on this. I should have, but I thought there would be a Community Notes on the tweet if it were dubious.
Out of curiosity, I asked Google for the percentage of A grades at Harvard in 1930. Google replied:
“While precise department-wide data for the exact year 1930 is not explicitly documented in a single percentage, historical reports indicate that A grades at Harvard were relatively rare compared to modern standards. In 1930, the average GPA at Harvard was approximately 2.4 (on a 4.0 scale), a figure that aligns with a grading culture where a ‘C’ was the most common or average mark.”
In other news from the land of Oz, a moustachioed, bearded gay man who identifies as “she” just won the $50,000 Stella prize for Women’s Literature – for writing a crude, poorly drawn cartoon!
As reported in ‘The Independant’…
“A Texas Democratic congressional candidate accused of antisemitism has been condemned by her own party, after a campaign post called for “American Zionists” to be jailed in an ICE detention center.
Maureen Galindo, a sex therapist and housing activist, is caught up in an intense primary runoff for the state’s 35th Congressional District against Bexar County sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia, with voting due May 26.
She attracted backlash after she appeared on Texas Public Radio May 13 and declared that “anybody who is supported by Israel should be tried for treason” and repeated a number of antisemitic tropes alleging Zionist influence over the media and banking sectors.”
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/texas-dem-condemned-after-calling-for-american-zionists-to-be-jailed/ar-AA23JnjX