Welcome to Monday, September 7, 2026, and since it’s the first Monday in September, it’s Labor Day, an official government holiday. Here’s a brief history of the one day a year dedicated to celebrating workers:
It’s also Grandma Moses Day, celebrating the painter born on this day in 1860 (she lived to be 101). She started painting at age 77, older than I am now, and you can see some of her paintings here. It’s also National Acorn Squash Day, National Beer Lover’s Day (note that the apostrophe implies that the holiday celebrates only one lover of beer), and Salami Day. Salami is of course an Eastern European treat, and, in the porkless form, beloved by Jews. Here’s a photo that was in the window of Katz’s Delicatessen in New York City in 2010 (it was clearly taken during WWII):
Finally, today’s Google Doodle celebrates Labor Day; click the icon to see where it goes:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 7 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*In a NYT op-ed, Margaret McMillan (“a historian and a former warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford”) predicts a worldwide apocalypse, or perhaps even a world war, in a piece called “A new world order is coming. We aren’t ready” (article archived here).
Today, there are dead rats all around. Temperature records have been set and reset this summer, the earth has baked in droughts, and wildfires have raged. Debt across advanced economies is approaching historic highs. Cuts in medical and food aid, most significantly by the United States, have caused unnecessary deaths and helped the spread of diseases, one of which, sooner or later, could become another pandemic. Artificial intelligence continues its rapid, unregulated rise, threatening jobs, security and, in darker projections, human existence.
Revisionist powers flout rules and norms with impunity. Electorates are angry and volatile. Slow, deliberate, necessarily discreet diplomacy, which builds trust and understanding, has given way to a performative, brash style more suited for TikTok-addled attention spans or the playground.
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program recorded 65 state-based conflicts last year — the most since 1946. Great powers find themselves bogged down in asymmetric wars with countries that are making the most of new technologies. Russia’s war in Ukraine, meant to be won in a matter of days, is creaking through its fifth year. Iran, using inexpensive, mass-produced drones to attack American forces and allies, has gained control, perhaps permanently, over a crucial corridor of world trade, drastically reduced U.S. missile stocks and mired President Trump in a war of his own choice.
A world war is not inevitable, but the threat of a catastrophic conflict between big and well-armed powers is closer than it was for decades.
. . .But a new reality has arrived with startling speed. The world order that held together for most of our lives started to erode when those within it got too comfortable and complacent and when there was too much acceptance — even approval — of bad behavior.
We have arrived in a new age of disorder. We must prepare ourselves, beginning with being honest about the seriousness of the moment we’re in and accepting that our fragile system is faltering. That countries are already adjusting, for better and worse. And that any future of cooperation will have to look different.
McMillan ends on a hopeful note: perhaps we can rebuild something afresh, something that will not fail. Her example is what the Allies created after WWII. Unfortunately, that lasted only 80 years.
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal gives us another dip on the roller-coaster ride of his Iran war coverage: this time he argues that although launches of drones and missiles from Iran have fallen substantially, they could in principle be replenished quickly:
By the tenth day of Operation Epic Fury, US officials assessed that Iranian drone launches had fallen 83 percent from their opening levels and ballistic missile launches by roughly 90 percent. But a recent report by the Hudson Institute’s Can Kasapoğlu argues that despite the seemingly optimistic numbers, Iranian drones and missiles can make a quick recovery.
His broader assessment is that attrition has hurt the IRGC badly without breaking it. Inventories are depleted and infrastructure damaged, but the order of battle, doctrine, discipline and cohesion have held. Despite the killing of much of the senior leadership in the first 24 hours of the war, the direct Mossad phone calls, and the apparent double agent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there have been no senior defections and no organizational fragmentation. Precisely what is needed for an organization to rebuild.
Drones will come back first. The inputs are modular and substitutable, spread across universities, workshops, front companies and foreign vendors. Strikes can eliminate stockpiles, but so long as the knowledge and the suppliers survive, so will the drone threat. Kasapoğlu expects Iran to regain drone mass within months. They won’t be the highest quality, but it doesn’t take million-dollar drones to keep Gulf capitals up at night and the United States restrained.
Missiles will return more slowly, held up by a chemical chokepoint. Solid-propellant production depends on large planetary mixers and on sodium perchlorate from China. Rebuilding a bombed factory is the easy part. Restoring controlled chemical flows, specialized machinery and skilled production teams is not.
Whether that flow resumes depends less on Washington than on Beijing. China supplies the vast majority of Iran’s missile-fuel precursor and more than 60 percent of the electronics in the Shahed drone family, along with navigation modules, optics, batteries, machine tools and fibre-optic cable. Publicly, Beijing has assured Washington that no weapons will reach Iran; in practice, sanctioned Iranian ships have kept docking at Chinese ports.
None of this would matter much if not for one fact: US and Israeli interceptor stocks are stressed, and take far longer to replace than the cheap weapons fired at them.
Much of the mainstream media has hauled the battered Iranian boxer off the canvas, checked he’s still breathing, and declared him the winner for lasting a few rounds with the champion. It continues to insist, even as the effects of the blockade and sanctions have made it clear who has the upper hand.
My argument is simply not to swing from the doomerism of the past two months into triumphalism now. The lion may be trapped and starving, but it still has claws.
Well, does the U.S. have the upper hand? We haven’t stopped the Iranian nuclear weapons program for good, the Strait of Hormuz has a lot less traffic than before the war, and the Iranian people are still under the yoke. I call that something close to a standoff.
*Over at the Free Press, psychiatrist Sally Satel tells us what kind of verdict she thinks should have been handed down by the jury in the Lindsay Clancy case.
Clancy continues to be charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Her lawyer and the prosecutors will consider next steps while she remains in a mental-health facility.
Whatever comes next, the case is a reminder about the hazards of addressing mental illness challenges in the courtroom, the need for legal and psychiatric reforms, and the urgency of educating doctors as well as patients about psychosis in general and postpartum psychosis in particular. If Clancy is retried, here is why I hope the next jury will find her not criminally responsible.
. ., .The tragedy was the culmination of five months of anguish and help-seeking. Although Clancy said she initially felt well following Callan’s birth in May 2022, she saw a psychiatrist in late summer for help with depression, severe insomnia, and feelings of being overwhelmed by simple tasks like dressing or showering.Over time, she allegedly began having suicidal ideation and experiencing what have been variously described as “intrusive thoughts” and “auditory hallucinations” telling her that she was “damaged” and would “not be the same,” and that “the only option is to die.” In December 2022, she told her husband and mother that she had thoughts of harming her children and was worried that other people could hear those thoughts.
. . .Massachusetts uses the McHoul standard for insanity. It allows for a determination of “not criminally responsible” if a person with a mental disorder or defect (which every expert agreed Clancy had) lacks either the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or the capacity to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law. If the defendant presents evidence to support her lack of responsibility, the prosecutors bear the burden to prove her responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. Some thought the prosecutors did not carry this burden; others thought they did.
I see particularly strong reasons to doubt Clancy’s capacity to conform her behavior to the demands of the law. After her husband left on the errand, she experienced an audible command to kill. She felt she had to “obey,” according to psychiatrist Phillip Resnick, an expert for the defense. Resnick also testified that Clancy suffered a “delusion of influence” (a formal term) just before and during the killing. “She felt that her body was taken over by an external force, where she was in a dream state and did not have control of her own body,” Resnick told the jury. “It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings.” In short, this compulsion made it impossible for her to follow the law.
I could also make a case for solid skepticism that Clancy appreciated the wrongfulness of her conduct. This does not mean that she was ignorant of the law—she surely knew that murder was wrong and illegal. Rather, it means that she was acting on a deranged belief that her kids would suffer so greatly without her that they needed to die. Clancy genuinely believed, Resnick said, that she was protecting the children by taking them with her to heaven. Consistent with this formulation was Clancy saying to a hospital chaplain a week after the killings: “I am so glad my children are safe.”
In reaching these conclusions, I have accepted the truth of Clancy’s description of the voice she heard and her explanation of why she followed its command. I believe her account because absolutely nothing in her past foreshadowed her cataclysmic act.
Well, Clancy is responsible in the sense that she killed her kids, but to me that’s all a jury can decide, and it’s something that she already admitted. The second part of the justice system, which shouldn’t involve a judge or jury, is to determine how the accused is treated when convicted—treatment that can only be, in my view, for deterrence, sequestering a baddie from society, and for rehabilitation. Already there’s a parallel case in which a North Carolina woman did something pretty similar to Clancy, probably inspired by her (the woman was transfixed by the Clancy case). So yes, we may need deterrence. I can’t make a good case that Clancy remains a danger to society since she has no more children and is probably unlikely to attack strangers. As for the cure, well, that’s the job of the therapists. If a woman’s mentally ill but no longer a danger to society, can she be locked up against her will?
*If you read here regularly, you’ll know that although formal affiliation with religion is dropping among Americans, many still claim they have a “god-shaped hole” in their soul that needs to be filled with some faux-religious activity. Now the Democratic Socialists of America are trying to fill that hole with social (and socialist) activity; this is reported in the WSJ article, “The DSA is using coffee with comrades and socialist softball to convert the curious” (nice alliteration!). Sure enough, while I was thinking the above when reading the article, the word “church” appeared!
On a recent Saturday morning, a youngish group gathered around a table in the sun-dappled garden of a Brooklyn coffee shop. Beneath a bright blue sky they were sipping drinks, chatting—and building socialism.
The “Coffee With Comrades” was hosted by the Democratic Socialists of America. It was yet another in an endless buffet of social events the DSA uses both to attract new members and more closely bind existing ones to the movement.
In Queens, DSAers were playing “socialist softball” at Queensbridge Park. “Bring your own glove if you can—but if you don’t have one, we’ll encourage folks to share as need be,” an invitation advised. Meanwhile, at Forest Park in Woodhaven, other socialists gathered for a “Desi, Afro and Latin” potluck picnic. The previous evening featured a DSA game night in Long Island City.
The socialists, it turns out, are highly social.
In chapters across the country, they enjoy DSA barbecues, beach days, running clubs, happy hours, karaoke, prom nights, transgender rights and bodily autonomy game nights, reading groups, Marxist study circles and more. The DSA is even moving into affairs of the heart with a recent “Socialist Speed Dating” event in New York’s Lower East Side. (“In the era of late-stage capitalism, our dating and social lives are more and more controlled by for-profit companies,” read a flier.)
“It’s a good way to be social,” Caroline Hill, a printmaker who had attended the Brooklyn coffee, said of her DSA activism. The 25-year-old estimated about half of her social life was tied to the DSA.
For others, the DSA can become all encompassing, according to David Duhalde, a longtime member and writer. The movement, he argued, has stepped into a gap left by a withering civic society—particularly for a generation yearning for engagement after the isolation of the pandemic.
“It really fulfills a social function that a church would,” said Duhalde, who plays pickup basketball with DSA chums, often finds himself at dinner parties with fellow DSA couples and whose phone is populated by various DSA message chains—the DSA Knicks Chat, the Socialist Majority Caucus Chat and others. “It becomes a way for people to hang out.”
I don’t know which is worse: the DSA or religion.Well, I suppose religion is worse overall, but some religions, like the Quakers, are less harmful to America than the DSA would be if it ever got substantial political power.
*In the “Trilobites” biology column of the NYT, science writer Kate Golembiewski reports on insect fossils, noting that “The world’s first bugs had way more legs” (six is the standard number now). The article is archived here, and the Nature paper it summarizes is linked below (click the title to read).The word “bug” is unfortunate as Golemiewski really means “insects” (“true”bugs are insects in the order Hemiptera). This insect, from 324 million years ago, is identified as an insect because it shares “apomorphies” (derived traits common to all members of a group) with all insects, living or fossil; those traits are include “an ovipositor and a terminal filament but differ[ing] from crown-group insects, most notably with respect to the presence of multisegmented abdominal legs with paddle-like modifications.” The multisegmented legs and their position are not known in modern insects. An excerpt:
Erik Tihelka’s first glimpse of one of the world’s oldest insects came from an outdated Russian textbook that he bought on eBay.
In it, a small line drawing of a fossil, labeled as an early crustacean that had lived 324 million years ago, caught his eye. “The more I looked, the more intrigued I got,” said Mr. Tihelka, a doctoral student in paleontology at Cambridge.
For a fossil described as a crustacean, it seemed to have an awful lot of insectlike traits, such as a body split into three parts, a pair of antennae and six legs emerging from the central part of the body. Overall, it looked a lot like a modern silverfish.
But there was one big difference between this fossil and our current definition of an insect, which has six legs: This one had 24.
Today, insects make up more than half the known species of animals, but their early origins are shrouded in mystery. The many-legged fossil, unearthed in Texas and stored in the collections of the San Diego Natural History Museum since 1985, could represent a breakthrough. In a new study published in Nature, Mr. Tihelka and his colleagues propose that his discovery is one of the oldest insect fossils ever found, and that these early insects had four times the number of legs seen on a standard bug today.
Genetic analyses have shown that insects’ closest relatives are crustaceans, but they split off into their own group and moved onto land. Very little is known about this transition, because insects and their fellow six-legged arthropods are missing from the fossil record from roughly 385 to 322 million years ago. Paleontologists call this period the “hexapod gap.” But the insect-resembling fossil in Mr. Tihelka’s textbook was from 324 million years ago — just inside the gap.
Based on the illustration alone, he couldn’t be certain that he’d really spotted an early insect. “Although it’s a very nicely preserved fossil, it’s a black fossil on a black rock,” Mr. Tihelka said. “I had an inkling, but I thought, I have to make sure.”
. . .He took his first trip to the United States to examine the fossil in person. Using a microscope and specialized light polarization filters to highlight subtle features, he was able to confirm that the fossil had a combination of insect and crustacean traits. He hypothesized that the extra legs were “a holdover from its crustacean ancestors,” but the fossil was indeed an insect.
From the paper’s abstract:
Together, these stem-group fossils represent the earliest uncontested insects and partly reconcile the incongruence between molecular clock estimates and the fossil record. The unusual abdominal gill-like appendages of Chosha suggest a semiaquatic mode of life in at least some stem-insects and revise our understanding of the assembly of insect morphological organization.
Here’s a figure (with caption) from the paper, showing the 24-legged proto-insect (click to enlarge):
“Trilobite” gives this lesson: collections are important!
In addition to providing new insight into the history of life on Earth, Dr. Knecht said that the study highlights the importance of museum collections like the one where Chosha was kept for 40 years before being recognized as an insect. “It allows us to go back, revisit, and sometimes make big discoveries using new technologies or new insights that we didn’t have the first time we looked at the fossil,” Dr. Knecht said.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili isn’t ready for sleep:
Andrzej: It’s late already, time to go to bed.
Hili: Let’s read for another half an hour.
In Polish:
Ja: Późno już, pora iść spać.
Hili: Poczytajmy jeszcze pół godziny.
*******************
From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices; inappropriate apostrophes. The only possibly accurate one is “massage”:
From Meow Incorporated:
From the 2025 Darwin Awards!!!/Epic Fails!!!
From Masih; a sixteen-year-old girl beaten to death with batons by the Iranian police. Why? She was peacefully demonstrating, of course.
Let me introduce you to Sarina Esmailzadeh, another hero from my country, Iran.
She was 16 years old. And like so many teenage girls her age, she had a YouTube channel.
She filmed herself baking cookies. She vlogged about her life in Karaj. She talked about compulsory hijab,… pic.twitter.com/HPUHTBAMTB
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 31, 2026
From Malcolm; my dream (note that the tiger sounds like a buzzsaw):
A cat is a cat no matter the size pic.twitter.com/JdkFellG0D
— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) January 20, 2025
From Luana. People will believe anything, including that correlation proves causation. Also, maybe, over history, the rise of fascism is correlated with less food for both sexes.
Hollywood actress Hannah Einbinder blames “fascism” for women wanting to be slim.
“As we see a rise in fascism, there is a direct correlation with thinness to make women take up less space.” pic.twitter.com/0VTlRFqe2e
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) August 30, 2026
The Number Ten cat has a bit of hubris:
Magnifique! https://t.co/9Ng0bdldF7
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) September 3, 2026
One from my feed, and it’s a good one:
Norway’s Prime Minister rips apart Trump’s stupid letter. Love this!
Every leader that receives a letter like this from DJT should do the same.
Thanks for your attention to this matter! BRILLIANT! pic.twitter.com/dkytn3qp5t— Helena (@HelenaGoransson) September 6, 2026
And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08164649.2025.2556256#abstract
Two from Matthew Cobb. The first one he deems “accurate” (it’s a loon, of course). Click on it to go to original, as I can’t embed it.
A series of “reincarnation” cartoons on this thread; they’re of varying quality. Here, the second is far better.
A bit late, but what even is time cosmically speaking?
— Adrian Brightmoore / The World Foundry (@theworldfoundry.com) 2026-08-31T06:16:15.385Z