Monday: Hili dialogue

September 21, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, September 21, 2026: the last full day of summer and the second and final day of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur ends at sundown, and observant Jews who have fasted and refrained from drinking can start ingesting then.

It’s also National Chai Day. I’ve been drinking the stuff for decades, since I first went to India, but now it’s become very popular (in various forms, like lattes) in America. Here’s how the really good stuff is made in a street stall; note the high pouring from vessel to vessel (6:05) that cools the tea and foams the milk. The chaiwallas pride themselves on the height of their pour.

A nice cup of chai I had ten years ago in Bangalore (Bengaluru):

It’s also International Day of Peace, National Beef Stroganoff Day, National Pecan Cookie day, and National Sponge Candy Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 21 Wikipedia page.

Posting will be light tomorrow, and perhaps for several days thereafter, as I have to have the lens in my right eye pulverized, sucked out, and replaced with an artificial one. Such are the ravages of age.

Da Nooz:

*Trump has carried through on his threat to ban reporters for three liberal media venues from the White House (article archived here).

CNN, MS NOW and Politico said their journalists were denied access to the White House grounds early Saturday and that their press passes were confiscated, a day after President Donald Trump said he would ban them — and that other media organizations would follow.

Numerous press freedom organizations said the president’s attempt to ban journalists from reporting at the White House was an unconstitutional attack on Americans’ free speech and right to know what’s happening in government.

“The First Amendment extends to White House grounds as strongly if not more than pretty much anywhere,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation. “It’s the people’s house; it’s the center of government.”

The media organizations all said they would fight the restrictions and continue reporting on the president. CNN and MS NOW journalists began reporting across the street from the White House on Saturday.

“The White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars,” MS NOW said in a statement. “MS NOW intends to take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalism in our democracy.”

Trump abruptly announced Friday he would ban MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House, saying he disliked how they covered him. “They’re fake news,” he said.

Akayla Gardner, a White House reporter for MS NOW, described on air how she tried to scan her badge to enter the White House grounds but was told it was “disabled.” An MS NOW producer who was with her was able to enter, but a photographer “had their badge taken this morning,” she added.

It’s clear now that what Trump means by “fake news” is “news I don’t like”, even if that news is true.  But this decision will not stand, for it’s a clear violation of the First Amendment and, if it stood, would allow any President to exercise censorship over news he didn’t like.  Obama said yesterday, with a chuckle, something like “Imagine if I decided to ban Fox News from my press conferences.”

*In an article in the NYT Magazine (archived here), Nikole Hannah-Jones of “1619” infamy sent her daughter Najya to a so-so public school in Washington, D.C.: an attempt to improve the substandard system by participating in it. It failed; her daughter got a poor education up to middle school:

In an interview in the paper’s morning newsletter yesterday, Jones said this:

I asked her permission to report it in the first place, and then I asked if she wanted to be photographed for the story. She’s angry about the choices that my husband and I made, and she wanted to have her say. Did she really want people to know she had failed algebra after middle school? Her answer impressed me: “Well, it’s true.” But when I showed her a draft, she didn’t feel I was hard enough on myself. So I tried to capture the conflict. In the years since my original essay, I’ve moved through the world with the unearned valor of people commending me for the strength of my choice. Now I felt I owed it to her to tell the truth.

I could feel her looking at me. Her body slung in adolescent impertinence against the front passenger seat door, shoulders turned so she could face me fully. Usually when I picked up my daughter, Najya, from middle school, she’d tumble into the car and bombard me with the day’s escapades, chattering nonstop about her friend group or complaints about an annoying teacher or her wonder at the test she’d aced despite thinking she’d failed it. But not this day.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.

As they neared the end of her seventh–grade year, Najya and her closest girlfriends were thinking about their futures. Honors students, they searched the nation’s top colleges, and that led to a curiosity about New York City’s highest ranked public high schools.

Wondering about their chances of getting in, they decided to Google their own school and its ratings. And in doing so, Najya and her tight trio of Black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city’s deeply segregated educational landscape but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide.

By dismissal time, Najya’s shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me.

. . . So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools. Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.

. . .We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.

After much internal debate in our household, in 2015, we enrolled Najya in pre-K at Public School 307, a segregated, high-poverty school across from the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn.

. . .“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.

Luana has pointed out to me, though, that the school where Hannah-Jones sent her daughter was actually quite well endowed. Here’s a tweet from Wilfred Reilly.

But in the end, it remains a sad story. Ultimately Najya got to choose her own high school—a selective public school that was mostly white, but she was floundering (even in math, her favorite subject) because of a substandard education in lower grades. And Hannah-Jones is clearly overcome with regret.  What it goes to show is that you shouldn’t force your own values on your children, especially if it could hurt their welfare.  Jones ends with an indictment of racism and the “riches” of white people.

*The WSJ reports on “The twin sisters facing the wrath of Iran’s crackdown” (subtitle: “Romina and Taraneh Rahimi were detained in January after a wave of protests. One was sentenced to decades behind bars; the other condemned to death”).

Taraneh Rahimi was staying with friends on the night of Jan. 24 when masked, armed men barged into the house, put a bag over her head and took her away. They later came for her twin sister, Romina.

For months after that, their loved ones didn’t know where they were, or whether they were even alive. Their mother searched for her 20-year-old daughters everywhere, begging staff at hospitals, in courts and outside prisons for information about them, to no avail.

In April, she received an anonymous call, a family member said. “Your daughters are at Dowlatabad Prison. You can book an appointment to see them,” the caller told her.

When she finally saw the twins again, in Isfahan’s female prison, their mother could hardly recognize them. Their faces were puffy and there were bald patches where their hair had been ripped out. They recounted harrowing tales from their time in detention, where they were tortured and sexually assaulted, according to information obtained by relatives and lawyers who reviewed their case.

An Iranian government spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Their crime? Peaceful political protest, of course, and now one of them may die but both will be in a dire prison for a long time—for protesting, for crying out loud.

The Rahimi sisters were among 16 defendants detained over their alleged role in the unrest around Shohada Square in Isfahan earlier this year. The central Iranian city, known for its blue-tiled Islamic architecture, has emerged as a focal point of the continuing judicial crackdown.

. . . The twins spent the first three months in a detention center run by the intelligence arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, where they were tortured and sexually assaulted.

A lot of the torture was psychological, according to information obtained by relatives and human-rights lawyers familiar with the case. The sisters were held separately in isolation, but they could hear each other screaming and crying from a distance. They were made to watch male prisoners being tortured. Taraneh suffered severe physical injuries when she was repeatedly beaten with a baton on her leg, knee, hand and arm, according to the lawyers and relatives.

. . . . The twins turned 21 in prison. At the end of August, Taraneh, along with nine others, was sentenced to death. Romina received a 25-year prison sentence. The convictions could be appealed, but rights groups worry the executions could be fast-tracked.

Taraneh’s relatives fear she could soon be the first woman to be executed in Iran in connection to the protests. “Every night we fear it could happen,” said Masoud Nourmohammadi, a cousin of the twins who is based in the U.S. “It could be any time.”

Here’s a photo of the twins supplied to the WSJ by their family; the caption’s from the paper. They’ve already been beaten and sexually assaulted; this is what Masih keeps writing about in her twitter feed (see below).

Taraneh, wearing red, and Romina Rahimi, pictured a few months before they were taken away. Family of Taraneh and Romina Rahimi

*Over at the Times of Israel, Amit Segal describes “How Hamas stopped and started the presses,” showing how the terror group controlled all the news coming out of Gaza.

It’s Sunday, September 20, and the most revealing sentence spoken from Gaza’s press corps this year came on a podcast from one of its greatest stars. “If someone says something like this, many journalists lower the camera.”

That is Motaz Azaiza—one of TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2024, GQ Middle East’s man of the year—explaining how, when faced with dissent, the Gaza media complex fixes the narrative on Hamas’s behalf.

Speaking on the Palestinian podcast Taqarob, Azaiza described a WhatsApp group that “all the Gaza journalists are in.” For anyone picturing a professional association: its icon is a Hamas flag, and its administrator, he said, is the media director of the Rafah crossing.

Azaiza is no friend of Israel. TIME’s honoree celebrated October 7 and filmed hostages being beaten in a Gaza street, but then promptly buried the footage. When Yahya Sinwar was killed, he told mourners that anyone who had not answered Sinwar’s call to go out and engage the enemy had “no right to mourn and boast about the manner of his death.” Sinwar, he wrote, “wanted you in the field.”

That Gaza is an authoritarian hellscape is hardly worth stopping the presses for. Anyone thinking critically assumed Hamas controlled the narrative from the very beginning. Azaiza’s testimony is less an indictment of Hamas than of the media complex that lapped up its releases.

The Committee to Protect Journalists ran a feature in May of last year in which the head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate listed Hamas’s methods—summonses, interrogations, threats, beatings, arrests, publication bans, interference with content, surveillance—and his deputy conceded that most journalists in Gaza now censor themselves. One photographer, beaten unconscious by plainclothes police beside Nasser Hospital, told CPJ that when colleagues tried to intervene, they were informed that “the spy and the journalist are one and the same.” CPJ noted the violations were vastly underreported, because the victims were too frightened to say so.

. . .The foreign press has omitted Hamas control since 2008, when Hamas stopped the West Bank dailies at the crossing and told their editors, according to the head of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, that they could enter Gaza once they signed an undertaking not to criticize Hamas. It broke cover once again in 2014, when, in a rare moment of lucidity, the Foreign Press Association condemned the “blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods” used against its members in Gaza. A Hamas information official then confirmed it on Lebanese television: the security services, she explained, “would give them some time to change their message.”

When the war began, Hamas already had years of evidence that the foreign press would take what it was served. That is how a single group chat, with no foreign members, set a global narrative.

This is one reason why I trust the IDF more than the press coming out of Gaza. Israeli journlists (many, like those at Haaretz, opposed to their government) don’t have to take an oath not to criticize Israel.

*Finally, the WSJ has an article by the U of C President, Paul Alivisatos, on AI: “Teach students to think with, without and about AI“.

Something different and far more optimistic is emerging at the University of Chicago, including a new, AI-adapted core curriculum. Campuswide work on this topic commenced in the fall of 2024, with the creation of an interdisciplinary group of faculty to consider reforms. The report of this working group provides a simple, principled framework that will guide our changes in curriculum and classrooms. The first goal is that our students should learn during their time with us to be ethical, skeptical and ambitious about the role of AI in their education and their lives. The second is that all students at UChicago should learn to think both with and without machines.

Here, we hold fast to our belief that a core curriculum is the foundation for a college education that supports a life enriched by a love of learning and ideas. In the past, anyone proposing a change in our core curriculum would have to be steeled for a decadelong debate. Yet the urgency of this moment is prompting beneficial changes in tandem at a pace commensurate with the technological transformation.

Our core curriculum—which students largely complete within their first two years—consists of humanities and social science, as well as the study of mathematics and biological and physical sciences, and the study of civilization and the arts. Soon all undergraduates will be required to take a class in writing, without the aid of any machine, and engage in the true struggle. Real writing. Blank page. Tough comments from instructor and peers. The humanities and social-science cores will also exclude technology from the classroom.

In line with the principle that it is important for students to learn how to think with machines, there is broad internal support for the notion that to be an educated person today and in the future, one must be able to use computational tools and concepts within one’s domain, and to reason critically about how computation, data and algorithms shape what can be known and built. Likely, this will result in a new core curriculum requirement for coursework in computational thinking within the next year.

The idea that learning to use AI should be an integral part of learning how to think increasingly cuts across the whole of the university. Earlier this summer, our law school declared that first-year students will be required to learn to write and reason without technology in the classroom or the use of AI. This will be followed by deliberate and thoughtful integration of AI tools and methods in years two and three.

I heartily applaud the course in writing, though I’m not so keen on a course about how to use AI. I suppose they need to know how to use it, but it’s dead easy to learn on their own. I still consider writing skills essential for reasons I’ve stated before.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s knowledge of art prompts a question:

Hili: Did Rousseau have a cat?
Andrzej: I don’t know, why do you ask?
Hili: I’m wondering where he got the idea of the noble savage from.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy Rousseau miał kota?
Ja: Nie wiem, dlaczego pytasz?
Hili: Zastanawiam się, skąd mu się wzięła koncepcja szlachetnego dzikusa.

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

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Give Me a Sign:

From Bad Spelling on Signs and Notices; another salacious one:

From Masih, who argues that the Iranian government is not giving any “freedom” to its people.  Au contraire: they are training more authorities to oppress people.

From Science Girl. Look at the Milky Way!

From the parody account “AOC”:

.From Malcolm; photobombing cats (don’t miss the cat butt):

One from my freed; an excellent summary:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Doc Cobb. First, dinnertime for tortoises:

Dinnertime! #AGoodPlaceSource: http://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmil…

— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ❤️ (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) 2026-09-19T11:26:18.850Z

Matthew posted this himself and says that I MUST see “Amadeus”:

Re-re-re-re-watched AMADEUS. Even better than I remembered. The editing – film and sound – is extraordinary and Abraham deserved his Oscar. A really fabulous, opulent production. As to truth? It’s a fantasy, very harsh on Salieri, but rightly shows Mozart as the voice of God. One of the great films.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-09-19T20:51:39.989Z

2 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Nikole Hannah-Jones is still under the impression that there are “good” schools and “bad” schools, and that white families use their influence to send their kids to the “good” schools, and thus white kids do well, whereas society conspires to send black kids to the “bad” schools, and so black kids do badly.

    As Wilfred Reilly says, the reality is that the performance of the school is purely a product of the cohort of kids sent to it. Thought experiment: take the best-performing schools (full of white and Asian kids) and the worst-performing schools (full of black kids) and swap the cohorts around. Which is then the “good” school, with good discipline and outcomes? America needs to face up to the answer to that.

    She is also oblivious to the effect of policies that she herself has pushed, for example the prime directive that schools must “close the gaps” so that groups have equal outcomes, in other words that black kids all score As.

    Well there’s a hard way of achieving that (educate the kids to the point that they deserve As) and a vastly easier way of achieving that (don’t even bother to mark their work and award them As whatever).

    Human nature being what it is, can Hannah-Jones really complain about schools taking the latter approach, given the pressure they’re under to attain equal outcomes?

    Reply

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