Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, October 3, 2026: shabbos for Jewish cats and, importantly, the birthday of Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), one of my favorite authors, and one who is much denigrated by the literati for “overwriting.” And yes, he did overwrite at time, but he was so frantic to capture the tone and color of America that he couldn’t stop himself. He was quite restrained in his first and best-loved novel, Look Homeward, Angel, but then he let himself go in the other three long novels (two published posthumously), which together comprise a lightly fictionalized autobiography. I’ve read them all several times, and there are wonderful set pieces if you can’t take a diet of desserts. Read, for example, the chapters “The Child by Tiger” or “I Have a Thing to Tell You” to see what he could do (both are free at the links), or read “The Party at Jack’s,” first a novella and later incorporated into the posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again. I posted his “Hymn to October” in yesterday’s Hili.
Without the editorial help of Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s—perhaps the greatest of all American editors (he also discovered and edited Fitzgerald and Hemingway)—Wolfe, who was unable to stop writing, would never have been able to mold his gazillion pages of prose (often written on top of a refrigerator as Wolfe was so tall) into sell-able books. Wolfe eventually had to write about Perkins, since all of his novels were autobiographical, and it was not exactly a flattering portrait. The two men fell out and Wolfe found another publisher. But as Wolfe lay on his deathbed (he died at 37 of TB after a brain operation), he made amends with Perkins in this wonderful letter, which always makes me tear up. (h/t Work-in-progress):
August 12, 1938
Dear Max:
I’m sneaking this against orders—but “I’ve got a hunch”—and I wanted to write these words to you.
I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do, and I thought about you all 1000 times, and wanted to see you all again, and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do—and I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before—and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can’t explain I know I am a deeper and a wiser one—If I get on my feet and get out of here, it will be months before I head back, but if I get on my feet, I’ll come back.
—Whatever happens—I had this “hunch” and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that 4th of July day 3 yrs. ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the café on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below—
A senior United Arab Emirates political figure and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the near-downing of FlyDubai Flight 1073 as terrorism on Friday, a clear indication investigators view the incident as an ideologically motivated act.
The comments from Anwar Gargash, senior foreign-policy adviser to the U.A.E. president, came a day after an Emirati security team escorted the jet’s wounded captain and the co-pilot who stabbed him back to the U.A.E. from Saudi Arabia, where the plane made an emergency landing after passengers intervened.
Netanyahu said the picture of what happened on Wednesday’s flight is becoming clearer, calling the co-pilot a terrorist who had been radicalized. The prime minister and people familiar with the matter said the attacker was Omani, but other details of his identity remained unclear.
The prime minister said Israel has launched an investigation into who was behind the attack and promised retribution.
Other officials haven’t gone as far in defining the attack. Saudi Arabia said the co-pilot assaulted the captain but didn’t suggest a motive.
President Trump told reporters Thursday that Iran may have had a role in the FlyDubai incident. Earlier in the day, U.S. officials said there was still no concrete evidence about who, if anyone, was behind it. No other country involved has formally blamed Iran.
. . . [Pilot] Machchhar described a fierce fight with his co-pilot in a call with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday. The captain said he had collapsed on the cockpit floor after being repeatedly wounded while fighting for his life, then felt the plane pitch into a dangerous dive. Fearing for his passengers, he made a desperate lunge and opened the cockpit door, allowing rescuers to burst in.
“I knew I could not let him kill everyone,” he told the prime minister.
. . . Once the plane was stabilized, passengers took control of the cabin. Opher Dubrovsky, who works in tech at Amazon.com, said some passengers worried that crew members might have been involved in what they suspected was a terrorist attack. They decided to keep close watch on the crew, and someone would shadow their every move until they landed.
My Bayesian probability that it was at least partly motivated by terrorism is increasins, but that’s based on evidence that the copilot had been radicalized. Suicide is another possible motive, though it would be hard to explain as the sole motive when the copilot wanted to take 200 Israelis with him. We shall wait and see.
It is sensible to hope that on Nov. 3 most of the Republican Party will be smashed to atoms. It is now a trembling and embarrassed, because frightened, emanation of one man. Justice — of a rough sort, but still justice — will be done if the undertow from his unpopularity drowns many of those who have tried to purchase political longevity by obedience to him.
Vast Republican carnage should not be entirely indiscriminate. Two Republicans especially deserve to win their Senate contests.
. . .When judging Republican incumbents who have enabled Trump’s rampancy, and Republican candidates eager to further abet it, voters should remember: If there is no penalty for travesties, travesties will proliferate.
The president’s aching neediness explains his lengthening list of legally dubious, and unhinged, acts of self-celebration. Such as, taxpayer-financed ads praising him. And his proposed Arc de Trump that will double as a sniper’s nest.
Voters should ask: If there were only enough Republicans in Congress to sustain a presidential veto, would anything, including the president’s behavior, be any different? There will be enough in 2027. Beyond this number, any surplus of congressional Republicans is superfluous.
And here are the two Senate Republicans that Will thinks should keep their seats:
If Mike Rogers, former seven-term congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, is not Michigan’s next senator, Abdul El-Sayed will be. The Democrat is comfortable in the company of antisemites and Holocaust deniers.
If Sen. Susan Collins loses in Maine, this will be partly because she did something admirable and senatorial. Standing against manufactured hysteria, she voted to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. In 4,192 words spoken on the Senate floor, she examined his extensive judicial record and the sexual assault allegations against him. Demonstrating the complete lack of corroborating evidence, she concluded that the allegations could not meet even the minimal “more likely than not” standard. Read her statement and marvel at its sobriety about the Senate’s “advice and consent” duty. This is vanishingly rare among incumbent senators of both parties.
I don’t know if Maine Democrats even know about Collins’s stand on Kavanaugh—unless the Democrats are making a big deal about it in campaign ads. But it’s not something that would cause most people on the fence to vote for or against Collins. As for El-Sahyed, I consider him an Islamist antisemite, and I’m glad I don’t have to vote for him.
*The other day I described an op-ed in the NYT by Joe Cruz, a professor of philosophy at Williams College (where Luana teaches; she sent me this link). Cruz maintained that AI isn’t as much of a danger to higher education as we think, for students can simply discuss matters and learn things orally and verbally—the Socratic method. Writing, he argued, is not nearly as important to learning to think as is discussing. I gave a number of reasons why this wouldn’t work in general, but now Matt Taibbi has taken on Cruz on Taibbi’s substack: “Writing is good (he said controversially.”
The latest diatribe in the Times against a once-uncontroversially wonderful human activity is written by Professor Joe Cruz, chair of the philosophy department at Williams College. He appears as an advocate for permitting students “the use of A.I. writing tools,” which he believes can take place “without undermining the next generation of thinkers.”
After all, Cruz reports, when he allowed students to use A.I. for their final essays within “specific guidelines” — a comical set of “restrictions” that boil down to “you shouldn’t let A.I. completely compose your essay” — the only notable result was that students performed better:
I was aghast reading Cruz’s description of a beneficial use of A.I. The aforementioned rules at Williams don’t allow students to offer prompts like “come up with a topic” or “generate a thesis,” but do allow them to solicit “objections” from the machine. In other words, instead of writing for people, you can bounce your ideas off an A.I. This is like calling an erotic chat with a bot a form of sex.
It isn’t. The writing process does not work without the element of pain and rejection from a human audience. The whole idea is to put a part of yourself on paper and allow yourself to be vulnerable by showing your writing to another person. A negative reaction can be crushing, but it forces writers to confront the reality of how others view them. It might hurt the first time, or the first thousand times, but the human element is how you learn.
Replacing that process with an A.I. mirror that gives pillow criticism before helping students touch up “their” prose for presentation to an actual person is the ultimate in participation trophy-type infantilization. Worse, it inserts a machine — a deeply politicized, biased machine that teaches a conformist, submissive intellectual instinct — in the middle of a student’s thought process.
To the extent that a student taught this way ever learns writing (or as Cruz puts it, “archiving”), he or she will be like a healthy, ambulatory person trained to get through a Wal-Mart with the aid of a “mobility scooter.” The benefit of mobility scooters for Wal-Mart is obvious: they get everyone through the store. Functional shopping! Doing this with writing, though? It might be good for a school, in the sense that students will be able to present the appearance of literacy all the way through graduation, but it turns thinking — for college students — into a machine-aided process. Who imagines this will incentivize better thinking? Has it made fitter Wal-Mart shoppers?
. . . I’m not anti-A.I. I think the technology is amazing, and people will be able to do wonderful things with it, already have in fact. What Cruz is arguing, though, is nuts. He goes far beyond saying A.I. can be a useful tool and makes the case that perhaps we shouldn’t teach young people to write, because writing may not be so inherently valuable. He reduces it to a technical process, useful for “cognitive scaffolding” and organizing, but not for learning, which takes place through “speaking, answering, and defending our ideas.”
And here’s a point I made in my critique (Taibbi’s words):
The part that blew my mind was the notion that writing is an antiseptic, solitary behavior, lacking benefits that students gain from dialogue. Just consider, Cruz says, what “we might gain if we practiced speaking more and carrying around the resources of mind through our own attention, memory and engagement with one another.” Right, because why would a chair of a philosophy department think writing is a form of “engagement with one another”?
Of course those of us who love writing and reading, and who have done a lot of it in our careers, will naturally defend the practice as compared to speaking. But it’s more than that. There is no reason why a dialogue can’t be had in writing, and there are clear advantages of that form, including needing to weigh your words and arguments most carefully, and the fact that the words are permanent compared to oral discussion. (I used as one example my written exchange with Adam Gopnik, comprising four letters each on whether the methods of science constitute the only “way of knowin.”
I wonder if Cruz is rethinking his essay. (I doubt it.)
A Baltimore opera group ousted its recently hired white executive director after she sported cornrows at Burning Man.
The Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS) canned Kelly Carnes on Sept. 23 after a video posted to social media showed her with the new hairdo at an organizational event, according to an email sent to volunteers and obtained by The Baltimore Banner.
Carnes said she styled her hair in cornrows as a form of protection from the elements at Burning Man — a nine day festival in the Nevada desert.
But her appearance apparently raised concerns of ‘cultural appropriation’.
. . .Carnes confirmed her sacking to The Banner on Wednesday, saying she was stunned that an organization claiming to celebrate creative freedom would suddenly police her personal appearance.
“I believe the circumstances surrounding my termination raise serious questions about discrimination, governance, and whether the values BROS presents publicly are actually extended to the people it employs,” she wrote.
. . . . BROS proudly announced on Instagram Sept. 14 that they were welcoming Carnes — who also goes by the moniker “AWOL” — as executive director.
“BROS is excited for the new stories about to unfold under AWOL’s leadership as she supports us in our 7,000 year mission of incredible rock theater,” the group said.776
Just two days later, BROS completely changed course, declaring on Instagram that they were “taking action” after the controversial video showing Carnes’ cornrows was posted.
“We regret removing the video without an explanation and take responsibility for the confusion that [it] caused,” the organization posted, adding, “more importantly, we are taking action.”
This is palpably ridiculous. A fair number of white people, both male and female, like cornrows, and adopting them is either a form of hair protection or of admiration. It is not at all like blackface; it is appropriation based on appreciation. Why on earth do only black people have the right to wear cornrows? And isn’t just as much appropriation for black people to straighten their hair to emulate the hair of whites? Neither is something to beef about. As I’ve said before, “cultural appropriation” is worth criticizing only when someone steals stuff from another culture and, by so doing, denigrates, anonymizes, or impoverishes members of that culture. Nothing like that is going on here.
Here’s the poorly treated Ms. Carnes from a Facebook post.
Facebook/kelly.carnes
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: No fatties, no beardos, no weirdos.”
→ Iran writes a letter to its American fan base: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps published “An Open Letter to the Honorable People of the United States of America,” addressed to “the scholars, the students, and the members of the media”—Iran certainly knows its audience!—urging Americans to use the midterms to “wrest control back from corrupt politicians” and end U.S. support for the war against Iran. Iran, could you issue local district by district voting guides? I think that would really help out the media workers and the grad students! Also, a “Where Iran Eats with Friends in NYC” Apple Maps guide, and a “10 Things Iran Loves/Hates” list? Hates: 1. Loud restaurants; 2. People that say “mm-hmm” instead of “thank you”; 3. Women voting. The ayatollah should go on Subway Takes.
→ Were the Canadian doctors busy?: A woman was set to be executed in Tennessee this week, but survived two rounds of the death drug and was taken to a hospital for treatment. Apparently the drug, pentobarbital, was old and degraded? Or her veins were too small. At one point she asked if it was supposed to burn. This is the stuff of nightmares. Just hell. And here it was an “all-female lethal injection team” and everything (was that a glass ceiling we were worried about?). But Christa Pike, who’s been on death row for 30 years for the torture and murder of a classmate, survived the execution attempt. My conspiratorial gut is that someone wanted to sabotage the controversial execution (controversial because she’s a woman and, although we can vote and drive, the consensus of both sexes is that women should sort of be treated like minors when it comes to crimes). Anyway, my question is this: Canadian doctors are executing people constantly (sorry, performing medical assistance in dying), and it seems to have a 100 percent successful death rate. They do it with IVs, too. Have we called any of them to help? Right now, Christa Pike is receiving life-saving medical care so that. . . the state can potentially try to kill her again. Professionally, this time. As Robbie Soave of Reason put it: “This is a level of mania, incoherence, and incompetence that only the government could possibly deliver.”
→ A thwarted plane hijacking: On a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, the co-pilot allegedly decided to try to do a little plane terrorism. He’s accused of stabbing the flight captain and steering the plane into a nosedive over Saudi Arabia. After a young girl heard screams in the cockpit, passengers and crew snapped into action. They tied up the attacking co-pilot with headphone cords and zip ties. A dentist on board tended to the brave captain’s wounds. The crew was able to land the plane safely. It’s like a movie! Let’s see how this was covered in the press.
The paper was then very defensive about the post and made a whole thing about how no one knew anything yet so we have to keep it real vague. First of all, we knew a lot, and it had been reported all over the place by that time. Also: Funny how they’ll blast entirely fake headlines about Israel bombing a hospital, including fake fatality numbers for an attack Israel never did. But if the news might look good-ish for Israelis? Well, we all need to wait a good, long while to hear the facts. These are Israeli officials making these claims, after all; we should be careful. Certainly there must be some other explanation. And of course, now we have the chic leftists saying it’s a false flag.
“I’m not saying this is a false flag. I don’t know yet. I don’t know yet. I think it’s fishy,” says popular political commentator Ana Kasparian. And so Ana becomes Candace, and Candace becomes Ana, and we press on.
Kasparian is getting more and more antisemitic and odious.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej’s book launch went spectacularly well, with friends and readers of all stripes showing up:
Hili: So many wonderful people have come to see us. Andrzej: You’re right. Now we have to make friends with the silence again.
In Polish:
Hili: Tak wielu miłych ludzi odwiedziło nasz dom.
Ja: Masz rację, a teraz musimy znowu polubić ciszę.
There are high-school demonstrations and closures all over France (accompanied by fires and other violence), and I haven’t seen anything about this being a protest largely immigrants, but Luana thinks it is, and tenders these two tweets:
A French woman tells one of the second and third-generation migrant rioter no to vandalize her city
Regarding the riots in France, on could think that at least now people can see the dangers of allowing this much immigration from Africa and the Middle East.
But regrettably, no. We won’t even get that. The angle the news media is going with is something along the lines of “a… pic.twitter.com/7YOGGj5e6s
And I found this one. English translation: “Marseille has fallen. Now, Emmanuel Macron may finally be able to designate Marseille as the Palestinian state he so fervently desired.” That’s pretty hyperbolic, but I’ll find out what I can about the stuff going on in France.
Marseille est tombée.
À présent, Emmanuel Macron pourra peut-être désigner Marseille comme l’État palestinien qu’il souhaitait tant. pic.twitter.com/cGcrxADADZ
One from Dr. Cobb, who’s off to Dijon. This is T.H. Morgan’s lab at Columbia, and yes, he did get a Nobel Prize out of the fly work. The bananas are making fly food, and in the lab only Morgan himself was allowed to eat one.
Thomas Hunt Morgan was born OTD in 1866.If you're ever feeling that your work is uending and unedifying, remember that he once said this: "Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it."🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM
I love Fleetwood Mac, now dissolved, but of all their great songs, the one I most favor is below: “Landslide,” written by Stevie Nicks and here performed by her and her erstwhile paramourLindsay Buckingham.
Stevie Nicks has said that she wrote “Landslide” while contemplating either going back to school or continuing on professionally with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. At the time, Nicks was financially supporting both herself and Buckingham by taking up jobs as both a waitress and a cleaning lady. Following the release of their debut album Buckingham Nicks, they had been dropped from their recording contract by Polydor Records before they could release a follow-up. Nicks wrote the song while visiting Aspen, Colorado, sitting in someone’s living room “looking out at the Rocky Mountains pondering the avalanche of everything that had come crashing down on us … at that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways.”
On the studio recording of “Landslide”, Buckingham played a Martin D-18 acoustic guitar using a Travis picking technique with the thumb alternating between bass notes. He described the part as a “three against four pattern that crosses the bar line and gives the chorus another level of lift.”In 2007, Buckingham told The Austin Chronicle that the song addressed some of the interpersonal issues between him and Nicks. He thought that the song possessed a “nice” guitar solo and also maintained that “Landslide” was not a “signature guitar piece”.[10] In a different interview, Buckingham discussed how he bristled at the notion that “Landslide” was associated with country music.
This is what can be done with just a guitar and a voice (I love Buckinham’s three-finger picking). Fleetwood Mac is one of those groups that sounds just as good in concert as on records, and this is a live version.
