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.
Now that colleges have morphed from institutions of higher learning to buy-a-diploma mills, colleges are increasingly catering to students’ desires. At many schools now, more than half the students get special accommodations during exams, like having rooms to themselves or extra time. (This is okay for some students, but more than half?).
At any rate, the University of Michigan has joined the ranks of schools that don’t show students their grades awarded during their first semester. (As you’ll see, they do get grades, but they’re secret and used in limited ways).
Click below to read the WSJ article on the deep-sixing of grades, or go here to read an archived version:
An excerpt (indented; my own comments are flush left):
The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.
Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.
The program, set to start in fall 2027, applies to students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which enrolls about half of Michigan’s roughly 8,000 first-year students.
A Michigan spokesman declined to comment about how the university reached the decision to enact the pilot. Although grades won’t be recorded on student transcripts or affect grade-point averages, professors will still assign them internally to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.
I’m wondering whether student anxiety will really abate because of this. What happens during the second semester, if you know you passed but don’t know where you stand? If you barely passed during your first semester and get a “pass”, you might want to work harder, but you won’t know where you stood initially in competition with your classmates. Also, the grades do count for scholarship and awards, so they aren’t irrelevant. Will your inability to know your “internal” grades possibly increase anxiety?
And why does the risk of mental problems decrease after the first semester? After all, you’re going to get real, “external” grades from then on.
This tactic is not unique:
Schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have implemented similar “grade-covering” programs in past years.
The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes. University of California math and science professors have urged UC regents to reinstate entrance exams because so many freshmen were unprepared.
Of course poor preparedness is the fault of secondary schools like high schools, but entrance exams can help. The SATs or equivalent tests are even better, and, in combination with high-school grades, are the best predictor of how well a student does in college—and later life.
But in a perverse move designed to coddle students (they have numerous excuses), many schools no longer require such tests for admission (the University of Chicago makes them optional), or prohibits you from submitting scores at all. This kind of coddling is also instantiated in grade inflation. Harvard has taken ineffectual steps to remedy this, but at least they require SATs or ACTs for admission. Michigan doesn’t.
In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
Kenneth Lowande, a former Michigan political science professor who left for Rice University, said he didn’t think the new policy would make much of a difference because grade inflation had made grades largely irrelevant. Michigan no longer mandates the SAT or ACT for undergraduate admissions.
“Grades have lost their value as an indication of quality or excellence,” Lowande said.
That’s true if you gauge quality relative to others. If everyone is excellent, of course, grades do indicate quality, but that’s not the case. What we have is an Alice In Wonderland “All Must Have Prizes” mentality based on coddling. And the students love it:
Michigan students lauded the new policy. Student body president Summit Louth said he had spoken to around 50 classmates and they were either happy or jealous the policy didn’t exist when they were freshmen. Poor mental health is closely tied to academic stress and anxiety among students, Louth said.
Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.
How does Louth know that?
Derek Peterson, a history professor and former chair of the faculty government, said he believes the move is generally beneficial because it will give students a chance to explore subjects more freely.
If that’s the idea, why give grades at all? Why not give written evaluations that can be put in students’ transcripts? That might be difficult for large courses, but several schools, according to Grok, have completely dispensed with letter grades:
Schools That Dispense with (or Heavily Minimize) Traditional Grades
. . . . several colleges (mostly small liberal arts institutions) fully or largely replace letter grades with narrative evaluations (detailed written assessments of a student’s performance, strengths, weaknesses, and growth). Examples include:
Hampshire College — Narrative evaluations only; no letter grades or traditional majors.
The Evergreen State College — Narrative evaluations; no letter grades or GPAs.
Alverno College — Ability-based assessment with detailed feedback; no traditional letter grades.
New College of Florida — Narrative evaluations / performance reviews.
Antioch College / Antioch University — Narrative evaluations (sometimes alongside or instead of grades).
Sarah Lawrence College — Strong emphasis on narrative evaluations (letter grades are recorded but secondary).
St. John’s College — Seminar-based “Don Rag” discussions; letter grades are recorded but available only by request.
Narrative evaluations would seem to be better anyway for small courses, but in light of the difficulty of grad schools or employers reading a bunch of narratives, I still favor traditional grades, but with caps like Harvard’s. If that policy is made public, students can’t beef about it when they arrive.
There comes a time in life when the free rides stop. Employers don’t dispense with evaluation of employees early in their tenure on the grounds of mental health. And college, where you can seek counseling if you’re upset or distressed, is the place for it to start—if you haven’t already gotten grades in high school! This may sound curmudgeonly, but part of the art of living is to realize that you are not the best at everything, and to either accept that or try to better yourself. After all, grades are not the totality of existence.
Today’s Jesus and Mo strip is a “resurrection from 2006,” called “faith2”. It’s a clever one. But I can’t resist adding my own view on the different construals of “faith”, a piece called “No Faith in Science,” published in Slate in 2013 (free access at an archived site). The barmaid is right.
Oh, and the artist reminds us to support him/her, which you can do for only a dollar or a few dollars:
Please consider helping to keep J&M going by becoming a Patron here.
Books are still available – The latest J&M collection of J&M strips, which has a foreword by Jerry Coyne, is available here
Welcome to a Hump Day (“Woensdag” in Dutch): Wednesday, August 12, 2026, and World Elephant Day. I can’t post my own pictures of elephants as my transfer to a new computer has temporarily left my own photos in limbo, but here’s one by David Hughes that appeared in a “Readers’ Wildlife Photo” post from 2024. The caption was “A mother elephant and her calf enjoy the wetter environment along the Khwai River”:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 1 Wikipedia page.
Posting will be light today as I have an appointment downtown. Bear with me; I do my best.
Da Nooz:
Breaking news ripped from the headlines: At last a Democratic Socialist has been defeated. Francesca Hong, predicted to win, actually lost the governorship of Wisconsin to a moderate Democrat, though it was a squeaker and in another election a progressive won a nomination to run for the Senate:
David Crowley, the moderate Milwaukee County executive, won an upset victory for the Democratic nomination for governor in Wisconsin early Wednesday, prevailing over Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who had led in opinion polls but faced questions about whether she could win the swing state in the general election. Mr. Crowley will face Representative Tom Tiffany, a Trump-endorsed Republican, in November.
But another Midwest progressive, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan of neighboring Minnesota, won the high-profile Democratic Senate primary there, giving the party’s left wing a mixed showing on a busy night of primaries in six states. In South Carolina, Senator Darline Graham, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, advanced to a Republican primary runoff against Representative Ralph Norman, a hard-line conservative, to run for a full term in November.
In Wisconsin, Mr. Crowley, who had the endorsement of Gov. Tony Evers, scored a surprising win over Ms. Hong, a chef and state lawmaker who energized left-wing voters. But her candidacy worried moderate Democrats: Ms. Hong had come under fire for writing on social media in 2020 that Thanksgiving should be canceled, though she recently walked back the statement. She also supported abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and increasing taxes on people who make more than $750,000 per year.
Hong can request a recount since the margin of victory is less than 1%. More on her from the WSJ:
The 37-year-old state representative and part-time bartender backs legalizing marijuana to fund high-speed broadband. She also supports a state-run development bank, taxpayer-subsidized child care, government-run grocery stores, the elimination of all college debt, Medicare for All, a 32-hour workweek with no pay cut, abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, restoring voting rights to felons and the eventual elimination—or at least reduction—of prisons and police.
U.S. forces fired on a Panama-flagged ship that attempted to run the American blockade of Iranian ports early Tuesday, a U.S. official said, stepping up enforcement as the Trump administration attempts to squeeze the regime economically.
A U.S. military helicopter fired at the rudder of the ship after its crew ignored warnings from American personnel working to enforce the naval blockade of Iran’s ports, the official said.
There were no immediate reports of any casualties in the incident, which took place before dawn on Tuesday. The U.S. official said the ship appeared to be attempting to transfer its crew to another civilian vessel after the attack.
Earlier Tuesday, maritime security firm Vanguard reported that a Panama-flagged containership called Vela Nova was struck by a missile fired from a helicopter while transiting westbound through the Gulf of Oman about 71 nautical miles from the coast of Pakistan.
“The missile struck the vessel, causing a fire that was subsequently extinguished,” said Vanguard in an initial report on the incident. All 17 crew were accounted for, it added.
. . .The U.S. attack on the ship comes during a relative lull in hostilities in the war with Iran, including attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has choked off traffic with attacks on ships.
Control over the strait, the transit route for about a fifth of the world’s oil, has become the central sticking point in negotiations to de-escalate tensions with Iran.
. . .With talks toward a deal to reopen the waterway having been stalled for days, President Trump has turned back to the economic pressure of sanctions and the U.S. blockade.
Trump first declared a blockade of Iran in April before lifting it as part of an earlier deal to open the strait and start winding down the war in June. He reimposed the blockade in July after Iran started attacking ships again to assert its control over the strait.
As of Monday, the U.S. Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, had redirected 55 commercial ships, disabled two and boarded two to enforce the blockade. It redirected 194 vessels and disabled nine in the first round of the blockade as of mid-June.
Of course Iran is reported to have fired at a ship transiting the Strait on Monday, so I guess it’s tit for tat. The main issue is that the Strait, which should at the very least revert to how it was before the war, has become a sticking point in ceasefire negotiations—and that doesn’t even consider the nuclear stuff, which Trump put in the foreground in his initial announcement.
Top administration officials engaged in an elaborate deception to spirit President Trump out of Turkey during the NATO summit there last month, transporting him in a catering container to a military jet because of a threat against him and Air Force One from Iran, two senior U.S. officials said on Monday.
Mr. Trump and other officials had said publicly that he would be leaving Turkey on July 8 aboard one of the older versions of Air Force One rather than a luxury 747-8 donated by Qatar that he had flown in on. Mr. Trump told reporters at the time that he was making the switch for “old time’s sake.”
Mr. Trump boarded the older plane from the left-side door in view of cameras, and news organizations, including The New York Times, reported that he had traveled on it to Britain, where he switched back to the newer plane. The Times reported at the time that the decision was driven in part by concern about the security of the new plane donated by Qatar, which had not been equipped with all of the defensive capabilities of older versions.
But instead of flying out aboard that older, powder blue, modified 747, Mr. Trump was whisked off that plane via a catering container that had been lifted to the opposite side of the plane from where the journalists traveling with him boarded, one of the U.S. officials said. The president was then taken to a third plane, which he flew in secret to Britain, the official with knowledge of the matter said.
Reporters on the older plane were not told that Mr. Trump had not flown with them from Turkey to an air base in Britain, making them unwitting participants in the ruse and leaving them, along with some White House staff members, to serve as unknowing decoys.
After Mr. Trump arrived in Britain, he was secretly moved back to the older version of Air Force One. He then disembarked in view of reporters and walked across the tarmac to the plane donated by Qatar, which he flew to Washington.
The elaborate plan appears to have been developed in a matter of hours after officials determined that a threat against Mr. Trump from Iran was credible. It came after years of threats against Mr. Trump from Iran and amid the war he launched against that country. And it was an unusual instance of the public being deceived about a president’s whereabouts.
I have to say that this is pretty clever, though the thought of Trump being ferried to a fighter inside a big steel box of cookies and Diet Coke is amusing, though it may be his idea of paradise!
*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal reports that “Trump gets the nuclear dust“. This refers to a felicitous removal of nuclear material from Syria, of all places.
It’s Tuesday, August 11, and with Israeli help, the Trump administration has reached a deal to denuclearize an Islamist nation: Syria. According to Axios’ Barak Ravid, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will soon remove nuclear material stored at a clandestine site in the country.
But first, context.
It was 2007, a simpler time, when disabling a nuclear program and deterring a genocidal dictator from rebuilding it took a single resolute strike. Israel showed the evidence of a secret reactor to the Bush administration, hoping for support. At the time when the Bush administration feared the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” the way today’s administrations fear “boots on the ground,” Israel went it alone. It destroyed the reactor in Operation Out of the Box, and in the aftermath the United States, Israel, and Syria all officially pretended nothing had happened. Syria denied the reactor had ever existed—even after IAEA inspectors found evidence of undeclared nuclear material and declared the country in noncompliance with the NPT.
Bring us to the late days of 2024 when the Assad regime collapsed, Israel—suspicious of the ex-jihadist government that replaced it—set about crippling Syria’s military. A country it wouldn’t trust with fighter jets it certainly wouldn’t trust with nuclear material, so it kept the old reactor site under watch.
According to the report, that monitoring picked up movement around the site a few weeks ago—enough to suspect the new government was reneging on understandings and trying to reach the nuclear material. Israel wasn’t going to let that stand. It told the Trump administration it would strike the site again if the material wasn’t removed, or if there were any sign Damascus was trying to get to it.
Syria’s new government, for its part, is eager to clear away the sensitive files it inherited from Assad—the nuclear and chemical weapons programs chief among them—that could sabotage its bid to rehabilitate the country’s international standing. The ultimatum handed it the perfect opportunity to look responsible, especially set against other Islamist states in the region.
This is great news. The last thing we need is another unstable Middle Eastern country with nuclear weapons. But Syria, unlike Iran, is not sworn to destroy Israel. It doesn’t like Israel, but is hewing to a non-conflict status with respect to the Jewish state. So, it’s pretty good.
For the third time in less than a year, President Trump on Monday issued an executive order that calls for American children to be routinely immunized against fewer diseases, as they are in countries like Denmark.
The latest version embraces more explicitly than its predecessors a revised schedule that recommends immunizing children against 11 diseases, rather than the 17 that are currently recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The order also “directs the attorney general to advance legal challenges against states that violate children’s rights to religious or medical vaccination exemptions,” Mr. Trump said.
Speaking in the Oval Office before signing the executive order, Mr. Trump said he was motivated in part by concerns over whether vaccines were tied to autism, even though dozens of studies have found no link between the two.
It is unclear whether the order has any legal power. Vaccine recommendations in the United States are made by a committee of experts who advise the C.D.C., and are then adopted by the agency’s director. But only states can require vaccinations for children to enter school or day care.
The administration’s previous attempt at implementing a shorter vaccination schedule was already frozen once by a federal court. That ruling is part of a continuing lawsuit, brought by medical organizations, that argued that the administration did not follow proper procedure and that it made “arbitrary and capricious” decisions. A judge agreed with that claim, saying the government had bypassed the careful, evidence-based practice that has traditionally underpinned vaccine recommendations.
“This is not likely to address the court’s concern, and is not a legally valid way to fill the statutory requirements about vaccine recommendations, it’s just not,” said Dorit Reiss, an expert on vaccine policy and law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.
The president cannot legally circumvent the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which is empowered by Congress to make vaccine recommendations, she said. Attempts to enforce the order are likely to run into the same legal challenges, Ms. Reiss said.
I’m heartened that Trump cannot circumvent the immunization committee, and that experts are criticizing this order:
Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that harm was “inherent” in the executive order, because ignoring evidence-based vaccine recommendations would lead to more children getting sick.
The executive order recommends splitting the vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella into individual shots, rather than administering them in combination as is now the case. “Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal, and separately, it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective,” Mr. Trump claimed on Monday.
There is no evidence that the M.M.R. shot is lethal, and many decades of evidence for its overall safety. The combination shot has been associated with a small risk of seizures if a child develops a fever, but that type of seizure does not cause long-term harm, according to the C.D.C.
Individual vaccines are available in some countries, but would need to be tested in the United States before they can be administered.
My only question is why some European countries recommend fewer vaccines than the U.S. Are some diseases less prevalent in those countries? Regardless, I presume there is evidence underlying the recommendations of the immunization committee, and Trump should keep his nose out of places where it doesn’t belong, like medical advice. He’s the President, not a doctor.
*“In the U.S. we don’t hear much news about author J. K. Rowling, but she’s still busy defending women’s rights from her home in Edinburgh. Quillette summarizes her latest campain in an article called, J. K. Rowling vs. Amnesty“, with “Amnesty” being Amnesty International. Here’s what’s happening:
On 31 July, Amnesty International publicly apologised for publishing an “anti-rights” briefing at the heart of a weeks-long public clash with author J.K. Rowling. The document, “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK,” purported to map a nationwide “anti-rights ecosystem” that included Beira’s Place, the Edinburgh sexual-violence support service established by Rowling in 2022. Transgender-rights activists have long criticised the charity for excluding transgender women from its services.
Rowling was having none of it, and she launched a scathing public attack on an NGO that she said has “become a tyrant that persecutes those who don’t espouse what it decrees acceptable beliefs.” She invited any of the groups named on what she called Amnesty’s “blacklist” to apply to the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund for legal support. Amnesty quickly realised that it had picked the wrong fight. Its earlier, carefully calibrated expression of “regret” collapsed into a full mea culpa; it withdrew the briefing. The document had been uploaded by mistake, the organisation said, bypassing its established and normally rigorous internal-review processes. An internal investigation was announced, to be followed by an independent external review.
Her tweet:
Should any of the women’s organisations targeted by @AmnestyUK‘s recent ‘anti-rights’ blacklist wish to take legal action, applications can be made to the JK Rowling Women’s Fund. https://t.co/iyohnrgVZNhttps://t.co/D28OInpM5g
At a glance, Amnesty’s climbdown seems to close a brief but turbulent chapter in the history of one of the world’s most influential human-rights organisations. But if it hopes that its procedural explanation will satisfy critics and end scrutiny of its operations, it is mistaken; it only raises more questions. How, for instance, does a document of this significance—which named more than a hundred British organisations and might have seriously damaged their reputations and funding—reach publication without passing through the oversight that Amnesty claims it applies to all its work? And if that process failed here, why should anyone assume that it has not failed elsewhere?
As senior editor at Human Rights Watch (HRW), I saw the machinery behind major human-rights publications up close. It beggars belief that a complex document like this one about a highly sensitive issue simply slipped out of the door unnoticed. A less fantastical explanation is that it was not a rogue briefing, but the most legally exposed expression of a settled institutional view. In May, Amnesty published a related report titled “Like a Snowball: The Growth and Impact of the Gender-Critical Movement in the UK,” which included comparable characterisations of many of the same organisations and was finally withdrawn on 31 July. Also withdrawn was a parliamentary briefing produced for Pride Month this year that likewise described 51 gender-critical organisations as “anti-trans.”
Amnesty’s approach in the Rowling affair followed the familiar NGO playbook that has allowed human-rights organisations to survive crises for decades to preserve their moral authority and avoid meaningful accountability. First, downplay the incident by framing it as a regrettable breakdown in an otherwise scrupulous system; second, promise an investigation; third, wait for the news cycle to move on. But maybe that won’t work this time. Is it too much to hope that Rowling’s stand-off with Amnesty will finally produce a reckoning for an increasingly unaccountable sector?
Amnesty has, of course, also demonized Israel:
We found that the conclusions of NGO investigations were sometimes determined before completion, including Amnesty’s 2024 “genocide” report, which was already moving through internal systems under its pre-agreed heading while research was supposedly still underway. We also found that research was bent to the demands of ideology, buried, or delayed for political reasons. While Amnesty issued a report accusing Israel of “genocide” a year after Hamas’s 2023 massacres, it took more than two years to release a report on the 7 October atrocities. Internal documents show that staff were concerned an earlier publication date might generate sympathy for Israel.
Other NGOs like Doctors Without Borders have been subject to the same ideological capture. Amnesty can be added to the list of agencies that you might not want to donate to. As for Rowling, she abides and persists.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is concerned. Did Szaron eat the spider?
Hili: There’s been a dead fly in that spiderweb for two days. Andrzej: So what?
Hili: I’m afraid someone ate the spider.
In Polish:
Hili: W tej pajęczynie od dwóch dni jest martwa mucha
Ja: I co z tego?
Hili: Boję się, że ktoś zjadł pająka.
From Masih; another female political prisoner about to be executed:
This is another Iranian woman who is about to be executed soon.
Every morning I write about someone Iran has just executed; within minutes, a message arrives from a mother, a sister, a friend, begging me to write about their loved one on death row. Before it’s too late.
From Maarten Boudry, another piece about performative academic purity tests, this time at Bates College in Maine (Atlantic article here).
Here’s another brilliant piece by a Black (ex-)academic describing his experience of being treated like a mascot by his white liberal colleagues, and why he (@Tyler_A_Harper) eventually left his tenured job. It’s mind-boggling.
Both this piece and the one above also refute the…
If I had a pound for every time a bumbling, egotistical political leader with outrageous hair hid in something designed for food, I’d have £2, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it’s happened twice https://t.co/HL0nxuqBpCpic.twitter.com/8FLfba1MyS
This French Jewish girl was gassed, together with her mother, immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was three years old, and had she lived she’d be 84 today. https://t.co/Wm8rrbSfk1
Two from Matthew. The first one shows a dying person hoping for reincarnation as a better being. There are others in the series, but I like this one best.
The Headington Shark, installed 40 years ago, initially a source of anger, confusion, complaints then extended legal combat with the council, now on an Historic England register due to the efforts of that same civic body.📷 Roger Close
The weather is threatening a hard rain, and we not only received tornado warnings, accompanied by loud sirens, on our phones, but there’s a big siren blaring at the university.
But the ducks don’t care; this is their weather. In fact, all five were napping together on the Second Sacred Rock. It’s rare for them to all be sleeping, but it’s dark with clouds and Miss Duck decided to join her brood in forty (or is it 200?) winks. Note how fast the ducklings are getting feathered:
I wasn’t quite sure what John McWhorter’s take on l’affaire Ardey would be, but given that he is sensible, heterodox, and has himself been somewhat sidelined by his circle of linguistic scholars, I’m not surprised that he doesn’t see the affair as demonstrating racism as much as showing “the soft bigotry of low expectation” towards black scholars. Arday, he says, wasn’t really a scholar, but a mimic who got by with calling out the racism of his peers.
What does surprise me is that McWhorter chose to publish his views in the City Journal, which is generally conservative and Right-leaning. I don’t know if he tried to publish it in his regular column in the New York Times, but I suspect that it wouldn’t fly there, even if he is heterodox.
Click below to read McWhorter’s take. I’ll give a few excerpts
Excerpts:
. . . Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.
The main theme of Arday’s work is that racism is grievously determinative in the lives of black Britons; his Ph.D. dissertation describes racism that black scholars must grapple with endlessly. In presentations, his manner, in his usual way, suggests that no decent person could disagree with this take, and that in a just world he wouldn’t even have to spell it out. Racism’s ubiquity and power is obvious, and anyone who questions this has an ulterior motive (maintaining power, inability to process The Other as fully human, etc.). In this, what Arday has in common with Ibram Kendi is not just dreadlocks but an assumption that his view is one that everyone would share if not compromised by hatred of the subaltern.
The problem is that what is obvious is probably not very complicated—never mind that what Arday thinks is obvious is a vast and self-indulgent exaggeration. Within this mental universe, Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. The term “scholar-activist” tries to finesse this by making the two appear to be alternate forms of the same endeavor. But the scholar-activist is often more activist than scholar, and Arday was an extreme example of the type.
Nothing in his work suggests intense engagement with a body of data (Arday himself has claimed that because of his dyslexia, he can engage only one page of academic prose in a sitting) or with a challenging way of analyzing that data. In academia, what is interesting is the counterintuitive, the discovery. Arday merely reinforced long-established and simplistic pieties. He became the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge based on doing interviews with acquaintances about the racism they experienced, and then largely just presenting what they said. At its highest level, this could be good (but not great) journalism; it could not be academic work. On the level Arday worked, my 14-year-old could best him after some quick training in Latinate, Judith Butler-esque prose.
Arday was defrocked after the revelation that most of even this incurious nattering in the guise of research was plagiarized from others’ work. Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry, he composed most of his work from generous tranches of cut-and-paste from other sources, often (but certainly not always) lightly reworded. But even if this performance art disguised as thought were all his own work, his elevation to such heights by Cambridge was an abomination.
As I might say (with palms out and widened eyes), arguing for the obvious is not brilliance. Even when it’s about black people.
. . .Even worse than Arday’s work displaying no actual excellence is the consequence that characters like him wind up passing the torch to the next generation of black scholars. In a career spent in and around academia, I’ve seen this happen too many times. I refer to nothing like all black academics. But this is a vortex that young black scholars are sadly vulnerable to being pulled into, aided and abetted by white fellow travelers.
Especially if they have a certain stage presence, people like Arday attract mentees, who often value sitting at the feet of someone of their own race, who may understand their experiences more readily than other professors. But what happens when the Arday types don’t have anything actually to teach? Some of his former students are demanding redress.
Arday had no original ideas. He can’t teach someone how to write because his writing consists of, well, “mimicry.” (Even his resignation letter seems likely to have been generated by AI.) There are reports that—big surprise—Arday had no idea what actual teaching was and couldn’t be bothered with supervising students’ work, probably because he had never done any himself. People taught by versions of this type end up occupying an alternative academic universe, where cultural fellowship and advocacy are the North Star, and learning and curiosity get lip service but are beside the point.
When eager young black students gravitate to people like Arday, they learn that, for black academics, their race is more important than having anything to say. Sadly, white colleagues reinforce this by treating black academics this way at conferences and in hiring. One typical result: Carolyn Rouse being appointed president of the American Anthropological Association, despite her inability to answer civil but serious questions about charges of ideological takeover in her discipline with anything beyond verbal coleslaw. Arday was treated as brilliant for his self-involved, unfocused, underinformed drivel—and his resignation letter shows no awareness that anything was amiss about that.
I have to stop myself from reposting the entire article, as it’s eloquent and sensible. But you can read it all for yourself. McWhorter can get away saying this stuff because he himself is a black academic, though he’s somewhat suffered for his “anti-wokeness.” Here’s a bit more from the long piece:
No, it is only because he is black that Arday was elevated in this way. The idea is that being black and triumphing over obstacles merits being appointed a Cambridge professor. This means that race determined his appointment.
. . .The youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge properly should have been a physical education teacher who did some after-hours tutoring. A make-believe academic who misspelled paltry as poultry in the title slide of a keynote address instead scaled the heights of Britain’s Harvard because of his skin color and his exceptionally long dreadlocks.
There is a certain mercy in the impression that he won’t perceive how those who elevated him saw him as a performing monkey. Still, it’s long past time for Anglophone academia to stop thinking that it’s immoral to evaluate black scholars on the basis of whether they are—get ready!—intelligent.
It really is time for academia to have a reckoning of this sort, judging scholars not by ethnicity or background but on accomplishment and merit. The first paragraph in the excerpt above, beginning “it is only because he is black that Arday was elevated in this way,” is something that everybody knows but that nobody—save “heterodox” blacks like McWhorter—can say. It is an “Emperor has no clothes” statement that we need to discuss openly.
I should add that several black academics express the opposite view: yes, tthey say, there is a double standard in academia, but it leads to harsher evaluation of black than of white scholars (see this Guardian article). But given that Arday got by—actually, got so high—for so long with so little, that view doesn’t hold water.
If you already think the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are bad, have a gander at this interview. An article in the Times of Israel (click screenshot below) summarizes a New Yorker interview, also on video (below), with Megan Romer, current co-chair of the DSA. As you know, DSA members or affiliates are winning important Democratic primaries throughout America, and so, especially if you’re a Democrat, you’ll want to know their platform and their leadership. (The platform is summarized here in a post about it.)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are the members of the DSA in Congress, but come November there will likely be more. (I do predict that the ambitious AOC will quit the DSA and become a Democrat plain and simple.) Bernie Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist but is not a DSA member. Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, is also a card-carrying member.
And remember the follies of their platform, which include abolishing the Senate, replacing the Presidency and the Supreme Court with an organization subservient to a unicameral legislature, and putting all the means of production (including large corporations) into the hands of the public, as well as eliminating bills, providing free and equal housing for all, and, of course, getting rid of Israel. But the ToI below gives a summary
The ToI article is mostly about the DSA’s damnation of Israel and support of Hamas (!):
The co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has defended rallying in support of Hamas and disputed Israel’s right to self defense during a recent interview.
Megan Romer, the United States’ national co-chair of the DSA, told The New Yorker in an interview published Friday that she “probably would have” joined an anti-Israel rally in New York City the day after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, had she lived in the city.
“One day after the slaughter of 1,200 people and taking of over 200 hostages, you would have come and rallied behind Hamas?” New Yorker editor David Remnick asked Romer.
“I think that October 7th was largely inevitable. If you put people in an open-air concentration camp and you deprive them of rights, of dignity, of food, of the ability to live in safety, you have to expect that they are going to not take that for that long,” she said.
If there was ever a Palestinian state, it was Gaza, and any restrictions on travel out of Gaza (also imposed by Egypt) were the results of Hamas, which governed the territory, spent its money building tunnels, and fostered terrorism. In fact, the October 7 attack on Israel did express dissatisfaction, but not with the governance of Gaza (blame those problems on Hamas), but with the existence of Israel, which Hamas has sworn to destroy. A bit more from the ToI:
At the October 8, 2023, rallies in New York City, anti-Zionist protesters chanted in support of Hamas killings, mocked and threatened Jewish counter-demonstrators, celebrated the taking of Israeli hostages, and called for the destruction of Israel.
Romer is one of two co-chairs of the national DSA, making her a central figure in the ascendant far-left movement, which has made anti-Zionist activism central to its politics.
. . . The DSA candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won her congressional primary in New York City in June, attended the rally. Chevalier refused to condemn Hamas or the October 7 attack during her campaign.
Romer told The New Yorker that any defense or economic support for Israel was a “solid red line” for the DSA, and that the movement sought a “free Palestine with the capital in Jerusalem,” which she described as a “one-state solution.”
As you’ll see from the 30-minute New Yorker interview with Romer below, she is either ignorant of many things she should know, or she refuses to be specific about what the DSA thinks. But it’s clear that she’s an anti-Zionist (e.g., antisemite) and favors the erasure of Israel. More from the ToI:
Romer was unfamiliar with former US president Bill Clinton’s Camp David Summit, during which Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat walked away from a proposed Palestinian state.
Asked if she would have been “satisfied” with the terms at the Camp David Summit, Romer said, “I don’t know them off the top of my head.”
She also disputed Israel’s right to defend itself, saying, “People, humans, peoples have the right to life in safety. But if that safety means doing genocide to somebody else, then no, that’s not defensible.”
Of course she doesn’t define “genocide”, so it’s not clear what, if anything, Israel could have done after October 7 to defend itself against Hamas’s terrorist attack. She simply implies that Israel didn’t defend itself “properly” because it committed “genocide”. Philosopher Maarten Boudry has a much better take on this issue than Romer.
The New Yorker also pressed Romer about supporting both “queer-friendly” politics and the anti-LGBTQ Hamas.
“I would not call Hamas queer-friendly. I would not say that you can get a lot of social rights when you’re under siege,” she said.
Again. with the excuses: Hamas has to kill gay people because Gaza was “under seige”, ego they had to throw gay people off buildings. Does that make any sense? No, it’s just an excuse for the excesses of Islamist governance. Finally, she refuses to condemn Hamas, and a refusal to condemn terrorism doesn’t bode well for DSA’s governance of the U.S.
Romer also defended Hamas in 2024, saying that “no socialist should” condemn the terrorist group.
The ADL has its say.
The Anti-Defamation League said Romer’s rhetoric “puts every Jewish American at risk” due to her justification of violence against the Jewish state.
“The DSA co-chair does not and will not condemn a US-designated foreign terrorist organization responsible for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and whose charter calls for the destruction of the state of Israel,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement.
But listen to this half-hour video, which should both appall you and frighten you. Ms. Romer is one of the two heads of the DSA. She’s questioned by David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who does a good job trying to get her to be explicit about her beliefs and the DSA platform. The ludicrous views she espouses are masked by her genial demeanor, and is further hidden by her claims that much of the DSA’s platform will be enacted at some time in the future (e.g., getting rid of the police)
Now much of what the DSA wants is in principle admirable, like public medical care and and end to the Electoral College. The problem is how to do this. But much of the rest of their platform involves amending the Constitution, which, according to Remnick, has a chance of “about zero.” As for getting rid of Israel and supporting Hamas, well, you know my position on that, which is that it both instantiates and demonstrates anti-Semitism.
I oppose the DSA for several reasons. It wants to abolish capitalism, which, though the system has some bad effects, can be modified to ameliorate those effects (Social Security and Medicare). It wants to get rid of America’s balance of power, a crucial aspect of American government that has served us well. It wants to get rid of cops and prisons, and no government in the West had done that or wants to—the effects are predictable, as seen in the 1969 M0ntreal Police Strike.
And it wants to get rid of Israel and, for all I know, the Jews. The DSA is not yet at the stage of camps and gassing, but already Canadians are leaving their country because of antisemitism and repairing to Israel. If the DSA controlled America, we’d see a similar exodus.
Finally, as a Democrat, I think the DSA will fracture and perhaps destroy the Democratic Party, ushering in Republican governance, something I don’t want. Already prominent centrist Democrats, like Rahm Emanuel and J. D. Pritzker, my own governor, are holding their tongues about the DSA and its anti-Israel policies.
Although the DSA doesn’t represent most of the Left, they are loud, promise Pie in the Sky, and above all are performative, talking a good game but not accomplishing much. They are not really “democratic socialists” in the European sense: capitalist democracies with some socialistic aspects. Nope, they are Marxists, pure and simple, and I will not vote for one.
Welcome to The Cruelest Day, Tuesday, August 11, 2026, and Ingersoll Day, celebrating the life of “The Great Agnostic,” born on this day in 1833 (died 1899). Today he’d be called “The Great Atheist.” Ingersoll was an eloquent speaker, great writer, and by all accounts, a genial and lovely man. My favorite quote from Ingersoll, which I often used on lectures about the incompatibility of science and faith, is this:
“There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: ‘Let us be friends.’ It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: ‘Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet’.”
For weeks, President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war should Tehran fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even floating the idea privately to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, U.S. officials said.
But that scaled-back objective became more difficult when Iran insisted Saturday on its highest price yet for permitting the free flow of traffic in the waterway, seeking billions of dollars in U.S. payments, the removal of American troops from the region and an end of the U.S. naval blockade, among other things.
This rapid chain of events suggests Trump’s options for walking away from the conflict have again narrowed. Trump has repeatedly threatened—and then backed away from—a massive escalation of its bombing campaign. But the recent chaos in negotiations signaled Tehran is prepared for a long and grinding conflict.
“Iran’s recent hardline demands for reopening the strait make it increasingly difficult for the president to manufacture a face-saving off-ramp from the conflict,” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
Gregory Brew, an Iran expert at the Eurasia Group consulting firm, said, “The Iranians fully believe Trump wants out and is focused on opening the strait, which is why they are playing hardball.”
Hanging over diplomatic talks since April has been the White House’s ultimatum that Iran will never obtain a nuclear weapon. Trump sought to include nuclear talks as part of broader negotiations with Iran, but those have proven too difficult, leading the White House in recent weeks to focus more on reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
There we have it: Trump is willing to “walk away without a nuclear deal”—the deal he said was the most important issue for the U.S. Iran was never going to get nuclear weapos, Well, forget about that; all he wants now is an open Strait of Hormuz, and you don’t have to be a genius to realize that Iran is going to delay that and deny it. This “war” may last a while, but Trump will never be able to declare victory on the terms he wanted.
*Now here’s a clickbait headline in the NYT (click to read, or find article archived here):
An excerpt:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York posted a series of video clips on social media Saturday night saying that she would freeze her eggs despite what she called a “political risk” for sharing her decision.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, a Democrat who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, made the announcement hours before saying in a TV interview Sunday that she is open to running for president or the Senate.
“There is very strangely a political risk, or a political tax, that comes with sharing this info,” she said of her decision to freeze her eggs. She added that she had shared the information “to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.” The announcement further fueled speculation on social media that she is gearing up for a presidential run.
Asked on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday morning if she would consider a White House bid, she said, “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” adding that she was “humbled” by the support she is receiving.
She also suggested she would consider running for the Senate seat held by the minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, telling host Jonathan Karl that “anything is possible at this juncture.” But, she added, “I think that we have a responsibility to remain focused on the midterms and not on our individual aspirations or plans.”
Her interview Sunday — her first appearance on a major Sunday news show since 2024 — marked her most public suggestion yet of aspirations for higher office. First elected in 2018, she rapidly became a top voice in her party’s ascendant progressive wing.
While Ms. Ocasio-Cortez identifies as a democratic socialist, she distanced herself in the interview from some of the more radical positions of the Democratic Socialists of America. Asked if she supports all of the tenets of the group’s guiding document, including abolishing the Senate, police and prisons, she said no. She also said she was a member of her local D.S.A. chapter, but not the national group.
I don’t care if she freezes her eggs or not, and I don’t understand why anybody else should care, either. The time has passed when women would be criticized for deciding not to have children, or for delaying that decision. What bothers me instead about AOC is her arrant careerism, combined with no sign that she has leadership abilities to warrant elevation to the Senate, much less the Presidency. From the beginning it was clear that she wanted a Big Time Political Position, but she’s been primary sponsor of zero bills that have become law, though she’s been a co-sponsor of such bills, and has introduced minor amendments that became law. Her main activity in Congress apepars to be self-promotion. And I predicted that she’d back away from her Democratic Socialist positions when she realized that would impede her rise to the Senate. That is exactly what she’s doing now. If she does run for higher office, I hope she gets primaried.
Democrats are lashing out at fellow Democrats for the nation’s largest pandemic-era welfare fraud, theft that handed Republicans a potent example of government waste from Democratic mismanagement.
In a recent debate, Rep. Angie Craig flashed anger as she connected the scandal to progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, her opponent in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.
“It pisses me off that you completely put all of the responsibility on the governor of Minnesota when you were the No. 2 elected leader in Minnesota during that period of time,” she said. “Republicans, they are going to have a field day with this with you.”
Flanagan was alongside Gov. Tim Walz when the fraud was uncovered. Craig, who represents a swing district, added she felt it was her “responsibility to warn Democratic primary voters that Republicans are dying to run against you because they believe that you have a unique vulnerability on fraud.”
Flanagan has tried to play down her role in the scandal, saying at the debate that “the governor has taken the lead” in addressing fraud fallout.
. . .Democrats are lashing out at fellow Democrats for the nation’s largest pandemic-era welfare fraud, theft that handed Republicans a potent example of government waste from Democratic mismanagement.
In a recent debate, Rep. Angie Craig flashed anger as she connected the scandal to progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, her opponent in the state’s Democratic Senate primary.
“It pisses me off that you completely put all of the responsibility on the governor of Minnesota when you were the No. 2 elected leader in Minnesota during that period of time,” she said. “Republicans, they are going to have a field day with this with you.”
. . . The swindling, perpetrated mostly by Somali immigrants, has been jarring to many longtime residents because they had long clung to an unofficial Minnesota motto: Our taxes may be high, but we have good government and services.
Former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, a Republican who served as a state auditor for 12 years before he led the state, said it was stunning how many officials missed major warning signs or looked the other way.
“You’ve got to have a culture that is protective of the dollar, and that culture had long disappeared,” he said.
The reason the Democrats didn’t come down hard on this fraud is because it was done largely, as noted above, by Somali immigrants. Somalis are deemed an oppressed group, and therefore any fraud on their part must be overlooked. This is one result of wokeness among Democrats. The fault is not that the culture is not protective of the dollar, but that it is protective of those perceived to be oppressed, who are treated lightly according to a “progressive” double standard.
t’s Monday, August 10 and within hours of Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that Israel rejects the 15-point roadmap, Nickolay Mladenov—Director General of the Board of Peace, the Trump-led body meant to oversee postwar Gaza—sat down with me to explain why Israel should want the very thing Bibi had just rejected.
His entire case reduces to one word: verification. Nobody is required to do anything, he insists, “last of all Israel,” before verified steps on the ground. The IDF sits at the yellow line agreed under the comprehensive plan; the Board’s ask is only that it hold there and not fire across unless troops face a real threat. The line moves back only after individual sectors are cleared and their weapons certified, stored, and rendered unusable. If the next stage’s commitments go unmet, “the process stops.”
Why store the weapons in warehouses inside Gaza, where Hamas is “always one wall away from rearming”? Because they will be rendered unusable, he says, by the Board’s National Committee for the Administration of Gaza with backing from the international force. More a reassurance than an answer.
Who destroys the tunnels? Contractors, but at this rate it will take more than a decade, and, he adds, this is precisely why Israel needs the Board of Peace: together it will go faster.
What counts as the “personal arms” Gazans may keep—might that quietly include the Kalashnikovs that actually govern the Strip? No, he says; the framework covers everything, heavy weapons to personal ones. He acknowledges that Gaza is ruled from the barrel of a Kalashnikov—which is why, he insists, those rifles and every other weapon must pass to civilian authority.
And Turkey and Qatar—the two governments Israelis least want inside Gaza? Without Egypt, Turkey, and Qatar, he says flatly, Hamas would never have agreed to the roadmap at all; their role was critical. Told that letting them help dismantle Hamas is the fox guarding the henhouse, he answers: “If I have to speak to the devil, I will speak to the devil”—to make sure no second October 7 ever occurs. The verification mechanism, he stresses, is American-led, backed by the ISF and, on paper, by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Morocco.
Pressed on whether Hamas will really disarm itself—whether the whole thing is too good to be true—he offers the tell. “I’m not building any of this on the basis of trust. And none of us are.” Clear-eyed about the risks, he says, and building on verification instead. If it doesn’t work, the process stops.
Yet despite this, Segal is in favor of at least starting to implement this plan:
My take: In contrast to the entire political establishment, I support this plan. It won’t dismantle Hamas—nothing will, not completely. But if it nets a third of the tunnels and half the Kalashnikovs, I’ll take it. Will 100,000 Kalashnikovs be handed in? Of course not. But 40,000 collected and another 300 kilometers of tunnel mapped is not nothing—and the next round, which everyone knows is coming, gets fought on considerably more favorable terms.
I’m not sure why the “next round” will be more favorable to Israel, much less the U.S. Yes, half the guns is “not nothing’, but it’s not far from nothing. We’re a long, long way from peace in Gaza.
*The famous “Furthur” bus documented in Tom Wolfe’s book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which the Merry Pranksters, Neil Cassady, and Ken Kesey took their act on the road, is getting ready for one more trip (article archived here). I had no idea that it still existed. (Wikipedia’s article on Furthur notes that there have been two buses, but this trip will use the original, the one in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test )
Among the rolling hills outside Eugene, Ore., down a winding gravel path and inside a big barn sits a school bus built in 1939. Its once-blazing colors have faded. Its roof is crumbling. Its windows are cracked. The only regular occupants these days are insects.
It might look like a hunk of junk, but the muted technicolor splotches tell the story of one of the most exuberant periods of San Francisco history.
Sixty years ago, this bus symbolized the city’s counterculture revolution, the embrace of psychedelic drugs and the live-out-loud, love-your-neighbor ethos for which the era is remembered.
With the nation once again facing war, polarized politics and cultural battles, Zane Kesey thinks some of that old bus magic is needed. And that is why he has agreed to send the bus, the one he helped cover in swirls of Day-Glo paint when he was 3, back to the city that spawned a movement.
“I would love to see it adored again,” he said. “And for people to feel that pure, innocent love that came out of it.”
His father, Ken Kesey, who died in 2001, had just written the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” when he purchased the former school bus that a large Bay Area family had tricked out with beds, benches and a refrigerator for road trips. Mr. Kesey and his freethinking friends, called the Merry Pranksters, painted the bus in psychedelic colors, cut a sun roof into it, added a powerful sound system and installed a balcony on top.
. . .So later this month, it will leave the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Ore., a short drive from Eugene, for the first time since 1969. A flatbed truck will carry it down Interstate 5 to California, over the Bay Bridge and into the city. In the dead of night, when the streets are quiet, it will trundle into Golden Gate Park and into its Hall of Flowers alongside the botanical gardens.
There, starting Sept. 5, the bus will be on display as part of a show called “Forever Grateful, Golden Gate Park,” put on by the Haight Street Art Center, which aims to preserve and showcase art and cultural artifacts from the city’s counterculture movement. The exhibit will also feature Jerry Garcia’s BMW, live performers, puppetry and storytelling.
I’d love to see this iconic bus, but if you’re in SF and a Wolfe/Kesey/Cassady fan, go see it! The NYT article has lots of cool photos (see the archived version), but I’ll show two from the Wikipedia article as well as the whole movie about the original trip.
And the inside, also from Wikipedia; note the psychedelic painting (the bus was of course loaded with drugs). You can see more in the movie below. Cassady, of course, was the driver, and the only driver.
Here’s the video “Magic Trip” (out in 2011) with Ken Kesey, my hero Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters. I’m so glad this is free on YouTube. Click on “watch on YouTube”, or go here.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats are making Big Plans:
Szaron: Got any plans for tomorrow? Hili: Yes, I’ll be lying in a different spot.
In Polish:
Szaron: Masz jakieś plany na jutro?
Hili: Tak, będę leżała w innym miejscu.
From Masih; an Iranian woman hanged for defending herself against sexual assault and killing the assailant.
Islamic Republic in Iran hangs 24-Year-old woman who defended herself from sexual assault
Yesterday the regime executed Marziyeh Neyri yesterday, a young woman who was forced into marriage at age 17 and hanged for fighting back against her attacker.
One from my feed; it is a sin to disturb a sleeping cat:
Coming across a cat on his way, this man stopped to play with it until it drifted off to sleep right there. He stayed completely still afterward, careful not to disturb its rest. No act of kindness is ever too small, and the world keeps turning because of men like him, truly 🐾 pic.twitter.com/90Kh0UKV2S
