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.
Plant lovers and botanists will be especially pleased by today’s selection of lovely photos from Thomas Webber. Thomas’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them (recommended).
The theme for today’s installment is Gone to Seed. Here are a few north-Florida flowers shown in their prime and afterward, when their glamor parts had been replaced by seed enclosures, bare seeds, or merely the dried remains of the flower bases. All of them grew within Gainesville’s city limits, at sites from semi-pruned to semi-wild. I think I’ve identified them all correctly to species this time, but I invite corrections.
Frostweed, Verbesina virginica. Individual flowers 1 cm. Native:
These bracts, called phyllaries, surround the bases of the flowers. In late February a few of their papery remnants are still aloft on their brittle four-foot stalks:
Showy rattlebox. C. spectabilis. 3.5 cm across. Native to southern and southeast Asia, now widely naturalized in southeastern North America:
C. spectabilis seed pods. 4 cm long. The pods of C. pumila look similar but are smaller. Crotalaria, and especially their seeds, are laden with toxic alkaloids. Larvae of the rattlebox moth, Utetheisa ornatrix, bore through the walls of the pods and feed on the seeds. Somehow the caterpillars manage to detoxify the alkaloids enough so they aren’t poisoned, while remaining poisonous enough to deter most animals that might try to eat them. The larvae retain the toxins into the flying-moth stage, and at both stages their distinctive vivid color pattern warns predators to leave them alone.
A rattlebox-moth caterpillar. About 3 cm. I doubt that I could have found any of these if I’d gone looking for them, but this one crawled right in front of me while I tried to get a picture of the low rattlebox. It held fairly steady for a few seconds, letting me capture enough detail to identify it. I didn’t have my choice of background:
Tropical sage, Salvia coccinea. 3 cm. Native. At this latitude these remain at their peak through late December:
All that’s left in late February are these cones called calyces, which are fused sepals:
Spanish needles, Bidens alba. 2.5 cm. Native. This is the king weed of these parts, growing everywhere and sometimes in great masses; one dense bunch covers an acre of a low damp lot in the middle of Gainesville:
Seeds of Spanish needles. 1 cm long. The name of the genus, meaning two-teeth, derives from the forks at the tips of the seeds. The barbs on these projections are part of an impressive example of convergent biological and cultural evolution, and have turned out to be just the thing for attaching the seeds to socks and shoelaces:
Dotted horsemint, Monarda punctata. Whole flower head 2.5 cm wide. Native. The most complicated flowers I find around here:
All of that elaborate presentation goes to produce seeds 1 mm in diameter, too small to show well with my basic macro gear. At this stage you can still shake a few of them from the calyces. Thanks to Mark Frank of the Florida Museum of Natural History herbarium for a remedial lesson in the difference between calyces and phyllaries:
Beggarweed, Desmodiumincanum. 1 cm across. Native to Central- and South America, naturalized in the southeastern U.S. This year, by means unknown, a few of them showed up for the first time in what passes for my lawn:
Morning-glory seed pods, 7 mm. The hard little capsules cleave along their sutures and split open to release black seeds the shape of orange sections, exposing the translucent porcelain-like septa that divided them:
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, October 21, 2025, and National Reptile Awareness Day. here’s a video of a very weird turtle, the mata mata turtle (Chelus fimbriata). The video is on FB and can’t be embedded, but if you click on the screenshot you can see the video. Wikipedia describes the turtle’s appearance, which takes advantage of crypsis (camouflage).
The appearance of the mata mata’s shell resembles a piece of bark, and its head resembles fallen leaves. As it remains motionless in the water, its skin flaps enable it to blend into the surrounding vegetation until a fish comes close. The mata mata thrusts out its head and opens its large mouth as wide as possible, creating a low-pressure vacuum that sucks the prey into its mouth, known as suction feeding. The mata mata snaps its mouth shut, the water is slowly expelled, and the fish is swallowed whole; the mata mata cannot chew due to the way its mouth is constructed.
Click below to see one:
Reader Divy, who runs a veterinary business with her husband Ivan, a business concentrating on reptiles, also sent in a photo with the caption:
Here is a picture of our pet Shingleback skinks (Tiliqua rugosa aspera), Boggy and Bindi. We’ve had Boggy since 2004, and we got Bindi in 2008 when she was 6 months old. Sadly, we lost Bindi last year, and we’re still so sad about it.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 21 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT editorial board is now weighing in about what the the Democrats need to do to win future elections. The title of their long op-ed, called “The partisans are wrong: moving to the center is the way to win“. They begin with a cool moving graphic showing that in the last election 16 Representatives (13 Democrats and three Republicans) won their seats in Congress in districts that were predominantly from the other party. And all of the winners were moderates, which launches the editors’ message:
American politics today can seem to be dominated by extremes. President Trump is carrying out far-right policies, while some of the country’s highest-profile Democrats identify as democratic socialists. Moderation sometimes feels outdated.
It is not. Candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left. This pattern may be the strongest one in electoral politics today, but it is one that many partisans try to obscure and many voters do not fully grasp.
The evidence is vast. Republicans have frittered away winnable races in Alabama, New Hampshire and elsewhere over the past decade by nominating extremist candidates, while Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican, is the only sitting senator who represents a state that reliably votes the other way in presidential elections. On the Democratic side, there are no progressives in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who represent a swing district or state. Instead, the Democrats who win tough races work hard to signal to voters that they are less progressive than their party.
One way to see the pattern is to examine the 17 Democrats — 13 in the House, four in the Senate — who last year won in places that Mr. Trump also won. Moderation dominated their campaign messages. Ruben Gallego of Arizona mocked the term “Latinx” and was hawkish on immigration. Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas and Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada criticized other Democrats’ tolerance of illegal immigration. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Representative Pat Ryan of New York emphasized public safety and their national security backgrounds. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin bragged about taking on federal bureaucrats who had imposed needless regulation. Representative Jared Golden of Maine spoke of “opening up oil and gas production to lower fuel costs.” No progressive won a race as difficult as any of these.
Left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans have spent years trying to tell a different story. They claim that reaching out to swing voters is overrated and that the better strategy involves turning out the base by running pure, ideological campaigns. They are wrong, but their argument does contain an element of truth: As the country has become more polarized and many voters cannot fathom crossing over to the other party, persuasion has become harder. It is not impossible, though — and it remains far more effective than pursuing the fantasy that America has a latent left-wing or right-wing majority waiting to be inspired to turn out.
. . . As Representative Marcy Kaptur, Democrat of Ohio, said in a campaign ad last year, “America has gotten off course.” She cited “the far left ignoring millions illegally crossing the border and trying to defund the police” and “the far right taking away women’s rights and protecting greedy corporations at every turn.” Although Mr. Trump won her district by seven percentage points, voters re-elected her.
The op-ed is long, informative, and correct. The sad part is that Democrats are moving away from the party itself, particularly young people. Regardless of the electoral success of people like AOC or Mamdani, if we want to win the House and Senate, and especially the Presidency, we need to stay towards the center. Damn the “progressives,” and full speed away!
*My friend and collaborator (we co-wrote a philosophy paper), the Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry, has a good article in Quillette called “They Don’t Believe It Either,” with the subtitle “The ‘Gaza genocide’ calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the ‘stolen election’ hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence.” Maarten is a brave guy: not Jewish, he’s nevertheless defended Israel in the Gaza War on moral grounds, and has suffered professionally for his stand. (Belgian academia is rife with antisemitism.) His topic: dispelling the bogus accusation of genocide against Israel. An excerpt:
If the Gaza War was a genocide, it was the most incompetent genocide in recorded history. Had Israel wished to use the 7 October massacre as a pretext for genocide, it could have carpet-bombed the entire Strip without without endangering the life of a single IDF soldier. Instead, Israel lost more than 900 soldiers during the Gaza campaign (and thousands more were wounded) precisely because it entered the enclave on foot and refrained from indiscriminate killing. Even according to Hamas’s own statistics, which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, the overwhelming majority of casualties are male and of fighting age, which is inconsistent with a policy of indiscriminate killing (Hamas initially tried to fool global opinion that the casualties of the Gaza war were “70 percent women and children,” but that claim collapsed under scrutiny and was then quietly retracted).
🧵GAZA FATALITY UPDATE: Hamas issued new list of 50,021 fatalities. Findings: (a) Fatalities age 13-55 are 72% men (b) Teen soldiers confirmed; males=65% of deaths age 13-17 (c) Natural deaths are ~8,300 of total fatalities. (4) IDF targeted combatants; NO genocide. Analysis: 1/ pic.twitter.com/gP2nl4ztLc
Israel also enabled the delivery of tens of thousands of trucks with food and medical supplies, organised humanitarian pauses and aid corridors, and even facilitated a polio vaccination campaign in the middle of the war. This is not the behaviour of a state attempting to wipe out a population group. Even the provisional ruling from the ICJ acknowledges that Israel delivered water, food, and medical assistance in Gaza throughout much of the conflict, behaviour inconsistent with charges of deliberate starvation.
From the very beginning of the conflict, Israel’s war objectives were unambiguously clear: recover its hostages and secure the surrender and disarmament of Hamas. Now that Hamas has released the surviving hostages it held in Gaza and has agreed to release the remains of the Israeli dead, the fighting has ceased. If Hamas disarms in accordance with Donald Trump’s peace place and plays no further part in Palestinian governance, the war will be over, just as Israel always said it would be once it achieved its objectives.
Why then did this war have such a terrible toll on civilians, despite Israel’s efforts? Because Hamas is not just indifferent to civilian casualties; it actively solicits them as part of its military strategy. It has constructed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels for its fighters, while failing to build a single shelter for its own women and children. It deliberately fires rockets from hospitals, schools, UN buildings, mosques, and in the vicinity of humanitarian zones. Fully aware that it is no match for the Israeli army on the battlefield, it possesses one secret weapon to bring Israel to its knees: the moral conscience of the international community. If they sacrifice enough innocent women and children and then broadcast the harrowing images and casualty figures all across the international media, they can push Western nations to ostracise, delegitimise, and boycott Israel.
The absurdity of the genocide charge should not obscure valid criticisms of the mistakes Israel made during this conflict. Particularly in the last few months, Israel’s miscalculations have been infuriating at times. The decision to wrest humanitarian aid from Hamas’s control and establish an alternative distribution system seemed to make sense at first, but the eleven-week aid blockade employed to put the screws to Hamas was a moral and strategic error. This kind of tactic was never likely to work with a jihadist organisation that employs human shields to maximise its own side’s civilian casualties. The cynical exploitation of Palestinian suffering to bring international pressure to bear on Israel is central to Hamas’s strategy.
Nevertheless, nothing Israel has done over the past two years reveals an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”—as the UN definition of genocide stipulates. It is fine to criticise Israel for taking insufficient steps to protect civilian lives in a particular operation, or to question the proportionality judgements made before executing a strike. But the very framing of these criticisms implies that the avoidance of civilian deaths is integral to the moral calculus of the IDF. The only genocidal party to this conflict is Hamas, which fantasises about the eradication of Jewry in its apocalyptic foundational covenant, and which has openly vowed to repeat the 7 October pogrom as soon as the opportunity arises.’
This explanation is particularly insightful:
The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the wilful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel, even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020?
The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion.
What can I say?—Maarten’s right. When I hear people accuse Israel of genocide (and ignore the fact that Hamas deliberately made genocide of the Jews an object in its founding charter), I write those people off as obtuse. For the accusation is both false and also a sign of virtue signaling. It is a token of wokeness. For sure Maarten will get into even more hot water for writing this article!
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is rallying the support of his European partners after a bruising meeting with President Donald Trump, in which he was told to make concessions to end the war or risk facing destruction at the hands of Russia.
In a tense meeting at the White House on Friday, Trump tossed aside maps of the front line and urged Kyiv to concede its entire Donbas region to Russia to clinch a deal, according to people familiar with the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive diplomacy.
“He said [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will destroy you if you don’t agree now,” one of the people said. “Zelensky had his maps and everything, and he was explaining it to him but [Trump] wanted nothing to do with it.”
Trump listened but was not responsive to the Ukrainian message, the person said. “It was pretty much like ‘No, look guys, you can’t possibly win back any territory. … There is nothing we can do to save you. You should try to give diplomacy another chance.’”
. . .As European leaders issue proclamations of support for Zelensky, hisWhite House disappointment is set to dominate diplomatic talks this week, including a European Union summit Thursday.
Just days after musing about giving Zelensky Tomahawk missiles to strike Russia, Trump’s latest swerve on the war appeared to stem from a call with Putin last week. Putin demanded that Kyiv surrender Donbas as a condition to end the war.
A European official said Trump moved from talk of long-range missiles before the call to land swaps in his meeting with Zelensky. “Now he was saying the U.S. needs Tomahawks and doesn’t want to escalate.”
A European diplomat briefed on the White House exchange described itas a mess and said Trump also “went on and on” about “his grievances of not having gotten the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Good lord! Trump’s surrendering land to Putin is not going to help him win the Nobel Peace Prize and, in my view, the cease-fire in Gaza isn’t enough for the Prize: the peace there has to be more lasting before it counts as “peace” (of course, Obama did bupkes to get the Prize). On moral grounds the U.S. should be supporting Ukraine as far as it can.
*I can’t believe that thieves broke into the Louvre in broad daylight, using a truck equipped with a ladder, climbed up to the second floor and smashed glass containing priceless historical jewelry, then making their escape on motobikes. How could that happen? The NYT describes the heist:
The police in France were racing against time as they searched on Monday for four thieves who carried out a daring heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris, aware that the chances of recovering the stolen jewels risked diminishing with every hour.
The robbery on Sunday stunned France and has raised uncomfortable questions about security at one of the world’s most famous cultural institutions, which remained closed on Monday.
Much about the heist remained unclear. But the authorities said that organized crime was most likely involved and that investigators were looking into how the museum’s alarm systems functioned.
Many are now worried that the thieves, ignoring the jewelry’s historical value, might break the pieces apart to sell the stones on the black market and melt down their precious metals for sale.
“This morning, the French people, for the most part, feel as though they have been robbed,” Gérald Darmanin, the country’s justice minister, told France Inter radio on Monday. “In the same way that when Notre-Dame burned, it was our church that was burning — even if you weren’t Catholic — such an incredible jewelry robbery at the Louvre looks bad.”
“We cannot completely secure all locations,” Mr. Darmanin added. “But what is certain is that we have failed.”
. . .They took eight precious pieces of jewelry, including a royal sapphire tiara, necklace and matching earring; a royal emerald necklace and its matching earrings; and a tiara and a brooch worn by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, France’s 19th-century ruler.
But they dropped a ninth item, which the authorities recovered later: Empress Eugénie’s crown, which features 1,354 diamonds, 1,136 rose-cut diamonds and 56 emeralds.
They haven’t provided a net worth for the items, but that may be impossible because of their historical value but they say this about one item:
But one of them, a decorative bow with jeweled tassels that also belonged to Empress Eugénie, is listed by the Society of Friends of the Louvre as worth 6.72 million euros, or about 7.8 million dollars. The Society, a private sponsor that helps the museum buy objects of artistic or historical value, helped acquire the bow from the United States in 2008.
And given that, the thieves may well take the jewels out of their setting and sell them, along with the gold and other precious metals used. That’s why the cops are racing for time. But it’s unthinkable to me that security wasn’t better (the Louvre was OPEN then), and nobody noticed the truck with the ladder pulling up to the museum.
To put his performance in more simplistic terms: There are three main components to baseball — pitching, hitting and fielding. Ohtani pitched for two-thirds of the game and allowed the fewest runs possible. He had four opportunities at the plate and did the best thing possible in three of them. The other was a walk.
It would have been hard for him to do any better unless he pitched more innings — or maybe played in the outfield and robbed a couple homers.
When Don Larsen threw his perfect game for the New York Yankees during the 1956 World Series, he dominated on the mound only. And it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. He went 0 for 2 with a sacrifice at the plate that day, according to Baseball Reference.
Other comparisons involve fewer skills:
Wilt Chamberlain once scored 100 points in a game. Carli Lloyd had a hat trick in the first 16 minutes of a World Cup final. Secretariat’s 31-length win at the Belmont was so jaw dropping even non-horse racing fans can understand the enormity of it. You could argue those three — or even Larsen — were more dominant on those days than Ohtani. But their performances didn’t combine two increasingly incompatible skills in such a wondrous way.
Comparable examples of using more than one skill:
In the NFL, passing and running are distinct skills, but plenty of players possess both. Colin Kaepernick threw for 263 yards and ran for 181 in a 2013 playoff game. Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes have both surpassed 500 yards passing plus running in a game, but the fact that multiple players have done it makes it less of a novelty.
The reverse — a great running back who also throws — is less common. Darren McFadden was a two-time Heisman Trophy finalist at Arkansas, dominating games on the ground while also taking snaps at quarterback in the Wildcat formation. He once tied an SEC record with 321 yards rushing in a game — and also threw a TD pass that night.
The article ponders other performances (soccer is presumably out of the running), and winds up with baseball again:
It’s probably easier to compare Ohtani to other baseball performances. The two previous pitchers with three-homer games were Jim Tobin with the Boston Braves in 1942 and Guy Hecker with the Louisville Cardinals in 1886. Both pitchers allowed five runs in complete-game victories.
Perhaps the closest feat to Ohtani’s came in 1971, when Rick Wise of the Philadelphia Phillies pitched a no-hitter against Cincinnati while also hitting two homers. Although it wasn’t a postseason game, Wise is one player with a legitimate case to have bested Ohtani’s effort last week.
And later in that 1971 season, Wise pitched a 12-inning complete game — retiring 32 batters in a row at one point — and won the contest himself with a walk-off hit.
Rick Wise’s performance is comparable, but he pitched a complete game while hitting two homers. That’s one less homer than Ohtani, but he pitched a full game. Wise, I think, is tied with Ohtani. And I won’t consider other sports, which I don’t know as well as baseball (which has been very, very good to me).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is beefing even though she doesn’t eat grapes. Or maybe she’s just observing.
Hili: The grapes have been picked. Only the ones no one wanted are left.
Andrzej: I pick them sometimes. They’re really sweet.
In Polish:
Hili: Winogrona zebrane, zostały takie, których nikt nie chciał.
Ja: Czasem je sobie zrywam, są bardzo słodkie.
*******************
A letter to the editor found by Ant (not sure where it came from) and posted on Facebook:
From Jesus of the Day. You better know your Bible if you use these:
Masih has resumed tweeting. Read the full text (reading time: 1.5 minutes)
I love you, America!
In this photo are two faces of the same regime of terror.
One was the head of Revolutionary Guard in Iran, Hossein Salami, he ordered my assassination. The other was the man sent to kill me on U.S. soil, at Fairfield University, where I was scheduled to… pic.twitter.com/Rmbjva3G5J
From Luana. Take care of any jumping spiders in your house: they are awesome, cute, and harmless.
This is Ocho. Ocho lives in my bathroom and hangs out on my orchid plant. Every day I soak a Q-Tip in water and put it down for him wherever he is (on the plant or behind the toilet or on the vanity) and he comes running over and gets a drink. Was my first reaction to smash him?… pic.twitter.com/dDbq6BZjyq
. . . and another from Luana. I suspected Greta was making stuff up:
Breaking: The Swedish Foreign Ministry confirms Greta never reported any abuse to the Swedish diplomats who repeatedly visited her in Israeli custody. Israeli court transcripts likewise show she made no such claims before the judge.
A Dutch Jewish girl and her mother were both gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. The girl was three years old, and would have been 87 today had she lived.
One post from Dr. Cobb, and it’s a good one. Click screenshot to go to the original:
Click below to see the obscene video that our President posted on Truth Social, showing him dumping feces on the “no kings” protestors. Because it only embeds part of the “tweet,” I’ll put the YouTube video below that:
You’ll know Bret Stephens as a conservative columnist for the New York Times. He also got his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago in 1995 and later won a Pulitzer Prize for political commentary. Because of his journalism and association with the University, he was invited to deliver yesterday’s University Class Day speech, an invitation extended by the University. (“Class Day” is the beginning of the Convocation Weekend, or graduation, with the formal cap-and-gown ceremony taking place today.)
The students didn’t like that much, especially because they didn’t have a say in who got to speak. And the speaker is a conservative who doesn’t hate Israel, which means he’s doubly damned. A coalition of students from the groups below thus wrote a very long Google document (see below the fold) calling Stephens a bigot, a racist, a “bigoted ideologue”, and an “apologist for Israeli apartheid” (yes, the signers included the Students for Justice in Palestine). There’s also a “content warning”. Here are the signers:
CareNotCops [JAC: they want to abolish the police] Environmental Justice Task Force Students for Disability Justice Students for Justice in Palestine UChicago Against Displacement UChicago Democratic Socialists of America
They criticize Stephens for many things, the one most relevant to this post being his supposed attempt to suppress the speech of other writers at the NYT. The evidence, however, is merely a Twitter thread by writer Wajahat Ali that is entirely hearsay, saying that Stephens has criticized other writers, written to editors (no evidence is adduced), and has also responded to being criticized with more criticism. This is thin gruel. I don’t agree with everything Stephens says in the NYT, but one thing I haven’t seen him do is call for suppression of speech. If he ever did, he’d be violating the principles of the college from which he graduated—the principles he lauded in his talk.
In an email to The Maroon, Stephens responded to the statement.
“I read the coalition statement carefully. It is a caricature of my views. It is based on cherry-picked and misleading quotations and bad-faith readings of my work. It also borders on self-parody: To accuse me of being an “imperialist” sounds like 1960s agitprop. For the record, I am not an imperialist, a racist, or anything else the statement accuses me of being.”
In the email statement, Stephens countered that he had a more moderate ideology than what the statement suggested, pointing to some of his political views.
“The more mundane truth is that I’m a moderate conservative and card-carrying NeverTrumper who opposes the Dobbs decision, supports repealing the 2nd Amendment, and favors a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Last year, the Russian government banned me for life from visiting that country and Tucker Carlson calls me a ‘leftist.’ If this puts me beyond the pale of the ‘coalition,’ it says a lot more about them than it does about me.” (Editor’s note: Stephens included the hyperlinks himself in his emailed statement.)
Well, all the student criticism is fine, even encouraged by our University, for it’s free speech. And to be fair, none of the critics called for the cancelation of Stephens’s speech. As far as I know, it wasn’t disrupted, either.
But Stephens got his own back with his talk, which he reprinted in the NYT. It’s all about the importance of freedom of expression, and gives special encomiums to our recently deceased President and free-speech promoter Bob Zimmer. You can read it by clicking on the link below.
I’ve listened to a lot of anodyne graduation speeches in myu career (this one is really not the official graduation address, which is always delivered by a member of our faculty—today colleague and law professor Tom Ginsburg). It’s the “Class Day” address. Read it by clicking the headline below, and it’s also been archived here. After reading it, I’m guessing that the University invited Stephens to talk on Class Day precisely so he could impart the lesson below to the departing students. If they wanted to cater to the students, they’d probably invite someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Stephens begins by addressing his critics directly, and then praising two major figures at the University (I don’t know if there was a walkout):
To those of you who are protesting or planning a walkout, I thank you for not seriously disrupting my speech. And though I’m sorry you won’t hear me out, I completely respect your right to protest any speaker you dislike, including me, so long as you honor the Chicago Principles. It is one of the core liberties that all of us have a responsibility to uphold, protect and honor.
To those of you who choose to stay, I thank you for honoring another Chicago principle, one that was dear to my dear friend, Bob Zimmer: Namely, that a serious education is impossible except in an environment of unfettered intellectual challenge — an environment that, in turn, isn’t possible without the opportunity to encounter people and entertain views with whom and with which you might profoundly disagree.To John Boyer, who welcomed me to Chicago in 1991 when I was a nervous 17-year-old freshman, I want to salute you for everything you’ve done to make the college so much better, while preserving what always made it great: the conviction that to think clearly, we must be able to speak freely; that to disagree intelligently, we must first understand the views of our opponents profoundly; that to change people’s minds, we must be open to the possibility that our minds might be changed. All of this asks us to listen charitably, argue candidly, consider deeply, examine and re-examine everything, above all our own deeply held convictions — and, unlike at so many other universities, to respond to ideas we reject with more and better speech, not heckling or censorship.
And the ending (but do read the whole thing):
. . . . You are about to go out into the real world, as real adults, with a real hand in shaping the conditions of our common life. Many of you will soon join and eventually lead great institutions, and a few of you will create significant businesses, NGOs, schools and other institutions of your own. I’m guessing not many of you are thinking: “I want to make them just like the University of Chicago,” at least as far as subzero temperatures, midterms that begin the third week and the food at Valois are concerned. [JAC: Valois is a downscale cafeteria in Hyde Park, known for its homey and inexpensive food. Barack Obama would occasionally eat there, even as President.]
But I hope you can at least say this: that, at Chicago, you learned that institutions become and remain great not because of the weight of their traditions or the perception of their prestige, but because they are places where the sharpest thinking is given the freest rein, and where strong arguments may meet stronger ones, and where “error of opinion may be tolerated” because “reason is left free to combat it” and where joy and delight are generally found at the point of contact — mental or otherwise.
If you can say this, then Chicago will have served you well. And if you can bring this mind-set and this spirit to the places you will soon make your own, then you will have served Chicago even better.
It’s Monday, March 12, 2023, Chicken Noodle Soup Day (much better with matzo balls). If you’re in America and haven’t moved your clock forward an hour, please do so now:
It’s also the Start of Daylight Savings Time, so be sure you set your clocks forward an hour. If you didn’t do it last night, do it NOW.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the March 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*I feel a bit removed from news involving the U.S., but I do my best. Here’s a NYT op-ed, by the entire editorial board, that calls for the U.S. to avoid a confrontational strategy with China and get involved in economic rather than military competition. After mentioning Chinese provocations like military displays around Taiwan and the famous “spy balloon” (whatever happened to that?), it urges a more conciliatory posture:
Yet the relationship between the United States and China, for all its problems, continues to deliver substantial economic benefits to the residents of both countries and to the rest of the world. Moreover, because the two nations are tied together by millions of normal and peaceful interactions every day, there is a substantial incentive to maintain those ties and a basis for working together on shared problems like climate change.
Americans’ interests are best served by emphasizing competition with China while minimizing confrontation. Glib invocations of the Cold War are misguided. It doesn’t take more than a glance to appreciate that this relationship is very different. Rather than try to trip the competition, America should focus on figuring out how to run faster, for example through increased investments in education and basic scientific research.
Chinese actions and rhetoric also need to be kept in perspective. By the standards of superpowers, China remains a homebody. Its foreign engagements, especially outside its immediate surroundings, remain primarily economic. China has been playing a much more active role in international affairs in recent years — a new agreement facilitated by China to re-establish relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is the latest example — but China continues to show strikingly little interest in persuading other nations to adopt its social and political values.
There are also signs that China’s leaders are not united in supporting a more confrontational posture. It behooves the United States to reassure those who may be open to reassurance. America and China are struggling with many of the same challenges: how to ensure what President Xi Jinping has termed “common prosperity” in an age of income inequality; how to rein in the worst excesses of capitalism without losing its vital creative forces; how to care for an aging population and young people who want more out of life than work; how to slow the pace of climate change and to manage its disruptive impacts, including mass migration. . .
They’re right: Russia is surely far more worthy of disapprobation than China, though if China tries to take over Taiwan with its military, all bets are off.
*The Washington Post describes how a new technology, specifically a phone app that allows would-be immigrants at the southern U.S. border to make appointments with Customs and Border Protection, is glitching, squelching the hopes of those hoping to enter:
As the Biden administration struggles to bring order to the border, some of the most vulnerable migrants are finding themselves stuck in squalid camps in Mexico. A significant number are seeking asylum in the United States and were expecting the sanctuary of the nation’s immigration law, which allows migrants fleeing persecution to request protection no matter how they reach the country. Advocates estimate close to 7,000 people were spread out in encampments in Matamoros and Reynosa in January.
All are trying to usea new CBP appthat is supposed to make entering the country more efficient. Each day, migrants awake before sunrise to search for a WiFi signal and try to get one of the 700 to 800 appointments available at eight entry points. Advocates estimate there are more than 100,000 people seeking entry. The appointments fill up within five minutes.
Previously, attorneys could intervene to make a case for asylum seekers to get emergency admission into the United States. Now those fleeing gang violence are fighting for appointments on their own, alongside those facing less dire conditions.
More than 9,900 individuals have used the app to enter the country by getting an exemption from the Title 42 pandemic-era public health restriction since it went live in January, CBP data shows. Over 10,000 more have used the app to obtain humanitarian parole under a new program for those from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua — offering a lifeline for many who can avoid embarking on a treacherous journey.
Yet at migrant camps, shelters and safe houses along the U.S.-Mexico border, asylum seekers who arrived before the app was launched or faced such imminent danger that they could not wait to get an appointment struggle to get a WiFi signal. Families scramble to register all their relatives only to find out all of the day’s appointments have been taken. Desperation mounts as they look toward a country within eyeshot but perpetually out of reach.
It’s ridiculous to make people in migrant camps fight to get a Wi-Fi signal within a five-minute window and then fight for others who have better access—all to get an appointment. Surely there’s a better solution. Even online forms put into a hopper, with someone selecting the appointed number randomly, is fairer than this.
*Speaking of asylum, many who have entered America seeking a new life have been disappointed with their prospects, or by long processing times for applications, and have crossed the border into Canada. NYC helps by giving immigrants bus tickets to a town near the Canadian border, where the immigrants then seek asylum in Canada. This has caused Canada to reassess its immigration policies:
A sharp increase in asylum seekers entering Canada through unofficial crossings — including many whose bus fares were paid by New York City and aid agencies — is intensifying the pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reach an agreement with President Joe Biden to close off the entire land border to most asylum seekers.
Many of the arrivals abandoned plans to seek asylum in the United States, deterred by long processing times and restrictive definitions for asylum, according to aid officials and interviews with asylum seekers.
On a snowy day in late February, about three dozen asylum seekers, some wheeling suitcases, others carrying backpacks, trudged along a snow path from New York State to Quebec.
. . . Almost 40,000 asylum seekers entered Canada through irregular border crossings from the United States last year — nine times higher than in 2021, when pandemic restrictions were still in place, and more than double the nearly 17,000 who crossed in 2019. Almost 5,000 entered in January alone, according to the most recent figures from the Canadian government.
Canadian PM Justin Trudeau will take up this issue when he meets with President Biden at the end of March.
*Want to limit your screen time—or that of your kids—on your phone? SCIENCE (and the WSJ) tells us that the best solution is to switch the display to black and white instead of the more stimulating colored screen.
In the first group, participants weren’t asked to do anything specific with the Screen Time app other than to monitor their phone usage. They also were instructed to put their smartphones in grayscale mode, a feature that changes the phone display to black and white from color. The researchers believed that a less-stimulating screen would make for a less-rewarding user experience.
Members of the second group were asked to set time limits for themselves by using both the “downtime” and “app limits” features of the Screen Time app. With “downtime,” users set aside time where only calls and certain apps can be used; “app limits” puts time limits on certain apps or categories, such as social media.
Lastly, those in the control group were asked only to monitor their phone usage.
All participants completed a subjective well-being survey measuring life satisfaction, stress, sleep and happiness before and after the experiment.
The activation of grayscale mode immediately reduced users’ screen time (by 50 minutes a day—the average screen time being 261.50 minutes per day) compared with the control. Those who were asked to set time limits showed a more gradual reduction in screen time, perhaps indicating participants became better over time at reaching their time limit. This group’s average reduction in screen time was not significantly lower than that of the control group.
So that’s about a 20% reduction in screen time, but I’m still appalled that people with iPhones who used the reduction tool still spent over four hours per day on their phone. No wonder that when you ride on public transportation, about 80% of your fellow passengers will be glued to their phones. These devices have changed our lives permanently—many times for the better, but the mindless scrolling through Twitter can’t be seen as a good.
*The Academy Awards (America’s biggests Wokeathon) are tonight, and of course I won’t be watching. (There’s no t.v. set in our house, but I wouldn’t watch anyway.) The list of nominees is here, but I’ve seen only of the nominated films (the ones below in bold). Nine nominations are too many!
“All Quiet on the Western Front”
“Avatar: The Way of Water” “The Banshees of Inisherin”
“Elvis” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (stopped watching after half an hour) “The Fabelmans” “Tár” “Top Gun: Maverick”
“Triangle of Sadness”
There are quite a few people (e.g., here or here) who think that Tom Cruise should win a Best Actor Oscar for “Top Gun: Maverick”, and even more (like the Guardian) who think that the movie, which Cruise produced, should win for Best Movie. Steven Spielberg lauded Cruise for “saving Hollywood’s ass“, but I never equated box-office draw with movie quality, and the latter is supposed to be the criterion for winning. In action movies, the main actor is The Action. Granted, Cruise is a creditable actor (he was better in “The Minority Report” and “Jerry Maguire”), but he ain’t no male Meryl Streep. I still go with “Tár” for both Best Picture and Best Actress (Cate Blanchett), though my cinemaphilic nephew doesn’t agree.
Any reader who predicts the winner in the five categories of Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress will win a free book (one of mine) with a cat drawn in it. Put your predictions below.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I’m in today’s Hili, in which her highness gives me napping lessons. In truth, though, no cat ever had insomnia. (The photo is mine, too!)
What would YOU do if you came home to find sooty paw prints all over your bathroom? Well, this Arlington resident did the right thing by calling Arlington County Animal Control for advice! Officer Knight was dispatched to the resident’s home after they reported an unidentified animal in the house. When she arrived on scene, she was able to identify the sooty footprints in the bathroom as raccoon prints. Officer Knight determined that the raccoon had climbed down the chimney, and being a very tidy animal, decided to take a bath in the toilet bowl, before climbing back up the chimney! Officer Knight closed the chimney flue and referred the resident to Humane Wildlife Services and Humane Wildlife Conflict Resolution to service and re-cap her chimney.
From Mark. This is what keeps me up at night!
Bonus video: Philomena on acting (h/t Merilee). Diane Morgan found her niche in the role of Philomena Cunk, but was also good as Kath in Ricky Gervais’s series “After Life.” That, by the way, is an excellent series and you should watch it. Morgan hates stand-up comedy, which is how she started, and in truth wasn’t very good at it.
From Masih. You can’t get more defiant of the Iranian regime than burning your hijab (I remember American protestors burning their draft cards during the Vietnam war.) And you can’t get more oppressive and misogynistic than killing a woman who burns her hijab.
The rest of the tweet is
. . . and she was protesting the murder of #MahsaAmini. We the women of Iran do not deserve Islamic republic.
No, the Islamic Republic does not deserve the support of the women of Iran.
This 16 year old girl got killed by Iranian Regime for the crime of burning her forced hijab. I call on all girls and women to say her name and continue her path to help us to get rid of gender apartheid regime. Her nam was Nika Shahkarami and she was pic.twitter.com/EQIyNkgpKJ… https://t.co/t0FL0lWlwB
From Ricky Gervais. This is the very last scene of the last season of his show “After Life”, and is one of the most brilliant set pieces I’ve seen on t.v. The woman who appears is his late wife, who died of cancer: the starting point of the show. It’s all about the ephemerality of life:
#AfterLife launched #OTD 2019 – and what a journey it's been.
Tweets from Matthew. This first one is a brilliant demonstration that individuals will do whatever best helps them produce offspring. It’s dangerous to crawl to the water’s edge, where there are predators or the change of being landlocked, but you can squirt your larvae a lot farther in the air than in water. Presumably there’s an advantage to dispersal! (The original paper is here.)
Brilliant to be involved in this amazing study just out in @ESAEcology – parasitic freshwater mussels climb up the bank and spurt their babies back into the water to attract fish hosts! See paper for the lowdown: https://t.co/8704fBudlRpic.twitter.com/Lm2N3nBiB8
Matthew doesn’t really understand baseball (just as I don’t understand cricket), but sent a pair of tweets about a college player called out on strikes. Here, on the second strike, the player has a mini-fit (it looked like a ball to me). The next pitch was clearly a ball but the ump, who must be blind, called a strike. The catcher jumps in to prevent mayhem. (That last called strike may be the ump’s “acting out tax.”
What is going on…this umpire should be suspended! No way a game should end like this just because an umpire is holding a grudge!! pic.twitter.com/0OBfocuhlh
A friend of mine who’s followed the New York Times‘s 1619 Project sent me a link to an article that you can access by clicking on the screenshot below. It’s in the Catalyst Journal, and my friend adds “don’t confuse it with Catalyst Magazine, which is pure woo!!” First, though, be aware that Catalyst seems to be largely socialist and anti-capitalist, but you shouldn’t dismiss anything they say simply because of that. Here’s its mission as stated on its website:
Discussion of capitalism is not off the table any longer. Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy launches with the aim of doing everything it can to promote and deepen this conversation. Our focus is, as our title suggests, to develop a theory and strategy with capitalism as its target — both in the North and in the Global South. It is an ambitious agenda, but this is a time for thinking big.
Catalyst is a peer-reviewed journal sustained by the support of over 7,500 individual subscribers and our institutional readers.
This explains the remarks on capitalism included at the end of this critique by historian James Oakes. (Note: it’s long: 47 pages as I’ve printed it out, but if you’re interested in the 1619 Project, its implications, its benefits, or its dangers, you should read it.). Click on the screenshot or go here; both afford free access.
And if you’re worried about Oakes’s credibility, below are his credentials from Bookreporter. You can also go to his Wikipedia bio, where you can see his impressive list of books relevant to the issues of slavery and race. One simply can’t dismiss his critique on the grounds of his credentials!
My friend’s take on Oakes’s piece was sufficiently eloquent and thoughtful that I asked him/her—not a pronoun but a disguise!—if I could use it to introduce the article, and he/she agreed. It’s between the two lines below. At the bottom I give a few quotes from Oakes’s piece:
The beating heart of wokeness is racial guilt––sincerely felt by remorseful white liberals, but amplified by BLM advocates seeking to convince the liberals that they and all of their ancestors have always been “supremacists” and nothing else. Although repentance and reparations are called for, the demand is made without an expectation that the original sin will thereby be purged. Whiteness itself is construed as an indelible sign of racism.
The New York Times is impressive and invaluable in many ways, but it has become desperately trendy in others. With its recent 1619 Project, the paper has lent its well-deserved prestige to the woke worldview. The Project amounts to a recasting of American history that turns racial domination into an all-explanatory factor––the only significant motive in “the white mind” from the seventeenth century until today. The result is a moralizing simplification of the key issues in our national development.
As the following essay by James Oakes––Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY––reveals, one of those distortions has to do with the work of historians themselves. According toThe 1619 Project, all preceding experts have whitewashed the record. They have minimized the importance of 1619, when the first British slave ship landed in the Colonies, while jingoistically celebrating 1776 instead. And they have misinterpreted the Revolution itself, Abolitionism, the Civil War, and the economic development of the country, which, it is said, was powered above all by slave labor.
As the author of such books as The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War, James Oakes is well situated to assess those claims. You will see that he shows them to be libels of nuanced studies by major American historians––liberals, one and all. And you’ll be left to wonder whether the New York Times, always so insistent on fidelity to facts, will now apologize to its readers and cease recommending its deeply flawed Project to schools and colleges across the country. (Don’t wait up for it.)
JAC: Here are a few quotes from Oakes’s piece:
If the 1619 Project was not actually introducing Americans to an aspect of their history they were never taught in school, why the controversy? If all the Times was doing was restating what we already knew, why the complaints? What was it about the way the Times presented that history that caused so much strife? There were the egregious factual errors, of course, but it’s more than that. It’s the ideological and political framework of the project that led its editors to those inaccuracies and distortions. The 1619 Project is, to begin with, written from a black nationalist perspective that systemically erases all evidence that white Americans were ever important allies of the black freedom struggle. Second, it is written with an eye toward justifying reparations, leading to the dubious proposition that all white people are and have always been the beneficiaries of slavery and racism. This second proposition is based in turn on a third, that slavery “fueled” America’s exceptional economic development.
. . . If nearly everything was caused by racism and slavery, it must follow, as night follows day, that the defense of slavery had to be one of the “primary” reasons for the American Revolution. This absurd, insupportable claim is derived from a syllogism rather than source material. The jury is not out on the question, because juries deliberate over evidence. When confronted by the absence of evidence, the Times changed to wording that read that protecting slavery was the primary reason “some” Americans rebelled. That may be true, but there’s more evidence that “some” Americans rebelled so they could begin to undermine slavery. Either way, the effect of that rewording is to destroy the intellectual architecture of the entire project, for if — whatever the individual motives of “some” people — the revolution itself was not driven primarily by the defense of slavery and racism, it follows that slavery and racism cannot explain one of the most important events — if not the most important event — in US history.
. . .The political goal animating the 1619 Project is reparations. “If you read the whole project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones has said, “I don’t think you can come away from it without understanding the project is an argument for reparations. You can’t read it and not understand that something is owed.”But if the case for reparations rests on distorted history, it can’t be a good case. On the subject of slavery, the distortions of the 1619 Project are numerous, and they are significant. It conflates the wealth of the slaveholders with the wealth of the United States. It asserts without evidence that slavery “fueled” the growth of the Northern economy. It betrays a stunning lack of familiarity with the basic facts of cotton cultivation. It stresses the expansion of the cotton economy but ignores the South’s relative decline in the national economy. Slavery consigned generations of Southerners, black and white, to poverty and economic backwardness. Its legacy is hardship and misery, not widespread wealth.
Most of what the 1619 Project has to say about Southern slavery is contained in an essay by sociologist Matthew Desmond that grossly distorts the history of the slave economy and is riddled with factual errors. . . .
Read the rest for yourself; it’s the most powerful takedown of the 1619 Project I’ve seen, and I thank my friend for calling it to my attention.
As you probably know, the 1619 Project has produced a book (below), which is an expansion and supplementation of the original essays in the New York Times magazine. It’s selling like hotcakes, too: #4 on Amazon. Click on the image below to go to the Amazon site:
I haven’t read it yet, and am not sure that I will given the queue of books by my bed, but I did read two reviews of it. The first, in the Washington Post below, is quite critical. The reviewer is Carlos Lazada, identified as “the Post’s nonfiction book critic and the author of “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.”
The second review appears in the NYT itself, and the paper has a long history of reviewing books by its own writers favorably. That review is at the second screenshot below (you can access the reviews by clicking on the screenshots), and the reviewer is Adam Hochschild, author, journalist, and historian, who wrote a book I read not long ago and liked very much: King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. I would have bet a lot of money in advance that the NYT review would be highly positive, given their history of printing only positive reviews by their bigwig writers and the fact that Nikole Hannah-Jones, the main force behind the book, won a Pulitzer Prize for her first 1619 essay.
The contrasting titles of the reviews show their differential assessments. While both authors like parts of the book, Lazada is unwilling to excuse major claims in the book that are erroneous, misleading, or distorted, while Hochschild largely ignores or minimizes them. More important, Lazada emphasizes that the book pushes an ideological program, especially in a new essay contributed by Ibram X. Kendi.
I’ve always objected to the 1619 Project’s aim to inculcate schoolchildren with distorted and “progressive” Leftist views. It is propaganda and is not counteracted in schools by requiring other books giving other views. It’s the first time I know of that a newspaper has deliberately inserted itself into the school curriculum to push a set of ideological values and dubious “truth” statements.
Hochschild, on the other hand, gives a very laudatory review, picks out a few perfunctory problems, barely mentions Kendi’s essay, which he agrees with, and says it’s the book is a valuable and necessary corrective for racism. It might well be in bits, but if the assertions of Lazada be correct, there’s a considerable amount of distortion and cherrypicking going on. It’s amazing how the two reviews have such different takes on the same contentions of the 1619 Project.
First, Lazado’s review. I’ll concentrate on a few issues historians had with the book, and also on its propagandistic aims. Both reviewers’ words are indented:
Together these elements form a powerful and memorable work, one that launched a seismic national debate over the legacy of slavery and enduring racial injustice in American life. It is also a work with a variety of competing impulses, ones that can at times confuse and conflict. This is evident in “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” a book that softens some of the edges of the prior magazine collection but also transcends its original mission as a historical corrective, informing readers what they now must do or else risk personal complicity in the painful story they have just been told.
This is Kendi’s view, but more later. I doubt readers will appreciate being deemed racist if they’re not doing something, which includes paying reparations to the black community. (I favor a form of reparations, but in terms of social benefits, better schools, and affirmative action, not direct payments to individuals who can prove some black heritage.)
One of the contentious assertions of the first 1619 Project was Hannah Nikole-Jones’s claim that 1619, the date that the first slaves arrived in the colonies, was the true founding date of America, for slavery conditioned, she said, every aspect of American life, even being a major cause of the American Revolution. The paper has walked that claim back a bit in the face of historians’ corrections, but the book still waffles on the issue. From Lozada:
The elusiveness begins where the project begins — in 1619, with the first ship carrying enslaved Africans to reach the English American colonies, and that moment’s proper status in the history of the United States. In his note introducing the special issue, New York Times Magazine Editor Jake Silverstein first depicts the project as something of a thought experiment, counterfactual to the common notion of 1776 as the year of the nation’s birth. “What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?” Three sentences later, the question mark is gone, the tone more declarative. The barbaric system of slavery introduced that month is not just the United States’ “original sin,” Silverstein asserts; it is “the country’s very origin.” The project’s broadsheet supplement widens that perspective, declaring that “the goal of the 1619 Project is to reframe American history, making explicit that slavery is the foundation on which this country is built.” From what-if to no-matter-what, all on the same day.
This hardly settles matters. More than a year later, in an article titled “On Recent Criticism of The 1619 Project,” Silverstein indicated that the notion of 1619 as the country’s birth year should be regarded as a “metaphor” and not read literally. This is why, he explained, the Times had deleted a description of 1619 as our “true founding” that previously appeared in the project’s online presentation. But then, in an essay this month titled “The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over U.S. History,” Silverstein wrote that the date indeed “could be considered” the moment of the United States’ “inception.”
In the new book version, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist who conceived of the overall effort and wrote its lead magazine essay, offers a few interpretations. In the preface, she cautions that the project is “not the only origin story of this country — there must be many.” Then, in the opening chapter, Hannah-Jones repeats the text of her original magazine essay and refers to Black Americans as the country’s “true ‘founding fathers,’” as deserving of that designation “as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital.” Some 400-plus pages later, in a concluding chapter, she writes that the origin story in the 1619 Project is “truer” than the one we’ve known.
What might an assiduous reader conclude from all this? That 1619 is a thought experiment, or a metaphor, or the nation’s true origin, but definitely not its founding, yet possibly its inception, or just one origin story among many — but still the truer one? For all the controversy the project has elicited, this muddle over the starting point is an argument that the 1619 Project is also having with itself.
Lozada finds the 18 essays “both constructive and uneven”. An example of the latter is the chapter on “Capitalism”, which seems to distort matters (note that Hochschild’s review below accepts the chapter’s contentions whole hog):
Lozada:
Consider sociologist Matthew Desmond’s chapter, “Capitalism.” In his original magazine essay, Desmond argued that many labor-management and record-keeping practices of modern American capitalism originated on plantations, with lasting consequences for the nation’s growth and industry. He indicated, for instance, that the vast increases in the productivity of America’s cotton fields — an average enslaved field worker in 1862 picked 400 percent more cotton than one had in 1801, he noted — flowed from the meticulous efforts to manage every detail and moment of those workers’ lives. “Bodies and tasks were aligned with rigorous exactitude,” Desmond wrote in the essay, describing the “uncompromising pursuit of measurement and scientific accounting displayed in slave plantations.”
Critics of this essay pointed out that some financial and management practices Desmond mentions, such as double-entry bookkeeping, predated the slave-plantation era. More consequentially, they argued that Desmond’s discussion of cotton productivity bypassed the real explanation for the increase. In the new book, Desmond addresses this, but only to a point. Following a detailed discussion of the management of enslaved labor, he again cites the boost in productivity. Then he adds this caveat: “Historians and economists have attributed this surge in productivity to several factors — for example, Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode found that improved cotton varieties enabled hands to pick more cotton per day — but advanced techniques that improved upon ways to manage land and labor surely played their part as well.”
Note what is happening: A different explanation is introduced for an important point of fact, but the overall narrative remains — because “surely” it still holds. Readers should always be open to new historical interpretations, but when revising history, “surely” does not reassure. When facts complicate a story, they shouldn’t be tucked in an aside but taken up as part of that dynamic and contested process of discovery that Silverstein so praised.
Finally, Lozada criticizes the narrative of Hannah-Jones that the maintenance of slavery was a major cause of the American Revolution, which is based almost solely on an offer from the British in Virginia that any slave who joined them fighting the colonists would be freed:
In the opening chapter of the book, titled “Democracy,” Hannah-Jones adds two explanations supporting her interpretation of colonial motives. One involves the Dunmore Proclamation of November 1775, in which the royal governor of Virginia offered freedom to enslaved people if they joined the British side of the fight. (The declaration went unmentioned in Hannah-Jones’s original essay and did not appear in the magazine’s timeline of important events in African American life; now, it is featured in the book’s expanded timeline.) She writes that the proclamation “would alter the course of the Revolution,” appropriate phrasing given that the revolution was well underway by the time of the proclamation.
How influential was this episode in the fight for independence? Here Hannah-Jones narrows the story. She stresses that the proclamation “infuriated white Virginians” and that when you think about it, the revolution was mainly a Virginia thing, anyway. “Schoolchildren learn that the Boston Tea Party sparked the Revolution and that Philadelphia was home to the Continental Congress, the place where intrepid men penned the Declaration and Constitution,” she writes. “But while our nation’s founding documents were written in Philadelphia, they were mainly written by Virginians. . . . No place shaped the Revolution and the country it birthed more than Virginia.” It is a subtle but effective shift: Rather than expand history to encompass the range of the colonists’ rationales, Hannah-Jones limits the universe of colonists who matter. Now, Virginia is real colonial America.
This sounds a bit sleazy to me, but none of this is mentioned in the NYT’s own review. Lozada also criticizes the claim that the civil rights movement was fought almost completely without white allies, but I don’t have time to address that.
Finally—and I know I’m quoting too much, but readers may not have access to the story—Ibram Kendi writes the penultimate chapter with with his denial that American is making progress in racial relations (a claim I’ve always found totally ludicrous), so that the readers need to take antiracist action. Note the one fact Kendi adduces to deny the arc of progress (I’ve put it in bold):
In a chapter titled “Progress,” historian Ibram X. Kendi writes that the popular notion of America making steady, if slow, headway toward greater racial justice is “ahistorical, mythical, and incomplete.” The “mantra” of incremental improvement can undermine efforts to promote real equality. Kendi cites Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which held that the country’s progress against discrimination meant that certain states and counties no longer needed federal approval before amending their voting laws, as the Voting Rights Act required. (The decision unleashed a series of state-level initiatives creating obstacles to voting.) “Saying that the nation has progressed racially is usually a statement of ideology,” Kendi writes, “one that has been used all too often to obscure the opposite reality of racist progress.” The failures of the Reconstruction era led to the “Second Reconstruction” of the 20th-century civil rights movement, a cause and effect that Kendi says is too often “left out of the story.”
That is one action (there are some others, of course), but what we no longer have is blatant segregation (dual water fountains and restrooms, back-of-the-bus policies, segregated hotels), lynchinga, and mistreatment of and bigotry against blacks in every situation. What we do have are the Civil Right Act, the Voting Act, and a strident effort to hire blacks and provide affirmative action in college admissions and hiring. It appears, though, that the aim of both Kendi and Hannah-Jones is to deem all Americans as racists if they’re not antiracist by paying reparations. I favor reparations, but as a moral issue and not a duty (my ancestors, after all, came from eastern Europe around 1890), and not by dispensation of cash to individuals.
Lozada:
Kendi then introduces something else he says is left out of the story — that America requires a “Third Reconstruction” to address the unfulfilled promise of the second. Here the 1619 Project’s project becomes explicitly political. Hannah-Jones fills in the details in the book’s final chapter, “Justice,” where she identifies the racial wealth gap as the most serious challenge for Black Americans. “White Americans’ centuries-long economic head start,” she writes, is what “most effectively maintains racial caste today.” To narrow that gap, the country must embark on “a vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies.”
Among these are a slate of priorities such as “a livable wage; universal healthcare, childcare, and college; and student loan debt relief,” Hannah-Jones indicates. They also include cash reparations for Black Americans — specifically, for those who can document having identified as Black for at least 10 years prior to any reparations process and who can “trace at least one ancestor back to American slavery.” Also suggested is a commitment to enforce civil rights laws regarding housing, education and employment, as well as “targeted investments” in Black communities across the country.
And so the New York Times’s 1619 Project is now enlisted in the service of a policy agenda and political worldview. The book’s concluding chapter underscores that link. “It is one thing to say you do not support reparations because you did not know the history, that you did not understand how things done long ago helped create the conditions in which millions of Black Americans live today,” Hannah-Jones writes. “But you now have reached the end of this book, and nationalized amnesia can no longer provide the excuse. None of us can be held responsible for the wrongs of our ancestors. But if today we choose not to do the right and necessary thing, that burden we own.”
Is this the message that we want to convey to children—that if they aren’t antiracist, they are racist? That is Kendi-an to the bone. I’ll leave you to decide whether that’s proper.
The NYT’s review:
Hochschild takes a diametrically opposed view, saying that his worries about historians’ concerns “largely melted away” when he read the book. He then lauds the book for showing connections between past racism and present-day acts. Here’s one example:
Part of the book’s depth lies in the way it offers unexpected links between past and present. New Yorkers, for instance, have long protested that the city Police Department’s “stop and frisk” searches for contraband or guns disproportionally snag people of color. But how many had connected it, as Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander do here, to the slave patrols of the old South, in which groups of armed white men routinely barged into the cabins of enslaved men and women to hunt for stolen goods or “anything they judged could be used as a weapon”?
Is there a direct connection here, or merely an analogy? Connecting two things because they’re similar doesn’t show an ancestor-descendant relationship. And Hochschild accepts Desmond’s chapter without quibbles:
Another contributor, Matthew Desmond, points out that the cotton plantation “was America’s first big business.” On the eve of the Civil War the monetary value “of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation.” That fact alone should silence anyone who claims that slavery is not central to American history.
No, that’s best shown in other ways, not by comparative value.
Hochschild continues:
Moreover, controlling those workers “helped mold modern management techniques.” The plantations’ size allowed for economies of scale. And “like today’s titans of industry, planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker. So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs” — easy to do when you compared harvesters according to how far each had progressed down parallel rows of cotton plants. Every fieldworker’s yield was carefully recorded, and rewards or whippings administered accordingly. Spreadsheets tabulated the depreciating value of human property over time. Trade magazines for planters carried management tips on getting the most out of enslaved workers: the best diet, clothing and even the proper tone of voice to use when giving orders.
Does Hochschild, a historian, not realize that many modern management techniques were afoot independently in the North, not copied from slaveholders? And, of course, modern managers don’t dictate the diets of their employees nor whip them. He also buys Kendi’s assertion that Justice Roberts’s comment shows that racism has not waned a bit since the antebellum era.
To be fair, Hochschild does have some beefs about the book. He calls the claim that the Founding Fathers created the American system, and fomented revolution, all to preserve the institution of slavery “going out on a shaky limb.” He bemoans the lack of discussion of slavery in countries outside the U.S., and wishes that there were more about white allies of slavery. (Here he’s really admitting that the main criticisms of historians are correct.) But in the end, he sees the book as a necessary corrective—part of “The Reckoning.”
Despite what demagogues claim, honoring the story told in “The 1619 Project” and rectifying the great wrongs in it need not threaten or diminish anyone else’s experience, for they are all strands of a larger American story. Whether that fragile cloth holds together today, in the face of blatant defiance of election results and the rule of law, depends on our respect for every strand in the weave.
Yes, we do need a corrective to counteract the glossing-over of slavery and racism taught in many American history courses. But I’m not down with distortions of that history, and I’m opposed to calls for action and reparations in a book that will be used widely in schools. They should have left Kendi out, and also had the book reviewed not by self-picked reviewers but, like science papers, by anonymous but qualified reviewers picked by someone other than the authors.
Brown University professor Glenn Loury is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it any more. What’s he mad about? The protestors and their running dogs who are calling for defunding the police. And that, he argues—probably correctly—has reduced the amount of policing, which is “costing black lives.” Further, he’s angry at Nikole Hannah-Jones for being proud that someone called the riots after the George Floyd killing “the 1619 riots.”
Here’s part of his recent Patreon discussion with John McWhorter (the whole discussion is behind a paywall but will soon be up for free) about the 1619 Project and its leader, the often-unhinged Nikole Hannah-Jones. McWhorter isn’t a fan of Hannah-Jones, either, but shows a little more empathy for her because he thinks that she really believes she’s changing America for the better and isn’t just engaged in moral preening. McWhorter recalls an incident from his youth, when he knocked down a ten-year-old girl and “broke her,” as leading to his reluctance to “break” Hannah-Jones.
My own view is that you don’t need to “break” any of your opponents (after all, that’s what Woke people do): just break their arguments. On another note, I can’t wait for McWhorter’s upcoming book on social-justice activism and DiAngelo-style anti-racism as forms of religion.
Here’s Loury, in another clip from the same show, really heated up about the death of black children in drive-by shootings, and how, he thinks, the media ignores that compared to the death of people like George Floyd.
John McWhorter and I at The Glenn Show getting down to cases re. reporting on urban violence: pic.twitter.com/1z1CQrn9hZ
