Category: book reviews

Maarten Boudry defends our anthology

August 25, 2025 • 9:30 am

As I’ve mentioned before, an article by Luana Maroja and me was included in Lawrence Krauss’s new anthology, The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process (Amazon link here).

I’ve now read the whole book, and won’t review it myself save to say that it merits reading although there is some duplication of material between chapters.  However, a number of chapters, including the opening one by Richard Dawkins and the one by Steven Pinker, in which he’s reworked and expanded his 2023 Boston Globe op-ed, are marvelous. (And of course you should read the piece on biology by Luana and I, updated from this one.) Lawrence provides a good introduction as well as commentary for each section to tie the book together.

I have to add, though, that the one chapter I simply could not read was the last one by Jordan Peterson. It is so convoluted and prolix—par for the course—that I had to give up. 

The book was put together before Trump began his assault on universities by punishing science grantees and by appointing people like RFK Jr. to science positions.  I expected that, after this unpredictable bout of executive-branch bullying, there would be some wokesters who adopted a “whataboutery stance,” saying, “This book largely comprises attacks on how the progressive Left wing is eroding science. But Trump is dong much more damage from the Right.” And right now that is indeed the case, but Trump will be gone in a bit over 3 years, and I expect that, when Democrats take over (fingers crossed), the government will cut back strongly on interfering in the funding and production.

The effect of the Right on science, then, will probably be more temporary. In contrast, that from the Left will last a lot longer, for progressive professors who believe in nonsense like a spectrum of sex in animals will teach this nonsense to their students, and thus it will pass among academic generations.  We simply cannot sit by and let progressives distort science in the cause of ideology, regardless of what the Right is doing.

And, as Luana wrote me, “I would add that the right-wing attacks on science are well understood by all, both inside and outside academia, whereas the left-wing attacks are unknown to many and not acknowledged by most in academia.  For being so underreported, they deserve to be in the light. . . ”

Sadly, some people, including  scientists and journalists, don’t understand that both Right and Left both merit criticism and should be criticized. No part of the political spectrum should be immune to scrutiny, regardless of what the other parts are doing.

This reminds me of the criticism I got for going after the pre-election Kamala Harris for being clueless.  The comments were to the effect of “Shut up until after the election. When you criticize her you’re simply increasing the chances of Trump winning.”

Such people don’t realize that extremism of the Left, exactly what was instantiated by Harris (and now by woke scientists) actually helps Trump. Harris’s declaration that undocumented immigrants should get government-funded sex-change surgery, for example, was a huge part of Republican advertising during the election, and it made Democrats look clueless.

The same goes for science. Declarations that there is a spectrum of biological sex in humans, for example, is what plays into the hands of Trump, because everyone knows that such a claim (made loudly and frequently by progressives) is false and stupid.  Criticizing ideologically-based infection of science by the Left, then, is essential in keeping science free from politics. You may recall that Nature’s endorsement of Joe Biden for U.S. President in 2020 didn’t help Biden a bit: it only made people distrust science (and Nature) more and strengthened support for Trump while having no significant increase in support for Biden.

None of this has been taken in by journalist Sarah Jones, who produced a hit job on our anthology in New York magazine. Jones is described as “senior writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and labor.” Her critique is largely an ad hominem attack on the contributors, failing to come to grips with our substantive criticisms. Further, Jones takes the book to task for ignoring Trump’s attacks on science, which many of us have written about elsewhere. We were, she says, attacking the wrong target, and even helping Trump.

I didn’t want to give Jones’s piece air time here, as it is simply a hate-filled piece that largely attacks the contributors, not their arguments. Here’s a taste of Ms. Jones:

So it’s a strange time to read The War on Science, a new anthology edited by the physicist and New Atheist writer Lawrence Krauss. In atheist and skeptic circles, Krauss is — or was — known not only for his work on the cosmos but for his campaign against creationism and for science education. Now Krauss and his collaborators have identified an “emerging threat” to science and inquiry, as he writes in an introduction to the book. What threat? Wokeness, of course. Universities prize diversity over merit, while hysterics confuse words with violence and brave truth-tellers risk cancellation. Krauss does know something about cancellation, at least. A former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, he was still defending the predator well after Epstein’s 2008 sex-crimes conviction. Epstein always had young women around him, Krauss told an interviewer in 2011, but “as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” In 2016, he quietly wrote a birthday letter to his old pal, and two years after that, the hammer fell — this time on his own head. BuzzFeed News reported that Krauss had been the subject of sexual-harassment and -misconduct allegations for about a decade. He retired from Arizona State University after an investigation into his behavior. Now he has a Substack.

Krauss does not mention this in his introduction to The War on Science. The reader is left to assume that Krauss — and his 39 contributors — cares only for the integrity of science. They are beings of reason, united not by ideology, which is the refuge of a weak mind, but by the purity of their logic. Contributors include Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, and Jordan Peterson; others, like the skeptic and philosopher Maarten Boudry, may be less familiar. Many are atheists, while others, like Ferguson, have converted to Christianity. All are convinced of their own brilliance. Alas, our rationalists each face the same problem, the most obvious of many: Their anthology came out in July during a real war on science. Most contributors, Krauss included, have railed against DEI, and critical race theory, and social justice for years. Now their arguments are shaping policy, and the casualty isn’t creationism but science itself. One contributor, the biologist and prominent New Atheist Jerry Coyne, halfway admitted this on X. “A new book on the ideological threats to science (from the Left). And yes, we know that right now the Right poses a much more serious danger to science,” Coyne wrote before taking a final shot at “progressives.” You can’t defend reality if you aren’t willing to live in it.

The line “all are convinced of their own brilliance” gives her stand away, for that’s simply not true. Nor is it to be seen in the chapters. We are passionate, yes, but it’s hard to find arrogance in the book (do look at Peterson’s chapter, though!). If anybody’s convinced of their own brilliance, it’s Jones. But wait! There’s more fun from Jones!:

There are nearly 40 chapters in The War on Science, all pockmarked by omissions, misrepresentations, and, sometimes, obvious lies. Each section of the anthology addresses a different facet of the woke threat to reason, but a few common obsessions emerge: Genitals and what people do with them, Israel, DEI, and various professional insults — it’s all here, boomer Facebook on every page. The writers invoke the philosopher Judith Butler, but only by name, and their work on gender is never explained, quoted, or even paraphrased. Our rationalists are too sophisticated to bother with the effort. In one interminable entry, Dawkins insists that “science advances,” while other disciplines, like “theology, philosophy, sociology,” do not. “Science is the jewel in humanity’s crown,” he adds, and that is why trans people must not be indulged. Chromosomes are destiny. The “belligerent slogan” that “trans women are women” is therefore “scientifically false, a debauching of language, and because, when taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women,” Dawkins writes.

Lies? Really? We give are plenty of data and examples, and I challenge Jones to point out one lie in our chapter: something that we deliberately fib about to make our points. And if she says “boomer Facebook on every page,” well, I could say her review is “geriatric Millenial from Bluesky on every page.”  Again, no grappling with our arguments.

Note the personal character of the attacks, and that New Atheism has nothing to do with our arguments.  As for my quote, Jones leaves out my caveat that Left-wing erosion of science may be more persistent, even if it’s not as dangerous at the moment.  And of course I’m willing to live in reality: my frequent attacks on Trump and his bullying of science will testify to that. But Jones didn’t do her research to find that out.

But I will let my friend Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher, finish bringing the hammer down on Jones’s rancor-filled screed.  If you click below you can read his Substack piece for free (though he would appreciate a paid subscription).

Maarten explains the curious title:

Imagine some people in your neighborhood are mixed up in organized crime—say drug trafficking. Some locals decide to blow the whistle because they worry that the whole community will get a bad reputation, and they start urging everyone else to speak up too. Most people, though, just keep their heads down, understandably reluctant to pick a fight with the gang leaders and their enablers.

And then someday a new mayor arrives in town, eager to look tough on crime. In a big show of force, he has the entire neighborhood raided. Dozens are arrested, including plenty of people who did nothing wrong. Shops are shut down, and community leaders are strong-armed into accepting harsh, sweeping measures against anything that looks even remotely suspicious.

Now, what would you think of someone who blamed the internal whistleblowers as follows:

“Why did you bad-mouth your own neighborhood when a much bigger threat was looming on the horizon? You kept harping about some petty crime that may or may not have happened, while the police were gearing up for a massive crackdown. You didn’t see where the real danger was coming from.”

That, in a nutshell, is the reaction from a lot of left-leaning academics and journalists to The War On Science, a new collection edited by the physicist Lawrence Krauss, to which I contributed a chapter along with 38 others (including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal, Jerry Coyne, Luana Maroja and Carole Hooven).

Well that’s a bit long, but is a decent metaphor and does sum up Jones’s whataboutery. (New York magazine is a notoriously woke rag that, as you may recall, forced Andrew Sullivan to resign.) I’ll give a few excerpts from Boudry’s analysis, which is not long:

So, is it true, as the kids say, that our book “didn’t age well,” becoming cringe-worthy and out of touch even before it hit the shelves? How could we have been so oblivious to the looming right-wing assault on science while we were preoccupied with left-wing critiques? In fact, many left-wing critics were already singing this tune long before they even had the chance to read our work. For instance, this post from April, shortly after our publisher announced the title and list of contributors, racked up nearly 10,000 likes on Bluesky (which is pretty huge for this relatively small platform).

Note that Hank Green hadn’t read the book, so he goes after the authors so-called “rightism” as well as the title itself.  As Bugs Bunny said, “What a maroon!”

Yall wanna hear something extremely embarrassing? Before Trump’s election, a bunch of academics who lumbered rightward after being criticized by the left (Pinker, Dawkins, Krauss) wrote essays for a book that is coming out in July about the threats to academia from the left. YALL, THE TITLE!!

— Hank Green (@hankgreen.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:26:04.674Z

A bit more from Boudry:

The little story in my intro makes the point: when there’s rampant crime in a neighborhood and the community leaders look the other way, it creates the perfect opening for a sweeping police crackdown. In the same vein, the incursions of left-wing ideology in universities and other academic institutions have helped to turn them into prime targets for the populist Right. If you turn universities and academic journals into partisan lobby groups, don’t be shocked when you find yourself in the political crosshairs.

Yes, it is true that Trump’s assault on universities is both reprehensible and unconstitutional, that his professed concern about antisemitism is just a pretext for “owning the libs”, and that his sudden embrace of academic freedom is disingenuous—he just wants to swap one orthodoxy for another. But that is exactly why we should have cleaned our Augean stable before it came to this. As sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis says in this interview about our book: “We made ourselves into political actors and so therefore became political targets.”

About Jones’s piece:

. . . . the point is not that we’re facing two separate attacks on science from different directions and are now trying to determine which one deserves more of our attention—the point is that the more severe external assault was motivated by the internal war, marking a further escalation in the politicization of science. Conversely, these Trumpian attacks now risk radicalizing left-wing ideologues in academia even further, convincing them that science must become an even stronger fortress of progressive ideology.

You can already see it playing out. Thanks to Trump’s ham-fisted attack on DEI and campus antisemitism, anyone criticizing DEI programs now risks being lumped in with the Trumpian Right. Case in point: this hatchet job posing as a book review in New York Magazine, with the subtle-as-a-brick title: “How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science”.

. . .The reviewer claims that we—the book’s authors—weren’t merely blindsided by the MAGA assault on science, but have actively contributed to it. By “railing against DEI, critical race theory, and social justice for years,” the argument goes, we supposedly handed Trump and his allies ammunition and, in effect, joined their camp.

This line of reasoning is strikingly similar to the argument, endlessly repeated by progressives (mostly in Europe), that we shouldn’t discuss the negative consequences of mass migration, as doing so might “help the Far Right”. The reality, however, is quite the opposite—it’s precisely the unwillingness of progressives to engage honestly with these uncomfortable truths that drives people toward the Far Right. Similarly, many academics’ reluctance to call out the ideological antics within their own circles has led to a widespread perception that universities have devolved into left-wing boot camps (which is still a wild exaggeration).

Maarten then tells us how flattered he is that Jones devoted a whole paragraph to him in her frothings, and he ends with this: “If you continue to politicize science, then sooner or later the chickens will come home to roost.”  Progressives have only hurt themselves by trying to inject ideology into all STEMM fields, and so we face a flock of roosting chickens.

No Ms. Jones, I am not a sycophant of Trump—I detest the man, as you would know if you did your homework. And perhaps you should recognize that nobody should be immune from criticism in a society that has free speech.

Books to read

March 28, 2025 • 11:21 am

Between reading science stuff that I’m going to write about elsewhere, and my pleasure reading of a mammoth book (not one about the woolly mammoth!), I don’t have many books to report on. In fact, I’m about to be at a loss for books to read, and thus will tell you what I’ve read as a way of extracting suggestions from readers.

For a while I was on a Holocaust kick, and (as I think I mentioned earlier) I read The End of the Holocaust, by Alvin Rosenfeld, which you can get from Amazon by clicking below. His thesis is that the true horror of the Holocaust has been lessened by everyone using the word to mean “any bad thing that happened to a lot of people.” The book is especially concerned with Anne Frank, who, he says, was just one of a number of young victims who wrote about their situation, and somehow the attention devoted to her alone lessens the experience of other victims. Well, you can argue about that, but I think the book is worth reading now that words like “genocide,” “concentration camp,” and “Holocaust” are being thrown around willy nilly in a way that distorts their original meaning.

After that I read another short but very famous book about the Holocaust, Night, by Elie Wiesel. Click below to see the Amazon link:

Wiesel, a Romanian-born Jew, was taken to the camps with his family when he was young, and managed to survive two of them, writing several books about his experiences (this one, like the others, is either partly fictional or completely fictional but Night is mostly true). Wiesel was separated from his mother and sisters at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and they did not survive (they were probably gassed). Throughout the book he tries to stay with his father and keep him alive, but the father finally expires on a forced, foodless march through the snow as the prisoners are marched to another camp by the Germans as the Russians approach. Wiesel survived, but just barely.

After the war, Wiesel dedicated himself to writing and lecturing about the Holocaust, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.  Night is one of the best books about the Holocaust, at least in conveying its horrors, and was recommended by Rosenfeld in the book above. I too recommend it highly, and, at 120 pages, it’s a short read.

Here’s a photo of Buchenwald five days after its liberation by the Red Army, showing the arrangement of bunks and the skeletal nature of those still alive. Wiesel is in the photo; I’ve circled him next to one bed post. What better proof can you have that you really did experience what you wrote about?

Buchenwald concentration camp, photo taken April 16, 1945, five days after liberation of the camp. Wiesel is in the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left, next to the bunk post. From Wikimedia Commons

And below is the behemoth I just finished, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Circle Award in 2009. Click the cover to go to the Amazon site.

Several people recommended this book highly, and while I think the 730-page monster was very good, I didn’t find it a world classic. It recounts the life of Thomas Cromwell, who started life as the son of a blacksmith but worked his way up to being the head minister of Henry VIII. It deals largely with the intrigues and relationships of Henry’s court, which reminds me of Trump’s America.  Henry was sometimes amiable, but would ruthlessly order the death of those who crossed him, including Anne Boleyn, who met her end simply because she couldn’t provide Henry with a son that could be his heir.  Sir Thomas More is a prominent character, and he too meets his end for refusing to affirm that Anne Boleyn was the lawful queen. Everyone tiptoes around in constant fear of the KIng.

The book is quite involved, and has a big list of characters which are listed on the first page and to which one must constantly refer. It is the convoluted plot and surfeit of characters that made the book hard for me to read. Perhaps I’m getting old and my concentration is waning.  But the dialogue is fascinating, and parts of the book are quite lyrical, with the prose style changing quickly from conversational to rhapsodic. Here’s what Wikipedia says about Mantel’s writing of the book, and the effort shows.

Mantel said she spent five years researching and writing the book, trying to match her fiction to the historical record. To avoid contradicting history she created a card catalogue, organised alphabetically by character, with each card containing notes indicating where a particular historical figure was on relevant dates. “You really need to know, where is the Duke of Suffolk at the moment? You can’t have him in London if he’s supposed to be somewhere else,” she explained.

In an interview with The Guardian, Mantel stated her aim to place the reader in “that time and that place, putting you into Henry’s entourage. The essence of the thing is not to judge with hindsight, not to pass judgment from the lofty perch of the 21st century when we know what happened. It’s to be there with them in that hunting party at Wolf Hall, moving forward with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, but in any case, moving forward into a future that is not pre-determined but where chance and hazard will play a terrific role.”

The book (part of a trilogy) was made into a mini-series for t.v., and here’s the trailer. It feature Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII. Has anyone seen it?

So that’s my reading. Now I ask readers to recommend books for me—and other readers. They can be fiction or nonfiction, so long as they’re absorbing.  I’m not sure I’m yet ready now for another 700-page novel (Amazon’s version says only 600-odd pages, but I have an older edition).  Please put your recommendations, as well as the subject of the book, in the comments.

My Quillette review of Francis Collins’s new book on healing America with science, truth, trust, and faith

March 13, 2025 • 9:15 am

As I note in my new review of Francis Collins’s new book, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust, he’s a very good scientist and science administrator, but also a pious evangelical Christian (remember the frozen waterfalls that brought him to Jesus?).  Collins had previously written a book arguing that science and Christianity were not only compatible, but complementary ways of finding the truth, but now he’s produced another. As I say in my review of the new book in Quillette (click on screenshot below, or find my review archived here):

While much of the Road to Wisdom reprises the arguments of the earlier book, this new one takes things a bit further. Collins is deeply concerned about the divisions in American society highlighted by the last presidential election, by people’s inability to have constructive discussions with their opponents, and by our pervasive addiction to social media and its “fake news”; and he believes that accepting a harmony between religion and science will yield the wisdom that can mend America.

As the author of Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, I wouldn’t be expected to laud Collins’s thesis, and I didn’t.  You can read the review for yourself, but I spend a lot of time criticizing Collins’s claim that science combined with religion is the best way to find the “truths”to repair the deep divisions in America’s polity. Even if those divisions—Collins largely means Republicans vs. Democrats—can be repaired, saying that the way forward is combine the “truths” of science and religion is a deeply misguided claim.

I won’t go into details, but of course religion is simply not a way to discover truth, especially since Collins’s definition of “truth” is basically “facts about the world on which everyone agrees”: in other words, empirical truth. Religion can’t find such truths, as it lacks the methodology.  Note that Collins does not espouse Gould’s “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” claim that science and religion are compatible because they deal with completely different issues, with science alone getting the ambit of empirical truth. Gould’s claim, described in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, was also misguided, and you can read my old TLS critique of it here.) No, Collins asserts that religion can find empirical truths. Sadly, he gives no examples where religion can beat science–just a bunch of questions that religion can supposedly answer (e.g., “How should I live my life?”).

I’ll give one more quote from my review:

What are the truths that religion can produce but science can’t? Collins’s list is unconvincing. It includes the “fact” of Jesus’s resurrection and the author’s unshakable belief that “Jesus died for me and was then literally raised from the dead.” In support of this claim, Collins cites N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God as compelling evidence for the Resurrection, which Collins claims is “historically well documented.” But when I worked my way through the entirety of Wright’s 817-page behemoth, I found that the “historical documentation” consists solely of what’s in the New Testament, tricked out with some rationalisation and exegesis. Neither Collins nor Wright provide independent, extra-Biblical evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection, much less for the Biblical assertion that upon Jesus’s death the Temple split in twain and many dead saints left their tombs and walked about Jerusalem like zombies. Absent solid evidence for these claims, they are little more than wishful thinking.

Other “truths” that one finds in religion are “moral truths”: the confusing set of rules that Collins labels the “Moral Law.” To him, the fact that our species even has morality constitutes further evidence for God, for Collins sees no way that either evolution or secular rationality could yield a codified ethics. That claim is belied by the long tradition of secular ethics developed by people like Baruch Spinoza, Peter Singer, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. While many faiths and societies aspire to common goals like “love, beauty, goodness, freedom, faith, and family,” this does not suggest the existence of a supernatural being.

Click below (or here):

Although it seems obvious to me that religion and science are incompatible insofar as both make empirical claims (granted, some of faith’s claims are hard to test), it’s not obvious to the many Americans who blithely get their vaccinations but then head to Church and recite the “truths” of the Nicene Creed. Sam Harris pointed this out in a piece he wrote opposing Collins’s appointment as NIH director:

It is widely claimed that there can be no conflict, in principle, between science and religion because many scientists are themselves “religious,” and some even believe in the God of Abraham and in the truth of ancient miracles. Even religious extremists value some of the products of science—antibiotics, computers, bombs, etc.—and these seeds of inquisitiveness, we are told, can be patiently nurtured in a way that offers no insult to religious faith.

This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas/methods and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide. The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto—in a single brain, in an institution, in a culture—does not mean that there isn’t a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world’s “great,” and greatly discrepant, religions.

While I wouldn’t have opposed Collins’s appointment on the basis of his faith, I would have if he had shown any signs that his faith would affect his science. As it turned out, it didn’t: Collins left his religion at the door of the NIH.  But he continues to proselytize for both Christianity as the “true” faith and for a perfect harmony between science and religion.

In a patronizing New Yorker article (is that redundant?) about Collins and his book that I just discovered, I was sad to see another pal soften his views about Collins, science, and faith:

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who fiercely criticized Collins’s nomination on account of his “primitive, shamanistic, superstitious” religious views, told me in an e-mail that he had changed his mind about Collins, for two reasons. “One is the sheer competence and skill with which he’s directed the Institutes, blending scientific judgment with political acumen,” Pinker wrote. “The other is a newly appreciated imperative, in an age of increasing political polarization, toward making institutions of science trustworthy to a broad swath of the public, of diverse political orientations.” In a way, I thought, Pinker was saying that representation matters: science has an audience, and the right speaker can persuade all of that audience to listen. “A spokesperson for science who is not branded as a left-wing partisan is an asset for the wider acceptance of science across the political spectrum,” Pinker said. But Collins is more than a spokesperson for science. He is also a kind of representative, within the scientific community, of American communities that his peers sometimes fail to reach.

Pinker’s first point is right, and, as I said, I wouldn’t—and didn’t—oppose Collins’s nomination as NIH director.But the author then interprets Pinker as making the “Little People” argument: science will be accepted more broadly if scientists accept religion, even if those scientists don’t practice it. In other words, we have to avoid criticizing superstition if America is to fully embrace science.

But while there’s no need for scientists to bang on about religion when we’re teaching about or promoting science, no scientist should ever approve of a belief in unevidenced superstition, or of any system of such supterstition.  Yet that’s exactly what Collins does in his book, and it’s why the book is misguided, flatly wrong about accommodationism, and unenlightening.

New book argues that Alzheimer’s research is flawed, fraudulent, and incompetent

February 13, 2025 • 11:00 am

I have a friend with Alzheimer’s so I was especially depressed to read Jesse Singal’s discussion of a new book, Doctored, claiming that research on both Alzheimer’s disease and drugs that purport to ameliorate is all badly flawed, even fraudulent. You can read Singal’s discussion below (free access by clicking on the headline), and access the book on Amazon by clicking on the cover below.

An excerpt from Singal:

In his book, Piller, an investigative reporter at Science magazine, presents copious evidence of severe fraud, negligence, and buck-passing in Alzheimer’s research. From fabricated images published in major research journals (many of them still unretracted) to data manipulation conducted by pharmaceutical companies to the complete negligence of federal watchdogs, Piller’s reporting demonstrates indisputably that the field of Alzheimer’s research is in sorry shape.

Things are so bad, in fact, that the dominant theory that has guided researchers’ efforts this century — that Alzheimer’s symptoms are caused by the buildup of proteins called “amyloid plaques” in the brain — is now in serious question. That might explain why, as Piller notes, a recent meta-analysis of the available research found no evidence that any of the available Alzheimer’s drugs cause noticeable improvements in the cognition or daily functioning of patients. We’re two decades and many billions of dollars into the modern era of Alzheimer’s research, and we have precious little to show for it — a particularly dire state of affairs given that this dread condition is only going to hit us harder as America’s population continues to age. Piller’s book, which was released February 4, tells the story of a wild and heartbreaking goose-chase.

While Doctored is gripping in its own right, it also serves as a warning about the collapse of trust in expert authority. Thanks to the capacious new markets for crankery carved out by social and “alternative” media — not to mention a worldwide populist revolt against “the establishment” in general — there’s more grifting and science-denial than ever before, and the worst purveyors of pseudoscientific sludge rake in millions precisely by positioning themselves in opposition to mainstream science.

The lesson for scientists is to clean up their act and to stop misleading people about their work. I mean, I never had any doubt whatever that Alzheimer’s was caused by plaques in the brain.  Now that is not at all certain; the plaques could be a byproduct or a correlate and not a cause. If there’s that much uncertainty about it, why haven’t I heard about it.  Of course, journalists are responsible for this, too, but good scientific journalism is a species going extinct.

I believe that Singal has already been demonized on BlueHairSky, though he hasn’t been banned. The reason: the place is full of immigrants from Twitter who are “progressive” liberals and couldn’t stand the free speech on X. Singal described his apostasy: 

The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and TheEconomist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”

But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.

Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”

Back to his own Substack, though; Singal won’t win many friends by arguing that both scientists and liberals have exacerbated the problem, the former by acting precipitously or even duplicitously (the attempt to dismiss a lab-leak theory for the covid virus by scientific officials in the Biden ambit is a good example), while the left-wing public by always saying “trust the science” without realizing that a. scientists are human, with all the good and bad behavior that implies and b. science like investigating covid moves quickly, and what is true today could be false tomorrow.

But I shouldn’t exculpate the Right as well. After all, that’s the side of the political spectrum that still pushes creationism as well as quacks like RFK Jr. And Trump and his cronies are busy slashing scientific research almost willy-nilly. Singal, though, concentrates on the Left, perhaps because that’s where he resides:

At a time of such uncertainty and such dangerous overcorrection, it can feel awkward or difficult to point out, as Piller does in Doctored, just how broken some of our cherished mainstream scientific institutions are. Isn’t that playing right into Trump’s hands?

I don’t think so. The strategy adopted by many mainstream liberals in response to the populist surge — effectively, plugging our ears and chanting “trust the science” over and over — might be comforting, in that it offers a Manichaean worldview in which improving the world is a relatively straightforward matter of convincing people of their own ignorance so that they will board the science train with the rest of us.

But this effort has clearly failed. Some populist distrust of mainstream science is unwarranted and harmful, such as most strains of vaccine skepticism, but in plenty of instances, they are more or less correct not to automatically trust mainstream scientists, even if they arrive at that conclusion for reasons some of us might find uncouth. (Update: I added ‘automatically’ post-publication because I think it’s an important modifier here.)

In other words, while it’s easy to accuse those red-staters out there of exhibiting an alarming lack of faith in science, especially now that their wrecking-ball avatar is in power, it’s harder — and arguably just as important — to ask whether perhaps we have too much faith in it. The scientific establishment hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory in recent decades, given the replication crises that have roiled multiple fields, the data-fraud scandals popping up everywhere from cancer research to business-school psychology, and the frequently overconfident proclamations experts made about thorny Covid-era issues like mask mandates and school closures. And yet liberals tend to continue to reflexively trust many institutions that haven’t earned it, to the point where some of us have turned this sentiment into a mantra: “Science is real,” you will see on signs planted in front of many liberal homes.

I will read this book, as I’m particularly interested in how “fraud” was involved in Alzheimer’s research. Here’s one bit from Singal:

Piller’s book provides numerous damning examples of the difference between science as we idealize it and science as it is practiced by real-life human beings. For example, much of the data fraud in Alzheimer’s research, alleged and proven, involves doctored images. This fraud was uncovered not by journal editors or peer-reviewers — the individuals supposedly responsible for such quality-control — but by unpaid sleuths “who use pseudonyms to post comments” online, as he writes, in the hopes of someone who matters noticing and acting. (One notable exception is Elizabeth Bik, a Dutch microbiologist and legendary image sleuth who has taken on Alzheimer’s fraud.)

Who would have thought that we’d be catching so much fraudulent work by analysis of published images. One might conclude that reviewers of manuscripts aren’t doing their work, but I suspect that a lot of the fraud involves the same images repeated in different papers, and no reviewer has time to compare images in a submitted manuscript to other images by the same authors, but in different journals.

Doctored was released February 4 of this year.

To avoid making this post too long, I’ve put the book-publisher’s (Simon and Schuster’s) description below the fold. Click “read more” to see it:

Continue reading “New book argues that Alzheimer’s research is flawed, fraudulent, and incompetent” →

Another wonky critique of determinism in a review of Sapolsky’s book “Determined”

January 26, 2025 • 11:30 am

I’ve read Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, and it’s pretty good, making a material—in his view, neurological—case for determinism, though the book is a bit long and can be tedious in parts if you don’t want to plow through a lot of neurobiology. But I think that in the end he makes his case (of course, I’m a hardcore determinist so I’d agree!). If you don’t want to read 528 pages, there’s also Sam Harris’s Free Will or Gregg Caruso’s books on free will (he’s a determinist).

But Sapolsky’s book has gotten some negative reviews, and I should have realized that writing about determinism will immediately get people’s hackles up, because their feeling of having free will (and I’ll be talking here about libertarian “you-could-have-chosen-otherwise” free will) is so strong that they can brook no determinism. I’ve already recounted how I was menaced by a a jazz musician for intimating that is “extemporaneous” solos were determined before he ever played them, and was also kicked out of a friend’s house simply for calmly espousing and explaining determinism. As I always say, it’s harder for me to convince a creationist that evolution is true than to convince a “free willer” that determinism is true. And there are a lot more of the latter than the former!

But of all the reviews I’ve read of Sapolsky’s book, by far the worst just appeared in what was once a great venue, the New York Review of Books. (It went downhill fast when its wonderful editor Robert B. Silvers died in 2017.)  The review is free to access (also archived here), and you can read by clicking on the headline below.  It shows no understanding of the free-will controversy, or of science itself, and offers no alternative to determinism (it has to be some magical nonphysical agent that can affect material objects), though I suspect the author, because of her frequent references to God and theology, might believe that free will has a goddy supernatural origin. (Even if it doesn’t, libertarian free will has to rely on something supernatural.) Here’s the description of the author from the NYRB:

Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford. She is currently writing a book about the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the history of evolutionary theory. (February 2025)

Although I’m usually loath to dwell on credentials, a historian, even of biology, is not the person to review Sapolsky’s book. Perhaps a philosopher or a neurologist, but I can explain the pervasive awfulness of Riskin’s review only by appealing to massive ignorance of the topic.

I really don’t want to go through this long review bit by bit, but I’ll highlight a few weird things.

Ignorance of science.  Riskin doesn’t realize that getting evidence for phenomena (e.g., evolution) is very often a step-by step-process: you have an initial hypothesis, and then you either reinforce or reduce the likelihood of its being true with new data. This is a Bayesian approach, though often it’s implicit rather than specified using Bayes’s theorem.  You don’t “prove” determinism or free will, you simply gather evidence that makes one of them more likely. I would note that determinism should have high priors simply because our brains and bodies and environments, the source of our behaviors, affect our behaviors materially–usually through neuronal wiring.  (That’s why Sapolsky concentrates so much on neurons.) And material objects universally obey the laws of physics.

Riskin WANTS determinism to be proved, and says that Sapolsky doesn’t do it. But I say she’s put the bar too high, that Sapolsky makes a good case and that, combined with the presupposition that true libertarian free will must involve forces that we don’t know about—while the laws of physics appear to apply universally—should put Riskin on the defensive (which she is).

Not only are we “not captains of our ships,” he writes, “our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.” (This gives a taste of Sapolsky’s late-night-dorm-room literary style.) [JAC: it’s not ALL like that, so her comment is inaccurate.]

How does he know? Because of science. Sapolsky tells us that “the science of human behavior shows” it to be deterministic. But none of the scientific evidence he offers turns out to demonstrate this. He describes psychological studies revealing changes in people’s electroencephalograms (EEGs) taking place milliseconds before they were aware of making a decision, but he dismisses these—reasonably enough—as “irrelevant.” He presents other studies demonstrating that people can be subconsciously manipulated; that hormones, cultural beliefs, and moral values influence behavior; and that maturation, aging, and experience induce alterations in people’s brains and bodies with corresponding behavioral changes. After each discussion he asks, “Does this disprove free will?” and responds—again reasonably—with “nah,” “nope,” “certainly not,” and “obviously not.” Readers might wonder, equally reasonably, why they’ve slogged through all this irrelevant nonevidence.

That might be a fair criticism of Sapolsky’s style, but I don’t remember him saying that this evidence is irrelevant (it’s been a while since I read the book). But I do think that predicting behaviors before one is conscious of performing them raises the priors of determinism, as do the many, many ways that you can trick people into thinking they have agency when they don’t (brain stimulation, effects of drugs, computer experiments) or thinking they are not doing something consciously when they are (Ouija boards). Sean Carroll’s essay “On Determinism” (with extensive quotes by Massimo Pigliucci) makes a good case that the universality of the laws of physics leaves no room for libertarian free will. (Sean is a compatibilist and, although a determinist, says we have “free will” in a different sense. Dan Dennett used to say the same thing.)

More waving away of the notion of  proof:

Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds. Here’s another from Sapolsky’s final chapter: “What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning.” This might sound like the opposite of saying that science shows there’s a divine intelligence behind the world-machine, but it’s the direct descendant of that earlier claim, and comes to the same evacuation of meaning and agency from the mortal world. This isn’t a scientific proposition. It remains what it has been from the beginning: a theology.

This is wrong. One can gather data for and against determinism. If, for example, we found out that people could move objects by thinking about them, that would suggest that there is some nonmaterial brain force that can actually influence events, buttressing (but not “proving”) the case for free will. And saying that determinism is “a theology” is also wrong, for theology in the West is involved in exegesis of the Bible and beliefs in a supernatural being.

What’s the alternative to determinism?  Here Riskin is silent, though it looks from her frequent references to God and theology that she sees divine action as a possible counter to determinism and a buttressing of free will. (I can’t be sure of this, though, as Riskin doesn’t lay out what she sees as a viable alternative to determinism.) Riskin has described herself as a “Jewish atheist”, and given that she herself doesn’t see divine provenance out there, the onus on her is to admit that she is invoking some kind of supernatural but non-Goddy action.

Her only argument seem to be that because people look like they have “agency” (and they do in the trivial sense of being able to do things), this is evidence for free will. For example, this part seems deeply confused:

It’s because the many factors influencing behavior, Sapolsky thinks, place the burden of proof on defenders of human agency. It’s they who need to show that neurons are “completely uninfluenced” by any external factors and that “some behavior just happened out of thin air.” But why must human behavior be either deterministic or impervious to any influence? Sapolsky doesn’t explain; he takes as given that to show any influence at all is to show a determining influence. Similarly, he writes that we have “no control” over our biology, culture, or environment. Sure, we don’t control these things, but there’s an important difference between not controlling something and having no effect on it, or at least so anyone with teenagers is inclined to hope. Biology isn’t insulated from behavior any more than behavior is from biology. As Sapolsky himself points out, virtually everything a person does has an effect on their physiology. And a wealth of empirical evidence from Aristotle to Oprah suggests that people can indeed have cultural influence.

What is the sweating reviewer trying to say here? That there is some free will? I cannot tell. In fact, her own confusion and incoherent arguments seem to be imputed to Sapolsky, as if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve read the book, and I disagree. And “cultural influence” my tuchas! What does that have to do with refuting determinism?

Is there a god in this argument? The author makes the old “why is there something instead of nothing” argument:

Sapolsky’s turtles are of course metaphorical; they stand for deterministic causes, and by “a turtle floating in the air” he means a magical event. We must accept a strictly causal chain extending back to the beginning of time or acknowledge that we believe in miracles. But why are these our only choices? And are they really so different? Wouldn’t a chain of deterministic causes imply a miracle of some sort at the beginning—the old infinite regress problem rearing its domed shell again?

Yes, and we don’t know why there is something instead of nothing, though there have been some scientific suggestions that do NOT involve miracles. And obviously since Riskin is an atheist, she doesn’t believe in miracles. So what is her answer. She doesn’t tell us.

More touting of “agency:

Sapolsky tells the story of Phineas Gage, who suffered a metal rod through the brain while working on a construction site in Vermont in 1848 and was never quite the same afterward. He offers Gage as evidence that people’s personalities depend on their “material brains,” which he thinks poses a challenge to anyone who wants to defend the idea of free will. But why should the fact that humans and their brains are made of material parts mean there’s no such thing as human agency? There’s a good answer, but it’s historical rather than scientific: because determinism retains crucial elements of the theology from which it arose, according to which the material world was a passive artifact lacking any agency of its own.

It would be nice if Riskin would tell us what she means by “agency”.  Real “I could have made either choice” agency or simply the appearance of agency? The intimation that determinism is a form of theology again arises, but denial of free will in the world is simply not theology. It’s analogous to denial of a supernatural being, which Riskin presumably does in her atheism. Is this atheism theological?

I won’t go on here, as I don’t want to waste my time. I will simply say that Riskin sounds like she’s trying to be clever, but in so doing fails to confect a consistent argument against determinism. Her sniping at Sapolsky may occasionally hit home, but she comes nowhere close to dispelling determinism, simply because she doesn’t engage in the necessarily arguments. Read for yourself how she throws in lots of historical figures like Darwin and Paley and Laplace to show her erudition, but doesn’t deal with what libertarian free will would really entail. 

This egregious review also goes to show how far the mighty New York Review of Books has fallen. Yes, it likes cleverness and erudition, but in the old days it also liked substantive arguments in its reviews. Riskin doesn’t provide any. But don’t take my word for it; if you’re interested in the topic, read the review and see if you can find any structure or coherence in it.

 

h/t: Barry

Books I read and am reading

December 18, 2024 • 11:45 am

It’s time to tell each other what we’re reading and what we think of the books. The object, of course, is to give all of us hints about what we might want to read.

I’ve just finished two books, both of them good  (of course both were recommended by a friend who knows good writing), and I recommend both, but especially this first one, which is superb. Click on the cover to go to the Amazon site:

There’s a Wikipedia article about this 1999 novel here, but don’t read it if you don’t want to see the whole plot. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it’s about a Japanese-Korean man, Franklin Hata, who has moved to a small suburban town in New York, running a pharmacy-supplies store. He’s done well and has, in fact, become his town’s model citizen, eventually giving up his store and living a happy and prosperous retirement, having adopted, as a single man, a Korean girl named Sunny.

The one unhappy aspect of his life is that he can’t seem to form stable love relationships, not with Sunny nor with any of the several women he fancies. The reason involves a series of flashbacks to when Hata was serving in the Japanese Army in World War II (there are flashbacks involving nearly every relationship in the book), and a relationship he developed at that time, which haunts his whole existence. I will say no more, except that the prose is beautiful (a sine qua non for novels I like). HIGHLY recommended, and it should have won more awards than it did. I don’t think it was made into a movie, but it really should have been.

Here’s the book I just finished (click to go to Amazon site):

That one, from 2005, also has a Wikipedia page. Nathan Glass, stricken with cancer, moves to Brooklyn to live out his days in a pleasant urban environment (he’s the opposite of Franklin Hata, who hated cities). He meets his nephew, and then ensues series of random and unpredictable episodes involving an antique bookstore, long-lost relatives, and fractious relationships with other people.  It’s a good read, and a short one, so it’s a good book to take along on a trip or the beach (if you happen to live in a warm place). I would recommend it, but not nearly as highly as I would A Gesture Life.

I’m not going to read the other three essays in the Ta-Nehisi Coates book The Message, for his Israel-essay debacle put me off him for a while. Instead, I have two books in line. I started the first one, below, last night. It’s from 2001 and I have found but not read its Wikipedia page. (Click to go to the Amazon site.)

After that one, I’ll attack this monster, which I’ve requested on interlibrary loan (I have no more room to put any books I buy, so I get them all from the University Library). Click to go to the Amazon page. At 864 pages, this one is a monster, but, unlike the kids, I like long books. It was published in 2004, is highly regarded, and has its own Wikipedia page that I refuse to read.

It seems that I’m on a fiction kick lately, which isn’t usual for me, but the books that my literary advisor recommends, which have all been good, are guaranteed not to contain a clunker. As for nonfiction, I’m still waiting for Robert Caro to produce his fifth volume of the LBJ biography that I love so much (I think it’s the best biography ever written, at least that I’ve read), but Caro is now 89 and it’s a race against time.  The previous bio that I thought was the best, William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, was abruptly truncated after volume 1 because Manchester died. I’d still recommend reading the first volume, even though it ends right as Winnie becomes Prime Minister and things would be getting even more interesting.

Your turn. Which books have you read lately, and which do you recommend (or not recommend)?

Ta-Nehisi Coates and his ignorant demonization of Israel

December 15, 2024 • 9:30 am

A year before last September, I spent three weeks in Israel, visiting Tel Aviv for a week and Jerusalem for two weeks. I also got two one-day tours, one to Masada and the Dead Sea for sightseeing, and the other a “security tour” of the defensive environs of Jerusalem given by the head of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). While there, I deliberately looked for signs of apartheid within Israel: signs of Israeli Arabs being treated as inferiors by Israeli Jews. I didn’t see any: Arabs and Jews seemed to mix completely in restaurants, trains, and trams. But of course my visit was short, superficial, and there might have been discrimination that I simply didn’t see. In light of that, all I can say is that “I didn’t see any apartheid, but my visit to Israel was short and superficial.”

Unfortunately, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose visit to Israel and Palestine was much shorter than mine (10 days total) does not refrain from making sweeping pronouncements. And that is because he clearly went to the area (sponsored and guided by anti-Israeli groups) with a preconception: he wanted to show that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is closely analogous to American’s treatment of blacks, even during slavery.  His visit was thus tendentious and what he wrote about it (the last of four essays in the book below) is incomplete, misguided, and, to be honest, shameful.

Below is Coates’s new the book of essays; click on it to go to the Amazon site.  I read only the last (but most talked-about) essay, “The Gigantic Dream,” 117 pages long.  If you know anything about the situation in Israel and Palestine, and the history thereof, you will spot immediately how tendentious, erroneous, and damaging to Israel Coates’s essay is. And some reviewers have called him out for it, though of course the Israel-haters defend him.

Using the four categories of lies that Francis Collins lays out in his own new book The Road to Wisdom, I would say that Coates’s dilations on Israel fall between “delusions” and “bullshit.” That is, he is not intentionally lying, but I think his view is warped by his immersion in American racism, and I believe he knows that there is far more to the story than he’s telling. In fact, he has been corrected by both interviewers and reviewers about his distortions, but he hasn’t changed his mind.

The theme of his book could be summarized by saying, à la Orwell, “Israel bad, Palestine good.”  To arrive at this theme, he has to completely neglect anything bad ever done by the Palestinians and anything good ever done by Israel. But I’m getting ahead of myself:

There are the usual accusations of genocide and apartheid on Israel’s part (the apartheid is supposed to occur within Israel, with Jews oppressing Israeli Arabs), but the most obvious omissions are those of Palestinian terrorism and of Israel’s repeated offers of a state to Palestine.

What, for example, do you make of Coates’s repeated beefing about having to wait for long periods at checkpoints, or about Israeli soldiers at those checkpoints glaring at him?  Could the plethora of checkpoints have something to do with Palestinian terrorism and an attempt to keep murderers out of Israel? You won’t hear that from Coates. Nor does he mention the First and Second Intifada.  Will you hear that Palestine won’t allow a single Jew to live in Gaza or the Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank (areas A and B)? Isn’t that apartheid? If not, why not? Remember that fully 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, like the one in the first video below.

If you didn’t know about the Palestinian terrorism that’s killed Israelis ever since the seventh century (with two big pogroms in 1929 and 1936), you wouldn’t realize the context of much of Coates’s complaints. But he has a point to make: the treatment of Israel towards Palestinians—or, indeed, of its own Arab citizens—is precisely analogous to Americans’ treatment of slaves and the subsequent Jim Crow laws.  But you’d have to squint pretty hard to see Israel doing anything in Israeli that resembles even slightly the purchase and use of slaves, or of forcing Israeli Arabs to bow and kowtow to Israeli Jews.

Coates mentions the two-state solution, floated by one person he met, but he doesn’t mention that such a solution has been offered to the Israelis four or five times, and every time it has been rejected—by the Palestinians.  If there is apartheid and genocide to be seen, simply look at the first charter of Hamas, as well as its behavior and the statements of Iran, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and many other Arab groups sworn to extirpate Israel. There is of course no mention of the events of October 7, 2023, but the book came out on October 1, 2024, and perhaps, given that there’s about a year’s lead time on publishing many books, Coates couldn’t fit that event in. But I don’t believe Coates would have mentioned it anyway (not even one inserted footnote?), for the butchery of that day spoils his narrative. Would Coates admit now the truth that Hamas, proud of that day, has sworn to repeat it over and over again? Remember, Coates says not one word about Palestinian terrorism.

Coates dwells heavily on the nakba, or “catastrophe,” originally seen as the humiliation suffered by five Arab armies (and volunteers from two other Arab states) who invaded Israel right after independence but was routed by a lowly army of Jews.  The nakba was subsequently reconceived by Arafat to mean the “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel” after the invasion.  Coates implies repeatedly that, without provocation, the Jewish military simply slaughtered Arabs wholesale after their invasion.  This is not the case: many Arabs fled because they were frightened, many other because Arab countries ordered them to leave so the Jews could be destroyed before Arabs could return, and some fled because they started trying to kill Jews and were driven out militarily or destroyed.

The Arab invasion of Israel, beginning on its day of independence in 1948, was certainly not a genocide of Palestinians. Coates discusses the “massacre” by Israeli soldiers of the Arab village of Deir Yassin (an event badly distorted by Wikipedia, which repeatedly mentions rapes that never happened), but he doesn’t note that the attack was prompted by the infiltration of the village by Arabs who fired on Israelis. About hundred people died and, unfortunately, some non-combatants were bystanders in the line of fire.

To see another view of this battle (one that Coates, not interested in hearing all sides, neglects), read The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (and a review of that book in the Middle East Quarterly).

As for Coates’s writing, one petulant reviewer (the reviews are mixed) called Coates a “narcissist”. When I saw that after reading the essay myself, I said, “Precisely right.” Not only is there Coates’s hubris of assessing a messy, complex, and historically convoluted conflict after only a ten-day visit, but his writing is deeply self-absorbed. Coates is far more interested in his own reactions than in talking to people on both sides. A soldier glares at him, and he’s off to the races.

But Coates’s mission is not to talk to Israelis and Palestinians, but to show that Israel’s racism parallels that of America’s. It’s as if he needs to fill in a jigsaw puzzle, and is looking for just the right pieces to unite Israel and American segregationism.  I won’t dwell on the folly of such comparisons, except to say that Coates has a bill to sell. He seems to have been prompted in this solipsism by the success of his famous Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations”—a good piece of writing—an article that he brings up repeatedly.

And since Coates is tendentious, let me just give the other side, but in the words of other people.  First, how is Israel enacting apartheid against its own people? (I am construing this accusation as one of intra-Israel apartheid, not the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine.) I have tried to find laws in which Arab Israelis are discriminated against by Jewish Israelis. I could find only one discriminatory law, and it discriminates in favor of Arabs: they are not required to serve three years in the IDF unless they want to. There are also laws that discriminate among Jews themselves, with—until recently—Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews being exempt from military service as well, though that is supposed to end in a few years.  It is curious that those who level accusations of apartheid against Israel Israeli Arabs never come up with tangible examples.

If you want to dig deeper into the apartheid accusation, here are two videos, one long and one short. In the first short one (ten minutes), an Israeli Arab who served in the IDF fields a number of hard questions about whether he experienced discrimination. The answer was “no”:

. . . and here is the stupendous Natasha Hausdorff discussing the “apartheid” accusation with an American professor Professor Orde Kittrie from Arizona State. Kittrie is a specialist in international and criminal law, and, as I’m presenting this as a palliative to the ignorance of Coates. You will hear Kittrie’s opinion that the apartheid accusation is baseless. (At 31 minutes in, Natasha gives some viewers’ questions—and some of her own—that Kittrie answers.)

Here are the YouTube notes:

Chair: Natasha Hausdorff

A new UN Commission of Inquiry of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is poised to accuse Israel of apartheid.

Professor Kittrie discusses this Inquiry and its mandate, and the potential relationship with prosecutions by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The mandate’s reference to apartheid was apparently inspired by a lengthy report, accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid, published by Human Rights Watch (HRW). However this report is based on a definition of “apartheid” which is not found in the ICC’s Statute or the International Convention on Apartheid. Professor Kittrie discusses the different definitions of apartheid, reasons why the apartheid charge is wrong even under HRW’s definition, and options for responding.

Finally, here’s an article from Fathom taking apart Amnesty International’s 2022 accusation that Israel was an “apartheid state.”   Click to read:

Read, watch, and judge for yourself. In my view, Coates, while his writings on American racism may be good (I’ve read only the Atlantic article), his piece on Israel and Palestine is reprehensible, misguided, full of distortions, and, in the end, is pretty much racist, if not antisemitic. If you read it, please do so with some knowledge of the politics and history of the region.

h/t: Malgorzata