Category: journalists behaving badly

More woo from the NYT

September 21, 2026 • 9:40 am

UPDATE: Here’s a comment that Wildman herself left after her piece.  Notice how she characterizes what scientists have found: “It doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks, but how the moment makes the bereaved feel, and where it places us in our grief.”  One could paraphrase that as “I don’t care if it’s true so long as it makes me feel better.”  It is of course tragic that Wildman lost her daughter at only 14, but that doesn’t mean that people speak to us after they’re dead.

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I’ve banged on over the years about how the New York Times is soft on woo—this includes religion—as has Greg Mayer (see references here). The paper still has a weekly religion column, “Believing“, written by a nonbelieving ex-Mormon, albeit a writer extraordinarily sympathetic to faith.  There is no “nonbelieving” column, nor anything about why people reject faith.  In the introduction linked just above, author Lauren Jackson says that the paper’s readers were the impetus for this column:

Earlier this year, we published a series of articles about how people experience religion and spirituality now. In response, thousands of you told us you wanted more: You wanted us to expand our reporting on how ancient ideas are appearing in our very modern lives. You wanted a space for both believers and nonbelievers to share their stories. You wanted, above all, for us to take the subject seriously.

In other words, readers had a “woo-shaped” hole in their being.

The paeans to faith demanded by readers extended to faith in woo. After all, belief in woo—dowsing, mediums, astrology, reincarnation, facilitated communication, and so on—are, like religion, belief in unsubstantiated phenomena that is based on faith.  This is what the NYT readers want, perhaps as a palliative in these parlous times.

Now the NYT has done it again, in an essay by Senior Opinion editor Sarah Wildman. Greg, who has taught a popular course on “Science and Pseudoscience” at the University of  Wisconsin-Parkside, called the piece to my attention, and, sure enough, it’s a type specimen of faith.

The title says it all: mediums, who pass on messages from dead to living people, “may be on to something.”  Unfortunately, tests of mediums over the years show that there’s nothing to it save duplicity (including some mediums who have bought into the idea that they really can talk to the dead) and credulousness.  James Randi’s “million dollar challenge”, which ran from 1964 to 2015, offered a cool million bucks to anybody who could demonstrate paranormal powers under Randi’s rules designed to rule out fraud.  Thousands of people applied, but nobody passed the tests, including a medium.

Click on the screenshot to read the latest osculation of woo; you can also read it for free at this archived site.

There are two forms of “reading” that mediums use: “hot” and “cold”. In “hot” readings, the “psychic” finds out stuff about the client, her relatives, and her life in advance, and then spits it back during a session, claiming it came from the dead. From Wikipedia:

Hot reading is a technique used when giving a psychic reading in stage magic performances, or in other contexts. In hot reading, the reader uses information about the person receiving the reading (for example, from background research or overhearing a conversation) which the receiver is not aware that the reader already knows. Hot reading is commonly used in conjunction with cold reading (where no previously gathered information is used) and can explain how a psychic reader can get a specific claimed “hit” of accurate information

In “cold” readings, the psychic doesn’t know about the subject in advance, but uses a number of cues to confect a message that seems real:. From Wikipedia:

Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, and mediums.  Without prior knowledge, a practiced cold-reader can quickly obtain a great deal of information by analyzing the person’s body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. during a line of questioning. Cold readings commonly employ high-probability guesses, quickly picking up on signals as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not. The reader then emphasizes and reinforces any accurate connections while quickly moving on from missed guesses. Psychologists believe that this appears to work because of the Barnum effect and due to confirmation biases within people.

Neither of these are mentioned by Wildman in her article, nor does she talk about successful efforts to debunk mediums. This lacuna is expanded more because Wildman seems confused about her point. In places she states or implies that messages are really coming from the dead or the beyond, conveying “inexplicably specific knowledge.” In other places, though, she emphasizes that people’s belief that they’ve somehow sensed the presence of the dead, or contacted the dead, is simply a wonderful palliative for their grief; but she doesn’t state explicitly that what they’ve sensed is real.

This mixing of soothing faith and reality makes the whole article a mess.  Nevertheless, both kinds of belief are harmful (see below).

I’ll give some quotes. First, one that mixes both theses (bolding is Wildman’s):

. . . in recent years, researchers have spent considerable, serious effort to examine the psychological impact of perceiving a lost loved one after their passing, and the positive role that can play in what grief therapists describe as our ongoing relationship to those we have lost. Contact, for lack of a better word, can be sensory, auditory, visual, a sense of presence, or smell. It can be spontaneous, reached through meditation or directed therapy or even, sometimes, through mediums who, like this one, offer inexplicably specific knowledge. References to such experiences extend just about as far back in literature as the written word and are not limited by geography, or culture.

Some studies put the proportion of people who have perceived the presence or signs of their lost loved ones at around 60 percent. Sympathetic psychologists call these sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased or even “after-death communication.” (Others — perhaps less sympathetic — call them “bereavement hallucinations.”) The therapists I spoke to for this essay aren’t trying to determine the veracity of the supernatural. They are trying to learn how perceiving the presence of the lost can lift the bereaved from their darkest spaces.

In study after study, the sensation of contact with a deceased loved one plays a rather remarkable role in alleviating grief. In one recently published review of 14 psychological studies across seven countries, spanning over 1,900 participants, researchers found that a majority of those who reported experiencing the sensation of their lost loved one had had some sort of “emotionally restorative experiences that contributed to coping with their grief.” That doesn’t surprise me. It is bleak finality that leaves the griever reeling.

Note that she mixes the “inexplicably specific knowledge” (yes, inexplicable), with the palliative properties of simply perceiving signs from the dead or of the dead. Later in the piece she adduces more “evidence” that mediums are trawling up something inexplicable.

Here’s the one mention of doubt, but it expresses an anti-scientific attitude:

The study of these occurrences and their impact on grief has long been prejudiced by exactly what you’d expect: the surety of scientists and skeptics that all of it — mediums, sensations, signs — might be about as real as a dime-store Ouija board, a 19th-century séance or, worse, a momentary psychotic episode. William James, the philosopher and psychologist, who was himself sympathetic to the idea, published a study of mentally healthy individuals in 1890 and noted the peculiar insistence of the “hallucinations of the sane.” Sigmund Freud once called it “hallucinatory wishful psychosis.”

Oh, those cold, nasty scientists who are sure that psychic phenomena are delusions! How vicious they are to dispel comforting illusions! But I don’t think scientists have ever denied that mediums may be able to mitigate grief. Of course they do—that’s why mediums are in business! Scientists are concerned not with the psychological effect of mediums so much as with whether they are really doing what they say they’re doing.

Here is Wildman is on the frequency and therapeutic value of having experiences of the dead:

Nevertheless, researchers have long recognized how widespread the experience is. In 1971, Dr. William Dewi Rees conducted a study of 227 widows and 66 widowers in Wales in which nearly half — half! — reported what was referred to as “hallucinations” of their lost spouse. Most of them had told no one. Dr. Rees noted the episodes were considered “normal and helpful,” and nodded to the similar experience of widows in Japan.

Again, we’re not denying that people dream about, long for, and even experience the presence and feelings of the dead, just as we don’t deny that people have experiences of God. The question is this: do such experiences show real communication with dead people and that God exists?

Towards the end, Wildman becomes more and more invested in the reality of psychic contact with the dead:

In conversation, Mr. Ginsberg told me that, though he suspects a large percentage of mediums can’t offer what they promise, he has had too many inexplicable experiences not to believe in some form of continued communication with his daughter, both through mediums and on his own. It makes her loss a bit easier to carry.

After Mr. Ginsberg told me about a number of inexplicable occurrences, I offered him one of mine. Once I was sitting in a coffee shop, describing to a friend the lack of resolution I felt over Orli’s untimely death [Orli was Wildman’s daughter who died at 14]. When I got up, the song lyric playing as I entered the bathroom was “Find a way to make some peace / with how the story ends.” It was a song by the Midnight that I had never heard. It felt like magic.

I told several of the researchers I spoke to about instances like this that feel peculiarly transcendent.

To me it would feel like a coincidence, and these coincidences happen all the time.  Wildman has undoubtedly often grieved the loss of and thought about her daughter. How many different songs must she have heard before, during, or after such times? What are the chances she would find one at least vaguely relevant to her grief? Different kinds of songs are heard by grieving people, but they report only the ones that feel “transcendent.”

Finally, here’s the kicker meant to show that something weird and numinous is going on. Here’s what Wildman says after she had calls with the well known medium Laura Lynne Jackson and her press person. The “prediction” apparently comes from Jackson herself:

Ms. Jackson’s press person told me that when she does an interview she typically does not also offer a reading. Part of me hoped she might anyway. How could I not?

Just before we wrapped up our call, she asked me: Did Orli have a weird stuffed animal? “Not like a teddy bear,” she added. I laughed. Orli had an anteater stuffed animal, pillow-size, I said. It is still on her bed. Ms. Jackson mentioned her own spiritual signs are armadillos, aardvarks and anteaters. Receiving a sign of an unusual animal like this one, she said, was a wink to us both from Orli. She said I’d receive such a sign, and it would arrive as an image.

I didn’t tell anyone about this conversation.

Some weeks later, one of my old friends from college texted me out of the blue. It happened to be Orli’s birthday. “I just saw this,” he wrote. He attached an image of a belt buckle he said he planned to buy. It had, he said, made him think of us.

On it was a brass armadillo.

Oy! Orli had a stuffed anteater, not an armadillo. This is a classic example of how readers dupe their clients (and sometimes themselves). First, the medium asks a generic question, and, upon receiving the answer, feeds the answer  directly back to the client as though it was conveyed by the spirits, and not  just moments earlier by the client; Wildman just laps up this classic cold reading move. Then, when she hears about an armadillo, Wildman falls prey to what students of readings call “free interpretation”: she finds a way to turn a mention of one thing into a mention of something else, converting a psychic “miss” into a psychic “hit”. How far off from an anteater would an animal have to be before it was not considered a sign from the spirits? Would an elephant fit the bill, as it too has a long snout?

All we have here is the kind of coincidence that many of us have experienced. Or perhaps Ms. Wildman’s old friend knew about Orli’s stuffed animal and was sending a belt buckle in that knowledge. Who knows? What is clear is that closing the essay in this way suggests that Wildman was receiving the psychic “sign” predicted by the medium.

You might ask, sensibly, “What is the harm of making people feel good by telling them stuff about their dead loved ones, even if that stuff is made up or ‘cold read'”?

You know the answer. There are two palpable harms. The first is that people pay good money to psychics. Jackson doesn’t given prices on her site, but her waiting list is years and years long. But it’s big business. As the AP notes,

“The psychic services industry — which encompasses various specialties such as astrology, palm-reading, psychic readings and fortunetelling — generated an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2024 and employed 105,000 people, according to market research firm IBIS World.”

Since there’s no proof these people are doing anything that’s really psychic, though they may be soothing people, this is a form of therapy in numinous clothing.

The second harm is that, like religion, belief in the reality of psychic stuff weakens our skepticism, making us more liable to believe other unsubstantiated stuff, conspiracy theories, and other claims without evidence (“the election was stolen”).  Now I am not going to be the one to tell a dying relative that she’s not going to heaven, nor would I cast a cold eye on a psychic reading that soothed a widower.

But with this article, the NYT is buttressing the reality of psychic phenomena, and buttressing it with the imprimatur of America’s most authoritative newspaper.  The piece is irresponsible, as was the editor who let it go by. Once again the Paper of Record is meeting America’s demand for woo when it should be dispelling that woo with facts. Will there be an op-ed arguing that mediums are fraudulent? I doubt it.

Randi exposed many of the techniques of mediums and other psychics in the classic PBS Nova film, “Secrets of the Psychics”; it is well worth watching.

 

Gerald Posner: news coverage by the New York Times is unbalanced

September 20, 2026 • 9:30 am

Of course newspapers are allowed to have editorial opinions, usually expressed in op-eds written by the editors, but good newspapers are supposed to remain ideologically and politically neutral in their coverage of the news itself.  And in America the supposedly best newspaper, the New York Times (NYT), expresses its philosophy in a famous motto: “All the news that’s fit to print,” put on the masthead 119 years ago by the paper’s founders.

Now you can debate whether the paper includes all the news that is good to know about (the motto), or whether it includes trivial news of little interest (the latter is, formally, within the ambit of the motto). But the “paper of record,” as it’s called, should surely at least be objective about the news, not slanting it one way or thee other.

If you’ve followed the paper as this site has done, you’ll see that I don’t believe in the objectivity of the NYT’s news coverage.  It is strongly anti-Israel—the subject of this article—and also strongly anti-Trump (see below, and remember I’m talking about the news, not the editorials). While I’m no fan at all of our narcissistic President, I do expect objective coverage in terms of both content and balance. I really do believe in my heart that the NYT hopes that Israel will disappear, and that America will lose our war with Iran.

Gerald Posner, a very formidable figure, has arrived at the same conclusion. If you haven’t heard of Posner, you should have. He’s an investigative journalist who has written 13 books, although the list in Wikipedia comprises 14:

  • Mengele: The Complete Story (1986)
  • Warlords of Crime: Chinese Secret Societies – The New Mafia (1988)
  • Bio-Assassins (1989)
  • Hitler’s Children: Sons and Daughters of Leaders of the Third Reich Talk About Their Fathers and Themselves (1991), ISBN 978-0-394-58299-3
  • Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993), ISBN 978-0-679-41825-2
  • Citizen Perot: His Life and Times (1996), Random House, ISBN 978-0-614-05801-7
  • Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998), ISBN 978-0-375-50082-4
  • Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 (2003), ISBN 978-0-375-50879-0
  • Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power (Music of the Great Lakes) (2003), Random House, ISBN 978-0-375-50062-6
  • Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-U.S. Connection (2005), ISBN 978-1-4000-6291-1
  • Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power – A Dispatch From the Beach (2009), ISBN 978-1-4165-7656-3
  • The Third Man: Was there another bomber in Oklahoma City?(2013),ISBN 978-0-9891-4210-6
  • God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican (2015), Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4165-7657-0
  • Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (2020), Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-1-5011-5189-7

I’ve read the last one, Pharma, and found it a very good and thoroughly documented indictment of Big Pharma (don’t mistake it for Empire of Pain, the story of the Sackler family). At any rate, as Posner himself notes in the tweet below, he’s also written 11 op-eds for the NYT. And lately he’s been disappointed in the paper.

Posner is half Jewish and half Catholic; but, as Grok says, with some links, “Gerald Posner is not a practicing Jew and does not consider himself Jewish. He has said so directly and repeatedly.” That’s relevant because of his indictment of the NYT below.

First, the tweet, which Posner made last Friday:

You can read Posner’s piece at his Substack for free; just click here. The gist of it is in the tweet above, but I’ll quote a bit:

This week gave us a small, almost clinical example of a much larger problem.

Correspondent Isabel Kershner was reporting on NAZA, the wildly controversial Israeli film about IDF conduct in Gaza that received a 25-minute standing ovation and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. In the original version of her story, Kershner wrote that Israelis “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”

Not that they were victims. Instead, that they “view themselves” that way—as though there were another serious way to describe the people murdered, raped, wounded and kidnapped in the Hamas-led assault. Would the Times ever write that Americans “still largely view themselves as the victims” of 9/11?

After a furious online backlash, the Times removed the sentence and attached an Editors’ Note. It blamed “an editing error,” saying the language had been intended to convey Israeli perceptions of the government’s military response but had “inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception.”

I have written corrections in my career. I have had editors save me from my own inaccurate or clumsy phrasing. What I know from decades of reporting is that a sentence casting doubt on whether the roughly 1,200 people killed in Israel and 251 taken hostage on October 7 count as victims does not just materialize on the page. A reporter wrote it. Editors read it but it did not set off an alarm until readers outside the building made enough noise.

That is how a worldview leaks through an editing process.

Now people have lauded the NYT for making that “correction,” but in truth the paper was probably lying: the original wording was not an “editing error”, for the meaning of the original is quite clear. Nor was the correction explanatory: what does it mean to say the phrase was “intended to convey Israeli perceptions of the government’s military response”? The military response was clearly based on the government and IDF viewing themselves as victims of a Hamas attack.

Posner goes after Nicholas Kristof’s infamous “dog rape” piece, too, which was based on anonymous sources:

Then there was Nicholas Kristof’s May 11 opinion column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” I have written about its description of serious allegations of sexual abuse in Israeli detention, including the claim that dogs had been trained to rape Palestinian prisoners. That extraordinary claim was built largely on anecdotal, Hamas-adjacent sourcing that no other serious outlet had independently corroborated or agreed to publish.

The Times’s Opinion editors said the column had been fact-checked and that they found no errors. Executive editor Joe Kahn later said the news department “wouldn’t have done that exact piece,” while also expressing confidence that his Opinion colleagues had done their due diligence, a process he wasn’t part of. Kahn did not repudiate Kristof’s column but his distinction still exposed something readers are entitled to find troubling. A piece the news side would not have done appeared beneath the same New York Times banner, fortified by the same institutional authority.

Inside the building, News and Opinion may be separate countries. To the public, they share a flag. The paper had given its imprimatur to that flawed claim.

Well, I would cut the paper a little slack here, but it’s telling that an op-ed was really a news piece, and a news piece that would not have run as regular news. For one thing, the sources were anonymous.  I have looked for verification of Kristof’s claims and haven’t found any, but Israel is probably still investigating them, which were made in May.

What is telling to me are the statistics—the number of articles, which is what eventually convinced me that the NYT is biased (see also the headlines below):

The case is no longer merely anecdotal. It now has data behind it and the data needs to be described with some care.

Edieal Pinker, a professor of operations research at the Yale School of Management, analyzed 1,559 Times news articles published from October 7, 2023, through June 7, 2024. His paper was peer-reviewed and published in *Studies in Conflict & Terrorism*—an academic journal, not an advocacy website.

Pinker found that 1,423 of the 1,559 articles mentioned neither Israeli casualties after October 7 nor Hamas combatants killed in the ensuing war. “Israel” appeared 27,205 times, compared with 8,499 mentions of “Hamas.” Personal accounts of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering appeared, on average, two out of every three days, while there were nine stretches of at least a week with no mention of Israeli casualties after October 7. During one period, six Hezbollah rocket or anti-tank attacks that wounded Israeli civilians went unmentioned across 25 Times articles about fighting on the northern border.

Those are not merely impressions but countable editorial outcomes.

Pinker himself does not claim that his study proves bias or intent but rather that it documents imbalances that give readers an incomplete picture of the war.

Since the war was between Israel and Hamas, one would expect roughly equal coverage rather than a threefold difference in mentions of Israel versus Hamas. And the lack of mention of Israeli casualties inflicted by Hezbollah is also telling. The view one gets is that Israeli casualties simply aren’t important compared to those of Palestinians, which of course include Hamas terrorists (something that isn’t often mentioned, as they almost invariably are lumped in with “civilians”).

Posner notes this:

The Times responded to Pinker’s newly published study by accusing advocates of “cherry-picking” data and pointing to its own body of work—more than 23,000 articles, photographs and videos since October 7, 2023. It said its reporting had exposed atrocities by Hamas as well as alleged violations of international law by Israel.

That is a defense of volume and range, not a rebuttal of Pinker’s method or findings. The 23,000 figure also covers a longer period and mixes articles with photos and videos, while Pinker studied 1,559 news articles from a defined eight-month window. The two numbers are not competing samples. Invoking the larger one may sound impressive, but it does not answer what Pinker measured inside the smaller one.

But if this was a scientific assertion, reviewers would reject it because it’s trying to refute statistics by simply citing a large mass of articles in which you can find some indictments of Hamas as well as of Israel. And that is cherry picking. The question is how often is one cited versus another. Posner then clarifies his accusation:

I want to be precise about what I am contending. I am not alleging a conspiracy, and I am not saying every Times reporter on this beat acts in bad faith. Still, the imbalance is documented. Whether one labels it “bias” depends partly on the baseline used and partly on a judgment about intent—something a word count cannot establish. My own judgment comes not from one table or one sentence, but from the way the numbers, editorial choices and recurrent lapses fit together.

Israel-Gaza is the sharpest example right now, but it is not the only one. I have seen on other subjects a similar tendency: reporting that lands consistently on one side of a contested question, then treats challenges to its framing as evidence of bad faith rather than legitimate pushback. Israel is simply the case where the evidence this month is hardest to wave away—and where the human stakes are highest.

Posner ends by citing a damning figure about how the public trust in mass media has plummeted:

My own disillusionment is part of a much larger collapse. In 1972, when Gallup began asking Americans whether they trusted the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, 68 percent said they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence. In Gallup’s 2025 survey, the figure was 28 percent—the first time it had fallen below 30. The Times did not cause that collapse by itself. But the country’s most influential newspaper cannot pretend to be merely a bystander to it.

I still read the Times. I also read and watch outlets on all sides of the political spectrum, from Al Jazeera to Fox News. I learn from the different ways they cover the same issue. The Times is different because it continues to trade on the authority of an institution that is supposed to do more than validate the worldview of its core audience.

Indeed.  Of course the pro-Palestinians will deny his claims, but all I can say is that I was never a defender of Israel until October 7 happened and people started saying that Israel brought the Hamas attacks upon itself—and deserved them.  Then I began noticing that the NYT seemed to come down on that side.

And there is the biggest lie—that of Israeli genocide. That lie is easily refuted by looking at the food Israel sent into Gaza (how many armies give sustenance to their opponents?), the polio vaccines sent to Gaza by Israel during the war, and all the warnings that the IDF gave civilians to get out of the way before an imminent attack. For crying out loud, if Israel wanted to wipe out Palestinians as a whole, why didn’t they attack the West Bank after October 7?

If you want to read a scathing indictment of the Big Genocide Lie, read Maarten Boudry’s piece, “They don’t believe it either.”

But I digress.  To show more biased coverage, here’s a screenshot of the headlines from the Saturday NYT.  This is not at all unusual, and I haven’t edited it:

h/t: Luana

The New York Times’s magazine on “How to be cultured” completely neglects science

July 19, 2026 • 10:20 am

I used to pride myself on being “cultured”—knowing not only science but a decent amount about literature, art, the other humanities, and so on (about classical music, however, I’m an ignoramus).  Now, however, I realize I’m a total ignoramus, at least according to the New York Times, which recently published an entire magazine on how to be cultured. Not only does it not include any science, but the “culture” it reveals, in its articles and then the 30-item quiz (which I failed miserably) seems to be largely—but not entirely) “popular culture”. Although I keep up as much as I can with what’s going on today, I don’t have much patience for modern popular music and am very selective in popular literature. To me the quiz was telling: it was the paper’s way of telling you what you need to know to be cultured. It’s part of the “what-you-need-to-know” slant of modern journalism, which strikes me as patronizing.

But let’s hear what an aggrieved article in Physics World  has to say:

The New York Times recently published a 124-page special issue of its Style Magazine entitled “How to be cultured”. According to the cover of this glossy, ad-driven supplement, the contents were “idiosyncratic” but amounted to a “compendium of what you need to know right now”. The material had been “chosen by experts” for the purpose of “teaching readers how to be more cultured”.

Curious as to what would be included, my hopes were raised by the magazine’s lead editorial. It said that the issue “celebrates expertise, a quality ever less valued in our culture today, where learnedness and firsthand research can be overshadowed by slick presentation and dumb certainty”.

Now, I’m not naïve. I know that the New York Times Style Magazine caters to advertisers, who in turn cater to wealthy readers who feel the need to spend gobs of money to get culture. It didn’t therefore surprise me to have to leaf through 40 pages of adverts for jewellery [sic], champagne, watches and home furnishings before finally coming across the table of contents.

I saw headings for film, food, music, theatre, fashion and the visual arts. Shakespeare showed up several times: over half a dozen plays, sonnet #94 and one of his monologues. There were entries for 1930s movies, animated videos and films from Brazil. One page on food and drink covered porridge from Norway, meat from Mexico, lemonade from Vietnam and wine from Austria.

There was no mention of science in “How to be cultured”, nothing at all

Novels from the US, UK, France, Japan, India and Brazil made the list, as did selections of music from medieval times to opera and hip-hop. Samples of theatre, puppetry and architecture made it in too. But there was no mention of science, nothing at all. The closest I found were architectural materials such as plaster, glass, steel and textiles.

Shades of C. P. Snow’s lecture and book Two Cultures, famous for bemoaning the ignorance about science of otherwise educated people. A quote:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?  I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

All of this is missing. Biology is, too. How can you leave out Darwin, gene-sequencing, dark matter, and so on?

You can see the table of contents by clicking the screenshot below, or find the site archived here, though you can’t get to the individual articles. They include:

Film
Literature
Art
Food
Music
Theater
Architecture and Design
Fashion

Each of these has sub-articles. But there is NO SCIENCE!

I won’t go through the selections except to say that while there are some classics (in books: War and Peace, though I would have preferred Anna Karenina; and the 11 unforgettable film performances are decent, with “All About Eve,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Chinatown”, and “Sophie’s Choice,” though they’re short on foreign films).

As for food and fashion, fuhgeddaboudit it: the wine section, for example, is called “How to sound like a sommelier,” and rather than recommending wines to try, it tells you how to say “sophisticated stuff” about the wine.  In other words, the whole section, while good in some places, tells you how to appear cultured without having done the work.

There is simply no way to become acquainted with art, literature, wine, fashion, and the like without having acquired a thirst for learning these areas and absorbing them.  It’s in that sense that I object to an au courant list of what the NYT Millennials tell us we need to be cultured, as if you could watch the recommended movies, read the recommended books, and view the recommended paintings, and then be deemed respectable.

Perhaps I sound like a curmudgeon, but so be it. My objection to the whole enterprise is encapsulated in the 30-question “How Cultured You Are” quiz which you can see by clicking below (or find archived here, though the archived version it won’t tell you the answers). An example of the type of question they ask is also given below.

I took the quiz and my score is below: it’s PATHETIC.  It even tells me what I need bone up on, including reading Kindred, Quicksand and Passing.  And I simply must know these chocolate bars (figure from the article).

Well, that sucks. But my biggest beef is that made by Physics World: WHERE IS THE SCIENCE?  How can you be “cultured” unless you know about at least the greatest scientific advances of our age, if not the Second Law of Thermodynamics. C. P. Snow was right, but the NYT (and the New Yorker) ignore his plaint.  In the modern sophisticated world that New York supposedly exemplifies, science is not “culture.”

NYT news editor says he wouldn’t have run Kristof’s dog-rape column

July 9, 2026 • 9:45 am

The Washington Free Beacon is of course a deeply right wing site, but my policy has been, as you know, to judge stories by their content and not by who publishes them. This story is about a bit of a schism at the New York Times involving Nicholas Kristof’s infamous “dog rape column” (archived here), in which he argued that Israel was guilty of widespread systemic sexual abuse, mostly of prisoners or detainees. There was widespread pushback against Kristof’s claims (see my posts here and here),

 

The highest-ranking news editor at the New York Times, executive editor Joe Kahn, is publicly distancing himself and the paper’s 2,200-person newsroom from a May 11 Times opinion column that accused Israel of using dogs and carrots to rape Palestinian prisoners.

The article, by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose father served on the Nazi side during World War II, was denounced by the Israeli foreign ministry as “Hamas propaganda,” “fabricated,” and a “baseless blood libel.” It also generated a legal threat from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a formal condemnation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The piece relied largely on anonymous or Hamas-affiliated sources.

“It wasn’t edited by the newsroom,” Kahn said in a podcast interview with the media and technology journalist Peter Kafka released Wednesday, July 8. Asked whether he would have published the article in the news pages, Kahn first replied, “we probably wouldn’t have.” Then he provided a more definitive answer: “No, we wouldn’t have done that exact piece.”

Kahn’s statement seems to put him publicly at odds with—and certainly struck a different tone from—Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, who, in a May question-and-answer-format column, defended the article. Asked, “Given the volume of the critical response, do you stand by this column?” she answered, “Yes. … Before publication, Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces. The Times’s standards and legal teams also reviewed the column and offered feedback. After publication, we reviewed the factual challenges that readers and others raised, as is standard practice with any published piece. Editors found no errors.”

Kingsbury did also make the point that “The Times’s news staff in the Middle East played no role in Nick’s column.”

There’s more, but that’s the gist. It’s hard to know what to make of this save that a big news-editor at the NYT says he wouldn’t have run that story. But he does qualify it as “that exact piece”, which leaves room for interpretation. Which “facts” would he have published as news? The rape of prisoners by trained dogs? The systematic rape and torture of Palestinian women who were detained? Since Kingsbury asserts that there were “no errors” in Kristof’s reporting, why did the news side of the paper neglect this story completely?  Did they deem it sufficiently unsupported to not be worth publishing? Who knows?

What it does show is a crack in the Times‘s armor, to the extent that factual assertions made and vetted by the op-ed side of the paper wouldn’t pass muster with the news side.  What’s surprising is that Kahn still has his job.

Here’s Kristof’s reporting on the dogs, the part that got the column all that attention. I hope Israel has investigated or is investigating these claims. If they’re true, someone needs to be punished:

“No one escaped sexual assaults,” he said. “Not all were raped, I would say, but everyone went through humiliating, filthy sexual assaults.” On one occasion, he said, the guards zip-tied his testicles and penis for hours while beating his genitals. For days afterward, he said, he urinated blood.

On one occasion, he said, he was held down and stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.

“They were using cameras to take photos, and I heard their laughs and giggles,” he said. He tried to dislodge the dog, he said, but it penetrated him.

Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners. The journalist said that when he was released, an Israeli official warned him: “If you want to stay alive when you return, do not speak to the media.”

The Times ditched its public editor, but oy, does it need one now!

May 14, 2026 • 9:30 am

There have been a ton of articles criticizing Nicholas Kristof’s poorly sourced and dubious NYT column accusing Israel of widespread sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners (yes, with dogs, too)—most of the critiques noting that Kristof’s sources were unnamed, undocumented, and those that were named had histories of being pro-Hamas.  You can easily find these critiques on social media, but Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, levels a different accusation: not so much at Kristof but at the New York Times itself.

He notes something I overlooked: the paper used to have a “public editor” whose job was to call attention to errors and misreporting in the paper, but the NYT ditched that position nine years ago. Now there is no public editor: their job has been sourced to—get this—social media and readers.  The rationale is that social media itself, combined with reader reaction, will correct errors.  But that’s completely bogus. Yes, readers and social media may point out errors, as they have in this case, but thety also can reinforce them. As you know, social media is a dumpster fire and there’s no guarantee that a clash of ideas and assertions will surely out the truth.

Beyond that, it is the responsibility of the paper itself to correct errors, apologizing for them and admitting guilt. The NYT won’t do that, for it’s pushed back on the criticism of Kristof’s delusions, defending them by asserting—get this again—that he won two Pulitzer Prizes. With two nods like that, how can he be wrong? Here’s all the NYT has said:

In larger print; you can judge for yourself how extensive the “fact-checking” was, given that there was no public editor to describe it:

The deep-sixing of a public editor is almost an admission that a paper has no interest in correcting itself. You can see from the Times‘s doubling down in this latest case that the NYT is standing behind assertions of systemic sexual torture in the Israeli government, as well as in using trained dogs to rape prisoners.  The fact that Kristof’s factual claims were made in an op-ed does not excuse the paper.

Click below to read:

Some quotes:

In 2014, the New York Times had a Public Editor. Her name was Margaret Sullivan. When it emerged that Nicholas Kristof had spent years platforming a fabricator named Somaly Mam, Sullivan wrote that Kristof “owes it to his readers to explain, to the best of his ability and at length, what happened and why.” Kristof did. He wrote a column titled “When Sources May Have Lied.” Editor’s notes were added to old work. The mechanism worked.

In 2017, the Times eliminated the Public Editor role. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced that “readers and social media followers collectively serve as a modern watchdog.” Liz Spayd was the last to hold the job.

This week, Kristof published a column accusing Israel’s security forces of systematic sexual violence, sourced from a man who celebrated October 7, an NGO whose chairman was designated by Israel as a Hamas operative in 2013, and a fourteen-person account that grows more lurid each time it migrates to a larger platform. The Times defended the column with a statement from a spokesperson named Charlie Stadtlander, citing Kristof’s two Pulitzers. There is no Margaret Sullivan inside the building anymore. There is only Charlie.

That is the story I want to tell. Not the column. The column has been dissected by a dozen outlets in 36 hours. The story is what the column reveals about the institution that printed it, and about the decision the institution made nine years ago that produced this moment.

Yesterday I wrote about the sources:

The piece is The New York Times Has a Source Problem. The short version: two of Kristof’s primary sources are a man who left UCLA after a 17-year-old said he sent her unsolicited photos, and an NGO whose chairman publicly mourned a senior Hamas commander as “our great commander” earlier this year. The same NGO has officially called Hamas’s sexual violence on October 7 a “propaganda tool.” Its board chair endorsed 9/11 inside-job conspiracies.

I asked yesterday how the Times missed any of this when two Google searches would have surfaced all of it.

Today I want to ask why nobody inside the paper is allowed to ask that question on the record.

This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:

“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”

This was what happened when there was a public reporter and Kristof got his tuchas smacked:

Somaly Mam was a Cambodian woman who became globally famous on the strength of a story she told about her own childhood in sex slavery, and on the strength of the brothel rescues she said she conducted. Kristof made her career. He called her a “hero” in column after column. He live-tweeted her brothel raids to over a million followers. He featured her in his documentary Half the Sky.

In 2014, Newsweek published a piece by Simon Marks showing that Mam had auditioned girls to lie on camera. Her own backstory was fabricated. The “rescues” were sometimes police raids that generated headlines more than they helped victims. Mam resigned. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple called for Kristof to audit his entire Cambodia archive. Kristof wrote that he wished he had never written about her, said he had been “hoodwinked,” and added editor’s notes to old columns.

His response when Margaret Sullivan and Erik Wemple pressed him was telling. He said it was hard to verify facts in Cambodia. He said he was “reluctant to be an arbiter” of Mam’s backstory. He said he didn’t know what to think.

This week, asked whether Palestinians might fabricate accusations to defame Israel, Kristof wrote that “to me that seems far-fetched.” That is the same credulity, twelve years older, applied to a higher-stakes accusation on a larger platform.

The Times has watched this reporter make this mistake before. In 2014 there was an internal voice with the authority to push him to answer for it. There is no such voice now.

There are other examples, but the point is that no such internal mechanism of correction exists. Instead, we get a defense, which Mazzig summarizes:

. . . The defense

This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:

“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”

The fuller statement credits Kristof for traveling to the region and says his article collects accounts in the victims’ own words, backed by “independent studies.” It does not name the studies.

Read it twice if you need to. Notice what it does not say. It does not address Euro-Med’s Hamas affiliation. It does not address Sami al-Sai’s October 8 Facebook post celebrating the massacre. It does not address Amro’s shifting account between the Washington Post and the Times. It does not address the absence of corroborating evidence in the column’s most explosive cases. It does not say what the “independent studies” are.

It says Kristof has Pulitzers and the Times stands behind him.

In 2014, the same paper produced a Public Editor’s column titled “When Mr. Kristof’s Sources Are Questioned” and an internal reckoning. In 2026, the same paper produces a press release.

Deborah Lipstadt, until recently the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, asked the Times publicly whether it had any sense of decency. Lipstadt is the world’s leading historian of Holocaust denial. She knows what a blood libel looks like. When she names one out loud, the line has been crossed.

Mazzig hastens to add that he’s not saying Kristof is an antisemite or the NYT decided to hurt Jews. Nor is he claiming that Israel has never mistreated a prisoner, nor attacked one with dogs (I’d ask for evidence for both such claims, though). What he’s saying is this:

I am arguing something more dangerous because it is more boring. The editorial standards of the world’s most important paper have drifted, and the institution dismantled the internal voice that used to flag the drift. The defense statement issued today is what accountability looks like in a building where Margaret Sullivan no longer exists.

And he winds up going after the paper again:

The Times will probably not retract, but the conversation has started. Longtime contacts of media reporter David Shuster told him this afternoon there are discussions up the masthead. We will see.

What moves the needle is the accumulated record. The Somaly Mam parallel. The shifting Amro and al-Sai accounts. The verification asymmetry between American prisons and Israeli ones. The headline change on the Eurovision piece. The Silenced No More report. Lipstadt’s question. Yesterday’s piece and this one. Every citation builds the file.

That file is what real accountability requires. The Times made that file harder to build in 2017, and we are watching what that decision produced.

We know that the Times staff is full of young progressives—people who helped push out Bari Weiss, Donald McNeil, Jr., and James Bennet. They are sensitive to social media and public opinion, and the combination of progressive staff and social media is toxic.

The paper needs to correct Kristof’s column, for it’s clear he will not do so himself.

Anti-Jewish violence in the UK, politics, and the BBC

April 30, 2026 • 9:00 am

The degree of anti-Jewish violence in the UK has escalated since October, 2023, and has been especially noticeable in the last six months. Here are the antisemitic incidents that Grok describes, including the stabbing yesterday.

  • 23 March 2026 – Golders Green arson: Four ambulances belonging to the Jewish volunteer medical charity Hatzola Northwest were deliberately set on fire in the car park of a synagogue in Golders Green (a major Jewish neighbourhood in north London). Police treated it as a suspected antisemitic hate crime; multiple arrests followed.
  • Mid-April 2026 – Series of attempted arsons on Jewish sites in north London:
    • 15 April: A brick and two bottles (believed to contain petrol) were thrown at Finchley Reform Synagogue.
    • Around 17–18 April: Suspected arson attacks targeted a building in Hendon previously used by a Jewish charity and Kenton United Synagogue in Harrow (where a teenage boy reportedly smashed a window and threw a lit bottle inside).
    • Late April (reported around 27 April): A suspected arson attack on a Jewish memorial wall in Golders Green.

    Counter-terrorism police linked some of these to possible paid criminal actors (with speculation of Iran-related motives in some reporting) and made multiple arrests across the incidents.

  • 29 April 2026 – Golders Green stabbing (ongoing investigation as of 30 April): Two Jewish men (aged 34 and 76) were stabbed in the street in Golders Green shortly after 11 a.m. Police declared it a terrorist incident, stating the suspect (a 45-year-old man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder) appeared to be “hunting for anyone visibly Jewish.” Both victims were hospitalized in stable condition. The suspect also allegedly turned the knife on officers.

This was combined with persistent accusations of antisemitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, Those accusations againt Labpir seem to have eroded under PM Keir Starmer, whose wife and family are Jewish and the kids are being raised Jewish though Starmer himself is an atheist. Yet, as the Free Press article asserts (see below), Starmer is “failing Britain’s Jews” through inaction against incidents like the ones above. First, an archived article from the Torygraph (click to read), showing journalist Suzanne Moore (not Jewish) fed up with the violence:

A few paragraphs:

I am completely broken over the stabbing of two Jewish people in Golders Green.

I should have said “the stabbing of two of our own”. I am not Jewish, but these are our people in our streets, in the city in which I live. Today’s attack is utterly shaming and enraging, and the latest in a line of appalling anti-Semitic crimes. At this point, I just don’t want to hear any more excuses about why this is happening to this tiny minority.

I don’t want to hear more about Palestine, Zionism, Netanyahu, colonialism, “mental health” or “diversity”. Where have these endless, spiralling discussions got us? We are dancing on the head of a pin about whether anti-Semitism is a form of racism, when it so obviously is.

We are now at the point where ambulances are firebombed, and the leader of the Green Party has the gall to ask whether the problem faced by the Jewish community is simply a “perception” of being unsafe. When random Jews are subject to attack, no one asks their position on the Jewish state before spilling their blood, do they? Or where they stand on Gaza?

Where I live in Hackney, east London, Hasidic Jews and Muslims live alongside each other. Many of the local Haredi schools resemble fortresses with 24-hour security. No other community is living like this. Churches and mosques do not need armed guards, and if they did, we would see this situation for what it is – a national emergency.

In the past few years, long before October 7, waves of open anti-Semitism have crashed over us. Labour twisted itself up over it, and those they expelled went straight to the Greens.

Killing Jews in their place of worship in Manchester was shocking enough, but just like the dreadful massacre in Bondi Beach, no one was really that surprised. Jews don’t stab themselves, do they? Yet there is this disgusting underlying sentiment that somehow they have always had it coming. Jews are always held somehow responsible for the murderous violence against them.

She has a point.  Jews are not stabbing Palestinians, driving their cars into crowds of Arabs, or burning mosques.  She calls for action, as does Jonathan Sacerdoti below, who gives a number of suggestions.  And nobody asks the people who are attacked what their views are on Zionism or Netanyahu. This alone shows that it’s not Zionism or the current Israeli PM that’s prompting the violence: the target is Jews, pure and simple. As Moore says, “We need to protect each other, or we’re done for.”

The Green Party of England and Wales—it would be called “progressive Left” in the U.S.—has been accused by many, including at least two of my non-Jewish British friends (as well as by Suzanna Moore above) as being a refuge for British antisemites. One of the accused, Zack Polanski, has been leader of the Green Party for nearly a year, and happens to be Jewish, but Brendan O’Neill at the Spectator (not Jewish) calls out Polanski for weaselspeak. (Click below to read.)

 

Again, a few paragraphs:

Hey, Jews – have you ever considered the possibility that you’re making a fuss over nothing? That a few petrol bombs through the windows of your synagogues is not really a big deal? That your feelings of fear after two Jews were slain in Manchester on Yom Kippur and Jewish property was incinerated in Golders Green and Jews were spat at for wearing a Star of David pendant in public might be a tad overblown?

That’s what I heard when Zack Polanski wondered out loud this week if Britain’s Jews are experiencing ‘actual unsafety’ or just a ‘perception of unsafety’. It is one of the most tone-deaf, pitiless sentences I have heard a politician utter. The Jews of London were terrorised all last week. There were attempted firebombings at numerous synagogues. And here is the leader of the Green Party asking if Jews, the poor dears, merely feel unsafe. Callous doesn’t cover it.

It was an Israeli journalist who asked Polanski about the recent wave of Jewphobic violence. To be fair, Polanski, who is himself Jewish, did express concern about ‘the rise in anti-Semitic attacks’. But it felt perfunctory. He swiftly moved on to ‘the conversation’ he thinks we should be having. ‘There is a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety’, he said. He generously acknowledged that ‘neither are acceptable’. But there it was, out in the open, that slippery left instinct to minimise Jewish pain.

There is no other way to interpret his Kafkaesque formulation: ‘perception of unsafety’. That turgid piece of academese, which will doubtless go down a storm with the keffiyeh-wearing PhDs who swell the ranks of the Green party, seems expressly designed to downplay Jewish fear. Are you really at risk from the fire and the fists of the Jew-haters in our midst, or are you just imagining it? That was the toxic essence of Polanski’s unfeeling remarks.

. . . This isn’t all in Jews’ heads. They aren’t dumbly falling for a fear narrative. Their safety really has been compromised by the post-7 October frenzy of Jew hate. Imagine if petrol bombs were being thrown at mosques and Muslims had been murdered on Eid by a knife-wielding lowlife. Do you think Polanski would be holding forth on whether Muslims really are unsafe or are merely suffering from a ‘perception of unsafety’? Every single one of us knows he would not.

I am not keen on the word “Jewphobic” (it’s not a phobia; the word “antisemitism” will do nicely), but what’s going on in the UK is not simply a “perception of unsafety”. It is unsafety!  Look at the incidents above, all of which happened in the last two months. And is being stabbed simply a “perception” of being pierced with a knife?

Finally, to Labour PM Starmer himself. Today’s Free Press has an article critical of the inaction of Labour; the author is Alex Hearn, a co-director of Labour Against Antisemitism.

The “J’accuse” paragraphs:

Within hours of the stabbing, Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, called the attack “deeply concerning.” He said we must be “absolutely clear in our determination to deal with any of these offenses.” I have been a Labour Party supporter for decades and I have to say plainly: The prime minister’s platitudes are not enough. They have not been enough for some time.

This is the latest in a huge surge of antisemitic attacks in London in recent months. Only last week, a viral video circulated of an Orthodox Jewish man harassed in the street and called a baby killer. Weeks before, ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity were set on fire. Each time, the prime minister says “Antisemitism has no place in the UK,” or some similar platitude.

But a man is judged by his deeds, and unfortunately, Keir Starmer is failing British Jews. On his watch, Jews are struggling to recognize the tolerant country we once knew. As everyday racism has been accommodated and tolerated, we’re long past expecting action.

On Wednesday, Britain’s chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, said that “words of condemnation are no longer sufficient.” He called for “meaningful action.” The Israeli foreign ministry was even more blunt: “The UK government can no longer claim this is under control.” The Israelis are right, and they are saying what most Jews in Britain now know to be true.

Consider what British Jews have seen happen in their country in the last three years. Ever since October 7, they have watched streets close in central London, week after week, for marches characterized by racism and hate. Each time, the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state is chanted as a moral demand.

They have watched sitting members of Parliament attend those marches, where being “visibly Jewish” is deemed a provocation. They have watched as smashed windows of Jewish businesses are waved away in the pages of The Guardian as “small acts of petty symbolism.” They have seen an Israeli soccer team’s fans banned from Birmingham over concocted charges of hooliganism. They have watched students at Britain’s finest universities abuse Jewish professors and students, helping to create a culture where one in five British students said they would not house share with a Jew. They have watched parliamentary candidates campaign on Gaza, celebrating October 7. They have watched synagogues implement airport-style security, and their children required to undergo security briefings for kindergarten.

And they have watched a Labour government respond with the language of management, and with total inaction. “Concern.” “Determination.” “Resolve.” The vocabulary of bland press releases and the hope the news cycle will move on before anyone asks what, exactly, is being done to prevent the next attack.

But in the five years since Starmer took over as leader of the Labour Party and in the nearly two years since he has been prime minister, the problem has only gotten worse. Instead of just the Labour Party needing cleaning up, the entire country does. The prime minister has not summoned the heads of the universities where Jewish students have been spat at and chased. He has not used his office to name the Islamist ideology that has driven a series of recent terror plots. He has not demanded the proscription of organizations whose leaders openly celebrated October 7. He has not designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s version of the SS, as a terror group in the UK. And he cannot stop his own MPs from joining the hate rallies.

The last paragraph has a number of suggestions that Starmer could heed to lessen the antisemitism—or at least the acts that pervasive antisemitism has prompted. (I use “pervasive” antisemitism deliberately, as that’s exactly what seems to be true of the UK.) To me, some of the suggestions abrogate American-style free speech, but Britain has no First Amendment. That said, the leadership needs to cultivate a climate of tolerance, and stop having the law demonize Islamophobia but go soft on antisemitism.

Finally, this seven-minute BBC Berkshire video featuring Jonathan Sacerdoti (a pro-Jewish brodacaster) has caused a kerfuffle on social media. People object to the interviewer speaking over Sacerdoti, who ticks off a list of antisemitic incidents and criticizes Starmer for inaction. Finally, the interviewer actually mutes Sacerdoti’s microphone when he criticizes the Green Party.  The man is quite eloquent, and offers tangible suggestions to erode public antisemitism, but either the broadcaster wanted to end the segment for political reasons or simply was in a rush to wrap things up. You be the judge. But muting the microphone is not the way to go. (In my view, the interviewer is pushing back not only on what Sacerdoti “characterizes” which is not a characterization but a description of reality, and also lauds the BBC’s evenhandedness, though most people recognize that the Beeb has been anti=Israel since October 7.)

As for stopping antisemitism, well, Sacerdoti’s suggestions will make public acts of antisemitism less frequent, but will it eliminate  the sentiments behind them? And why is this stuff now fulminating in the UK?

More Pinker-dissing at Boston Magazine

April 17, 2026 • 10:30 am

There’s a free new article in Boston Magazine called “Can Steven Pinker save Harvard?” (subtitle: “But the celebrity professor’s own record raises a question: Is he the right guy for the job?”)  It’s the same-old-same old, recycling every accusation about Pinker that’s come down the pike (association with Bad People, unwarranted belief in progress, hereditarianism, love of capitalism, work on evolutionary psychology etc.), with nothing that you haven’t read before.  And yes, they do provide talking heads to give some pushback, but it’s all irrelevant in light of the title question.

Pinker helped form the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, now comprising 200 people, and they’re working on issues like freedom of speech, institutional neutrality, defusing DEI, extirpating bias, and so on.  It’s really a dumb question to ask whether just one of these people can “save Harvard”, and of course the answer is “we’ll see.” The article is totally a hit piece, but it’s slight for such a long piece, and adds nothing to the literature. But you can click below to read it for free.

Jesse Singal takes it apart at his Substack website, but you won’t be able to read his whole response. See the bottom for a screenshot.

The Boston Magazine piece is very long, but I’ll quote just the “j’accuse” bits and a few other things (indented). My own text is flush left.

J’Accuse!

Steven Pinker is one of the most famous—and divisive—academics in America. A cognitive psychologist at Harvard, he’s spent five decades writing about how we think, picking fights with the left, and wading into culture wars that most professors avoid. Bill Gates calls him a favorite writer. His critics call him a cover for racists. He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories. He’s also, right now, one of the loudest voices pushing Harvard to change.

. . . But Pinker’s critics—and there are many, especially in academia—argue that he’s guilty of exactly what he decries: my-side bias, ideological blinders, a willingness to engage with far-right figures in ways that give them legitimacy. He says he doesn’t set out to spark controversy—though he seems to welcome it when it comes. But it’s a double-edged sword in a dangerous time: Pinker has leaped into the fray of what ails Harvard—and higher education in general—starting with his own questions about our universities: What are they doing? Who are they for? Where are they going?

. . . . In The Blank Slate, published in 2002, Pinker argued against a prevailing orthodoxy that we’re born without any innate characteristics, shaped entirely by environment and culture. Instead, he made the case that genetics plays a significant role in how our minds work and who we become. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) detailed the long-term historical decline in violence, and Enlightenment Now (2018) made the case for reason and science creating a world of well-being and possibility foreign to earlier epochs. Those last two got Pinker a lot of heat for putting a sunny spin on the way things are now, especially among left-leaning thinkers who have called him a cheerleader for Western capitalism, blind to the inequalities it produces. And The Blank Slate has gotten Pinker criticized over the idea that biology is destiny, which leads into dangerous territory: racial differences, eugenics, the question of who gets to define human nature and why.

Yadda yadda yadds. But wait! There’s more! Louis Menand, with whom I’ve crossed swords by claiming that there’s no “truth” that can be derived from literature, shows up again arguing that Pinker’s ideas “lack nuance.”

The Blank Slate was much praised for opening up the nature-nurture debate—it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, but it also garnered some now-wait-a-minute reviews that sometimes attacked Pinker for oversimplifying things. Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club, a Pulitzer-winning intellectual and cultural history of late-19th- and early-20th-century America, reviewed the book skeptically in the New Yorker. Pinker’s villains, Menand wrote, were “social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists.” His heroes were cognitive scientists and ordinary folks. “I wish I could say that Pinker’s view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this,” Menand wrote.

It isn’t just Pinker’s conclusions that have drawn fire—it’s his method. “By far the nastiest and most aggressive academic responses I have seen come from humanities professors when there are ideas from the sciences that they see as encroaching on their territories,” Pinker told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. “That’s when you get rage and withering condescension.” It’s not hard to find.

. . . And Daniel Smail, a Harvard history professor, wrote a withering takedown of The Better Angels of Our Nature for an academic journal, dismissing Pinker’s optimism about civilization as naive. His verdict: “Better Angels is not a work of history. It is best understood as a work of moral and historical theology.”

Give me a break. Pinker’s assessment of civilization’s progress is absolutely convincing. Would you reather live now, or in 1400?  And although Pinker is optimistic in view of past progress, he constantly tempers his optimism by saying that we have no crystal ball that can tell us if, for example, there will be a nuclear war.

Now here’s an absolutely stupid accusation:

. . . . Still, the right had a field day. Neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer ran a headline that read, in part: “Harvard Jew Professor Admits the Alt-Right Is Right About Everything.” The left hammered Pinker for giving ammunition to extremists, regardless of his intent.

And this is the pattern: Bad actors and dark thinkers have appropriated Pinker’s research and writing for their own ends—and Pinker has done little to stop them.

I’m crying crocodile tears over that.  Who among us can prevent the “bad actors and dark thinkers” from appropriating our ideas? If Pinker went after everybody who did, or who criticized him (he does from time to time engage in rebutting criticism), he’d have no time for his own work.  Oh, and there’s Pinker’s involvement in the Epstein case–which he now regrets:

Then, of course, there is Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein collected heavyweight intellectuals, and in terms of funding and gifts seemed to have a particular affinity for Harvard. Pinker attended a few gatherings where he was present, but claims he never liked Epstein.

In 2008, Pinker’s friend and Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz defended Epstein, who had been charged with soliciting prostitution from a minor. Dershowitz had consulted Pinker for help interpreting the wording of a statute concerning the use of the mail to solicit minors to engage in prostitution or sexual activity. For that crime, Epstein pleaded guilty and served 13 months in prison.

Pinker says he doesn’t blame Dershowitz for defending Epstein, nor does he believe he did anything wrong by helping interpret the law. “I believe in the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of legal representation of the accused,” Pinker says. “If I had known then what I know now about the extent of Epstein’s crimes, and that it would be used in his defense, I might have second thoughts.”

How many times have you heard this?  In fact, I wouldn’t even apologize were I Pinker. After all, I was on O. J. Simpson’s defense team, arguably doing something even worse than Pinker: giving help to someone who likely committed two murders (note that I didn’t testify or take money). Even rich or famous people deserve a fair trial.  And yet author Robert Huber insinuates that the guilt-by-association trope does erode Pinker’s reputation, using this weaselly trio of sentences, unworthy of a serious journalist:

. . . Pinker dismisses criticism of his connections as guilt by association—whether it’s Murray or Epstein, he insists that proximity isn’t endorsement. But the pattern is visible: years of polite yeses, a willingness to lend his credibility to people and platforms that most academics would avoid. At some point, the accumulation starts to speak for itself.

A digression: Cowboy boots:

In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch.

Yeah, but he got the idea from me (I don’t wear them because I’m short, though I am.)

The Big Question: Can Pinkah save Hahvahd? Another quote.

But writing op-eds is one thing. Could Pinker actually change anything?

In 2023, Pinker and five copresidents, along with dozens of other Harvard faculty, formed the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, made up now of some 200 members, which regularly challenges university policies and pushes for change.

Whether and how much this Council changes Harvard is not up to Pinker, but to the President, the deans, and the faculty. At least he’s trying to do something according to his principles. And, to be fair to Huber, the article does note that some progress has already been made, like the Council having an unprecedented meeting with the Harvard Corporation, which really runs Harvard.   Pinker is “cautiously optimistic” that the Council will effect salubrious change. In the end, however, Huber’s title question isn’t close to being answered, mainly because it’s early days yet:

As always, Pinker is convinced he’s pursuing the truth as he finds it. His method has made him a star. It’s also left a trail of complications—the associations, the bad actors who cite his work, the questions about what doors he’s opened and for whom.

Whether that makes him the right person to lead Harvard out of its current troubles is a question the university will have to answer for itself. Pinker, for his part, shows no signs of slowing down. He carries on as if he is certain his work and beliefs deserve whatever airing he decides to give them.

So, that’s the Big Conclusion.  Clearly the University, not the author has to answer it. So why was this article written in the first place?

Jesse Singal wrote this piece about the Boston Magazine article. It’s paywalled, but read what you can by clicking below:

A couple of quotes:

Boston magazine just published an article about Steven Pinker headlined “Can Steven Pinker Save Harvard?” Subheadline: “But the celebrity professor’s own record raises a question: Is he the right guy for the job?”

First of all, I don’t get that “but.” It’s not referencing anything! It’s like the original headline was going to be something like “Steven Pinker Wants to Save Harvard,” and then someone changed the headline without changing the subheadline.

Setting aside my overreaction to a minor copy-editing error, this conceit is also a bit much — it’s very magazine-y. No one, including Steven Pinker, thinks Steven Pinker is (single-handedly) going to “save Harvard.” The article is really about a few different things, most of them summed up in the very first paragraph: “His critics call him a cover for racists,” writes author Robert Huber. “He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories.”

. . . I find it surprising, in 2026, that adherents of the more sweeping anti-Pinker view have done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position (I’m going to table the narrower and more standard academic debate over whether he has gotten this or that wrong in his books; obviously, it’s legitimate to closely read and critically respond to the work of as influential a figure as Pinker). Their myopia on this matter can, I think, be explained by their own form of blank slatism. They believe that people are more or less blank slates, with regard to political opinions, until they decide which scientific beliefs to adopt. Similarly, political ideologies are only adopted because they are seen as having scientific legitimacy.

So, the argument goes: Without figures like Pinker, who are at best useful idiots and at worst quiet but intentional enablers, the alt-right would have far less intellectual fuel and wouldn’t have gained the power it has gained. Or if they aren’t arguing this, I don’t understand how they could possibly have remained so mad at Pinker for so many years.

In the end, or so I think, a lot of opposition to Pinker, whatever form it takes, derives from people who buy into blank-slateism.  Of course very few people are pure blank-slaters, but there are degrees, and in general “progressives” tend to be on the side of seeing differences between people as due very largely to environmental influences.  This derives from a Marxist view of people as generally malleable, so that any genetic effect on differences should be ignored, minimized, or even demonized.

Pinker has spent much of his career emphasizing that a lot of what makes people different is due to their harboring different genes—genes that of course interact with different environments (language is a good example).  And so he’s demonized.