Category: wokeness

Molding “progressive” children with books

August 3, 2026 • 9:15 am

When I moved to Chicago I became a member of 57th Street Books, a well known store between my crib and my work, and I’d often stop in to browse. I no longer do that much, and for two reasons. First, because I have no more room for books on my bookshelves, so I rarely buy any books (I get them from the library).  Second. the store has become uber-woke, catering to buyers with “progressive” agendas.  Books featured in the windows and inside cater to the oppressor/victim narrative, often with the sacralization of the oppressed.  Here is just one example I photographed this morning: a window featuring children’s books about ethnic food.

If you look them over, you’ll conclude two things.  First, they celebrate books about groups characterized as oppressed minorities. In other words, they hew closely to an “identity culture” mindset designed to sacralize various ethnic groups.  I guess the intent in these children’s book is to make you feel proud of your group. That’s not necessarily so bad, but it seems to be not only a theme, but a ubiquitous theme.  It’s as if kids can be interested only in the food of their group. But there is more to life than identity, and kids need to know that.  (I hasten to add that I still haven’t found a publisher for my book about the Indian sweetmaker Mr. Das and his fifty cats, and that’s only because I’m not Indian; I presumably cannot write about India as an American.) Children’s and young-adult fiction are the two areas of publishing most affected by identity culture.

Second, the books (I’ve looked at some of them) stay away from the painful or unpleasant parts of life. You can tell by the titles that they are all sunshine and happiness, with plenty of exclamation marks.  Again, you don’t want to traumatize kids with literature, but neither do you want to teach them that life is all peaches and cream. At the bottom of this post I’ve listed some children’s and young-adult books that have sad parts. Some of them, like Charlotte’s Web (1952) and Old Yeller (1956) have endings so sad that they’ll make you cry (at least they did for me). Could those books even be published today?

Oh, and I’ll add one more thing. If you look at the cultures represented below, you find African-American, African, Indian, Persian (Iranian), Hispanic, and Japanese.  But one oppressed group culture is conspicuously absent.  Can you guess what it is given the “progressive” nature of the display?

It’s not that children’s books about Jewish food don’t exist; they’re just not represented above, and I doubt they’ll ever be. As a joke, I invented one of my my own:

Actually, though, Grok found for me a list of children’s picture books about Jewish food. There are even two intersectional books!

Picture books (great for younger kids):

  • Do Not Eat This Book!: Fun with Jewish Foods & Festivals by Beth Kander, illustrated by Mike Moran — A playful, interactive book full of Jewish holiday foods, Yiddish words, humor, and simple recipes kids can try.
  • P Is for Pastrami by Alan Silberberg — An alphabet book that introduces classic Jewish foods like latkes, matzah, and hamantaschen in a fun, diverse way.
  • 1, 2, 3, Nosh With Me by Micah Siva and Joshua Siva, illustrated by Sviatoslav Franko — A colorful counting book featuring Jewish foods associated with different holidays.
  • Bubbie & Rivka’s Best-Ever Challah (So Far!) by Sarah Lynne Reul — A warm story about a girl and her grandmother baking challah together, with themes of love, persistence, and imperfect (but delicious) results.
  • The Bagel King by Andrew Larsen, illustrated by Sandy Nichols — A sweet tale about the connecting power of bagels.
  • Jalapeño Bagels by Natasha Wing, illustrated by Robert Casilla — A boy blends his Jewish and Mexican heritage by creating spicy jalapeño bagels.
  • Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas by Pamela Ehrenberg, illustrated by Anjan Sarkar — An Indian-Jewish family celebrates Hanukkah with dosas instead of (or alongside) latkes.
  • Chik Chak Shabbat by Mara Rockliff, illustrated by Kyrsten Brooker — Neighbors come together to help make a traditional slow-cooked cholent for Shabbat.
  • The Matzo Ball Boy by Lisa Shulman, illustrated by Rosanne Litzinger — A lively Passover twist on the Gingerbread Man story, featuring a runaway matzo ball.
  • Hanukkah Cookies with Sprinkles by David A. Adler, illustrated by Jeffrey Ebbeler — A story of making and sharing special Hanukkah cookies (and showing kindness).
  • The Borrowed Hanukkah Latkes by Linda Glaser, illustrated by Nancy Cote — A girl “borrows” potatoes (and invites a lonely neighbor) so the family can make latkes for Hanukkah.

And here are some other children’s books with dark, sad, or depressing parts, again from Grok and with its descriptions. I had forgotten about The Yearling, which is a fantastic book intended for older children and adults. It is a must-read, and garnered a Pulitzer Prize for author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

  • Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson — A close friendship ends abruptly with a sudden death, leaving deep grief and lasting impact.
  • Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls — A boy and his two hunting dogs share a powerful bond that culminates in tragic loss.
  • The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings — A boy raises a fawn amid hardship; the ending involves painful loss and maturation.
  • Black Beauty by Anna Sewell — Follows a horse through years of kindness and cruelty, with many scenes of suffering (though it has some redemptive notes).

Picture Books and Shorter Works

  • The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein — A tree repeatedly gives parts of itself to a boy throughout his life until little remains; widely seen as poignant or melancholy.
  • The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams — A toy rabbit longs to become real and faces abandonment before a bittersweet transformation.
  • City Dog, Country Frog by Mo Willems — A seasonal friendship ends with the implied loss of one character; the remaining friend processes loneliness and moves forward.
  • The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen — A poor girl freezes to death on a cold night after lighting matches for warmth and visions; the ending is tragic yet includes a note of release.

Other Notable Mentions

  • Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt — Explores immortality versus the natural cycle of life and death, with a reflective, poignant close.
  • Watership Down by Richard Adams — An epic rabbit adventure filled with danger, death, and loss (including for key characters).

But no, you won’t see these in the window of 57th Street Books because they are neither uniformly joyful nor identitarian, and they don’t buy into the victim/oppressor narrative. They are, one might say, inclusive.

Anthropology bigwig defends her field against attacks that it’s moribund, but actually proves it’s moribund.

July 16, 2026 • 9:30 am

On June 8 I posted about the “Boghossian Report,” in which ten scholars argued that the humanities are becoming overly politicized—to the detriment of universities and their ideals. The politicization came, they said, mostly from the Left, and involved the promotion of “progressive” social justice rather than a search for truth. Click below to read it:

This was not a scientific survey but a warning based on a collection of observations and anecdotes. Nevertheless, the report has received considerable pushback from humanities professors who cannot accept that their discipline could possibly be politicized. One maintained that because the humanities were in disarray in the first place, it is that disarray that led to their politicization, not the other way around. At any rate, the report was particularly hard on anthropology, singling it out for special opprobrium:

In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.

and:

In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise.

For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that “anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences … because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism” (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that “the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,” but rather to “serve the interests” of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that “all ethnographies” — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology — have as their goal “not voyeurism but advocacy” (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.

Note that one of the authors of the Boghossian et al. report is anthropologist Joseph Henrich at Harvard. More on him below.

Well, Carolyn Rouse, the president of the field’s biggest scholarly group—the American Anthropological Association—couldn’t let that rest, but has been firing back at the Boghossian report. Stephanie Lee interviewed Rouse for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it wasn’t a puffball interview: Lee pressed Rouse hard, and it turns out that Rouse either ducked the questions, was ignorant about the author in her field, and how the Boghossian report was written, and even maintained that science showed there were not two biological sexes.  In the end, all Rouse reveals is that the accusations about anthropology in the Boghossian report are substantiated by one who tries to refute them.

You can read the article by clicking below (the photo is of Rouse), or find it archived here:

All text from the article is indented:

From Lee’s introduction:

But one field was singled out as “the most extreme case” — anthropology. Compared to philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, the discipline showed “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” The authors cited writings from several anthropologists, a speech by a recent president of the American Anthropological Association, and an AAA panel about biological sex that was canceled in 2023, among other things. The report described itself as a summary of reports, specific to each field. (Only one, on literary studies, has been released; it was posted after this interview was conducted.)

Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.”

Rouse is an anthropology professor at Princeton University who researches race and inequality in religion, medicine, education, and economic development. In 2016 and 2017, she went viral for leading a walkout of a speech by the political scientist Charles Murray, and for delivering a lecture titled “F%*# Free Speech,” in which she argued that free-speech absolutism does not exist. Rouse was elected president-elect of the AAA in 2023, and assumed the role last year. The Chronicle asked her about her views on the Vanderbilt report and the questions it raises about her field. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lee’s questions are in bold, and Rouse’s answers in plain text.

First, Rouse says that the Boghossian report was written using AI (not just for research but  “used an LLM to write this”. When pressed for evidence, she quotes an article in the Chronicle  of Higher Education, with Rouse saying, “Anthony Appiah says that they used AI.” But in that article, improperly cited in this report, Appiah actually says this:

We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on. My report will come with six appendices of such material, not produced by me but produced by the researchers that we were able to hire with the money that was given to us by the chancellors.

This does not say that the authors of the Boghossian et al. report used AI to write the report; it implies that they used AI to survey the bodies of text. It’s completely unfair for Rouse to accuse the authors of writing the report with AI.

To see what really happened, I contacted someone connected with writing this report who characterized that this accusation was “completely bonkers” and that the piece was a “most bizarre interview.”  This contact told me that while the report used various analytical tools (including LLMs) to get lists of syllabi, prizes, and so on, this was just the background research. The data were then debated heavily among the authors and the report was, as I expected, written entirely by humans. Rouse has come close to libel in her unfounded accusation. ​

Then Rouse ducks a question about an address given by Akhil Gupta, the previous AAA President:

Let’s talk about some of the specific critiques that were raised in the Vanderbilt report regarding anthropology, perhaps as a way of talking about these broader issues you have with its conclusion. So, in 2021, then-AAA President Akhil Gupta gave a presidential address where he said anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism,” and the Vanderbilt report said that this kind of remark is an explicit rejection of “the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.” Do you share Dr. Gupta’s conception of anthropology?

Anthropologists love to disagree with one another, so I’m not gonna say I agree or disagree with Akhil. Here’s the thing that I think they don’t understand: We are the instrument for data collection in the same way a Geiger counter detects radiation. We have to do a lot of refining of our instrument, our way of thinking, what we’re doing it for, how we’re seeing it, in order to collect data that we know is, of course, subjective, but uncover some truth. So that’s why we teach our students to be self-reflexive — why you’re doing this, what motivates you, what presumptions did you go into the field with, what do you think this information is going to do for the world?

That’s a non-response. Rouse says that the previous president was misquoted. Lee keeps on pressing Rouse, saying that she (Lee) saw Gupta’s published address and the quote is in there.  Caught out, Rouse bobs and weaves:

This is from his presidential address, or the written version of it. Not to be repetitive, but the report highlights this remark and says this remark is a rejection of the idea that “scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding.”
It’s a cherry-picked quote. They misquoted him, that’s what he says.
I mean, I wasn’t in the audience for this speech, either, but he published a version of this address —
I’ve read it, I’ve quoted from it.
So that quote is in there, you know.
But just because something’s quoted, there’s a whole context. There’s so much more than that. This is the problem with absolutist free speech. We talk in contexts. Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else. . . .

 

There’s that “context” defense, saying that Gupta’s quote didn’t mean what we think it did.  Also, everyone knows that free speech is never 100% free: even the First Amendment has its restrictions. Rouse’s example of speech being “connected to something else” is neither an example of the violation of the First Amendment nor does it have anything to do with Gupta’s claim. It’s evasion, pure and simple.

Here Rouse denies that the anthropologist on the report has any reputation:

Can I ask what you think about Joseph Henrich, the sole anthropologist on this commission? Had you heard of him? Were you aware of him having some kind of reputation or something prior to this?

No.

You’d think that Rouse would have looked up the only author of the report who was in her field, but she apparently didn’t.  He’s not obscure, either. He’s 57, has published five books (including two trade books) and roughly 200 papers. He’s a cultural anthropologist like Rouse, and according to Wikipedia is “a recipient of the 2003 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers[4] and the 2022 Hayek Prize.”  I think he has “a reputation”. 

There’s a lot more, but I want to get to the part where Rouse denies there’s two sexes.

In 2023, the AAA canceled an accepted panel at its annual conference, titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology.” The AAA said at the time that the panel would have harmed members’ “safety and dignity,” and that its premise contradicted “settled science.” The Vanderbilt report cited this incident to argue that when politically charged questions “are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent.” You were elected president-elect of the AAA shortly after that incident. Do you regret today the fact that the AAA canceled that panel, or the justification that it gave for canceling it?

Rouse thinks that whether sex is binary is a non-issue: it’s settled that there are more than two sexes!

There’s a point in that Vanderbilt report where they talk about astronomy departments becoming astrology departments. All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually, that there are different types of “sexes” and “genders.” You can have XY and you present as a woman, you can have XXY — they’re all variations, genetic variations. So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that. You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world. And then we have people who identify with genders that don’t match to their chromosomes, and people like Anthony Appiah, who are gay, and so I don’t know what they want, why they want us to teach in that way — that’s the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.

The second question: It should never have been accepted. At this point, we are demanding that people do good peer review, because that’s what happened — they slacked on the peer review.

Here Rouse is defining sex by karyotype: the chromosomes that someone has. And since there are several chromosomal types (XXY, XO, etc.), sex surely can’t be binary. But sex is defined as whether the individual has a reproductive system designed to produce large vs small gametes, not an individua’s chromosome complement. (These two things, however, align nearly perfectly.)  And even if you use chromosomes, 99.8% of people are born either XX or XY. Finally, what is this “maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world”?  Who wants to kill these babies?  This is just pure confusion and ignorance mixed with performative assertions and accusations of eugenics.

But Lee, who’s done her homework, won’t let this assertion rest, either, and presses Rouse, who issues a lame response, dismissing a survey of the very organization she heads:

OK. So on the question of this particular idea being “settled science,” as the AAA said at the time, there was a survey in 2022, published in the journal Forensic Anthropology, that asked forensic anthropologists about this question, and 42 percent of them said they agree that sex is binary, and 56 percent disagreed that it’s binary. So that ratio would seem to indicate that, in the field, the question hadn’t actually been settled, and I was wondering how you explain that.

 

I don’t believe in opinion research. Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they’re coroners, they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling. Things are in the air. I just don’t trust opinion polling. That’s from just being an anthropologist and spending a lot of time with people in the field. People don’t know a lot.

Had enough? I won’t burden you further, but this is a sample of how Rouse refuses to give straight answers, lies about the use of AI in the Boghossian et al. report, and completely gets biological sex wrong.  She is an ideologue who twists the truth to suit her ends, and that’s exactly what Boghossian et al. see about anthropology (another person Rouse praises is her Princeton colleague, sex-is-a-spectrum miscreant Agustín Fuentes, who’s appeared often on this site for his obtuseness about the sexes.

Rouse’s interview is nothing short of embarrassing.  Over at his website Leiter Reports, my law-school colleague Brian Leiter said this:

The CHE reporter Stephanie Lee does a really good job trying to get Professor Rouse to actually answer questions, but Professor Rouse’s responses mostly serve to confirm the doubts expressed about her field in the Boghossian Report.

Brian wrote a lot less than I did above but he has a way of distilling things into pithy but true assessments.

More wokeness from the journal Nature, and a response from a reader

March 31, 2026 • 11:00 am

It’s hopeless: Nature, like nearly all prominent science journals, has been colonized by woke craziness.  Perhaps the word “craziness” for the present topic is a bit too strong, but the headline below suggests a degree of unhinged-ness that often comes with virtue-flaunting. And of course this isn’t the first such article in Nature.

Click the screenshot to below read the article, part of a series billed as “profiles [of] scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests”. This scientist, Dr. Anne Poelina, has the unusual habit of naming a river as the first author of her science papers:

An excerpt;

Conservationist Anne Poelina has a deep connection to the fresh water that runs through the dry red-rock landscape of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Poelina identifies as a Nyikina Warrwa woman, and her people are the Traditional Custodians of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River. The river meanders through the region’s arid land, cutting a path of about 735 kilometres long through steep gorges, savannahs and flood plains before terminating at King Sound, a delta fringed by tidal mangroves by the Indian Ocean.

The Martuwarra Fitzroy River is one of Australia’s last-remaining relatively intact, undammed tropical river systems. For now.

The river faces many threats, for instance, from water use in agricultural irrigation. It’s also at risk from proposed plans to extract natural gas through fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, and to look for rare-earth elements and metals such as vanadium and titanium. Moreover, climate change is predicted to cause extreme floods and droughts.

. . .Poelina is connected to the river through her matrilineal heritage — her mother’s people are the Nyikina First Nation. The Nyikina’s traditional territory, or Country, lies in the river’s watershed, as do those of nine other Indigenous communities. (Country is the term that Aboriginal Australian people use to refer to their ancestral lands, its meaning is similar to the Western concept of nature.)

Poelina explains that “in terms of property rights, the river owns me. So, I have a duty of care and the fiduciary duty to protect this river’s right to life.” Because Poelina works with the river to produce fresh knowledge and assimilate ancient wisdom, she decided to recognize its contributions formally. In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications.

Poelina says, “Country is a first author for Indigenous people in the Northern Territory of Australia. So, I just did it.” Whether the journal to which she submitted her first paper assumed “that the name was human or not, I don’t know”, she adds.

Here’s a list of her papers on Google Scholar, and, sure enough, a few of them—but far from all—have “MRiverofLife” as first author, with “M” standing for “Martuwarra”. Here’s one (click to go to site):

Here’s a description of the river in northwest Australia (it’s called either “Martuwarra” or “Fitzroy”), and here’s a description of its place in local culture, where the river is called a “living ancestral being.”  It’s neither living nor an ancestral being: that is just lore. Still, the indigenous council of “river keepers” consults with the Australian government to keep the river in good shape, and that’s an admirable thing, But making a river a coauthor? Perhaps I should have made my Drosophila flies the first author of my papers, maybe disguised as “Dr. O. Sophila.”

At any rate, reader and professor Jente Ottenburghs (an evolutionary biologist who works on birds) couldn’t take it the Nature paper, and wrote me this: “This seems to be another case where a high-profile journal romanticizes indigenous knowledge (similar to the situations in New Zealand and Canada that you covered recently). I also decided to write a blog post about it, partly inspired by the book The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch which I am currently reading.”

Sure enough, his blog post is below, and you can access it for free by clicking the screenshot:

Two excerpts. First, on the ubiquity and sacralization of the “two-eyed seeing” trope and the sacralization of the oppressed (i.e., indigenous people). Note that yes, Australian indigenous people were badly treated by European colonists, but that is not what’s under consideration here.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in incorporating indigenous knowledge into scientific research. There are indeed nice examples where such knowledge has proven valuable. For instance, a recent study in Oryx combined ethnospecies lists from local communities with scientific datasets to reveal a consistent decline in bird body mass across three continents. Approaches like this study demonstrate that local knowledge can complement scientific inquiry, particularly in data collection and long-term ecological observation.

However, indigenous knowledge is often romanticized, sometimes being portrayed as inherently superior to scientific knowledge. This tendency is partly driven by a legitimate desire to correct historical injustices (such as colonialism and the marginalization of local communities) and to show greater respect for indigenous perspectives. While this shift is clearly necessary and overdue, it should not come at the expense of critical evaluation of indigenous knowledge.

Many elements of indigenous knowledge consist of local myths or context-bound explanations. As such, they are often parochial rather than universal, and therefore do not qualify as good scientific explanations. This does not diminish their cultural, historical, or philosophical value, but it does mean they should not automatically be treated as reliable sources of scientific insight.

Of authorship and the river:

There appears to be growing pressure within academia to signal the recognition of indigenous knowledge, sometimes in ways that blur the distinction between cultural respect and scientific rigor. A striking example appeared in Nature, where conservationist Anne Poelina listed the Martuwarra River of Life as a co-author on her publications.

Poelina explains that “in terms of property rights, the river owns me. So, I have a duty of care and the fiduciary duty to protect this river’s right to life.” Because Poelina works with the river to produce fresh knowledge and assimilate ancient wisdom, she decided to recognize its contributions formally. In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications.

When asked why the river should be listed as first author, she responded: “Because it’s the authority. It’s where I get my authority.” This reasoning stands in direct contrast with the scientific method, which explicitly rejects appeals to authority as a basis for truth. Science operates as a culture of criticism, where ideas must withstand scrutiny regardless of their source. As physicist Richard Feynman famously put it: “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is … If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

Hence, attributing authorship to a river on the grounds of authority is not just unconventional; it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how knowledge is evaluated in science.

. . .A similar issue arises in arguments that emphasize the age of indigenous knowledge (or any other knowledge system). Poelina suggests that “if we have the oldest systems of thinking around science and law, shouldn’t the world be listening to what our people have to say?”. But age is not a marker of reliability. As discussed earlier, Greek myths are thousands of years old, but they obviously fail as scientific explanations because they are easily varied and lack universality.

The same principle applies more broadly: all knowledge claims (whether scientific or indigenous) must be evaluated using the same standards. Some elements of indigenous knowledge may indeed prove robust and valuable under scrutiny, while other elements may not. We still need to separate the trustworthy wheat from the superstitious chaff. And the scientific method is the best approach to do just that.

There’s a preliminary section of Ottenburghs’ paper, inspired by his reading of Deutsch, about how science works and how scientific explanations are evaluated, which fed into the post (or riposte) above.  This whole thing may seem trivial, but if we don’t keep calling out the creeping sacralization of indigenous knowledge, and the intrusion into science of myth, storytelling, and superstition, it will become stuck in science like a tick on your leg, with the potential to cause the scientific equivalent of Lyme disease.

Amazon review of “The War on Science” volume rejected for using “woke” as pejorative

March 5, 2026 • 11:00 am

Reader Jon Gallant recently finished the essay collection compiled and edited by Lawrence Krauss, The War on Science:  Thirty-Nine Renowed Scientists and Scholars speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process.” (Luana and I have a paper in it taken from our Skeptical Inquirer paper on the ideological subversion of biology).

Jon decided to leave a review of the book on its Amazon page (his review is shown below in the Amazon rejection). Yep, his submitted review was rejected. He sent the rejection to me and I reproduce it and his emailed speculations (with permission).  I’ve put a red box around the submitted review:

At first I was puzzled, as I don’t follow Amazon reviews and know nothing about the ideology of the site or company.  Can you guess why the review was returned with requests for changes?  I suspect you’ve guessed correctly, though we can’t be sure.  I asked Jon what he thought, and here’s some of his response:

Use of the term “woke” in a less than reverential tone is no doubt classified by Amazon’s editors as “hate speech”.  After all, it makes wokies feel unsafe.  My hunch is that the dopier Communications majors from the 2010s work as review editors at Amazon.  The better-connected ones get into the editorial offices of some Nature publications we have encountered.

In truth, I can see no other explanation.  The review was not worshipful enough of wokeness, and in fact made fun of it, even expressing a hope that it would disappear.  If you have another explanation, by all means put it in the comments. I had no patience to read Amazon’s “community guidelines” to see if there were other infractions.

I don’t know if Jon will resubmit his review, but I thought that this was both sad and amusing. The other reviews (126 of them) are bimodal (70% five star, 18% one star), and it’s also amusing to look at the negative ones, most of them finding the book guilty of association with the wrong people, or not hard enough on Trump and right-wing assaults on science (not its purpose)

Andrew Doyle’s video retrospective of wokeness

March 4, 2026 • 10:00 am

Andrew Doyle, the creator of both Jonathan Pie and Titania McGrath (both of whom some people still take seriously), has taken out after wokeness in the article below from his own site (free to access).  It contains 20 short but inadvertently funny videos documenting the “woke era”—an era that Doyle sees as circling the drain. (I wish!). Here’s his intro:

There is little doubt that historians of the future are going to look back on the ‘woke’ era with utter bafflement. How is it that intelligent people were suddenly caught up in this identity-obsessed hysteria? Why did they forget that free speech mattered? Or that human beings cannot change sex? Or that judging people by the colour of their skin rather than the content of their character was a bad thing?

The lunacy was so intense that these same historians will probably have to be persuaded that any of it happened at all. So I thought it would be helpful to compile some of the more ludicrous and shocking video clips from this recent culture war. A kind of digital time capsule, if you will, for the sceptics of the future.

Woke may not have ended, but with any luck we are over the worst of it. With that in mind, here are my top twenty snapshots of this bonkers period of our history. Enjoy!

Here are the 20 topics; I’ve put asterisks next to my favorites. Some of the topics include more than one video.  Do watch them all; it’s a good summary of how crazy things have gotten.

  1.  The homophobic horses
  2.  The no-no square*
  3.  Gay conversion therapy goes mainstream
  4.  The abolition of history
  5. The alphabet soup (starring Justin Trudeau)
  6. Queers for Palestine*
  7. Problematic allies
  8. “Progressive” racism
  9. Pronoun lunacy, starring Kamala Harris and Jeremy Corbyn*
  10. Student meltdown (the Christakis incident at Yale about the Halloween-costume fracas. It’s worth finding the whole thing on YouTube.)*
  11.  You ain’t black
  12.  Humza Yousef’s own goal
  13.  Childhood indoctrination
  14. Male breastfeeding*
  15. Politicans forget about biology
  16.  Thought police*
  17.  Misogyny becomes “progressive”
  18. Everyone is a Nazi*
  19. Osama bin Laden gets some new fans (his “Letter to the American people” that the young wokesters so admired was removed from the Guardian, but can be seen here (and read about it here).
  20.  The sancification of drag

I suppose my overall favorite is #2: the “no-no square”, described this way:

In Finland, Oulu city council established a €2.5 million project to address the rising cases of sexual assaults by migrants. It was called ‘Safe Oulu’, and this was the official dance.

This performative “dance” is supposed to reduce sexual assault, as if people don’t already know where are the parts that shouldn’t be touched.

 

Lizzy Savetsky chews out the Democrats

March 3, 2026 • 10:15 am

I find it wearisome to have to say, each time I criticize the Democratic Party, that yes, I am a Democrat and have never in my life voted for a Republican. I also find it wearisome to repeat that I detest Trump and think he’s a terrible President. But what I cannot say is that everything Trump’s done, without exception, is bad, and that he’s incapable of doing anything good.

I cannot judge all of Trump’s motivations, and cannot agree with some readers who argue that even if he does something that has good results, his motivations were bad, evil, or self-serving.  I will judge an action by its results, not by its motivations.  As I’ve said before, I align with those Democrats who used to lean more Left, but since the entire party, dragged by the donkeys of progressivism, has shifted to the Left, I now find myself in the center—but still a Democrat.

The video below by pro-Israel activist Lizzie Savetsky, expresses some of this sentiment. I can’t find her party affiliation, but again I don’t care much, as what she says should not be judged by whether she’s a Republican or a Democrat.

Which brings us to our attack on Iran. Savetsky calls out the Democrats for now supporting Iran and criticizing Trump for his attack on the country. Given how the attacks have played out, generally support them, hoping for a toppling of the terroristic and murderous regime, for the Iranian people to be free of that regime, and for its nuclear program to be abandoned forever. Will that happen? I don’t know. Like many actions, this attack cannot be judged until it’s been over for quite a while, and I have no crystal ball.

Have a listen to the five-minute video.  I agree with much of it, though Savetsky is too hard on the Democrats as a whole. I don’t, for example, think that the entire party is riddled with fraudulent positions (many of us, for example, have not been silent about the oppressive Iranian theocracy).  And Savetsky’s argument that the Party is driven by an “oppressor vs, oppressed” postmodern ideology is incomplete. Those Democrats crying “Hands off Iran,” also see Muslims as oppressed because they are people of color, and the U.S. (and Israel) as odious because we are seen as “colonizers”.

I think Savetsky is right in saying that the Democrats’ position has devolved largely into demonizing one man: Trump. We are not allowed to say he’s taken any action that has good results, for that would be an admission that we agree with some actions taken by Republicans. If something does have a good result, then we must say that it was driven by bad motivations.  That’s what happened when, not long ago—in an attempt to mend some of the American rifts—I asked people to name something good that Trump has done. I still get flak on that one.

But if I put up only posts that don’t get me criticized, this website would become an anodyne mouthpiece for progressivism and wokeism, as some other sites have. And I would be a coward.

I hope that some day the Democrats will become less driven by progressivism and its monomaniacal concentration on Trump, so that I can feel comfortable in the Party.

And I stand with the brave people of Iran, and hope that at the end of the battle they get freedom, and that the government stops its singleminded drive to export terror and build nuclear weapons.

Watch Savetsky below, and weigh in in the comments, remembering Da Roolz.

Nature, ideologically captured, uses “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women”

February 13, 2026 • 9:30 am

Here’s a new article in Nature (click on the title screenshot below to read it); it’s about the dearth of information about the safety of drugs used by pregnant women. Except, to Nature, they refer not to “women” but to “pregnant people,” for in the article, that is about the only term that refers to women who are pregnant.  “Women” is used almost exclusively when it’s in quotations from others.

Here’s my count:

“Pregnant people”:  Used 41 times
“Women”:  Used 5 times, 4 of them in quotes from others

Clearly some bowdlerization is going on here.

The sad part of this article is that it has a lesson worth reading—a dearth of knowledge about how many drugs affect pregnant women—but it’s annoyingly peppered with politically correct and annoying usages. For example:

The first usage of the “pp” term is in fact in the subtitle, which I’ve highlighted below (again, click the article to read it):

Here’s a screenshot with “pregnant people” highlighted. This is only a small sample of the article:

Need I say more? What this means is that Nature is clearly truckling to the language adopted by extreme gender activists, who consider trans-identified men as “women”.  Ergo, the words “pregnant women” are seen as offensive, because “women” include trans-idenfied men who can’t have babies. Voilà:  “pregnant people.” Also, as reader Coel says below, “The main problem is trans-IDing women, aka ‘trans men’, who, being women, can get pregnant, but who they regard as ‘men’. Hence ‘pregnant women’ would exclude them, and so amount to erasure of and thus genocide of those ‘trans men’ who are indeed pregnant.”

Here are the five uses of the word “women”, all but the last quotes from other authors (they can’t sanitize other people’s words):

 

Note that the last usage of woman, not in quotes, is required because they are referring to females who are not pregnant. But the journal still slipped up: they could have used “people with uteruses”, or, like The Lancet, “bodies with vaginas”:

Conclusion: Nature has been ideologically captured. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

The journal should be ashamed of itself.

 

h/t: Schnoid