Category: wokeness

John McWhorter goes back to antiwoke

October 25, 2026 • 8:30 am

The other day I expressed dismay that NYT writer John McWhorter produced a piece heartily endorsing land acknowledgments (“LA”s). That was out of character for a man who got a lot of attention for his “antiprogressive” stands, encapsulated in his book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. My objection to the LA piece was not just that LAs are truly woke—in the sense of being a performative act that nearly always accomplishes nothing but signaling virtue—but that McWhorter neglected the problems with them. These problems included determining who should acknowledge whom (and when) as well as the objections that many indigenous object to LAs.  In other words, his column was slanted.

But McWhorter somewhat redeemed himself with a recent column on “lived experience”, also in the NYT.  To read it, click on the headline below or find the piece archived here.

His point is about literature: whether writers should be chastised for adopting points of view that don’t come from their own ethnicity or sex. That is, is it kosher to write about the “lived experience” of people who are Hispanic, black, or Asian if you’re white, or about a woman if you’re a man?

As we know, the “progressive” answer is “no.”  I’ve attacked this viewpoint many times, arguing that one of the purposes of literature is to give the reader other points of view, and there’s no necessity that a writer can do that only by writing from the viewpoint of his sex and ethnicity, much less lived experience.  Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, my favorite novel, describes in detail the emotions of a woman, although of course Tolstoy had a Y chromosome. Likewise, his The Death of Ivan Ilych recounts what it’s like to be dying, though Tolstoy himself died 24 years later. It is so realistic, and so moving, that it was used in medical schools to teach doctors what terminal patients might experience.  You don’t have to be a woman to portray what it’s like to be a woman, nor terminally ill to imagine what it’s like.

The presumption that only members of a group can write from the “group’s viewpoint” is doubly wrong. It assumes not only that “authenticity” requires a writer to write from his own “lived experience”, but also that every member of a group shares a similar viewpoint.  Did all white men share the view of Mark Twain when he wrote the novel Huckleberry Finn, featuring an empathic view of Jim, a black man? Was it improper for Kazuo Ishiguro to write about upper-class British life in Remains of the Day?  The answer to both questions is “of course not!”

In fact, imagination can stand in for lived experience, and imagination comes from the “lived experience” of encountering or studying people not of your type. But that’s not the progressive view, which has led to recent novels being demonized or canceled simply because the writer was of the “wrong” ethnicity.  McWhorter gives some examples, beginning with Allan Gurganus, a white author who wrote about women and blacks.

[Gurganus’s] command of the Black characters was equally authoritative. He especially got behind the eyes of a woman taken to Charleston via the horrific Middle Passage and how she perceived whites on seeing them for the first time, throughout her childhood as a slave, and then living long past the Civil War.

Today, however, a fashion among certain influential people is to dismiss it as “problematic” that someone would approach those characters without having had their “lived experience.” Under this analysis Gurganus was being a kind of puppeteer, speaking for characters he couldn’t hope to portray as accurately and fully as someone of their sex or race.

Accusations of this kind have been standard since the late 2010s. Jeanine Cummins’s 2020 novel, “American Dirt,” sold over four million copies and was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club amid glowing reviews from many important voices, including the Mexican American writer Sandra Cisneros. Suddenly, however, a chorus of detractors dismissed the book as poorly written, especially aggrieved that Cummins was a white woman writing about Mexican immigrants.

The major publishers rejected Rebecca Bruff’s “Trouble the Water” because she is white and wrote from the perspective of a Black Civil War veteran. In 2018 The Nation published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee written as a statement from a homeless Black narrator. The poem was written with care and empathy, but the predictable response from certain quarters led The Nation to publish an apology for printing it.

The Own Voices movement in the late 2010s elevated children’s books written by authors sharing the protagonists’ identities. Of late, Rachel Reid has been criticized for writing “Heated Rivalry,” a novel about gay male hockey players, when she is obviously not a gay man and has not specified whether she is a gay woman.

If you have any acquaintance with literature, you’ll be able to come up with similar examples.  My own children’s book, Mr. Das and his Fifty Cats (still unpublished), was received and read with enthusiasm by a British agent and an illustrator, but it was never shown to any publishers? Why? Because, as they told me, I wrote about India and am not Indian but “white”. If you read the book (and if you’re a publisher, please do!), you’ll see how dumb that judgment was.

Now McWhorter makes no points in this article that haven’t been made by others. But the article is valuable because the ludicrous view that authors must write from their experience as a member of the target group is a view still with us. These points must be made over and over again so long as “progressive” attitudes persist, passed on from one generation to the next.  Also, McWhorter is a superb writer himself , having a lot of experience with novels and musicals, and so makes a trenchant and compelling argument:

Broadway musicals, for example, are the product of people who created beyond their lived experiences, as the forthcoming book “Broadway in Black and White,” written by the conductor John Mauceri with interpolations by yours truly, describes. The score of “Show Boat” is a vast, plangent and achingly beautiful surge of musical and lyrical creativity, much of it channeling Black spirituals, blues and ragtime music as well as the Black characters’ speech patterns and perspective on their lives (“Ol’ Man River”). None of this was the “lived experience” of the two white, educated, affluent men who made “Show Boat,” Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein. But they created something so powerful that after the first performance, audience members were so stunned that they at first forgot to applaud.

Kern was of course Jewish, and Hammerstein was of part-Jewish ancestry, but the musical has nary a Jew in it.  A huge portion of Broadway musicals were in fact written by Jews, but none before Fiddler on the Roof starred explicitly Jewish characters. Did anyone object to all those other musicals being “inauthentic”? I don’t think so.

The one original point in the essay is in fact made by Garganus:

Gurganus has said: “It’s extraordinary that it is considered a feat for a male human to actually imagine a female one. Fifty-one percent of human beings on earth are women, right? We’ve all spent nine months riding around in the belly of one, and yet when it comes to writing I and thinking she — impossibility looms.”

Of course I’m not trying to justify the hegemony of whites or men as authors. Far from it. There was a time, though, when members of minority groups were barred from writing nearly anything—a product of bigotry. Those days are thankfully passing, and my view is that anybody can write about anything or any characters, and the product should be judged not by whether the “lived experience” comes from real life, but by whether the writing is engaging, resonating with the viewer, listener, or reader. As I wrote in Quillette:

The real value of art, then, is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Or, as McWhorter says at the end:

. . . But the idea that one should write from only one’s own experience is a willfully narrow-minded attack on creativity, empathy and even reason. It is cherished most by a vocal and generally younger minority, to whom the literary world caters out of fear of being called dirty names on social media, as well as mere expedience. Best not to poke the bear, you know.

The lived experience notion has certainly elicited pushback. This should continue, increase and ultimately render the whole idea an obsolete curiosity. This needlessly Balkanizing fashion, presented as enlightenment, is simply jejune. The literary world needs to get over it and get back to publishing writers for being the uniquely imaginative and empathetic humans they are.

Perhaps some day before I die an agent will read Mr. Das and His Fifty Cats and not devalue it because I am “white”.

John McWhorter goes all in for land acknowledgments

October 23, 2026 • 10:15 am

Although John McWhorter may have been taken on board the New York Times as a reliably “heterodox” columnist (remember his bestselling critique of wokeism Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America?), he occasionally comes up with something that’s pretty woke in itself. One example is his recent article favoring land acknowledgments.  Click below to read it if you subscribe, or find the piece archived here.

McWhorter is a smart and thoughtful man, and I wouldn’t dare accuse him of producing pieces like this just to keep his job.  But my “J’accuse” here is the weakness of his argument and his tendency to leave out counterarguments.  As you’ll see, his primary argument for giving land acknowledgments is because it “feels to him like the right thing to do.” He gives a few other benefits of these acknowledgments, but doesn’t talk about the problems, including the fact that many indigenous North Americans oppose acknowledgments and the issue of exactly who displaced who is often a problematic historical question.

Note that McWhorter says in the title below that land acknowledgments are both woke and right, but it was McWhorter himself who turned “woke” into a pejorative word, meaning (in my view) “something that purports to effect social justice but doesn’t do so, being largely performative.”  His whole book, in fact, is an argument against the “woke” nature of much antiracism, including that of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Is McWhorter now trying to reverse the meaning he gave to the term? (Note that “woke” originally was not pejorative but denoted awareness of racism and bigotry.)

Now I have no objection to land acknowledgments if they’re just meant to teach history, but you know very well that this is not their purpose. Their main purpose is to expiate the guilt of people who see themselves as “displacers”. It is generally a performative exercise that accomplishes nothing and can, as noted below, even be counterproductive, reducing interest in indigenous cultures.  Many of the people who have to suffer through these exercises had no part in the oppression of Native Americans but are cast as oppressors anyway. (My ancestors, for example, were in Eastern Europe fighting off Jew haters, and didn’t arrive in America until the early 20th century.)

But let me quote McWhorter, who deals briefly with the “performative” stuff and dispels it by saying that “some response is better than none”:

. . . . I think the land acknowledgments are wonderful.

Statements often also say that the original inhabitants were parted from their land by treachery, violence and European disease, and also note that their descendants survive and remain stewards of the land.

Events at Yale University, for example, sometimes begin with this acknowledgment:

“Yale University acknowledges that Indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.”

As for the performative aspect, McWhorter says this:

Many find these acknowledgments an inauthentic way of genuflecting to injustice without having to actually do anything about it. But institutions often treat the acknowledgments as one of many strategies for supporting the local Indigenous groups. Yale now grants a certificate in Native American and Indigenous studies. Its joint project with N.Y.U. supports Native American tribal sovereignty through legal advocacy and educational initiatives.

Yet obviously any efforts can repair only partly. Most of the descendants of the Lenape who originally inhabited Manhattan now live in Oklahoma and Wisconsin (and Ontario), their ancestors having been forcibly relocated there by whites in the 1800s.

But some response is better than none, and to sneer at land acknowledgments as performative nonsense is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

People often put land acknowledgments in the same basket as calling the soft bigotry of low expectations “D.E.I.” and calling for the defunding of the police. But trashing land acknowledgments because of these other woke shibboleths is like dismissing paved roads because the Romans built them but also espoused slavery, sexism and violence as spectacle. “Look at what the Romans were like — no aqueducts for me!”

This is a bogus argument: land acknowledgments do not improve society the way paved roads do. In the vast majority of cases, organizations who deliver the land acknowledgments (henceforth “LAs”) do not do anything to help the displaced peoples: they do not give money as reparations, return the land, or otherwise help the displaced people (more later on “displacement”).

McWhorter does give a couple of examples of nonperformative LAs. This one, involving bigotry decades ago, has little force:

My grandmother was a seamstress for a rich white family that would give their staff a luscious rustic week each summer on their island in Maine. She brought my family along in the summer of 1975. You could drink the lake water, it was so clean and clear. Dinner nightly was big lobsters. All you had to do was dip your rod in the water, and you’d be sure to pull up a bass. The cook made splendid blueberry pie with the local berries. The dogs were cute. In our “cottage,” there was for some reason not a piano but an organ; I loved learning how to work it.

The Polaroids of all of this just shine to this day with what a simple, unalloyed joy that week was. Except that late at night, I heard the white staff, always so warm and friendly around us, talking fiercely about the local Native Americans — I’m guessing they were the Passamaquoddy — as if they were less than human.

Apparently, the week in Maine is the equivalent of a land acknowledgment, but I’d rather have that and lobster dinners than empty words. And you can be sure that the staff were not Native Americans but African-Americans, and slavery and its sequelae are not the same thing as Native Americans displaced from their land.

McWhorter also cites, to his credit, something he did as reparations:

Later, I participated in a program helping restore Native Americans’ languages to them (Leanne Hinton’s pioneering Breath of Life). For one of the languages, a set of flash cards was one of the few records of its key words, and it had gone missing. The cards happened to turn up at my house, where one of the other assistants had accidentally left them after a gathering. When I gave them back to one of the group’s members, I will never forget her tears and the sincerity of her long hug. These people lost so much, and it still hurts.

There he put his money where his mouth is, but I have to say that giving back a pack of flash cards is not much reparations—not compared to giving back money or land.

But what does McWhorter leave out? Here are four issues:

Land acknowledgments can be detrimental. I mentioned that many people who deliver or hear LAs had no part in “stealing” land.  He also leaves out that land acknowledgments can, on the whole, be detrimental. Here’s a paper this year in Nature Human Behavior showing how:

The abstract relates that LAs can make people aware of “local indigenous groups” but also reduce interest in the culture and heritage of such groups. The conclusion is that LAs are pretty performative, serving mostly to elevate the reputation of organizations that make them rather than effect social justice. They are, in a word, performative:

Land acknowledgements—formal statements recognizing Indigenous custodianship of land—are widespread in Australia, where they originated, and have been gaining traction in the USA. Proponents argue they raise awareness of Indigenous histories and build support for reparations, but causal evidence is limited. Here randomized experiments on non-Indigenous populations in Australia (N = 1,724) and the USA (N = 1,773) find that exposure to land acknowledgements increases awareness of local Indigenous groups but can reduce interest in Indigenous culture and heritage. We find no significant effects on a range of political attitudes, including collective guilt and support for reparations. Additional experiments (N = 3,638) suggest that the adoption of land acknowledgements provides small reputational benefits to institutions facing public scrutiny. Costlier practices—such as financial compensation and Indigenous participation in decision-making—have significantly larger effects. These findings suggest that land acknowledgements primarily improve organizational reputation rather than generate sociopolitical change.

Many indigenous people oppose land acknowledgments. Below the fold I’ve given what Grok told me (with references) when I decided to ask it if any indigenous people opposed LAs. Grok spat out a pretty long list, with indigenous people citing the performative nature of LAs as means of flaunting one’s virtue and expiating white guilt.  LAs are also said to sometimes be historically inaccurate (see below), patronizing, and unable to provide “concrete benefits” for Native Americans.  In the cases I’ve heard, the LAs are delivered by white people, descendants of immigrants who didn’t drive anybody off their lands.

McWhorter doesn’t mention this. He just says that some acknowledgment is better than none. The article above suggests that this isn’t correct, especially if the LAs are quickly forgotten, as they often are. In that case, what “good” is done except for the LA announcers feeling good about themselves?

The history of North America is complex, beginning 20,000 years ago when Asians crossed the Bering Strait to colonize America. They subsequently split into many different populations as they spread south and east. Those populations sometimes cohered within themselves as “tribes,” and there’s a long history of intertribal warfare among Native Americans, with tribes displacing other tribes from their land and killing off or assimilating them. 

McWhorter doesn’t mention this, but the history is long, and very often a historically accurate LA would indict Native Americans tribes in sequence, valorizing only the last group that was displaced.

I’ll give two examples that can stand for many. First, the Comanche systematically forced the Apaches off “Apache land” (note that the concept of land ownership differed from what we have today); see here and here.

Likewise, the Lakota “were pushed onto the northern Great Plains during the seventeenth century by conflicts with the Anishinaabe and Cree; after adopting horse culture around 1730, they crossed the Missouri River and established themselves in the Black Hills by the 1770s as the spiritual center of their territory.” The moving and expanding Lakota then pushed out the Cheyenne “tribe” as well as other groups like the Crow and Kiowa. You’d need a very long acknowledgment to detail all this, and of course it would indict, along with white colonists, the Cree and the Lakota themselves. You can’t just give a performative LA indicting the present white “settlers,” for you’d be neglecting the nefarious conquests of the Lakota by the Cree and of the Cheyenne and Kiowa by the Lakota.  Is only the last group guilty? This also makes the question of reparations intractable: would a modern member of the Lakota apologize for displacing the Cheyenne, and offer reparations?

And of course all of these displacements trace back to the original users of land: the descendants of the H. sapiens who crossed into North America 20,ooo years ago.

Land Acknowledgments that indict only modern white people involve a form of “race essentialism”. This was suggested by Greg, who said this to me in an email:

There is race-essentialism inherent in LA’s. Some particular people of various ethnic groups displaced other particular ethnic groups. You (Jerry) are guilty because you are white– none of your ancestors were here at the time of the Indian wars, but yet you are guilty, because some other white people defeated some Indians, and all Indians have the same essence.

The question of LA is thorny and tortuous, but none of these issues are raised by McWhorter. There are far more LAs given than real attempts to “atone” for displacement, and we all know that the vast bulk of LAs are performative.  Yes, McWhorter can defend them as being “the right thing to do”, but if McWhorter is going to lecture white colonists on what is “right to do”, shouldn’t he also be lecturing the Lakota, the Cree, and dozens of other Native Americans groups who were “displacers”?

A war between tribes, taken from the video cited above:

[Addendum by Greg Mayer. Jerry and I were discussing this while he was composing his post, and he asked me to add some more thoughts, so here goes. The entire concept of indigenous is not at all straight forward. In biogeography, the word “indigenous”, as applied to plants or animals, has a relatively clear meaning– not transported to a place by man. (There are some terminological issues when dealing with recent natural dispersals.) But that doesn’t work for people– all people were brought by people! The term seems to mean “whoever was there when the first Europeans got there”. But why start “indigeneity” at that time point? Most places on Earth have been inhabited by people for a long time, and there have usually been numerous displacements, often by people who were culturally, linguistically, and ethnically distinct.  What makes some of the later groups indigenous? About the only places that we know who the first people there were are remote islands that were discovered by Europeans (and the first inhabitants were thus those very Europeans, e.g., Bermuda), or which were discovered so recently that a relatively complete archeological record documents the history of occupation (e.g. much of Polynesia). We know the Sioux displaced the Crow, but we can be pretty sure the Crow had not lived there for 14,000 years, so who is indigenous?

Until the post-World War II settlement of the world order, the conquest and occupation of land was the main theme of human history. There were all sorts of laws and principles about these things, beyond brute force– What is a terra nullius? What is effective occupation? (the latter still sort of an issue in the Falklands). It was only after WWII that it was generally agreed that borders can’t be changed by force, but only by negotiated agreements. Thus Czechoslovakia split peacefully, but most of the world condemns the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

Land acknowledgements in northern Italy would have to have the current Italians apologize to the Lombards (Germans), who would apologize for taking it from the Byzantines (who were legally Romans but mostly Greek), who would apologize for taking it from the Western Romans, who would apologize for taking  it from the Celts (the preceding is a huge simplification). Beyond the Celts, the historical record is meager, but I’m sure the Celts got it from somebody else.]

Examples of indigenous people opposing land acknowledgments are given below the fold (click “continue reading”)

Continue reading “John McWhorter goes all in for land acknowledgments” →

My take on Jason Arday and the journal Nature, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education

September 10, 2026 • 8:15 am

A week ago I wrote a critique of a really misguided (and unsigned) editorial in Nature, blaming the death of Jason Arday on his hounding by a racist press as well as “systemic racism” in academia. You can see that editorial by clicking the screenshot below:

The “deep reflection” that Nature demands involves us examining our souls for our complicity in Arday’s death, as well as realizing the harm caused by the press’s reporting of the Arday affair, as well as by Cambridge University’s announcement that they were investigating accusations against him. (That announcement itself was said by Nature to violate Arday’s confidentiality, perhaps also leading to his suicide. But if you read the actual announcement, it’s nothing that’s sp unusual when a university announces a public accusations.)

Perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of the Nature piece is that it almost completely ignores the lies, fraud, and fabulism issued by Arday, as well as the palpable fact that a man with almost no qualifications, and a background of duplicity (including probable research theft and fraudulent assertions on his c.v.) was appointed and lionized as a full professor of sociology at Cambridge. What Nature construes as “racism” is really “antiracism” by Cambridge: putting Arday’s ethnicity and claimed disability above his merit. If there’s any silver lining to the Arday tragedy, is that the outrageous claims by Arday touted have now made it okay to discuss how race-and-disability-based hiring can conflict with merit—that the term “inclusive excellence” might be an oxymoron. (There are of course very good black scholars, but Arday wasn’t one.)

At any rate, it was both misguided and even shameful for Nature to advance such a dumb argument, and I took it apart in my post.  That post caught the eye of folks at The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), and they asked me to rewrite it for publication on their site.  I did that, with the help of an excellent editor, and it was published yesterday. You can read it by clicking on the screenshot below. (You may have to “subscribe” by giving the CHE your email, but they do not send out promotional emails, and you can read a couple of articles a month for free.

I will not reproduce the whole piece I wrote there, but have put a few excerpts (indented) below.  I should be able to put it somewhere free, and in toto, next week. (I also see that it’s archived here for free.)

A few excerpts:

One of the more distressing changes in science is its infection by politics and ideology, a change visible in what I call “journal creep.” Until recently, the primary function of scientific journals was to disseminate research. Now, however, many journals have adopted an additional mission: promoting ideological, moral, or political positions. This newer mission, which endangers not only the reputation but also the practice of science, is seen clearly in a recent editorial in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, Nature.

The Nature editorial centers on the tragic story of Jason Arday, a sociologist who at 37 became the youngest Black full professor ever appointed at the University of Cambridge. In July, it was revealed that Arday had plagiarized significant portions of his Ph.D. thesis at Liverpool John Moores University. This in turn prompted extensive investigations by the press. What they found was not pretty: more evidence of plagiarism, falsified research, fabricated claims on his curriculum vitae, and, most striking, a breathtaking record of biographical fabulism.

. . . Nature’s editorial is titled “The Death of Jason Arday Must Prompt Deep Reflection.” Unfortunately, the reflection Nature demands does not involve asking how someone with such a thin academic record and a history of exaggeration and lying managed to secure such a prestigious position. Rather, Nature is concerned with assigning blame for Arday’s downfall and death, and the blame falls on everyone but Arday himself.

Most at fault, says Nature, was “persistent media attention” largely fostered by racism. Cambridge also deserves blame both for participating in the “systemic racism in academia” that supposedly made Arday’s life intolerable, and for announcing that they would investigate him, which, says Nature, was a violation of “confidentiality.” But all Cambridge announced was that it was investigating Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments” as well as allegations of “academic misconduct”— nothing more. Since the media was already intensively focused on Arday, announcing an investigation without giving details doesn’t seem out of line. American universities do it all the time, saying things like: “We are not commenting pending an investigation of these accusations.”

Oddly absent from Nature’s editorial is any serious acknowledgement of Arday’s apparent fabulism, plagiarism, errors, and lies. Nor is there any attempt to grapple with the fact that Arday’s decision to publish a memoir with a major commercial publisher further drew the media’s spotlight.

. . . Disparaging merit in favor of equity, shifting research funding towards progressive topics, misrepresenting science by skewing citations towards researchers having approved backgrounds, censoring papers, controlling language, and distorting accepted science so that it conforms to certain narratives while proscribing research on topics considered taboo — such symptoms of ideological pollution are present in journals across the sciences. Here are three examples, all involving Nature journals.

I then give three examples.  Nature, like many journals (I’m looking at you The Lancet, as well as at Science) has gone “progressive” (a polite word for “woke”), and the examples show that clearly.

 

. . . A scientific journal, like a university, should remain ideologically and politically neutral, with the possible exception of matters that directly affect the mission of the journal itself. Pinning blame for the death of Jason Arday on the press and on the University of Cambridge, and flippantly characterizing science as ridden with “structural racism,” are not issues within the remit of Nature. Although Arday was the author of his own tragedy, Nature asks all of us to search our souls for traces of the racism that, they claim, make us coauthors:

It is incumbent on all of us in the media and academia to reflect on our roles and responsibilities. Both research and media organizations have an obligation to communicate information fairly and accurately — and to avoid causing harm to the people they employ or report on. We can and must learn from this tragedy.

Sadly, Nature has learned the wrong lessons.

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)