Monday: Hili dialogue

June 1, 2026 • 6:45 am

It’s JUNE!!!  Welcome to the first day of that month, Monday, June 1, 2026, and here’s a depiction of the month in the illuminated manuscript the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, with the caption “June Palais de la Cité and the Sainte-Chapelle”.  This scene must be right outside 15th-century Paris, as that’s where Cité and Sainte-Chapelle are (they still look the same). The barefooted peasants are cultivating the crops:

Limbourg brothers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Dinosaur Day, Heimlich Maneuver Day (see instructions below), National Hazelnut Cake Day, National Nail Polish Day, National Olive Day, and World Milk Day.

Here’s an up-to-date video showing what you should do if someone is choking. Watch it, as we should all know how to do this.  Remember to first give those five sharp blows to the back.

There’s a Google Doodle below celebrating Pride Month. The caption: “In celebration of Pride Month, today’s Doodle celebrates the art of disco by shining a light on the LGBTQ+ artists who helped create space for everyone on the dance floor.”  Click on the icon to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 1 Wikipedia page

Da Nooz:

*After six musical acts pulled out of Trump’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, Trump has now announced that HE, the GREATEST PRESIDENT EVER, will headline the celebration.

President Donald Trump will headline an opening ceremony for the Great American State Fair on the National Mall next month after many of the musical performers slated for the event canceled, citing the event’s associations with him.

The Great American State Fair — organized by Freedom 250, a Trump-aligned entity he created by executive order to plan semiquincentennial events — this week announced a lineup of performers. More than half canceled shortly thereafter, including Martina McBride and Bret Michaels, claiming they had not known about the organizing group’s connections to the president.

After Trump said on his Truth Social platform Saturday that he understood “Artists are getting ‘the yips’” about performing and suggested headlining the event himself, Danielle Alvarez, an adviser to Freedom 250, confirmed to The Washington Post that Trump will now kick off an opening event for the fair.

“As the visionary behind the Great American State Fair, we are excited to announce that President Trump will personally kick off this historic celebration on Wednesday, June 24 in an opening ceremony celebrating America’s 250th birthday,” Alvarez said in a statement first shared with The Post. She called the multiday event “a World’s Fair celebrating the people, traditions, innovations, and spirit that make America the greatest nation on Earth.”

Trump earlier Saturday said that he was “ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally.”

Two of Trump’s advisers told The Post on Saturday, on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans publicly, that they were quickly working to make his suggestion of being the fair’s opening act a reality.

While the president’s post suggested he wanted his speech to take place on Wednesday, the Great American State Fair was originally set to begin June 25 and run through July 10.

And get a load of this fulminating narcissism, written by the President:

Prior to Freedom 250 confirming the newly planned speech, Trump in his Truth Social post wrote that he was “thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!”

What’s he going to do for his opening act: give another speech? Will the other acts go on? Of course given the politics of most popular musicians, I’m not sure that even if Trump hadn’t politicized the event, musicians would have declined simply because the government (aka Trump) is behind this celebration. It’s a shame, as there are many good things about America, and what do we get? A CAGE FIGHT, for crying out loud!

*The CBC reported that an autistic girl, 14 years of age,  went missing in Toronto, and her family offered a $25,000 for her safe return and lots of posters were put up. Would you be able to guess what happened when it was known she was Jewish? The posters were torn down, of course.

Toronto police say they’ve received reports of multiple posters for a missing teen girl being torn down, while her family has announced a $25,000-reward for any information leading to her “safe return.”

The 14-year-old girl was last seen in the area of Bathurst Street and Hotspur Road, south of Highway 401, on Saturday at 12:01 a.m., police say.

On Sunday, Toronto Reddit users posted images of what appeared to be torn-down posters reporting the girl missing. The Jewish and wider community in Toronto are concerned about these actions and the motivations behind them.

Nadine Ramadan, spokesperson for Toronto police, said in an email that police “understand reports of these posters being torn down are upsetting for the community.”

“However, removing posters is not necessarily a criminal offence,” she said. “Our focus remains on the investigation.”

Maureen Leshem, a spokesperson for the family, said it was “disturbing and cruel” to see the posters being torn down.

“When a family is desperately trying to find their child, this kind of behaviour should concern every person in our city,” she said in an emailed statement.

“Right now, the only focus should be on finding [her]. Instead, volunteers who have spent days and nights searching, postering, and raising awareness are watching those efforts deliberately undermined.”

Leshem said a $25,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the girl’s safe return.

You have to have no moral compass to tear down posters advertising for the return of an autistic girl–simply because she’s Jewish. But this is what’s happening in Canada these days, and not just Canada.  But, there’s good news about the missing girl:

  • UPDATE: Toronto police say the missing 14-year-old was found safe on May 28. You can find the latest here. CBC News is no longer naming the girl to protect her privacy now that she has been found.

No thanks to the haters.

*The “inclusive” mayor of NYC, Zohran Mamdani, is breaking a long tradition of city Mayors who will march in the annual parade honoring Israel. Mamdani has announced he won’t march, but he’ll ensure that lots of cops are on hand.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will not attend an annual parade honoring Israel on Sunday, breaking with a decades-long political custom because of his support of Palestinian rights.

Though it has gone by different names over the years, the Israel Day parade has always been a must-attend event for mayors, governors and other political leaders eager to win over the throngs of flag-waving revelers who congregate on Fifth Avenue to celebrate the birth of the Jewish state in 1948.

Not so for Mamdani. Two weeks ago the mayor’s office released a video commemorating the Nakba, an Arabic word for “catastrophe” that is used to describe the displacement of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.

“I said on the campaign trail that I wouldn’t be attending the parade, and I’ve made my views on the Israeli government abundantly clear,” Mamdani said at a news conference Thursday.

This is the first time in 60 years that the Mayor hasn’t marched in the Israel parade.

And, in fact, the Nakba really refers to the disaster that occurred to five Arab armies when they Israel the day it announced independence. Israel did not expel Arabs who weren’t fighting against them, but encouraged peaceful Arabs to stay.  Many, many Arab residents of then fled Israel on their own— at the request of the Arab states attacking it, who said that they could return when Israel lost. It didn’t lose. Ergo, Nakba, an embarrassment for the Arab states. It’s absurd that the mayor’s office would release a video commemorating it: a blatant ideological statement that has nothing to do with the governance of New York City. A bit more:

The city’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, told reporters she would attend.

“It is the mayor’s decision not to march, and it is my decision to march proudly,” she said as she stood alongside Mamdani at police headquarters.

The mayor’s absence, though long expected, has given fresh fuel to opponents who view his criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitic.

Rabbi Marc Schneier, founding senior rabbi of The Hampton Synagogue on Long Island and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which advocates for better relationships between Jews and Muslims, called Mamdani’s decision to not attend the parade “a slap in the face to all Jewish New Yorkers.”

“Do us a favor, stay home,” he said. “We don’t need you. We don’t want you.”

Nope, but, as Sam Harris said, Mamdani is either an Islamist or a promoter of Islamism, which is a government run along Muslim Islamic lines.  And it’s clear he’s an antisemite. Jews who voted for him are getting exactly what they deserve, even if it’s unexpected.

*A WSJ op-ed by the Editorial Board reports what happened when the University of California System dropped standardized tests like the SATs as requirements for admission.

Six years ago, in the 2020 year of progressive pandemic madness, the University of California led the Ivory Tower movement to drop standardized tests as an admissions requirement in the name of equity. The experiment has been a failure, as more than 750 professors in STEM disciplines across the UC system now admit in a cri de coeur to reverse course.

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” the professors write in an open letter to the Board of Regents signed by seven of nine chairs of UC math departments.

The Board of Regents in May 2020 moved to scrap the university’s SAT/ACT requirement on the spurious rationale that tests discriminate against minorities. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who appoints most regents, had claimed the tests exacerbate “the inequities for underrepresented students,” even though a faculty senate report found otherwise.

Test scores “add substantially to UC’s ability to predict student success” beyond high school grades, especially for minority groups, the faculty report said. It stressed that the university “does not appear to use standardized test scores in a way that amplifies racial disparities.” Without test scores, admissions would hinge on inflated grades, extracurricular activities and essays.

Note that the regents went against the faculty and against data suggesting that submitting tests in fact help get in qualified minorities.

Those warnings have borne out. The new faculty letter says that “for three consecutive years, 20-30% of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students who participated in mathematical diagnostic testing displayed severe preparation deficits.” Drop standards, and learning mastery declines. Imagine that.

The letter stresses that current admissions standards cannot “reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation and AI-assisted application essays.” Eliminating the test requirement has resulted in admitting students to STEM programs “without a reliable measure of whether they are prepared to succeed. This serves no one well.”

“Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome,” the professors write. “Obscuring preparation gaps harms both students individually and the University collectively. It offers the appearance of access while undermining the chance of success.”

AI won’t help you much (if at all) on SATs, and the Berkeley data shows that you can’t have equity and merit—not so long as you don’t accept standardized tests. Colleges are starting to use them again, though.

*I keep reading about “suicidal empathy,” in which empathic feelings lead one down paths of supporting odious causes (college students supporting Hamas is one example); and now Gad Saad has a new eponymous book on it. Sadly, Quillette gave it a damning review.

Homeowner Jane invites the homeless James to live with her. “I’d hate to be homeless,” she tells herself. James starts to exploit and abuse her. She accepts it. “I would not exploit and abuse someone unless something truly terrible had happened to me,” she thinks. This is what Gad Saad would call “suicidal empathy.” In his book of the same name, the Canadian commentator rails against “the orgiastic misfiring of one of our most noble virtues, empathy.”

There is merit to Saad’s critique. He is correct that empathy is problematic when people exaggerate the similarities between individuals. In all likelihood, James is not exploiting and abusing Jane because he has been maddened by trauma. He is, fundamentally, a less conscientious person.

Saad is clear—and rightly so—that he has no inherent objection to empathy. He objects to empathy, and all other emotions, when they are not regulated by rationality. The extent to which we empathise with other people must be framed by a rational understanding of those people and their circumstances.

. . .So far, so good. But Saad, a marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal, is a terrible guide to his theme. If the concept of “suicidal empathy” can be compared to an interesting neighbourhood, Saad does the equivalent of leading the reader on an extensive tour of an entire metropolis—ranting and bragging as he does so.

Saad has form here. A man who has never missed an opportunity to congratulate himself, he soaked his previous book—The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense—in narcissism, with incessant references to his courage, dedication, and football skills in the introduction alone. Suicidal Empathy isn’t quite that bad but he still can’t seem to finish a page without referencing his books, podcasts, talks et cetera; recounting his Twitter feuds; and making irrelevant and pandering remarks about contemporary politics.

This makes Suicidal Empathy almost impossible to read. Saad rambles smugly between subjects and tends to conflate sarcasm with wit—and with thinking that what makes a joke really entertaining is to repeat it. This passage may give you a sense of the Saad experience:

Late into the pandemic, the Quebec government had instituted a nighttime curfew that forbade people to walk their dogs outside, which they eventually rescinded after a dogged backlash. I hope that Fido does not have diarrhea during the curfew. After all, to walk your dog at 10:00 p.m. in a deserted residential area during a Montreal winter is simply too dangerous. You might pass the COVID virus to the accumulated snow. Much of the snow had yet to be mandatorily vaccinated, so empathetically speaking it was important to be vigilant. Snow Lives Matter.

I fully agree that COVID restrictions had diminishing returns. But so do jokes.

. . . In addition to this unfocused and self-satisfied style, there are deeper analytical problems. Saad is capable of making effective arguments (for example, he makes a decent case against “single-issue optimization” in the context of the pandemic). But he often leaps between arguments before he has actually finished making them, sacrificing thoroughness and coherence.

. . . If the Left can suffer from suicidal empathy, which is true, then right-wingers can suffer from homicidal incuriosity. This is a kind of self-absorbed arrogance that makes people assume that they have total knowledge of the facts of complex circumstances, including other people’s motivations, abilities, opinions, etc., and the power to control and reshape them as they please.

It goes on, but I’m familiar with Saad’s style, which is truly self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing. On the other hand, the Amazon rating is below, and on that page are a lot of blurbs from well known people.  And it’s #3 on the NYT list of print/e-book nonfiction works. So somebody likes it! If you’ve read it, weigh in.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s still distressed at the state of the world:

Hili: Oh God, you look like you’ve just finished going through the news.
Me: You guessed it.

 

In Polish:

Hili: O Boże, wyglądasz jakbyś właśnie skończył przegląd wiadomości.
Ja: Zgadłaś.

*******************

From TherionArms, another great medieval letter:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Masih, who breaks down on the CBS news as she thinks about Iranian protestors who have been killed or imprisoned. I’ve never heard her lose it before, but she’s a tough woman and four assassination attempts are too many:

From Luana, who doesn’t like Grokipedia. I haven’t tried it, but you can find it here, and the PNAS assessment here, which is not positive about the AI encyclopedia:

Posted by Emma; a commenter notes, in response to criticism, that there is no way to plot biological sex as a continuous distribution; these are traits connected with sex:

Two from my feed. The first one I retweeted:

I love it when kittens stot around like antelopes.  Here’s a translations from the Turkish:

It’s giving the world’s most beautiful poses. Anyone who claims otherwise can cry about it.

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed, together with his mother, when both arrived at Auschwitz. Manuel would be 89 today had he not been exterminated.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-06-01T10:26:38.121Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. He calls this first one “poorly spuds”:

Have you, like me, spent the last 26 years worrying if the Canadian Potato Museum STILL has the display of various potato diseases with potatoes in little coffins? Stop worrying. I checked today. Still there.

— Steve Hayman 🇨🇦 (@shayman.bsky.social) 2026-05-26T20:17:47.192Z

Shark navels!

About 60% of sharks are viviparous, meaning they use placental gestation like humans.Which means: SHARKS CAN HAVE BELLY BUTTONS.These small scars generally heal/disappear in a few months after live birth, making them a useful indicator of newborns in viviparous shark species.(📷:NOAA)

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T16:44:47.782Z

Words I detest

May 31, 2026 • 10:30 am

I have only three horrible words today, but I saw them all this week, and I want to get them off my chest before they tangle up my kishkes. Here they are, with examples.  Two of them appear in just one article—at the New York Times.

1.) Tradwife: This word seems to have appeared recently, and is a shortening of “traditional wife”—that is, as AI sees it, “It refers to a woman who chooses to embrace traditional gender roles, centering her life around being a homemaker, raising children, and submitting to her husband’s role as the primary.”  It’s an example of how the young people shorten phrases in order to look cool.  I had to look it up the first time I saw it, but that’s the case for many odious neologisms.

2.) Cosplay. This has been around for a longish while, and yet I still don’t know whether to pronounce it with a short or a long “o”. And you’ll never hear me using it.  But no matter, as it will never pass my lipes.

Again, here’s an AI definition:

Cosplay is a portmanteau of “costume” and “play.” It is a performance art and hobby where participants wear costumes and accessories to represent a specific character from a work of fiction, such as anime, comic books, video games, or movies.
In other words, it’s Halloween for adults.

Here are both of them used in a single piece from the NYT written by Lauren Jackson in her weekly column “Believing,” designed to tell the paper’s readers how wonderful religion is (Jackson claims to be a nonbeliever, but her lips are firmly affixecd to the posterior of faith).

The book “Yesteryear” has a fantastic, pithy pitch: A tradwife influencer named Natalie wakes up in the world she was cosplaying online, in the year 1855. It’s a thriller and a scathing critique of how women perform for the internet. It’s also a book all about religion, belief — and delusion.

It’s at the top of the Times best-seller list, and I bet it will hang out there for a while. Before it even came out, Anne Hathaway decided she’d adapt it into a movie.

I loved every page. So I called the author, Caro Claire Burke, to talk to her about it.

Both words in one sentence! Jackson thinks this kind of writing is au courant.  Seriously, Jackson should jettison her breezy prose, which I guess is designed to lure sheep into the fold.

And my Worst Word of the Year:

3.) Bougie.  I think this one is pronounced “boo-szhee”, and is a shortening of “bourgeois,” often used derisively to mock wealth and status.  Here’s its usage in the Free Press by Suzy Weiss, the younger sister of Bari Weiss who was nepotistically given a slot as a writer for the FP. She hasn’t yet grown into her role:

Everyone who moves to the bougie Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope does so with big ideas about how their new life there will go. How they’re going to jog in Prospect Park; how their brownstone apartments will be an oasis in the concrete jungle, a place to read on-trend books and host delightful dinner parties for erudite neighbors.

Isn’t that so cool?  She uses “bougie”. (I won’t go after “on-trend”, which is ridiculous; why not use “trendy”?) I can’t bear to go on. . .

A superb book about Gauguin

May 31, 2026 • 9:30 am

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and his erstwhile friend Vincent van Gogh, are two of my favorite painters, though I like van Gogh’s work better. But nobody from the post-Impressionist era ever went off to Polynesia like Gauguin, bent on living and depicting what he conceived as the natural life, unspoiled by the trappings of the West.  He produced some marvelous paintings (and sculptures, which he also was good at), though he was largely unappreciated and ignored during his life.

I first saw a lot of Gauguins at the famous Boston Museum of Fine Art’s exhibit in 2004, which displayed more than 150 of the painter’s works. I was mesmerized, not only by the colors and exoticism, but by narrative works like “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (see below).

Gauguin is buried on Atuona in the Marquesas Islands, his grave sporting a bronze cast of one of his wood sculptures:

Gauguin’s grave. Attribution: makemake, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I just finished a recent biography of Gauguin: Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, written by Sue Prideaux and published by W. W. Norton in May of last year.  You can see the Amazon version by clicking on the cover below, which shows  a photo of the painter.  It’s thorough and well documented but not academic: that is, the narrative is up to date, replenished by recently available sources, and it’s an engaging read. If you have any interest in art, I’d recommend it highly.  Gauguin was an important figure in the history of art, sui generis in his work but influential in the work of painters like Matisse and Picasso.

One could characterize Gauguin’s life as that of the classic “tortured artist”—tortured not by mental illness (as was van Gogh) but by an endless search for a place to escape civilization, a tortuous marriage, an endless search for money to live on, and, in the latter part of his life, severe medical issues. (His heart was bad, he had chronic eye problems, and he suffered from open sores on his legs, the result of a stomping in France by clog-wearing bullies.) That, combined with his love of lots of red wine and an odious diet of tinned food, led to his death at only 54.

Yet he had moments of great joy and beauty, and this is expressed on his canvas. In that way he resembled van Gogh. His most pleasurable moments were at his easel, where he spent a lot of time, and his paintings from Brittany, but especially Tahiti and the Marquesas, are splendid. I show a few below.

Prideaux’s book recounts a tumultuous life, with four years of Gauguin’s infancy spent in Peru (he called himself “the Peruvian savage” for the rest of his life) and later a stultifying stint as a stockbroker in Paris.  He was a self-taught painter who married a Danish woman. Circumstances forced her and their two children to move back to Denmark, where Gauguin joined them on occasion. Money was always an issue, and Gauguin, like van Gogh, simply couldn’t gin up much interest in his paintings. His need to sell his art to buy food, paints, and lodging persisted throughout his life.

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh, obsessed with the idea of starting a colony of artists, invited Gauguin to live with him at the famous “yellow house” in Arles, France.  They didn’t get along well, and it was during this period that, after an argument with Gauguin, van Gogh cut off his own ear and deposited it at a brothel.  After only nine weeks, Gauguin fled, but not before they had painted each other’s portraits. Here is van Gogh’s depiction of Gauguin:

Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret), 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam:

via Wikimedia Commons
And Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh as “The Painter of Sunflowers.”  Gauguin really did love and admire van Gogh, but couldn’t tolerate his eccentricities and periods of lunacy; yet for the rest of his life he would sometimes paint a sunflower in honor of his friend, even in Polynesia, where Gauguin planted some (van Gogh committed suicide two years after Gauguin fled Arles).
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The rest is history—and in Prideaux’s book.  Gauguin took off for Tahiti in 1891, returned to France for a few years, and set out for his second visit to Tahiti in 1895, where he took up residence with young Tahitian women (13 or 14 was the age of “marriage” for many of them) and produced many canvases. But dissatisfied with the fact that French colonialism was spoiling his “paradise,” Gauguin repaired to the Marquesas in 1901, where he spent the last three years of his life. After becoming integrated into local society, he eventually stopped partying and took seriously to painting. He was found dead in his bed on May 8, 1903.

Here are a few paintings I like from Gauguin’s stay in Polynesia. Click to enlarge them.

Below is his most famous painting. Gauguin captioned it Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, (1897, oil on canvas, 139 × 375 cm (55 × 148 in), Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is his vision of the span of life, starting with an infant on the right and moving an old woman on the left. Prideaux explains all the imagery of this and other paintings, which are reproduced in color in her book. 

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Maternity, 1899:

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. This was apparently painted after Gauguin returned home at night, with his young mistress, left in the dark, scared to death.  There is a lot going on here; note the iconography at the bottom and the weird figures at the upper right. 

Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Among the Mangoes (La Cueillette des Fruits), 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Gauguin loved color and lots of it; he was always sending back to Europe for more and different paints. 

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Tehura (Teha’amana), 1891–3, polychromed pua wood, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Public Domain, CCo, Wikimedia Commons

Here’s Gauguin about 1891. The book describes him as a handsome man, one who had no trouble attracting ladies either in Europe or Polynesia, where he lived with several women from the islands. But he was often laid low by his many maladies.

Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And here is his last self-portrait, painted only a year before he died. To me this image looks like the middle-aged Eric Clapton:

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Below is the NYT review by Jennifer Szalai. Click the headline to read from the NYT site or find it archived here:

As you see, it’s laudatory.  One excerpt from the review:

For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris. . .

. . . Given how eventful Gauguin’s life was, it’s remarkable how much Prideaux packs into this briskly readable volume, which clocks in at barely 400 pages. She elegantly recounts his artistic struggles and his persistent money worries. She offers lucid re-creations of key moments, like the time Vincent van Gogh, his friend and roommate in the south of France, ran at him with a razor. (The next morning, Gauguin learned that van Gogh had cut off his own ear and handed it to a brothel worker.)

But it’s Gauguin’s experiences in French Polynesia that have understandably become the most notorious. (The last major biography of Gauguin, published in 1995, called him a “syphilitic pedophile.”) By the time he died, at 54, on the tiny island of Hiva Oa in 1903, he had gotten two Indigenous girls — each about 14 years old — pregnant. Prideaux does not deny this fact, reminding us only that in France and the colonies, the age of consent at the time was 13.

“Wild Thing” is not a whitewash of Gauguin’s legacy; instead, Prideaux fills it in with more detail. As a Frenchman in a French colony, he excoriated himself for his moral hypocrisy and became a pamphleteer, taking a job writing for the opposition party’s newspaper. He also helped locals with their petitions against the colonial authorities. In a letter to the inspector of the colonies, he noted the “singular irony” of “the hypocritical proclamation of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” when it came to “men who are no more than tax fodder in the hands of a despotic gendarme.”

Toward the end of his life, Gauguin — who never fully healed from a nasty leg injury sustained in Brittany when he was almost kicked to death in a melee by a clog-wearing mob — hobbled around his island paradise, subsisting mainly on a calamitous diet of canned food. After his death, the administrator in charge of selling the contents of Gauguin’s home did not believe it would be possible to pay back creditors in full: “The liabilities will considerably exceed the assets, as the few pictures by the late painter, who belonged to the decadent school, have little prospect of finding purchasers.”

Again, I highly recommend Wild Thing.  And tell us below what you’ve read and liked lately.

Reader’s wildlife photo (and video)

May 31, 2026 • 8:15 am

We have a short RWP today as there are more posts to come.  First we hear from Robert Lang, who sees a surprising amount of wildlife near his home in the eastern LA “suburb” of Altadena. Robert’s intro is indented, and you can enlarge the photo by clicking on it.

Although every day sees another few housing starts in post-fire Altadena, it’s still mostly empty of people, but after a year that included plenty of rain, the vacant lots are lush with plants—a mix of native coastal sage scrub, invasive weeds, and landscaping gone wild. This temporary rewilding provides plenty of cover for the local wildlife to come down out of the hills and hang out. Yesterday the workers at our site reported that a bear had stopped by and done a walk-through of the framed house (fortunately, just lookie-looing, no damage). Today I did a short hike on the Gabrielino Trail above my old stomping ground of JPL and saw a different (younger) California black bear (Ursus americanus californiensis) just off the trail, and I shot the photo below. . .

. . .  also this video.

This isn’t the bear species on the California state flag, which is the California grizzly bear (Ursus arctos californicus); that was native to this area but was hunted to extinction in the early 20th century. In the 1930s, 28 “problem bears”, California black bears, were taken from Yosemite and released in the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. The black bear species is highly variable in coloration, ranging from black through brown, blond, and even white (the so-called “spirit bears” of British Columbia). Most of the bears we see in Altadena are brown, like this youngster, all descended from the original Problematic Twenty-Eight.

JAC: Here’s the California state flag sporting a grizzly:

Original: Donald Graeme Kelley. Vectorization: Devin Cook, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 31, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, May 31, Sabbath for goyische cats and World Parrot Day.  I can do no better than show a great photograph of a very rare and unusual parrot,  the Australian Golden-shouldered parrot (Psephotellus chrysopterygius), here photographed by Scott Ritchie. The parrot is endangered, with a total population of about 1000 birds.  And it’s the world’s only parrot that lives in termite mounds. Further, it has a symbiotic relationship with a moth species!. From Wikipedia:

The golden-shouldered parrot breeding season occurs from March to August. They construct nests in termite mounds, with a strong preference for conical shaped mounds. A 50–350 mm (2.0–13.8 in) long tunnel is excavated into the mound, ending in the nesting chamber. The clutch size is between 3–6 eggs, which are incubated by the female for 20 days. The termite occupants of the mound use a natural form of air conditioning to preserve the climatic conditions of their colony and this process regulates the temperature of the parrot’s nest chamber at around 28–30 °C (82–86 °F). Temperature surveys have shown, however, a range of 13–35 °C (55–95 °F). These conditions have led to the parrots developing a habit of leaving the eggs at night beginning around the 10th day after hatching. A symbiotic relationship is present between the golden shouldered parrot and the moth species Trisyntopa scatophaga, the antbed parrot moth. Found in around half of parrot nests, the moths seek out the newly dug nest tunnels and deposit their eggs in the entrance. The hatching moth larvae consume the faeces of the nestling parrots therefore helping to keep the nest chamber clean. Whether the parrots receive any other benefits from the presence of moths is arguable as not all nests contain moth larvae.

Scott tells me that the moth larvae also line the parrot’s burrow with silk, giving an easier ride to the incubating eggs. Amazing!  Here’s Scott’s photo:

It’s also National Macaroon Day (much better than the bougie and expensive macarons), National Meditate Day (dedicated to Sam Harris), and National Smile Day.

I slept poorly last night, though I had a series of dreams. I remember only one, right before I awoke.  My sister was leading me through some village that harbored dozens of cats that were underfoot. She pointed one of them out to me, a Siamese/tabby hybrid with an amiable expression and huge paws. I was told its name was “Pawsome.”  That’s all I remember.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 31 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The fragile cease-fire has been breached again, as the U.S. fired on a non-Iranian ship trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz.

US forces attacked a cargo ship they claimed was attempting to breach their naval blockade of Iran on Saturday.

Centcom said Lian Star ignored over 20 warnings before its forces struck the Gambia-flagged vessel’s engine room with a missile, stranding it in the Gulf of Oman.

The incident came as Tehran awaits the US president’s response to a proposed peace deal, as efforts to bring an end to the war drag on.

A senior official accused Trump of “betraying diplomacy for the third time”. Mohsen Rezaei pointed at the continuing naval blockade and what he called the president’s excessive demands in negotiations as he blamed the White House for failure to reach a peace deal.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, Israeli troops pushed beyond the Litani river and seized the Crusader-era Beaufort fortress in their deepest invasion of the neighbouring country in over 25 years.

The military said it was prepared “to expand the operation if needed”.

On Friday morning, it issued a fresh evacuation warning for residents south of the Zahrani River in southern Lebanon.

And from the NYT on Lebanon:

Once again, there has been a cease-fire in Lebanon for weeks.

And, once again, the fighting has not stopped.

Israel is still bombarding much of the south and east of the country. Israeli drones are still buzzing low over the skies in Beirut, the capital. Hezbollah is still attacking Israeli troops occupying Lebanese territory, and firing rockets into Israel. The death toll is still rising.

And now — though a truce was declared in April, and there has been talk this week of a potential U.S. deal with Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsor — resignation is setting in across Lebanon that a meaningful end to the war between Israel and Hezbollah is not coming anytime soon.

The blockade on ships leaving Iran, or trying to enter Iranian ports, is apparently still in effect, no matter what flag they’re flying, and Hezbollah is still refusing to disarm. (The chances of that are about equal to the chances that Hamas will disarm. Both are supposed to, but that ain’t gonna happen.)  The war is going to continue for a while, and I don’t see a cease-fire in Lebanon.

*A judge has ordered that Trump must take his name off the Kennedy Center, an emendation he made in December of last year.  Here’s a tweet showing the name change:

An excerpt from the WaPo article:

A federal judge ordered on Friday that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts remove President Trump’s name from the building’s facade and all official branding and temporarily blocked the institution from shuttering this summer for renovations.

Mr. Trump railed against the judge’s ruling in an incensed social media post, suggesting that he was considering casting the Kennedy Center aside as one of his personal projects. The president wrote that unless he was free to decide the center’s trajectory, he had “no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey.”

“Unfortunately, Judge Cooper and the Radical Left would rather see it DIE than have President Trump transform it into something that everyone could be proud of, much as I have done, in many cases, throughout my life,” he wrote.

Judge Christopher R. Cooper, of the Federal District Court in Washington, determined that the board’s decision to add Mr. Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center violated a law passed by Congress in 1964 that made “crystal clear” the institution was to be named for former President John F. Kennedy.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,” the judge wrote in a 94-page opinion. He ordered that the 18 letters added to the center’s front portico be removed within two weeks.

The center’s board of trustees, a vast majority of whom are allies of Mr. Trump, voted in December to add the president’s name to the performing arts center. Less than a day later, new lettering was added to the building’s marble facade, which now reads: “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”

Here’s the last big of Trump’s Truth Social post on the kerfuffle (link above; it’s too long to quote in full). It reads like the gibberish of someone who’s partly demented: full of caps and braggadocio.  “Your favorite President, ME. . . “, “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else. . . “, etc.

Therefore, based on the fact that the Radical Left Democrats care more about opposing your favorite President, ME, than saving a dying Performing Arts Center, almost all of which lose large amounts of money throughout the Country, we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it. Judge Cooper was given a presentation by leading Building and Construction Experts as to how structurally dangerous the Building is, with rotting beams, parking areas that are subject to collapse, and various other Life and Safety problems, in addition to the fact that it also needs a MAJOR renovation, from an aesthetic standpoint, but he was not “swayed,” and said he wants the Building to, incredibly, remain open and, therefore, dangerous. Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself! I cannot be involved with a situation where danger to the Public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight. Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into “NEVER NEVER LAND.” There has never been a President of the United States who has been treated so unfairly by the Courts as I but, that’s OK, I will continue to do, what is considered to be, a great job for the wonderful people of our Country. I have instructed the Department of Commerce to make all necessary arrangements with Congress to allow a full and complete transfer of this Institution, giving them the responsibility for its Operation, Maintenance, and Management. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

I wonder if this one will go all the way up to the Supreme Court.  Trump is both a narcissist and persistent, so I wouldn’t be surprised.

*Of all things: the UN has just placed Israel (and Russia) on a blacklist of countries accused of perpetrating sexual violence in war zones. What?

The United Nations on Friday added Israel and Russia to a U.N. blacklist of countries suspected of committing sexual violence in conflict zones, a move that prompted Israel’s foreign ministry to say ​it would sever all ties with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Guterres’ annual report to the U.N. Security Council on conflict-related sexual violence, opens new tab goes a step further than last year, when he put ‌Israel and Russia “on notice” that they could be added to the list of parties “credibly suspected of committing or being responsible for patterns of rape or other forms of sexual violence.”

The latest report does that and contains harrowing descriptions of abuses at the hands of Israeli and Russian armed and security forces.

Israel’s arch enemy Hamas, whose October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza, was already on the blacklist and in a post on X on Thursday, Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon ​said ranking Israel with the militant group marked a “new low”.

. . . “This is a political decision! Disconnected from the facts and reality!” Danon said in another post by the Israeli mission to the U.N. ​which said he was informed about it during a phone call with Guterres.

. . . The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, posted on X that it was “ridiculous for the UN to put a democracy like Israel — with ​robust rule of law that conducts investigations and holds criminals accountable — on the same level as terrorist organizations like Hamas.”

. . . Being added to the list does not automatically carry specific punitive measures such as sanctions, although ​public naming and shaming can cause significant reputational damage for the states involved, and those repeatedly listed are barred from U.N. peacekeeping operations.

. . . Danon said Israel had responded in detail to each allegation and had invited U.N. representatives to visit and examine the situation, but that they had chosen not to do so.

. . . This year’s report said that in 2025, “the United Nations verified multiple incidents of conflict-related sexual violence, including as a form of torture, inflicted against 14 men, seven women, nine boys and one girl from ​the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.”

It said 13 ​of the cases occurred in 2025, and 18 ⁠in 2023 and 2024.

“Violations consisted of rape, including with objects, gang rape, attempted rape, physical violence to the genitals, instances of targeted shooting of the genitals, touching of breasts and genitals, strip and cavity searches conducted without apparent security justification, forced nudity and threats of rape,” it said.

“Rape and gang rape, ​in some cases repeated, were perpetrated against nine victims, the majority from Gaza,” it said, adding that perpetrators included Israeli armed and security forces and occurred ​primarily during detention and interrogation ⁠and across several sites, including military camps and also at checkpoints and during Israeli military operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

It said survivors included journalists and human rights defenders and that in some cases, the violations were filmed or photographed, including one case of rape.

What bothers me is the UN’s refusal to meet with Israel to discuss the evidence as well as hear Israel’s response to the allegations. Of course one can’t say that all the claims our false, but evidence is needed and it’s bothersome that the UN refuses to meet with Israel—especially after Israel issued a documented report on the many cases of sexual attacks by Hamas on Israelis.

That of course doesn’t mean that any victimization of prisoners by Israel is okay, for one is too many, and it’s against Israeli law. But if you assume that Israel has 20,000 prisoners, and that the UN is correct in claiming a total of 31 victims of Israeli sexual violence over three years (some were only threatened with sexual violence), and assume further that the U.S. has 2.2% annual allegations of sexual violence or abuse of prisoners by staff in a nationwide prison population of 1.25 million (all figures from AI)—then the U.S. has an annual rate of sexual violence/abuse of prisoners by staff 44 times higher than Israel’s. The UN should add the U.S. to their list.

*Trump just had his annual physical (it’s his third visit to the doctor in a year), and has been pronounced “in excellent health.”

President Trump “remains in excellent physical health,” according to a memo from his physician released late Friday by the White House, following the president’s physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier this week.

The president’s physician, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, said in a memo that the Tuesday exam, Trump’s third since returning to office, included comprehensive and preventive laboratory testing “as well as consultations with twenty-two specialty providers from multiple academic institutions.”

Barbabella said in the report that “preventive counseling was provided, including guidance on diet, recommendation to take a low-dose aspirin, increased physical activity, and continued weight loss.” The president weighed 238 pounds, 14 pounds more since his 2025 exam, according to Barbabella, a career military doctor who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He added that the president’s “cognitive and physical performance are excellent” and Trump “is fully fit to carry out all duties of the commander in chief and Head of State.” The physician concluded after neurological and cognitive function tests that the president “demonstrated normal mental status.”

Trump, who will turn 80 years old on June 14, is the oldest person to ever assume the presidency. The results of his physical come amid increased scrutiny about presidential health. Former President Joe Biden faced questions about slipping physical fitness and mental acuity, which Trump bolstered on the campaign trail.

. . .Barbabella previously diagnosed Trump with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition in which valves inside the veins don’t work properly and allow blood to collect or transmit down the leg. The physician provided an update on the swelling in Trump’s lower legs, describing it as “slight” and an “improvement from last year.”

Barbabella reported that Trump takes two medications to treat high cholesterol, Rosuvastatin and Ezetimibe, as well as aspirin as a preventive heart measure. The physician noted that Trump benefits from “lifelong abstinence from tobacco and alcohol.”

Barbabella wrote that Trump’s “demanding daily schedule, including multiple high-level meetings, public engagements, and regular physical activity, continues to support his overall well-being.”

Aside from golf, Trump doesn’t get regular exercise, and he is known to consume a diet heavy on salty and fatty foods, such as hamburgers and french fries.

Given his horrible diet and sedentary lifestyle, I suppose he is in good shape for 80.  I woiuldn’t wish illness or death on anyone, including Trump, and perhaps some may be glad that he stays alive for 2.5 more years because it keeps Vance from becoming President.

*NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has neglected to fill a very important position in ensuring his city’s economic well being, and it’s not laziness but ideology that’s apparently caused this delay.

Over the course of his early tenure as mayor, Zohran Mamdani has filled out City Hall’s upper ranks with people he trusts to implement his democratic socialist-inflected agenda in New York City, the nation’s financial capital.

But one arm of city government continues to bedevil him: the Economic Development Corporation, whose mission is to leverage city real estate and tax incentives to attract private capital and drive job growth across the five boroughs.

Five months into the mayor’s tenure, the nonprofit corporation remains officially rudderless, with City Hall officials considering at least 10 candidates for E.D.C. president, including a consumer protection advocate and pro-business types. But the mayor’s team has been unable to coalesce around any of them, illustrating an internal debate over how to direct the organization.

The uncertainty surrounding the E.D.C.’s leadership and direction has fed the notion, widespread among business leaders and moderate Democratic politicians, that Mr. Mamdani is insufficiently attuned to the health of New York City’s economy, and that his inattention potentially comes at his, and the city’s, peril.

It also raises larger and more fundamental questions: What kind of economic policy does the mayor want to embrace? And is Mr. Mamdani quietly withdrawing from City Hall’s traditional role of courting business and using the E.D.C.’s power to support a thriving economic climate in New York?

“I have not heard one statement yet about how it is that the city sees industry growth, how the city wants to maximize talent, and, certainly, the absence of an E.D.C. head this far into the administration is a concern,” said Gregory Morris, the chief executive of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition.

When the mayor talks about the economy, he largely talks about his ambitious universal day care and housing programs, and how they will redound to the city’s economic benefit — a prediction that some analyses agree with.

But some business and work force development leaders argue that Mr. Mamdani cannot fulfill his vision for a more expansive government without a robust, tax-generating economy. They note that affordability requires not just cheaper goods, but also better-paying jobs. And they worry that he has yet to articulate what business growth in the Mamdani era will be, at a time when the challenges facing New York’s economy are legion.

The city’s job numbers are lackluster, even as office leasing has strengthened. Some financial sector jobs have migrated to Texas. The war in Iran continues to cast a haze over the country’s economic prospects. City officials are eyeing the coming disruptions from artificial intelligence with alarm. International tourism has declined.

Here’s Sam Harris’s take on Mamdani; and I agree with Sam’s take that the Mayor is a “none too closeted Islamist, or at minimum an apologist for Islamists.” As for his wife’s social media “likes”, it’s not clear that that is any reflection of Mamdani’s beliefs.

Szaron: Do you think it’s safe there?
Hili: I think so, it looks like the dog is locked up.

In Polish:

Szaron: Myślisz, że tam jest bezpiecznie?
Hili: Chyba tak, wygląda na to, że pies jest zamknięty.

*******************

From TherionArms, another great medieval letter with commentary:

From Funny and Strange Signs:

From CinEmma:

Masih is still at war with AOC’s desire to “respect” local customs, which involved her wearing a hijab and speaking to a sex-segregated crowd (men in front, women in back):

From Luana; Jonathan Kay continues his exposé of the paucity of empirical evidence for these bodies, which nobody has bothered to investigate thoroughly:

The Number Ten Cat is delighted that Trump’s name will come off the building. But will it?

Three from my feed. This guy is amazing!

Do not hurt opossums! They are wonderful! Look at all those babies holding on:

I’m not sure how funny this is, but it’s interesting:

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed as soon as she got to Auschwitz. She was three years old, and would be 87 today if her life had not been cut short.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-05-31T09:57:44.936Z

And one from Dr. Cobb. Look at those cute pink babies!

Deborah Sandidge Photography"A dedicated pair of Roseate Spoonbills watch over the nest, taking good care of the chicks. They spend time reinforcing the nest together. Each branch placement ensures the chicks stay safe, a process they continue as they grow up in their wetlands home."

— KOJAMF🤘🖤🤘 (@kojamf.bsky.social) 2026-05-29T22:46:00.770Z

 

New Rule from Bill Maher: Let’s be Frank

May 30, 2026 • 10:50 am

Here’s the latest opinion/comedy bit from Friday’s Real Time show with Bill Maher, with the episode called “Let’s be frank.”  Maher starts out by citing the recent Democratic Party Autopsy (here) about why the party lost the Presidency and Congress in 2024. But he then faults both parties for having politicians in office who won’t be honest (surprise!).

Honesty, he avers, can be found only in books politicians write after they have left office. Maher gives several examples, including Republicans who admit, after they leave office, that Trump is paying off the January 6 insurrectionists with a “slush fund.” And don’t forget, he adds, Eisenhower’s warning about the “military industrial complex,” issued just three days before he left office.

The key diagnosis, Maher says, was made by the late Barney Frank when he was in hospice. It’s cited in the Times of Israel:

“The key to liberal democracy being able to come back is to get rid of the perception that we have allowed to grow, that the entire Democratic Party is committed to a series of very drastic social reconstructions that go beyond the politically acceptable,

Maher says, “And there, in one sentence, is the autopsy the Democrats have been so desperately searching for.”  True! And of course this explains the capitalized “Frank” in the title.

The theme, then, is that Democrats say the truth about the party only when they have nothing to lose for speaking up.

Finally, Maher notes that some red states are better than his own “progressive” state—California—in education and in green energy.  The last bit: “Democrats: these are your issues: education, race, the environment. And I say this with love: you’re losing to the Waffle House car-on-the-lawn states.”  Well, we’ll see how the Democrats do in this fall’s midterms, though the most crucial election is in 2028.

The guests for this episode were astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, MS Now news correspondent Katy Tur, and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. Tyson is not shown in this segment.

Eighty years after a famous math problem was posed, AI finally solved it

May 30, 2026 • 9:30 am

I don’t wholeheartedly embrace AI, for I think it will be the death of liberal education.  In both the humanities and science, I fear that students will lose any ability they have to write, and will not improve their writing because they’ll be using bots.  This will degrade their ability to communicate. (Scientists too need to communicate, and if they rely solely on bots, which can write papers for them, they’ll also degrade their ability to think.)  Take-home assignments will vanish (AI can do them, and are doing them now), and all that’s left are in-class verbal participation and in-class exams.  This is fine for students who just think of college as a way to purchase accreditation and not a chance to glory in the joys of learning, but so be it.

However, AI is good for some things, including analyzing data, doing statistics, doing preliminary literature searches, and, in the article from the WSJ screenshot below, solving difficult math problems.  The article shows that a problem posed by the famous and eccentric Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös—the “unit distance problem” has been solved by AI. Open AI, which created the program that did it, describes it this way—but it’s not that simple:

For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place n points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance 1 apart?

This is the planar unit distance problem, first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. It is one of the best-known questions in combinatorial geometry, easy to state and remarkably difficult to resolve. The 2005 book Research Problems in Discrete Geometry, by Brass, Moser, and Pach, calls it “possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry.” Noga Alon, a leading combinatorialist at Princeton, describes it as “one of Erdős’ favorite problems.” Erdős even offered a monetary prize for resolving this problem.

The “distance 1” thing confused me, and Wikipedia explains it a different way:

A problem posed by Paul Erdős known as the unit distance problem asks for the maximum possible number of unit-distance pairs determined by n points in the Euclidean plane; equivalently, it asks for the maximum number of edges in a unit distance graph on n vertices.

It gives a figure described as “a unit distance graph with 16 vertices and 40 edges”.

By David Eppstein – Own work, CC0/

Wikipedia describes such unit distance graphs this way:

“In mathematics, particularly geometric graph theory, a unit distance graph is a graph formed from a collection of points in the Euclidean plane by connecting two points whenever the distance between them is exactly one.”

That’s what is confusing me, for if the theorem deals only with points in a two-dimensional plane, why aren’t unconnected dots not joined that are closer than some connected dots? (Look at the four dots around the center of the graph above. None of them are connected to each other, though more distant one are.)  I presume some math-savvy reader will enlighten us.

Anyway, Open AI and the WSJ tells us that the problem has been solved by AI. If you want to see the solutions, open AI says this:

The proof is available here ⁠(opens in a new window). The companion paper by leading external mathematicians is available here⁠ (opens in a new window). You can find an abridged version of the model’s chain of thought here⁠ (opens in a new window).

But the WSJ gives more comprehensible details.  Click screenshot to read (if you subscribe):

An excerpt:

“If you are a mathematician,” one of the world’s leading mathematicians recently wrote, “you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.”

And you’ll definitely need to sit down if you’re not a mathematician.

Because a famous math problem that stumped humans for the better part of a century has finally been toppled—by AI.

Not long ago, the most advanced AI models couldn’t do basic math. By last year, they were performing at gold-medal levels at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Now they are solving classic problems in combinatorial geometry using algebraic number theory. In no time at all, artificial intelligence has gone from stupid to frighteningly smart.

But even mathematicians were astonished when OpenAI announced that one of its models resolved a puzzle known as the unit distance problem without the help of any humans scribbling a bunch of equations on chalkboards.

It was fed this prompt:

And produced this proof, giving the maximum number of unit-distance pairs:

Apparently the proof was accepted by mathematicians.  More from the WSJ:

And everyone in math lost their minds.

For those who aren’t fluent in numbers, OpenAI helped translate its findings by presenting them alongside 19 pages of companion remarks from prominent mathematicians.

. . .Just looking at formulas is enough to hurt my brain, but I wanted to know more about what the AI found, how we humans missed it—and why this breakthrough matters to those of us who would like to permanently distance ourselves from math problems.

When I spoke with OpenAI employees, they told me this result would have sounded completely bananas one year ago.

“Forget one year ago,” researcher Sebastien Bubeck said. “A month ago.”

There are endorsements by mathematicians, and a history of the problem, which Erdös considered quite difficult.  So difficult, in fact, that he offered what was then a pretty hefty sum for anybody who could solve it: $500. I think the money will be given to the OpenAI team.

OpenAI’s researchers were stunned. They had given this Erdős problem to an internal model as a test of its capabilities—to find out whether it was better than previous models. They found out how much better it was once they took a peek at the solution. “I initially didn’t believe it,” said Mehtaab Sawhney, a Columbia mathematician at OpenAI. So they searched for errors, verified the results with outsiders and checked the AI’s work using the company’s AI coding agent. “With enough reading and enough Codexing,” Sawhney said, “it seemed believable—and pretty remarkable.”

Long before AI, mathematicians who solved Erdős problems often framed their checks instead of cashing them. For them, the money was worth less than the glory. When I asked OpenAI researchers about their plans for the prize, they hadn’t given it much thought.

But they did have lots of thoughts about my next question: Why did AI succeed where humans failed?

The first explanation is that this particular solution happens to be highly counterintuitive.

Most people who tackled this problem tried to prove Erdős’s conjecture, rather than disprove it. Only by defying conventional wisdom and experimenting with seemingly improbable strategies did the model find an unexpected path forward.

The second is that humans specialize while AI synthesizes.

While mathematicians tend to focus on their specific areas of expertise, AI models use their vast knowledge to spot connections that we couldn’t possibly see ourselves. In this case, that meant pulling from both algebraic number theory and discrete geometry, which have about as much in common as the marathon and pole vault.

The third explanation is that AI has time, attention, patience, focus and the persistence to stick with methods that humans might abandon—and the solution to this Erdős problem demanded it.

“It’s the kind of idea that you try for a bit, it doesn’t work, and you think maybe you were just too hopeful,” said Mark Sellke, a Harvard statistician at OpenAI. “So you give up and move on.”

AI doesn’t move on. It keeps plugging away without taking breaks to eat, sleep, answer emails, pick the kids up from school and watch the Knicks.

And it can think coherently for so long that even an abridged version of the model’s “chain of thought” ran more than 75,000 words—the length of the first “Harry Potter” book.

Was it an elegant proof? Well, the article implies “no,” but it’s apparently a proof:

“It’s fair to say that we haven’t seen yet the spark of genius that you could attribute to some of the grandest proofs in the history of humanity,” Bubeck told me.

And how long did the computation take? Less than a day and a half:

After reading it, a former OpenAI researcher did some back-of-the-envelope math and estimated it took less than 32 hours and $1,000 in tokens, a bargain for a result of this caliber. The researchers wouldn’t confirm the exact amount of time and compute, but Bubeck described the costs as “really nothing crazy at all.”

At any rate, this is what AI is good for, and I wonder if, say, it could solve Fermat’s Last Theorem, which took Andrew Wiles eight years of work to solve (he was knighted for it).  And I wonder if there are any seemingly intractable math problems that can’t be solved by AI, especially if they were or will be solved by humans.

Now I don’t think there are any practical implications of this results, but that’s true of much mathematical theory. I’m just amazed at what AI can do.