Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Today we have a diverse set of photos from Amy Perry of Indiana. Amy’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them. After this we have only one batch of photos left.
All photos were taken at Ritchey Woods, a state-designated nature preserve owned by the city of Fishers, a suburb of Indianapolis. The preserve is surrounded by commercial and residential development and an airport and is a treasured haven for families, dog walkers, runners, and birders and other nature lovers. The majority were taken with my iPhone 11 in the past year; a few plant photos were taken by the park naturalist, probably with her iPhone around 2019.
Common box turtle (Terrapene carolina) sitting just as royally as you please on a bridge:
Insects mating. Haven’t been able to identify the species [Readers?]:
Trout lily (Erythronium americanum). Spring ephemeral. Also called yellow adder’s tongue and yellow dogtooth violet. One of the few yellow spring ephemerals, in my experience. Most are white. Spring ephemerals bloom before the tree canopy leafs out, as they take advantage of the sunlight that the trees block after the leaves appear:
Shagbark hickory (Carya ovata). I like species that have an obvious identifying characteristic, such as the shaggy bark here. It’s a bonus if the common name and/or Latin name also reflects the identifying characteristic:
Spring beauty (Claytonia virginica). These beauties carpet the forest floor during April. The pale pink stripes are said to guide insects to the nectar or pollen. The blooms close if the temperature goes below 45 degrees F. Spring ephemeral. I just learned that another common name is Fairy spud, which seems apt:
More spring beauty, to show the attractiveness of their natural massed growth. They are at the foot of a sign marking a border of the nature preserve:
Skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus). This is the spathe. Grows in January and February in moist soil. Sometimes the energy radiated by the growth actually melts the surrounding snow or ice. True to its name, it has a strong, unattractive odor:
Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica). Often the blossoms are pink when they first bloom and then turn a lovely blue. Spring ephemeral:
Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana). Ending on a depressing note. These trees have a lovely oval shape but are invasive. Also called Bradford pear. This species is not on the state’s official invasive list, but plans are in the works to have it added soon. The official invasive list prohibits the sale, purchase, transport, or giving of invasive species within the state. When several species were added a few years ago to the list, this one was discussed, but so many nurseries had it “in the pipeline,” that conservationists decided to take a small victory and wait to add it later:
Welcome to CaturSaturday and the sabbath for Jewish cats: it’s May 24, 2025 and National Escargot Day. I don’t like ’em, but ducks do! In South Africa, they release Indian runner ducks in the vineyards to eat the snails that impede the growth of the grapevines. Look and this herd of “pencil ducks”:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 24 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Re Friday morning’s post about Harvard, things have moved swiftly. A federal judge in Boston blocked the administration from implementing its plan to prevent Harvard from accepting more foreign students as well as booting out the ones it already has. (Article archived here.)
Harvard University sued the Trump administration on Friday, less than 24 hours after the Department of Homeland Security said it would block international students from attending the nation’s oldest university and one of its most prestigious.
Later Friday morning, at the university’s request, a federal judge in Boston moved swiftly to block implementation of the federal government’s order.
The judge, Allison D. Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order against the federal edict, agreeing that Harvard had shown that its implementation would cause “immediate and irreparable injury” to the university.
The administration action, and Harvard’s response, signified a dramatic escalation of the battle between the administration and Harvard. And the university’s forceful and almost immediate response served as evidence that stopping the flow of international students to Harvard, which draws some of the world’s top scholars, would destabilize Harvard’s very existence.
In a letter to the Harvard community delivered Friday morning, Dr. Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, wrote, “We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,” adding that it “imperils the futures of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams.”
The lawsuit, which accused the Trump administration of a “campaign of retribution” against the university followed an announcement on Thursday that Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification had been revoked, halting the university’s ability to enroll international students.
The lawsuit was the second time in a matter of weeks the university had sued the federal government.
In the new lawsuit, the university accused the Trump administration of exerting “clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”
This was pretty much predictable given the rapid and immediate damage that implementation of the government’s order would cause, not to mention the chaos in the lives of foreign students. I am counting on the courts to rectify Trump’s obviously illegal moves, but the Supreme Court, as far as I know, has not definitely overturned any of them.
*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s snarky news summary at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Fit to serve.”
→ What’s the latest, Mr. President? And returning from a huge trip to the Middle East, President Trump, as far as regards Middle East policy goals on a 20-year time horizon and a reimagining of the JCPOA, had this to say on Truth Social:
→ We do not need an immigrant competition show: The Department of Homeland Security wants to develop a reality show titled The American, where immigrants compete through a variety of challenges “for the honor of fast-tracking their way to U.S. citizenship.” This is real. And the challenges will be incredible: finding the rotisserie chicken aisle at Costco; binge-watching Yellowstone without peeing the longest; seeing how fast you can get diabetes. DHS has been working with writer and producer Rob Worsoff (supervising producer of The Millionaire Matchmaker, co-exec producer of Duck Dynasty), who, in his 35-page show proposal, said that the show will aim to “celebrate what it means to be American and have a national conversation about what it means to be American, through the eyes of the people who want it most.” It’s a Hunger Games. It’s a Squid Game. But it’s real people, trying to escape gang wars and starvation. By singing a Luke Combs song in front of a studio audience and then doing an obstacle course after eating a Big Mac. I hate myself because I know I’ll watch this.
→ This is technically still illegal: Trump’s Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation into Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, alleging he hired city employees solely because of their race, after the mayor gave a speech saying he hires solely based on race. Here’s Mayor Johnson: “Detractors . . . will push back on me and say, ‘The only thing the mayor talks about is the hiring of black people.’ No, what I’m saying is, when you hire our people, we always look out for everybody else. We are the most generous people on the planet. I don’t know too many cultures that have play cousins. That’s how generous we are.” He then lists all the city leaders who are black and all the reasons the black race is superior for these roles. Anyway, typical MAGA craziness going after a normal American mayor who is simply doing diversity.
*I can’t help but be amused at this because North Korea, though an odious regime and perhaps the world’s most oppressive country, is also hamhanded. So, in attempt to modernize its antiquated navy, Kim Jong-Un got a new warship built and launched. It sank.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s dream of modernizing his country’s outdated naval fleet suffered a major setback after a much-touted warship crashed into the water after a botched exit from the dock.
Kim, who witnessed the mishap unfold at a Wednesday launch event, lambasted officials for their “absolute carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism” in causing the “serious accident,” North Korea’s state media reported. The 41-year-old dictator equated the gaffe to a criminal act.
The unnamed 5,000-ton destroyer had been docked at a shipyard in Chongjin, a northeastern port city. As it was pushed sideways toward the water, the ship didn’t move in parallel. Its hull got crushed and its bow got stranded on the shipway, state media said.
Citing satellite imagery of the shipyard, South Korea’s military said the destroyer lay on its side in the water. North Korean state media didn’t publish images from the launch event or mention any injuries.
The warship represents one of Kim’s crown jewels in his push to upgrade North Korea’s naval fleet. Much of the country’s ships are from the Soviet era—and pale in comparison to the nuclear-powered submarines, warships and vessels possessed by the U.S. and South Korea.
Atop a country with serious food shortages, a down economy and widespread human-rights abuse, Kim has leaned heavily on military breakthroughs to boost morale and demonstrate the nation’s strength. Officials responsible for the warship blunder were censured for the fault. Kim vowed a turnaround by next month.
The accident, Kim was quoted as saying, “brought the dignity and self-respect of our state to a collapse.”
. . . . In recent months, Kim had showered extra attention on his country’s naval operations, visiting shipyards and touting breakthroughs. He oversaw a successful rollout in late April of another warship from the “Choe Hyon” class, named after a general who served under Kim’s grandfather and country founder Kim Il Sung.
Desiring for the North to become a maritime power, Kim Jong Un, in a lengthy speech, linked naval advances to his nation’s sovereignty, since the country has seas off its eastern and western coasts. A fleet of elite warships, he declared, guarantees peace and development.
Jong-Un’s words presage, to anyone who follows North Korea, that whoever designed that ship is destined for a quick end. . . or a lifetime stint in one of the country’s many horrible prison camps. Here’s a news clip about the accident:
President Donald Trump on Friday threatened a 50% tariff on goods from the European Union, citing a lack of progress in current trade negotiations.
“Their powerful Trade Barriers, Vat Taxes, ridiculous Corporate Penalties, Non-Monetary Trade Barriers, Monetary Manipulations, unfair and unjustified lawsuits against Americans Companies, and more, have led to a Trade Deficit with the U.S. of more than $250,000,000 a year, a number which is totally unacceptable,” he wrote in a Truth Social post Friday morning.
“Our discussions with them are going nowhere!” Trump wrote.
“Therefore, I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025.”
Olof Gill, a spokesperson for the European Commission, declined to comment immediately, saying he was waiting until after a call between Maroš Šefčovič, European Commissioner for Trade, and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer. Gill did not specify when the call is taking place. Reuters reported it’s set to occur at 11 a.m. ET on Friday. A USTR spokesperson didn’t respond to a CNN request for comment.
Shortly after Trump’s Truth Social post on Friday morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a Fox News interview that the “EU proposals have not been of the same quality that we’ve seen from our other important trading partners.”
“I’m not going to negotiate on TV, but I would hope that this would light a fire under the EU,” Bessent said, adding that the “EU has a collective action problem.”
The three major European stock market indexes fell sharply after Trump’s post: The benchmark STOXX 600 index was down 1.7%. Germany’s DAX fell 2.4% and France’s CAC index slid 2.2%. London’s FTSE index was 1% down. US stocks also slid, with the Dow opening lower by 480 points, or 1.15%. Stocks came off their lows after Bessent said in a Bloomberg TV interview on Friday that he expects US trade representatives to meet in person with Chinese officials again to continue trade negotiations following a temporary pause in higher tariff rates.
The stock falls are predictable, as are the price rises that will follow any increase. Are they going to raise the price of French, German, and Spanish wine, for crying out loud?
The story starts with Vladimir Dinets, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the study’s author, and an intersection in West Orange, New Jersey, near his home. As a zoologist, he had long been interested in animals’ perspective on and understanding of urban environments—and in birds’ relationship with cars, in particular. Scientists have previously observed ravens patrol American highways waiting for roadkill and songbirds using cars to hide from predators.
Dinets was on the lookout for these interesting interactions when a young Cooper’s hawk migrated into his neighborhood and started doing something brilliant.
The intersection wasn’t particularly busy, even during rush hour, Dinets wrote in a guest editorial for Frontiers in Ethology. But sometimes, a pedestrian would cross the street, causing cars to pile up all the way to a small, bushy tree down the block. The pedestrian “walk” signal would also make a sound that indicated it was time to walk.
One morning, Dinets saw the hawk emerge from the tree, fly very low above the line of cars, cross the street between the cars, and then dive to get something near one of the houses.
Then the same thing happened again. And again.
It turns out that the family that lived in that house near the bushy tree liked to have dinner in their front yard. In response, birds—like sparrows and doves—would flock there to claim the leftover crumbs.
That made for easy pickings for the hawk, who would swoop down into the yard to catch said sparrows and doves. But, curiously, the hawk only did this when cars were lined up along the block all the way to the tree.
Dinets eventually figured out that the line of cars provided cover for the hawk, and that the hawk had learned to recognize the sound of the pedestrian “walk” signal. As soon as a pedestrian pressed the button, the hawk would fly from wherever it had been hanging out and into the small, bushy tree. It would then wait for cars to pile up before using the line of cars as cover to sneak up on its prey.
The hawk had, apparently, learned to use the pedestrian signal as a cue to start heading over to the house crowded with defenseless birds, according to Dinets.
“That meant that the hawk understood the connection between the sound and the eventual car queue length,” Dinets explained. The hawk also apparently had a good mental map of the neighborhood.
The family moved away and the light stopped working, so the story, for now, is over. This should have been documented and published in a bird journal, but I doubt that it is, and I can’t find any video.
From Barry. For some reason I find this hilarious:
From Bryan, some nice jazz:
Scatman Crothers was born on this day in 1910.
Scatman played drums with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, played Scat Cat in the Aristocats, he shined in The Shining, and voiced Hong Kong Phooey. This performance of All of Me with Redd Foxx on Sanford and Son is brilliant. pic.twitter.com/1lshT5GvGK
As you know, Colossal Biosciences, a company heavily funded by donors who include Paris Hilton and Tiger Woods, claims that it “de-extincted” the defunct dire wolf, and says it will have woolly mammoths on the ground within three years. This claims are grossly misleading, as I pointed out in a recent Boston Globe op-ed.
The press and much of the public, of course, reacted with joy at the notion that we could bring back charismatic extinct species, although here and there scientists like me would show why these claims are overblown, largely because the “de-extincted” species would represent only modern species that had had just a tiny handful of genetic edits making them resemble the extinct one. Important adaptations in the extinct species, most notably those involving physiology and behavior (the latter would require edits to genes in the brain that we don’t know), would not appear in the de-extincted species. As I wrote in my piece:
. . . . . most important, “de-extinction” is not de-extinction. The company says its claim to have de-extincted the dire wolf is legitimate because its edited pups meet some of the criteria for species “proxies” established in 2016 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But that claim is bogus. What Colossal has made is simply a gray wolf with a handful of genetic tweaks changing its size and color.
In the case of the mammoth, what we (may eventually) have is an Asian elephant with a handful of mammoth traits. And a handful of mammoth traits does not a mammoth make. I can paint my Ford Taurus bright red and even attach the Ferrari insignia to its hood, but it’s still a Ford Taurus, albeit with a handful of Ferrari traits. The Ferrari-ness of a Ferrari permeates every feature of a Ferrari’s engineering, just as the mammoth-ness of a mammoth permeates every feature of its biology. We know from ancient DNA studies that mammoths differ from Asian elephants at 1.4 million sites along its DNA, yet Colossal plans to mammoth-ize only a tiny fraction of these. Victoria Herridge, a mammoth expert, has described Colossal’s “mammoth” as nothing more than “an elephant in a fur coat.”
Now, according to a New Scientist article below (click headline to read archived version, or find it here), the chief scientific officer of Colossal has finally admitted, after claiming otherwise, that they really haven’t produced dire wolves. As we critics maintained, they’ve produced grey wolves with a few traits that might have been present in dire wolves. But even their admission of having distorted what they did is disingenuous, as they claim they never said what they in fact did say.
I’ve put an excerpt (indented) below:
Excerpt:
The dire wolf is “the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal”, Colossal Biosciences claimed on 7 April. And many people seemed to believe it. New Scientist was one of the few media outlets to reject the claim, pointing out that the animals created by Colossal are just grey wolves with a few gene edits.
Now, in a subsequent interview, Colossal’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro appears to agree. “It’s not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned,” she tells New Scientist. “And we’ve said that from the very beginning. Colloquially, they’re calling them dire wolves and that makes people angry.”
I haven’t seen the interview, but. . . .
Richard Grenyer at the University of Oxford says this is a major departure from what Colossal has said previously. “I read that as a clear statement of her view of what they did and didn’t do – and that what they didn’t do was bring back a dire wolf from extinction.”
“I think there is a serious inconsistency between the contents of the statement and the actions and publicity material – including the standard content of the website, not just [the] press briefing around the dire wolf – of the company,” he says.
For instance, the Colossal press release announcing the birth of the gene-edited wolves refers to them as “dire wolves” throughout. Shapiro defended this claim in an interview with New Scientist on 7 April.
“We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal,” she said at the time.
I know of no biologist who adheres to the morphological species concept, and even if they do, they wouldn’t say “if they look like species X (with “like” being totally ambiguous), then they are members of species X. A superficial resemblance is not enough, and even then we don’t know what the real, extinct dire wolf looked like.
Calling the pups dire wolves, wrote the evolutionary biologist Rich Grenyer, is “like claiming to have brought Napoleon back from the dead by asking a short Frenchman to wear his hat.”
If you’ve followed Colossal’s statements, or gone to the de-extinction part of its website, the company is still claiming that it’s more or less bringing back species, though as I recall from earlier versions, they’ve walked back some of their claims. Now, for instance, they single out just six physical or physiological traits in the woolly mammoth that they’re trying to tweak, and they are still claiming that their efforts will make serious inroads on the problem of species extinction.
Here’s a kicker. Colossal engineered white coats into the three faux “dire wolves,” apparently because the animals (made famous by the t.v. series “Game of Thrones) were white on television. But. . .
It is actually unclear whether the gene-edited wolves look like dire wolves. For instance, there is some evidence dire wolves had reddish rather than white coats, according to Claudio Sillero at the University of Oxford.
And here’s one more claim that isn’t all what it seems to be:
Yet even when Sillero and other experts put out a statement saying the gene-edited grey wolves aren’t dire wolves, the company stuck to its guns. “[W]e stand by our decision to refer to Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi colloquially as dire wolves,” Colossal said in a statement on X. [JAC: Don’t bother looking up the tweet, as it’s no longer about dire wolves.]
But in her more recent interview with New Scientist, Shapiro claims Colossal made it clear from the start that the animals are just gene-edited grey wolves.
“We didn’t ever hide that that’s what it was. People were mad because we were calling them dire wolves,” she says. “Then they say to us, but they’re just grey wolves with 20 edits. But the point is we said that from the beginning. They’re grey wolves with 20 edits.”
Well, this is partly true. There were indeed 20 edits in the gray wolf genome, made in 14 genes, but five of those edits weren’t taken from the ancient DNA of the dire wolf; they were taken from mutations in dogs and gray wolves that resembled what Colossal thought dire wolves looked like. (We’re still not sure.) And among those five dog/wolf mutants were the color alleles that turned the faux wolves white.
On Colossal’s website, you can still see them claiming that they de-extincted the dire wolf:
Note Colossal’s claim that they “successfully restored a once-eradicated species”. Now that is simply wrong. They used 15 edits taken from the dire wolf genome to produce a gray wolf that has only a tiny, tiny portion of dire wolf genome. Were I in Colossal, I’d simply drop the word “de-extinction.” But of course you don’t attract donor or make money by saying that you’re “tweaking an existing species to look like an extinct one.”
Trump continues to go after Harvard, ostensibly because of its pervasive antisemitism (granted, President Alan Garber says that the climate is still antisemitic and he himself has been a victim). However, Trump is punishing the wrong people for Harvard’s presumed crimes, and those include researchers whose grants have been cut or rescinded.
Now he’s taken an even more egregious step: threatening to ban the school’s ability to accept international students unless it coughs up a pile of information about all of Harvard’s foreign students. Click the headline from April 17 below to read, or find the article archived here:
An excerpt:
The Trump administration on Thursday said it would halt Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation of the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.
The administration notified Harvard about the decision — which could affect about a quarter of the school’s student body — after a back-and-forth in recent weeks over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The latest move intensifies the administration’s attempt to upend the culture of higher education by directly subverting the ability of one of the nation’s premier universities to attract the best and brightest students from all over the world. That capability, across all of academia, has long been one of the greatest sources of academic, economic and scientific strength in America.
It is also likely to prompt a second legal challenge from Harvard, according to another person familiar with the school’s thinking who insisted on anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The university sued the Trump administration last month over the government’s attempt to impose changes to its curriculum, admissions policies and hiring practices.
“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” a letter to the university from Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.
The Department of Homeland Security said the action applied to current and future students.
“Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status,” the department said in a news release after Ms. Noem posted the administration’s letter on social media later on Thursday.
Not only that, but current foreign students have to find another place to study, pronto. Do you think that’s easy? And of course Trump has a way to enforce this plan: all he has to do is revoke the visas of foreign students.
Granted, a lot of dosh is involved, as foreign students tend to pay full fare:
The administration’s decision is likely to have a significant effect on the university’s bottom line. Tuition at Harvard is $59,320 for the 2025-26 school year, and costs can rise to nearly $87,000 when room and board are included. International students tend to pay larger shares of education costs compared with other students. (Harvard notes it is need-blind for all students, regardless of nationality.)
You can read the letter from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem here, which lays out what Harvard has to cough up to prevent loss of its foreign students. It was apparently sent to the school
I don’t think Harvard responded by the April 30 deadline, and they have responded this way:
Harvard relayed those concerns to the administration on April 30. On the same day, the university’s executive vice president, Meredith Weenick, issued a public letter that vowed the school would provide the administration only with information “required by law” and urged students to “stay as focused as possible on your academic pursuits.”
The administration responded the following week, notifying Harvard that the school’s response did not satisfy Ms. Noem’s request, the people said. In the same message, the administration appeared to narrow its request by asking for information on international students who met any one of four criteria.
Noem then disqualified Harvard from the student visa program. I have just learned that Harvard has filed a lawsuit over this latest action and has filed a restraining order against the government (you can read the new suit here). I haven’t read it yet, and though I’m not a lawyer, I think the university has a good case. Harvard is being singled out among all American universities in this way (some are even more antisemitic than Harvard) and the government’s dismissing of foreign applicants has never been done before. I’m not sure whether selective enforcement is grounds to sue, but you can be sure that Harvard will mount a case.
One quarter of Harvard’s students are foreign, and they are essential to Harvard being Harvard. Further, it’s inimical to scholarship to prevent students who want to study at Harvard from coming here, denying the world the ability to send people to an American university renowned for producing brilliant foreign scholars.
This morning, Steve Pinker published a long op-ed in the NYT on the “Harvard derangement syndrome” of the administration. Click on the headline below to read it, or find it archived here:
An excerpt (Steve first mentions all the pieces he’s written criticizing Harvard):
And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.”
This is not just trash talk. On top of its savage slashing of research funding across the board, the Trump administration has singled out Harvard to receive no federal grants at all. Not satisfied with these punishments, the administration just forbade Harvard from enrolling foreign students and has threatened to multiply the tax on its endowment as much as 15-fold, as well as to remove its tax-free nonprofit status.
Call it Harvard Derangement Syndrome. As the country’s oldest, richest and most famous university, Harvard has always attracted outsize attention. In the public imagination the university is both the epitome of higher learning and a natural magnet for grievances against elites.
He admits that Harvard still has problems:
Yet some of the enmity against Harvard has been earned. My colleagues and I have worried for years about the erosion of academic freedom here, exemplified by some notorious persecutions. In 2021 the biologist Carole Hooven was demonized and ostracized, effectively driving her out of Harvard, for explaining in an interview how biology defines male and female. Her cancellation was the last straw that led us to create the academic freedom council, but it was neither the first nor the last.
. . .The most painful indictment of Harvard is its alleged antisemitism — not the old-money WASP snobbery of Oliver Barrett III, but a spillover of anti-Zionist zealotry. A recent, long-awaited report detailed many troubling incidents. Jewish students have felt intimidated by anti-Israel protests that have disrupted classes, ceremonies and everyday campus life, often met with a confused response by the university. Members of the teaching staff have gratuitously injected pro-Palestinian activism into courses or university programming. Many Jewish students, particularly Israelis, reported being ostracized or demonized by their peers.
As with its other maladies, Harvard’s antisemitism has to be considered with a modicum of discernment. Yes, the problems are genuine. But “a bastion of rampant anti-Jew hatred” with the aim of “destroying the Jews as a first step to destroying Western civilization”? Oy gevalt!
I’m glad there’s some Yiddish in there. He notes that withholding grant money hurts Jews than other groups, and is hypocritical given Trump’s past statements:
Just as clear is what won’twork: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.
Mr. Trump’s strangling of this support will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews.
The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.”
Indeed. It’s natural that a populist and delusional President will go after America’s most elite university.
. . . . Why does this matter? For all its foibles, Harvard (together with other universities) has made the world a better place, significantly so. Fifty-two faculty members have won Nobel Prizes and more than 5,800 patents are held by Harvard. Its researchers invented baking powder, the first organ transplant, the programmable computer, the defibrillator, the syphilis test and oral rehydration therapy (a cheap treatment that has saved tens of millions of lives). They developed the theory of nuclear stability that has saved the world from Armageddon. They invented the golf tee and the catcher’s mask. Harvard spawned “Sesame Street,” The National Lampoon, “The Simpsons,” Microsoft and Facebook.
Ongoing research at Harvard includes methane-tracking satellites, robotic catheters, next-generation batteries and wearable robotics for stroke victims. Federal grants are supporting research on metastasis, tumor suppression, radiation and chemotherapy in children, multidrug-resistant infections, pandemic prevention, dementia, anesthesia, toxin reduction in firefighting and the military, the physiological effects of spaceflight and battlefield wound care. Harvard’s technologists are pushing innovations in quantum computing, A.I., nanomaterials, biomechanics, foldable bridges for the military, hack-resistant computer networks and smart living environments for the elderly. One lab has developed what may be a cure for Type 1 diabetes.
Pinker feels that Harvard is capable of reforming itself, and in fact is now doing so. But even if some of the reforms coincide with those demanded by the Trump administration, it’s simply bad for the government to mold universities to its liking. Withholding grants and revoking the visas of foreign students will not cure Harvard of antisemitism.
“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”
Read the whole op-ed, written with Pinker’s typical panache; he concludes that, for Harvard, the “appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.” Sadly, Trump has already wielded the knife.
Reader Ephraim Heller sends some lovely photos from his safari in Tanaznia in April 2025. Emphraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Today’s photos focus on lions (Panthera leo). [JAC: I especially love this one]:
Welcome to the tail end o’ the week: Friday, May 23, 2025: World Turtle Day. Here are some turtles from Botany Pond in July, 2018; I believe they are red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans) sunning on a duckling ramp. I doubt whether we will have turtles in the pond this year.
It’s also the Declaration of the Báb (part of the Bahái faith), and National Taffy Day. Here’s how one place makes saltwater taffy, which has salt and water but is not appreciably different from other taffy. It is not a “salty treat”, as the video avers; it’s just sold near the beach, along boardwarks.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 23 Wikipedia page.
George Wendt, an actor with an Everyman charm who played the affable, beer-loving barfly Norm on the hit 1980s TV comedy “Cheers” and later crafted a stage career that took him to Broadway in “Art,” “Hairspray” and “Elf,” has died. He was 76.
Wendt’s family said he died early Tuesday morning, peacefully in his sleep while at home, according to the publicity firm The Agency Group.
“George was a doting family man, a well-loved friend and confidant to all of those lucky enough to have known him,” the family said in a statement. “He will be missed forever.” The family has requested privacy during this time.
Despite a long career of roles onstage and on TV, it was as gentle and henpecked Norm Peterson on “Cheers” that he was most associated, earning six straight Emmy Award nominations for best supporting actor in a comedy series from 1984-89.
Six straight Emmy nominations! I guess he didn’t win any, but he was great. Here’s a montage and a memoriam (the show ran for eleven years and was one of my favorites, especially the fractious relationship between Sam and Diane):
The Republican-led House passed President Trump’s sprawling tax-and-spending bill early Thursday, after party leaders made a series of last-minute changes that united their warring wings.
The vote was 215 to 214, with one lawmaker voting present. The measure now goes to the Senate, where a similar tug of war could play out.
The passage of Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” marked a major win for Trump and for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who again found the formula that steered a course between hard-liners, who wanted deeper spending cuts, and moderates, who worried that the bill would hurt their districts’ hospitals and clean-energy projects.
Thursday morning’s vote was a significant step toward extending Trump’s expiring 2017 tax cuts and cementing other conservative priorities while trimming spending on Medicaid and food aid. It again showed the president’s power to unite fractious House Republicans, whose narrow majority meant that any handful of dissidents could have sunk the bill.
“This bill is our opportunity to deliver on the promises we made,” said Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R., Texas). “At its core, the one big, beautiful bill is about more than dollars and cents. It’s about liberty and empowering the American people.”
Reps. Warren Davidson of Ohio and Thomas Massie of Kentucky were the only two Republicans to vote against the measure, arguing that it didn’t do enough to rein in deficit spending. All Democrats were opposed.
Rep. Andy Harris (R., Md.) voted present, saying he wanted to move the legislation along but had concerns about deficits and Medicaid. Reps. Andrew Garbarino (R., N.Y.) and David Schweikert (R., Ariz.) missed the vote. Schweikert said that the vote concluded as he reached the House floor and that he supports the bill. A Garbarino spokesperson said he inadvertently missed the vote and supports the bill.
The bill tightens the work requirements for Medicare, which will cause roughly 14 million people to lose their health benefits, cuts taxes (mostly for higher earners, but also for seniors), doubles the maximum child tax credit, reduces the amount of student loans subsidized by the government, and, among other things, exempts qualified tipping income from taxation—up to $160,000 (does anybody earn that much in tips?) PBS adds this:
A fresh analysis from the Congressional Budget Office said the tax provisions would increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion over the decade, while the changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other services would tally $1 trillion in reduced spending. The lowest-income households in the U.S. would see their resources drop, while the highest ones would see a boost, the CBO said.
Here’s the Washington Post‘s bar graph about how the present bill would affect the national debt. Red bars increase it, green ones decrease it:
There are likely to be substantive changes as the bill moves to the Senate, but don’t ask me what’s likely. What’s clear is that Trump has won this one.
A divided Supreme Court rejected a plan on Thursday to allow Oklahoma to use government money to run the nation’s first religious charter school, which would teach a curriculum infused by Catholic doctrine.
The court split 4 to 4 over the Oklahoma plan, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself from the case, and the decision provided no reasoning.
That deadlock means that an earlier ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court will be allowed to stand. The state court blocked a proposal for the Oklahoma school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which was to be operated by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, and aimed to incorporate Catholic teachings into every aspect of its activities.
Because there was no majority in the case, the court’s decision sets no nationwide precedent on the larger question of whether the First Amendment permits states to sponsor and finance religious charter schools, which are public schools with substantial autonomy.
The brief ruling in one of the most anticipated cases of the term came as a surprise, after oral arguments took place only a few weeks ago in April. At the argument, a majority of the justices had appeared open to allowing Oklahoma to use government money to run the nation’s first religious charter school.
The decision did not include a tally of how each justice voted. It stated only that the lower court ruling was “affirmed by an equally divided court.” It is also unclear why Justice Barrett, the junior member of the court’s conservative supermajority, recused herself, which meant that she did not participate in oral argument or deliberations.
Why did Barrett, who is religious, recuse herself? The article adds “it may be because she is close friends with Nicole Stelle Garnett, a professor at Notre Dame Law School who was an early adviser for St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, the school involved in the dispute.” Whatever; it seems to me that the government paying for a religious education is a violation of the First Amendment, even if all religions get this benefit. And the issue now has to be litigated state by state. If Barrett had voted for the bill, it would have passed and we’d have religious charter schools everywhere.
In the year and a half since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, there have been so many alarming incidents on college campuses aimed at Jews. Many stick out for their grotesque imagery, for their outrageous slanders, and for their Soviet-style tactics. But the incident that I remember most vividly is the one that took place at Harvard University less than two weeks after Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 more.
No one was physically injured that day. But the fact remained that the incident was wildly beyond the pale: a group of Harvard students surrounding another student, an Israeli named Yoav Segev, repeatedly screaming “Shame!” in his face, blocking his path, and forcing him to leave a part of campus that he was entitled to be in just as much as they were.
Check the video. This is exactly what happened to me when I was photographing a singer in the encampment last year. I wasn’t causing trouble, I was just recording video because I liked his voice. But I was, as I called it, “keffiyehed”, surrounding by people holding up keffiyehs and who wouldn’t let me out of the fabric circle (they’d move every time I tried to get out and accuse me of bumping them. It was scary, but I couldn’t report it because I couldn’t identify the protestors and of course Chicago does all it can to avoid punishing them. I finally got out, but was badly shaken. The Jewish student at Harvard, however, could identify the assaulters, but Harvard didn’t do much to discipline them.
The incident might have just disappeared from the news, like so many other videos of post-October 7 antisemitism on campus, if not for another shocking fact. The two aggressors who were the easiest to identify, because they were not wearing masks or hoodies and did not have keffiyehs around their faces, were not just Harvard students. They were also Harvard employees.
Ibrahim Bharmal was a Harvard Law School student and an editor at the Harvard Law Review. He was also a law-school teaching fellow in a civil procedure class. Elom Tettey-Tamaklo was a student at Harvard Divinity School. He was also a residential Harvard proctor, someone who advised first-year Harvard College students and lived in their dorm.
The Free Press concludes this:
An investigation by The Free Press into the October 18 confrontation caught on video and the resulting criminal case reveals that Harvard and its police department played a very significant role in delaying the case and thereby influencing its course and outcome. In doing so, Harvard and its police department, whose chief resigned this month in the wake of a nearly unanimous no-confidence vote against him, worked at cross-purposes with the Suffolk County, Massachusetts, district attorney’s office—and with the pursuit of justice itself.
None of this might even have been an issue if Harvard had dealt with the incident immediately and decisively.
The outcome? The assaulters got a slap on the wrist:
Last month, a day before Harvard released its antisemitism report and about 18 months after the video went viral, the case ended with a whimper, not a bang. A judge ordered Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo, charged with misdemeanor assault and battery, to perform 80 hours of community service and to complete an in-person anger-management class as part of a pretrial diversion program. They will also take a negotiation class at—where else?—Harvard.
Now, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo are set to graduate next week, at which point Harvard’s ability to take disciplinary action against them will no longer just be controversial. It will be moot. Segev’s lawyers told The Free Press that Garber and other Harvard officials haven’t responded to their questions about whether Harvard has finished a disciplinary process for Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo.
The recommended reading list contained some works of fiction. It also contained some works that were, in fact, actually fictional.
The content distributor King Features says it has fired a writer who used artificial intelligence to produce a story on summer reading suggestions that contained books that didn’t exist.
The list appeared in “Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer,” a special section distributed in Sunday’s Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer last week.
More than half of the books listed were fake, according to the piece’s author, Marco Buscaglia, who admitted to using AI for help in his research but didn’t double-check what it produced. “A really stupid error on my part,” Buscaglia wrote on his Facebook page.
Among the summer reading suggestions was “The Last Algorithm” by Andy Weir, described as “a science-driven thriller following a programmer who discovers an AI system has developed consciousness” and been secretly influencing world events. “Nightshade Market,” by Min Jin Lee, was said to be a “riveting tale set in Seoul’s underground economy.”
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Both authors are real, but the books aren’t. “I have not written and will not be writing a novel called ‘Nightshade Market,’” Lee posted on X.
Cue the Schadenfreude.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili glories in the local flowers:
Hili: It’s the end of the lilac.
A: But the roses are just beginning.
In Polish:
Hili: Bez się już kończy.
Ja: Za to róże zaczynają.
There is also a picture of a rose at Hili’s house:
Masih is back posting again! Read the whole thing and watch. Look at those scary morality cops!
Hey Western feminists! watch this.
Imagine you’re driving your car or sitting on the subway, and suddenly you’re surrounded by police officers because your hair is not covered.
The regime says sending videos to me — Masih Alinejad — could lead to 10 years in prison.
In every line you sense the writer’s gritted teeth as they strain to avoid using a single pronoun for cross-dressing paedophile and convicted sex offender, ‘Katie Birtles’.https://t.co/efDzh8O4CK
And this is unbelievable. I don’t believe the courts will let it stand:
The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the college to fall in line with President Trump’s demands. nyti.ms/4k8w2qB
This is the last (I hope) of three posts on a topic I’m reading about: academic freedom (I have to be on a panel about the topic in June). Part 1 is here and part 2 is here. I won’t reprise what I said in those posts except to summarize their main points:
Post 1: The “clash of ideas” touted by Mill and others as the primary virtue of free speech, assuming that this clash will produce the truth, is in fact ineffective at furnishing us with the truth, for truth is ascertained not by a collision of ideas given equal weight, but from empirical investigation (“science construed broadly”). Nevertheless, free speech is a sine qua non for democracy, whose working reflects popular opinion, and popular opinion is the foundational turtle of democracy.
Post 2: Academic freedom, the right of scholars to study, research, and teach what they want without interference, is essential for finding the truth about anything (“truth” is what exists in the universe). This does involve the clash of ideas mentioned above, but not all ideas are regarded as equal under academic freedom: some have more credibility than others, viz., evolution vs. creationism. Further, unlike the egalitarianism of the public square, academic freedom assumes a meritocracy and also involves scholarly behavior that would seem to (but doesn’t) violate the First Amendment, like compelled speech (a professor, for example, must teach her topic and not some other topic). Finally, scholarly standards differ from discipline to discipline, and so the notion of “what academic freedom entails” will also differ: “success” in doing literary criticism, for example, is very different from “success” in molecular biology. I maintain further, that the notion of “truth” isn’t relevant to much of humanities, for example literary criticism, music, art, or ethics. There is no empirical truth to be found there, but nevertheless the clash of ideas is still essential to dispel error. (“You can’t prove that Spinoza said that.”)
The more I read, the more disagreement I find about what academic freedom really means and how it relates to free speech. Is it covered by the First Amendment? (some say “yes”)—or is it something different? Is academic freedom something possessed by professors, universities, students, or all of the above? I would answer to the first part “no,” since “freedom of thought” isn’t covered by the First Amendment. But I read last night that the Supreme Court has deemed academic freedom not only a First-Amendment right, but one that applies to all universities, be they public or private. (The First Amendment applies only to public universities, since they’re an arm of the government, though many universities voluntarily adhere to its standards).
As I said, every private school, including Hamline University where a professor was fired for showing an image of Mohammed, has academic freedom for its faculty; the fired Hamline professor was defended by many (including the AAUP) for having her academic freedom violated, and she settled with Hamline. (The President of the College subsequently resigned.
I emphasize that when I say that many areas of the humanities are incapable of finding truth, that is not to denigrate them or deem them inferior to science (see a list of their areas here). For humanities have their own ambit. Philosophy keeps us thinking straight and prevents us from falling into error, literature puts us into the shoes and minds of other people, and music and art give us beauty. Life without humanities would be dull indeed, and I’ve always said that in general scientists know more about and appreciate the humanities more than humanities people know about and appreciate science.
This leaves one question: what about institutional neutrality—the principle that universities should not make ideological or political pronouncements unless they bear directly on the mission of the university? (This was of course first embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Principle.) The purpose of this principle is to avoid the chilling of speech that would occur if a university establishes an “official” position that students and faculty would be loath to violate. (Everyone, of course, is free to voice their personal opinion according to the First Amendment: you just can’t do it in the name of the University. And our late President Bob Zimmer said that he was reluctant to give his own personal opinion because it could be taken to represent the University of Chicago’s position.).
By impeding the chilling of speech, Kalven also impedes the chilling of research and teaching. If, for example, a college held the position that sex was not binary, and that there was a spectrum of sex in humans, researchers would be reluctant to either publish, work on, or make that claim. (The President of Spectrum U. would be Agustín Fuentes.)
Thus institutional neutrality is the rope that ties together free speech and academic freedom. Any university worth its salt—one that wants to foster discourse and consider all ideas on their merits, however offensive—should adhere to the three prongs of Kalven, academic freedom, and free speech. It’s a pity that so few Universities follow all three (only 30 American universities have adopted institutional neutrality; and that’s out of 2,637 four-year colleges!).
