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.
If you’ve read about the various pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests across American campuses, one thing you’ll notice is a general reluctance to punish demonstrators when they violate university rules. Of course protests are usually fine if they conform to First Amendment principles (though some schools don’t hold those principles), but they’re never fine when they violate campus rules. These latter rules are usually called “TPM rules”, meaning that universities can regulate the “time, place, and manner” of demonstrations in a way that doesn’t impede the mission of the institution: teaching, learning, and research.
So at the University of Chicago, for example, we’ve laid out the rules for protests and demonstrations at this website, which gives information about noise levels permitted, building occupancy (not permitted at all) and the like. In 2024, I gave four examples of pro-Palestinian demonstrators violating University regulations without any punishments meted out. The only sanction levied was a tepid warning to Students for Justice in Palestine that they disrupted a Jewish gathering, a warning that they’d better not do it again or else. . . .
As I always say, rules that aren’t enforced are not rules at all. Even our encampment, which involved several hundred people—both students and outsiders—which was declared in violation of university rules, was dismantled by the university police, but none of the demonstrators faced any punishment.
Is it any wonder, then, that the anti-Israel demonstrators feel empowered to break any campus rules they want? And they did—two weeks ago when the pro-Pals, a consortium called “UCUP”, for “UChicago United for Palestine” held a week of demonstrations commemorating last year’s encampment, which, not coincidentally, also included Alumni Weekend. (One wonders what mindset thinks that these loud and obnoxious intrusions will change peoples’ opinions.)
At any rate, the Chicago Maroon, which loves nothing more than an anti-Israel demonstration, had an article about a week of protests that included several violations of University rules, all of which seem to have been unpunished. Oh, well, there’s one exception: the police confiscated one megaphone being used illegally. I suppose they arrested it for “excessive loudness.”
Click below to read the article. I’ve bolded the bits where illegal actions went unpunished. The cops and deans-on-call showed up, but the former are constrained by the administration and can’t take action without permission from above, and deans-on-call are, to me, a joke; mere observers who can’t enforce anything and barely want to report anything. In fact, some of the deans-on-call are blatantly pro-Palestinian, and so can’t be objective. Here’s a photo of the “watermelon” (Palestinian colors) fingernails of one of those deans-on-call taken by a student during the encampment last year:
I’ll give some excerpts showing how the U of C ignores violations, as well as giving the article’s introduction. Click headline below to read; unpunished violations are in bold.
Marking the one-year anniversary of the 2024 pro-Palestine encampment, UChicago students and community members launched a week-long protest and installation outside Swift Hall. The students, organized as the “Popular University for Gaza,” called for solidarity with Palestine and the divestment of University funds from institutions tied to Israel.
Between Monday, April 28, and Friday, May 2, the group held teach-ins, workshops, and demonstrations—some resulting in confrontations with the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) and deans-on-call—as they sought to maintain public pressure on University leadership.
Shortly after 1 p.m. on April 28, protesters gathered on the quad outside of Swift Hall, raising a banner reading “Free Palestine, Bring the Intifada Home.” UCPD officers and deans-on-call observed from a distance as the group began a series of chants over a megaphone. Deans repeatedly informed the protesters that they were in violation of University policies regulating the use of amplified sound on campus.
Did anybody stop the violations? Are you kidding me?
Around an hour and a half into the demonstration, the UCPD officers and deans-on-call requested identification from those who had been using megaphones. The protesters initially locked arms to prevent possible arrests, with the crowd gradually dispersing as officers continued to ask for identifying information.
And again it seems as if the protestors, who are obliged to provide identification, did not do so; nor did the cops take any IDs.
Here’s a protestor waving a Houthi flag; photo by Grace Beatty. Love that AK-47! Note the covered faces of the protestors, indicating two things: they are cowards who don’t want to be identified, and they are not enacting civil disobedience, whereby you break a law considered immoral and voluntarily take the punishment.
On Thursday they arrested. . . .a megaphone:
Two UCPD officers, along with several deans-on-call, gathered to observe the protest.
As protesters continued to chant, UCPD officers chased after demonstrators and confiscated at least one megaphone. The demonstration, which took place after 1 p.m., was again in violation of University policy regarding amplified sound. An unidentified protester flew a flag identifying with the Houthi movement in Yemen; one UCPD officer was overheard saying “As long as they’re holding [the flag], it’s free speech.”
The cop is right about free speech; our campus police are well aware of what is a violation and what is not. But they cannot move against real violations without permission of the administration.
Finally, although again this is legal, they heckled the President and Provost. Not THAT is going to change their minds!
Here’s President Alivisatos being heckled as he walks to the alumni tent. He kept his cool and did not respond. And you have to hand it to the heckler that he didn’t cover his face. (This was published on the UC United Instagram page.)
So the week was a mixture of legal and illegal activities by the protestors, but the only thing arrested was a megaphone.
Below you see a poster in the Quad. If you know what “Intifada” means, it’s a term in Arabic for “shaking off” and has come to mean “shaking off the Jews”, i.e., killing them. These are really congenial sentiments.
I’m not sure whether the students had permission to post such a banner, but even if they did the sentiments surely create a hostile climate for Jewish students:
Photo by Nathaniel Rodwell-Simon
These demonstrations used to bother me more, especially their implicit calls for genocide of Jews (the poster above and the “From the river to the sea. . ” chants), but now that Hamas is losing, and the University of Chicago has made it clear that it will not divest from Israel, these demonstrators strike me as pathetic, cosplaying as Houthis and members of Hamas. Surely a large moiety of them are antisemitic, and it’s okay to do that so long as you don’t create a climate inimical to the participation of Jewish students at the University. Do we have such a climate? You’d have to ask the Jewish students, but some of them have, I’ve heard, said “yes.” I know some of them won’t wear their Stars of David necklaces in a way that make them visibly Jewish.
I wish only that my University would be serious about its demonstration rules. When students break those rules, they should be punished, bar none. If Columbia can do it, so can we.
We have three—count them, three—items today. The first is the first known portrait of an individual cat, that is, a cat who is known to have existed as a pet and with a name:
tumblr: Giovanni Reder, Portrait of the cat Armellino, 1750. Oil on canvas. The first known painting of an individual cat. The italian poetess Alessandra Forteguerra commissioned the artwork of her beloved tom cat. Museo di Roma.
Very few cats can boast that they have actually had their portraits painted, that is, that they have been depicted without any allegorical, moralizing, religious, esoteric, or simply decorative intent on the part of the artist….Armellino, wearing an elegant little collar, has literally posed on a luxurious cushion; a sonnet by the abbot Bertazzi has even been dedicated to him.
Now, I can’t find a translation of that sonnet anywhere. If any reader can, or can speak Italian, please provide me with a translation. I will credit the translator and put the sonnet in this post. You can enlarge the text by clicking on it.
Reader Brooke supplied the necessary sonnet:
The translation of the sonnet in the painting can be found on this page (you have to scroll down the page quite a ways):
Sonnet to a Cat
by Abbott Bertazzi
This Cat painted here on canvas,
tasted a loving kiss from a beautiful goddess,
after having done the portrait from life,
The cat keeps himself well guarded and most jealous.
In order to keep himself fully intact,
like an Ermine who lives in fear
and to avoid being caught
flees rapidly to stay in the wood or in a more hidden place.
So you as well, oh adventurous Cat,
preserve your mouth intact and your heart pure,
and only think of the one who kissed you,
and allow only me to love you,
you who shoot a kiss,
and take back my lovely kiss to cool the passion.
The cat’s name, Armellino, apparently means ‘ermine’ in old Italian.
Another site has an excerpt about this painting from H.V. Morton’s A Traveller in Rome (1957).
In a picture gallery upstairs [in the museum of Rome] I found a portrait of a black and white cat. This lordly and imposing creature prowled the marble halls of some seventeenth century palace and is here seen enthroned upon a tasselled cushion, wearing a broad collar to which bells are attached. Pinned to a curtain behind the cat is a little poem which says that a great and beautiful lady once kissed the cat and bade him keep his heart and mouth pure, and to remember her kiss. No one knows who the lady was.
Wouldn’t “the lady” be the cat’s owner? It’s rather confusing.
There are earlier named cats, of course, including Pangur Bán (“White Pangur”), the subject of a poem written by an Irish monk in a 9th-century manuscript. It’s a wonderful poem, comparable to “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry,” by Christopher Smart, but, alas, there is no portrait of Pangur.
These are the two best cat poems ever.
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The Japan Rail Club site gives us a look at a wonderful Japanese cat train (I think there are several). The article and photos are from Carlissa Loh, and go to the site to see tons of photos. If you’re an ailurophile, you’ll want to take this train.
Click below to read and see photos, alo by Carlisa Loh:
Excerpts:
Would you take a 1.5-hour train in the Wakayama (和歌山) countryside just to see a cat? Many people would, and many have! In fact, it was thanks to a beloved cat, Tama, that one railway line was revitalised and saved from closure.
The railway line was Wakayama Electric Railway’s Kishigawa Line (貴志川線), and in January 2007, Tama (たま), a female calico cat, became the station master of Kishi Station (貴志駅).
Here’s Tama, the subject of a Wikipedia article in Japanese that autotranslates into English. It says, among other stuff, this:
Tama ( also known as Stationmaster Tama ; April 29 , 1999 ( Heisei 11) – June 22, 2015 (Heisei 27 )) was a cat and the honorary permanent stationmaster of Kishi Station on the Wakayama Electric Railway ‘s Kishigawa Line .
She was a female calico cat kept at the station’s convenience store and became an idol , like a maneki -neko (beckoning cat), before eventually becoming the station’s official mascot (a unique stationmaster, or cat stationmaster ) with the title of ” stationmaster ” and becoming world-famous . [ 3 ] She is now the station’s honorary permanent stationmaster.
On January 5, 2007, he was officially appointed as the stationmaster by the Wakayama Electric Railway, which caused quite a stir . [ 3 ] His main job was to “welcome customers,” and he is said to have not only attracted customers to Kishi Station, but also brought about the Heisei era cat boom, ” nekonomics ,” in Japan . [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] He was employed for life with no term limit , and his annual salary was one year’s worth of cat food .
Tama died in 2015, age 16.
But the Japan Rail Club says there’s a new stationmaster cat:
Her role of station master at Kishi Station was assumed by another beautiful calico cat, Nitama (ニタマ literarally “Tama two”), for whom curious travellers and excited fans alike travel all the way to the quiet station in Wakayama Prefecture.
Nitama — the new stationmaster of Kishi Station in Wakayama Prefecture — has been praised for her “hat-wearing” skills. courtesy Ryobi Group
Notes (indented) and 3 photos from Carlissa Loh:
As a tribute to Tama, Wakayama Electric Railway started operating the Tama Densha train (たま電車), an adorable train with an exterior decorated 101 drawings of Tama donning a station master’s hat in various poses. Affectionately called “Tamaden”, the train’s front even has ears and whiskers, how cute is that? As a self-professed noritetsu, I love riding special trains, and knew I had to make room in my trip to take a ride on this train and pay a visit to Nitama.
Inside the train, there were even more darling drawings and decals of Tama adorning the windows and walls, and since it was the New Year’s period when I visited, there weren’t many other passengers, so I could take photos to my heart’s content.
The Tama Densha is made up of two carriages, and each one is furnished with wooden seats of varying designs of shades of orange, black, and white, and just oozed comfort and cosiness. The train was designed by Mitooka Eiji (水戸岡 鋭治), who has designed many memorable sightseeing trains such as the luxury cruise train Seven Stars in Kyushu, many of JR Kyushu’s D&S Trains, Kyoto Tango Railway’s sightseeing trains, and more.
I’d surely ride this train if I went to Japan (one of my dream destinations)!
More photos and info at the site.
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And from Defector, Alex Sujong Laughlin interviews his cat Pong about the cat’s obnoxious behaviors. Click below to read:
Excerpts by Laughlin are indented:
Like every other member of my generation who has put off traditional markers of adulthood, like home ownership and having children, I am completely, utterly devoted to my cat, Pong. In the five years he’s lived with us, Pong has evolved from the scrawny street cat we adopted in the Union Square Petco to the ruler of our household. We often quote a decade-old Adam Serwer tweet about his own cats: Management doesn’t need a union.
We’ve invented a rich mythology for Pong’s inner life over the last five years. His hardscrabble early years taught him to flirt and charm for his meals on the streets of Harlem, where he developed his taste for French fries, noodles, and pizza. He ran with a tough crew that wasn’t afraid to get into scraps if he needed to assert dominance. He inherited his asthma and anxiety from his mother (me), and he spends his days working hard (sleeping on a chair in my office) for the money to pay our rent.
In any relationship, you fall into rhythms built around each other’s quirks and scar tissue. This is true even—or maybe especially—when the relationship is with an animal who cannot speak English. We’ve come to accept his most annoying behaviors; his loafing on our backs at 5 a.m. like a sleep paralysis demon is just a part of life with Pong, as are the lost hours of sleep and frequent yelling when he can’t find us in the house. \
I got a recommendation for a pet communicator, whose identity I’m keeping private at their request, and booked a 30-minute session with them. We met on Zoom, and when they started looking for his energy, they asked if he’s a male, six to eight years old, who’s very sure of himself. Pong was sleeping next to me in a little kitty croissant but the communicator couldn’t see him on screen. I told them they had the right guy.
What follows is an interview with Pong, through the communicator, which I’ve edited for clarity.
Just two Q&A’s via the pet communicator:
Can you tell me anything about your life before you came to live with us?
There wasn’t a loving family, but there were two or three people who took care of me on the street. There was one man who I had a strong relationship with. There was a misunderstanding, the people tried to bring me into the house, and then took me away.
(This made me think of Alex, the doorman who apparently fed him when he was a stray, and who he was named for when he was brought to Union Square. Yes, we should’ve kept that name.)
. . .I appreciate that. OK, one last question. Sometimes you’ll crawl up onto my lap and be really sweet and snuggly, and then out of nowhere you’ll start attacking me, biting me and breaking skin. It really sucks when that happens! What’s going on?
Sometimes I feel like I’m back on the street and it just happens. It feels right in the moment, but when you get upset I feel ashamed. I saw the tissues with the blood last week and I feel bad. It’s not your fault.
Save for John Avise’s collection of dragonfly photos for tomorrow, we’re out of readers’ wildlife. This is sad, as the feature has been going since this site started in 2009 (I can’t believe it’s been that long!). If you have wildlife photos and don’t want the feature to disappear, please send ’em in. There will be no photos today.
Welcome to Jewish cat shabbos: CaturSaturday, May 17, 2025, and National Walnut Day. Here’s a short video about how commercial walnuts are harvested: They shake ’em off the trees!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 17 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*To become an American citizen, applicants have to answer questions about America’s history and laws, which is okay (I hear that most native Americans can’t answer them). But now, in this Age of Trump, they’re thinking of turning this vetting into, yes, a reality television show. It’s not a done deal yet, but it’s tacky, and of course the pressure of being on t.v. could throw some people:
The Department of Homeland Security is considering taking part in a television program that would have immigrants go through a series of challenges to get American citizenship, officials said on Friday.
The challenges would be based on various American traditions and customs, said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the agency. She said the department was still reviewing the idea, which she spoke about several weeks ago with a producer named Rob Worsoff.
“The pitch generally was a celebration of being an American and what a privilege it is to be able to be a citizen of the United States of America,” she said. “It’s important to revive civic duty.”
She said the agency was happy to review “out-of-the-box pitches,” particularly those that celebrate “what it means to be an American.”
“This isn’t ‘The Hunger Games’ for immigrants,” Mr. Worsoff said, adding, “This is not, ‘Hey, if you lose, we are shipping you out on a boat out of the country.’”
Ms. McLaughlin said the pitch had not yet reached the level of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. She said on social media on Thursday that the department “receives hundreds of television show pitches a year,” including for documentaries about border operations and white-collar investigations. “Each proposal undergoes a thorough vetting process prior to denial or approval,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “This pitch has not received approval or denial by staff.”
The department has worked with filmmakers in the past on programming.
In 2017, during the first Trump administration, the agency allowed documentary filmmakers extensive access to operations conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for a program called “Immigration Nation.”
I cannot imagine the American public being intensely interested in such a show. Granted, they would learn some history and law, but people would find it boring. I find it embarrassing and schlocky, and imagine answering those questions on t.v. I am betting they won’t go through with it. “I’ll take Canceled Amendments for $200.”
Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip on Friday killed at least 74 people, Hamas-run authorities said, as US President Donald Trump wrapped up a Middle East visit that skipped Israel and offered little prospect for a ceasefire and hostage deal.
Vowing to take care of Gaza, Trump said “a lot of people are starving in Gaza… There’s a lot of bad things going on.”
Strikes overnight into Friday morning hit the outskirts of Deir al-Balah and the city of Khan Younis, and sent people fleeing from the Jabaliya refugee camp and the town of Beit Lahiya.
The death toll figure, which is not independently verified, does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas, including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
The Saudi Al-Hadath news channel reported that Israeli tanks advanced in the area of Beit Lahiya.
The IDF said Friday afternoon that it had carried out airstrikes on over 150 “terror targets” in the Gaza Strip over the past day.
The targets included anti-tank missile launch posts, cells of operatives, and buildings used by terror groups to carry out attacks on forces, the army said.
The strikes in Gaza on Friday were preparatory actions leading to a larger operation and were meant to send a message to Hamas that the campaign will begin soon if there is not an agreement to release hostages, the Associated Press reported, citing an unnamed Israeli official.
The problem with the food, which I do worry about, it that yes, Gaza has enough food for all its people for some time, but Hamas is guarding it in warehouses. True, no food is coming in, but Israel has offered to distribute food to people so it could ensure that the food goes to civilians, not to Hamas, but the UN won’t let Israel do that for reasons that are completely unclear to me. But, at any rate, it’s not true that Israel refuses to distribute food, and remember that there is no obligation to distribute food to an enemy country (we didn’t in WWII), so Israel is going beyond the call of duty by offering to do so.
*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly and snarky news column in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: The emir of America.”
→ Biden and Kamala continue their bickering: A top adviser to Kamala’s presidential run told authors of a forthcoming book that Biden screwed the campaign over, and that if he had only dropped out earlier, Kamala would have soared. Which makes no sense, because she became slightly less popular as she campaigned. It seems like if Biden would’ve quit just a couple months earlier, Doug Emhoff might have been in the East Wing today switching out the drapes and getting ready for SoulCycle in Georgetown. The new book details Biden’s aging, and the lengths people went to cover it up includes that his team planned for Biden to be in a wheelchair soon after the election. I need everyone involved in this to step away from public life. But they refuse. Last week, Joe and Dr. Jill Biden went on TheView. The ladies asked him about the criticisms of his age, and he went on for a few minutes until Dr. Jill, our villain, swooped in to say how very hard he worked.
The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day. I mean, he’d get up, he put in a full day, and then at night he would, I’d be in bed, you know, reading my book, and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff. I mean, it was nonstop.
He put in a full day like a grown-up, she says, as Joe stares ahead, confused. Why is Joe all dressed up there at The View table anyway? Dr. Jill, just let him rest, good Lord.
→ The new Statue of Liberty: Donald Trump is being gifted a jumbo jet by the Qataris. The administration says it’s being given to the Defense Department and then will go to Trump’s “presidential library foundation,” which I’m sure will be very real and very full of big books. Facing criticism, Trump reposted someone on Truth Social saying the plane is a gift from a foreign government, like the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France. Just like that. But does the Statue of Liberty have a minibar full of Diet Coke?
My favorite exchange on this whole thing was on Fox News, between Brian Kilmeade and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Kilmeade: “Do you worry that if [the Qataris] give us something like this, they want something in return?”
Leavitt: “Absolutely not, because they know President Trump, and they know he only works with the interests of the American public in mind.”
To be clear, I only work with the interests of TGIF in mind. So if someone wants to gift a briefcase of diamonds or a big private plane, TGIF might be interested in promoting your concrete company. Incentives: aligned! You’re welcome, TG readers.
Attesting to the legality of the gift from Qatar was United States attorney general and top blonde Pam Bondi, whose former job was working as a lobbyist for Qatar.
→ UC Berkeley votes against Hindu Heritage Month: The UC Berkeley student senate voted against Hindu Heritage Month, citing “Hindu nationalism,” despite the university’s observing several other heritage months. Hindus are not allowed heritage time! Stop asking for heritage awareness, Hindus. You must sit in shame next to the Irish Pride group and the campus Israel club (it is an awkward combo in there, I gotta warn you). Certain heritages’ self-awareness needs to be suppressed, and UC Berkeley is adding Hindu to that list. The failed resolution had recognized contributions to the Berkeley community by people of Hindu heritage, and called on students to “support their Hindu peers on campus.” No. Stop asking. As your debutante arbiter of who is white, and what to do with edge cases, I’ll be clear: Greeks and Italians are ethnic and may celebrate, though not for a whole month, just a heritage week. Basically a food festival and that’s it. But Hindus are white. I can’t explain why but it’s true.
*A new paper in Science once again shows the value of genetic differences between human populations in reconstructing the history of human migration. Who says population differences are of no biological significance?. Click below to read it, or find the pdf here (h/t Matthew):
The upshot is really summarized in the abstract, and the four lineages giving rise to modern South American populations is shown in the figure below. The size of the circle in each area is an index of the inhabitants’ genetic diversity, which itself is an index of population size (bigger circles = more people in the past).
Here’s the summary:
From our origins in Africa, humans have migrated and settled across the world. Perhaps none of these migrations has been the subject of as much debate as the expansion into and throughout the Americas. Gusareva et al. used 1537 whole-genome sequenced samples from 139 populations in South America and Northeast Eurasia to shed light on the population history of Native Americans. Collected as a part of the GenomeAsia 100K consortium, analysis of these data showed that there are four main ancestral lineages that contributed to modern South Americans. These lineages diverged from each other between 10,000 and 14,000 years ago, and this analysis reveals more details of the population history dynamics in these groups.
Note how, in general, the South American circles are smaller, reflecting the fact that only a limited number of individuals went on each southward foray, reducing the genetic diversity. Note that they used over 1500 whole genome sequences to get these data, and that the lineages diverged over 10,000 years ago. What I always find amazing is that humans crossed the Bering land bridge about 17,000 years ago, and only a few thousand years later they’d already crossed North America, Central America, and made it to South America. That’s some fast traveling, and one wonders why. (I presume competition, but we don’t know.)
They also were unable to find the part of NE Asia where the immigrants originated, but they surely had to pass through Siberia.
Click picture to enlarge:
(From paper): Genetic ancestry and nucleotide diversity. Colors represent genetic ancestries estimated by whole-genome sequencing data of contemporary human populations. Countries having no data remained empty. Circle size indicates the average nucleotide diversity of each population.
The man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in 2022, leaving the prizewinning author blind in one eye, was sentenced Friday to serve 25 years in prison.
A jury found Hadi Matar, 27, guilty of attempted murder and assault in February.
Rushdie did not return to court to the western New York courtroom for his assailant’s sentencing but submitted a victim impact statement. During the trial, the 77-year-old author was the key witness, describing how he believed he was dying when a masked attacker plunged a knife into his head and body more than a dozen times as he was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution to speak about writer safety.
Before being sentenced, Matar stood and made a statement about freedom of speech in which he called Rushdie a hypocrite.
“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” said Matar, clad in white-striped jail clothing and wearing handcuffs. “He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”
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Matar received the maximum 25-year sentence for the attempted murder of Rushdie and seven years for wounding a man who was on stage with him. The sentences must run concurrently because both victims were injured in the same event, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said.
Rushdie, stabbed 15 times, lost one of his eyes and the use of one hand, and if you want to read his ruminations about the attack, I highly recommend Rushdie’s account Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, which I’ve mentioned before. Since Rushdie never met the guy who stabbed him, it’s not just his thoughts about the murder, which are quite eloquent, but the gruesome details of his long healing. At the end he confects a dialogue between himself and Matar in an attempt to suss out Matar’s motivations. It’s all because Rusdie wrote a book that offended some Muslims; I bet Matar didn’t even read it.
Here’s an 8.5-minute BBC video giving details of the trial; it includes a short interview with Rushdie:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s looking for books in all the wrong places.
Hili: What are you looking for?
Andrzej: A good book.
Hili: You are not going to find it here.
In Polish:
Hili: Czego szukasz?
Ja: Jakiejś dobrej książki.
Hili: Tu nie znajdziesz.
And a picture of Szaron stalking:
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Masih must be feeling better, as she’s reposting old posts. Here’s one about hijabs. There are English subtitles
Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who’s recovering rapidly. The first one he captions, “More nightmarish visions from the good old US of A. It’s heinous:
The state of Georgia is using the body of a brain-dead woman as an incubator. Because she was 9 weeks pregnant when she died, and their abortion ban is from about 6 weeks, they are sustaining her on life support, without input from her family, until 32 weeks of gestation. A true dystopian nightmare.
Here’s natural (well, really artificial) selection for antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Note that the environment gets more challenging towards the center.
A fabulous video – I used to show this to my first year students as am example of natural selection in action.
Reader Enrico sent me a link to this video called “Blind Spot“, a 2024 movie that’s 95 minutes long. The topic is antisemitism on American college campuses.
The YouTube notes:
“Blind Spot” is the only current film focused exclusively on campus antisemitism. Featuring never-before-seen interviews with students before and after October 7th, along with testimony before Congress and insights from officials, journalists, and university staff, it reveals how antisemitism on campus didn’t appear overnight—and what can be done about it. Described as “like nothing I’ve ever seen” and “a fire alarm ringing,” the film highlights the resilience of Jewish students and the urgent need for change.
It begins with the infamous conflict between Rep. Elise Stefanik and the Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. The Presidents’ answers about the rules were correct, but the Presidents of Penn and Harvard later resigned, largely because of the hypocrisy of their answers: free speech is indeed within the colleges’ ambit, but they enforced it erratically and hypocritically.
The rest of the video consists of short interviews and statements and scenes of anti-Israel demonstrations from many schools, including the University of Chicago. As we already know, anti-Semitism is pervasive at many of these schools. What impresses me is the resilience and determination of the Jewish students. Compared to the angry, shouty, ace-covered advocates of Palestine, they seem eminently rational. I found it both depressing and heartening.
This film was made last year, but I can’t say things have gotten palpably better in the last year. As Hamas continues to lose in Gaza, the intensity of Jew hatred has only grown.
BTW, my Belgian colleague Maarten Boudry, a philosopher with whom I’ve published (and an atheist), just published an article in Quillette detailing his impressions of his first trip to Israel.
We have only one set of Readers’ Wildlife left, so I’m putting in a “Spot the. . .” feature from Neil Taylor of Cambridge in the UK. But please send in your photos, folks.
Neil says this:
The first photo is a tree stump draped in spider webs in which a spider is hiding. . . .I’m not a spider expert but I think it is a running crab spider (Philodromus sp.). Quite a beautiful little thing.
Can you spot it? I’ll post the reveal at 11 a.m. Chicago time. I think this is of medium difficulty. Please do not reveal in the comments where it is; let others have the fun of finding it.
It’s Friday! It’s Friday! Gotta get down on Friday! Yep, it’s Friday. May 16, 2025, and National Barbecue Day. Below is a stupendous barbecued beef rib with all the trimmings from one of my favorite places: Black’s in Lockhart, Texas. It was part of my first trip after the pandemic: a 2021 BBQ Tour of Texas. You can see Potato salad, beans, raw onions, jalapeño corn muffin, and sweet tea on the side (not visible). Or get the brisket, but GO!
There’s a Google Doodle today, which takes you (click on screenshot) to another lunar game. I think Google is getting all astrology-y:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 16 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*It looks like what I thought would be a no-brainer Supreme Court case: the birthright of citizenship, which Trump opposes, has run into some trouble. The Justices seem divided!
The Supreme Court appeared divided after hearingarguments Thursday about the power of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions, including rulings that have blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting the guarantee of birthright citizenship nationwide.
Several liberal justices argued that Trump’s order denying automatic citizenship for U.S.-born babies is blatantly at odds with more than a hundred years of Supreme Court precedent. The court only indirectly considered the citizenship issue as it was more directly being asked to weigh the scope of nationwide injunctions. The arguments on Thursday — lasting a little more than two hours —largely focused on that issue.
The Trump administration asked the justices to scale back nationwide injunctions to apply only to the pregnant women, immigrant advocacy groups or states that challenged the ban — which opponents say conflicts with the Constitution, past court rulings and the nation’s history. More than 300 lawsuits have been filed challenging Trump’s actions, and courts in many cases have at least temporarily blocked many of his initiatives.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices that relief should be granted to people who sued, not other people, which he said “results in all these problems.” Justice Clarence Thomas, who asked the first question, said the country “survived until the 1960s” without nationwide injunctions.Justice Elena Kagan, a former solicitor general, questioned the practical effects of limiting nationwide injunctions, asking how else courts could address unconstitutional issues.
In the end the Court has to decide this one; injunctions by federal courts that apply nationwide won’t hold until the Big Court weighs in. Either you’re a US citizen or not, and you can’t be a citizen in, say, Oregon but not Alabama. And the idea that relief applies only to those who sue is palpably stupid. It’s time for Roberts & Co. to bite the bullet. Are they afraid of striking down Trump’s orders?
While I agree that Trump is depraved, I disagree that federally defunding NPR and PBS exemplifies it. Rather, I see this move as anything from reasonable to necessary. Mostly, I see it an opportunity.
Trust in the media remains at an all-time low. Many liberals understand the problem with highly biased news outlets, and regularly decry the slant of Fox or Breitbart, which baldly sell the intermeshing of editorial and news. But few of us would admit that NPR and PBS are also slanted—just in a complementary direction to our own views. (Well, not my views, but those of the people around me, aghast that someone would steal the Pride flag from in front of a brownstone, while preventing a woman from posting on the neighborhood listserv when her Israeli flag was stolen. My view is that if you’re gonna be upset about flag theft, you gotta be upset about both of those instances equally.)
Groups that comb the media for bias tend to rate NPR and PBS as left-ish, not full blown propaganda. But former NPR employee Uri Berliner wrote in The Free Press that the organization had “lost America’s trust” by representing “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.”
What reporters at NPR should have been doing was questioning whether the psychological and medical interventions of “gender-affirming care” added up to healthcare. They should have asked, and educated others about, what “trans” means, and where the idea of gender identity came from. They should have scrutinized the research they reported as showing interventions were successful, and not just reported the research with conclusions that affirmed their own worldviews. They should have examined the differences between adult transsexuals and young people seeking transition, and taken the idea of rapid-onset gender dysphoria seriously, rather than ignoring it. They should have explained that, no, this is not an equity issue—it’s an issue of science and of medical ethics, and it’s a cultural issue, related to how we understand, or don’t, gender… whatever the hell that word means.
Some of the bias:
· NPR refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story, calling it a waste of time and a distraction, despite that it was highly relevant to the presidential election.
· NPR repeatedly insisted COVID-19 did not originate in a lab and refused to explore the theory.
· The FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy have all since deemed the lab-leak theory the likely cause.
· NPR ran a Valentine’s Day feature around “queer animals,” in which it suggested the make-believe clownfish in “Finding Nemo” would’ve been better off as a female, that “banana slugs are hermaphrodites,” and that “some deer are nonbinary.”
· Research shows that “congressional Republicans faced 85% negative coverage, compared to 54% positive coverage of congressional Democrats,” on PBS’s flagship news program.
· Over a six-month period, PBS News Hour used versions of the term “far-right” 162 times, but “far-left” only 6 times.
. . . . I’d say it’s a little more complicated when it comes to PBS, which relies more heavily on federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting than NPR does. I don’t think Masterpiece Theater and Antiques Roadshow are suffering from ultra-biased leftism, even if PBS NewsHour is. And I think Sesame Street was one of the greatest things that ever happened in television history (and I highly recommend this documentary about it). But I still don’t see a reason for all of America to subsidize such programming. Trump’s declaration is correct about this: “No media outlet has a Constitutional right to taxpayer subsidized operations, and it’s highly inappropriate for taxpayers to be forced to subsidize biased, partisan content.”
Like most Americans, I’d rather defund CPB than I would the police—and that’s not because I’ve turned right-wing. It’s because I ended up learning a lot more about race, gender, Covid, George Floyd, and many other things than my incredibly slanted liberal media gave me. Some of that knowledge came from consuming an omnivorous media diet, including certain outlets I was told would forever stain my soul if I consulted them. Mostly, I learned more because I found individuals whose reporting and analysis I could trust—the Substack model of journalism. But that’s not what I want, nor do I think most people have the time to figure out whom to trust. They want to trust a news outlet, not an newsperson.
After saying that the priorities of these venues should change, she avers that that’s nearly impossible, and so suggests this:
So here’s another version, although one that takes a similar route. If PBS and NPR want to stay open, they’re going to need to rely more on a different kind of public funding—by individual members of the public, not the money we give the government through taxes. That means they shouldn’t just appeal to a small band of educated elites who want to bask in the glow of their own certainty. They should undergo a massive ideological overhaul to more accurately reflect the views and tastes of America.
I agree. I used to listen to NPR a lot, as it’s one of the few stations I can get on my car radio, but lately I learn almost nothing by listening, and am angered that the station’s coverage is so slanted. It takes about 15 minutes of listening before you see where it’s coming from. Now, only 10% of NPR’s total budget comes from the taxpayers, and 15% for PBS, but why not get rid of taxpayer funding altogether? If you want slanted media, that’s fine. But I’d really like a PUBLIC station that discusses all sides of the issues instead of the MSNBC of the airwaves.
*Several major league baseball players, including Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, formerly placed on a list ineligible to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame, have been reinstated again. Rose was banned for repeatedly betting on baseball, though not against his team (the Cincinnati Reds) when he was a player, and lying about it. He may have bet on the Reds, however, when he became manager. Jackson was expelled for supposedly accepting bribes to throw the 1919 World Series when he played for the Chicago White Sox (this is the “Black Sox Scandal”). Rose admitted guilt, but never admitting betting on (or against) his team; he holds several all-time records. From Wikipedia:
Rose was a switch hitter and is MLB’s all-time leader in hits (4,256), games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), singles (3,215), and outs (10,328).[1] He won three World Series championships, three batting titles, one Most Valuable Player Award, two Gold Glove Awards, and the Rookie of the Year Award. He made 17 All-Star appearances in an unequaled five positions (second baseman, left fielder, right fielder, third baseman, and first baseman). He won two Gold Glove Awards when he was an outfielder, in 1969 and 1970. He also has the third longest hit streak in MLB history at 44, and remains the last player to hit safely in 40 or more consecutive games.
The NYT asked 12 living Hall of Famers if they thought Pete Rose should get in, even though he’s dead (article archived here). By my count, four said “yes,” one said “no,” and the other seven either had no opinion or said it should be left up to those who vote. In my view, Rose shouldn’t get in for betting on baseball, for betting on (or against) his team, for besmirching the reputation of baseball (though players like Ty Cobb have done that, too), and because one reason he’s now eligible is because Trump raised a ruckus with the Commissioner of Baseball. Pressure from anybody shouldn’t count, only performance; but Rose’s betting and lying was part of his performance.
*Martha Nussbaum, a highly regarded professor of law and philosophy at my University, has given Judith Butler what the kids call “a sick burn” in a New Republic piece called, “The professor of parody: the hip defeatism of Judith Butler” (h/t Bryan). As I recall, she’s gone after Butler in print before. A few excerpts:
Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible.
These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.
One American feminist has shaped these developments more than any other. Judith Butler seems to many young scholars to define what feminism is now. Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen (more by people in literature than by philosophers) as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body. As we wonder what has become of old-style feminist politics and the material realities to which it was committed, it seems necessary to reckon with Butler’s work and influence, and to scrutinize the arguments that have led so many to adopt a stance that looks very much like quietism and retreat.
. . .It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler’s work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.
AD
A further problem lies in Butler’s casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of “interpellation,” you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.
This is a very long article, and dissects many of Butlers’ views, concentrating on her idea that sex is not a biological reality but a social construct mirroring the power of those who make the constructs. If you want to see what a fraud Butler is, read the article, which ends this way:
Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler’s hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.
*I didn’t realize until today that Chicago’s Field Museum has its own specimen of Archaeopteryx, a transitional form between dinosaurs and birds, and one of the world’s most famous fossils (there are 12 body specimens and some bits and bobs). It was perhaps the earliest transitional form discovered (1861, only two years after publication of The Origin), though its status as evidence for transitions between major forms wasn’t touted until later.
Here’s Wikipedia’s dope on the Chicago specimen, which is the subject of a brand-new paper (below):
The existence of a fourteenth specimen (the Chicago specimen) was first informally announced in 2024 by the Field Museum in Chicago, US. One of two specimens in an institution outside Europe, the specimen was originally identified in a private collection in Switzerland, and had been acquired by these collectors in 1990, prior to Germany’s 2015 ban on exporting Archaeopteryx specimens. The specimen was acquired by the Field Museum in 2022, and went on public display in 2024 following two years of preparation. In 2025, the paleornithologist Jingmai O’Connor and colleagues officially published a study describing this fourteenth Archaeopteryx specimen.
From Reuters:
The new study, examining the Chicago fossil using UV light to make out soft tissues and CT scans to discern minute details still embedded in the rock, shows that 164 years later there is more to learn about this celebrated creature that took flight 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.
The researchers identified anatomical traits indicating that while Archaeopteryx was capable of flight, it probably spent a lot of time on the ground and may have been able to climb trees.
The scientists identified for the first time in an Archaeopteryx fossil the presence of specialized feathers called tertials on both wings. These innermost flight feathers of the wing are attached to the elongated humerus bone in the upper arm. Birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs, which lacked tertials. The discovery of them in Archaeopteryx, according to the researchers, suggests that tertials, present in many birds today, evolved specifically for flight.
Feathered dinosaurs lacking tertials would have had a gap between the feathered surface of their upper arms and the body.
“To generate lift, the aerodynamic surface must be continuous with the body. So in order for flight using feathered wings to evolve, dinosaurs had to fill this gap – as we see in Archaeopteryx,” said Field Museum paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor, lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, opens new tab.
“Although we have studied Archaeopteryx for over 160 years, so much basic information is still controversial. Is it a bird? Could it fly? The presence of tertials supports the interpretation that the answer to both these questions is ‘yes,'” O’Connor added.
It’s still not clear that tertial feathers are a strong indicator of flight, though they do provide lift. But that can also be used for gliding, or hopping up in the air to get prey. I have to get down to the Field Museum to see this specimen; I think it’s one of the few in the world—and the only one in America—that you can see with your own eyes.
Here’s the paper in Nature (I won’t summarize it):
And a short video that shows the specimen, which took two years to prepare:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats are enjoying the good weather (she’s down by the Vistula River):
Hili: I have a dream.
A: What dream?
Hili: That May would last all year round.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam marzenie.
Ja: Jakie?
Hili: Żeby maj był przez cały rok.
*******************
From Another Science Humor Group:
From Animal Antics:
From Things With Faces, a goofy ice cream bar:
Masih is quiet as she’s still recovering from surgery. Have a tweet reposted by JKR; the original Torygraph article is archived here. And get a load of this excerpt:
The NHS is treating nursery-age children who believe they are transgender after watering down its own guidance, The Telegraph can reveal.
The health service was previously set to introduce a minimum age of seven for children to be seen by its specialist gender clinics, claiming anything less was “just too young”.
The limit was removed after the proposals were put out to consultation, with new guidance due to be published showing that children of any age are eligible.
However, a source close to the consultation process said NHS England had “caved to the pressure” of trans activists to remove the limits.
The children are not given powerful drugs such as puberty blockers at the clinics, but are offered counselling and therapy along with their family.
The tweet:
The class action lawsuits coming down the line are going to turn all previous medical scandals into mere footnotes. The medical establishment has buckled to the demands of an unfalsifiable ideology and children are being sacrificed on its altar. https://t.co/kyqWemxVIU
