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.
Welcome to the tail end o’ the work week: Friday, August 14, 2026, and National Navajo Code Talkers Day. (Wikipedia lists other Native American languages also used as codes during WWII.) Here’s a short video of this remarkable endeavor:
Jon Ossoff, Wes Moore, Raphael Warnock and other newish names: The Democratic base seems hungry for new leaders right now. Ossoff, the 39-year-old Democratic senator from Georgia, is fitting that bill in a big way. He’s getting millions of views for his sharp social media posts and campaign speeches that mercilessly criticize President Donald Trump.
“This is the cruelest and most arrogant group of people who have ever ascended to high office in modern American history,” Ossoff told supporters in July.
He is running for reelection in Georgia, and his race will be one of the most competitive in the country.
Other Democrats point to Ossoff’s fellow senator from Georgia, Raphael Warnock, as a potentially strong contender. (Warnock is not up for election in November.)
“For the first time since Obama, there’d be a candidate that unites the progressive Democratic lane and Black voters,” Texas-based Democratic pollster Nancy Zdunkewicz said.
Moore, the first-term Maryland governor and only sitting Black governor, is described by some Democrats as young and vibrant.
“Ossoff is currently on fire,” Anzalone said, “and Moore is also the type of guy who could really catch fire.”
Kamala Harris: This summer, Democrats recommended South Carolina vote first in the 2028 Democratic nominating process. That boosts Black voters’ representation in picking the nominee and Harris’s fortunes, given the former vice president and 2024 nominee is probably the candidate on this list with the most support among Black women. She’s been rallying voters for the midterm elections by touting her “controversial” plan to abolish the electoral college and add justices to the Supreme Court. “They are ruthless! We need to be ruthless too,” she said recently of Republicans. Some Democratic insiders don’t see her as a viable candidate, given she lost to Trump.
Gavin Newsom: The other California Democrat on this list aside from Harris has used his position as governor of the largest Democratic-run state to consistently oppose Trump. This summer he announced he and his wife were under federal investigation. (The Post has reported prosecutors are looking into potential tax crimes related to a nonprofit Newsom’s wife is linked to.) Newsom framed it as a compliment: “He’s coming after me because I’m considering running for president,” Newsom said of Trump.
Josh Shapiro: The popular Pennsylvania governor has had a relatively low-profile summer compared to other candidates on this list. He appeared in a music video. He has declined to take sides on the progressive-versus-centrist split in the party (at least for now). His breakout moment may be coming. He’s up for reelection in November and is trying to help Democrats take back control of the House by helping his party win four of the most competitive races in the nation, all in his state.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Democratic socialists are having their own moment. After helping elect New York City’s mayor earlier this year, they and the broader progressive movement ousted longtime members of Congress in deep blue cities and won a hard-fought primary in Michigan. Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York, was one of the first members of the Democratic Socialists of America to win federal office, and she’s an obvious pick for the broader progressive movement to get behind if she runs for president. She hasn’t ruled it out, though she could also run for Senate.
Mark Kelly: The senatorfrom Arizona has emerged as a forceful pushback against his party’s turn to the left. He’s also a candidate some Republicans say scare them: He’s a former astronaut (at a time when astronauts are cool again) and an astronomical fundraiser from a swing state.
Pete Buttigieg: President Joe Biden’s transportation secretary is cited by Democrats as one of the party’s best messengers and another young candidate who can catch fire. Despite not currently holding office, he’s near the top of several polls of Democratic primary voters.
The only one of these I can get behind now is Buttigieg. I don’t know enough about Ossoff to give an opinion.
*As you know, Francesca Hong, a Democratic Socialist, was favored to win the Democratic primary for Governor in Wisconsin. She lost by a hair. And the winner was James Crowley, a moderate Democrat and, in the pre-voting polls, was a distant second. The NYT explains “How the polls got it so wrong in Wisconsin” (the article is archived here).
Why were the polls so wrong?
Possible explanations range from a genuine, last-minute change in voter sentiment — Ms. Hong, a state representative, faced significant negative publicity in the closing days of the race — to miscalculations by pollsters about the makeup of the primary electorate.
The disparity between polls and results in Wisconsin and Michigan prompted Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and consultant, to jokingly call for “a total and complete shutdown of primary polling in the Midwestern United States until we can figure out what the hell is going on” in an early-morning X post on Wednesday.
. . . Polls failed to predict the outcome of Tuesday’s election, but they did not significantly overestimate Ms. Hong’s portion of the vote. Most surveys estimated she would win about 40 percent of the vote, and she ended up winning 39 percent.
What changed was Mr. Crowley’s support. In a ballot-counting marathon that stretched into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he over-performed the Marquette poll’s estimate by more than 30 points.
Explanations:
Many primary voters tune in at the last minute
Mr. Crowley may owe much of his success to the support of previously undecided voters.
Polls expected more young voters to show up
Even after an internal poll found that Mr. Crowley was trailing Ms. Hong last week, his campaign manager predicted that polls would not reflect the primar
. . . Across elections, primary voters tend to be older, and Wisconsin is no exception. Older voters and moderates were also more likely to remain undecided until close to the end, Mr. Franklin said, based on his polling data.
Hong’s supporters may have been more eager to respond to polls
Chaz Nuttycombe, executive director of the firm State Navigate, which conducted polls in Wisconsin, suggested that Ms. Hong’s early and enthusiastic supporters may simply have been more willing to respond to polls, thus skewing the results.
Republicans and independents were wild cards
Conducting surveys in partisan primaries has long been a challenge for pollsters, requiring them to make assumptions about the partisan composition of who will actually turn out to vote.
That is particularly difficult in states like Wisconsin and Michigan that hold open primaries and where voters are not registered by party.
As pollsters attempt to target likely Democratic primary voters in surveys, they are often unsure about the percentage of
Republicans and independents were wild cards
Conducting surveys in partisan primaries has long been a challenge for pollsters, requiring them to make assumptions about the partisan composition of who will actually turn out to vote.
That is particularly difficult in states like Wisconsin and Michigan that hold open primaries and where voters are not registered by party.
In other words, Republicans who voted in the primaries were not supporters of Hong. I suppose some of these explanations are empirical claims that could be tested, but I’m satisfied enough that Hong lost. It was a bright spot in a dark season of DSA and “progressive” candidates winning.
The IDF on Thursday ordered the evacuation of 15 homes in the northern West Bank village of Qusra, as part of an operation that was purportedly aimed at clearing several Israeli illegal outposts surrounding the town.
But while Palestinians were ordered to leave the area, settlers from the outposts who have been laying siege to a pair of homes in Qusra since Sunday remained on site.
It was unclear why the IDF needed to remove Palestinians from their homes in order to clear settlers from the area, but the IDF rescinded the evacuation order shortly after it began making headlines.
Some Palestinians were allowed to return to their homes, but one of the two besieged families told The Times of Israel that they were still barred from reaching their house.
Meanwhile, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee slammed the settlers as “terrorists” and said Israeli security forces were in the area at the US Embassy’s request.
From It’s Noon in Israel:
For four days, the most capable military in the Middle East could not clear a path for a family to reach its own front door. The family lives on the outskirts of Qusra, south of Nablus. On Sunday, settlers from the encampments seeded by the Tel Talpiot outpost sealed the entrance to their home and would not let them in or out.
The most damning verdict of the event comes from Israel’s most faithful friend, Mike Huckabee. The most pro-settlement ambassador in the history of the post, a man who will not so much as use the word “settler”—called the men at Qusra “Israeli terrorists.” He described what they did as a deliberate act of intimidation and harassment against the family, with “no excuse for such thuggish behavior.” One of the besieged homes belongs to an American citizen, and Washington is rightly furious.
The army moved to end it. But the plan leaked to the press, and by the time the troops arrived, dozens of activists were waiting, blocking the roads with boulders. That a handful of stones could stop a military that routinely penetrates through tens of meters of solid rock deserves an explanation.
Start with the obvious. These are not Hezbollah fighters or Iranian operatives. For all their open contempt for state authority, they are Israeli citizens, and overwhelming military force is not an option.
Then consider who actually showed up. The first forces on the scene were not Border Police or infantry trained for this, but Home Front Command reservists—a consequence of the manpower shortage the army has been running on for three years. They did not understand the scenario they had walked into. Some of them joined the prayer at the outpost, which has since been reported as solidarity. It was ignorance.
. . . Settler violence is a sensitive issue in Israel. Only a vanishingly small share of the settler population supports or takes part in such acts, but because the problem is exaggerated and used to obscure Palestinian violence against them, they bristle at hearing about it—even from Israel’s greatest friends.
Yes, but the reason we should prevent such acts is not because they look bad, but because they are bad. Yes, Israel may be held to a higher standard than other countries, but the solution is for Israel to behave impeccably, not ask others to lower their standards.
*I’ve written a bit about why I don’t use AI to write and look down on those who do. It turns out that Bret Stephens agrees, and in his latest NYT column, “I’m begging you: Never write with A.I.,” tells us why (article archived here).
This column isn’t so much an argument as it is a plea: Don’t use artificial intelligence to help you write. Never let A.I. do your writing for you.
Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.
Do none of these things not because they are unethical. Writing with A.I. is unethical when it’s a deception: when you pass off words, ideas and information as your own when they aren’t. An acknowledgment can largely address the problem. Do none of these things, either, not because you might be able to learn to write better than an A.I. can. Pretty soon, if not already, you won’t, just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app.
The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age.”
What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought. It compels thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can. It compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence, the inspection of others. In doing so, it also enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate — and accountable. People may easily forgive a word said in anger but not so easily one written in anger, precisely because the fact that it was written tells us that it was considered.
. . .We become better writers by the constant effort that mundane writing demands. We become better thinkers by investing into that writing a degree of attention we’d never give it if we relinquished the task to A.I. We become more creative when we learn how to put a personal stamp even on routine things, making them unmistakably our own.
These skills are now evaporating. A recent examination using A.I.-detection technology of 100 doctoral dissertations found that 56 percent of them contained “more than negligible” A.I.-generated writing and 19 percent had “more than 50 percent A.I.-generated text.” Anecdotal stories from college professors have a finger-in-the-dike feeling with regard to their efforts to hold back the flood of A.I.-generated student papers. It’s easy to treat the problem as one of mere cheating. But cheating doesn’t capture the real scope of the A.I. threat, which isn’t merely to academic integrity or personal betterment but also to democratic self-governance.
‘Nuff said! I will never use AI to write prose on this site, and when I use AI to answer questions, as I did today, I will of course inform people.
*Whan AOC announced she was freezing her eggs, I thought it wasn’t anybody’s business, and any criticism about that was dumb. But if it’s just her businesss, why did she post all that information in a long Instagram video? Now, however, Caitlin Flanagan at the Free Press adds that AOC, who’d apparently just split from her fiancé, should, if she intended to empower other women to do the same, have added the success rate of the procedure.
Lately, it seems, every possible phenomenon can be categorized as something that should or should not be “normalized.” AOC feels strongly that egg freezing, and talking about egg freezing, should very much be normalized because: “We are not taught about our bodies, we are not prepared for our own lives, whether that is in puberty, whether that is in pregnancy, whether that is in perimenopause, menopause.”
Fifty years ago that was certainly true, but today we’re living in an information glut that has sandblasted any trace of mystery and manners from our lives. A few minutes on TikTok and you can learn how to deliver your own baby, naturally or by C-section. AOC is by no means the first woman to bring her followers along on her egg-freezing “journey.” And yet, she speaks of freezing eggs as taking radical action: “We’re going to take our power back and we’re going to talk about it.” That power lay in an array of medications on a coffee table, the ones that can increase the number of eggs a woman produces in a single cycle. Freezing your eggs is a strike against “an administration that is dedicated to politicizing women’s bodies and taking our choices away from us and punishing us around decisions to be pregnant or not be pregnant.”
. . .The legacy media has always been pro–egg freezing, and it was quick to repeat AOC’s message. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is sharing her personal decision to preserve her ability to get pregnant later in life,” said an anchor on CBS New York, introducing a segment in which a fertility specialist named Jaime Knopman explained the meaning of the powerful “message” that AOC is giving women: “You can play multiple roles in your life. You can be [successful] professionally and be a mother. And if those times are not aligning because your career is advancing forward and you want to maintain the ability to have a genetic child”—what?—“then egg freezing is an excellent way to do that.”
No, it’s not. The truth is that many, many times, egg freezing can lead to heartbreak because it’s hardly foolproof, or even a likely way to get pregnant.
Women tend to have an optimistic view of egg freezing because at the time in a woman’s life when it first comes into view as a possibility, they’re not knee-deep—or even ankle-deep—in the research that suggests it’s actually a last best hope, not any kind of guarantee. We’ve known this for a long time, but it’s such a dream-buster that the media tends to steer clear of it until some event forces them to report on it. Egg freezing as a highly reliable way to preserve your fertility is something a lot of women want to be true. It would be a more equitable world if it were true. But as The New York Times reported in 2022, there was “sobering” news about egg freezing. A study conducted at the New York University Langone Fertility Center found that the overall success rate for a “live birth” using thawed eggs was 38 percent. As with almost everything with women’s fertility, youth is the most critical factor. Women who were younger than 38 when they froze their eggs had a 51 percent success rate. AOC is 36, young enough to be in that 51 percent. But it’s still only 51 percent.
Besides, these numbers may be moot: The vast majority of women who freeze their eggs never come back to the clinic to have them thawed and fertilized. Perhaps they have become pregnant in the interim; perhaps their desire wasn’t so much to have a baby as it was to put off the decision. Either way, if we are to start talking more about egg freezing, we should probably do the truly feminist act of sharing the full news of everything we know about it, so women can take power back from the industry that sells it.
The harsh truth is that a 36-year-old who wants a baby should probably start trying to get pregnant now, not freeze her eggs. The terrible, irreducible fact of the matter is that by the time you need to thaw those eggs, it will probably be very hard to get pregnant naturally. When you put off childbearing, even with your eggs on ice, you are more likely to find motherhood is out of reach. This, too, is a decision. There are three things I know about having a baby. The first is that it’s the most important thing you can ever do; the second is that nothing will ever come close to giving you as much joy as a baby; and the third is that it’s a young woman’s game.
I suppose there is always surrogate motherhood, which can be done by implanting a frozen, thawed, and then inseminated egg into a non-donor mother. Flanagan doesn’t mention that possibility, though it results in a fetus just as genetically related to AOC as one she carried herself. Perhaps that’s what AOC had in mind.
Here is a longish Free Press video (55 min.) in which some interviewer whose name I don’t know interviews Dr. Debra Soh about, among other things, AOC and her announcement. The AOC part starts at 18:37.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is referring to the Jason Arday affair:
Hili: I’m noticing more and more plagiarism in sociologists’ publications.
Andrzej: Yes, it’s an interesting social phenomenon worth investigating.
In Polish:
Hili: Zauważam coraz więcej plagiatów w publikacjach socjologów.
Ja: Tak, to ciekawe zjawisko społeczne, warte zbadania.
From Bryan, who adds, “I just about fell out of my chair (so to speak) when I caught this assertion in the following video clip of an interview.” The purported explanation is in the tweet below the first one, but that one’s really talking about “Islamism”, not “Islam.” Islam has started off as a religion and is still a religion.
From Malcolm, with plenty of notes adding that this is surely AI-generated, and it must be. But I’ve seen a cat-shaped cake being cut before, and it still freaks me out:
Notice for cat owners: Your cat will expect breakfast to be served as soon as the eclipse is over. Note that in London time, the eclipse started at 6:17 p.m. and ended at 8:06 p.m.
One from my feed. Note that some of the executed writers were accused of “Zionism”. Read the whole thing:
On This Day — August 12–13, 1952
Night of the Murdered Poets: Stalin massacres the greatest living Yiddish writers in a prison basement.
Thirteen leading Soviet Jewish intellectuals, including poets, novelists, and cultural figures, were taken to Moscow’s Lubyanka prison and… pic.twitter.com/FiBjzT8Vr0
Father Kolbe died after volunteering to take the place of a prisoner condemned to starve to death as a reprisal for an escape. After a period of starvation in the basement of the infamous Block 11 of Auschwitz, he was pulled out and killed with an injection of phenol in the… https://t.co/MlyTDGeY9x
A new species of “axolotl” juvenile barred tiger salamanders. The classic axolotl is a species of “mole salamander”, Ambystoma mexicanum, which is threatened in the wild.
Someone from Montana was telling me they had axolotls in Montana and it seemed odd so I finally googled it. Apparently they have alpine lakes with barred tiger salamanders that stay in a larval state and thus look like axolotls?
Here I am writing about Jews and words again, but I can’t get this issue resolved in my mind. I wrote about it before, and I still can’t find a construal of “anti-Zionism” that is not equivalent to “antisemitism”? I ask because people who throw the term “anti-Zionist” around, like Zohran Mamdani, adamantly deny that they mean “antisemite.” So that makes it okay for them to tar people as “Zionists” and deny that they mean “Jews.” Or to say that “anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism”.
Today, supporting Zionism means promoting the continued existence of a Jewish state and upholding the right of Jews to live freely in their historic homeland.
As I’ve said before, denying that this is antisemitism makes no sense, for the Jewish sovereign state is already in existence and if you don’t support Zionism then you are denying what already exists—saying, in effect, that the UN made a mistake. You are implicitly arguing that Israel should no longer exist. Yes, there are some Jews, including ultra-Orthodox ones, who don’t think Israel should exist, and you can say they’re anti-Zionist and not antisemitic, but I’d say these people are confused or addled by faith.
As for those who say “anti-Zionists” are simply those who think that Palestinians should have the vaunted “right of return”, that ship too has already sailed. For if that right were exercised as Palestinians mean it, there would be a “one-state solution” in which Jews would eventually either be killed or expelled. That is also antisemitism.
Zionism as a political movement came to an end in 1948, as Israel now exists. This is why I claim that anybody who throws around the term “Zionista” usually just means “Jews.”
Here’s what Grok said in answer to my question, “How many Jews are anti-Zionist: that is, don’t believe the state of Israel should exist?”
A small minority—typically in the low single digits to around 7% in major diaspora surveys, and near zero among Israeli Jews—with the absolute number in the low hundreds of thousands at most out of a global Jewish population of roughly 15.8 million.
Anti-Zionism here is defined (as in the query) as rejecting the idea that the State of Israel should exist, particularly as a Jewish state. Polling distinguishes this from criticism of Israeli governments/policies, emotional distance, or reluctance to use the “Zionist” label (which has become loaded for many). Self-identification as “anti-Zionist” and direct questions on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish/democratic state track closely.
Quarrel with any policy you want held by Israel (save the right to exist and defend itself), and beef all you want about Netanyahu (you can join me in that). But doing those things is not antisemitism. For sure anyone who said that Pakistanis or Iranians had no right to live in their countries beginning with “The Islamic Republic of. . . ” would be called “Islamophobes.” And I’ve never heard that.
It’s funny: I’ve never heard anyone say that those who say that neither “The Islamic Republic of Iran” not “The Islamic Republic of Pakistan” have a right to exist are not called “Islamophobes.”
I’ve read only two of Maggie O’Farrell’s ten novels, but, based on just those two I’m convinced she’s a major figure in modern fiction. I’ve already talked about her 2020 novel Hamnet, which won all kinds of prizes and was made into a superb movie in 2025. O’Farrell wrote the screenplay along with director Chloé Zhao, and Zhao nabbed a Best Director nomination and the film a Best Movie nomination. In a stunning performance, Jessie Buckley won the Best Actress Oscar; the last fifteen minutes alone would make her deserving of this award, but, please, see the whole thing. This is one of those movies as good as—but different from—the book on which it’s based, and if you haven’t seen it you are missing one of the best films of the decade. I’m glad I read the book and watched the film, but if you can deal with only one, see the movie.
It was on the basis of the Hamnet novel that my two-person book club essayed another O’Farrell book,The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, published in 2006. Click below to go to the publisher’s page:
It’s a novel about family—albeit a convoluted and dysfunctional one—and is also a bit of a mystery story, in that three related women’s voices are speaking during two different times: in India and Edinburgh in the 1930s and at the present time in Edinburgh. The mystery consists in the reader and the protagonist figuring out what happened to these women, as each had a checkered background. The novel involves are two Scottish sisters, Esme (Euphemia) and Kitty, born in India but who moved to Scotland when their baby brother died. Solving what happened next falls to their descendant Iris, living now, who has her own convoluted life.
To avoid big-time spoilers, I’ll just note that for reasons that will be revealed, Esme was confined in a mental hospital for sixty years, all the while being perfectly sane. During this time her sister Kitty raised a family, but the nature of that family involves a spoiler.
By the present time, while Esme is still confined in a “facility,” Kitty has developed Alzheimer’s and her words appear as a series of incomplete but comprehensible thoughts, thoughts that are unknown to Iris, who has decided to remove Eseme from her asylum and let her live in her home. Iris becomes obsessed with figuring out the family history despite Esme’s laconic nature and Kitty’s Alzheimer’s.
Bit by bit the pieces of the puzzle fall into place as you read, as the book comes to a bumpy and unexpected ending. That’s all I’ll say except that, as in Hamnet, O’Farrell has an eye for detail and is a superb writer.
It’s a short book (243 pp. in my edition), and I should have heard of it but hadn’t. I’m calling it to your attention because it seems relatively unknown despite its excellence. And of course I’m going to look into O’Farrell’s other books, the first of which, After You’d Gone, also received much acclaim.
And when I call books to your notice I hope you’ll let us know what you’ve read lately, especially the good stuff.
Please send in wildlife ph0tos if you have some good ones. This feature has become pretty intermittent.
Today’s wildlife photos come from reader Jan Malik, who sent bird photos taken in Poland. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
In July, I had an opportunity to hike in the northern, Polish section of the Tatra Mountains. This part of this alpine range is probably less biodiverse than the substantially larger Slovak part, where a large portion of the slopes are south-facing. Still, I saw a few animals—both vertebrates and invertebrates—that were new to me.
A sample of the habitat at the entrance to a valley in the limestone Western Tatras:
Just as I stopped by this creek to eat my breakfast on the go, a bird appeared, forcing me to postpone consumption and switch to photography mode. The bird was a male Grey wagtail (Motacilla cinerea), which in its breeding plumage is actually bright yellow. He was hopping lively on the cliff, collecting arthropods to feed his chicks. The white, woolly-looking flower by the wagtail is the emblematic Edelweiss (Leontopodium nivale), a hallmark of limestone alpine mountains (it grows only on basic substrates). The flower’s woolly appearance may be an adaptation to low temperatures and intense ultraviolet radiation:
The wagtail disappeared for a moment and then returned, having fed his chicks. Its flight is highly undulated, and when resting it, well, wags its tail vigorously:
Another successful hunting run finished, and the wagtail is ready to return to his nest with a beak full of insects. Judging by their opaque wings and long antennae, these are caddisflies (order Trichoptera):
The wagtail left, and just as I was going to resume my hike, another bird landed on the same spot—a good lookout in the middle of the creek. This was a White-throated dipper (Cinclus cinclus), a close relative of our American dipper, which I had once searched for in vain in the American Southwest (Zion National Park and the like). This genus is unique among songbirds in that it is mostly aquatic when feeding. It nests close to the banks of fast-flowing streams and forages by wading and diving underwater in search of arthropods, sometimes using its wings for underwater propulsion if the current gets too strong. I think in this picture the bird holds a caddisfly larva (stripped of its protective debris case) and possibly a couple of adult caddisflies.
Dipper females and males are monomorphic, and both sexes sport a white bib, which their American cousins lack:
Apart from a nearly identical body structure, what they have in common with our American dipper (or, as some say, the water ouzel) is a white upper eyelid, visible when the bird blinks. Unlike wagtails, they fly in a dead straight line, patrolling and defending their stretches of waterways:
For the next 20 minutes I watched the bird collect food above and under water, but capturing its underwater feeding was harder than I thought, with the bird being restless and the autofocus being thrown off by the turbulent water. They usually start nesting as soon as the water is free of ice, which in this location can be mid-April. If they are still nesting in July, it may mean they are raising a second brood:
They are called “dippers” because of their habit of bowing and bobbing. While they are songbirds, I didn’t hear any calls, but I read they do call and sing, like any songbirds. It is reasonable to assume that, since they live in the fairly noisy environments of fast mountain creeks, they communicate visually via displays like wing-quivering. It was a real treat to see these birds in action, especially in the crowded environment of Tatra National Park, which sees more than 5 million visitors annually. To put it in perspective, that is more visitors, in a much smaller area, than Yellowstone National Park receives. During my 30-minute impromptu birding session, an incessant stream of people kept streaming into the valley right behind my back, but the birds were completely habituated to the human presence:
After ascending for a while, I reached the krummholz and alpine meadow zone. A notable distinction between this and a similar zone in the Adirondacks of NY or the White Mountains of NH was the presence of a specialized high-altitude dwarf mountain pine (Pinus mugo), forming dense thickets. In the US, these zones feature dwarf, bonsai-like variations of spruce and balsam fir from the boreal forest zone:
I noticed a little commotion in the dwarf pine thicket; it was a fledgling following its parent, begging to be fed:
After a while, the adult bird appeared. It was, I believe, a Black redstart female (Phoenicurus ochruros); the “black” part comes from the male’s coloration. They nest in rocky areas across Eurasia;
Comparing the Tatra Mountains to mountain ranges in the US Northeast, it is surprising that, even though the Tatras are about 5 degrees closer to the North Pole and higher (I believe the last three pictures were taken almost at 6,000 feet altitude), they are more biodiverse.
Welcome to Thursday, August 13, 2026 and National Filet Mignon Day. From Wikipedia, with a picture of where this cut of steak comes from:
Filet mignon (/ˌfiːleɪˈmiːnjɒ̃/;[1]French:[filɛmiɲɔ̃]; lit. ‘delicate, fine, or cute fillet‘) in North America, especially the United States refers solely to a cut of beef taken from the smaller end of a tenderloin, or psoas major of a cow. In France, filet mignon usually refers to cuts of pork tenderloin or veal tenderloin.
The tenderloin runs along both sides of the spine, and is usually butchered as two long snake-shaped cuts of meat. The tenderloin is sometimes sold whole. Filet mignon is usually presented as a round cut taken from the thinner end of a piece of tenderloin. It is often the most tender and lean cut. Filet mignon often has a milder flavour than other cuts of meat and as such is often garnished with a sauce or wrapped with bacon.
Due to the small amount of filet mignon able to be butchered from each animal, it is generally considered one of the most expensive cuts of beef.
Butchers can get from 10 to 16 filets per cow. I avoid this cut because while it’s tender, it doesn’t have the beefy flavor of, say, ribeye or other cuts, and it lacks marbling with fat, which is why, as they say, it’s often served wrapped with bacom. If you prize flavor over tenderness, as a good eater should, you’ll avoid this expensive steak.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 13 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Amit Segal discusses the growing amity towards Israel of South America in an It’s Noon in Israel article called “¡Viva Israel, Carajo!”
It’s Wednesday, August 12, and Israel may never have had a better month diplomatically. Back in June, if Vice President JD Vance is to be believed, Israel had a single ally left in the world. Yet in the space of a few weeks it seems to have found several new ones, above all in South America.
Few leaders, Donald Trump included, can out-philosemite Argentina’s Javier Milei, the self-declared “most Zionist president in the world”—he has given even Isaac Herzog a run for his money. But Milei now has competition on his own continent.
Over the past month, Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has moved to reverse wholesale the hostile posture of his predecessor, the leftist Gustavo Petro, who had severed ties with Israel and halted Israeli arms imports over the war in Gaza. In July and August 2026, Bogotá ordered the full restoration of diplomatic relations, pledged to move Colombia’s embassy to Jerusalem, and withdrew from South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Then, on Monday, Colombia became only the second country in the world, after the United States, to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
Venezuela, improbably, has moved in the same direction. On Tuesday, the two countries announced they had agreed to renew consular relations, 17 years after severing all diplomatic ties in 2009 under Hugo Chávez. The thaw followed Israel’s dispatch of an aid delegation—led by the Foreign Ministry and the IDF’s Home Front Command—after the double earthquake that killed thousands in Venezuela in late June.
Vance’s advice about not alienating Israel’s most important ally still holds. His claim that it was Israel’s only one is aging rather less well. As Milei would put it: ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! (“Long live freedom, goddamnit!”)
Well, that’s three countries only, but I’m not sure that Israel has no allies other than the United States. I’m told that Brazil remains steadfastly anti-Israel because it’s a “leftist country with a socialist mentality.”
*I was amazed that Dick Cheney lived to be 85 given his history of severe heart problems, but he soldiered on until death. Yesterday his cardiologist uses Cheney’s example to question Trump’s own health in a NYT op-ed. Trump, says, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, “has not looked well” (article archived here).
In June, President Trump celebrated his 80th birthday, and at the end of this term he will be the oldest person ever to serve as this nation’s leader. After Mr. Trump’s medical evaluation in May, Dr. Sean Barbabella, the physician to the president, wrote that Mr. Trump “remains in excellent health” and that his “demanding daily schedule, including multiple high-level meetings, public engagements and regular physical activity, continues to support his overall well-being.”
Despite reassurances from the White House to the contrary, at times over the past year, the president has not looked well. I am not Mr. Trump’s doctor, and have only reviewed his records that have been made public. But Mr. Trump is probably the most photographed president in American history, and a variety of physical ailments are easy to see. He’s had large bruises on both hands, swelling in his legs and episodes when it appears that he is struggling to stay awake. He’s also had advanced imaging performed for unclear reasons. The public is again left to wonder whether the nation’s leader is OK.
Despite the unparalleled power afforded to the president of the United States, there is no formal requirement for the commander in chief to certify his fitness for duty. That’s a mistake. Members of the military, Secret Service agents, commercial pilots, school bus drivers and air traffic controllers all must periodically demonstrate that they are well enough to perform their work. The current practice of reporting the results of a yearly medical examination for the president began in the Nixon administration, but it’s only a custom, not a formal obligation. And, as history has shown, it can be unreliable.
This does not mean that every detail about a president’s health must be disclosed. It’s appropriate to withhold elements of a medical history that could be exploited by an adversary. In 2007, when we replaced Mr. Cheney’s defibrillator, we didn’t share information about a new wireless feature of the device that I considered a security threat to the vice president. (We ultimately were able to get the manufacturer to disable that capacity.)
The 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows for the best solution to this problem: It permits Congress to establish a panel outside the executive branch to assess the health and fitness of the president. In April of this year, Representative Jamie Raskin introduced a bill to create a congressional commission that would do just that. Ideally, such a panel would be empowered to review data from routine presidential physical examinations, as well as assessments performed when medical concerns emerge.
Reiner gives a list of seven questions that the panel should ask Trump or his doctor; I’ll give just two:
1. Dr. Barbabella’s recent report states that the president was evaluated by 22 consultants, an extraordinary number of specialists for even the most extensive executive health evaluation. Why were so many physicians summoned, and what were their specialties?
5. In October 2025, Mr. Trump underwent advanced imaging of his heart and abdomen at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The president’s physician offered a vague description of the reason for the tests: “to identify issues early, confirm overall health and ensure he maintains long-term vitality and function.” He said the tests did not reveal any abnormalities. Was there a specific symptom or clinical event that prompted this testing?
Reiner concludes this way, and I agree:
But the United States does not have a king. In a representative democracy, the people must have confidence in the health of their leader, and in the leader’s capacity to guide the nation. We have been kept in the dark too long.
Don’t we have a right to know if our President has grievous medical ailments? Or should all his conditions be kept private—or even lied about?
*A Free Press article by Liel Leibovitz, “New York is not, a ‘Habibi City’,” discusses another viral piece published in the New Yorker, declaring that Islamist immigrants are turning New York into a city run on Muslim principles, and, this being the New Yorker, thinks that’s peachy. (You can find the New Yorker article mentioned in the story archived here.
I immigrated to the United States from the Middle East for the one and only reason anyone should ever come to America: Because I believe it, firmly and passionately, to be the greatest nation ever endowed by God with the mission of spreading liberty and light to a benighted world, and because I consider it the honor of a lifetime to partake in the solemn work of making America ever greater.
Apparently, my fellow Middle Eastern immigrants have very different feelings. In her now-viral cover story for New York magazine, journalist Zaina Arafat—who was born and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., but identifies as SWANA, an acronym that previously stood for the Solid Waste Association of North America but now apparently means Southwest Asian and North African, and represents anyone who is vaguely Middle Eastern and dislikes capitalism, America, and the Jews—kicks things into high gear by celebrating the fact that New York is now “Habibi City,” a full-on SWANA enclave.
What does the average day look like in Habibi City? Arafat is all too happy to tell you: There’s a workshop for kids at a Lebanese bookstore dedicated to Middle Eastern culture, then a fundraiser for Gaza at a “women-run Syrian supper club.” Which, Arafat concluded, made her feel “like in the blād,” which means “back home, overseas.”
. . .Arafat, whose book You Exist Too Much won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction, herself attempts an answer, embodied in the name of one of her favorite SWANA-ese publications: it’s called Bidoun, meaning “without,” which is a name “meant to evoke existing without the concreteness of space.” In other words, because SWANA is really a state of mind, we must make sure America becomes its forever home.
It’s a perfect manifestation of a specific grad school sensibility, light on logic and high on pretense and self-importance. But it also captures the real tragedy—and threat—at hand: For Habibi City to be born, New York City must die.
. . .Here’s a thought experiment:
Imagine you are a magazine editor. A writer comes to you and suggests a piece revolving around a new term, SWANA, popularized by academics to protest against alleged American imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy. The term, the writer explains, stands for South West Asia and North Africa, a very vast swath of the world that includes hundreds of millions of people and myriad cultures, nationalities, and belief systems.
Fret not, says the writer: These hundreds of millions of human beings stand as one, all sharing a singular and solid identity rooted pretty much exclusively in the belief that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Would you allow such dross? Or would you argue that coming up with a ludicrous term like SWANA and then explaining it as “a decolonial framework and a way of moving through the world” may be arousing for those privileged enough, like Arafat, to idle away their days on Columbia University’s campus but of no real value to anyone seeking to make sense of the real world?
. . . Sadly, New York magazine chose door number one. It printed all of Arafat’s ramblings, including referring to October 7, 2023, as an attack on Palestinians alone and describing September 11, 2001, as the day Americans, for no particular reason whatsoever and without any provocation, decided to turn nastily suspicious of Middle Easterners. It ran a side column with the perfectly Third World-y title “When Eating Out Is Political” that referred to the Jewish state as “the land mass currently called Israel.” In other words, the magazine didn’t just report on the SWANA-fication of New York: It adopted its rhythms, its feverish and conspiratorial thinking, its senseless and illogical formulations, and its rank biases.
. . . It’s (still) a free country, and anyone, of course, is welcome to build power as they please. But in her helpful piece, Arafat gave us all the best glimpse yet into what this power is being used to achieve. Anyone content with magazines laundering logic and language to fit the prevalent ideology and with politicos using their office to advance the interests of one tribe over the other is welcome to retreat to their favorite women-run Syrian supper club. Everyone else should fight like hell to make sure New York never becomes Habibi City.
It’s curious that although the New Yorker is anti-DSA (or at least that what’s edotpr David Remnik’s interview with the co-chair of the DSA implies), it’s also anti-Israel: conflicting sentiments. But I stopped subscribing to The New Yorker because it got pretty much ideologically captured. And in this Free Press piece, they should have left out Leibovits’s statement, “If all you care about is your native culture, if you wish to fill every moment of your day with swell SWANA sensations, why not, ya know, go back to SWANA?” That smacks a bit of the love-it-or-leave it mentality, though I see what he’s getting at.
*Over on his Substack site, philosopher Maarten Boudry decries the “AI slop” infecting writing in a piece called “Show us the prompts.” He is surprised to find so much on the Internet that’s written with AI (he uses the Pangram detector, which I might subscribe to).
The problem of AI slop in writing has been bothering me for a while. As you know many of the earlier cases centered around hallucinated quotes, which are pretty much the only way to catch an author with their pants down, as there is simply no innocent explanation. But as LLMs have improved and trained through human feedback, their tendency to hallucinate sources and quotes has diminished (though not completely disappeared). So now we’re arriving at the stage when there are no longer any smoking guns – just probabilistic estimates from Pangram.
If AI writing becomes so good that it is no longer distinguishable from human writing (except by being far superior to it), should we care? Will we all be reading AI slop soon, with human writing becoming a niche artisanal craft for anti-AI snobs? That’s the question my essay is asking. My main inspiration was this recent piece by Tyler Cowen in The Free Press, which predicts that before long hardly anyone will care whether or not a text was written by a human. Likewise, Richard Hananiawrote that it doesn’t really matter if the author of a piece is human or not. With the possible exception of memoirs, which are inherently personal, he does not care one way or the other. I beg to differ.
Well, I care, too; I want to know that somebody whose name is on an article put in the thought and the work. I don’t even like AI correcting prose, though it’s not as bad (I see putting your name on something that was written by a bot as unethical). Here’s an article that several people sent both Maarten and I. I didn’t post it because it seemed too glib, and Maarten detected real signs of AI. Here you go:
Or take this viral piece by Israeli writer Nachum Kaplan (originally here) [the title is “I went to an anti-Israel dinner party. It did not go as planned.”]. It is also from “my” political side, lampooning the idiocy of pro-Palestinian discourse, so if anything it panders to my own views and tastes.
Multiple people sent it to me as a brilliant takedown of pro-Palestinian lunacy. But although I find the piece highly entertaining and incisive, I’ve always thought it’s a bit lame to recount an unverifiable conversation you supposedly had with other people, in which you portray your interlocutors as maximally moronic and yourself as maximally savvy and eloquent, delivering one witty riposte after another. In Yiddish, as it happens, they call this trepverter: the witty comeback you only think of when you’re already halfway down the stairs.
I didn’t share the piece online, as I found it a bit too smug, but I didn’t expect that it was written by AI. But you’re not fooling Pangram, which diagnoses it as 100% AI-generated. (But surely here there must have been extensive prompting describing the general outline of the dinner conversation, and some jokes and comebacks? Surely AI is not becoming that good?)
I see AI writing all over Facebook, and when I do I comment “This is AI writing and I’m unsubscribing.” Does that make me a bad person?
British driver Andy Green reached 406.320 mph (653.908 kph) in a car powered by two hydrogen internal combustion engines with a combined 1,600 horsepower, setting the record for that vehicle category, according to the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, the international governing body of motor sports.
The 64-year-old retired Royal Air Force pilot rocketed across the crystalline crust at Utah’s famous Bonneville Salt Flats in a 32-foot (9.75-meter) car engineered by British construction equipment manufacturer JCB. The engines, adapted from those used in the company’s heavy machinery, mix pressurized hydrogen gas with air and ignite it to create bursts of power.
But that isn’t the overall record.
. . .To be clear, Tuesday’s feat didn’t come close to approaching the overall land-speed record, which Green set with jet power in 1997. That year, he climbed into the Thrust SSC, a black needle sandwiched between two cartoonishly large jet engines, and hit 763.035 mph (1,227.985 kph), breaking the sound barrier and achieving a feat no one has come close to matching. His runs in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert produced sonic booms that shook the nearby town of Gerlach.
In 2006, Green also set the land-speed record for a diesel-powered car — 350.092 mph (563.4 kph) — at the Bonneville Salt Flats. He returned there Tuesday with the goal of beating that mark using hydrogen power, which he has called the “fuel of the future.”
Here’s the latest record and the car in a video:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s notion of reality is undercut:
Hili: Are you sure reality still exists? Andrzej: Yes, but more and more often, it’s artificial.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy jesteś pewien, że rzeczywistość jeszcze istnieje?
Ja: Tak, ale coraz częściej jest sztuczna.
From Masih, another Iranian woman likely to be executed for protesting:
Zeinab went into the street to protest. To demand freedom. For that, the authority charged her with “Moharebeh”, which means; enmity against God, means execution.
Speaking of fabulists, one from Michael Shermer via Steve Pinker:
My favorite example in the genre of fabulists is Nick Clark, the cyclist who was exposed by local riders for his exaggerated Strava KOM (King of the Mountain) times. For years he said he raced professionally in Europe, that he was also a military soldier/weapons instructor, a…
From Luana, a double standard for Muslims in Massachusetts (they are the beneficiaries):
Have you ever heard about people from Vietnam, Armenia, or Russia asking for such preferential treatment? No Seventh-Day Adventist Commission? No Shintoism Commission? No Hasidic Jewish Commission? Muslims are special. They deserve unique accommodations in America because… https://t.co/bSIh9SSRi6
From Malcolm. It’s fake, of course, but I think it’s funny:
Have you ever heard about people from Vietnam, Armenia, or Russia asking for such preferential treatment? No Seventh-Day Adventist Commission? No Shintoism Commission? No Hasidic Jewish Commission? Muslims are special. They deserve unique accommodations in America because… https://t.co/bSIh9SSRi6
Two from my freed: shameless groveling to Jason Arday by a Cambridge prof:
Diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of 3, Jason Arday learnt to read & write at 18. On Monday he’ll start work as @Cambridge_Uni’s youngest black Professor. It was a real privilege to help tell his story @BBCNewspic.twitter.com/8sCJnL26fb
. . . and a follow-up tweet; you can read the article about the fawning professor here. I’m afraid that Dr. Cremin, the head of Arday’s department, will never live this down.
1./ 🧵My latest article in @spikedonline is about Prof Hilary Cremin. The Cambridge academic who gushed over Jason Arday likes to berate people for their alleged racism. Yet her own intellectual inspiration is a notorious antisemite. Yes, really. 👉https://t.co/tjQWt3iu3E
One from Doctor Cobb, who says this is “good news” but it’s also sad: the Great Synagogue of Vilna was destroyed by the Nazis in 1941 and the Russians in 1957. Note that this is a video. The bimah is the “pulpit”: the platform from which the Torah is read.
Archaeologists have uncovered the central dais, or bimah, of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, Lithuania.The synagogue was ransacked by the Nazis in 1941 and then destroyed under the Soviet regime in 1957. http://www.timesofisrael.com/buried-for-7…
Now that colleges have morphed from institutions of higher learning to buy-a-diploma mills, colleges are increasingly catering to students’ desires. At many schools now, more than half the students get special accommodations during exams, like having rooms to themselves or extra time. (This is okay for some students, but more than half?).
At any rate, the University of Michigan has joined the ranks of schools that don’t show students their grades awarded during their first semester. (As you’ll see, they do get grades, but they’re secret and used in limited ways).
Click below to read the WSJ article on the deep-sixing of grades, or go here to read an archived version:
An excerpt (indented; my own comments are flush left):
The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.
Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.
The program, set to start in fall 2027, applies to students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which enrolls about half of Michigan’s roughly 8,000 first-year students.
A Michigan spokesman declined to comment about how the university reached the decision to enact the pilot. Although grades won’t be recorded on student transcripts or affect grade-point averages, professors will still assign them internally to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.
I’m wondering whether student anxiety will really abate because of this. What happens during the second semester, if you know you passed but don’t know where you stand? If you barely passed during your first semester and get a “pass”, you might want to work harder, but you won’t know where you stood initially in competition with your classmates. Also, the grades do count for scholarship and awards, so they aren’t irrelevant. Will your inability to know your “internal” grades possibly increase anxiety?
And why does the risk of mental problems decrease after the first semester? After all, you’re going to get real, “external” grades from then on.
This tactic is not unique:
Schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have implemented similar “grade-covering” programs in past years.
The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes. University of California math and science professors have urged UC regents to reinstate entrance exams because so many freshmen were unprepared.
Of course poor preparedness is the fault of secondary schools like high schools, but entrance exams can help. The SATs or equivalent tests are even better, and, in combination with high-school grades, are the best predictor of how well a student does in college—and later life.
But in a perverse move designed to coddle students (they have numerous excuses), many schools no longer require such tests for admission (the University of Chicago makes them optional), or prohibits you from submitting scores at all. This kind of coddling is also instantiated in grade inflation. Harvard has taken ineffectual steps to remedy this, but at least they require SATs or ACTs for admission. Michigan doesn’t.
In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
Kenneth Lowande, a former Michigan political science professor who left for Rice University, said he didn’t think the new policy would make much of a difference because grade inflation had made grades largely irrelevant. Michigan no longer mandates the SAT or ACT for undergraduate admissions.
“Grades have lost their value as an indication of quality or excellence,” Lowande said.
That’s true if you gauge quality relative to others. If everyone is excellent, of course, grades do indicate quality, but that’s not the case. What we have is an Alice In Wonderland “All Must Have Prizes” mentality based on coddling. And the students love it:
Michigan students lauded the new policy. Student body president Summit Louth said he had spoken to around 50 classmates and they were either happy or jealous the policy didn’t exist when they were freshmen. Poor mental health is closely tied to academic stress and anxiety among students, Louth said.
Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.
How does Louth know that?
Derek Peterson, a history professor and former chair of the faculty government, said he believes the move is generally beneficial because it will give students a chance to explore subjects more freely.
If that’s the idea, why give grades at all? Why not give written evaluations that can be put in students’ transcripts? That might be difficult for large courses, but several schools, according to Grok, have completely dispensed with letter grades:
Schools That Dispense with (or Heavily Minimize) Traditional Grades
. . . . several colleges (mostly small liberal arts institutions) fully or largely replace letter grades with narrative evaluations (detailed written assessments of a student’s performance, strengths, weaknesses, and growth). Examples include:
Hampshire College — Narrative evaluations only; no letter grades or traditional majors.
The Evergreen State College — Narrative evaluations; no letter grades or GPAs.
Alverno College — Ability-based assessment with detailed feedback; no traditional letter grades.
New College of Florida — Narrative evaluations / performance reviews.
Antioch College / Antioch University — Narrative evaluations (sometimes alongside or instead of grades).
Sarah Lawrence College — Strong emphasis on narrative evaluations (letter grades are recorded but secondary).
St. John’s College — Seminar-based “Don Rag” discussions; letter grades are recorded but available only by request.
Narrative evaluations would seem to be better anyway for small courses, but in light of the difficulty of grad schools or employers reading a bunch of narratives, I still favor traditional grades, but with caps like Harvard’s. If that policy is made public, students can’t beef about it when they arrive.
There comes a time in life when the free rides stop. Employers don’t dispense with evaluation of employees early in their tenure on the grounds of mental health. And college, where you can seek counseling if you’re upset or distressed, is the place for it to start—if you haven’t already gotten grades in high school! This may sound curmudgeonly, but part of the art of living is to realize that you are not the best at everything, and to either accept that or try to better yourself. After all, grades are not the totality of existence.
Today’s Jesus and Mo strip is a “resurrection from 2006,” called “faith2”. It’s a clever one. But I can’t resist adding my own view on the different construals of “faith”, a piece called “No Faith in Science,” published in Slate in 2013 (free access at an archived site). The barmaid is right.
Oh, and the artist reminds us to support him/her, which you can do for only a dollar or a few dollars:
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Books are still available – The latest J&M collection of J&M strips, which has a foreword by Jerry Coyne, is available here
