Welcome to Thursday, April 16, 2026 and Save the Elephant Day.  Here’s a group of elephants (don’t know the formal term) digging for water in a lake bed in Kruger National Park (photographed in August of 2024). The cute thing was that the mother would dig a hole and then let the babies drink first.

It’s also Day of the Mushroom, International Pizza Cake Day (yes, it’s a cake that looks like a pizza), National Ask An Atheist Day (the answer is “no”), National Eggs Benedict Day,  National Librarian Day, and National Orchid Day.

The bunnies (Eastern Cottontails) are out! On my way to work I passed by two furry lumps standing like statues only about ten feet away from me. They were bunnies! I silently moved away from them to allow them to forage.  An iPhone photo:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*At It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal describes the talks between Lebanon (not Hezbollah) and Israel as a “resounding success”:

The highest-level direct talks between Israel and Lebanon in history have concluded with neither side getting what they wanted. Regardless, the summit was a resounding success.

Lebanon entered the negotiations hoping to achieve an immediate ceasefire, reportedly threatening to walk away from future talks unless this condition was met. Israel, meanwhile, came to the table demanding a concrete commitment and a clear timeline for the disarmament of Hezbollah north of the Litani River. While neither delegation walked away with their demands fulfilled, further talks are already confirmed. As U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted after the meetings, this will take time; the talks “are a process, not an event.”

In statecraft, as in life, you cannot expect others to treat you with respect if you do not first respect yourself. For the first time in decades, Lebanon’s government is asserting itself as a sovereign entity, and for the first time in decades, Washington is officially recognizing it as such. Prior to yesterday, whenever Washington needed something done in Beirut, it dialed Damascus, Tehran, Doha or Riyadh.

The question is whether the government is actually in charge.

The mere fact that the Lebanese government chose to engage in the negotiations is a good sign. Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem explicitly warned against the summit, labeling it “futile” and declaring it a “stab in the back to the resistance.” Had Hassan Nasrallah issued a similar warning in 2021, his word would have been an insurmountable veto. But two years of relentless Israeli military pressure, coupled with the succession of the significantly less imposing Qassem, has considerably defanged the organization.

Still, breaking the psychological hold Hezbollah maintains over the country requires the Lebanese government to treat it like the paper tiger it has become, rather than the actual tiger it once was.

Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter addressed the media following the meeting, claiming that the officials on both sides discovered they are actually on the “same side of the equation” and are “united in liberating Lebanon.” Most intriguingly, Leiter suggested that once the security situation is resolved, the two nations “can embark on a harmonious relationship” akin to the Abraham Accords countries.

The penultimate paragraph is the important one.  The Lebanese government is largely under the sway of Hezbollah, but the Lebanese people are sick of the terrorist organization.  Still, don’t see a ceasefire or disarming of Hezbollah, any more than I see a disarming of Hamas. But it’s a start.

*Michael B. Horn at the Free Press tells us “Your local college is running out of cash.” This is true even at the University of Chicago, where strict budgetary restrictions have been imposed.

It’s no secret that higher education is reeling. The litany of challenges is long. Among them: struggles over free speech, antisemitism, and ideological uniformity; President Donald Trump’s many attacks on the sector;, a replicability and peer review crisis in research, and declining public confidence in colleges.

Then there’s also student debt, a declining percentage of high school graduates enrolling in college, low graduation rates, increasing questions around a college education’s return on investment, and a free-for-all in college athletics.

I could go on. But there’s one piece of the puzzle that’s received relatively less attention, however: the fiscal health of many colleges themselves. To put it simply, a tremendous number of colleges and universities are on the fast path to insolvency, which stands to quickly transform not only America’s higher-education landscape but also the many communities built around these institutions.

In 2013, the late Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen and I wrote a piece in The New York Times predicting that within 15 years, 25 percent of colleges would close or merge. The claim rested on patterns observed in other industries where rising expenditures, declining demand, and structural change eventually forced institutions to consolidate or declare bankruptcy and restructure.

Since then, over 15 percent of the 4,724 degree-granting colleges or universities that existed at the time we made the prediction have shut their doors.

Yet college leaders seem not to grasp the scale of the problem and, in public, dismiss the danger to their institutions. Yes, enrollments might soften. Yes, some institutions might struggle. But higher education is resilient. We’ve heard rumors of insolvency before, they would say as they dismissed our claims.

But the math is about to get a lot worse for many schools.

The number of traditional college-age students in the United States is projected to decline for at least the next two decades as the smaller birth cohorts following the Great Recession move through the education pipeline. For an industry built around steady enrollment growth, that demographic shift alone guarantees increasing financial pressure.

But demographics alone won’t determine which institutions survive. The more immediate threat is simpler: cash.

And a recent study says this:

. . . Even assuming enrollments remain steady—an optimistic scenario given the coming demographic decline—more than one-third of the colleges studied have less than five years before becoming fiscally insolvent without significant changes. That means they will have less money coming in annually than they are spending, and will need to start drawing down their unrestricted endowments, or borrowing—if they can—to keep operating. On average, those schools have less than a year before their financial position falls into that territory.

. . .In most industries, leaders would immediately recognize this situation as a liquidity crisis. In higher education, it is often treated as a temporary dip that strategic plans or enrollment initiatives will eventually solve.

That optimism is difficult to reconcile with demographic reality.

The “elite” colleges will fix the problem by belt-tightening, but most schools are not “elite”. Horn offers a number of solutions, including deep-sixing under-enrolled majors or even merging colleges with other colleges. Our own school is going the former route, plus ratcheting back on hiring.  No matter what:  we are going to see a revolution in higher education, including the inimical effects of AI on all subjects, especially the humanities.

*I’ve always found Bret Stephens’s take on recent wars, be they in Gaza or Iran, quite sensible. His latest NYT column tells us “How Trump can wrap up the war” (column archived here). Stephens offers four suggestions. Excerpts:

First, Trump should put Iran’s regime to a fundamental choice: It can have an economy. Or the regime can attempt to have a nuclear program while trying to control the Strait of Hormuz. But it can’t have both.

“Iran’s central bank has warned President Masoud Pezeshkian that rebuilding the country’s war-damaged economy could take more than a decade,” reports Iran International, an Iranian opposition news site based in London. The bank anticipates up to two million additional people left jobless by the war, along with inflation as high as 180 percent. An inflation rate of over 40 percent was what sparked January’s mass protests. As for the effects of the blockade, the site reports, it would wipe out “an estimated $435 million in daily economic activity,” and force “oil field shutdowns within weeks.”

. . .Second, Trump must bear in mind what precipitated the current crisis with Iran — not its nuclear programs, but the murder ofthousands of Iranian protesters in January. What Iran’s leaders fear more than economic collapse is the wrath of their own people.

Administration policy should be geared to exploit that wrath. That begins by breaking the information blockade the regime has sought to impose through an internet blackout. Fully restoring funding to Radio Farda, the Persian-language service of Radio Free Europe that the Trump administration slashed last year during the tenure of the incompetent Kari Lake would be one place to start. Flooding Iran with additional Starlink terminals — too many for the regime to stop — would be the next. What would not help, by contrast, is to target civilian infrastructure, particularly power plants, whose destruction could only bring misery to ordinary Iranians.

The most important step Trump could take would be to warn the regime publicly — and in a way that gets communicated to Iran’s people — that it will intervene militarily if it again attempts a bloody crackdown on public protests. The United States cannot bring about regime change in Iran. But it can do what it can to tilt the scales in favor of the millions of disaffected Iranians who can.

This is my own main goal of the war: freeing the Iranian people, who want to be modern, from the oppressive theocracy. Two more:

Third, if the regime wants to link the current cease-fire with an end to Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon, then it must itself desist from arming and financing the terrorist group.

The principle is simple: Israel will get out of Lebanon the moment Iran gets out of Lebanon. Failing that, the United States should give Israel a green light to continue degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities until it can no longer initiate wars against Israel, as the group did in 2006, 2023 and again this year. If other states, particularly France as Lebanon’s former colonial power, object to this, they can always volunteer to send their own troops to enforce the U.N. Security Council resolution that Hezbollah has been violating for nearly 20 years.

There may already be French troops among the thousands of UN troops supposedly enforcing the resolution. But they’re doing bupkes. Finally,

Finally, Trump can offer the regime a grand bargain: what I’ve long called “normalization for normalization.”

Iran could get an end to both war and blockade, full relief from international sanctions, the resumption of diplomatic and commercial relations with the United States and every other benefit that Tehran used to enjoy before the Islamic revolution of 1979. In return, all that would be asked of Iran is to behave like a normal country: no efforts to support armed militias throughout the region, or harbor Qaeda leaders, or send hit squads to kill or kidnap enemies abroad, or declare “death to Israel” and “death to America” as foundational principles of the regime while trying to build nuclear weapons.

Does any of that sound outrageous? Of course not. The outrage is that the regime’s current leaders would almost certainly dismiss the proposal out of hand because ideological militancy, rather than fidelity to the interests of the Iranian people, is what has defined them for the past 47 years.

Aye: there’s the rub. We are dealing with a hard-line Islamic theocracy, and only regime change can bring about Stephens’s goals. As usual these days, I see no solution, though these suggestions are good. But they require the administration to stick to goals other than its own popularity.

*At his Substack site Reality’s Last Stand,” Colin Wright tells us that “The war on biology is far from over.” The war, of course, involves pushback against the (true) binary nature of sex in animals and plants. The article is free, but subscribe if you have the dosh.

The war against biology has not slowed down. Despite the chatter on X that woke ideology is dead or at least in retreat, a brief internet search reveals that activists are still flooding the zone with sex pseudoscience.

Just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen several examples. Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes published a piece in Science Politics arguing that government efforts to define sex as a biological binary are based on “falsehoods and erroneous assertions.” IFLScience ran an article claiming there is “no clean definition” of biological sex. The Trans Advocacy & Complaints Collective published a piece insisting that “sex does not fit neatly in boxes.” And now a peer-reviewed paper in BioScience claims that teaching students what the authors call “the diversity of biological sex” makes LGBTQIA+ students feel more included and enjoy biology more.

That last example is particularly concerning, because peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals carry more weight than newspaper think pieces or activist blog posts. They influence how biology is taught, how future teachers are trained, and regularly serve as the basis for public policy.

The BioScience paper presents itself as offering a more “accurate” way to teach about biological sex, but what it actually offers is the same sex pseudoscience activists have been pushing for years. It promotes confusion about what sex is, arbitrariness in how it is defined, and a conflation of exceptions and variations with the category itself.

In reality, the concept of sex (i.e., what defines an individual as male or female) is not complicated. In species that reproduce sexually through anisogamy—that is, by fusing gametes of two different sizes—males are the sex with the biological function of producing small gametes (sperm), and females are the sex with the biological function of producing large gametes (ova). That is what the sexes are. Chromosomes, hormones, genital morphology, and secondary sex traits are all related to sex, but they are not included in the definition of sex. Rather, they are either upstream developmental determinants of sex or the downstream expression of it.

This is the central point the BioScience paper obscures.

. . .But the definitions of the sexes has long been established, with no serious alternative definition of sex in biology that is logically coherent or explanatorily useful. Scientists can debate all kinds of things about sex determination, sexual development, or unusual disorders of development, but the meaning of male and female is not some open-ended philosophical question. Male and female are grounded in reproductive function. The only people who question this or claim the definition isn’t “settled” are those trying to distort biology to fit their radical political agendas. But as I stated in a recent scholarly article, “while biology can and should inform policy, policy preferences should never be used to dictate biology.”

The paper also confuses the definition of sex with the mechanisms that determine sex.

. . . But a manufactured consensus is impossible to maintain forever, because the truth doesn’t just go away. Activists are now increasingly being forced into the kind of direct engagement they have long tried to avoid, because while fashionable sex pseudoscience can sound persuasive on its own, it quickly disintegrates on contact with informed opposition.

I’ve read all these papers myself and yes, they’re sorely misleading. But it’s ideology, Jake! Another area in which politics has pushed science aside is the efficacy and benefits of transgender hormone therapy and surgery.  I wrote about that yesterday, and even the AMA can’t decide whether to go with the science (i.e., results as of yet unclear) versus ideology (rah, rah, go transition!).

*On March 18, the Williams Record, the student newspaper of Williams College (where Luana teaches) published an op-ed (“Gender gap in economics department persists despite faculty interventions”) showing that, compared to the sex ratio of student enrollment at the school (52% female) the proportion of women majoring in economics has historically been lower (35% in 2022).  Here’s the graph they give:

The tenor of the article is that this “inequity” must be corrected as it reflects a problem that needs correction, implicitly bias against women and explicitly (and patronizingly) ignorance among females about economics. Two quotes from the op-ed:

Professor of Economics Sarah Jacobson told the Record that she has been working to even out enrollment between female and male students in the major since arriving at the College in 2010. “It is difficult to not notice that when you walk into an economics classroom, certain identities are strongly underrepresented … professors notice it, and students notice it,” she said. “While many other STEM fields have gotten more diverse on both race and gender over the last couple of decades, economics has really lagged behind.”

. . . “The idea [in the UWE study] was to try to find out why women were not concentrating or majoring in economics as much as men were,” [Nobel-winning economist Claudia] Goldin said in an interview with the Record. “We discovered it was generally that women thought that economics was mainly about finance and not about people. They didn’t understand what it was really about.”

Well, we know the problem of jumping from inequities to concluding both bias and the existence of a problem that needs to be fixed. The “progressive” view is that, given a “blank slate” view, inequities must be fixed so all groups should be represented in proportion to their existence in a population. The “people verus finance” trope might, indeed, reflect differential interests.

Luana has pushed back on that with the most obvious response for differences between sexes: they could reflect interest, not bigotry. She wrote a response to this op-ed called, “Why sex-ratios in majors might be more than just bias.”  An excerpt:

Humans are not blank slates, and many studies show that males and females have, on average, different preferences and behaviors which can affect their choice of major and profession. While some of these differences are influenced by societal norms, others have been molded by a billion years of the evolutionary process of sexual selection. True fairness in representation lies not in achieving parity, but in respecting individual preferences.

The persistent underrepresentation of women in economics (36 percent in the department’s 2023 internal report) is real. But the sources in the article try to explain this “imbalance” by lack of access, lack of incentives, or outright discrimination against women. A more evidence-based explanation should include the awareness that sex differences in educational and vocational preferences have been documented across decades of psychological research.

It is undeniable that society’s incentives and prohibitions guide what is a permissible career path for each sex. However, as someone who studies evolutionary biology, I also note that millions of years of sexual selection have produced average differences in behavior and preferences between the sexes — differences that appear early, are cross-cultural, and persist even in the most egalitarian societies today. Past sexual selection produced not only different body sizes and strengths, but also different behaviors. In mammals, females bear the far higher reproductive costs — pregnancy, lactation, and extended parental investment — while male investment in most species is limited to a brief copulation and sperm delivery. Over millions of years, this asymmetry has favored greater male risk-taking, aggression, and drive for resources — all things that could enhance chances of acquiring a mate.

. . . . Society accepts — without outrage — majors and professions that are heavily female-dominated. Today psychology and biology routinely exceed 60 to 80 percent female nationally, and fields such as nursing and several medical specialties are also overwhelmingly female. We also do not lose sleep over male-dominated professions like policing or trucking. So, why single out economics (and, similarly, political science) for criticism when in fact the overall distribution of majors must balance out to result in an overall 50 percent of women in the College?

There is danger in assuming every inequality reflects bigotry rather than choice. 

There should be a name for this fallacy. At any rate, Luana’s fighting it in the trenches.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s scrutinizing the garden:

Hili: These tulips were a different color last year.
Andrzej: We live in a world of illusions.

In Polish:

Hili: Te tulipany miały w zeszłym roku inny kolor.
Ja: Żyjemy w świecie złudzeń.

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

An AI photo made by Mark Richardson with the details (remember Sinead O’Connor tearing up the Pope’s picture on Saturday Night Live? You can see it here.):

Your AI rendition of Trump as Satan on Hili this morning was serendipitous. Plus funny!  Last night, while musing about Trump’s battle with the pope, I was reminded of the time in ’92 when Sinead O’Connor ripped a photo of pope John Paul II live on SNL. I watched as it happened, and even though I was an atheist back then and had no truck with religion, I still remember being shocked.

 So (mostly to make my wife laugh) I went to ChatGPT’s photo renderer and asked: have Trump rip a photo of the pope like Sinead O’Connor did on Saturday Night Live.

Attached is the photo. Not bad eh?  I know the context is off since O’Connor was protesting the Catholic pedophile cover-up and Trump’s protest is just narcissism run amuck, but it was worth the 30 seconds it took to render.

From CinEmma:

From Meow, Incorporated.:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Masih, who calls out Iranian government official Masoumeh Ebtekarv to Anerson Cooper:

Live on CNN, where you, @ebtekarm_ir, gave multiple interviews to promote the Islamic Republic and called out millions of Iranian women simply for removing their hijab, you once laughed at me when I exposed your hypocrisy, now, I couldn’t hold back my grin as I watched you… https://t.co/JZ82lwhCnm pic.twitter.com/vQUr3pAyRs

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 15, 2026

From Simon; a good one, referring to when Lydon B. Johnson “lost America” because Walter Cronkite said the U.S. was mired in a stalemate.  Simon titles this, “When you lose Sarah Palin.” Indeed!

pic.twitter.com/Y9TozqBRH9

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 14, 2026

From Luana; click on the screenshot to go to the most unhinged AI video ever (it can’t be embedded here):

From Malcolm; the amazing reaction time of cats:

Cats are highly skilled predators with a strong instinct to hunt, even if they are well-fed domestic cats.

They have exceptionally fast reaction times, ranging from approximately 20 to 70 ms, significantly faster than humans (around 250 ms).pic.twitter.com/Ykj7cSBhc9

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 30, 2026

One from my feed:

“Bunch of fucking amateurs” pic.twitter.com/yGGlHCXsDZ

— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) April 15, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This German Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was eleven years old. https://t.co/bgXOawP3pt

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 16, 2026

Two from Dr. Cobb, soon off to Italy and Chile. First, a 1948 cat photo (Bluesky was down this a.m., so you might not see these):

📸 Édouard Boubat. Réunion des chats1948. Paris Cats

— 2️⃣0k 😊 Paris FB (@parispaname.bsky.social) 2026-04-11T15:57:50.146Z

The problem is that RFK, Jr. is not a zoologist:

OK, there are lots of reasons to dislike RFK, but I've worked with plenty of zoologists who would consider this to be perfectly normal behaviour.

— Markus Eichhorn (@markuseichhorn.bsky.social) 2026-04-15T10:07:56.546Z

Welcome to Tuesday, April 14, 2026, and it’s International Laverbread Day. What’s that?, you ask. It turns out that it’s not bread at all but seaweed mush. From:

Laverbread . . . is a food product made from laver, an edible seaweed (littoral alga) consumed mainly in Wales as part of local traditional cuisine. The seaweed is commonly found around the west coast of Great Britain, and the coasts of Ireland, where it is known as sleabhac.^[1] It is smooth in texture and forms delicate, sheetlike thalli, often clinging to rocks. The principal variety is Porphyra umbilicalis, a red alga which tends to be a brownish colour, but boils down to a dark green pulp when prepared.

Would you like this for breakfast?

It’s also Holocaust Remembrance Day (but the International Holocaust Remembrance Day is on January 27, and there are other country-specific ones, too),

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 14 Wikipedia page. National Dolphin Day, National Grits Day (I’ll be eating them in Savannah next week), and National Pecan Day.  Remember this clip from “My Cousin Vinny” of Marisa Tomei and Joe Pesci encountering grits in an Alabama diner? Many people spurn the hominy derivative, but I love grits, though not as much as I love Marisa Tomei. She won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Mona Lisa Vito in the movie.

There’s a Google Doodle today honoring World Quantum Day.

World Quantum Day, celebrated annually on April 14th (4/14), promotes global awareness and understanding of quantum science and technology. Launched in 2021, the date honors Planck’s constant, a fundamental value in quantum mechanics. Events worldwide highlight how quantum mechanics powers, or will power, technologies like lasers, GPS, and quantum computing.

And here’s the constant:, which connects the frequency of light to its energy:

The Planck constant, or Planck’s constant, denoted by h, is a fundamental physical constant of foundational importance in quantum mechanics: a photon’s energy is equal to its frequency multiplied by the Planck constant, and a particle’s momentum is equal to the wavenumber of the associated matter wave (the reciprocal of its wavelength) multiplied by the Planck constant.

The SI units are defined such that it has the exact value h = 6.62607015×10⁻³⁴ J⋅Hz^−1[4] when the Planck constant is expressed in SI units.

Click to see where it goes:

Da Nooz:

*The latest war news by Amit Segal at It’s Noon in Israel  (bolding is theirs):

It’s Monday, April 13, and there is a cardinal rule in diplomacy: everything that happens before a deal is closed—the threats, the slammed doors, the declarations that “it’s over”—is simply negotiation by other means. Donald Trump’s recent move to blockade the Strait of Hormuz falls squarely into this category.

Even when the strait was effectively closed during earlier military operations, Iranian, Russian and Chinese tankers sailed through unimpeded. Although the U.S. navy could have easily stopped them, increasing the pressure on Iran and its key sponsors, Trump deliberately chose not to escalate. The president was walking a tightrope: maintaining heavy pressure on Tehran without triggering a catastrophic spike in global oil prices. At the time, a total blockade would have instantly removed millions of barrels of oil from global circulation. Now, however, with the countervailing force of negotiations calming the energy markets, Trump has the freedom to ratchet up the pressure.

But this raises a more fundamental question: What is he hoping to get out of this tactic?

As Trump himself has noted on numerous occasions, “Iran has never won a war, but it has never lost a negotiation.” Trump must know that the chances of the Iranians folding and voluntarily surrendering their nuclear program are essentially zero. After all, if the regime refused to concede under direct military pressure, it certainly will not concede at the negotiating table.

Just look at the terms currently being floated in Islamabad. The U.S. is reportedly offering to release a portion of frozen funds and end the war in exchange for a 20-year freeze on enrichment, the removal of enriched material, and free navigation in the Strait of Hormuz without tax payments.

Yet even this remains miles from the Iranian position. Anyone familiar with the region understands that the complete surrender of their nuclear program is the ultimate Iranian red line—one they have never and will never cross. To be fair to the Iranian perspective, latent nuclear capability is their ultimate deterrent; had they already weaponized, Rising and Roaring Lion would have remained permanently on paper.

So why is Trump going down the path of negotiations? There are two possibilities.

The first is legal: The War Powers Act requires American forces to be withdrawn within 60 days of initiating hostilities unless the operation receives formal authorization from Congress. According to recent reports, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson warned Trump that any military operation—even a strictly limited one—would not survive a vote in the Republican-controlled House. Launching a military campaign with a 60-day ticking clock is unfeasible, so entering negotiations may simply give Trump the ability to appear before Congress and declare, “We tried diplomacy; we have no other choice.”

The second possibility is pragmatic: Trump understands he lacks the domestic political support required for an extended military entanglement. By initiating talks, he is attempting to maximize his off-ramps and explore any possible avenue for freezing the conflict, no matter how slim the odds might be.

Note the importance that Iran attaches to its nuclear program. And a 20-year delay is not good enough, for it just stalls the inevitable, and Iran would probably cheat unless there is some form of verified and unannounced inspections. Meanwhile, the poor Iranians are huddled inside, waiting, like us, to see what happens.

Now, there’s a new deal on the table:

The United States and Iran have traded proposals for a suspension of Iranian nuclear activities, but remain far apart on the length of any agreement, according to Iranian and U.S. officials.

During weekend negotiations in Pakistan, the United States asked Iran for a 20-year suspension of uranium enrichment. The Iranians, in a formal response sent on Monday, said they would agree to up to five years, according to two senior Iranian officials and one U.S. official. President Trump rejected Iran’s offer, according to a U.S. official.

Still, the discussions suggested a possible path to a deal, even as the U.S. military began its blockade of Iranian ports.

Officials also said they were discussing a second round of face-to-face talks, but provided no details.

Iran, it seems, is getting the better of Trump, who is fumbling about in the dark.

*According to Trump’s stipulations, the U.S. blockade of Iran should have begun yesterday morning. And it did.

A U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz was set to take effect on Monday in an effort to raise pressure on Tehran, even as questions surrounded the plan and U.S. allies distanced themselves from it.

The blockade was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Eastern time, but the United States had not formally acknowledged that it had begun.

The announcement of the blockade, declared by President Trump on Sunday, rattled the already fragile cease-fire among the United States, Israel and Iran, which began last week. A round of high-level talks over the weekend between negotiators from Iran and the United States, including Vice President JD Vance, ended without a breakthrough.

Now Mr. Trump is seeking to prevent Iran from profiting from oil exports and force its leaders to accept American conditions for ending more than a month of war. Iranian forces have largely barred Western tankers and ships from transiting the strait, the Persian Gulf waterway through which about one fifth of the world’s oil passes. The price of oil has soared by more than 50 percent since the war began in late February.

The U.S. military said that it would block ships “entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas” starting at 10 a.m. Eastern on Monday, while allowing other vessels to transit the strait on their way to or from non-Iranian ports. Two tankers linked to Iran — one carrying naphtha, a petroleum product, and the other carrying gas oil — slipped through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday hours before the blockade went into effect.

Earlier on Monday, Iran warned of repercussions. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, an Iranian military spokesman, said Monday that if Iranian ports were threatened, “no port in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman will be safe.” The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, rose about 7 percent on Monday, to nearly $102 a barrel. U.S. markets opened slightly lower after stocks fell in Asia and Europe.

. . . . Experts on Iran questioned whether a U.S. blockade would force Iran’s leadership to accept terms that five weeks of war and the killing of many Iranian leaders had not. The Trump administration has been insisting on stopping Iranian nuclear enrichment, as well as confiscating stockpiles of enriched uranium they say could form the basis for a bomb.

European leaders, already frustrated by Mr. Trump’s military campaign in Iran, quickly distanced themselves from the blockade, despite his promise “that numerous countries are going to be helping us with this.”

See next comment:

*I can’t help it, but I read the above reportage from the NYT as slanted, emphasizing the problems with the blockade, almost like an editorial that it shouldn’t be done. Granted, Trump is flopping about like a fish out of water, but I want straight news, not slanted news. For example, here’s the Wall Street Journal’s reporting of the same event, put up at about the same time:

The U.S. has an aircraft carrier, multiple guided-missile destroyers, an amphibious assault ship and several other warships in the Middle East, according to Navy and Central Command officials. These ships have the ability to launch helicopters that support boarding operations, and some are capable of marshalling commercial vessels to specific areas to hold them in place.

That seems more like “just the news”.  Indeed, for news along I trust the WSJ more than the NYT or WaPo. And indeed, the WSJ is, as rated by the AllSides Media Bias Chart, pretty much in the center compared to the NYT:

*OMG Department. Just when you think Trump can’t get more narcissistic, he does. The WaPo reports that Trump posted an illustration on Truth Social of himself as Jesus!

President Donald Trump’s posting of a rendering that appeared to depict him as Jesus drew rare criticism from the religious right, prompting calls for him to take down the post and allegations of blasphemy.

Shortly after posting a screed against Pope Leo XIV on Sunday night as he returned to Washington from Florida, Trump shared an image that appeared to be AI-generated in the style of a painting, depicting him in a long white robe. In one hand was an orb glowing with light; Trump’s other hand rested on the forehead of a man in what resembled a hospital bed — light beaming from the man’s head as Trump appeared to pray for his healing. Patriotic symbols including an eagle, fireworks and the Statue of Liberty filled the frame.

Unlike the post criticizing Leo, whom Trump later said he didn’t like and is too “liberal,” the image evoking Jesus drew swift criticism from some evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics who have otherwise expressed near constant support for Trump’s decisions.

“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” wrote Megan Basham, a prominent conservative Protestant Christian writer and commentator. “But he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Trump’s intent in posting the image. The president last year posted an image of him as pope that appeared to be AI-generated.

And of course you want to see it. Here it is:

I tried to make an AI photo one of Trump as Satan, presiding over Hell, but ChatGPT rejected it on grounds of “violence.” Here’s a version of a Satanified Trump from Grok, which is inferior to ChatGPT at creating images:

*The UPI’s odd news site describes a new world record: the most people dressed up in dinosaur costumes at one time and place. The new record: 682!

 An Alberta university broke a Guinness World Record by gathering 682 people in dinosaur costumes at the school’s 60th anniversary celebration.

The University of Calgary, whose sports teams are known as the Dinos, gathered people dressed as various dinosaurs Saturday outside the Taylor Family Digital Library.

The gathering of 682 dinos broke the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people dressed as dinosaurs, which was previously set by 468 by the Cox Science Center and Aquarium in West Palm Beach, Fla., last year.

“The old record is extinct,” Ed McCauley, UCalgary’s president and vice-chancellor, was quoted as saying by the Calgary Herald. “This is just a great example of the University of Calgary and our Calgary community coming together to set a world record.”

A Guinness World Records adjudicator was on hand to verify the record had officially been broken.

Here’s the Instagram post.  I swear, people will do anything to set a world record.  And I have to say that some of the participants don’t look particularly dinosaurian.

Here’s a 2.5-minute video of the event:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a question about the Pope:

Hili: What does the Pope think about when he prays for peace?
Andrzej: He’s probably wondering whether everyone can see it.

In Polish:

Hili: Co papież myśli kiedy modli się o pokój?
Ja: Pewnie zastanawia się, czy wszyscy to widzą.

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

Masih describes a second war in Iran: the government against its own people:

“Speed up the executions and confiscation of property.”

This is the order issued by Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i. It is nothing less than a death sentence for the children of Iran and a green light to plunder the property of its people.

After its humiliating setbacks against… pic.twitter.com/wu3BwDX86D

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 13, 2026

Emma answers a frequent question:

I get asked this a lot.

I’m in the centre of a Venn diagram:
Developmental biology
Sports geek
Feminist

And a reminder that sports science is an applied science. It pulls in a ton of basic disciplines.

What it wasn’t doing was enough developmental biology 😉 https://t.co/j4jo9WINIi

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) April 11, 2026

From Luana, who says she had a pet rabbit as a girl in Brazil, and it was groomed this way by her cat:

Fun fact: In cat world being the one that grooms the other one means they’re the boss.
In bunny world it’s the other way round – the one being groomed is the boss.
So they both are thinking they’re the boss. pic.twitter.com/8yaQMg9y1V

— The Best (@Thebestfigen) March 23, 2026

From Malcolm;

x

From Bryan; another version of the trolley car problem:

Finally 👏👏👏 pic.twitter.com/NihKHu5Wgk

— 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚆𝙷𝙸𝚃𝙴 𝚁𝙰𝙱𝙱𝙸𝚃 (@White_Rabbit_OG) March 24, 2026

From Malcolm; if it fits, he sits:

Cats are cats, no matter the size.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/UPnhp2ApKE

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 26, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This 11-year-old pair of twins was “selected” by Josef Mengele (these twins were used in horrible experiments and then killed); their mother and sister were gassed to death as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz https://t.co/j6lR69vVYL

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 14, 2026

And two from Dr. Cobb. First, a groaner:

— Rob DenBleyker (@robdenbleyker.com) 2026-04-11T18:31:05.839358Z

I’d sure get up for this! Watch until the end:

Marg Leehane, part owner of Great Bear Lodge in Port Hardy, British Columbia, decided it was worth waking up the guests at 6 a.m. to show them two humpback whales in the bay.TT: bookofcabins

— Luca (@lucagalletti.bsky.social) 2026-04-06T22:10:39.804Z

Welcome to Monday, April 13, 2026, and National Thomas Jefferson Day, celebrating the birth of our third President in 1743,  Having produced offspring by an slave, Jefferson is no long extolled, but Bill Maher, in a post later today, has a few words on how we’re supposed to regard someone who did both good and bad things. He was probably a religious nonbeliever, but in those days you didn’t declar ethat publicly. He was also author of a secular bowdlerization of the Bible:

The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible, is one of two religious works constructed by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson compiled the manuscripts but never published them. The first, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1804, but no copies exist today. The second, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1820 by cutting and pasting, with a razor and glue, numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson’s condensed composition excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels that contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine.

Here’s the title page of the Jefferson Bible written in his own hand:

It’s also National Peach Cobbler Day and Scrabble Day, celebrating the birthday in 1899 of Alfred Butts, the game’s creator. The game was devised in the early 1930s but not trademarked until 1948:

Butts decided to create a game that utilized both chance and skill by combining elements of anagrams and crossword puzzles, a popular pastime of the 1920s. Players draw seven lettered tiles from a pool and then attempt to form words from their letters. A key to the game was Butts’s analysis of the English language. Butts studied the front page of The New York Times to calculate how frequently each letter of the alphabet was used. He then used each letter’s frequency to determine how many of each letter he would include in the game. He included only four “S” tiles so that the ability to make words plural would not make the game too easy

. . . To memorialize his importance to the invention of the game, a street sign at 35th Avenue and 81st Street in Jackson Heights is stylized using letters with their values in Scrabble as a subscript.

Here’s the sign (near where Scrabble was invented), erected mysteriously (the city denies responsibility) and then mysteriously vanishing in 2008. It’s reported to have been re-installed.

And I had a dream last night, for I slept pretty well and had it right before I woke up, so I remember the details. I was assigned to give three lectures on various topics to school students, but didn’t have time to go over my first lecture, which was on sex determination. When I sent to the classroom, unprepared, I saw that the students were about eight years old and rowdy. When I showed my first slide, which was a complex slid of how sex is determined in humans, with busy pathways and pictures of molecules, the kids weren’t interested and began shouting sentences full of obscenities about copulation.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*From It’s Noon in Israel‘s daily war report, we have an article called “The Phony Ceasefire.”

Today, we seem to be living through a “Phony Ceasefire.” Following the supposed halt in hostilities with Iran, nations including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain reported attacks on their territory, with one impact in Bahrain reported as recently as yesterday. The Strait of Hormuz, while no longer actively engulfed in flames, remains largely closed. Meanwhile, both sides quietly prepare for another round.

. . . How many mines are actually in the Strait? The number is unknown, but much like the threats issued by the IRGC during the war, the mere possibility of danger is sufficient to deter commercial passage.

Yesterday, the U.S. began its efforts to deprive Tehran of this leverage. Two U.S. destroyers tested the Strait, daring Iran to enforce its closure and laying the groundwork for the resumption of safe passage. U.S. mine removal operations have been announced to begin this week, and Qatar has already announced it will resume operations “for all types of maritime vessels and ships.”

There exists an ironic deterrent to resuming hostilities: Trump’s threat. By declaring he would devastate Iran’s energy infrastructure unless an agreement was reached, Trump armed a nuclear bomb that only negotiations can defuse. Iran fears this bomb will explode in Tehran—perhaps not returning them to the Stone Age, but utterly devastating the country. Trump, meanwhile, fears the fallout in global energy markets.

Trump has the option to disarm his threat by pivoting to a different target. But short of taking dramatic actions—like seizing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, conquering Kharg Island, or forcibly reopening the Strait, all of which demand an unpopular ground campaign—he has few options to resume the war and eventually re-enter negotiations from a position of greater power.

Regardless, unless something fundamentally shifts in Islamabad, this state of affairs—much like the Phony War—is destined for conflict.

More pessismism and more anxiety.

*The latest news as of Sunday afternoon was Trump’s announcement of a naval blockade of Iran. And this morning Iran threatened all Persian Gulf ports if the U.S. won’t let ship into or out of Iranian ports. The WSJ’s take from this morning:

From the WaPo:

After marathon overnight talks between the United States and Iran failed to clinch a deal on U.S. terms, President Donald Trump on Sunday announced the imposition of a naval blockade on Iran — a move that could derail a tenuous two-week ceasefire reached just five days ago.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump posted Sunday on Truth Social, his social media site. The president also said he had instructed the Navy to interdict all ships that have paid a toll to Iran for traversing the strait, calling Tehran’s expanded control of the waterway “EXTORTION.”

A U.S. official told The Washington Post that the U.S. and Iran failed to reach agreements on ending all uranium enrichment and retrieving highly enriched uranium; dismantling all major nuclear enrichment facilities; accepting a broader de-escalation framework involving regional allies; ending funding for terrorist proxies including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis; and fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz with no tolls for passage. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private negotiations.

In an interview Sunday morning with Fox News, Trump said he expected “numerous” countries to help with the blockade, which he compared to the U.S. operation to block the flow of oil ships out of Venezuela earlier this year, saying it would be “very similar to that but at a higher level.”

Well that ain’t gonna happen. If those countries wouldn’t help open the Strait of Hormuz, why would they want to get involved even deeper in the war by blockading Iran?

The blockade in the short term, at least, might risk worsening a war-driven global energy crisis by halting all cargo traffic through the strait, and Trump acknowledged that price of oil and gas may continue to increase in the U.S. for some time. While Iran would potentially suffer the most economically, the move may come as a blow to the rest of the world as well, especially nations in Asia, which rely heavily on oil and gas, petrochemicals, and other essentials shipped from the Persian Gulf.

The tight geography could also make naval operations in the Gulf perilous. U.S. ships could be vulnerable to attacks by small craft, as well as drones and missiles. Trump in his post said other countries would be involved in imposing the blockade but offered no specifics.

Despite failing to reach a deal, Trump expressed optimism that one would still be struck with Iran and reiterated Vice President JD Vance’s earlier remarks that the main sticking point was disagreement over Iran’s nuclear program.

“It was a good meeting yesterday, really, a good meeting, except for one problem — and it’s 95 percent,” Trump told Fox. “They want to have nuclear weapons. It’s not going to happen.”

. . . Except for one problem. But that is a huge problem, and I can’t imagine Iran giving way on its nuclear ambitions. Or they could do what they usually do—lie about them and then hide their efforts to get a bomb.  And of course the Strait of Hormuz is also a big problem, and Iran’s ace in the hole that it’s not keen to discard.

Oh, and I still think that the NYT and WaPo want the U.S. to come out badly in the Iran war, or even lose it. Their news is palpably positive for Iran and negative for the U.S., as this morning’s war headlines show (click to enlarge):

*Harvard has proposed curbing grade inflation by capping the “A”s in a course, which now, including A-s, stand at around 80% of all grades.  Grades there, like at many schools, have become a joke. The Harvard faculty voted the A curb, but delayed its approval until next month. And perhaps in the end it won’t get approved. The efficacy of the plan is that it will be implemented by all courses, so no professor need fear being singled out as a hard grader.  In an editorial-board op-ed called “Harvard’s grade inflation experiment,” the Washington Post recommends that the plan be implemented ASAP:

About two-thirds of grades at Harvard College last school year were A’s. That doesn’t count A-minuses, which were another 18 percent, meaning fewer than one in six grades were a B-plus or lower.

The Harvard Crimson says this:

Where the Class of 2015 had a median grade point average of 3.64 at graduation, the Class of 2025 clocked in at 3.83. And since the 2016-2017 academic year, the median Harvard College GPA has been an A.

Back to the WaPo:

You might have guessed grading at Ivy League schools was lenient, though not this lenient.

There’s a thoughtful solution on the table. Unfortunately, amid a student revolt last week, Harvard’s faculty postponed a vote to impose a cap on A’s. Forging ahead with the plan anyway would send a promising signal about merit and competition in American higher education.

Grade inflation — like the inflation of a currency — is a collective action problem. Professors increase the share of A’s they hand out because they know other professors are doing so and breaking from the herd would have costs. Just 35 percent of grades at Harvard were A’s in the 2012-2013 academic year, but the number climbed at a rapid clip and then surged during the covid pandemic.

. . .The result is a collapse in the informational value of grades, especially at the high end. “As GPAs accumulate against the wall of 4.0,” a Harvard faculty committee report noted earlier this year, “the small numerical differences that remain are less reflective of genuine variation in academic performance than random noise in the grading process.”

The proposal under consideration would cap the share of A’s an instructor can give to 20 percent of the class plus four students. That means that in a large introductory course, the share of students who could get A’s — 24 out of 100, for example — would be lower than in smaller courses, which tend to be more advanced. Up to eight A’s would be available in a class of 20.

The overall effect would be to cut the share of A’s in half from the last academic year, to around a third, according to the Harvard Gazette. There would be no limit on A-minuses.

. . . This effort matters because Harvard has the stature to prompt similar changes across the rest of higher education, where grade inflation has also been rampant. Princeton and Wellesley both tried to respond to grade inflation with caps but abandoned their efforts in 2014 and 2019, respectively.

A major objection from students at Harvard is that going back to grading on a curve will discourage them from participating in extracurricular activities. But the core purpose of campus life is learning, not socializing or networking, and academics have been excessively devalued at Harvard in recent decades. This would help restore the balance.

An admirable plan, for the students at Harvard have not gotten uber-smarter in the last decade—the higher grades reflect professorial inflation of marks. Another suggestion, which I think should be implemented in all schools that have transcripts, is to put the overall median grade for each course on a student’s transcript.. Even if other schools are too timorous to curb grade inflation, at least the median will give people scrutinizing transcripts an idea of how inflated the grades really are.

Grok tells me this about my school (the U of C doesn’t release the data): “Unofficial estimates from students, alumni, and forums (Reddit, College Confidential, Quora, Wall Street Oasis, etc.) consistently place the current average/median undergraduate GPA in the 3.3–3.5 range, often around 3.3.”  That is a B+, and at least we grade harder here than they do at Harvard. 

*Reader Reese called my attention to an Atlantic article called “The most beautiful moment of the Artemis II mission” about naming new craters on the far side of the Moon, including on in memoriam of an astronaut’s late wife. A short excerpt from the article:

On Monday, while flying around the moon, the crew tried to live up to this elevated standard of naming. During the livestream, Hansen said that the crew hoped that a crater on the moon’s far side might share the name of their spacecraft, Integrity. You can understand why they might have been feeling gratitude for the little vessel at that moment. In carrying them farther from Earth than any humans had ever traveled, it had bested the Santa María, the H.M.S. Endeavour, and every single one of the Apollo crew modules. For days, its thin walls had been the only thing separating their soft animal bodies from the lethal vacuum of space.

Hansen said that the second crater was especially meaningful to the crew. It was located close to the boundary line between the moon’s near and far sides, and can be seen from Earth for part of the year. Hansen proposed that it be named for a departed loved one from their “astronaut family.” To his right was Reid Wiseman, the mission’s commander, who in 2020 lost his wife, Carroll, to a five-year battle with cancer. The couple’s two daughters were teenagers at the time, and since then, he has raised them on his own. “We would like to call it Carroll,” Hansen said of the crater. His voice cracked as he spelled it out. C-A-R-R-O-L-L. The astronauts wiped away tears, and all four of them floated up to the top of the capsule, in a group hug—an image of human tenderness, beamed down to a planet that badly needed one.

The naming of Carroll starts about 1:15 in. The sound cuts out towards the end before resuming, but that’s because there are tears and hugs. It is indeed moving.

*If you’re a baseball fan, you might have heard that a game played between Los Angeles and the Seattle Mariners on April 4 has been labeled “the greatest single defensive game in major league history.” What happened was this:

On April 4, 2026, [Los Angeles outfielder Jo] Adell became the first player in MLB history to rob three home runs in one game, when he did so in a 1–0 win over the Seattle Mariners. He first robbed Cal Raleigh‘s first potential homer of the year in the first inning, before robbing Josh Naylor of a home run in the eighth. In the ninth inning, the third took place when he robbed J. P. Crawford of a home run, leaping into the right field stands in the process.The previous record, as tracked by Sports Info Solutions was two, by Nook Logan in 2005 and Jesús Sánchez in 2025.

And here’s the video:

Whether this is the greatest defensive performance in MLB history is arguable (you might say that pitching a 9-inning perfect game is a great act of defense), but that last catch, judged by the bot as caught before Adell left the field as well as a fair ball, was a doozy.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is giving advice so generalized that it’s useless:

Hili: We must be principled.
Andrzej: In what matter?
Hili: I don’t know yet.

In Polish:

Hili: Musimy być pryncypialni.
Ja: W jakiej sprawie?
Hili: Jeszcze nie wiem.

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

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From CinEmma:

From Now That’s Wild:

Masih doesn’t like Iranians associated with terrorism to have luxury lives in the U.S. when they’re not even citizens. The son of “Screaming Mary” has been arrested and is scheduled for deportation.

This is Masoumeh Ebtekar, the 1979 U.S. Embassy hostage-taker spokeswoman, once ready to “shoot American hostages in the head, here she responded to my investigation into her son’s luxury life in Los Angeles.

She laughs, nervously and claims her son is “just another student”… pic.twitter.com/BGtOyliR5Z

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 11, 2026

From Simon: Larry the Cat, like Hili, doesn’t much care for humans:

Lucky blighters https://t.co/vrS0X6iAPu

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) April 6, 2026

From Luana; the decline of Caltech and the decline of MIT. Caltech is attracting the smartest math students.

From Malcolm, making a point I’ve always emphasized:

Owls are just cats with wings pic.twitter.com/htwcM2v4jr

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) April 5, 2026

One from my feed: I’m not sure what this bird is (a starling?), but note the “Community note”: “Not shown on X: This video was taken from Instagram user inkydragon without proper attribution. https://www.instagram.com/inkydragon”. There: it’s properly attributed. Now sound up. 

Imagine being lost in the woods hearing this pic.twitter.com/1vSkcRgd4g

— Nature Videos (@naturevideos) April 11, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch girl was gassed, together with her mother and five bothers and sisters, as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T12:48:55.600Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. You can buy this fly all painted up, but it costs £800.  They also give you the printing directions if you have access to a 3D printer. Awesome!

Who does not want an AMAZING 3D printed fly???? This Drosophila was printed for me today as a prop for a talk at the @rigb.org It caused a minor commotion on the tube on my way home. And I LOVE IT – @bittelmethis.bsky.social 🤓🪰🤘

— Erica McAlister (@flygirlnhm.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T20:26:00.934Z

From Artemis II posted by astronaut Katie Mack:

Whoa 🤯The Moon, in full eclipse, with the #Artemis II Orion spacecraft. Part of the Moon and spacecraft are lit by Earthshine, and both Saturn and Mars are visible to the lower right. Incredible. Details: images.nasa.gov/details/art0…

— Katie Mack (@astrokatie.com) 2026-04-07T19:00:14.800Z

Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats: It’s Sunday, April 12, 2026, and National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day, celebrating the perfect accompaniment to a bowl of good tomato soup. Wikipedia even has a page on this sandwich, showing the combo in this photo:

It’s also, appropriately, International Day of Human Space Flight and National Licorice Day. Licorice flavoring comes from the roots of a herbaceous perennial plant, Glycyrrhiza glabra.

Here: sections of licorice root:

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

Da Nooz:

*It’s no surprise that the U.S. and Iran have failed to reach a peace deal. The negotiations lasted 21 straight hours, but came up dry.

Vice President JD Vance said on Sunday that 21 hours of peace talks between the United States and Iran had failed to produce an agreement to end the war, leaving the fate of a fragile two-week cease-fire, and whether President Trump will resume major combat operations, uncertain.

“They have chosen not to accept our terms,” Mr. Vance said at a brief news conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, although he left open the possibility that terms could still be reached.

“We leave here with a very simple proposal: a method of understanding that is our final and best offer,” he added. “We’ll see if the Iranians accept it.”

Mr. Vance did not provide specifics, but said the United States needed an “affirmative commitment” that Iran would not seek a nuclear weapon or the tools with which to achieve one.

By early Sunday, reopening the Strait of Hormuz remained one of three main sticking points, according to two Iranian officials familiar with the talks. The United States had demanded that Iran immediately reopen the strait to all maritime traffic. But Iran refused to give up its leverage over the critical choke point for oil tankers, saying it would do so only after a final peace deal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic negotiations.

The other two key issues were the fate of nearly 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium and Iran’s demand that about $27 billion in frozen revenues held abroad be released, the officials said.

Those are major sticking points!  In other news, the U.S. claimed that two American warships went into the Strait and began clearing mines. Iran, however, denied that U.S. Navy ships were in the Strait.  And Israel continued bombing Lebanon, in the south this time.  Right now, it looks like the war will go on.

Quote of the Day:

Earlier, President Trump played down the importance of the peace talks, which took place against the backdrop of a fragile cease-fire. “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me,” Trump said. “And the reason is because we’ve won.”

We did?

*Obituaries second: Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Mount Everest (in 1963), and latter the CEO of REI, died on April 7.  He was 97 years old.

Jim had an identical twin brother, Lou, who died in 2024. Lou was also a mountaineer.   Here’s a video about Whittaker’s legacy, including the famous photo of him atop Mount Everest, snapped by Gombu. You can see more photos of Whittaker on the 1963 Everest expedition on his website,  And don’t forget that two other Americans, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, also reached the summit, but took a far more adventurous (and dangerous) route.

*As a result of the war with Iran, the WSJ predicts that “the era of free seas is unravleing—and now everyone’s going to pay” (page archived here).

In just six weeks, the Iran War has shattered a system of global trade that has enriched people and nations for more than a century: the freedom to sail the open seas.

The Strait of Hormuz long functioned as an artery for the world’s maritime economy. But that 30-mile-wide waterway is now a monument to a new global disorder. As some 20,000 sailors effectively held hostage at sea digested President Trump’s cease-fire announcement this week—contingent on the complete opening of the strait—Iranian officials stressed they would determine which ships could leave and at what price.

The “Tehran toll booth” was taking effect, as the U.S. Navy watched on, an admission that, at least here and now in the world’s oil corridor, America no longer rules the waves.

Captains, owners and managers of the more than 700 vessels stuck near Iran, carrying tens of billions of dollars in cargo, were messaging one another to try to make sense of Tehran’s shifting rules. After days of drones and missiles flying overhead, Iran’s navy broadcast a radio message clarifying their position: “If any vessel tries to transit without permission, [it] will be destroyed.”

. . .The Strait of Hormuz, sailors said, risks becoming a graveyard for a trading system so integral to the modern economy that most consumers, accustomed to cheap imports and three-day shipping, take it for granted. The price stands to be shouldered by consumers across the world, in inflation, scrambled delivery schedules and the snarls of a new arrangement in which Tehran can choose which countries access Middle Eastern oil.

If Iran continues to charge tankers for safe passage, the added cost will hardwire a higher price for a gallon of gasoline, economists said. Or its Revolutionary Guard Corps could choke the flow entirely, wreaking havoc on energy markets. Either way, shipowners, their insurers and crew remain wary of sailing back into a once-bustling strait that could spring like a trap on the slightest misunderstanding between an aggrieved Iranian regime and an American president who threatened to wipe out its entire civilization in a single night.

Whatever happens next, the precedent of a toll booth in open waters will reverberate across a world order the U.S. helped build. America’s allies worry other players could try to replicate Iran’s example, like empires of the 17th century, when China’s Qing dynasty, the Ottomans and Portuguese taxed passing vessels. Trump has floated his own wish for an American toll on the Persian Gulf, and his expenditure of naval power in the Middle East has given Beijing and its navy—the world’s largest—freer rein to expand control over the South China Sea.

. . . American thinking evolved after World War I to advocate free navigation for all countries, an idea that only came into widespread practice when the U.S. Navy became the global maritime police force after World War II.

I’m trying to think of what other areas of strategically important open ocean don’t already charge for sea transit but could be ripe for tolls. The only one I can think of is the Taiwan Strait, between China and Taiwan, which is 160 km wide at its narrowest point. Taiwan wouldn’t charge to traverse it, but I bet China would.  And the Beagle Channel through which Darwin (and I) traveled, could be controlled (it’s 5 km wide at its narrowest point), but it’s free and international (Chile and Argentina), and not of strategic importance.

*To top that, Iran now says it can’t find all the mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz.  Even if the Strait gets opened in ceasefire talks, this will inhibit ships from wanting to pass through the narrows.

Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.

The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.

Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.

Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.

Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.

As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.

I can see that this would be problematic for any peace agreement!

*John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor and U.S. ambassador to the UN, asserts in the Free Press that it was “a big mistake to have the ceasefire.” This is an interview conducted by Nicholas Clairmont:

Nicholas Clairmont: I’m just going to start by asking, what is going on with Iran and with the ceasefire? Have we lost? Have we won? And what do you predict is about to happen?

John Bolton: Well, I think it was a big mistake to have the ceasefire. I don’t think the Iranians have any intention of doing any of the things that Trump wants in terms of opening the Strait of Hormuz. I think they needed relief from the pounding they’ve been taking. We’ve been through this in various iterations with them before, and it’s very unclear to me what happens next. Because having basically backed down on the effort at regime change, if there ever was one, by acknowledging now that we can kind of negotiate our way out of the Strait of Hormuz closure, Trump is conceding the key, central point of leverage that we have. And I’m just very concerned that we’re going to be faced with a choice of which concessions we’re going to make that we don’t want to make. And the regime will skate free, basically.

It’s suffered enormous damage. But, from the regime’s point of view, if they survive that amounts to victory for them. And they will rebuild the nuclear program, rebuild the ballistic missile program, rebuild the terrorism program, and reconstitute in full their capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz. So this is what you get for mowing the lawn, as the Israelis call it. You can do a lot of damage, but you don’t resolve the underlying problem.

NC: So what would it take to resolve the underlying problem? What should we be doing differently?

JB: I think there are a lot of things that should have been done differently well before the military attack. Like, for example, coordinating and assisting the opposition. If you take Trump at his word that he wasn’t going to put boots on the ground—and I don’t see he has any inclination to do that, except for limited specific missions—then the role of the opposition internally becomes critical. Because the pounding that the regime has taken on their principal instruments of state power I do think has caused fractures in the top of the regime. Certainly, we’ve caused a lot of fractures by eliminating the top 400 or 500 people. This is how regimes like this can begin to come apart.

“Trump is conceding the key, central point of leverage that we have,” said Bolton.

And I think that’s happening. I think it’s a mistake to say the regime has survived. Pieces of it have survived, but we don’t know that there’s any central authority or that its capacity has very much longer to survive if it does. The Times of London reported on Monday that the Supreme Leader is in a coma being treated for severe wounds in the ayatollah’s city of Qom. If that’s true, and it’s purportedly based on intelligence that they’ve seen, it means that the Revolutionary Guard, the ayatollahs and whomever, are ruling through some kind of council mechanism, and they haven’t picked a new Supreme Leader. We can’t say for certain, but I think they have begun the process of seeing the regime disintegrate. So every time they get a break, which is what the ceasefire is, that’s time that they can come out from wherever they’re hiding and see if they can’t get their act back together.

. . . the logic is pretty straightforward: Unless you’re willing to live under a nuclear terrorist threat, and now a threat to the global economy, if you can’t change the regime behavior, changing the regime is the only alternative.

Bolton thinks the regime is actually beginning to fall apart, but given that whoever’s in charge has the weapons, and the civilian population doesn’t want to get shot during peaceful protests, how do we get regime change? Some have suggested arming civilians, but they are not an organized force, nor can the Kurds topple the regime itself.  Bolton sees regime change this way: “I think ultimately in Iran, you’ll get a military government that can restore order after the ayatollahs are overthrown. Hopefully it’ll have the sense to provide some kind of consultative mechanism so the Iranian people can pick whatever kind of government they want to come next. And then, basically, it’s up to them.”  But he thinks that Trump simply wants out, and sent Vance to Pakistan to do that.

*Both the NYT and the Washington Post are touting (with glee, I bet), the supposed increase in Catholicism in America. But their data is misleading, as the number of pious Catholics, as well as their church attendance, is declining. It’s just that young ‘uns are converting to Catholicism more often than before. As the WaPo notes, the rate of deconversion far outstripping conversions. From the NYT:

People are joining the Roman Catholic Church in surprising numbers.

This Easter the Archdiocese of Detroit will receive 1,428 new Catholics into the church, its highest number in 21 years. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston will have its most in 15 years. In the Diocese of Des Moines, the count is jumping 51 percent from last year, from 265 people to 400.

The first year after the election of Pope Leo XIV, the first pontiff from the United States, many Catholic churches across America are welcoming their highest numbers of new Catholics in recent years. The newcomers are set to officially be received into the church during the Easter Vigil Mass, the night before Easter Sunday on April 5.

Bishops are buzzing about the surge, and confounded by what is behind it.

“Of course we think the Holy Spirit is,” Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington said. “But we are kind of stymied.”

From the WaPo:

In many places, the converts are disproportionately young. These reports have encouraged talk of a religious revival in Generation Z and generated controversy on social media. Discussion has centered around the sudden prominence of a few “hot” churches, such as St. Joseph’s in New York’s West Village and St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Nolita. At these spots, young professionals mingle at post-Mass wine receptions. Meanwhile, Catholic social media influencers have helped make an ancient faith seem trendy.

Is Catholicism undergoing a revival? Not in broad numerical terms. A Pew survey suggests that for every young adult who joins the Catholic Church, a dozen leave it. This year’s conversion wave doesn’t come close to offsetting the decades-long decline in Church membership, or solving the problem of ever fewer infant baptisms. Indeed, the recent wave of converts is best understood as a response to religious decline. In a secularizing world, becoming Catholic has a rebellious cachet.

Of course the papers don’t really concentrated on the data showing the extreme decline of religiosity in America. For example, the Pew survey reported in 2012 that the number of Catholics who consider themselves “strong” Catholics is at an all-time low, and church attendance is dropping rapidly, having fallen nearly 50% cince 1974.  Here are the facts, ma’am (note that the rate of Protestants claiming “strong religious identity” has gone up by about 11%.)

Why is the MSM so eager to report the rise in religion in America when it’s actually on the way out? Does the media have a God-shaped hole?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili had a good idea:

Andrzej: I don’t enjoy the taste of anything.
Hili: Eat from my bowl, and I’ll eat from your plate. You’ll see everything will taste different.

In Polish:

Ja: Nic mi nie smakuje.
Hili: Jedz z mojej miseczki, a ja mogę jeść z twojego talerza. Zobaczysz, że wszystko będzie ci smakowało inaczej.

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

From Give Me a Sign:

From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs or Notices:

Re the tweet below: The U.S. State Department is expelling Iranian non-citizens from the U.S. if they have ties to the theocratic regime. As they announced:

This week, three Iranian nationals with ties to the Iranian regime were arrested by federal agents following Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s termination of their lawful permanent resident (LPR) statuses.

Seyed Eissa Hashemi, Maryam Tahmasebi, and their son are now in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pending their removal from the United States.

Eissa Hashemi is the son of Masoumeh Ebtekar, also known as “Screaming Mary,” the infamous spokeswoman for the Islamist militants who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

Ebtekar was notorious for her role as the leading propagandist for the violent Islamists who perpetrated the Iran hostage crisis.

. . . Last week, Secretary Rubio terminated the legal status of the niece and grandniece of deceased Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Qasem Soleimani. Hamideh Afshar Soleimani and her daughter are now in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Masih, of course, is all for this.

Behind me is the luxury home belonging to the son of Islamic Republic Vice President @ebtekarm in Los Angeles.
The same Ebtekar who took American diplomats hostage in 1979. Children of top officials in Iran prefer to live in the US away from the hell their parents have created. pic.twitter.com/l8BftjNAkw

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 1, 2021

From Luana: chimp fingerprints!

Our evolutionary sibling, with whom we share more DNA than either of us do with gorillas or orangutans. pic.twitter.com/XSWRorDDOT

— Apatheia Ⓥ 🇺🇸 (@DanKellyFreedom) April 8, 2026

Also from Luana; the alphabet soup gets more voluminous:

This is done perfectly.

The MMIWG2LGBTQQIA+ is NOT inclusive ENOUGH pic.twitter.com/Oi6wWGRH1L

— Marc Nixon (@MarcNixon24) April 10, 2026

From Malcolm; a great cat artist:

Dudu Cat King is a Chinese artist who paints expressive cats with a few effortless sumi ink strokes.

pic.twitter.com/OJN2E0GaYZ

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) March 29, 2026

One from my feed—an ant bridge.

No other species on Earth has a teamwork system quite like ants.
This tiny creature pulls off missions far bigger than its size could ever suggest. pic.twitter.com/GVP799bGry

— The Figen (@TheFigen_) April 10, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was six years old, and would be 90 today had she lived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T09:56:50.310Z

And two from Dr. Cobb. Look at this deep-sea siphonophore! It was identified as Stephanomia amphytridis, which can apparently grow more than 10 meters long:

Bargmannia? I hope they see a bunch of siphonophores on the next SOI expedition b/c Dhugal is finally going to be on the ship for that one! I've been waiting years for this. This 1 is from @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 642 #sepacificseamounts #MarineLife

— Lisa (@tuexplorer1.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T23:32:08.975Z

I have no idea what’s going on here, and neither does Matthew:

Welcome to the end of a long week, though the troubles of the week won’t end tomorrow. It’s Friday, April 10, 2026, and National Siblings Day. Here’s the passport photo showing my mother, me, and my sister (2.5 years younger than I), taken before we went to Greece in the mid-Fifties. Look at my big ears!

It’s also National Dive Bar Day, National Farm Animals Day, and National Safety Pin Day, marking the day in 1849 when Walter Hunt got a patent for this device.  Hunt sold the patent for $400.

And Artemis II returns to Earth today, splashing down somewhere in the Pacific at 8:07 p.m. Eastern time. I will give a live feed. There are some concerns about the heat shield:

The Artemis II heat shield, NASA agrees, is flawed.

The heat shield is the critical layer at the bottom of a spacecraft that protects it — and the astronauts inside — from searing temperatures upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. If the shield fails, the underlying metallic structure could melt, rupture and disintegrate.

And there is no backup, and no way for the astronauts to escape.

NASA officials, however, are confident that despite the known shortcomings of the heat shield, the four Artemis II astronauts will remain alive and comfortable as they arrive at Earth on Friday evening at a speed of nearly 24,000 miles per hour, concluding a 10-day trip to the moon and back.

Extensive analysis and testing of the heat shield material “got us comfortable that we can undertake this mission with lots of margin to spare,” Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, said in an interview in January.

However, Charlie Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and an expert on heat shields, says NASA should never have launched Artemis II. The agency does not understand well enough the chances that the heat shield might fail, he says, and the mission, a success so far, could end with the deaths of the astronauts.

“I’m going to pray that nothing happens,” he said during an interview a few days before the launch of Artemis II.

His hunch is that there is a 95 percent chance that the astronauts will return safely. But that would mean a 1-in-20 odds of a disaster.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Now Israel is beginning cease-fire talks with Hezbollah, though I suspect that Israel will accept a cease fire only if Hezbollah disarms, which it’s already required to do under UN Security Council Resolution 1701. But it won’t, and Iran appears to be invested in keeping up Hezbollah terrorism. Israel is still striking Hezbollah, and PM Netanyahu refused to participate in a cease-fire and will not do so until Hezbollah is disarmed.

Hours after vowing to continue strikes targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appeared to make a concession on Thursday by saying his government would start talks with the Lebanese government on disarming the Iran-backed militant group.

Mr. Netanyahu’s announcement came as Israel’s attacks on Lebanon put immense strain on the shaky two-day-old cease-fire, as Iran has insisted the agreement covers Lebanon and the strikes violate the terms of the truce.

Israel’s attacks have also further strained and U.S. relations with Europe, where several leaders of NATO countries have been insisting that Lebanon be included in the truce.

While Lebanon has been pushing for talks with Israel since Hezbollah joined the war a month ago, the talks between Israel and Lebanon face enormous hurdles. It is far from clear how much buy-in the talks have from Hezbollah, which has long overshadowed the official Lebanese government. And while Lebanese leaders have voiced interest in disarming Hezbollah, Israel has voiced intense skepticism that they are willing or able to do so.

At the same time, the Israeli military warned civilians to evacuate parts of the country, including Beirut’s southern outskirts, suggesting another wave of strikes was imminent. People going north packed the roads.

It remained to be seen whether the Lebanon dispute would derail the cease-fire or affect talks between American and Iranian officials, which the Trump administration said were scheduled for the weekend in Pakistan.

There is more justification for Israel continuing its attacks on Hezbollah, which has been firing missiles and drones at Israel for a long time, and finally, violating the cease-fire sufficiently that Israel went after Hezbollah in Lebanon with boots on the ground (southern Lebanon only), as well as intensively bombing Hezbollah targets.  If Trump includes Lebanon in the cease-fire deal, he is endangering Israel and promoting the continuation of terrorism. But the Lebanese government does not speak for Hezbollah, so talks with Israel seem futile.

*Here’s a 30-minute video about the ceasefire discussed by Niall Ferguson and put up by the Free Press (h/t Bill) in an article called “Why Iran thinks it’s winning.” (the subtitle is a quote from Ferguson: “‘President Trump may have made a mistake by not deploying ground forces. Because without them, it’s simply not going to be possible to shut down the Iranian threat to the Strait”).  Ferguson discusses the Lebanon add-in to the deal, and argues that there’s no easy way to eliminate Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz save “deploying ground forces.” The U.S. has won militarily, he says, but not economically or strategically.

A quote from Ferguson: “One lesson of history is that negotiation when the two sides are this far apart is highly unlikely to deliver a result—certainly within a 14-day time frame.”

The video title is below, and it’s certainly provocative.

*The Washington Post adds that Iran is already trumpeting that it’s defeated the U.S.

Shortly after President Donald Trump threatened to erase the “whole civilization” of Iran, all 6,000 years of it, the crowds came out into the streets of Tehran waving flags — and not white ones. They bore the green, white and red banners of the still-standing Islamic Republic. Some set fire to the star-spangledones of the superpower that, according to state media, they had just “humiliated.”

Whatever the outcome of the unstabletwo-week ceasefire that the United States and Iran agreed to just before Trump’s apocalyptic deadline — whether it becomes an enduring truce or a return to the violence that has upended life from Israel to Azerbaijan — the pause in hostilities did not begin with images of an “unconditional surrender” that the president repeatedly demanded.

Exhausted Iranians may yet get a fortnight’s respite from airstrikes, but Trump’s central war objectives remain unmet, and hard questions are left unresolved. Each side is claiming victory, but neither is a clear winner.

Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28 demanding unconditional surrender, the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program and the destruction of its ballistic missiles. He, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said they hoped the attacks would lead to regime change.

By those measures, Wednesday’s scorecard after nearly six weeks of bombing makes for sober reading.

Iran is battered but unbroken. The regime has not collapsed; it has hardened. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still has weapons to fire, including ballistic missiles shot at Israel and Persian Gulf states in the hours after the ceasefire was announced, injuring two teenagers in Beersheba, Israel. Somewhere in Iran, a few hundred kilograms of enriched uranium remains as prospective raw material for a nuclear weapon.

Yep, I think we all agree that this is correct. The Post calls the cease-fire a “rest stop” rather than an “off ramp”.  I am curious what is going to happen, but worried that we’ve gone to war and didn’t accomplish anything. But with Trump in charge, we don’t know what is going to happen, though I think he is quite reluctant to send in ground troops. Nothing creates more opposition to a war in the U.S. than the sight of body bags coming home containing the remains of U.S. fighters.

*Greg Mayer called my attention to another public dismantling of Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The dismantling is at Current Affairs, conducted by Brian McLoone (!), and is called, “Ross Douthat’s shoddy arguments for religion“.

According to Pew’s most recent Religious Landscape Study, a growing share of Americans identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.” These so-called “nones” made up 16 percent of the population in 2007, but 29 percent in the latest survey, from 2023-24. The trend among younger Americans is even more striking. In this latest survey, 43 percent of those born in the ’90s and early aughts identified as nones.

In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, hopes to stem the tide. Referring to the Gospel of Mark’s admonition to be awake when the “master of the house” (i.e., God) returns, Douthat warns the reader: “If you are this sleeper, I beg of you—awake.” But he doesn’t think there are only fear-based, prudential reasons for believing in God. He thinks there’s good evidence that God exists. “The religious perspective,” he explains, “has the better case by far for being true.”

At the start of Believe, Douthat says part of his job at the Times is “to make religious belief intelligible to irreligious readers.” Believe is an outgrowth of that project, and succeeds at the task; it is clear what Douthat takes his factual premises to be and how he thinks one can infer from those premises to a theistic conclusion. The problem is that many of those premises are false or suspect, and many of the inferences unwarranted. His conclusion, that we should all be religious, is a house built on sand.

Remember that Douthat thinks that science itself gives evidence for God. This view is dismantled:

Note that, while this scientific perspective doesn’t posit a God, it doesn’t strictly rule one out either. Of course, the perspective does raise some challenging questions for someone (like Douthat) who believes in the Judeo-Christian God. (In Believe, Douthat describes himself as “a conservative Catholic by the world’s standards.”) If we humans are special, why did God wait billions of years to create us? Why did He make many trillions of other solar systems? And, perhaps most pressing, why is none of this mentioned in the Bible? One possibility is that God wanted to speak metaphorically in Genesis about our origins. Another is that those stories were created by people who were trying their best to explain how the world around them came to be. If they had known how old and big the universe is, or that humans share a common ancestor with fish and olive trees, they would have incorporated those facts into their origin story. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.

The latter possibility, of course, is more parsimonious. But Douthat argues that science (e.g., the “fine tuning” argument) shows that the universe was “made for us.” Yet his method of arguing is inconsistent:

That argument [science shows that the Universe was “made for us”] sits uneasily with Douthat’s claim, elsewhere in the book, that we don’t understand some important bits of our existence, like consciousness. He says that “the immense progress we’ve made in figuring out how chemistry and biology interact in the pathways of the cerebellum has brought us no closer to answering the question of why these physical interactions yield both conscious self-awareness generally and the specific kind of experience we have.” Douthat takes science’s inability to explain consciousness to be evidence that the mind has a “supernatural character.” When we put these two arguments side by side, we see that together they make a rigged game: if science can render some natural phenomenon intelligible, then that’s evidence for God; and if science can’t render some natural phenomenon intelligible, then God must be the supernatural force pulling the strings. Heads theism wins, tails atheism loses.

The end of the piece, which is long but a very good review of Douthat’s execrable book, suggests that McLoone might be—gasp—a New Atheist:

How I wish that the issues Douthat discusses in Believe were of purely intellectual interest. But they’re not. Despite the decline in religiosity among Americans that I noted earlier, religion of course still has an enormous influence on U.S. culture and policy. To take a recent example, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who is almost certainly overseeing war crimes in Iran, clearly views that conflict from the perspective of Christian nationalism. One way to counter this trend is to amplify the commendable commitments to social justice that one finds in many religions, perhaps especially in Christianity and its strands that emphasize dedication to the poor (incidentally, the tradition in which I was raised). This is the rhetorical strategy that Texas politician James Talarico has adopted in his campaign for U.S. Senate. The problem is that adjudicating which politics better aligns with a given religion is a fool’s errand, since religious doctrine underdetermines how one ought to act. Some passages of the Bible seem to extol pacifism, others genocide. The better strategy is to show that the foundations for religious beliefs are very shaky. That skeptical project, spanning millenia and continents, has been slow but successful. Believe reminds us that the project is far from complete, and the current political moment reminds us that the project remains critical.

I should add that Greg wrote me, after the NYT hired Douthat, “Who, other than his close friends and family, could care at all what Ross Douthat thinks about anything?”

*According to the AP’s “oddities” page, New Yorkers are flocking to a NYC park to see American woodcocks (Scolopax minor), which are not that rare! But they have a weird walk.

American woodcocks came to New York City looking to strut their stuff, and New Yorkers fell in love.

The curious birds, known for their bobbing walks and kazoo-like calls, have drawn a crowd to Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan since arriving in late March. Dozens of spectators are gathering at the park every day to try to catch a glimpse of the grapefruit-sized birds as they poke their long bills in the ground for earthworms.

“It’s a very charismatic bird. I mean, it’s goofy-looking. It’s got eyes that are always looking at you no matter where you are. It does this nice little dance when it’s nervous,” said Bill Rankin, a Yale University professor who stopped by the park. “Having two of them together is a kind of nice little romantic story of spring.”

The woodcocks are known to stop at Bryant Park every year as they migrate north in early spring. They are strange-looking critters, seemingly assembled from the parts of other birds — a round body, enormous eyes and a long, thin bill. They’re also called “timberdoodles” or “bogsuckers” by some.

Here’s a woodcock photographed in, of all places, at Bryant Park in NYC.

Nobody knows why it walks like this, though there’s one explanation given in the video below:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is nosing about:

Hili: Do you have something you want to talk to me about?
Andrzej: No, I just wanted to make sure everything is alright.

In Polish:

Hili: Masz do mnie jakąś sprawę?
Ja: Nie, chciałem tylko zobaczyć, czy wszystko jest w porządku.

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

From The Language Nerds:

From CinEmma:

From Things With Faces; a distraught melon:

Masih is angry at loose talk about “regime change” in Iran:

My message to the U.S. government on CBS: stop talking about a fake “regime change” in Iran.

Any negotiation that says nothing about executions, political prisoners, mass repression, and internet blackouts is not about the Iranian people. It’s about saving a regime that is… pic.twitter.com/WdToTWiyik

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 9, 2026

From Jay, a video compilation of driverless cars stopping in the road to avoid hitting animals:

More than 350 million vertebrate animals are killed by human driven vehicles every year. In general, autonomous vehicles are much better than humans at dodging animals.

A compilation I made of @Tesla’s FSD stopping for animals, and often saving their lives: https://t.co/BL6LiryTdu pic.twitter.com/MC7QhcdwRG

— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) April 9, 2026

A mutation in goats from Sciencegirl. I’m not sure that breeding up a bunch of animals like this is an ethical thing to do:

The myotonic goat is a breed with a condition that makes it prone to stiffening or falling over in response to excitement or surprise. pic.twitter.com/EbsWAHESN5

— Science girl (@sciencegirl) April 8, 2026

From Malcolm, who says, “Cats always win.”

Cats always win.. 😅 pic.twitter.com/DjxaAJ6GVR

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) March 22, 2026

From my feed: interspecies love:

A male orangutan started bottle-feeding four orphaned tiger cubs after watching his human caretakers.

Suryia lived at Myrtle Beach Safari, a wildlife preserve in South Carolina in the United States. In 2015 the cubs were just one to two months old and had been rejected by their… pic.twitter.com/rUHxFYMi9c

— Dr. Lemma (@DoctorLemma) April 9, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This German Jewish boy was one of the 90% of people in his transport gassed to death when it arrived in Auschwitz. He was 12 years old. https://t.co/CDQcQVRpzs

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 10, 2026

And two from Matthew. First, the astronaut fixation with watches (see the thread to see what models of watches were issued by NASA:

WATCHES IN SPACE 🧵Ever notice how all of the astronauts are wearing a billion watches in every picture? Christina Koch is wearing three in this picture1/x 👇

— Steven Lucy (@slucy.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T17:04:40.609Z

And a video showing that the pharyngeal nervous system of this flatworm can by itself organize feeding behavior (I don’t like them cutting up flatworms):

One of the wildest things I learned about planarian flatworms: you can isolate their pharynx (throat) and it will autonomously engage in feeding behavior.www.science.org/doi/full/10….

— Sam Gershman (@gershbrain.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T18:59:12.843Z