Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to Friday, April 24, 2026. Today I fly back to Chicago. Normally I would look forward with joy to returning, ready to help Vashti rear her brook of seven ducklings to maturity. This is not to be, however, and I am heartbroken to know that I’ll face an empty pond.
To some it may sound stupid that I’m mourning the loss of our brood of ducklings, but, as the old Jewish saying goes, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” What that means is that if you save the life of any creature, you have saved the world for that creature, who now gets to experience a world it would otherwise lose. That is our situation—seven times over.
Truth be told, I am not energized to write today, and it may be a while before I am. As always, I do my best.
Here, in memoriam to our brood, are three photos taken by Peggy Mason and one by another student. They were sent to me as I didn’t see the brood myself. Whatever happened to them, I hope they found safe harbor.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 24 Wikipedia page.
The 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, due to expire Sunday, will be extended for three weeks, President Donald Trump said Thursday during the second round of peace talks at the White House.
The announcement of an extension, which had been requested by Lebanon, came as Trump and Vice President JD Vance joined participants of the talks in the Oval Office. Led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and State Department Counselor Michael Needham, Israel and Lebanon were represented by their ambassadors to the U.S. The U.S. ambassadors to Lebanon and Israel also participated.
Israel and Lebanon had agreed to the extension of “an additional three weeks of, I guess no firing, ceasefire, no more firing. And we’re going to be working with Lebanon to get things straightened out in that country. I really believe it’s something we can do pretty easily,” Trump told reporters admitted to the Oval Office where participants were seated on sofas.
The Israel-Lebanon ceasefire has been only tenuously observed, with reduced but continued attacks by Israel and Hezbollah.
Hezbollah has not officially recognized the pause in hostilities and on Thursday launched its first missile attack on northern Israel since the ceasefire went into effect April 16. The Israel Defense Forces said the missiles had been intercepted.
Israel has continued sporadic bombing attacks in what it says is “self defense” permitted under the ceasefire, and tens of thousands IDF troops occupying southern Lebanon have continued attacks against alleged militants and their infrastructure.
Each side has accused the other of violating the ceasefire.
Note that the talks are with Lebanon, not Hezbollah. The Lebanese government cannot stop the terrorism of Hezbollah, which is why Iran wants these negotations to be part of its own cease-fire settlement. The negotiations will not be successful because Hezbollah’s aim is to destroy Israel, and, Hezbollah has ignored the UN Security Council’s Resolution 1701 from 2006, ordering the group to cease hostilities and disarm. What is Trump thinking? Until Lebanon gets control of Hezbollah—a very slim possibility—there will be no peace between the two countries.
For the first time in the history of the IDF, a part of the defense budget had to be devoted to buying a statue of Jesus. But it was the right thing to do.
The first point is the most obvious: it is a blatant moral failure to desecrate another faith’s holy items. As a matter of history Jews should know how that feels. The conduct of an IDF soldier destroying a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon is entirely unacceptable, particularly for a military operating as an occupying force.
But if morality didn’t stop this soldier’s actions, I should think practicality would.
If you were to ask any Jew to identify the single most lethal antisemitic trope in history, the answer would undoubtedly be the accusation of being “Christ killers.” Knowing that history, how any Jewish soldier could think that taking a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus—and filming it—was in any way a good idea simply baffles me.
Thankfully, out of both moral necessity and practical reality, the IDF has taken swift action. The soldier who smashed the statue, along with the soldier who photographed the act, have been dismissed from combat duty and sentenced to jail. Six other troops who were present at the scene and did not act to stop the incident or report it are also under investigation. The IDF has also organized a replacement for the broken statue, which it has returned to the village.
The unfortunate truth is that soldiers will inevitably do destructive, foolish things. That cannot always be prevented. The ultimate measure of an army’s morality is not whether bad actors exist within its ranks—it is how the system holds them accountable.
Here, courtesy of Amit Segal at the site, is an IDF photo of their replacement statue, which has been installed. Although the entire world, including the MSM, has been tarring the whole IDF, and by extension Israel, for breaking the statue, please read the last paragraph above.
And a bit from today’s report, suggesting that Iran’s titular leader may in fact be dead, an ex-ayatollah:
In early April, a joint U.S.-Israeli diplomatic memo, reported by The Times, claimed that Mojtaba is physically incapacitated, completely unconscious, and hidden in a specialized hospital. The memo also noted ongoing preparations for a massive mausoleum in Qom—a subtle hint that the regime is preparing for a funeral.
This week, The New York Times published a detailed investigation based on leaks from “senior Iranian insiders,” claiming the Supreme Leader is sequestered in a highly secure medical hideout. These officials concede he is severely mutilated—awaiting a prosthetic after three leg surgeries and suffering from facial burns that render him largely mute—but insist he remains “mentally sharp.” Conveniently, because all modern electronics are banned around him to prevent Israeli tracking, he is entirely isolated, relying on a slow human chain of motorcycle couriers to communicate with the IRGC generals who are now effectively running the state.
But within Israeli intelligence, a much colder, simpler theory is taking root: Mojtaba is already dead. All that fantastic, detailed intel—even the candid admissions of severe injury in The New York Times—is carefully calibrated Iranian disinformation.
*Over at Quillette, Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry writes about his awakening on October 7, 2023 in a piece called “What do you think decolonization meant?” (article is archived here).
I was terribly wrong to be so insouciant, as I discovered when 7 October happened. I’m not Jewish and don’t have a personal connection to Israel, so initially I didn’t follow the news very closely. I had relegated the attack to the—regrettably vast—mental category of jihadist terrorist attacks across the globe, failing to grasp that this was, in fact, a full-blown invasion. In my naivety, I assumed that after the massacres in Paris, Brussels, Nice, Berlin, and countless other Western cities, everyone had finally woken up to the true nature of jihadism. When a bunch of Allahu Akbar-chanting fanatics slaughtered innocent young people at a music festival, just as they had done at the Bataclan in Paris, it seemed inconceivable to me that any of my colleagues and friends would condone, rationalise, or even celebrate such acts. And yet that is precisely what happened.
To my horror, within days—even hours—of the attack, when the Israeli army was still fighting off the invaders, I started seeing reactions of excitement and gleeful jubilation on social media. Not from the usual religious maniacs praising Allah, but from left-wing activists at prestigious universities. Academics started breathlessly applying the same framework of decolonisation that I had foolishly brushed aside as amusing but harmless virtue signalling. As the writer Najma Sharif famously posted on X that day, racking up tens of thousands of likes and reposts: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
It was as though she was talking about me. I was one of those “losers” who had been foolish enough to think that decolonisation amounted to little more than papers and essays, along with some harmless but well-intentioned proposals to diversify the philosophy curriculum. If only. What I came to see in the wake of 7 October was something far less benign. Decolonisation operates as a rigid, almost Manichaean ideology that neatly divides the world into evil perpetrators (Western colonisers) and innocent victims (the colonised, indigenous peoples). In this worldview, there is no room for moral ambiguity. Those on the wrong side of the divide are irredeemably rotten and deserve everything that’s coming to them, while those on the side of the angels are completely absolved of any wrongdoing. If they appear to commit atrocities, these are reframed as understandable—perhaps even inevitable—responses to prior injustice. In fact, the more extreme the violence, the greater the wrongs they must have endured.
At one point, many on the Left considered Israel an admirable success story of decolonisation—of an indigenous people driving out the Western colonisers and achieving self-determination in their historical homeland. For a variety of complex historical reasons, however, the Jewish state is now firmly relegated to the side of the oppressors. In fact, Israel is regarded as the settler-colonialist enterprise par excellence, and Palestinians as paragons of victimhood. And that is all the latter-day activists need to know to reach their moral verdicts—which explains why those verdicts came rushing in mere hours into the unfolding event.
That mindset was on full display in a joint open letter at my own Ghent University, published just three days after 7 October. It pointedly refused to condemn Hamas, shifted all blame for the massacre onto “Zionists,” and praised Palestinians for their “tenacity and fierce resistance to racism and settler colonialism,” which the signatories found immensely “inspiring.” The ideological rationale is right there in the letter: “Decolonization is not a metaphor, nor is it only a theory to be used for intellectual clout. It is about supporting the right for self-determination of Palestinians to live freely and with dignity.” It was signed by two thousand academics and students.
An even more revolting open letter at the University of Amsterdam, again with hundreds of signatories, rejoiced that 2023 “will no doubt be the year admired, recorded and studied for the way in which Palestinians steadfastly resisted colonialism, occupation and survived genocide.” The text echoes the same jargon and turns of phrase, as if its authors’ minds had been hijacked by the same zombie virus: “We must stress that decolonisation is not an abstract theory, it is an action, it is a way of being. […] Decolonisation is not a metaphor. […] It is the UvA’s ethical duty to support decolonial endeavors that aim to end colonialism.”
Every one of these academics would describe themselves as “progressive” or “left-wing.” And yet here they were, rallying to the defence of a reactionary death cult that had just committed the largest antisemitic pogrom since the Holocaust, livestreaming their atrocities with GoPro cameras, sadistically calling family members on the victims’ cellphones, ecstatically calling home in triumph to boast of how many Jews they had killed with their bare hands.
If there are two words that describe this species of “progressive”, they are “anti-Enlightenment” and “Manichean”.
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a gene therapy that can cure a rare, inherited form of deafness. The treatment is the first to restore normal hearing in children who were born deaf.
The maker of the therapy, Regeneron, plans to provide it free to any child who needs it. “We wanted to make a statement,” Dr. George Yancopoulos, Regeneron’s chief scientific officer said on Thursday morning.
The therapy called Otarmeni, is intended for children with otoferlin deafness, a rare form of hearing loss caused by a mutation in a single gene. The mutation destroys a protein in the inner ear that is needed to transmit sound to the brain.
. . . Although otoferlin deafness accounts for just 2 percent to 8 percent of congenital hearing loss, the new treatment “is groundbreaking,” Dr. Dylan Chan, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said.
He added, “This is the first time in history that there has been a medical therapy that has enabled deaf children to hear.”
. . .Researchers chose to focus on otoferlin deafness because its cause was straightforward. The otoferlin gene is expressed only in the hair cells of the inner ear. The inner ear structures, including the hair cells, are intact. So to allow patients to hear, doctors simply needed to deliver a working copy of the otoferlin gene.
Otolaryngologists had long thought that injecting a medicine into the inner ear would inevitably damage the delicate cells and membranes of the cochlea.
But children with otoferlin deafness are already unable to hear. Even if an attempt at gene therapy damaged their inner ears, they could still receive cochlear implants.
. . .Kerri M., whose baby, Miles, had otoferlin deafness, said gene therapy “completely changed our lives.” She spoke on condition of anonymity because she wanted to protect her son’s diagnosis from appearing on the internet.
Dr. Shearer said Miles’s hearing loss was so profound that he could not hear a jet engine if it were next to him.
Miles was given the Regeneron therapy on May 19, 2025, when he was 13 months old. At his last visit, his hearing was normal.
. . .Most children who received the gene therapy have had hearing restored, but not all have been as fortunate as Miles. So far, Dr. Chan said, about 80 percent of the patients who have been treated successfully in clinical trials were able to hear well without needing cochlear implants.
Most still needed a hearing aid, but about 30 percent of those who could hear after the treatment were like Miles — their hearing was in the normal range.
The next target for the scientists working on gene therapies to correct deafness is mutations in the GJB2 gene. It causes the most common form of congenital hearing loss in children and accounts for about 20 percent of cases.
This is remarkable, and heartening that the company that created the cure is supplying it for free. Of course most genetically-based diseases are not this easy to remedy, but we are on a thresh0ld of successful gene therapy.
*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: We live in the world we’re in.” The first story about bannng tobacco sales in the UK is true:
→ New job opportunity for Americans: The United Kingdom passed a bill this week to ban the sale of tobacco to anyone born after 2008. The goal is to create a “smoke-free generation.” Anyone born after 2008 will never be able to buy cigarettes or vapes or any tobacco product in the United Kingdom. Ever. Might as well call them the loser generation. Taking cigs away from Brits is like grabbing spaghetti out of an Italian’s mouth. If there’s no cigarette, what are young Brits meant to do with their hands after making a wry and devastating observation? Wave? That’s for the Yanks.
For a kid from the UK, coming to New York and trying a vape is going to be the equivalent of an American going to Amsterdam to try crack and prostitutes. Me, I’m going to travel to London with strawberry vapes sewn into my Levi’s, like an American hero. They said artificial intelligence would take all our jobs, but they didn’t consider that cigarette smuggling would employ 15,000 Americans each year. British teens: Call me!
→ What’s going on with Ilhan Omar’s net worth?: Rep. Ilhan Omar has revised her net worth. Earlier, she filed paperwork reporting her and her husband’s net worth at between $6 million and $30 million. Now, she’s filed new paperwork reporting their net worth to be between $18,004 to $95,000. An easy enough mistake to make! Zeros are confusing. Responding to a letter from the Office of Congressional Conduct, her lawyer said: “As the busiest of people, it is very common for members and their spouses to rely on learned professionals like accountants to make calculations and determinations that appear on public filings. While the error is, of course, unfortunate, there is nothing untoward, and nothing illegal has occurred.” The busiest of people. So busy, somewhere between the personal training and CAIR meetings, they forgot how many more millions they made. Apparently the confusion comes from her husband being involved in so many businesses. All you need to know is that there was some backlash and the husband is worth nothing now. As a scholar of LLCs, my wild guess, if there is a noncriminal explanation, is that the money was put into a new trust or something. So it’s not hers anymore, per se, not exactly.
→ Carrying knives “for a good reason”:
A Kuwaiti man, on trial for allegedly trying to break into the Israeli embassy in London while armed with two knives, regaled the court with tales of his treacherous boat crossings in which he put his “life on the line.” As noted by the BBC: “His defense case is likely to be that he was not trying to enter the embassy for a terrorist purpose, and that he was carrying the knives ‘for a good reason’ unrelated to his activities that day, jurors have been told.” Unless there’s a fish market inside that embassy, I got a few questions about what constitutes a “good reason” in the UK.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej sounds a familiar note:
Hili: We have to work again?
Andrzej: That’s our lot.
From Masih, with the President mis-sexed in the English translation (there are subtitles):
The President of the German Bundestag [Julia Klöckner] declared with clarity and courage: [S]He does not recognize a regime that blinds women and pierces the bodies of protesters with buckshot. And he made this statement from the podium of the President of the German Bundestag. These remarks were made in tribute to the efforts of Masih Alinejad, for raising global public awareness of the fully armed governmental violence, through which she has become the extension of the voice of millions of Iranians who do not recognize this regime.
The original:
رئیس مجلس آلمان، با صراحت و شجاعت اعلام کرد:
او رژیمی را که زنان را نابینا میکند و بدن معترضان را با ساچمه میدرد، به رسمیت نمیشناسد.
و این حرف را از جایگاه رییس مجلس آلمان زد.
این سخنان در تقدیر از تلاشهای مسیح علینژاد بیان شد، برای آگاهسازی افکار عمومی جهان از خشونتهای… pic.twitter.com/kPQyKTzCHE
— United Against Gender Apartheid (@UAGApartheid) April 23, 2026
From Luana, though the community notes say the quote was mistranslated. The apparently correct translation, which you can see here, is even better.
The first recorded appearance of a cat in Japan is described arriving as an imperial gift, written down on March 11, 889 AD by 22-year-old Emperor Uda on his diary: pic.twitter.com/fw1MsR4PSY
And a turkey named JERRY who loves and protects ducks:
The turkey you see here is Jerry. He never seemed to like living with other turkeys but LOVES the ducks, so we let him move in with them a few years ago. They all get along, in fact Jerry puffs up to protect them whenever a raptor is in the neighborhood. Sometimes found family is the best family! ❤️
It breaks my heart to have to report this, but somehow Vashti and her brood of seven ducklings vanished from Botany Pond sometime after Tuesday morning, and have not been seen since.
I have no idea what happened. They were last seen at the pond during Tuesday’s morning rain showers, with the brood warmly tucked under Vashti’s belly. Now: no ducks—not a trace. The only one left is Armon, who swims disconsolately around the pond and refuses food. He has lost his family.
It was probably not predators: no bodies were found. I’ve ascertained that no workpeople were in the pond during the week. Either someone scared them away or they walked away, something that hasn’t happened before.
Whatever is the case, the ducklings will probably perish, as the nearest body of water is too far away for little ones to walk.
The members of Team Duck and I are devastates. The seven ducklings were healthy, Vashti was being a great mother, and even Armon stepped up to protect the brood. The invading undocumented drakes left the brood alone. Everything promised a great duck season, and I was looking forward to helping the little ones grow up into adult mallards.
That, it seems, is not to be. This portends to be The Year Without Ducklings.
Welcome to Thursday, April 23, 2026 and World Table Tennis Day. It’s a good day to watch the excellent but not world-class movie “Marty Supreme“, about the sport and a down-at-the-heels master of it.
Here’s a video of one person’s top ten table tennis players, with each getting about a minute. The caliber of play is amazing, and doubles competitions look quite hard!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 26 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*From this morning’s report at It’s Noon in Israel. (There’s more, too–about a rift in Iran’s leadership):
It’s Thursday, April 23, and the war with Iran is no longer about oil or gas; it is a battle over a single resource: time. The question that will determine the fate of the Middle East is who controls the clock, who can afford to wait, and who is simply out of time?
Currently, the Ayatollahs boast that their dictatorial regime will allow them to hold out indefinitely, while the closure of the Strait of Hormuz imposes an expiration date on U.S. aggression. Meanwhile, Trump claims to be in an equally comfortable position: Iranian ports are blockaded, some commercial ships are still navigating the strait despite the closure, and fresh U.S. military assets are on their way.
The question is, who’s bluffing?
The reality is both. But Iran’s position is significantly weaker.
Every American president sits on a ticking clock, and with the midterm elections approaching, Trump has less time than most. But Iran is bleeding an estimated $400 million a day to the blockade. It’s true that the U.S. is also sustaining high costs to forward-deploy its forces, alongside the strategic opportunity cost of their absence in other theaters. The difference is that Washington can afford it: the Iranian annual budget sits around $56 billion; the U.S. budget is over $6 trillion.
It all comes down to the blockade. Rather than risk casualties to seize Kharg Island or force immediate results through an aerial campaign, the U.S. military can cruise safely out of range in the Arabian Sea, intercept the occasional breakout vessel, and simply wait for economic isolation to do its work.
While Washington holds the front door closed, Tehran’s most crucial ally is starting to push them harder from behind. Xi Jinping is fighting a clock of his own as China’s oil reserves rapidly dry up. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Iran accepted the Pakistani-mediated ceasefire following a last-minute intervention by China, which asked Iran “to show flexibility and defuse tensions.” But that was the rhetoric of a China that had an extra half-month of oil reserves compared to today. I doubt their words will be as soft now.
The Iranians certainly believe the blockade is effective. Iranian Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf recently compared the strategy to the bombing campaign and demanded its cessation as a precondition for continuing the talks in Islamabad.
Tehran has another, separate crisis draining its time reserves. As a senior Pakistani source recently confirmed to the U.S., a significant rift has paralyzed the regime. On one side are the Revolutionary Guards and the Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters, representing the uncompromising extreme; on the other is the civil-political echelon led by Ghalibaf. Presiding above this fracture is the severely injured Mojtaba Khamenei, whom both sides defer to as the final authority. Because of his grievous wounds and the constant threat of Israeli assassination, simply communicating with the supreme leader has become a lengthy, complex logistical nightmare.
Pakistan had hoped for another windfall of global good will as it prepared to host a new round of peace talks between the U.S. and Iran this week, locking down its capital for the second time in a month in the hope that the warring sides could make a deal. But this time, after the principal players were no-shows, disappointment has set in and businesses are counting their losses.
. . . Pakistani officials say they remain hopeful both sides could agree to de-escalate and meet again. An advanced U.S. security team sent to protect a senior American delegation remains on the ground, said people familiar with the matter.
. . .“Both countries are back on the brink, there is no getting away from that,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistan diplomat who was twice the country’s ambassador to the U.S. “The question is how to get them to step back from the brink.”
Pakistani officials are still speaking with both sides and pushing for flexibility. “They haven’t given up by any stretch of the imagination,” she said.
. . .There were glimmers of that again this week. Trump said he had unilaterally extended the cease-fire, which was supposed to end Wednesday, at the request of Munir and Sharif, and the American president has continued to heap praise on Pakistan for its mediation efforts; Iran has said it isn’t bound by Trump’s announcement, with officials saying the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports means the cease-fire had already lapsed.
Yet the prevailing feeling in the Pakistani capital is that it is a city stuck in limbo. Authorities have maintained security measures for now, given the logistical challenges—and expense—of withdrawing the security net and having to reimpose it should talks suddenly materialize.
I have stopped trying to make useful comments about this war. The two sides are far apart, and Trump is chaotic. All I can say is that there should be no moratorium on Iran’s attempt to make nuclear weapons: there should be a blanket prohibition forever. And one of my most fervent wishes—that the Iranian people could somehow take control of their government and eliminate the theocracy—seems to have dropped off Trump’s agenda after he deluded himself (or us) that there has been “real regime change.”
*Speaking of “regime change,” the NYT describes how IRGC generals have replaced the Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei (the son of the late Ayatollah) as the figures running Iran (article archived here). But they imply that Mojtaba is still calling the shots.
Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the son, is an elusive figure who has not been seen and whose voice has not been heard since he was appointed in March. Instead, a battle-hardened collective of commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and those aligned with them are the key decision makers on matters of security, war and diplomacy.
“Mojtaba is managing the country as though he is the director of the board,” said Abdolreza Davari, a politician who served as senior adviser to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he was president and knows Mr. Khamenei.
“He relies heavily on the advice and guidance of the board members, and they collectively make all the decisions,” Mr. Davari said in a phone interview from Tehran. “The generals are the board members.”
. . . Mr. Khamenei, who was selected by a council of senior clerics as the new supreme leader, has been in hiding since American and Israeli forces bombed his father’s compound on Feb. 28, where he also lived with his family. His father, wife and son were all killed. Access to him is extremely difficult and limited now. He is surrounded mostly by a team of doctors and medical staff who are treating the injuries he sustained in the airstrikes.
Senior commanders of the Guards and senior government officials do not visit him, fearing that Israel may trace them to him and kill him. President Masoud Pezeshkian, who is also a heart surgeon, and the minister of health have both been involved in his care.
Though Mr. Khamenei was gravely wounded, he is mentally sharp and engaged, according to four senior Iranian officials familiar with his health. One leg was operated on three times, and he is awaiting a prosthetic. He had surgery on one hand and is slowly regaining function. His face and lips have been burned severely, making it difficult for him to speak, the officials said, adding that, eventually, he will need plastic surgery.
. . . The combination of concern for his safety, his injuries and the sheer challenge of reaching him has resulted in Mr. Khamenei’s delegating decision making to the generals, at least for now. Reformist factions, as well as ultra-hard-liners, are still involved in political discussions. But analysts say that Mr. Khamenei’s close ties to the generals, whom he grew up with when he volunteered to fight in the Iran-Iraq war as a teenager, have made them the dominant force.
Generals, schmenerals Whether they run the country or whether the theocrats run the country, it’s still hard-line authoritarians. That is the “regime change” that Trump says he’s effected.
Of course the sources, “senior Iranian officials” would say that he’s still “managing the country.”
*One of the most amazingly persistent bis of “fake news” is the Canadian fixation on the unsubstantiated claim that 215 indigenous (“First Nations”) children were killed (or dued) and were secretly buried at a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Jonathan Kay recounts the story at Quillette, which speaks very poorly about Canadian journalism and its “search for truth” (h/t Luana). You won’t see this story in the American MSM. Tha article is archived free here.
As just about every Liberal in the Palais des congrès audience would have known (or at the very least, should have known), those “215 kids” risen from the dead in Kamloops are fictional characters. They never existed “in flesh,” even if their “spirit” once felt very real to Canadians, thanks to a nationwide social panic that spread in mid-2021 following falseclaimsthat215 “unmarked graves” had been found on the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in the aforementioned city of Kamloops.
The original 27 May 2021 announcement convulsed Canadian society for many weeks. The Canadian Press called it the “Story of the Year.” Justin Trudeau lowered flags on federal buildings for almost six months, and had himself photographed bowing his head and taking a knee, BLM-style. He also authorized hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Indigenous groups—including $12.1-million to the Kamloops First Nation alone—so they could find, exhume, and identify the children whose bodies (we were told) had been tossed anonymously into the earth by murderous white teachers and administrators.
In the four years and eleven months that have passed since then, not a single actual grave (let alone human remains) have been found at any of the identified sites. It turns out that back in 2021, no one—not the Kamloops band leadership, not Canadian journalists, not Justin Trudeau—had bothered to educate themselves about the limits of the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology that had been the basis of the unmarked-graves claims.
GPR technology doesn’t provide X-ray-type images of what lies beneath the earth’s surface, as Canadians had been led to believe. Rather, it identifies sub-surface soil dislocations. Such dislocations can signify graves, but also many other things—including pipes, irrigation networks, rocks, and tree roots.
It so happens that the area in question had formerly been used as an orchard when the Kamloops residential school was operating—a place where trees were planted in neat rows, much like graves. And one might think that would provide a more likely explanation than—oh, say—the hitherto unreported slaughter of 215 unidentified children.
. . . One might also think that the people who’d spread this misinformation would now be humbled, abashed, and perhaps even contrite. If so, one would be wrong. While the CBC belatedly admitted that no “unmarked graves” have been found in Kamloops, most media outlets and politicians have simply gone silent on the issue altogether, hoping that history will forget their role in signal-boosting fake news.
and here’s the kicker:
Moreover, Deer’s gauzy language about the invisible “spirits” of those 215 (non-existent) children captured one of the fallback claims that public figures have been making in recent days: that it doesn’t actually matter if there are real bodies under the ground—because what we should truly focus on is the “symbolic” idea that such graves would represent.
When the facts don’t support your ideology, simply say that the facts don’t matter: what matters is that there was (or is) still oppression.
Canada should be ashamed at how its politicians and media have quietly dropped the story when they couldn’t substantiate it, but won’t even mention the lack of evidence. Now, it’s possible that there may be graves, but until they find them (and they’re not looking), people should, as Archie Bunker told Edith, “stifle themselves.”
Harvard’s graduate student union began its second day on strike Wednesday morning, with roughly 20 picketers gathering at the Science Center as the walkout continued.
Around 8:30 a.m., demonstrators assembled in the Science Center plaza, where they set up a tent and began circling outside the building’s main entrance.
The strike centers on disputes over pay, workplace protections, and benefits. Union leaders have said some graduate workers earn as little as $26,300 annually and are calling for a $55,000 base pay floor, along with raises tied to inflation. They are also seeking stronger protections for international students, an independent process for handling harassment and discrimination complaints, and the restoration of benefits that expired with the previous contract in June 2025. (Harvard, however, has pushed back on the union’s characterization of compensation, saying that Ph.D. students receive at least $425,000 in total benefits over a minimum of five years.)
Benefits not mentioned above include restoring child care and medical expenses that were in the contract that expired last June.
Union members – including teaching fellows, course assistants, and graduate research assistants – have paused teaching and research duties as the strike continues.
Harvard has not scheduled additional bargaining sessions beyond April 28. Union leaders said Tuesday that Harvard has yet to reengage with the union since the walkout began.
Given that the median income for all Americans is about $63,000, and many Americans get neither childcare nor medical insurance with their jobs, these seem like extraordinarily high demands for work that is not only not full time, but also is part of their education as academics. Not to mention that while getting a Harard Ph.D., students already receive over $400,000 along with their prestigious degree. It’s not like they’re making cars or anything.
The president of the John Templeton Foundation, Timothy Dalrymple, said: “What makes Conway Morris abundantly deserving of the Templeton Prize are his groundbreaking advancements on the theoretical foundations of evolutionary theory alongside his commitment to addressing the philosophical implications of that work for humankind.”
. . . Professor Conway Morris said: “As somebody once said — ‘Be careful when you step on to the unending road.’ A Ph.D. on fossil worms might logically lead to fieldwork in Greenland, but to an absorption with evolutionary convergence and thence the Fermi Paradox? And still the road stretches on, now to the question of human uniqueness and, I suspect, way beyond.”
As I’ve noted, Conway Morris sees evolutionary convergence (the arriving of different animal and plant groups at similar phenotypic “solutions” to environmental challenges) as signs of a divine hand behind evolution. He is a theistic evolutionist.
A professing Christian, Professor Conway Morris is highly critical of materialism and reductionism, and has participated in many public debates on religion and science. His study of the patterns and processes of life on earth has, in recent years, led to a keen interest in astrobiology — “the study of things that do not exist”, as he says.
His criticality of materialism and reductionism is only because he sees a divine hand behind evolution. Earlier in his career, Conway Morris made big contributions to paleontology, particularly in early life around the time of the Cambrian Explosion. But he went off the rails and his recent books have been osculations of God as a dab hand in evolution.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron have an arcane discussion:
Hili: What color was Sisyphus’s stone? Szaron: Blue, the gods do not value gray.
In Polish:
Hili: Jaki kolor miał kamień Syzyfa?
Szaron: Błękitny, bogowie nie cenią szarości.
From Luana, who hopes that many people see this (you can read the article here):
Hamas terrorists are gang-raping displaced widows in tents in Gaza. But when it gets reported up the chain, leadership orders silence. The media has largely ignored it too.
From Barry, who adds this: “But can it be a ‘pet’? I don’t understand why it’s in someone’s home. And as someone commented, ‘How long until it starts chewing off the stairway railings for wood supply?’“
This beaver was orphaned and rescued as a newborn. See the incredible instinct to build a dam, even though no parent has ever passed this information to it. [📹 hmuraco]Original post
And two from Dr. Cobb. LOOK AT THIS SQUIRREL! It’s a thread and I’ve put in two posts:
The Tufted ground squirrel (Rheithrosciurus macrotis) is a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in floof.Let's start with the *FLOOF* & talk about why they're called "VAMPIRE SQUIRRELS" last.They have the largest tail: body size ratio of any mammal on Earth: the tail is *130%* the size the body.
They're only found on the island of Borneo, which is why they're an enigma. They have many properties SHARED with squirrels from Europe & America (baculum, grooved teeth), but almost none of the characteristics of Asian squirrels.Their closest living relatives are in South America.
Bill Maher’s “New Rules” segment from the week before last is about AI, its history, its dangers, and its errors. Maher doesn’t think too much of it, for, after all, AI can’t cure cancer. I think he gives these bots overly short shrift, and neglects the productive things AI really can do. But he then implies that it’s run by sociopaths and could drive humanity extinct.
Without a doubt, the most famous “restaurant” in Savannah is Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room, formerly known as Mrs. Wilkes’ Boarding House (the apostrophe seems to be optional). It is a stupendous all-you-can eat Southern homestyle meal, formerly served to the lodgers at a boarding house. A bit from Wikipedia:
Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room was previously the dining hall of the Wilkes House, a downtown boardinghouse. Today the restaurant is housed on the ground floor of the same historic house, built in 1870, at 107 West Jones Street. The restaurant was described by author William Schemmel as “a treasure hidden away in a historic district town-house”. Its longtime owner, Sema Wilkes, published several cookbooks. As of 2024 her family continued to run the restaurant, serving lunch on weekdays.
We happen to be staying at about 200 Jones Street, so could walk get there in about 7 minutes, though waddling home the obligatory postprandial nap took a while longer!
More:
Mrs. Wilkes’ is noted for its homestyle traditions, in which guests are escorted in shifts of ten into the dining room, where a variety of dishes are freshly laid on one of several long tables. There is no menu; dishes are selected by the restaurant and change daily. Travel Holiday in 1993 recalled that the “tables were set with steaming bowls and platters of tasty Southern food”.
The guests sit at the table and pass the dishes around to one another like a family. There are usually long queues waiting to get in.
Usually?? Try “always”!
We tried to go on Monday, but didn’t make the first seating and so, lest we miss our Monday architecture tour, decided to return yesterday. The first three pictures are from Monday, but the line was the same (long) yesterday. The difference was that yesterday got there a full hour before it opened at 11 a.m., and so were seated as soon as the doors opened.
I’ve put a lovely YouTube video about the place at the bottom of this post, so be sure to watch it. It perfectly captures the Wilkes Dining Experience.
x
The line was longer than this but I wanted to fit in the house as well as the hungry customers.
I wanted Tim to photograph me holding a fried chicken leg (the place is famous for its fried chicken) and, sure enough, my chicken leg was on the sign by the entrance.
The place was about five minutes late in opening—a delay I couldn’t tolerate. Photo by Tim.
They take only case: no credit cards (there’s an ATM nearby).
Our table set up with some (but far from all) of the dishes we got, along with glasses of tea (sweetened, of course) and fresh roses. You can see collard greens, fried okra, macaroni salad, cucumber salad, and, well, I put below of what we were offered.
One of the two dining rooms after it filled up.
Immediately after sitting down, we were served both cornbread and fresh, hot biscuits.
And of course the food and atmosphere were conducive to making friends, and so we chatted with two amiable visitors from the UK, one from Manchester, where Matthew lives. I’m sure this is a particularly unique experience for Brits who aren’t familiar with southern American cuisine (the best in the U.S., in my view, especially if you throw in Texas brisket).
Here are the dishes that were put on the table, but we may have forgotten a few. There were more than two dozen, and you could help yourself to as much as you wanted. Our lunch took about an hour.
Below: my plate, the first of 2.5 platefuls I ate. Clockwise from 11 o’clock: biscuit, cornbread, collard greens, deep-fried okra, macaroni salad, pulled pork, black-eyed peas, stewed cabbage, rice with chorizo, sweetened yams, and fried chicken. As expected, the fried chicken was fantastic: among the best I’ve ever had. A crunchy, crackly exterior enshrouded juicy chicken.
This was, of course, only my first plate, as I wanted to try nearly all the dishes except stewed okra (okra is edible only when deep-friend, and ;then can be very good).
Me eating chicken–a breast this time, though I also had a thigh. Photo by Tim.
Here are Tim and Betsy digging in:
We were offered a choice of desserts: peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream or banana pudding studded with vanilla wafers. Since part of my stomach is reserved for desserts, I asked for (and got) both.
Cobbler:
Banana pudding:
We waddled home after that, and all of us needed a nap. I did not eat a bit of food until this morning, when I ate only two pieces of toast.
If you go to Savannah (and do go when it’s not summer), you MUST go to Mrs. Wilkes’. This is not optional.
Here’s a great video about the place I found on YouTube.
Welcome to a Hump Day (“Gjornade dal gof” in Friulian): April 22, 2026 and, of course, that means it’s Earth Day, now celebrating its 56th birthday—but who remembers? Here is the unofficial Earth Day flag, noted by Wikipedia as created by John McConnell and including The Blue Marble photo taken by the crew of Apollo 17:
Created by Dcoetzee, public domain
There is a Google Doodle for Earth Day; click the screenshot to see where it goes:
It’s also “In God We Trust” Day, marking the day in 1864 when Congress passed an act allowing that religious phrase to appear on U.S. coins. Finally, it’s National Jelly Bean Day, and here are two fun jelly bean facts from Wikipedia:
The “jelly bean rule“ is a rule put forth by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on May 19, 1994.
It says that just because foods are low in fat, cholesterol, and sodium, they cannot claim to be “healthy” unless they contain at least 10 percent of the Daily Value (DV) of: vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, protein, fiber, or iron. The FDA also made a policy that companies could not fortify foods with the sole intent of making that claim.
and
In United States slang during the 1910s and early 1920s, a “jellybean” or “jelly-bean” was a young man who dressed stylishly but had little else to recommend him, similar to the older terms dandy and fop. F. Scott Fitzgerald published a story, The Jelly-Bean, about such a character in 1920.
The next time conversation lags at a gathering, just ask people what the connection is between F. Scott Fitzgerald and jelly beans. You’ll be the life of the party!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 26 Wikipedia page.
Two ships came under attack in the Strait of Hormuz as tensions flared in the waterway, after President Trump said the U.S. would extend its cease-fire with Iran and continue its blockade until Tehran presents “a unified proposal.”
An Iranian gunboat fired on a containership northeast of Oman, before a second vessel reported being fired at off the coast of Iran. The two incidents within hours of each other demonstrate that while the aerial war between the U.S. and Iran is on pause, the fight for control of the strait continues.
President Trump said that the U.S. will extend its cease-fire with Iran and continue the blockade of the country’s ports until its leaders present “a unified proposal.” The move came after Vice President JD Vance paused plans to travel to Pakistan on Tuesday for negotiations with Iran over ending the war, highlighting uncertainty about possible talks. Regional mediators led by Pakistan are racing to try to convince Iran to join the talks, and neither Washington nor Tehran have informed the mediators the talks will be cancelled.
Earlier on Tuesday, U.S. forces boarded an oil tanker in the Indo-Pacific region that was previously sanctioned for working with Iran, the first such move outside the Middle East in connection with the war. Trump, in an interview with CNBC, said he wants to make sure the threat from Iran is ended even if it means the war doesn’t wrap up quickly. “I have all the time in the world,” he said.
“Based on the fact that the Government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so and, upon the request of Field Marshal Asim Munir, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, of Pakistan, we have been asked to hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal. I have therefore directed our Military to continue the Blockade and, in all other respects, remain ready and able, and will therefore extend the Ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump didn’t set an end date for the new cease-fire extension. A previous two-week cease-fire was due to expire Wednesday evening, he said previously, and had signaled earlier this week that he was unlikely to extend it.
The question is this: who does the extension help more: Iran or America? As gas prices rise and Americans get weary of war, it hurts the U.S. But as Iran loses its main source of income, it’s bad for them. And Trump doesn’t have all the time in the world: he has about 2 years and six months (or six months if you count of Republican losses in the midterms).
*Imagine what would happen if two members of Hamas made their way into Israel and one photographed another smashing the door of a synagogue. They’d be heroes! But when one IDF soldier photographed another smashing the head of a Jesus statue in southern Lebanon, it gave the whole world an excuse to damn Israel (the NYT reported it in detail), even though this is totally atypical behavior for the IDF, reflecting a couple of bad actors. And, sure enough, the two IDF soldiers were jailed:
Other troops who stood by but did nothing to intervene, the military said, have also been summoned and could face disciplinary action.
The military replaced the damaged statue with a gleaming new sculpture of the crucifixion of Christ and released a photo of it.
The extraordinarily swift administration of military justice by Israel was a tacit acknowledgment of the reputational damage the incident had done to the country, more than the seriousness of the crime.
The incident occurred in Debl, a Christian village in Lebanon a few miles from the Israeli border. The village is in an area that the Israeli military seized as a buffer zone before a cease-fire with Hezbollah went into effect late last week.
The photograph surfaced online Sunday, sparking widespread outrage in Israel and beyond, and demands for harsh punishment of the soldiers.
Experts said the act of vandalism reflected both ignorance and a growing hostility to Christians among some Israeli Jews, who see Christianity as a form of idolatry or Christian proselytizing as a threat.
The incident also prompted immediate and profuse apologies from Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its foreign minister, Gideon Saar.
In a statement Tuesday, Israel’s military expressed its “deep regret” and said that its chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, had condemned the incident as “a moral failure.”
I’m no expert, but this is the first I’ve heard of a fulminating hatred of Christianity among Israeli Jews. At any rate, it shows the very high (and double) standards to which the IDF and Israel are held compared to other countries. One or two rotten apples in the military suddenly tars the whole enterprise. But of course that is the way it has always gone.
*This is a surprise: The U.S. Department of Justice has charged the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with financial crimes, namely defrauding donors by misusing their money. As you may remember, the SPLC was once a respectable organization uncovering and enforcing civil rights for all groups. But it then fell on hard times, with accusations of misusing funds and selectively leveling charges based on ideology, There were mass layoffs and the leadership quit or was fired. The latest news, however, seems to be a very hard blow (article archived here):
The Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that has long tracked hate groups, on Tuesday with financial crimes, accusing it of defrauding donors by using their money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations.
At a news conference announcing the charges, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that from 2014 to 2023, the group made payments totaling more than $3 million to people who were affiliated with extremist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America. The law center, he added, was “doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism, but funding it.”
The indictment, however, offers little to support the notion that the group’s payments to informants was meant to aid the extremist groups they had infiltrated.
That last paragraph, however, seems less than accurate in light of this:
Prosecutors describe how one informant, which the law center refers to as a field source, “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the S.P.L.C.”
That rally included torch-wielding marchers chanting antisemitic slogans, and violent clashes that culminated with one participant ramming his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a woman and leaving at least 19 others injured.
The informant “made racist postings under the supervision of the S.P.L.C. and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees,” the charging document said. Between 2015 and 2023, the informant received more than $270,000 from the group, the indictment said.
Is that not helping the organization?
The center faces charges of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. No individuals were charged in the indictment, though Mr. Blanche said the investigation was continuing. He accused the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”
Luana sent a tweet thread with more information, if it can be trusted:
Context: The SPLC spent more than $3 million in donor funds on informants from 2014-2023.
The crux of the DOJ’s case is that the SPLC did so duplicitously in violation of the law. pic.twitter.com/eo7dp35YXC
That thread also alleges that the SPLC set up dummy corporations to funnel the money to a series of extremist organizations. I guess this all depends on whether it is considered illegal to use donor money to pay off informants, especially if the dosh somehow furthered the goals of the organizations that the SPLC was infiltrating. We shall see.
*The Free Press describes a new literary genre, “Gazology,” in which, says author Matti Friedman, the whole world is seen through the lens of the war between Israel and Hamas, and to the detriment of Israel. Whole sections of bookstores in the West are devoted to these tomes. Here’s one example:
It’s likely that much Western culture, journalism, and politics in the coming years will be downstream of these books and the ideology behind them. Students in disciplines from anthropology to medicine will be assigned these works and invited to see the world’s problems through the lens of “Gaza.” For this reason, the genre is important. What follows is a survey of five representative samples of the volumes in question, in an attempt to sketch the contours of this expanding body of writing and to understand what it is trying to say.
. . .The memorable cover of the genre’s most popular title, and the first one I read, shows a stylized girl with a bomb about to drop on her head. The author, Omar El Akkad, was born in Egypt and immigrated to Canada, where he reported for TheGlobe and Mail before moving to the United States. He’s now an American citizen living in Oregon.
In the pages of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad watches the war in Gaza unfold in portrayals on television and online, describing it as an era-defining evil that people will eventually claim to have opposed, like the crimes of the Nazis or the conquistadors. The war resonates for him as someone living with the displacement of his own migration from the Islamic world as a teen, with a heightened sensitivity to racism, and with the abiding discomfort of a Muslim man living in North America.
The book’s title, particularly the word this, led me to expect an account of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, or the war itself, but the strangest aspect of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is the author’s slim interest in any of those topics. We follow his travels in Oregon, and in Montreal. He listens to Nirvana. His backyard deck collapses in a way that feels emotionally significant, an episode that gets more space in the book than the entire ideology of Hamas—including the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews in pursuit of the supremacy of Islam—which is never mentioned at all. He writes sentences like “We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance,” and “Fear obscures the necessity of its causing.” His daughter, we learn, “turns seven soon, a hundred in dragon years. She is made of dreaming.” The book won last year’s National Book Award for nonfiction.
El Akkad complains about racism from officials on the U.S.-Canada border, about the hardships of the writer’s life, and about the immoral Israeli investments of people who once gave him a Canadian book prize worth $100,000, which he doesn’t mention giving back. “I’ve sat through a wildly uncomfortable book tour interview once after I joked that I write all my novels in Arabic and then run them through Google Translate, and the interviewer believed me,” he tells us. We’re meant to sneer at this prejudice and sympathize with its victim, but why wouldn’t the interviewer believe him? And why does an author claiming to have discovered the age’s defining evil seem to be concerned primarily with himself? This was confusing at first, but as I read Gazology more deeply, I realized this approach is a characteristic of the genre: In these books, Gaza is not a subject but a stage.
The author gives no indication of ever having set foot in Gaza or in Israel, and when he talks about witnessing events, the recurring phrase is “I watch footage.” Some events are “witnessed” in this fashion—that is, via images that are subject to Hamas censorship and intimidation in Gaza, often curated by Western activists practicing journalism as agitprop, and then supercharged by the various Qatari, Chinese, and Russian information campaigns bending our online algorithms. Other events are not witnessed but ignored to the extent possible, most notably the October 7 massacre that began the war. In what turns out to be another feature of the genre, El Akkad sidesteps the butchery of that day by homing in on one false story promulgated after the attack about Israeli babies who were beheaded or put in an oven. That didn’t happen. But a reader doesn’t learn what did happen: namely, a premeditated mass murder committed by teams of terrorists going house to house through Israeli communities, burning families in their bedrooms, kidnapping toddlers and grandparents, and gunning down more than 350 young people at a music festival. To a reader of this book the motivation behind the attack remains mysterious. Though it was carried out by the Islamic Resistance Movement, known by the Arabic acronym Hamas, the words Islam or Islamic appear in the entire book a total of four times. The word genocide, on the other hand, appears more than 40 times.
There are four more examples, of course. The reason for the popularity of this genre, of course, is because Gazans and Palestinians are seen as The Colonized, people of color who have been victimized by “white adjacent” Jews. It’s the world turned upside down
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Princess demands her due:
Andrzej: What are you doing here? Hili: Waiting for applause.
From Give Me a Sign. Even I am not enough of a curmudgeon to carry around a bunch of these pre-made signs:
From Masih; another political prisoner executed in Iran:
Today, right after the call of “Allahu Akbar” at dawn, the regime in Iran, placed a noose around this young man’s neck and kicked the chair from under his feet, so he would struggle, suffocate, and die.
Yes this is happening in 21st century. They executed him because he went to… pic.twitter.com/4uAcRRVT9L
From Luana, who says that this book was “banished from Amazon for telling a dystopian story of France after immigration in the distant future”. This article gives more information; the book definitely appeals to the Right, but Amazon is not supposed to censor books based on ideology.
In an egregious act of censorship, Amazon has removed @VaubanBooks‘ new edition of The Camp of the Saints, by the prize-winning French novelist Jean Raspail, from its US site. Since I wrote the critical introduction for the new edition, this turns me into a banned writer!
Yesterday involved a lot of walking, much of it with no destination, but I did get in 12,000 steps. Our plan was to take a two-hour walking architecture tour at 9:30, followed by a search for lunch. Unfortunately, my friend Tim got lost on our walk to the tour’s starting point, and we missed the whole tour. The plan then changed to an attempt to have lunch at the famous Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room, an all-you-can eat dining experience with great Southern food. But we missed that, too: we found we could change our architecture tour to 1 p.m., and so missed the first seating at Mrs. Wilkes’s.
So it was back to Ogelthorpe Square for the second tour attempt, which succeeded. In between, we grabbed a forgettable lunch at a Mexican restaurant and some excellent ice cream at a famous place.
First, the street where we’re staying again: Jones Street, which our tour guide called “The most beautiful street in Savannah”, lined as it is with oak trees and old houses:
And a portion of the long line at Mrs. Wilkes’. This is an every day occurrence as the place is famous and it doesn’t take reservations. After one seating, you have to wait until a table vacates (you sit with nine strangers) before you can get in, and we missed the first seating. In the meantime, Tim managed to get us on the 1 p.m. tour without paying extra.
After lunch, the first stop was Leopold’s Ice Cream, founded in 1919. From Wikipedia:
In August 2004, Leopold’s moved to its present home on East Broughton Street, in Savannah’s downtown, where it is known for regularly having a line of customers waiting outside. Stratton Leopold hired Hollywood production designer Dan Lomino to recreate his father’s soda fountain from the original store. The ice cream is made, using the same recipes developed by his father and uncle, at a former wholesale florist building at 37th and Price Streets and brought over to the store as necessary.
Leopold’s signature flavor is tutti frutti, a favorite of Savannah’s Johnny Mercer, who worked in the shop as a ten-year old, sweeping floors, while former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s favorite was the butter pecan. Carter wrote the foreword to Leopold’s Ice Cream: A Century of Tasty Memories, 1919–2019 (Melanie Bowden Simón, 2020).
The outside:
The inside; I didn’t see a soda fountain (perhaps this counter is the remains), but they had a gazillion flavors of ice cream. And yes, there was a line outside.
The newest flavors were also listed outside, and I immediately decided to get the top two, neither of which I’d had before:
My double scoop of lavender and cherry blossom (I ascertained first that they used real flowers). It was terrific: high in butterfat content, dense, and with very subtle flavors. Two scoops after lunch made me walk slower on the architecture tour!
Our first stop was the house of Juliette Gordon Low (1860-1927), who married an uncaring git named William Mackay Lowe, who often cheated on her. During her long periods of being alone, Low learned metalworking, pottery, and other skills. She in fact made this wrought-iron gate at her house:
Low had a tumultuous life, and was almost cheated out of her inheritance as her husband left his money to his mistress. But the will was successfully contested, Low got the dosh, and looked for a worthy project to occupy her. Her project was to found the American Girl Guides, which became the Girl Scouts of America. Eighteen girls were enrolled, and the organization continues today.
Below is a photo from Wikipedia labeled, “Juliette Gordon Low (center) standing with two Girl Scouts, Robertine McClendon (left) and Helen Ross (right).” They’re all in Girl Scout uniform. We were told that every summer Girl Scouts from all over America make a pigrimate to visit Low’s house in Savannah.
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Here’s the tallest structure in downtown Savannah, the Independent Presbyterian Church, with a steeple that’s 227 feet and 6 inches tall. Now, by law, no structure in the town can be higher than four stories. They take their historic preservation seriously here.
The bench where Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) catches a floating white feather (symbolizing the “randomness” of fate) was located right next to the church above, but although the bench was a Hollywood prop and is no longer there, tourists still come in droves to be photographed at the bench site. That famous scene is below:
A typical scene: Southern live oak (Quercus virginiana) covered with Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides), a flowering epiphyte that’s neither a moss nor Spanish.
Another epiphyte on an oak tree, Pleopeltis sp. or “resurrection fern,” The AI Google search explains the name:
The resurrection fern (Pleopeltis polypodioides) is named for its remarkable ability to survive long periods of drought by curling up its fronds, turning grey-grown, and appearing dead. When exposed to moisture—even just a little water—it rapidly uncurls and turns vibrant green within 24 hours, appearing to “resurrect”.
There is a drought in Savannah now, so you see the fern in its moribund state:
Below is the Green-Meldrim Mansion, built in 1853 and a National Historic Landmark. The photo below the house explains its historical significance as Union General Sherman’s headquarters in Savannah (upper floor, two window to the right). While Sherman burned much of Georgia during his infamous 1864 March to the Sea that pretty much ended the Civil War, he spared Savannah because it expelled its Confederate troops and surrendered to the Union Army.
Click to enlarge:
One of the many buildings of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), one of the world’s most famous art schools. Their philosophy is to have art taught by those who make art, not by academics, and I’m told they have a 99% placement rate of its graduates. The school is so wealthy that it participates in Savannah’s ongoing efforts to buy and refurbish historic buildings exactly as they were: a laborious and expensive effort.
In fact it occupies many of the buildings it’s bought and refurbished: this is Poetter Hall, the National Guard Armory in the late nineteenth century. It was SCAD’s first academic building.
A monument to (and burial place) of Casimir Pulaski, a Pole who moved to America and fought for the colonial army during the American Revolutionary War, saving George Washington’s life. He’s a much beloved Polish-American.
Below is the Mercer House (now the Mercer House Museum), completed in 1868. It’s famous for reasons set out in Wikipedia:
The house was the scene of the 1981 killing of Danny Hansford by the home’s owner Jim Williams, a story that is retold in the 1994 John Berendt book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The house is also featured in the movie adaptation of the book, released three years later. Williams held annual Christmas parties at Mercer House, on the eve of the Savannah Cotillion Club‘s debutante ball, which were the highlight of many people’s social calendars. Williams had an “in” box and an “out” box for his invitations, depending on whether or not the person was in Williams’s favor at the time.
The site of the killing was the room on the first floor whose window is bottome left.
Williams went through four trials for the killing, but no jury in Savannah would convict this popular man, so he esceped punishment, though he did spend some time in jail awaiting trial.
The house was build by the great-grandfather of lyricist Johnny Mercer (“Moon River,” “And the Angels Sing,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” etc.) but nobody named Mercer ever lived in the house.
Because of the movie “Forrest Gump,” Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and the subsequent movie, tourism in Savannah has increased by several-fold in recent years.
Another Historic District house. I can find its picture on Google Image Search, but not its name:
The Armstrong-Kessler Mansion, once owned by Jim Williams (see above): a lousy panoramic shot due to the absence of a viewpoint that didn’t endanger me. From Wikipedia:
The Armstrong Kessler Mansion (formerly known as Armstrong House) is a nationally significant example of Italian Renaissance Revival architectural style located in the Savannah Historic District. The structure was built between 1917 and 1919 for the home of Savannah magnate George Ferguson Armstrong (1868–1924). It was owned by the Armstrong family from 1919 to 1935. Afterward, the structure and grounds served as the campus of Armstrong Junior College. Threatened with demolition, the Historic Savannah Foundation purchased the Armstrong House along with five other threatened historic buildings from the college for $235,000 in 1967. Once saved, Historic Savannah Foundation sold the Mansion (and Hershel V. Jenkins Hall) at the exact purchase price to preservationist and antique dealer Jim Williams who restored it as his home. Eventually, both were sold to a major Savannah law firm as offices.
It’s HUGE and has lovely gardens that are not open to the public. Our guide got to see them, though, and showed us photos.
Finally, a Jew church in Savannah! Yes, a Gothic Revival style synagogue, the only one I know of. Congregation Mickve Israel was founded in 1735, almost immediately after Savannah was settled. It was formed by Sephardic Jews and is now a reform temple . The building dates from 1876, and is built to look like a church as the Jews didn’t want to stick out in Christian Savannah.
A note from Wikipedia:
The Congregation was the first Jewish community to receive a letter from the President of the United States. In response to a letter sent by Levi Sheftall, the congregation’s president, congratulating George Washington on his election as the first President, Washington replied, “To the Hebrew Congregation of the City of Savannah, Georgia”:
… May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land – whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation – still continue to water them with the dews of heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.
“That people whose God is Jehovah”—as opposed to those people whose God was the REAL God!
The plaque outside (click to enlarge).
We had no food ot note yesterday save the ice cream, but in about an hour from this writing we’re off to Mrs. Wilkes’s Boarding House for a gigantic Southern meal
