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.
One generous contributor has come forward with some wildlife photos: mathematician Abby Thompson from UC Davis. Abby’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
This is a grab-bag of photos from Northern California from the summer (with one exception).
Cervus canadensis nannodes. A particularly contented Tule elk from the Point Reyes preserve:
Cornu aspersum (garden snail)- As a gardener I abhor them but looked at closely they are beautiful. They were introduced to California in the 1850s to be made into escargot, and now plague gardeners up and down the state:
Once the extreme tides of the summer pass and there are no “good” low tides, I start looking through a microscope at bits of riffraff collected from the beach. It’s astonishing how many different creatures can live in a cubic inch of washed-up kelp holdfast.
Thetis vagina (twin-sailed salp). One of the seemingly endless types of blobby transparent things drifting around the ocean. Lying on the sand it looks like a scrap of Saran Wrap. Once revived in some sea water and under magnification the ghostly internal structure appears. From google AI: “Despite their jelly-like look, salps belong to the subphylum Tunicata (sea squirts), making them chordates that are evolutionarily more closely related to humans and vertebrates than to actual jellyfish.” Cousins!
Phragmatopoma californica(California sandcastle worm). The worm is the curly orange thing on the left, which connects to the pink tentacles on the right underneath the structure with purple flecks, which is all that’s left of the tube the worm calls home (it’s ok, they can rebuild):
Close up showing the worm’s operculum – the “lid” of the tube, which the worm pulls down to close off the top of the tube when it retreats inside. I’ve posted a picture of this species before; my excuse is that this one’s tube, usually just made of sand, has an interesting feature:
A close-up of the tube remnants, showing some Foraminifera, amazing 1-celled organisms. The white ones in the center that look kind-of like a snail shell are Haynesina depressula (thanks inaturalist expert!) and there are several other types in there, harder to pick out. I think the purple bits are pieces of sea urchin spines. An artistic sandcastle worm!:
Genus Elphidium– another foram. This one was tangled in a shred of bryozoan. It’s hard for me to believe this is a single cell, but I guess life is complicated:
Class Ostracoda – the things with little white dots. These are tiny crustaceans, mere specks. There’s a foram in this photo, too:
Another ostracod- from 2025, not a great photo, included because it’s the first ostracod I ever saw. At first I thought I was looking at an infant mussel. Then it sprouted legs and started running around like a crazy cartoon mussel. Quite a shock:
Genus Corambe (nudibranch, a baby), surrounded by its bryozoan prey. I think this ID is correct- its coloration is not typical of the genus. The nudibranch is so small that it looks slightly like it’s going to be attacked by the bryozoa, rather than vice-versa:
Sunset over the water:
Most photos taken with an iPhone precariously clamped to the eyepiece of an antique microscope.
Welcome to the tail end of the week: Friday, October 9, 2016, and Submarine-Hoagie-Hero-Grinder Day, and that’s all the names of America’s beloved long sandwich. But here’s a Mexican version I had in Puebla in 2018. It was part of a multicourse meal.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats would move swiftly to reverse Trump-era cuts to healthcare spending and bring down households’ costs, expressing confidence that his party would win a majority during President Trump’s final two years in office.
The New York Democrat, speaking with a group of reporters, laid out some of his key priorities Wednesday should his party win back control of the House in November’s midterm elections, while also nodding toward planned investigations of GOP “crooks” but giving few details.
Jeffries said he was “very confident” the party will win enough seats to regain a majority, while cautioning it “remains to be seen what that looks like in terms of the number of seats.”
Democrats need a net gain of three seats to win back the House, which would put Jeffries in a strong position to become the nation’s first Black speaker. A large majority could give him more ability to keep Democrats’ agenda on track and push back against any small group of holdouts in the party.
Current House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) has predicted that Republicans will defy historical trends and keep the majority, despite the party of the president almost always losing seats in the midterms. He has cast Democrats as wanting to roll out socialist policies that will hurt voters. Election watchers currently see Democrats as favored to take the House and having a good shot at winning back the Senate as well.
Asked about working with Trump as a potential House speaker, Jeffries said, “We will cross that bridge when we get to it, based on what happens on Nov. 3, and then it will fall into the hands of the caucus to determine who is put in position to help lead us forward.”
Jeffries said a Democratic-led House would tackle Trump’s sweeping 2025 tax-and-spending law that cut taxes and slashed more than $1 trillion in healthcare spending. He said Democrats would be united around reversing cuts to Medicaid and restoring expired enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits “right out of the gate.”
Any legislation would face a possible filibuster in the Senate and Trump’s veto pen, setting up possible policy showdowns headed into the next presidential election.
It looks pretty likely that Democrats will capture both houses of Congress in November, and I’m happy with what Jeffries says are Democratic priorities. Further, Jeffries is one of the few Democratic Representatives who openly supports Israel,but not without criticism. Remember, though, that Trump still has veto power over a Democratic Congress, and he won’t hesitate to use it.
Pentagon commanders abruptly evacuated a fleet of long-range B-1 bombers from a British air base over the weekend when fears spiked of a potential Iranian drone attack against planes and personnel at the facility, according to two people familiar with the decision and a British official.
The two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters, said about a dozen B-1 bombers were moved from Royal Air Force Fairford in response to multiple streams of intelligence warning about possible attacks. Particularly concerning was the possibility of a swarm drone attack similar to one Ukraine launched against Russia in June 2025.
In that attack, known as “Operation Spiderweb,” Ukraine smuggled more than 100 small armed drones into Russia concealed in cargo trucks and stationed near air bases; the operation destroyed an estimated one-third of Moscow’s long-range bomber fleet.
Concerns for the security of the U.S. bombers began to rise in late September, when police arrested five men in white vans outside of RAF Fairford, although they found gasoline, not drones or explosives. Top U.S. and British officials said Iran might have paid them, but to do what is unclear. All five, as well as a sixth suspect detained later, were released on bail.
British police said Tuesday that they had made a seventh arrest in the case, detaining a 22-year-old British national in London on suspicion of planning an act of terrorism.
. . .The people familiar with the decision to move the aircraft noted also that the long-range conventional bombers could still launch from U.S. bases as needed in operations against Iran.
Britain has faced dozens of plots traced to Iran in recent years, but no details have surfaced from these cases to suggest that Iran is capable of orchestrating a sophisticated swarm drone attack on a high-security military bases used by American bombers.
Attacks attributed to Iran in recent years have mainly been low-level sabotage operations or violent plots involving proxies recruited from criminal networks on social media platforms. Even the arrests near RAF Fairford ended with the release of suspects after no explosives or other weapons were detected.
But if Iran was behind the massing of suspicious vehicles and personnel at the very edge of the air base, it may have been sending signals that it is capable of taking at least “the initial steps” of such an operation in British territory, even it stops short of carrying them out, said Ali Vaez, deputy Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group.
Military drones can now travel up to 2500 km (about 1500 miles), about the distance from Turkey to England, so they would have had to have been launched from either within England or from some European country. As for the “warning shot” scenario, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: you don’t need to get a bunch of your people arrested just to show that you are serious, particularly if you cant even carry out the threatened act.
*I haven’t thought of the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine as a particularly heterodox journal, but the latest issue (ahead of print) is entirely about the politicization of science, with most of the articles being critical of that trend, but some approving of some mixture of science and politics, but prescribing limits. Click on the cover below to go to the list of free articles, and I’ll put the contents (with links) below. You’ll have heard of a few names:
*I can’t say that this headline at the Free Press made me happy, but it didn’t surprise me: “Ross Douthat: I’m writing a column for the Free Press.” Douthat is a conservative, of course, which doesn’t violate the FP’s stand of being centrist, but he’s also way religious, and the venue. like many MSM sites, is getting softer and softer on religion. Frankly, I’m tired of seeing superstition presented unquestioningly in the NYT and the Washington Post, and the FP is following the trend. I can’t remember reading any article espousing nonbelief in these venues in donkey’s years. Here, let Ross speak. And now he’s a correspondent for 60 Minutes!
. . . . here I am, six years later [Douthat had discussed the possibility of a centrist site with Bari Weiss back then], about to start a column for a thriving general-interest magazine with a remarkable cast of writers and an independent perspective on the world. And it’s a privilege to be here.
When Bari and I had our conversation, I had just published a book entitled The Decadent Society, which argued that Western civilization had slipped into an age of repetition, drift, and uncomfortable stagnation.
Because God likes to amuse Himself at my expense, the book appeared just as the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world and the artificial intelligence revolution began in earnest. The decadent patterns I had described in that book haven’t disappeared: Human beings are still having ever-fewer children, political futility still grips the United States and Europe, superhero sequels still bestride the movie box office. But they coexist with more hopeful and more apocalyptic trends—with technological breakthroughs and signs of artistic and religious and political ferment, but also with growing extremism, mounting fears of human obsolescence, and dark post-human trends.
My hope is that my writing here will help make sense of all these developments, in a landscape where both cultural renaissance and total dystopia seem more plausible than they did when The Free Press was just an interesting media idea.
This is not my day job. I am a newly minted correspondent for 60 Minutes, where the goal is to ask probing questions, not sling political hot takes. If all goes well, this column will complement that work, staying a little bit above the partisan fray while giving readers useful frameworks (or, sometimes, truly eccentric frameworks) through which to understand our strange-and-getting-stranger century.
I think that aspiration is in keeping with the larger mission of The Free Press: an independent-minded vantage point on a world that defies simplistic categories, tidy ideological expectations, and easy certainty about what is normal and plausible and real.
I look forward to exploring all this complexity with you every week in these pages.
All this sounds okay except that at the NYT he wrote about religion constantly, and, as a pious Catholic, believes literally in the Nicene Creed, which asserts that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. Here: from a 2025 essay by Douthat:
When I say the Nicene Creed, I mean it. I am open to hidden complexities and unexpected syntheses, but in the end I think that God has acted in history through Jesus of Nazareth in a way that differs from every other tradition and experience and revelation, and the Gospels should therefore exert a kind of general interpretative control over how we read all the other religious data. I think the New Testament is just clearly different from other religious texts in a way that stands out and demands attention, that the figure of Jesus likewise stands out among religious founders, that together the sources and the story and the Nazarene Himself all seem God-touched to a degree unmatched by any of their rivals. So where there is uncertainty, tension, a wager to be made, I make my bet on Jesus.
Christopher Hitchens once asked me in the kitchen of a house in D.C.: “If Jesus did rise from the dead, what would that really prove?” The easy answer is that it should at least make someone like Hitchens a lot more interested in the truth claims of religion. But really I think one can go much further than this, for reasons connected to the assumption that God is not trying to trick us, that if the universe offers us clues to its purpose we should follow them with confidence, that the path to truth may be extremely hard, but it shouldn’t be deceptive or impossible.
Given that Douthat has touted Christianity in at least two pro-Christian pieces for the Free Press (here and here), we can expect him to crank out more of them as a regular columnist. If the FP really wants to be an objective news site, it’s incumbent on them to give voice to nonbelievers. After all, the evidence is on their side, not Douthat’s.
*If you’re in the mood for sleuthing, the NYT has an AI-generated photo (below) that is hard to tell as a fake, but there are a few subtle clues. If you subscribe,click on the photo below to see them, or see the clues without details at the archived version:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the gang at Listy is still lazy:
Andrzej: We need to get moving because we’re falling behind with our work. Hili: That’s what happens when you’re lazy and spend so much time walking the dog.
In Polish:
Ja: Musimy się zmobilizować, bo mamy zaległości w pracy.
Hili: Tak się mści to twoje lenistwo i długie spacery z psem.
From Masih; this Iranian girl needs both better food and some medical attention:
Want to know why Iranians are furious at the Islamic Republic, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis?
Watch this little Baluchi girl in Iran. Look at her infected eyes. Listen to what she eats for lunch and dinner.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic reportedly pledged $200 MILLION to Hezbollah supporters, after pouring billions into Hezbollah over the years.
Billions for Hezbollah. Hunger and misery for Iranian children.
They call it the “Axis of Resistance.” Resistance to what? Feeding your own children? We called them terrorists. Because we have lived in the Middle East.
From Luana; once again biological women are forced to compete in sports against biological men. But this pair decided not to compete, as their principles were more important.
Sierra and Charlie are breaking their silence. The 16-year-old cross-country runners chose to WALK OFF the starting line rather than race a biological boy from Camas, Washington. https://t.co/NYyhSa5Cvm
From Bryan. Individual monarch butterflies can now be tagged and traced, and oy, do they fly far!
Super exciting stuff coming from #ProjectMonarch ! This collaboration, forged by the @cmpsciencecentr and @CellTrackTech and now over 70 collaborators – is uncovering the mysteries of monarch migration at an unprecedented level of detail! Download the app and follow along live!
This thing is insane. The Cannonball Pulsar is travelling at 1127 km/s and has moved 53 light years from its formation supernova. It will eventually leave the galaxy. It is currently 6,500 light years away in Cassiopeia, rotating 8.6682 times a second and has a 13 light year wake tail!
Here’s another pop hit rendered only with voice and guitar: “Eternal Flame,” written by Tom Kelly, Susannah Hoffs, and Billy Steinberg, and here performed by the lead singer of the Bangles, Susannah Hoffs. The song was released in 1989, topping the Billboard charts as well as charts in many other countries. It’s a lovely song, with the lyrics by Hoffs—the object of every young Jewish boy’s desires in that era. I have no idea who the guitarist is, but perhaps a reader knows.
I prefer the live and simpler version to those by the Bangles; this one comes from 1996, when Hoffs was 37.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani dined at a Palestinian restaurant chain blasted for being “openly genocidal” against Jews on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.
Hizzoner ate dinner at Ayat Hinds Hall on the Upper West Side — part of a chain whose sister restaurant in Brooklyn was blasted for featuring a menu section entitled “From the River to the Sea,” in the wake of the 2023 attacks.
The restaurant is named after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian child who was killed by IDF forces in Gaza in Jan. 2024, and also pays homage to the anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University, who renamed Hamilton Hall “Hind’s Hall” when they took over the building.
Yesterday, New York City’s Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, issued a statement commemorating the October 7, 2023 attack of Hamas on Israel. The problem for me and many others was the the commemoration was more about the depravity of Israel than of Hamas, and more sympathetic to the Palestinians to the Israelis. Here’s the statement as given by the Mayor’s Office:
This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them—all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.
Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.
There you have it: 49 words devoted to Hamas’s attack, and 163 words on the crimes of Israel, including an erroneous statement about the death toll as well as inclusion of the Three Big Lies about Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide.
And it’s not that different from the statement he made on October 7 of last year:
Yesterday’s small-beer “commemoration” was decried by Jews and Jewish organizations, but what is surprising is that Mamdani was booed for it—by supporters of Palestine! When I first saw the headline below in the NYT, I thought, “Well, of course the Jews harbor anger and bitterness”about the statement, but then I learned that, no, it was supporters of Palestine who were angry and bitter. Click to read, or see an archived version of the article here:
An excerpt, and I have to say it brought me a frisson of pleasure:
It seemed inevitable that the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks would touch off tensions for Zohran Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel and the first Muslim mayor of a city that is 12 percent Jewish.
But Wednesday erupted with such anger and emotion that it seemed to overwhelm any efforts to solemnly mark the deadliest day in Israeli history.
Mr. Mamdani began the day shortly before 9 a.m. by issuing a statement that was meant to acknowledge the Oct. 7 anniversary but almost immediately caused an uproar among some Jewish leaders, who said it minimized Israeli suffering in the Hamas-led attacks.
It took a turn roughly 12 hours later at a vigil organized by Israeli peace activists in Union Square in Manhattan, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupted the event to jeer the mayor. He appeared ashen and upset as he left, without addressing the crowd, flanked by his security detail as he walked to a waiting S.U.V. at 8:50 p.m.
The events raised questions about whether Mr. Mamdani, who energized his campaign with his embrace of the Palestinian cause and ardent criticism of Israel, can now, as mayor, unite New Yorkers whose emotions remain inflamed over the issue.
“This is a moment when people are looking to see if we have the kind of leadership that brings people together, lowers the temperature and makes everyone feel respected,” said Mark Treyger, the chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council. “And today was just not it.”
The mayor, who is known for his broad, effervescent smile, seemed especially stung by the opposition to him expressed by the pro-Palestinian crowd in Union Square, given his consistent support of their cause.
During the vigil, he stared stone-faced, and at times looked crestfallen, as the activists chanted in support of Hamas, called for the deaths of Israeli soldiers and denounced him as a “traitor,” many citing his meetings with President Trump or his efforts to build ties with Jewish leaders.
“Zohran, you coward!” someone yelled from the crowd, which numbered in the hundreds. Others yelled, “Zohran is a sellout!”
The chickens have come home to roost: now Mamdani, who’s tried to walk a fine line between the Jews and Muslims, is being booed by his own ilk—and it bothers him.
I have no doubt that Mamdani is not only anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, but also suspect he’s an Islamist and may even be anti-Semitic.
There are more Jews than Muslims in NYC: Grok estimates about 960,000 Jews and between 250,000 and 700,000 Muslims.)Yet about a third of Jews who voted for Mayor in 2025 voted for Mamdani. Granted, they may have been “progressives” taken in by Mamdani’s promises of free daycare, free public transportation, and subsidized grocery stores, but in the end they’re like chickens voting for KFC. You just know that when Mamadani goes home at night to his antisemitic wife Rama Duwaji, they don’t sit around and praise Israel!
Here’s a news clip showing some of the booing at the candlelight vigil.
Just about an hour ago, the Nobel folks gave the 2026 Literature Prize to Canadian writer and poet Anne Carson, and I admit I’d never heard of her. I should have: as Wikipedia notes,
With more than twenty books of writings and translations published to date, Carson has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters. In 2026, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
She’s produced over twenty books, including translations.
The official award by the Nobel Foundation gives this rationale:
“for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.
And the Nobel’s “biobibliography” adds this:
Carson once described boredom as her arch-enemy, and it is a state she confronts with drastic humour and wit. The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, published in 2001, tells of a cutting and sardonic row with a deceitful husband, its twenty-nine episodes each opening with lines of verse by the romantic poet John Keats. Keats’s sublime words about beauty being truth are, in brutal yet playful fashion, juxtaposed with this exhausting relationship drama.
An unforgettable work of Carson’s is Nox (2010), written in memory of her brother Michael, who was mysteriously absent prior to his death in Denmark in 2000. Palpable here is a deep sense of loss that works its way up from below. The result is a creation as sculptural as it is literary, an epitaph in the form of a box containing an accordion-fold-out of pictures, letters and other written texts dedicated to her dead brother. There is moreover a third voice that provides temporal depth in the shape of the Roman poet Catullus, with his famous elegy 101 in honour of his own departed brother, who like Michael died on foreign soil. Present also is Carson’s moving translation of the poem.
Throughout her entire authorship, Carson with a light touch explores the possibilities of writing, a process by which the literary sketch has become of particular value to her. Bearing witness to this is Float (2016), a work consisting of twenty-two chapbooks on different subjects, capable of being read in any order. Another is Wrong Norma from 2024, a diverse combination of texts with a strongly performative aspect in which Carson crosses over into various artistic and academic fields. Her collaborations with visual artists and choreographers and with opera and theatre directors demonstrate the freedom with which she relates to literary expectations and rule systems. It is this that lies behind the outstanding importance her work since the 1990s has had for the international art and literature scene.
Renée Szostek guessed Carson in our contest, and if there’s no earlier winner for the Peace Prize, awarded tomorrow, Szostak will be the winner.
There will be a shortish version of Hili today as I’m not feeling that well (yes, the eye, which is ok but focusing makes me nauseated).
Welcome to Thursday, October 8, 2026 and National Pierogi Day. I eat a lot of pierogi in Poland, and here’s some blueberry dessert pierogi I had in a restaurant:
There is a Google Doodle today honoring World Space Week. Click to see where it goes:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 8 Wikipedia page.
As I have mentioned several times before, this website seems moribund: comments are few, and the content doesn’t seem to appeal to potential readers. This is depressing, and it can’t continue at the present rate. I am not seeking reassurance here, as I write what I want. This is just a notice. Few people send in readers’ wildlife (it used to be a daily feature), and comments are waning. All the signs are that the website’s life is moving peacefully to its close.
Once upon a time, the idea that the world was growing stupider was mostly confined to the realm of dyspeptic reactionary polemic. But nowadays, the idea is increasingly mainstream. The belief that smartphones are “rotting our brains” is a widely repeated cliché. Data seems to corroborate this feeling, too: Studies have shown declines in IQ over the past two decades, with the sharpest drops among age brackets that use their phones the most. Students themselves have reported since the 2010s that they have difficulty concentrating and remembering. One study found that even having a phone turned off on a table nearby may be enough to impair a student’s academic performance.
But perhaps another reason that people feel this way is that cultural output — not just short-form videos or Instagram posts but films, television, music and books — is becoming simplified, too. The smartphone’s constant distraction and hostility to complex thought is reshaping almost every aspect of culture. Entertainment and the arts are undergoing what might be termed a Great Simplification.
Take the Netflix film “Irish Wish,” which ranked No. 1 on the streaming platform following its release in 2024. The film stars Lindsay Lohan as an American book editor named Maddie, who travels to Ireland dreaming of marriage to a hunky best-selling author (a genre of person more common in films than in life). As writer Will Tavlin observed, as you watch, you may notice that the characters are explaining what is going on, as if you are too slow to understand. In one scene, Maddie says to her lover, “We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” He replies, “Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”
In a world of constant distraction, scriptwriters can no longer rely on audiences to pay attention. Executives at Netflix have reportedly demanded simpler scripts in which characters repeatedly announce what they are doing, so that scrolling viewers can keep track of what is going on.
According to actor Matt Damon, filmmakers are told: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” The result is the inverse of the traditional creative writing advice “show, don’t tell.” It is hard to sustain interiority or nuance in a film in which every action must be clearly signposted. Not every Netflix film needs to be a masterpiece of insinuation and subtext, and good, challenging films are still being made — but nonetheless, complexity seems to be rapidly draining out of culture.
. . .The same relentless pressures toward simplification are at work in almost every creative industry. A 2024 statistical analysis of more than 350,000 songs between 1970 and 2020 found that lyrics are becoming simpler, more repetitive and less rich in their vocabulary. Another study suggests that melodies are becoming less complex, too.
. . . Equally striking is what is happening in the publishing industry. Books are getting simpler and easier to read. An Economist analysis of New York Times best-selling books from the 1930s to the 2020s found that “sentences in popular books have contracted by almost a third since the 1930s.” Long sentences are not easy to grapple with in an age when, according to one estimate, the average American checks his or her smartphone 186 times per day. The audiences for serious nonfiction and literary fiction have declined steeply in recent decades. Sales of books about economics, current affairs and politics have fallen particularly sharply. [JAC: If the average American is awake 17 hours, then the average rate of phone-checking is 11 times an hour, or about once every 5.5 minutes!]
By contrast, best-selling books of the 1960s included Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” Saul Bellow’s “Herzog”and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard.” In 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling’s collection of essays “The Liberal Imagination” was a bestseller in the United States, with more than 100,000 copies sold.
It is not easy to imagine such books commanding mainstream audiences today.
. . .Getting to grips with a new book, film or song requires a special and sometimes painful effort of concentration.
I think this attention may partly explain why studios opt for remakes, franchises and “extended universes.” Before the turn of the millennium, only about 25 percent of top-grossing films were spin-offs or sequels; by the 2020s the figure had risen to 75 percent.
. . . Not everything can be said simply, and understanding requires sustained concentration from readers, viewers or listeners. If they are distracted and unfocused, culture risks being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.
The statistics speak for themselves. (Don’t forget the “reading time” put before many printed articles so you can see if they are too long to read!) The good news is that I can read or watch whatever I want, and, fortunately, good books and good movies are still available.
*Matthew sent this video about the sentencing of a military soldier to death by firing squad—the first such sentence since World War II. Nidal Hasan killed 13 people and injured 32 others in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009, and has been on death row ever since. The sentence, signed by Donald Trump, is to be carried out on December 1. While firing squad is probably among the most humane methods of execution, I oppose it, as does Matthew, who labeled his email, “Barbarians.” He’s right. Life without parole is sufficient.
Since you last thought about math, the people who think about math every day have been freaking out.
A month ago, when OpenAI announced that one of its powerful internal models had cracked a notoriously difficult Millennium Prize Problem, it looked like the most spectacular demonstration yet of AI’s progress in mathematics.
Then mathematicians revolted.
The backlash from the math world coincided with a global reckoning about Silicon Valley labs racing to build technology that could spiral beyond their control. On the same day that OpenAI published its landmark proof, a researcher quit Anthropic over safety concerns. Within hours, the AI breakthrough was overshadowed by fears that AI could destroy humanity.
Meanwhile, mathematicians were dealing with existential questions of their own.
But as they publicly debated the future of their ancient field, OpenAI’s model kept churning out new proofs behind closed doors. This left the company with a problem for a bunch of humans to solve: what to do with all that AI-generated math.
On Tuesday night, OpenAI published hundreds of proofs for mathematicians to wrap their minds around.
An unprecedented number of answers that had eluded mathematicians for decades arrived in a single night. The deluge included AI solutions to more than 300 problems across number theory, algebraic geometry and other fields with names that could give anyone haunted by high-school math a migraine. Among the major findings in a collection of 722 papers were advances related to three of the five remaining Millennium Prize Problems, including the Riemann hypothesis.
“If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked,” Alex Kontorovich, a Rutgers University distinguished math professor, wrote on X about the “quasi-Riemann hypothesis” proof.
The understated rollout of such monumental results marked a shift in OpenAI’s approach to publishing scientific discoveries, part of an effort to win back mathematicians who have become allergic to AI hype in recent months. On late Tuesday and early Wednesday, many of them reported feeling a sense of awe.
As stunned math experts scrolled through the results and began to absorb them, even a researcher inside Anthropic called the release “obviously the most significant moment in mathematical history.”
. . . Instead of dripping out findings one by one, OpenAI dropped them all at once. The company released 372 groups of results and said the model attempted roughly 4,000 problems in total. It also provided summaries of the model’s “chain of thought” and estimated the average result required only a fraction of the computing power that went into the Millennium Prize triumph.
Mathematicians are naturally flummoxed by this, as AI is doing what they can’t do. Further, they can’t kvetch that AI is stealing their results, because if it’s using published work to get a head start, well, that’s what regular mathematicians have always done when solving hard problems. Perhaps they’re beefing because this AI work threatens to put a lot of them out of business.
*Here are adjacent articles in yesterday’s (Oct. 7) New York Times. This is a pathetic attempt to be objective in their reporting. I’d blame those bodies on Hamas. The NYT has become hopelessly slanted in its coverage of Israel, and not in favor of Isael.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej engage in badinage:
Hili: I’m walking into the future, leaving the present behind. Andrzej: At my age, I prefer to do that sitting down.
In Polish:
Hili: Idę ku przyszłości i zostawiam za sobą teraźniejszość.
Ja: Jestem już bardzo stary i robię to na siedząco.
From Masih: “Aimless strolling” is now verboten in Iran:
Believe it or not: walking is now a crime in Iran.
A police commander in Isfahan ordered police deployed and destroyed the flowerbeds, green spaces and beautiful benches of Sanai and Iranshahr streets. His justification? Young people were “aimlessly strolling.”
He says: “I went there myself and asked a young man, what are you doing here? And even he didn’t know!”
So let’s write this down. If a street is pleasant and peaceful, we must not walk there. Because if police stop you and ask what you are doing, and you say “Nothing, just walking,” you are a criminal. Your own two feet become instruments of the crime.
In 21st-century Iran, a woman walking unveiled is a crime but hanging people in public is treated as a blessing under Sharia law.
Shame on you. You cannot even stand the sight of people taking a walk. Fine, ban walking too. You are not banning anything. You are only turning yourselves into a joke, in front of everyone.
Although compulsory hijab, is it still a law and you force even seven year-old schoolgirls to cover her head to toe in order to get an education, but you cannot control millions of women who say NO to Islamic republic’s barbaric laws.
#WalkingUnveiled
#StopExecutionsInIran
*Here’s the odious NYC Mayor pretending to honor dead Jews when in fact he accuses Israel of occupation, apartheid, and genocide, while Hamas gets accused of none of these, but is the subject of 3/4 of the Mayor’s tweet. I detest this man and still can’t believe that New Yorkers—including many Jews—voted for him. But just wait until they get their subsidized grocery stores and free daycare!
This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.
Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.
From Steve Stewart-Williams via Luana; the “gender equality paradox for STEM. Fewer women go into STEM fields in nations that have greater equality between men and women. This holds for other counterintuitive indices of “accomplishment”.
Nations with greater gender equality have a *lower* percentage of female STEM graduates.
The 85-year-old who chose to die to save his family.
On October 7, Hamas terrorists went from house to house in Kibbutz Nahal Oz.
Shlomo Ron, 85, understood what was happening – but he had a plan.
He told his wife, two daughters, and grandson to hide in the safe room. They tried to convince him to come inside with them.
He refused.
Shlomo believed that if the terrorists entered and found an old man sitting alone in the living room, they would assume he lived alone, kill him, and move on without searching the rest of the house.
So he sat down in his armchair and waited.
The terrorists entered.
They saw Shlomo alone.
They shot him dead—and moved on without searching the rest of the house.
Exactly as he had hoped.
His wife, daughters, and grandson survived.
Shlomo Ron, one of the founders of Nahal Oz, was 85 years old and unarmed.
His final act was to give his life to protect his family.
And one from Doctor Cobb, urging people to read this paper about Rosalind Franklin and”photographs 49 and 51″, and giving his take on the whole issue:
A lot of excitement on here about the article in Science summarising the discoveries of @alistairsponsel.bsky.social and Brian Sutton, just published in the Journal of the History of Biology. Some people have asked, so here is what I think they show, and what are the implications:
Today’s music is from a group that readers either have forgotten or are too young to know about: the Kingston Trio (all the members of the original group have expired). This is one of the old folk songs they rearranged: “The Wagoner’s Lad,” first recorded in the 1920s. It’s a sad song about young lovers forced to separate because the lad drives wagons. The first verse is an paean to first-wave feminism.
From the link just preceding:
One of the things that I have always loved about folk music is its capacity to surprise. You can be humming along through all the wonderful chanteys and cowboy songs and ballads and love songs…and then stumble unexpectedly on the surpassingly beautiful (like “Shenandoah” or “The Mountains of Mourne”) or the darkly tragic (like “The Sloop John B”) – or amazingly modern sentiments in a very old song, like “The Wagoner’s Lad.”
The very first verse of the song, which is known in a host of variants including “My Horses Ain’t Hungry” (recorded famously by Peter, Paul and Mary as “Pretty Mary”) and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and which dates to the early nineteenth or even late eighteenth century, tells us that we are not in the standard folk universe in this song, where women are usually the objects of either romantic desire or borderline misogynistic humor or scorn. Instead, “Wagoner’s Lad” opens with a plaint as old as time, one that remains distressingly true for a really unthinkable percentage of the world’s women today – in the Middle East, in most of South Asia and much of East Asia, and in large parts of Africa. Perhaps half of the women in the world today do not choose their husbands freely, making that opening verse perpetually relevant:
The link to the song’s name will take you to several recorded versions, including ones by Joan Baez, Sarah McQuaid, John Denver, and one by Burt Jansch and John Renbourn, which I finally found on YouTube.
Here are three videos and several articles on October 7 that are worth watching and reading.
First, one from Coleman Hughes: “Inside Israel’s war room: what really happened after October 7.” (Subtitle: “Israel’s leaders hated one another. They fought a war anyway. Elliot Kaufman takes us inside the room where it happened.”) Kaufman is an editor of the Wall Street Journal, and imparts a number of facts about the war (and subsequent “peace”) that haven’t been widely reported. It’s a long conversation, and I haven’t yet finished, but Kaufman is eloquent, Hughes asks good questions (as usual), and you’ll learn a lot.
Click to watch it (now on YouTube):
Free on YouTube: “Israel regained deterrence. The U.S. lost it.” Bret Stephens is interviewed by Times of Israel editor deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan about all manner of Israel-related items: the war, why Israel won despite losing world approbation, the Democrats vs. the Republicans on Israel, is the New York Times anti-Israel?, and so on. The one bit that irritated me was when Borschel-Dan asks Stephens whether the NYT is anti-Israel. It of course is, but Stephens weasels a bit, which he probably has to do to keep his job. Otherwise, it’s a good conversation.
A short video of Natasha Hausdorff being interviewed on October 7 by Julia Hartley-Brewer. Note the two big truths that Hausdorff says have been neglected by the media but which we must recognize.
The front page of the Free Press is loaded with articles appropriate for this day. You’ll have to subscribe to read any, though. Note the ones at upper left and lower right, which go against the prevailing narrative.
As the grim third anniversary of October 7 befalls a decimated Gaza Strip, the state of the discourse among many in the so-called “pro-Palestine” movement remains as embarrassing, dismal, and disastrous as it was when Hamas initiated the attack in 2023. Over the past three years, I have seen countless posts by self-described Zionists criticizing the conduct of Israel’s government, the behavior of Israeli officials, and the excesses of the Israeli reaction to October 7. And yet, I have struggled to see even a dozen posts by “pro-Palestine” activists, advocates, or organizations explicitly condemning Hamas for triggering the most catastrophic chapter in contemporary Palestinian history.
And let’s be clear: That’s exactly what this is. Three years after October 7, the Palestinian people face their greatest crisis of the modern era.
I begin on the ground, in Gaza itself. The majority of Gaza’s buildings are partially or fully destroyed. Tens of thousands have lost their lives, including entire families wiped out by ferocious Israeli bombardment. People will argue to the moon and back about who was ultimately responsible for the level of devastation in Gaza. I personally believe Israel killed far too many civilians, including dozens of my own family members. Israeli air strikes destroyed both of my childhood homes. I will never not be angry or upset about this.
But I will also forever be furious at the fact that Gaza would still be standing had Hamas simply kept its terrorists at home on October 7. I will forever be rageful at the fact that Hamas not only weaponized every aspect of Gaza’s infrastructure but also held Israeli hostages in a manner that was inevitably going to invite more devastation and suffering for Palestinian civilians. I will forever be resentful of the useful idiots who ignored Hamas’s sadistic tactics, hiding behind vacuous appeals to “international law” despite there being no legal framework to justify a terrorist group entrenching itself in medical facilities, educational spaces, markets, and areas meant to shelter the displaced.
. . . In other words, three years after the October 7 attacks on Israel, Palestinians have seen their homes decimated, their reputations destroyed in both Israel and the Arab world, and the actions of their supposed allies in the West amount to nothing. Yes, this has been the most catastrophic three years in modern Palestinian history.
However, a narrative shift is of paramount importance. To promote a fundamentally different future for the Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond, we must acknowledge that within the massive power differential between Israel and the Palestinians, there exists an immense margin for Palestinian agency, responsibility, and accountability. Recognizing that is far from “blaming the victims,” as many of my detractors allege; it is, in fact, the first step toward empowering the Palestinian people.
Each day’s news is filled with declarations of defeat. The online world is filled with shrill declarations that Israel has lost this war.
But as we approach the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, I stand by what I wrote here this time last year: that Israel and her allies have been winning the war on the ground even as they have lost the PR war around the world. The PR war matters. But it matters less than the war itself. Better to win the ground war and lose the PR war than the other way around.
Three years after the attack that Yahya Sinwar started, it is worth reiterating the successes of the nation he tried to defeat—and the utter decimation of the people who started this war.
. . .Once the mullahs [in Iran] had deliverable nuclear weapons, they believed they would be invincible—effectively able to continue repressing the Iranian people for the indefinite future and hold not just the Middle East but also the wider world by the throat. That was, effectively, what their mouthpieces in the Western media wanted. Only one great miscalculation prevented them from getting there: Sinwar’s launch of the October 7 attacks.
With the hindsight of three years of war, we can now see more clearly how complete the devastation of Iran’s plans has been. Piece by piece, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu took apart the Iranian axis.
First, they took apart Hamas in Gaza. They did this despite constant attempts to make them stop, which came not just from the negligibly important “allies” in Europe but from President Joe Biden’s White House. Throughout the years during which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attempted to finish its mission in Gaza, the Biden administration consistently tried to pull it back. But the Israeli government refused. Even as Kamala Harris declared that she had “studied the maps” and the hashtag “All eyes on Rafah” went global online, the IDF went into Hamas’s last stronghold. There they cornered Sinwar and killed the mastermind of the attacks. There was no “massacre” in Rafah, as the online world had predicted. There was simply another Israeli victory.
People will beef at Murray’s praise of Netanyahu, but there’s a nice ending, referring to last week’s failed hijacking attempt of a FlyDubai airplane:
Sinwar was a psychopath, and so he probably would have launched his war anyway. But by any analysis, what he started on October 7 was one of the greatest military missteps in history. Everybody alongside and above him in the chain of command is now dead. Neither Hamas, Hezbollah, nor the Iranian regime has a noose ready to pull around Israel’s neck anymore. Three years ago, this set of victories would have seemed unthinkable. Today, it is an average day’s news. That a large share of the Israeli hostages who Hamas claimed on October 7 were eventually returned alive is an additional victory worthy of scripture.
Only one part of the war has been lost, and that is the war for public opinion—especially among the young. That is both concerning and unsurprising. The terrorist-linked regime in Qatar, among others, has been superb at using its mouthpieces at Al Jazeera and other, more covert propaganda channels to influence global opinion. These outlets started making false claims that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza beginning in October 2023. Sadly, large parts of the world have believed this lie, and weak governments like that of the UK have decided to pander to a part of their domestic political base by repeating and feeding it.
In the years ahead, that will be their problem. But for the time being, what happened in the skies above Saudi Arabia on Wednesday morning stands as a metaphor for three years of war. The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course. The rest of the West will have to decide whether it will follow the Israeli model or let its own future be dictated by terror and the hijacking of its entire society.
*****************
From It’s Noon in Israel; click the headline below to read. Tatarka and Segal paints two worlds: the “Nova world” described this way:
The Nova world is a world of good and evil. Evil is the entity that raped and pillaged its way through the Gaza envelope, kidnapped 251 people and sacrificed Gazans on the altar of its deity, death. It is the militia that fired on the north and drove tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes. And it is the regime in Tehran that armed and funded them both, the Great Satan of this world.
and the “October 8 world”, in which Israel is the evil and hapless entity:
The other world dates its birth to October 8, omitting the day its ideology won its greatest victory and its goals were realized: October 7. This “October 8” world has even fewer shades of gray than the Nova world. Its black is Israel, the unholy nation, the spearhead of Western colonialism and the last obstacle to the world’s redemption. Its white is the Gazans, victims of oppression and genocide, who have replaced Jews as the archetypal persecuted other. It has adopted the jihadist’s categories: “settlers” and Israelis are one and the same, as are terrorists and civilians.
An excerpt:
Reality conforms to neither narrative entirely.
The hostages have come home. Hamas is shattered, Hezbollah decapitated, Assad gone, and Iran struggling for breath. By almost any military measure, Israel has never been stronger. And yet France, the U.K., Canada and Australia have recognized a Palestinian state, and visitors to the Netherlands are having their bags rifled through for products from Judea and Samaria.
That does not make the two worlds equally wrong. The October 8 world’s distortions are too many to count. The most fundamental is its refusal to see non-Westerners as actors in their own right. In its telling, every event is written in Jerusalem or Washington. Hamas didn’t choose to attack; it was provoked. Hezbollah didn’t choose to open a second front, and Iran didn’t choose to build an axis; they were simply defending themselves from Israeli aggression.
The Nova world’s error is subtler, and for Israel, more dangerous. Before October 7, Israel fell for a conceptzia of safety: the belief that Hamas was deterred, contained, and bought off. Three years later, it risks the opposite, a conceptzia of unsafety, in which every threat is existential and every problem is answered with force. Israel has become a hammer in search of nails. This complicated region is fluent in the language of force, but it is not monolingual, and those who insist Israel speak only that language will miss the larger opportunities its military victories have created.
Criticizing the Nova world is not the same as doubting it. On the question that matters most, it was right: evil is real. Today, three years on, a letter by an officer of Shayetet 13, the Israeli Navy’s special forces unit, has been published. I will let it speak for itself.
