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.
Plant lovers and botanists will be especially pleased by today’s selection of lovely photos from Thomas Webber. Thomas’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them (recommended).
The theme for today’s installment is Gone to Seed. Here are a few north-Florida flowers shown in their prime and afterward, when their glamor parts had been replaced by seed enclosures, bare seeds, or merely the dried remains of the flower bases. All of them grew within Gainesville’s city limits, at sites from semi-pruned to semi-wild. I think I’ve identified them all correctly to species this time, but I invite corrections.
Frostweed, Verbesina virginica. Individual flowers 1 cm. Native:
These bracts, called phyllaries, surround the bases of the flowers. In late February a few of their papery remnants are still aloft on their brittle four-foot stalks:
Showy rattlebox. C. spectabilis. 3.5 cm across. Native to southern and southeast Asia, now widely naturalized in southeastern North America:
C. spectabilis seed pods. 4 cm long. The pods of C. pumila look similar but are smaller. Crotalaria, and especially their seeds, are laden with toxic alkaloids. Larvae of the rattlebox moth, Utetheisa ornatrix, bore through the walls of the pods and feed on the seeds. Somehow the caterpillars manage to detoxify the alkaloids enough so they aren’t poisoned, while remaining poisonous enough to deter most animals that might try to eat them. The larvae retain the toxins into the flying-moth stage, and at both stages their distinctive vivid color pattern warns predators to leave them alone.
A rattlebox-moth caterpillar. About 3 cm. I doubt that I could have found any of these if I’d gone looking for them, but this one crawled right in front of me while I tried to get a picture of the low rattlebox. It held fairly steady for a few seconds, letting me capture enough detail to identify it. I didn’t have my choice of background:
Tropical sage, Salvia coccinea. 3 cm. Native. At this latitude these remain at their peak through late December:
All that’s left in late February are these cones called calyces, which are fused sepals:
Spanish needles, Bidens alba. 2.5 cm. Native. This is the king weed of these parts, growing everywhere and sometimes in great masses; one dense bunch covers an acre of a low damp lot in the middle of Gainesville:
Seeds of Spanish needles. 1 cm long. The name of the genus, meaning two-teeth, derives from the forks at the tips of the seeds. The barbs on these projections are part of an impressive example of convergent biological and cultural evolution, and have turned out to be just the thing for attaching the seeds to socks and shoelaces:
Dotted horsemint, Monarda punctata. Whole flower head 2.5 cm wide. Native. The most complicated flowers I find around here:
All of that elaborate presentation goes to produce seeds 1 mm in diameter, too small to show well with my basic macro gear. At this stage you can still shake a few of them from the calyces. Thanks to Mark Frank of the Florida Museum of Natural History herbarium for a remedial lesson in the difference between calyces and phyllaries:
Beggarweed, Desmodiumincanum. 1 cm across. Native to Central- and South America, naturalized in the southeastern U.S. This year, by means unknown, a few of them showed up for the first time in what passes for my lawn:
Morning-glory seed pods, 7 mm. The hard little capsules cleave along their sutures and split open to release black seeds the shape of orange sections, exposing the translucent porcelain-like septa that divided them:
Welcome to a Hump Day (“יום הגיבנת” in Hebrew): Wednesday, February 25, 2026, and National Clam Chowder Day. Of the several varieties, I can recommend only one, the New England variety made with cream and plenty of clams. Avoid anything with tomatoes in it! Your bowl should look like this:
Jon Sullivan (original uploader Y6y6y6 at English Wikipedia)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
*I didn’t listen to the State of the Union address, as I couldn’t bear more braggadoccio and chest-thumping. Here’s a short summary from the NYT, and I’ll put the video below.
In his State of the Union address, President Trump didn’t bother to introduce a raft of new policies — unusual in a midterm election year with control of Congress on the line. He did not seem concerned with making the case that he gets it when it comes to the issue Americans are most worried about. “Affordability,” he said, was part of a “dirty, rotten lie” perpetuated by the Democrats.
Instead, with the slashing style of a natural campaigner and the instincts of a onetime reality television producer, he spent the better part of two hours baiting the ranks of incensed Democrats in the chamber and endeavoring to define them to the electorate as “sick,” unpatriotic and utterly out of step with the values of most Americans.
“These people are crazy, I’m telling ya, they’re crazy,” Mr. Trump said at one point, while relaying the story of a young person who had been forced to undergo a gender transition. “Boy oh boy, we’re lucky we have a country with people like this — Democrats are destroying our country, but we’ve stopped it just in the nick of time.”
Several Democrats walked out and one was ejected. Here’s the full speech, nearly two hours of bombast:
The British police said on Tuesday that they had released Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the United States, following an arrest the previous day amid allegations that he had passed confidential government information to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
London’s Metropolitan Police, which began an investigation into Mr. Mandelson earlier this month, said in a statement on Monday, “Officers have arrested a 72-year-old man on suspicion of misconduct in public office.”
The statement added that the man had been taken to a police station in London to be formally interviewed. He was released on bail pending further investigation, the police said in an updated statement early Tuesday morning.
The police did not name Mr. Mandelson, in line with British rules that ban them from identifying suspects before any charges are brought. But footage broadcast by the BBC showed Mr. Mandelson being led from his home into an unmarked police car by plainclothes police officers and driven away, at around 4:30 p.m. local time. Mr. Mandelson was not handcuffed and was carrying a bottle of water.
The arrest is the latest dramatic development in Britain to follow the U.S. Justice Department’s release of files related to Mr. Epstein, and marks a new low for Mr. Mandelson, a veteran Labour Party strategist and one of Britain’s best known political figures.
It comes just days after the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, on suspicion of the same offense — misconduct in public office, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
. . .Official guidance to British prosecutors says that the offense is committed when a public officer, such as an elected politician or government official, “willfully neglects to perform their duty” or “willfully misconducts themselves” in a way that abuses the public’s trust.
Previously a Labour lawmaker representing Hartlepool in northeast England, Mr. Mandelson served as a minister in Tony Blair’s government between 1997 and 2001, and under Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2008 to 2010.
In September, Mr. Mandelson, 72, was fired from his diplomatic post in Washington when the depth and duration of his friendship with Mr. Epstein became clear after the publication of emails between them.
The release of new material by the U.S. Department of Justice on Jan. 30 increased the scrutiny of Mr. Mandelson’s relationship with the sex offender and provoked a political crisis for Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
The latest batch of documents appears to show that in 2009, when Mr. Mandelson was a senior cabinet minister, he gave potentially confidential and market sensitive information to Mr. Epstein.
Like The Andrew Formerly Known as Prince, the report says that Mandelson, though arrested, “has not been charged with a crime.” I guess those charges will come, but that we won’t know what they are until they are announced in court. I predict that Andrew won’t spend a day in jail (I don’t know about Mandelson).
There are more than 900 confirmed measles cases in the United States, as of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent weekly count. It’s less than two months into the year, “and we already have over a quarter of [the measles cases] we had all of 2025, so things are not great,” said Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.
. . .When vaccination rates decrease, the most highly contagious diseases pop up first, “and that’s why we call measles the canary in the coal mine,” said Wallace. Other vaccine-preventable infectious diseases could follow, the World Health Organization warned in a joint statement with UNICEF and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, last year. Some already show a worrisome upward trend.
“Measles is the most contagious disease that we have, period,” Wallace said. “So as soon as we start to see measles, we know that the [vaccination] rates in that county or state are starting to drop, and so other diseases will follow on to that, but they just take longer to rip through the communities.”
Here are the other nine diseases poised for comebacks:
Pertussis (“whooping cough”). The frequency of cases is rising, but there is an effective vaccine.
Meningitis. “Meningococcal disease, or meningitis, isn’t as widespread or infectious as measles and pertussis. But cases have been increasing since 2021, and the meningococcal vaccine was recently removed from the CDC’s universal recommendation for adolescents.”
Polio. “Children receive four doses of the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) starting at 2 months old. Poliovirus infection can be serious, leading to paralysis or death.” There were still outbreaks when I was a kid, and they were plenty scary. We do NOT want it to return.
Rotavirus. “Rotavirus can cause babies and other young children to become rapidly dehydrated. Before the availability of rotavirus vaccines, which can be given by 15 weeks, ‘almost all children during the first two years of life would get rotavirus infection,’ Kotloff said.”
RSV. “Like rotavirus, symptoms of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are often mild. But certain people are at risk for severe illness, particularly kids who are born prematurely or have underlying diseases, such as heart defects, according to Kotloff.”
Tetanus. “Unlike many other vaccine-preventable diseases, herd immunity doesn’t exist for tetanus, a rare but potentially life-threatening infection caused by Clostridium tetani bacteria.” I got a tetanus shot before I went to South Africa last year.
Rubella. “Like measles, rubella may be mild, with symptoms like a cough, fever and red rash. But serious complications can develop, too, particularly if someone contracts rubella during pregnancy.”
Hepatitis B. “Hepatitis B is a liver infection spread through bodily fluids, often from mother to child. Getting infected at a young age carries a high risk for developing cancer later on, ‘so early vaccination at birth is key to prevent this,’ Lo said.” I also got a Hep-B shot before I went to South Africa.
Diphtheria. “Diphtheria is no longer common in the U.S. But the bacterial disease still circulates in parts of the world with lower vaccination coverage, and there have been cases where it was brought back by travelers.”
The moral is this: get your shots and ensure that your kids are vaccinated (as always ASK YOUR DOCTOR. I believe I’ve had every one of these shots and I’m as healthy as a bull.
*Over at Quillette, Israeli historian Benny Morris discusses “Trump’s Iranian Dilemma“. The subtitle, and dilemma, is this “President Donald Trump must choose between a military strike on Iran, whose consequences no one can predict, and a deal that would leave the Islamic Republic still able to attack its own citizens, menace Israel, and export terrorism worldwide.” Bolding is mine:
The Middle East—indeed much of the world—is currently waiting with bated breath to see whether the United States will attack Iran or whether it will agree to prolong the negotiations in the hope of achieving a peaceful resolution. Back in early January, President Donald Trump assured the Iranian masses protesting against their totalitarian rulers that help was on the way. But that help was not forthcoming, and, on the orders of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime’s security forces, led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij militia, proceeded to mow down some 32,000 protesters and arrest and torture tens of thousands, suppressing the incipient revolt.
Since then, Iran and the US have traded threats while Trump has steadily beefed up America’s offensive and defensive capabilities around Iran. This past weekend, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, and its attendant battle group, arrived in the eastern Mediterranean, thus completing the planned American deployment. For its part, Iran has carried out large naval and missile exercises around the Straits of Hormuz, implicitly threatening to close the waterway linking the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea/Indian Ocean, and hence cutting off the main route for oil and gas exports, should America strike. The Iranians have also threatened to rocket America’s Sunni Arab allies and its bases in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Israel. Meanwhile reports suggest that Khamenei, advised by the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, has prepared the country for war, naming successors for himself and for the holders of top civilian and military posts in case of their deaths.
The Sunni Arab states abominate the Shi’ite regime in Tehran but fear its wrath and armaments and, at least publicly, they have pleaded with Washington not to loose the dogs of war. The Saudis especially remember Iran’s devastating drone and cruise missile attack on their oil installations in 2019 and the intermittent Iran-backed terrorist attacks on their cities. Iran has explicitly threatened to broaden any clash with America into a regional war. But while a closure of the Hormuz Straits would hurt the revenues of the Arab gulf states and cause a global chain reaction that would result in massive hikes in fuel prices, it would also halt Iranian oil and gas exports and possibly trigger an American or joint American–Israeli bombardment of Iran’s oil installations at Abadan and Kharg Island. Blocking oil exports from the gulf would also badly affect China, which is reliant on Iranian oil, though a hike in oil prices might please Russia, which is itself an oil exporter. But bluster notwithstanding, neither power is likely to come to Iran’s aid should hostilities break out between the Islamic Republic and the US.
Since the twelve-day Israel–Iran war in June 2025, during which the United States bombed key Iranian nuclear installations, Washington has tried to engage Tehran in talks designed to halt the country’s march toward nuclear weaponry. At first, Iran refused to play ball. However, the massive anti-government demonstrations last December and January, coupled with the American threat to intervene, propelled the ayatollahs to begin negotiating with Washington, albeit through Omani mediation. The Iranians refused to meet the lead American negotiators—Stephen Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—face to face, who both happen to be Jewish.
As Israeli officials feared, the Iranians have succeeded in dragging out the negotiations and have insisted that they be restricted to the nuclear issue. Washington is demanding the complete cessation of uranium enrichment on Iranian soil and has asked the country to relinquish the 400-plus kilogrammes of enriched material it already possesses. For their part, the Iranians have declared that they will never give up uranium enrichment—which they see as a natural right and a matter of national honour and pride—and are demanding the lifting of the American and European economic sanctions as a quid pro quo for whatever concessions they may make. Some of these sanctions were imposed before the multilateral nuclear deal of 2015: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany) and the EU, which curbed Iran’s progress toward the Bomb. Further sanctions have been imposed since Trump pulled America out of the JCPOA in May 2018.
So long as the talks are limited to the nuclear issue, they will fail. The alternative is that they strike a “deal” in which Iran pretends to cut back on enriching uranium, and the U.S. pretends to believe Iran. That’s a bad bargain, and if Trump thinks he can pull it off, it may bring peace, but only at the price of more Iranian protestors shot dead and a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic looming over Israel. I still think Trump will attack, but without U.S. soldiers in the country, there’s no chance of regime change.
In the documentary, The Zero Line: Inside Russia’s War, men give detailed accounts about how they were tortured for refusing to take part in assaults they describe as verging on suicide missions. Russian troops call these attacks “meat storms” as waves of men are sent across the front line relentlessly to try and wear down Ukrainian forces.
For the first time, the BBC believes, Russian soldiers from the front line say on the record how they witnessed commanders ordering executions of their own men.
One of the men, whose job was to identify and count dead soldiers, provided detailed lists showing that he is the sole survivor from a group of 79 men he was mobilised with. Because he refused to go to the front line, he says he was tortured and urinated on. Others in his unit who refused would be electrocuted, starved and then forced into meat storms unarmed, he says.
The four men, who are on the run, told of the horrors they witnessed at an undisclosed location outside Russia.
Almost all public opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been stamped out in Russia. Official casualty numbers are not released by Moscow, but the UK’s Ministry of Defence says more than 1.2 million Russian troops have been killed or injured since the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022.
. . . The detailed first-hand testimony from all four men also verifies reports of a breakdown of law and order on the Russian front line.
. . .All four men told us in graphic detail about the dreaded meat storm missions – part of the Russian military’s wider “meat grinder” tactic on the Ukrainian battlefields.
The storms are so deadly, they are likened to suicide missions.
“I saw them [commanders] send wave after wave, throwing men like meat at the Ukrainians, so they run out of ammo and drones and another wave can reach their objective,” says another former soldier, Denis.
“You send three guys, then another three. It didn’t work out, send 10. It didn’t work out with 10, send 50,” he says. “Eventually you will break through. That’s the logic of the military.
The Russians are, in effect, conducting “banzai” suicide charges, like the Japanese in WWII. They conscript criminals or anybody with a record, send them to the war to die, and execute them if they won’t go. And then the officers take their bank cards. And, as the article says, no criticism of the war is allowed in Russia.
The violence in the Puerto Vallarta area is unnerving America’s community of expat retirees in Mexico, a destination popular with the growing number of people retiring abroad.
The Pacific coast tourist city is home to thousands of American retirees. They include Bill Huebsch, a 79-year-old New Yorker who spends about two months a year in nearby Nuevo Nayarit, also known as Nuevo Vallarta, where he purchased a condo with his late wife, Joanne, in 2012.
. . . More Americans are choosing to spend their golden years abroad, and the violence in Puerto Vallarta is underlining the risks. Advisers to people considering expat retirements are telling clients to consider the risks of natural and man-made disasters, from political upheaval to organized criminals. That is in addition to the financial and personal preparations that come with moving abroad.
. . . Ken Schmier, 75, said he and his wife recently purchased a $2.5 million condo on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. “I can see the thing depreciating in half in the last day,” said Schmier, before adding that he was joking. The real-estate developer, who also lives in Larkspur, Calif., said he believes the area is safe thanks in part to its thriving tourist economy.
I had thought of retiring abroad, but changed my mind. If I want to see foreign countries, I will travel, and I am comfortable enough to live my life in the U.S. But I do need to travel more, though I’m not contemplating any parts of Mexico in the near future. (France is more appealing.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is reproving Andrzej, even giving him the STINK EYE! (Look at her picture, which I’ve made my Twitter avatar.)
Hili: Yesterday you did not write a single sentence.
Andrzej: I was reading a book.
Hili: That is not an explanation.
In Polish:
Hili: Wczoraj nie napisałeś ani jednego zdania.
Ja: Czytałem książkę.
Hili: That is not an explanation.
From Masih, more protests in Iranian universities. I fear that the shooting and killing will resume. (Sound up.)
Today, Tuesday, February 24, students across universities in Iran, for the fourth consecutive day, held protest gatherings and chanted slogans against Khamenei and his regime.
At many universities, Basij forces attacked and beat students, leading to violent clashes. The… pic.twitter.com/iEzxDPM4UT
From Emma, highlighting this article. A film called “I Swear”, about Tourette’s Syndrome (which sometimes causes it sufferers to yell out obscene or forbidden words), was up for a BAFTA Award when its subject shouted out the n-word inadvertently when several black people went onstage. The sufferer, John Davidson, was then demonized for something he could not control. I just found another piece in the free press about the same thing: “It’s not his fault he used the n-word.” The article adds that “the audience had been alerted that someone with Tourette’s was in the building.”
“Only an industry located so firmly up its own backside could gather to honour a film illustrating the grim realities facing someone living with Tourette’s and then be so publicly aggrieved when the actuality of that illness – and the involuntary nature of its effects on those… https://t.co/tfdG9ANAH6
*Here the pious Cathlic Ross Douthat (author of a new book about why we should believe in God) debates atheist Phil Zuckerman on God. I still haven’t found out the details for Steve Pinker’s debate with Douthat, which I thought was on Thursday. Stay tuned. I haven’t listened to this full debate yet, but the parts I have heard shows Douthat using the “fine tuning argument” and the existence of consciousness as evidence for God. Big yawn!
Should Everyone Be Religious? Phil Zuckerman, in conversation between Ross Douthat, eloquently explains why we shouldn’t. https://t.co/K3XuaZcC2j via @YouTube
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge…”This quote from Darwin's Descent of Man, published #OnThisDay in 1871, pretty much sums up the challenges the world is facing now, a century & a half later.
At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.
Everyone immediately speculated that, because many colleges are determined to continue using race as a criterion for admission, they would try to circumvent the Court’s decision by asking students, in their admissions essays, to describe how they overcame hardships or would contribute to the university community, realizing that students would slip in race or ethnicity in these essays to lubricate their admission. As Libes describes in her piece (click screenshot below to read), that’s exactly what was done in North Carolina.
Libes also stresses the importance of real writing—as opposed to AI—as a skill that will help students in their later lives, for of course one can get AI to write essays along the lines of the themes above. I did that for one admissions essay (see below).
First, why students should learn to write well with their own brains and hands, and why colleges should ask for more than boilerplate essays designed to foster racial diversity or assess students’ ideologies. Libes’s extracts are indented:
Despite what our schools may have students believe about the relative uselessness of writing, strong writers achieve disproportionate professional success because good writing is a proxy for creative thinking—and creative thinkers become society’s visionaries. Take Steve Jobs, who was a storyteller before he was a programmer, or Thurgood Marshall, who reshaped American law not only through legal mastery but through powerful rhetoric. These mavericks have gone down in history not necessarily for their technical proficiency but for their aptitude for creativity.
Writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.Writing is the best tool we have to showcase creative thought.
. . . A good writer is therefore a strong thinker—and this distinction transcends academic disciplines. In my counseling practice, for instance, I routinely observe smart STEM students producing more insightful essays than average humanities students, because good writing is not so much a measure of technical ability as it is a proxy for the capacity to express ideas. Because creative thinking is invaluable in any walk of life, writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.
I suppose that part of Libes’s job is to prepare students for college admissions, as she’s not on a faculty. But I’m heartened by her observation that STEM students write better essays than humanities students. I have no experience of whether that’s true, as I never taught humanities students.
According to Libes, the changing of the college admissions essay, which began as a way to keep Jews out of elite colleges by looking for “Protestant values,” started after the banning of racial quotas in the Bakke case (1978):
In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, however, with many universities forced to drop their racial quotas, the college essay evolved into a tool for admissions officers to gain a glimpse of applicants’ “backgrounds and perspectives.” Soon, the college essay became less about the discriminatory idea of “fit” and more about the ideas that students could bring to the intellectual table.
Around the same time, the revamped college essay shifted admissions practices towards a more holistic evaluative model that relied less on grades and test scores than on the applicant’s intellectual potential as a whole. In one sense, this model is still in use today: I have students with perfect GPAs and SAT scores who not only fail to secure admission to “elite” colleges but who are also destined to land in menial professional roles—not because they aren’t smart but because they have never learned to effectively express their ideas. In theory, the college essay should be an effective tool to separate “smart but dull” from “smart and interesting” students. Though many college-consulting professionals have expressed doubts about the viability of the college essay in the face of generative AI, so-called large language models will only ever fall into the category of “smart but dull,” giving truly visionary students a chance to shine by demonstrating their capacity for original thinking.
These changes, then, apparently occurred between the early Sixties and the Bakke decision in 1978:
For a brief moment in time—the halcyon decades following the Civil Rights era—the college essay did indeed allow strong writers and thinkers to rise to the top of our society. In his book On Writing the College Application Essay, for instance, former Columbia admissions officer Harry Bauld wrote that the college essay “shows you at your alive and thinking best.” That was 1987. Today, colleges seem to be doing everything they can to move the college essay away from the model of “thinking” prowess towards the infamous doctrine of “fit.”
And so college essays have degenerated into exercises that allow admissions offices to judge both the rcial and ideological “fit” of students to a given school. Libes uses as examples schools on in North Carolina. Get a load of this:
Of the five most competitive colleges in North Carolina—Duke, Davidson, Wake Forest, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State—three ask the ubiquitous “fit” question, prompting students to identify their reasons for wishing to attend these universities in a short-answer statement. [JAC: as you see below, the University of Chicago also asks a “fit” question.] Duke explicitly uses the language of “values” in its prompt, suggesting that the university cares less about academic preparation than it does about the morals of each individual applicant. Share the wrong moral values—conservatism, religious traditionalism, or moral absolutism, among others—and risk facing a rejection letter in your inbox the coming spring.
The “fit” question is not the only way these colleges screen for values. UNC-Chapel Hill and Wake Forest both insist that students demonstrate their readiness to make contributions to their “community,” thereby favoring students with a natural bent towards communal rather than individualistic values. Wake Forest, in fact, has no reservations about framing its “community” prompt in terms of social justice:
Dr. Maya Angelou, renowned author, poet, civil-rights activist, and former Wake Forest University Reynolds Professor of American Studies, inspired others to celebrate their identities and to honor each person’s dignity. Choose one of Dr. Angelou’s powerful quotes. How does this quote relate to your lived experience or reflect how you plan to contribute to the Wake Forest community?
Similarly, Wake Forest asks students to identify their top-five favorite books. While this might seem an innocuous and even intellectually worthy question, there is no doubt that a student who includes Born a Crime by Trevor Noah will fare better in the admissions process than a student who dares to list Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
Oy gewalt: that Wake Forest question seems to be there to weed out students who don’t have the correct “progressive” ideology! And does Wake Forest also give a selection of Maya Angelou quotes, or does it assume that students already know her books? If they don’t, they’ll be scurrying like termites to read them ASAP.
And Duke, which I’ve realized is woker than I knew, raises the issue of the goodness of diversity, and explicitly incorporates that in a question. You know the students are going to go full Kendi with this one:
Adapting to the rise of wokeness in 2014, for instance, Duke added the following college-essay prompt:
Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better—perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background—we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.
But with the rise of Trumpism and the suppression of DEI and wokeness in universities, Libes notes that essay questions are now concentrating on the value of viewpoint diversity, which Libes says is “this year’s new ‘it’ essay.” She concludes by once again emphasizing real essays that inspire independent thought rather than ticking off presumed boxes about race and ideology:
If colleges wish to remain institutions devoted to intellectual excellence rather than moral choreography, they must abandon their obsession with “fit” and return to the college essay’s original purpose: to identify students most capable of independent thought.
It is precisely those students who go on to shape ideas, build institutions, and sustain our free, pluralistic society.
Libes doesn’t deal with AI so much (see below), but her essay is well worth reading, and inspired me to look up the University of Chicago’s admissions essays. My school is famous for asking unusual and sometimes off-the-wall questions aimed at demonstrating a student’s ability to think. And commercial sources publicize them during the admissions cycle, to let students see what they’re in for and to offer students “help” by producing company-written answers for a fee (I consider this unethical). You can see the list of admissions questions for 2025-2026 at the commerical site here (“we can help you draft in time for submission”). Sadly, the only required question is of the anodyne type seen above:
Question 1 (Required)
How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.
A big yawn for that one! It’s a “fit” question like the ones in North Carolina. HOWEVER, we offer seven other essays that are far more interesting as gauges of creativity, and applicants must choose to answer just one of these in addition to Question 1. I’ll show you just three:
Essay Option 1
In an ideal world where inter-species telepathic communication exists, which species would you choose to have a conversation with, and what would you want to learn from them? Would you ask beavers for architectural advice? Octopuses about cognition? Pigeons about navigation? Ants about governance? Make your case—both for the species and the question.
Essay Option 2
If you could uninvent one thing, what would it be — and what would unravel as a result?
Essay Option 6
Statistically speaking, ice cream doesn’t cause shark attacks, pet spending doesn’t drive the number of lawyers in California, and margarine consumption isn’t responsible for Maine’s divorce rate—at least, not according to conventional wisdom. But what if the statisticians got it wrong? Choose your favorite spurious correlation and make the case for why it might actually reveal a deeper, causative truth.
Now THOSE are questions worth offering, and do you really need the required question to assess a student’s ability?
But there is one big problem: AI can answer all of these questions, and better than most students. As an example, I chose the Option 1 question, about telepathy, and sent it to Luana to put into her paid AI bot. I will put the bot’s answer below the fold. But do read it because it’s amazingly good and, to me at least, indistinguishable from a human answer. In fact, it’s much better than I think many high-school students could write. THAT is why they use AI, and why Luana thinks that AI spells the death of humanities in liberal-arts schools.
In the end, then, given the existence of AI and its ubiquitous use by students, is there really any point to asking essay questions? I doubt it, especially because you can “guide” the AI bot by asking for specific things to appear. After due cogitation, I decided that universities should require only four things for admission, none of them essays:
High-school grades
SATs or ACT standardized test scores. Sadly, these are optional at the University of Chicago, and 80% of American colleges and universities either do not require test scores or forbid submitting test scores. (Grok says 90-93% don’t require them, though in 2015 60-65% of them did.) Doing away with test requirements is a big mistake. There is no downside to using such scores; they were banned or made optional solely as a way to increase ethnic diversity, even though an article in the NYT shows that using standardized tests does not hurt diversity.and is also the best predictor of success in college, success in getting into graduate school, and success in the workplace in later life.
Letters of recommendation. (These are not great, as students won’t ask for letters unless they know they’ll get good ones. In fact, I’ve been asked by students requesting letters from me to assure them that I’d write a good one.)
Personal interviews. You can tell a lot about a person from a 20-minute interview. Unfortunately, those have been used, as at Harvard, as a tool to weed out students—in their case Asian students, who were deemed from interviews to not be as “personable” as other students. That this was a bogus way to reduce the percentage of Asians admitted came from data showing that the difference appeared only when Harvard staff did the interviews, not when alumni were recruited to do interviews.
Some schools, like those concentrating on music, art, or fashion design, require submitting samples of your work, which cannot (as of yet) be faked by AI.
The four criteria above should suffice to properly assess students. And standardized tests should always be required. I’m hoping for the day when the University of Chicago realizes that.
Click “continue reading” to see the AI answer to the essay option 1 (on telepathy) below. We didn’t specify a word limit, though both essays that Grok produced were close to 500 words (I show just one response). Thanks to Luana for interacting with the bot.
We have a timely contribution, and a bit of duck-related drama in New Jersey, from Jan Malik, whose captions and story are indented below. (The duck was, in the end, unharmed.) You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here is a short series of pictures from Barnegat Light that I took about twelve years ago. I was sitting on the rock jetty one February day, scanning for any passing seabirds, when something in the corner of my eye caught my attention: a commotion farther out in the inlet channel. A duck was being attacked by a large gull.
Trigger warning and spoiler alert: the gull went hungry— the duck escaped that morning.
This isn’t the actual bird that was attacked; I think I photographed this one later that day. But like the victim, it was probably an immature male. Long‑tailed Ducks form large flocks outside the breeding season, wintering offshore from the Arctic Ocean, Norway, Greenland, and Canada, and reaching New Jersey when the weather turns especially cold. Unfortunately, their IUCN status is Vulnerable, and based on my very unscientific observations over twenty years of winter trips to the Jersey shore, their numbers seem to be declining.
These gulls—the largest species in the family Laridae—are powerful scavengers and opportunistic predators. I don’t see them often at Barnegat Light or other exposed coastal areas; they seem to prefer city dumps and places with more edible refuse than the clean, wind‑swept inlet.
Each bird pulls in a different direction. The duck tries to dive, while the gull attempts to lift its prey and carry it to land, where it can kill it properly by violent shaking.
Given the size difference, the duck can’t fight back All it can do is try to slip free:
A second gull arrives The possibility of a meal attracts another gull, which immediately tries to steal the catch. This actually helps the duck—when raptors (if we can stretch the term to include gulls) quarrel over prey, they often drop it:
The gull’s grip is weak. Here it’s clear that not all is lost for the duck. The gull’s smooth, non‑serrated bill has only a tenuous hold on the duck’s feathers, and it’s far from securing a proper grip:
The gull’s feet offer no help. Like other gulls, Great Black‑backed Gulls have webbed feet built for paddling, not grasping. Their only real weapon is the bill, and in this case it wasn’t placed well enough to subdue the duck:
The hunt ends unsuccessfully. The duck breaks free and immediately dives. Long‑tailed Ducks can dive 100–200 feet (30–60 m) and swim underwater using both their feet and wings, much like penguins:
Another Long‑tailed Duck in flight. I include this photo to show why the species is called “long‑tailed,” although this individual doesn’t have the longest tail I’ve seen. These ducks were once called “Oldsquaw” in the United States and “Old Wife” in parts of England, but in the early 2000s the name was changed because it was considered offensive. I agree with the change, though I sometimes wonder whether it marked the beginning of the slippery slope that later led to Audubon being “canceled” and many other biological names being flagged as candidates for revision.
Ignacio Anaya used triangles of fried tortilla for the nachos he created in 1943.
The triangle-shaped tortilla chip was popularized by Rebecca Webb Carranza in the 1940s as a way to make use of misshapen tortillas rejected from the automated tortilla manufacturing machine that she and her husband used at their Mexican delicatessen and tortilla factory in southwest Los Angeles. Carranza found that the discarded tortillas, cut into triangles and fried, were a popular snack, and she sold them for a dime a bag at the El Zarape Tortilla Factory. In 1994, Carranza received the Golden Tortilla award for her contribution to the Mexican food industry
Tonight Trump delivers the State of the Union address before the Congress and members of The Supreme Court. Will there be protests from Democrats? The NYT has a column (archived here) in which three op-ed writers discuss, “After a big loss, what to expect from Trump at the State of the Union.” The “loss” refers to the Supreme Court decision rejecting Trump’s tariffs, which he’s now trying to circumvent.
Thirteen months into the second Trump administration, science, medicine and public health have been hijacked by a cadre of grifters and ideologues and by the politicians in obvious thrall to both. Federal institutions have been all but dismantled. Researchers have been defunded en masse and the universities that support them deliberately destabilized. Discourse on crucial scientific questions and key public health challenges has been stifled. And, along the way, trust has been broken between scientists, the nation’s leaders — and the people that both are supposed to serve.
It’s tempting to view this undoing as temporary. Americans love science and revere innovation, almost as a rule, and politicians of every stripe have spent the better part of a century promoting and protecting both. However imperfect the resulting system was, hardly a modern convenience exists that can’t be traced back to it: central air conditioning, the internet and ChatGPT; polio vaccines, statins and weight loss drugs; the human genome sequence and CRISPR gene editing. The National Institutes of Health alone generates about $2.50 in economic returns for every dollar of investment. It’s also the largest government-funded biomedical research agency in the world, and until recently was the envy of scientists across the globe.
The president’s attacks on this legacy have been relentless and all-encompassing. He has turned the federal health department over to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer. For months, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget all but froze operations at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. His newly established so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, fired thousands of civil servants from The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a process that was wildly disorganized, frequently unlawful and needlessly cruel. Global health initiatives were also eviscerated.
Stacked against these measures, the administration’s explanations — which focus on cutting waste and eliminating so-called woke politics from science — have been inadequate and disingenuous.
The bulk of the article concerns the Trump-induced tribulations of Kathryn Macapagal, identified as a “clinical psychologist and a faculty researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who lost four grants and a quarter of her salary in the first flurry of Trump cuts in NIH and NSF funding. But her grants and salary have been restored. The article also concentrates heavily on funding for LGBTQ initiatives, but the cuts affect more than that:
In the past year or so, scientists funded through the National Institutes of Health have developed potential treatments for pancreatic cancer, broke the logjam on Huntington’s disease, shepherded a male birth control pill through clinical trials and saved a baby’s life with the first personalized gene editing procedure. In a different time and place, any one of those breakthroughs would have been hailed as the triumph of an epoch, and might have lured a new generation of talent to the cause of scientific research.
Instead, six years after the pandemic began and one year into the second Trump administration, we have the opposite: seasoned scientists fleeing the profession (or the country), and younger prospects deciding not to pursue it at all. It’s impossible to say what new medicine those minds might have developed or what wicked problems their efforts might have solved.
What seems clear is that Americans have entered a grim new era, one where science itself is a political weapon, rather than a tool for the collective good. It would be simplistic to argue that the two — science and politics — should be wholly disentangled (as a human endeavor that involves trade-offs and requires public support, science is inherently political). But real data and hard, neutral facts still drive the work that most scientists do, and the best of that work should still frame public discourse and ideally, inform public policy. And right now, it does not.
The title of the article is a bit misleading about its contents, which concentrate on a single researcher and on diseases prevalent in the LGBTQ community. All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not doing research any longer.
*A new poll by ABC, the Washington Post, and IPSOS shows that Trump’s approval rating (just before the State of the Union address) has dropped, to only 39%, but the authors say that Democrats shouldn’t necessarily be ready to see their party winning a lot of elections.
As President Donald Trump prepares to address the nation Tuesday evening, Americans remain generally sour about his performance, with majorities disapproving of his handling of priority initiatives while saying he has overreached the authority of his office, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll.
The president’s approval rating stands at 39 percent positive and 60 percent negative, including 47 percent who say they strongly disapprove. The last time Trump’s disapproval touched 60 percent was shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among registered voters, Trump’s approval is 41 percent and his disapproval is 58 percent.
Here’s a graph from the Post, though note that the Y-axis is between 40 and 60%. The upper line is the disapproval rating. which has gone up 7% in a year.
Dissatisfaction with Trump applies to specific issues, as well,with significant majorities saying they disapprove of how he is handling the economy, tariffs, inflation and relations with other countries. His worst rating is on inflation — 32 percent approve of how he has dealt with the issue. On the question of his handling of the economy overall, 41 percent approve, but while he still gets low ratings on this, the gap between negative and positive assessments has narrowed from 25 points negative in October to negative 16 this month.
For Democrats, Trump’s relatively low standing provides opportunities for the upcoming midterm elections, but the party out of power has made little headway in persuading Americans that they have better ideas or policies to offer and are seen as no more in touch with the concerns of the average person.
Asked whether they trust Trump or Democrats in Congress to handle major issues, 33 percent cite the president, 31 percent say Democrats, 4 percent say both equally and a crucial 31 percent say neither. In April, Trump led by 37 percent-30 percent on this question.
Trump will deliver the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress after a disruptive first year that has produced some successes but more controversies.
Though his approval rating has sagged from the early months of 2025, it is not statistically changed from 41 percent in October. That highlights the degree to which opinions about Trump remain firm and largely fixed among both his supporters and the far larger group of detractors. In the new poll, 85 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s job performance while 94 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of independents disapprove. Those numbers are almost identical to the partisan breakdown in a Post-ABC-Ipsos poll in October.
I voted this morning (by mail) in the local and Illinois primaries, but of course this is a Democratic state and so things will remain Democratic, and that’s fine with me. We’re also replacing a Senator, Democrat Dick Durbin, and there were lots of primary candidates for his position. I chose what whom I think is the best candidate, but all are untested. Still, I try not to think too much about how the Democrats are doing, not only because the news isn’t good, but also because it’s early in the election cycle and I have a life to live; all I can do is give my opinions and vote. The midterms will be telling.
Mexico’s most powerful drug kingpin, the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, was killed by Mexican security forces on Sunday, Mexican defense officials said.
The killing of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho,” represents a major show of force by the country’s military as President Donald Trump continues to pressure the United States’ southern neighbor to do more to fight its drug trafficking organizations.
The cartel leader’s killing set off a wave of violence in areas controlled by the cartel, with reports of burning cars blocking roads. In Guadalajara, the capital city of the western state of Jalisco and one of the host cities of the upcoming World Cup, businesses were shut down, sirens and helicopters could be heard in the city center, and residents were warned to stay inside.
The U.S. Embassy warned U.S. citizens in Jalisco and Tamaulipas states, and parts of three other states, to shelter in place because of security operations and related road blockages and criminal activity.
Oseguera, one of the most wanted fugitives in Mexico, was a founder of the New Generation cartel, which has grown to become one of the most powerful and violent organizations in Mexico, trafficking large quantities of fentanyl, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine into the U.S.
. . .U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, in a post on X, described Oseguera as “one of the bloodiest and most ruthless drug kingpins” and said his killing was a “great development for Mexico, the U.S., Latin America, and the world.”
In a hotel in Guadalajara, tourists on Sunday morning had no way to get to the airport, with taxis and public transit paralyzed. Hotel staff worked a double shift because employees had no way to get to work. A woman made a sign of the cross as she stepped outside the hotel.
Although Trump once floated a U.S. invasion of Mexico to stop drugs, this seems unlikely, and we’ll see how Mexico’s new President, Claudia Sheinbaum—the country’s first woman Preisdent and its first Jewish President (the U.S. hasn’t had either)—will do with her promise to clamp down on drugs. Clearly the cartels are enormously powerful in Mexico, rivaling the government. Imagine if this situation obtained in the U.S., and when a big drug-seller was taken down, huge areas of the country become nonfunctional, to the point where people must stay indoors.
A long-running legal battle over whether a lesbian group can exclude transgender women from its events has made its way to the Federal Court.
The Lesbian Action Group (LAG) is appealing a decision by the Human Rights Commission, which ruled it could not legally exclude transgender women.
The case, described as a “clash of rights”, will determine whether the rights of cisgender lesbians come at the expense of trans lesbians.
The Victorian-based LAG says it subscribes to the philosophy of lesbian feminism and does not believe humans can change sex.
It wishes to hold public political and social events exclusively for “lesbian-born females” that would exclude all males irrespective of whether they identify as women.
The group requires an exemption to do this in order to avoid breaching the Sex Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to exclude someone on the basis of gender identity.
The LAG was denied a five-year exemption in 2023, when it applied to the Human Rights Commission.
It then lodged an appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal, which found “overt acts of discrimination” should not be allowed and the exemption could have a detrimental impact on trans women.
The group has now appealed to the Federal Court after running a crowdfunding campaign that raised close to $40,000, with donations made by people from around the world.
Today the LAG’s lawyers told the court the group had the freedom to associate in a way that catered to their own needs.
Counsel Leigh Howard said there was “no human right to be invited to the party” and that the exemption should be granted on the same basis that female-only gyms were given exemptions.
This wouldn’t fly in the UK where they have legalized a definition of “woman” based on biology. In Australia your sex is apparently defined solely by your “gender identification”, whether or not you’ve had transitioning treatments like hormones or surgery. I can understand the anger of lesbians, who presume that a lesbian must be a woman, not a trans-identified man. This may be an additional example of a clash of rights between groups with biological women (lesbians in this case) are entitled to their own “space.”
*Mark Gustafson’s WSJ column is called “The diminishing risk of an Iran attack,” but by that he means that the risk of Iran attacking other countries is lower, not that the risk of a U.S. attack on Iran is lessening. Gustafson is identified as “White House chief of intelligence (2021-22) and head of the Situation Room (2022-25).” It’s clear he thinks that the risk of U.S. action is smaller than it was during the Biden administration, though there are palpable dangers, like creating chaos in the Middle East.
A lot has changed in two years. The risk of regional war has greatly diminished. Several factors have put the regime on its heels:
• Iran’s regional strength has weakened. Sustained Israeli and U.S. strikes have significantly degraded its proxy network of Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iraqi Shiite militias, the backbone of Tehran’s deterrence strategy. Iran has struggled to resupply them, limiting its ability to mount coordinated retaliation.
• The regime faces profound domestic strain. The economy is in free fall. The rial has lost more than 90% of its value since 2018. Inflation has hovered near 50% annually. Corruption has drained the revolutionary fervor that sustained the state’s legitimacy. Last month the regime killed thousands of protesters in a few days.
• U.S. military capabilities have advanced significantly. Precision strike systems, cyber tools, missile defenses and offensive drones can impose costs without a ground invasion. In Venezuela last month, new tools to disable the electric grid, destroy missile-defense systems, and facilitate cyberattacks helped ensure a successful operation.
• Iran’s leadership is fractured. Last year, Israeli operations killed many of Ali Khamenei’s most loyal security officials, leaving behind tenuous alliances and a supreme leader who is almost 87.
• Iran’s military capabilities are hamstrung. Last year, Israel destroyed most of Iran’s long-range missile infrastructure, advanced air defenses, ammunition depots and radar sites.
• Tehran’s response to Israeli and U.S. attacks last year was tepid. It could muster only a missile barrage against a well-defended U.S. base in Qatar. This time around, the U.S. has deployed more-advanced air defenses to protect its bases and almost doubled the naval and air assets it deployed last year.
For the Trump administration, the upside of acting at a moment of Iranian vulnerability is plainly alluring. It could further erode proxy networks, blunt the nuclear threat, and help tip the global balance of power in America’s favor.
Meamwhile, the U.S. continues to amass troops and weapons around Iran, at the same time that many Iranians, according to the Washington Post’s morning report, are fearful, defiant, exasperated, and divided in their feelings about a possible U.S. attack, but “joyful” or “hopeful” are not words that were used.
Our armaments and troops around Iran:
From the WaPo: Note: Some U.S. ship locations are approximate. Source: New York Times reporting and analysis of satellite imagery, ship- and flight-tracking data. The New York Times
Will the U.S. attack? I still think so, but it’s not so clear now, for if we really want regime change, I don’t think we can get this without U.S. boots on the ground. And that means a real war, and that in turn means that Congress should really declare it—though Trump’s ignored that Constitutional stipulation over and over.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s asking, “Where’s the beef?”. And her photo is especially cute today:
Hili: All is lost.
Andrzej: What happened?
Hili: Today we ate the last piece of tenderloin.
Look how sad she is!
In Polish:
Hili: Wszystko stracone.
Ja: Co się stało?
Hili: Zjedliśmy dziś ostatni kawałek polędwicy.
From Masih, who in this tweet answers a challenge from an Iranian official. This is very moving:
Wow. The Foreign Minister of the Islamic regime admits to killing 3,117 Iranians.
That’s his defense on international television, then says: If you think it’s more, add one name.
We accept your challenge.We won’t bring one name.
We will bring thousands. pic.twitter.com/hI4gUTB01U
From Luana. If this is real (what he said appears genuine), Newsom is a condescending twit. How could he say such guff? There is a community note that he wasn’t addressing blacks (the audience was mixed), and that may well be true, but it doesn’t matter: what he’s telling people is “I understand you because I’m as dumb as you are.”
Gavin Newsom is absolutely KILLING IT with the black crowd in Georgia:
“I am like you. I’m a 960 SAT guy. I can’t read. Hopefully that doesn’t offend you.”
From The Pinkah; I haven’t read the article yet, but Sally is good, and this is worth a look:
Can You Really Be ‘Addicted’ to Social Media? Addiction expert Sally Satel @slsatel examines the complexities and suggests that social media overuse is not like heroin addiction after all. https://t.co/K8hE1MMRYU
Titania has as a new (sarcastic) article in The Critic inspired by Mayor Mamdani. It’s about the need for communism and why Islamic countries are not homophobic (she says this: “Some bigots have argued that homosexuality is incompatible with the Islamic faith. But in fact, homophobia is extremely rare in Muslim-majority countries. This is why there isn’t a single LGBT+ community centre in the whole of Afghanistan. Everyone is so tolerant that there is simply no need for them.”
Communism is the only guarantee of human happiness.
Two from Dr. Cobb. His great niece just won a world championship in bicycling. That’s some sprint she puts on at the end!
My great niece, Erin Boothman, just became UK Women’s Champion in the Elimination track race (in Elimination 18-odd riders whizz round the track, then, every other lap, the last rider is eliminated until there are just two left.). She is only 19, beat some of the best in the world. Hooray!
I’m not sure who Frederick Alexander is, but he’s written an intriguing article at The Gadfly (click below to read for free)
Alexander lists five types of “progressives”, and although their characteristics are distinct, he avers that their natures interlock to reinforce “progressivism”, which he sees, as most of us do, as performative wokeness that serves as a form of virtue signaling. And yes, two of the subspecies really believe the ideology. I’ll give the five types (indented), but it’s fun to try to think of examples of each one. I have omitted some of the descriptions in the interest of space.
The True Believers are the rarest and most dangerous type. Usually found in university admin or HR, they genuinely think that questioning any aspect of progressive orthodoxy constitutes harm. The moment they make eye contact with reality, their pupils dilate, and they assume a glazed, faraway look like someone’s talking to them through an earpiece only they can hear.
It’s the Tavistock clinician who dismissed parents’ concerns about rushing children into transition as “transphobia”. It’s the university administrator who considers “women” a radioactive word and the niqab an expression of female empowerment. It’s the civil servant who enforces unisex toilets because questions of “dignity” matter more than safeguarding.
The Careerists know it’s all nonsense but have mortgages. They privately roll their eyes at the latest pronoun updates but champion them in the board meeting with the enthusiasm of a North Korean newsreader.
Examples include the BBC editor who knows “pregnant people” is absurd but issues the apology on behalf of the female presenter who corrected the autocue to “women”. It’s the museum curator who rewrites exhibition labels to acknowledge “problematic legacies” to satisfy the demands of the True Believer, who controls the money.
The Cowards are everywhere. They know exactly what’s happening, hate it, but will never say so out loud. They’re the sort who’ll text you “100% agree!” after you’ve been fired but somehow missed every opportunity to back you up before the True Believer called you in about your unconscious bias.
When Kathleen Stock was hounded out of Sussex University, the Coward thought it was outrageous right up to the moment they realised they could be next. Then they recalibrated the events in their mind and took a different view.
. . .The Opportunists don’t care either way but have spotted the angles. Young, ambitious, and morally vacant, they add a dozen causes to their personal website and say things like “centring marginalised voices” without meaning a word of it.
The Opportunist will launch a DEI consultancy today and charge an HR True Believer ten grand tomorrow to tell a roomful of Careerists they’re racists. Or they’ll be the author who went from wellness influencer to decolonisation expert in 18 months and set up a podcast in between. It’s the academic who discovered that adding “queer theory” to their research proposal tripled their funding chances.
. . .The Fanatics think they’re True Believers except they dial it up to eleven. Pronouns and watermelon emojis in the bio, sure. But they also believe in decolonising logic and think the world is going to end tomorrow if we don’t do what they tell us. Every cause connects to every other cause, and all causes connect back to the same enemy.
It’s the student activist who screams at a Jewish classmate for three hours about Zionism, then files a complaint claiming she felt unsafe. It’s the protester who glues himself to a motorway, causes an ambulance delay, then calls the criticism “ableist”. The Fanatic cannot maintain eye contact except when talking about Palestine, at which point his eyes fix unblinkingly on yours, daring you to push back on his claims of genocide.
I could name a specimen of each of these, but will refrain on the grounds that you wouldn’t know most of them. Fanatics, though, include Robin DiAngelo, and True Believers the many biologists who assert that sex is a spectrum. (Some of the latter could be “careerists” as well, knowing that they can sell books and write articles, advancing themselves, by supporting nonsense.
Then, in an analysis that I like a lot, Alexander explains why these types are self-reinforcing, advancing “progressivism” as a whole (I hate calling it that; how about “wokeness”?):
Identifying these types isn’t an exact science, and they overlap to various degrees. The crucial thing to understand is that they need each other.
True Believers provide the moral authority, write the policies, and enforce the rules with genuine conviction. They absorb the ideology and give it form. Without them, it would all feel like a game of pretend (which it is).
Careerists provide the manpower. They actually implement the nonsense without stopping to think much about what any of it means.
Cowards provide the silence and the illusion of consensus, allowing the system to expand unopposed.
The Opportunists provide the raw energy, finding new ways to monetise moral exhibitionism because they see progressive orthodoxy as a business opportunity. Celebrity activists – indeed the whole entertainment industry – fall into this category.
Fanatics provide the threat. They’re the enforcers who make the Careerists think twice about cracking a joke since every joke has a victim. The Coward looks at them and thinks at least I’m not that person in an effort to assuage the sense of disgust at their own lack of integrity.
The system rewards all of them. True Believers get authority. Careerists get promotions. Cowards keep their heads down and Opportunists get book deals. Fanatics get the attention they crave, which is why we’re forever seeing clips of them in our social feeds waving Palestinian flags or throwing soup at Van Gogh.
What they all get – every single one – is protection from consequences.
Why? Because progressive orthodoxy is sustained by particular incentives. It’s got nothing to do with the strength of the ideas, most of which are obviously terrible when examined under daylight. It’s about the incentives that come with compliance and the costs that come with dissent.
In the end, Alexander still thinks the ideology is doomed to disappear:
The good news is that every protection racket collapses eventually – and progressivism will be no exception. The lawsuits will become too expensive, the backlash too loud to ignore. Those politicians who told us that men can be women will explain with a frown that these were “challenging times” rather than a gruesome display of moral cowardice. Pronouns in bios will become so mortifyingly embarrassing that those who had them will pretend, even to themselves, that they never dreamt of anything so silly.
Well, I’m not so sure he’s right here, but one can hope. The Democratic Party has been influenced too long by “progressivism,” and that shows no signs of disappearing. Indeed, it’s growing, to the point where Nate Silver lists Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the two top Democratic candidates for President. (Remember, though, that it’s early days.) AOC is clearly a progressive, a combination of Fanatic and Careerist, while Gavin Newsom used to be progressive but, starting to realize he can’t win the Presidency that way, has been moving towards the center. He’s clearly a combination of Careerist and Opportunist.
In the meantime, have fun by listing below individuals falling into the five classes given above.
But today we have a glorious selection of water birds (starring DUCKS) from New Zealand, where reader David Riddell lives. His commentary and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Be sure to read the notes; you’ll see that several of these species are endangered.
Knowing how much our host likes ducks, I thought I’d put together a few images of water birds from around New Zealand. Most of these are from the North Island, where I live, but there are a couple of South Islanders in here as well.
The blue duck (Hymenolaimus malacorhynchos) is one of only two duck species in the world that are mountain stream specialists, the other being the torrent duck (Merganetta armata) of South America. Males have a breathy whistle, which gives them their Maori name, whio, while the female call is a harsh, growling croak. Like many New Zealand birds they’ve been badly impacted by introduced mammalian predators, but with management they’re holding their own and even expanding in some areas, such as the Volcanic Plateau in the central North Island. For Tolkien fans, this pair was just below Tawhai Falls in Tongariro National Park, which doubled as the Forbidden Pool where Gollum was captured by Faramir’s men in The Two Towers:
Brown teal (Anas chlorotis) used to be the most abundant waterfowl in the country, but again have declined markedly, although numbers have increased in recent years in a few places. They occupied a wide range of habitats, not all of them aquatic. This pair (male on the right) is part of a population introduced to Tawharanui Regional Park north of Auckland, which has a predator-proof fence across the base of a peninsula, protecting a 588 ha park from rats, cats, possums, mustelids and other exotic predators:
New Zealand scaup (Aythya novaeseelandiae) is a diving duck with a cute, “rubber duckie” profile. They mostly live in deep, clear waters where they feed on submerged water weeds, though this one was on a eutrophic (nutrient-enriched) lake in the small town of Cambridge:
Pacific black duck (Anas superciliosa) can cope quite well with introduced mammalian predators, but is perhaps now the country’s most endangered duck, as it is being genetically swamped by mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), with which it readily hybridises. This one, on the shore of a remote lake on the Volcanic Plateau, has the typically stripy face, and the green speculum with no white band on its upper margin, but the slight smudging of the facial stripes and orange tinge to the legs suggests that even this one has some mallard ancestry. Fortunately they are still widespread elsewhere in the Pacific:
Mallards have also been in the news here lately as a few individuals on a high country lake in the South Island recently started preying on the chicks of Australasian crested grebes (Podiceps cristatus australis) and had to be “euthanised” as the local media euphemistically put it. The concern was that, being such adaptable creatures, other ducks would learn the habit and it would spread. The grebes (a subspecies of the great crested grebe, from which it differs mainly by not having a distinct non-breeding plumage) are considered threatened, although their numbers have increased from a couple of hundred in the 1980s to perhaps a thousand today, with more in Australia. Once almost entirely confined to the high country they are now well established on many lowland lakes, though they have not yet repopulated the North Island, from which they disappeared in the 19th century. In 2023 the bird’s international profile was lifted dramatically when it was crowned New Zealand’s Bird of the Century after being championed by comedian John Oliver. “After all, this is what democracy is all about,” he said on his show, “America interfering in foreign elections.” This one was photographed from the footbridge over the outlet of Lake Tekapo – the lake is fed by glacial meltwater, hence the pale blue colour:
While the crested grebe retreated to the South Island, another grebe, the New Zealand dabchick (Poliocephalus rufopectus) went the other way, becoming restricted to the North Island from the 1940s. More recently it’s been expanding again, and recolonised the South Island in 2012. This is a pair engaging in a courtship dance:
And another dabchick:
Another small grebe, the Australasian grebe (Tachybaptus novaehollandiae) has been colonising New Zealand since the 1970s, though numbers nationwide are still low. Adults have a prominent yellow spot at the base of the bill that looks almost like a second eye, though the colour hasn’t fully developed on this juvenile:
Pied shags (Phalacrocorax varius) are one of 13 currently recognised New Zealand species of shags and cormorants (all usually called shags in New Zealand), making the country a centre of diversity for the family. The same species in Australia is generally a freshwater bird, although in this country they’re most commonly found on the coast. This one however was nesting alongside the Karamea River in the north-west of the South Island:
Here are two other shag species, at a small lake near my home in the Waikato region of the North Island. On the left is a black shag (Phalacrocorax carbo novaehollandiae), the local subspecies of the widespread great cormorant, while on the right is a little pied cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos). This is a highly variable species; juveniles are entirely black, while adults can range from a white-throated form through to completely pied. This individual has a rather unusual motley appearance – I suspect it’s an older juvenile moulting into adult plumage:
American readers may be wondering why I’ve put in a picture of such a common species as a laughing gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) – and one in scruffy non-breeding plumage at that. But this was the first individual of the species ever seen in New Zealand, which my wife, daughter and I found two days before Christmas in 2016, when we stopped for a picnic lunch at a beachside reserve near the small east coast town of Opotiki. It created huge interest among the local birding community, hanging around for several weeks and allowing many people to see it, eventually moulting into its much more handsome breeding colours, with black head and white-ringed eye. It eventually moved southwards down the coast as far as Cape Kidnappers in Hawkes Bay, and was reported intermittently until October 2018:
Here’s another shot of it, next to a red-billed gull (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae scopulinus), which is the species you would expect to see in such a place:
Black-billed gulls (Chroicocephalus bulleri) are our only endemic gull (the southern black-backed or kelp gull, Larus dominicanus, also occurs here). Until recently they were classified as critically endangered due to rapid declines at some of their main breeding colonies on South Island river beds, but they’re holding their own elsewhere, and establishing new colonies in the North Island. These ones are roosting on an old wharf at the southern end of Lake Taupo, the large lake in the centre of the North Island:
