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.
We have only one batch of photos remaining, a special batch for Darwin Day tomorrow, so again I’m stealing some e great photos by Scott Ritchie, who hails from Carirns, Australia. Scott’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. But please send in your good wildlife photos. His bird today is itself a marvel of natural selection for cryptic coloration and behavior: the Papuan frogmouth.
FROGMOUTH FUNNIES
A Papuan Frogmouth chick [Podargus papuensis] sparked my interest in bird photography 7 years ago. This is a large bird that mimics a dead tree stump or broken branch. Grey and brown mottled camo, and sites still. Carefully watching you through its slit eye. In Nov. 2019, I was thrilled to see Papuan Frogmouths nest in a tree in my front yard. The chick was so cute! I followed it until it fledged a month later.
Ever since this time, I’ve wanted to recapture the magic that a young frogmouth chick brings to the viewer. Large, intense eyes on a fluffy white downy head. CUTE. And they never nested in our tree again.
This year I finally captured a frogmouth chick as it grew, and successfully fledged (i.e., left the nest) near the Cairns Botanic Gardens. Here are some pictures of the growing bird, and my silly stories. I hope you get a kick out of them, and wish them well
My first Papuan Frogmouth chick. Nov. 2019, my yard. The bird that sparked my passion. Max cuteness!:
Fast forward, Dec. 2025. A PFM nests near the Cairns Botanic Gardens.:
A few weeks later, the egg hatches. And a little chick is born. A bit scrawny now. Max cuteness in 1-2 weeks:
In late January, the mozzies [Australian for “mosquitoes”] are fierce. “Dad, there’s a mosquito trying to bite me. Do something!” Max cuteness!:
Dad laughs. “Get used to it. You’re in north Queensland son!”:
Come on Dad! Be a sport:
A week later, max cuteness is past. And a surely teenage frogmouth realises he has to put up with his home a bit longer:
But he’s good humoured about it. Can’t beat ’em, join him!:
And finally the time has come to leave the nest. Dad and son are now roosting in a nearby tree. He’s still a cute puffball. But has a lot to learn:
“Son, comb your bloody feathers! You’ll never convince anyone that you’re a tree stump with that ragtop!”:
I used to subscribe to the New York Review of Books, which, while sometimes a repository for boring academic cat-fights, often included engaging and illuminating articles—until fabled editor Bob Silvers died in 2017. Now, under the leadership of editor Emily Greenhouse, the magazine, always Left-leaning, seems to have become more progressive.
The article by gender scholar Paisley Currah in the December issue, for example, fully accepts the argument that trans people are fully and legally equivalent to the sex that they transitioned to or think they are, not their natal sex. While for most issues trans people should have the same legal rights as cis people, I’ve argued that in a few cases, like sports, confinement in jails, and right to have a rape counselor or battered-woman’s helper the same as one’s natal sex, trans “rights” conflict with women’s “rights”. Further, an enlightened resolution of those “rights” involves accepting the biological definition of sex, based on gamete type, rather than the self-identification of sex adopted by many gender activists and “progressives.”
You can read the NYRB article by clicking below, or find it archived here.
What’s useful about Currah’s article is its summary of the history of legislation involving both biological sex and self-identified gender, as well as discrimination against women if they stepped outside what was seen as their “proper roles”. What’s not so useful is that Currah swallows the whole hog of “progressive” gender activism, arguing that those who hew to the biological definition of sex are not only endangering feminism (in fact, the opposite is true), but buttressing the Right, including Trump and Team MAGA. Here he is wrong, for he neglects the many liberals who question the view that you are whatever sex you think you are. (Most Americans, for example, do not think that trans-identified men (“trans women”) should compete on women’s sports teams.) Currah further argues, also mistakenly, that legislation accepting that biological sex can matter legally, is really “anti trans”. I would argue that, at least in the cases I mentioned above, it is in fact “pro woman.”
There’s no doubt that much of the legislation involving trans people is meant to buttress a conservative, religious-based agenda, and I disagree with a lot of it (I think, for example, that there’s no good reason to ban transgender people from the military). But when there are real clashes of rights, what we need is discussion and argumentation, not name-calling or claims that adherence to a definition of sex based on biology is designed to “erase” trans people—or rests at bottom on bigotry.
You can see where Currah is going at the outset:
On April 27, 2023, Kansas became the first state in the country to institute a statewide definition of sex. “A ‘female’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ova,” the law declared, “and a ‘male’ is an individual whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.” Since then dozens of state legislatures have introduced similar bills; sixteen have passed. In Indiana and Nebraska governors have issued executive orders to the same end. Each of these measures effectively strips transgender people of legal recognition.
While Currah, tellingly, never gives a definition of “man” or “woman,” he seems to tacitly accepts the self-identification principle: “a woman is whoever she says she is,” regardless if that person has had no hormone therapy or surgery, and has a beard and a penis. He rejects the biologicaL sex definition on the grounds that so many seemingly intelligent people do. People like Steve Novella and Agustín Fuentes, for example, argue that gamete-based sex is associated or can be disassociated from many other traits, including chromosome type, hormonal titer, chromosome content, and morphology, so there is no one way to define biological sex. I won’t go into the arguments about how a gamete-based defintion is both nearly universal and also helps us make sense of biology; I’ve gone through that a million times. If you want a good take on sex, see Richard Dawkins’s Substack article). Here’s Currah again:
There is no single sound definition of “biological sex.” Even if you know the chromosomes of a fertilized egg, you can’t definitively determine which type of reproductive cells will develop. . . .
But that definition, too, flies in the face of current knowledge. Biomedical researchers have come to recognize that sex is not a single thing but an umbrella term for a number of things, including sex chromosomes, internal reproductive structures (prostate, uterus), gonads (testes, ovaries), and external genitalia. For most people, these characteristics generally align in a single direction, male or female. But they won’t for everyone. At birth some people, often labeled intersex, don’t fall neatly into the male or female column.
Most people? The frequency of true intersex people in the population, estimated by serious people rather than ideologues, lies between about 1 in 5600 and 1 in 20,000. This means that, for all intents and purposes, sex is a true binary.
Currah’s implicit definition of “sex” based on self-identification leads him to reject all forms of discrimination involving biological sex, including the “hard case” of sports, where biology makes the crucial difference:
That coercion isn’t confined to trans people: the current wave of efforts to enshrine biological definitions of sex pressures cis people, too, to conform to a conservative vision of gender difference. A sports ban in Utah led officials to investigate the birth sex of a cis girl after parents of her competitors complained.
And while he’s again not explicit about gender medicine—at a time when “affirmative care” is being recognized as harmful and is being rolled back for young people—he seems to buy that, too, and without age limits:
A blitz of anti-trans executive orders requires that passports list birth sex, trans women in federal prisons be housed with men and denied transition-related medical care, and federal employees use bathrooms associated with their birth sex.
I am not as concerned with bathroom bills (though single-person bathrooms are one solution) as with medical care. No, allowing a 12-year old girl to have a double mastectomy, or a teenage boy to start taking estrogen or testosterone blockers, or any adolescent to take pubery blockers, do not comprise an “enlightened” form of care. What about therapy—objective therapy? What about the fact that the vast majority of gender-dysphoric adolescents not given hormones or surgery eventually resolve as gay people as opposed to trans people?
Currah’s main conclusion is that accepting a biological definition of sex, and thinking that biological sex matters, are not only bigots bent on erasing trans people, but also are doing severe damage to feminism:
By campaigning to make birth sex the sole basis for legal distinctions between men and women, advocates of a “gender critical” feminism evidently hope to cordon off trans women from the rest of womanhood without jeopardizing cisgender women’s access to the rights and freedoms that feminism won. But the logic of this position in fact aligns with—and ultimately serves—the desire to roll back feminism itself. That trans and nonbinary people have been able to move beyond their birth sex classifications is due precisely to the successes of the women’s liberation movement. And that movement’s most influential social victory, the decoupling of ideas about biology from ideas about how women ought to be, is precisely the achievement under threat today.
Currah doesn’t realize that liberals like me don’t give a damn about women’s “roles” or “how women ought to be,” but do care about the difference that biology makes when rights clash between groups. He doesn’t realize that those on the Left who emphasize biology are not “transphobes,” but accept trans people but also care about women’s rights—the rights of natal women. (Note that if you think you can be whatever sex you think you are, there is no such thing as “women’s rights”; there are just “people’s rights.” This goes along with the inability of those favoring trans rights, including the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Skrmetti case, to even define “man” and “woman”.)
In fact, what does “feminism” even mean for those who think that you’re whatever sex you think you are? Does a biological man who suddenly identify as a woman gain a new set of “rights”? If so, what are they beyond the “right” to be called whatever pronouns you want? Tarring one’s opponents as conservatives, bigots, or transphobes accomplishes nothing; in fact, it’s counterproductive. And society is beginning to realize this.
I will tar people like Currah, though, with one word: “misguided”.
There are a fair number of newbies coming on to the site, which is great, but a couple of them are hateful, like the one who tried to refer to your host yesterday as a “kike faggot who runs this site” with “a fine hooked nose as any other degenerate kike”. Needless to say, that person has been vanquished to the hinterland for antisemites for committing a big-time Roolz violation. But I wanted to let other new readers/commenters know that there are guidelines for commenting here, called, in Chicago argot, “Da Roolz“. You can find them on the left sidebar or at the preceding link. They may seem long, but I find them useful for ensuring civility and reasonable discussion on this website. If you haven’t read them, please do before posting.
And if you want to send me wildlife photos (I welcome good ones), read the sidebar post “How to send me wildlife photos.”
Welcome to the first Monday in February: February 2, 2026, and it’s National Tater Tot Day, celebrating the commerical nubs of grated and deep-fried potato. They’re good, though I almost never have them. Some of the history:
Tater tots were developed in 1953 when American frozen food company Ore-Ida founders F. Nephi Grigg, Golden Grigg, and Ross Erin Butler Sr. were trying to devise a recipe to use leftover slivers of cut potatoes that would otherwise be thrown away. They chopped up the slivers, added flour and seasoning, then pushed the mash through holes and sliced off pieces of the extruded mixture.
The product was first offered commercially in stores in 1956. Originally, sales were slow; the family speculated the product was priced too low, so it had no perceived value. When the price was raised, people began buying it. By 1960 Ore-Ida captured 25% of the frozen potato market.
The Tots can also be made into a casserole with ground beef and other stuff; I’ve always wanted to try it but haven’t (it’s popular in the Midwest). Here’s what it looks like, and you can find a recipe here. It uses just a few common ingredients, and takes only 5 minutes to prepare (and 40 minutes to cook). Somebody make one!
Here’s the best song I know that incorporates a ukulele. The song was, of course written by George Harrison, who loved the ukulele, and here Macca plays an instrument that belonged to the late Harrison. One of the YouTube comments says this:
Paul is playing a 1920’s Gibson Tenor Ukulele that was gifted to him by George. George Harrison had a very impressive ukulele collection, including two of George Formby’s banjo ukuleles.
Look at all the great musicians! This is a live performance from the Concert for George, performed at London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 29, 2002: the first anniversary of Harrison’s death.
The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to arrest and detain as many people as possible during its immigration crackdown. But in recent weeks, a deluge of court cases has led federal judges to release hundreds of immigrant detainees back into the country, and threatens to overwhelm the court system.
In case after case, federal judges have found that the Trump administration has been ignoring longstanding legal interpretations that mandate the release of many people who are taken into immigration custody if they post a bond.
The surge in such cases has dominated the court dockets in some districts, overwhelming government lawyers who have to defend the detentions. And the wave of people who have been set free has upended the Trump administration’s effort to keep detained immigrants locked up indefinitely, even if they do not pose a public safety threat.
Lawyers representing detainees have been filing rafts of what are known as habeas corpus petitions — court filings that compel the government to justify holding someone in custody. In the vast majority of cases, judges are siding with the detainees and ordering their immediate release, or ordering immigration judges to hold bond hearings, according to 10 lawyers interviewed by The New York Times, who said their practices had filed dozens of habeas petitions over the last couple of months.
Jessie Calmes, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said that she had filed at least 40 petitions since November. Every one had been granted, she said.
“A lot of these people have been here more than 10 years and have U.S.-citizen kids,” she said. “They’re people who were picked up on the way to work, at their job site or for a traffic violation.”
The surge in habeas petitions has strained federal courts in some states, including Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, with hundreds of new cases a month in some court districts, according to a person with knowledge of the
And the explanation:
The wave of habeas petitions traces to a key change the Trump administration made in how immigration detention decisions are made.
For decades, immigration judges — who are separate from the federal courts and overseen by the Justice Department rather than the judiciary — granted bond to immigrants in detention who were not public safety threats or flight risks, allowing them to live and work in the community while pursuing their cases.
But last year the Trump administration moved to make virtually everyone who is in the country unlawfully subject to mandatory detention. When the policy change was affirmed by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, it took discretion away from immigration judges.
Well, I’m glad that everyone gets adjudicated now instead of just snatched up and deported. But what puzzles me is that immigration justices are said to be overseen by the Department of Justice, but Trump’s policy change has been affirmed by that very department. So why are the judges taking precedence here when, one would think, they should be judging cases by the policy created by the DOJ. Regardless, it’s clear people want deportation policy applied most strongly to undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes beyond entering the U.S. illegally.
*I’m still betting on (and still ambivalent about) the likelihood that the U.S. will attack Iran in a week. But remember—I am not pundit. The NYT’s Bret Stephens is, however, and in his latest column he ponders the question, “Can we let Iran get away with mass murder?”
So far, a U.S.-based Iranian human rights group says it has verified the killing of more than 5,500 protesters and is still reviewing 17,000 additional cases. Many thousands more were injured, and independent reports indicate that tens of thousands of Iranians have been arrested or arbitrarily detained. An Iranian doctor in the city of Isfahan told The Times of having seen “young people whose brains were smashed with live bullets, and a mom who was shot in the neck, her two small children were crying in the car, a child whose bladder, hip and rectum was crushed with a bullet.”
ran could always become more pliant, if only to play for time. But the odds are growing that the president will order some sort of attack once sufficient U.S. forces are in the region, which could happen as early as this week. That, in turn, makes it more likely that Israel will become involved — either because it will respond to Iranian retaliatory missile strikes or because it will seek to pre-empt them by hitting first. Whichever way, this will not be a Venezuela-style sub-three-hour war.
Is the military option wise? The argument against it is that it’s unlikely to achieve much.
. . .And something else: Do we really want to live in a world in which people like Mohseni-Ejei, the judicial leader, can terrorize people with utter impunity? Have decades of vowing “Never again” — this Tuesday marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz — taught us nothing more than to offer pro forma condemnations when thousands of protesters are gunned down by modern-day Einsatzgruppen?
I know that, for now, thoughtful Americans are much more alarmed by the thuggish killing in Minneapolis on Saturday of Alex Pretti and by the smears to which he’s been posthumously subjected by senior members of the administration. I also know that the president who is so grotesquely at fault for inflaming the situation in Minnesota makes an unlikely champion of protesters in Iran.
But if Pretti’s death is a tragedy, what do we say or do in the face of the murder of thousands of Iranians? Are they, as Stalin might have said, just another statistic?
I think Stephens’s answer to his title question is “no.”
A woman who received a double mastectomy at the age of 16 under the guise of transgender-related healthcare was just awarded $2 million in the first successful medical-malpractice lawsuit brought by a destransitioner.
Fox Varian sued her New York-based psychologist and plastic surgeon for facilitating her gender-transition double mastectomy in 2019, independent reporter Benjamin Ryan who attended Varian’s recent trial, said. Although a host of detransitioners have sued doctors who rush to “affirm” gender confusion with life-altering surgeries, Varian’s is the first known successful lawsuit.
Claire Deacon, Varian’s mother, was led by her daughter’s psychologist to believe that breast removal was the only way to heal Varian’s gender dysphoria, she told the jury. At first Deacon told Varian’s psychologist Kenneth Einhorn that top surgery was “never gonna happen” if she could help it.’
“This man was just so emphatic, and pushing and pushing, that I felt like there was no good decision,” she said, according to an Epoch Times report. “I think it was a scare tactic: I don’t believe it was malice, I think he believed what he was saying … but he was very, very wrong.”
The idea of her 16-year-old daughter receiving a mastectomy made her “physically ill,” Deacon said. But Deacon was led to believe by Einhorn that Varian would be unhappy unless she was affirmed in her gender dysphoria. It was the “the hardest, most difficult, gut-wrenching” decision, Deacon told the jury.
Defendants Einhorn and plastic surgeon Simon Chin implied that Varian wanted the medical procedure, and was even at risk of suicide should she not receive a mastectomy. Chin’s attorney called Deacon’s consent a “critical fact” of the case, and asked jurors what might have happened to a potentially suicidal Varian had Chin refused the surgery.
Varian’s legal team argued that the matter in question was not if the surgery should have been performed on her because she was a minor, but if the doctors correctly assumed Varian had gender dysphoria. Defendants did not notify Varian of “the risks, hazards, and alternatives” before surgery, her legal team claimed.
We will see a lot more of these cases, since “affirmative care” is not “objective care”, but a form of rah-rah pushing of those with gender dysphoria to get hormones and then surgery. Especially when this is performed on kids under 18 or so, one can persuasively argue that such children cannot make rational decisions; nor do doctors always apprise patients of the risks of transitioning. This verdict alone is going to put a big chill on the “affirmative care” movement for children with gender dysphoria: $2 million is a lot of dosh.
I spoke about the trial with three prominent pediatric gender-care psychologists who have beencritical ofthe field: Amy Tishelman, Laura Edwards-Leeper, and Erica Anderson, the latter of whom served as an expert witness for the plaintiff. All three said that pediatric gender medicine is facing a long-overdue legal reckoning.
Varian’s case, Edwards-Leeper said, “should be a wake-up call to American medical and mental health organizations to stop ignoring the growing body of research showing how the patient population has changed and revealing serious flaws in current practices. If we do not course correct immediately, I predict we will see either continued lawsuits and detransition tragedies or increasing bans on care, both of which will hurt the gender-distressed youth the field is trying to help.”
“They had every opportunity to slow this down, to do the work, to follow the standards, to say not yet, to ask questions, to explore,” Deutsch said during his closing argument of Einhorn and Chin’s care of Varian. “And instead, they did nothing. They abandoned all of the guardrails, and then tried to sell to you that no guardrails exist. And a vulnerable child paid the price.”
Promoted by President Donald Trump as “a must watch,” the Melania Trump documentary “Melania” debuted with a better-than-expected $7 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The release of “Melania” was unlike any seen before. Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights, plus some $35 million to market it, making it the most expensive documentary ever. Directed by Brett Ratner, who had been exiled from Hollywood since 2017, the film about the first lady debuted in 1,778 theaters in the midst of Trump’s turbulent second term.
While the result would be a flop for most films with such high costs, “Melania” was a success by documentary standards. It’s the best opening weekend for a documentary, outside of concert films, in 14 years. Going into the weekend, estimates ranged from $3 million to $5 million.
But there was little to compare “Melania” to, given that presidential families typically eschew in-office memoir or documentary releases to avoid the appearance of capitalizing on the White House. The film chronicles Melania Trump over 20 days last January, leading up to Trump’s second inauguration.
The No. 1 movie of the weekend was Sam Raimi’s “Send Help,” a critically acclaimed survival thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. The Walt Disney Co. release debuted with $20 million. The film, with a $40 million budget, was an in-between kind of release for Raimi, whose hits have typically ranged from low-budget cult (“Army of Darkness”) to big-budget blockbuster (2002’s “Spider-Man”).
. . .But most of the curiosity was on how “Melania” would perform. A week earlier, the White House hosted a black-tie preview attended by Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy, Apple chief executive Tim Cook and former boxer Mike Tyson.
. . . . “Melania” didn’t screen in advance for critics, but reviews that rolled out Friday, once the film was in theaters, weren’t good. Xan Brooks of The Guardian compared the film to a “medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.” Owen Gleiberman of Variety called it a “cheese ball informercial of staggering inertia.” Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “To say that ‘Melania’ is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies.”
But among those who bought tickets over the weekend, the response was far more positive. “Melania” landed an “A” CinemaScore. Audiences were overwhelmingly 55 and older (72% of ticket buyers), female (72%) and white (75%). As expected, the movie played best in the South, with top states including Florida and Texas.
Here are the critics’ and public’s ratings of the movie on Rotten Tomatoes. I have never seen such a huge disparity, nor a critics’ rating that low! The Popcornmeter must reflect a dogpiling of Republicans on the site, as well as those “old, white females”:
I have been following and writing about UFO phenomena and the people who believe they represent alien visitation since the 1990s, and until recently the topic was always largely treated by the public and media as fringe and beneath serious consideration. That began to change in 2017, when The New York Times published a front-page story about the Pentagon having established the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to learn what was really going on with all these sightings, many of which happened over military facilities.
Since then there have been Congressional hearings involving, not tinfoil-hat-wearing kooks, but — for example — former Navy pilots David Fravor and Ryan Graves and government intelligence employees Luis Elizondo and David Grusch, who told Congress and millions of online viewers that the U.S. government was covering up evidence of alien visitation. The UAP acronym, gradually adopted by the Pentagon around 2020, signifies the subject’s transformation into the official conversation.
All of this was packaged into a documentary released last year by the noted filmmaker Dan Farah, “The Age of Disclosure,” which has been widely reviewed in mainstream media and discussed not only on popular podcasts with UFO enthusiasts but at the highest levels of government, including by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
. . .In my own classification system, I put reported UFO and UAP [“unidentified anomalous phenomena”] sightings in three categories: 1. ordinary terrestrial (balloons, camera/lens effects, visual illusions, etc.), 2. extraordinary terrestrial (Russian or Chinese spy planes or drones capable of feats unheard of in the U.S.) and 3. extraordinary extraterrestrial (alien presence).
I strongly suspect that all UAP sightings fall into the first category, but other commentators suggest the second, noting that they could represent Russian or Chinese assets using technology as yet unknown to American scientists, capable of speeds and turns that seemingly defy all their physics and aerodynamics.
That hypothesis is highly unlikely. It is simply not possible that some nation, corporation or lone individual — no matter how smart and creative — could have created an aircraft of any sort that would be centuries ahead of the West’s present technologies. It would be as if the United States were flying biplanes while the Russians or Chinese were flying Stealth fighter jets, or we were still experimenting with captured German V-2 rockets while they were testing SpaceX-level rocketry. Impossible. We would know about all the steps leading to such technological wizardry.
Finally, could UAPs really be space aliens? It’s not impossible, but it is highly improbable. While intelligent life is probably out there somewhere, the distances between the stars are so vast that it is extremely unlikely that any have come here, and what little evidence is offered by UAP believers comes in the form of highly questionable grainy photographs, blurry videos and stories about strange lights in the night sky.
What I think is actually going on is a deep, religious-like impulse to believe that there is a godlike, omnipotent intelligence out there who 1. knows we’re here, 2. is monitoring us and is concerned for our well-being and 3. will save us if we’re good. Researchers have found, for example, an inverse relationship between religiosity, meaning and belief in aliens; that is, those who report low levels of religious belief but high desire for meaning show greater belief in extraterrestrials. They also found that people who self-identified as either atheist or agnostic were more likely to report believing in ETIs than those who reported being religious (primarily Christian).
From this research, and my own on the existential function served by belief in aliens, I have come to the conclusion that aliens are sky gods for skeptics, deities for atheists and a secular alternative to replace the rapidly declining religiosity in the West — particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, where, not coincidentally, most UAP sightings are made.
It’s a religion, Jake! That’s what I concluded a while back from the fervor of adherents, who refuse to listen to any evidence against their faith. Where are the crashed spacecraft and pickled bodies that the adherents claim are somewhere in the U.S.?
*The Wall Street Journal has a list and description of “20 songs that defined America“: basically a song for each decade since the 1840s. I’ll list the last 8 (songs that arose since 1956), and make a few comments:
First, the criteria:
In the 19th century, a song that sold 2,000-5,000 copies of sheet music could be considered a hit; a blockbuster moved 10,000-20,000. By the 1890s, the industry’s scale exploded, with top songs selling more than 100,000 copies, and rare megahits supposedly reaching the million mark (their publishers at the time may have been inflating numbers, according to the Library of Congress).
When radio—then record players, then TV, then MTV, then streaming services—emerged, tallies were taken differently, and success was measured accordingly. But almost since its founding, America has had hit songs that often defined an era.
Here’s a look at 20 such songs, the artist that made them famous, and what they reveal about their times.
12.) Hound Dog (Elvis Presley, 1956)
13.) I Want to Hold your Hand (The Beatles, 1963)
14.) Stayin’ Alive (The Bee Gees, 1977)
15.) Billie Jean (Michael Jackson, 1983)
16.) Friends in Low Places (Garth Brooks 1990)
17.) Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana, 1991)
18.) Porcelain (Moby, 1999)
19.) Hey Ya! (Outcast 2003)
20.) Uptown Funk (Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars, 2014)
It’s not a bad list, though I’d put Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (released 1954) in place of “Hound Dog,” since I think the Haley song was really the first popular rock and roll song. I still remember the first time I heard it, when I was a kid in Greece, and I recognized that something new had arrived. Songs after the Nirvana record I can’t comment, as that’s where my experience stops. As for why “I Want to Hold Your Hand” defines the era, the paper says this:
What it says about America: Amid protest and upheaval, America embraced catharsis and connection in its pop music. “You can make the case that the same girls who were flocking to these stadiums, 10 years later were marching in the streets for women’s liberation,” says Fink. With Beatlemania, argues Fink, “huge masses of women got used to smashing through police barricades.”
Well, I don’t agree that the song is a harbinger of feminism—that’s stretching it. It was simply the first really popular song of the best rock group that ever existed. And there’s a good argument for adding to the list Sam Cooke’s “A change is gonna come“, as there are really no soul songs, much less songs that limn the civil rights movement of the Sixties, an epochal change in America. Pity that the song came out in 1964, in the same decade as the Beatles’ song. Here it is anyway, because I love it:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili casts a cold eye on postmodernism:
Hili: What is this postmodernism?
Andrzej: It’s a synonym for post-rationality.’
In Polish:
Hili: Co to jest ta ponowoczesność?
Ja: To synonim postracjonalności.
From Masih. This protestor was killed by the Iranian regime not long after being arrested:
Do not stop talking about Iran.
This is what is happening right now.
Taha Soleimani, a 19-year-old young man, disappeared on Friday, January 9.
Twenty days later on January 29, his body was returned to his family from Kahrizak, bearing clear signs of torture.
Taha was buried in… pic.twitter.com/KUO26BsTJK
We don’t talk enough about the student protests at Wellesley College in Feb 2014 against an outdoor public sculpture called “Sleepwalker” which students claimed was “harming” them. https://t.co/PE4bFFo1cJpic.twitter.com/lJDt1yppxI
The Brooklyn-based artist had installed the piece outside of the college’s Davis Museum, which was hosting a concurrent exhibition of his work. Sleepwalker was immobilized in the frosty landscape, but students saw a threat and created a petition for its removal from the lawn. Their claims that the sculpture produced apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts about sexual assault on the all-women’s campus—well-founded or not—in many ways presaged the debates still raging today about free speech and abuse.
From Simon. The public doesn’t agree with this tweet, though:
Two from Matthew. There are a lot more images and manuscript pages at this remarkable site documenting sixteenth-century Mexico:
One of the most extraordinary documents ever created by humans. The 12 volume manuscript "General History of the Things of New Spain", created in 1577 by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a group of Nahua elders, authors, and artists, it describes the culture of indigenous Mexico.
Bill Maher is back, and this week he has a particularly good comedy bit: “New Rule: Eyeroll Activism.” His topic is similar to Ricky Gervais’s scathing remarks at the 2020 Golden Globes in that both men excoriate Hollywood for its virtue signaling, with Maher beginning with the wearing of anti-ICE pins at the Golden Globes. And since Hollywood is identified with the Democratic Party, Maher claims that this virtue-signaling, in which celebrities weigh in on political issues they know little or nothing about—but thinking that their “star power” gives them extra credibility—is said to turn off the average viewer. Maher argues that such “Golden Globe activism” actually works against liberals.
Here are the two money quotes. First, referring to ideological lapel pins:
“Get out of here with your virtue-signaling body ornaments. They are just crucifixes for liberals, because every time I see one I think, ‘Jesus Christ!'”
and to the signalers:
“I know it’s very important to you that you feel you’re making a difference, so let me assure you that are. You’re making independents vote Republican.”
The longer (23-minute) overtime segment with guests Marjorie Taylor Greene and MS Now host and former congressman Joe Scarborough, is not as funny, but Maher gets into it with Scarborough about attitudes towards America, and also shows a bit of the attitude that gets Maher labeled as an anti-vaxer. He seems to be pretty ignorant of the science attesting to the safety and efficacy of vaccinations.
We have one submission, today from Paul Handford, and I’ll show part 1 of his hummingbird photos. Paul’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
While living in south-central British Columbia, I was so fortunate as to have had close encounters with North America’s smallest breeding bird, the Calliope hummingbird, which weighs just short of 3 grams— about 0.1 oz— and is just over 3 inches long. Its scientific name, Selasphorus calliope, is well merited: the generic name derives from ‘selas‘ = Gk. ‘a bright flame’ plus ‘phoros‘ = ‘bearing’, ‘carrying’, while the specific epithet references Kalliope, chief of the muses, and goddess of poetry.
First, the female. Here are four views of her; in two you can see that the wing-tips reach beyond the short tail; in others you see the buffy flanks and faintly-spotted throat (the closely similar female Rufous hummer has a tail that extends beyond the wing-tips, and is strongly rufous on flanks and tail).
Then, males. The brilliant magenta feathers of the male’s gorget are very obvious when the bird faces you. These feathers can be erected so as to form a ‘sunburst’ ruff, which males will do when engaged in disputes, and in courtship displays (see below):
The magenta of the throat feathers is produced by the phenomenon of interference rather than by pigment and, as mentioned above, this optical effect is striking when directed at the viewer. But when seen from the side, these feathers lose their brilliance, often not appearing to be coloured at all:
Many hummingbirds are pretty pugnacious, and often engage in quite spectacular combat. In these next pics, two males try to impress one another, and the ‘sunburst’ erect ruff is visible:
My Facebook page is filled with criticisms of all the craziness in the world due to Trump’s actions, and of course most of the news and websites I read are similar. Because I usually use Facebook to see what my friends are doing, or to look at pictures of cats, ducks, and other animals, I find the constant harping on Trump and his deeds depressing. That’s not because I disagree with these views; as should be clear by now, I think the man is mentally ill and that his presidency has been a disaster, with him veering between one crazy, drastic decision and another. (The threat to take over Greenland was merely the latest dumbass move.)
I say this because I think I need to make my position clear before I ask a question. And the question is this:
What do you think are the beneficial things Trump has done?
Why am I asking this? Well, first, because I think he has done some good stuff, including helping Israel, taking out Maduro, attacking Iran along with Israel, defining sex for official purposes as biological sex rather than self-identification, reducing illegal immigration at the border (I am not, of course, approving of the heavy-handed and often injurious tactics of ICE), and trying to expand the use of mental institutions to reduce the privations suffered by homeless people who are mentally ill. Again, I am not saying that the net effect of all of Trump’s policies are good for America, as one can easily make the case otherwise—most notably in his changing a checks-and-balance Presidency into a quasi-dictatorship.
However, I don’t think that people’s opinions of policies should rest on an assessment of the person, but should be based on the policies themselves. It’s both divisive and irrational to refuse to admit that, if someone does something good, it’s really bad because the person is bad (in Trump’s case, he’s often called a “Nazi”, which is hyperbolic and inaccurate).
So, I’m asking readers to answer the question above. If you wish to add a caveat about disliking Trump as I have done above, you’re welcome to do so, but I’m not asking for harangues about the man, as I can read those everywhere on the Internet. (I can guarantee that this very post will lead me to be called a “right-winger,” just as my opposition to biological men being put in women’s prisons or participating in women’s sports has led to my being called a “transphobe”. More on that later.)
If you don’t think he’s ever done anything good, feel free to say that, too.
