Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ retrodiction

September 30, 2026 • 8:15 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “bang2“, is an old one that I don’t remember, but it’s a good one. The term “retrodiction” is mine, though someone might have throught of it before I did.

The strip came with a note, and notice the new book on sale:

A resurrection from 2008 today, slightly edited. In other news, there’s a new J&M book out! It’s a best-of compilation, selected by me. 150 pages of J&M, without any crap ones!

In the strip below, of course you know who “Al” is, right?

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

September 30, 2026 • 7:10 am

Welcome to Wednesday, September 30, 2026—the last day of the month and also a Hump Day (“Lillördag” in Swedish). It’s also International Goose Day, and here’s a goose and two goslings I photographed on Svalbard last year. Do you know the species?

It’s also Confucius Day, National Mocha Day, National Coffee Day, and of course to go with that it’s National Biscotti Day.

There was a Google Doodle yesterday; click on it to see where it goes:

There will be no Hili tomorrow as I have to go to the retina doc for a checkup and I feel pretty awful.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 30 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Breaking news, ripped from the headlines (h/t Jay): there was a foiled hijacking of a plane bound for Israel. Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal described it as “Miracle on flight FZ1073.”

It’s Wednesday, September 30, and for the first time in over 20 years, someone has tried to hijack a plane bound for Israel. Miraculously, the attacker, an Omani pilot, was overpowered before he could complete his mission.

The entire region held its breath as the morning Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv sent an emergency signal, flashed the hijack code and appeared to veer off course over Saudi airspace. The region then exhaled, almost with a chuckle, when early reports blamed a scuffle between the two pilots. That laughter quickly died as security assessments and passenger testimony revealed that the co-pilot had repeatedly stabbed the captain. The terrorist then seized the controls and pointed the plane toward the ground, dropping almost 20,000 feet in just over a minute, until several crew members and passengers forced their way through the cockpit door and subdued him. Many were injured in the process. The plane made an emergency landing in Tabuk, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, where the passengers are now waiting for Israel to bring them home.

The assailant’s specific motive and affiliation are still unconfirmed, but Israel is treating the incident as terrorism.

It’s also reported in the NYT, which describes it as a “clash in the cockpit”. Jay Tanzman sent me this email:

I was up all night watching this unfold in real time on X. Copilot on a FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv repeatedly stabbed the pilot and took over the flight, diving the plane toward the ground in an apparent 9/11-style hijacking. Israeli passengers broke into the cockpit and overpowered and subdued the copilot. Two pilots, who were on board as passengers, then took over the flight and landed the plane, which had suffered significant tail damage in the high-speed dive, at a Saudi Arabian airport, while an Israeli doctor tended to the critically injured pilot.

*Why hasn’t anyone accused Russia of genocide given that it’s constantly attacking Ukrainian civilians with no military purpose. Russia just did it again, sending a drone to destroy a big warehouse of children’s books and textbooks.

The first Russian jet-powered drone slammed into the warehouse about 11 a.m. on a Saturday in August. The fire burned so hot that employees could not extinguish it. Within minutes, the second drone hit the building, and everyone ran for the shelter. The fire burned for almost a week. By then, almost everything inside was gone.

This was no weapons depot, no drone manufacturer, no cog in the war machine. Instead, the warehouse targeted by the drones belonged to Ranok Publishing, one of the largest children’s book publishers in Ukraine. The company, based in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, was attacked during one of its busiest times, when it was preparing textbooks for the new school year.

“It’s such a disaster,” said Viktor Kruglov, the publishing house’s chief executive, who was working at the warehouse with about 50 employees — all of whom escaped injury — when it was hit.

“Russia thinks that books are more dangerous for them than military equipment,” he said. “They deliberately damage, erase, extinguish everything which is connected with Ukrainian culture.”

All eight million books inside the warehouse were destroyed, including 620,000 textbooks. Though the strike was the worst attack on books this summer, it was far from the only one. All told, Russian shelling has destroyed as many as 15 million new books in recent months, almost half of Ukraine’s annual production, said Artem Bidenko, chief executive of the Ukrainian Publishing Association.

Note that aiming at civilian facilities with no military import is a war crime. Ukraine has done it too, but not to the extent that Russia has. And since Ukraine gave Russia no provocation to start a war, one might call this a Ukrainian genocide.

*In an ideal world this shouldn’t need to be written, but we don’t live in that world. And so we have a piece by Eli Lake at the Free Press called “The moral illiteracy of Hasan Piker.” (Remember that he’s campaigned with Abdeul El-Sayed, AOC, and Ilhan Omar (the latter two to mobilize voters).

Is America really worse than al-Qaeda? It’s hard to imagine that any serious person could answer yes. But that is the sincere view of Hasan Piker, the wildly popular left-wing Twitch streamer who has been elevated by many Democrats and progressives during the 2026 midterm elections as a way to attract Gen Z men.

“Pound for pound, as far as the number of deaths, yes,” said Piker in response to Axios reporter Alex Thompson in an interview clip released Thursday. Piker went on to claim that America sows terror all over the world. For example, during the opening strikes of the Iran war in February, a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile hit an Iranian girls’ school in Minab, collapsing a main building. “If you’re killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror,” Piker added in the Axios interview.

This is moral blindness: the death of the schoolgirls was an accident based on erroneous information; it was not meant to happen. But wait: there’s more.

This is the kind of sophistry that passes for sophistication in a streamer’s comment section. In national politics though, such claims should be self-discrediting. Al-Qaeda deliberately kills civilians to advance its warped ideology. America also kills civilians, but not by design, and usually only in wars being fought to advance the national interest.

The strike on the Iranian girls’ school in Minab was a tragedy, but it was not because U.S. war planners wanted to kill civilians. Rather, it was because the targeting data was out of date. The missiles missed their intended target, U.S. officials have said. An investigation by the U.S. military has not been published. In contrast, when al-Qaeda operatives hijacked airplanes on September 11, 2001, and turned them into guided missiles aimed directly at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the intention was to kill as many innocents as possible.

. . . Piker still insists that the forces of jihad are superior to America and her allies. Piker has praised the so-called resistance operations of the Houthis and Hezbollah. This week on the MS NOW show Clock It with Symone & Eugene, when Piker was asked about his previous statement that “Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel,” he responded that what he said was “intentionally provocative” but also “not untrue.”

. . .The problem is that many Americans do not remember what it was like when we were under attack on 9/11. For the 35-year-old Piker and those who see the world as he does, the legacy of 9/11 is the spread of Islamophobia, the curtailing of civil liberties, and pointless wars in the Muslim world. Perhaps this ignorance was inevitable, but Democrats do not have to indulge it.

Sadly, that is exactly what many Democrats—and the left more broadly—have chosen to do when it comes to Piker. For a while at least, Piker was not challenged and condemned. He was feted. In April, The New York Times featured him on a podcast to discuss the virtues of shoplifting. The College Democrats of America invited Piker to speak at its annual convention in July, where he delivered a fiery speech dressed in the style of the late Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. Piker also was a crucial surrogate in Abdul El-Sayed’s successful primary campaign to be the Democratic nominee to represent Michigan in the Senate.

Piker’s stock has dropped since then, but he still has millions of followers and Grok estimates that this American-hating chowderhead makes $2-4 million per year.

*Reader Norman points out a letter signed by “more than 6,000 leaders across entertainment, academia, and public life” that “rejects the ‘genocide’ accusation against Israel. (It’s also highlighted in an article in the Jerusalem Post.) Bolding is from the letter’s website.

Released today by Creative Community for Peace (CCFP) in partnership with Yossi Klein Halevi, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, Rabbi Micha Odenheimer, and Professor Jonathan Karp (the authors of the letter), the initiative brings together a broad coalition spanning politics and public policy, academia and scholarship, entertainment and media, and religious and civic leadership.

Among the political and public-policy figures signing the letter are former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson; former Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Irwin Cotler; former UK Cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi; former U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie; former senior U.S. diplomat Elliott Abrams; and former White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman. They are joined by prominent scholars, historians and intellectuals, including Harvard professor Steven Pinker; historian Benny Morris; historian Sir Niall Ferguson; Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, University Distinguished Professor at Emory University and former U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism; former Yad Vashem Chief Historian Dina Porat; Yossi Klein Halevi, Author and Senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute; Brandeis University Professor Emeritus Jonathan D. Sarna; historian Simon Sebag Montefiore; historians Jeffrey Herf and Norman Goda; UCLA professor Judea Pearl; author Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Professor of History and Judaic Studies at Binghamton University Jonathan Karp; and urban-warfare expert John Spencer.

I signed it too, thugh I ain’t no “leader”.  From the Jerusalem Post:

“There is a vigorous debate within the Jewish community over aspects of how this war was fought, and that is a sign of moral health. So is our pain over every innocent life lost. But we must unite in repudiating the lie of genocide,” the letter states.

It goes on to address the “unprecedented combat conditions” in Gaza, including Hamas’s use of “hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, thousands of boobytrapped homes [and] the conflating of combatants with ‘journalists’ and ‘human rights workers.’”

It also addresses the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio, which it says is “considered low for asymmetrical urban warfare.”

Taking the Gaza Health Ministry’s current death toll, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, alongside INSS’s May estimate of more than 23,000 terrorists killed, the implied civilian-to-combatant ratio would be roughly 2:1.

The letter also cites “the absence of mass starvation despite repeated claims of imminent catastrophe” and “the warnings given to civilians before attack,” and asserts that “All these factors were erased in the eagerness to indict Israel for genocide.”

Meanwhile, the letter argues that Israel went to war after October 7 to break what it calls an “Iranian-led siege of terror enclaves” on its borders, while noting that anti-Zionists were already leveling accusations of genocide against Israel the following day.

“The bitter irony is that Israel, home to half the world’s Jews, is the only country to face a sustained war of attempted genocide – from its inception in 1948 until today,” the letter states.

And although I signed the letter, I’m under no illustion that it will accomplish much—or anything. The “genocide” mongers have simply changed the definition of a well-established term to suit their purposes, and they’re not going to admit that they’re wrong. All one can do is point out that many, many things that Israel has done in the Gaza war are apparently aimed not at extirpating civilians, but helping them.  I have seen no responses when those things (warning civilians of strikes, creating “safe zones”, sending polio vaccines) are mentioned.

*This is what AI makes possible. The WaPo reports that a University of Chicago statistician “published” (I’m not sure where) over 200 coauthored papers and 14 books in a single year.  An online site where his papers were placed, the Social Science Research Network, has removed 257 of them.

Many academic researchers publish only a handful of papers each year, seeking scientific discoveries or solutions to everyday problems facing businesses and government agencies. Some especially busy professors might publish a dozen or more studies a year.

Then there’s the curious case of Nicholas Polson.

The University of Chicago statistician has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers and as many as 14 books released this year, unleashing speculation on the internet about whether he used artificial intelligence to inflate his production without disclosing the assistance.

. . .The online platform where Polson posted his papers said itremoved 257 of his works over the past month after his surge in releases. Critics have not accused Polson of fraud, but have raised questions about whether Polson properly disclosed his use of AI and whether it’s even possible to produce that many high-quality papers in so short a span.

Polson acknowledged in an email to The Post that he used AI to help produce the work, but did not say whether he disclosed the use of AI in any of the papers he published.

Most of Polson’s papers focus on advanced statistics and mathematics, though some touch on topics of broader interest. Those include efforts to understand the financial pressures that could lead to cuts in Social Security and other benefit programs, why players excel at certain strategic games like chess, and how TikTok serves up certain videos that engage viewers without informing them.

University of Central Arkansas economist Jeremy Horpedahl was stunned by Polson’s productivity.

“Two hundred-plus papers in nine months is both unheard of and unbelievable,” he said.

The questions about the papers were so significant that SSRN, the platform Polson used to share the research papers, took down the articles over the past month and froze the accounts used to post the works.

Polson suggested the complaints stemmed from jealousy.

“Clearly AI makes a productive researcher far more productive,” he wrote in an email to The Post.

The controversy highlights a growing concern in academia about whether some researchers could rely too heavily on AI to churn out a wave of papers that overwhelms journals charged with vetting the work.

Well, overwhelming journals with papers is not the problem: the problem is whether producing so many papers involves producing a number of trivial results that shouldn’t be published because they’re trivial or don’t really advance knowledge.

*College officials (including Dartmouth’s provost) and faculty are being found out and called out for using AI, even as they ban it from the classroom.  Bolding is mine.

College professors and administrators have been busting students for cheating with artificial intelligence for several years. Now, the professors and administrators are getting in trouble, too.

Dartmouth College last week announced it was investigating its provost, Santiago Schnell, after the college’s student-run newspaper found that some of his published writing appeared written by A.I.

Dr. Schnell, a mathematical biologist, is perhaps the most prominent in a growing cast of college professors and administrators who have been accused of using A.I. in a way that crosses ethical lines. There have been instances of opinion articles, research papers and even campuswide messages to students showing traces of A.I. influence. He issued a statement apologizing.

Administrators wring their hands, and sometime issue punishments, when students outsource writing assignments to a robot to save time or avoid the hard work of thinking.

Some students are calling out the examples of faculty doing the same thing as hypocritical.

“It just goes against all the values of our institution and the concept of academia,” Eli Moyse, a Dartmouth senior, said in an interview.

A working group at George Washington University said in a report in August that many students reported “doubts that faculty themselves are using A.I. ethically and transparently.”

And at Brown University, a survey found that close to two-thirds of undergraduate students who responded had some worries about faculty members relying on A.I. to develop course lectures and other content.

At Dartmouth, Dr. Schnell’s A.I. use in public writing came up in an investigation in August by the news site Semafor about A.I.-created writing appearing in the opinion pages of major publications. That investigation said an Aug. 9 commentary by Dr. Schnell in The Washington Post was written by A.I. The opinion article was about A.I. cheating in school.

Here’s the Pangram analysis of Schell’s WaPo commentary: 78% written (not tweaked) by AI:

(The Semafor investigation also found indications of A.I. writing in New York Times opinion articles.)

The follow-up investigation in September by the student publication, The Dartmouth, found extensive A.I. use in Dr. Schnell’s published work this year.

Dr. Schnell told The Dartmouth in a statement that he used A.I. “for language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient.” The newspaper then ran Dr. Schnell’s statement on his A.I. use through an A.I. detector, which flagged the statement itself as apparently written by A.I.

Dr. Schnell did not respond to a request for comment.

Crikey, if you’ve gone all the way up to Provost, or a tenured professorship, you damn well better be able to write!  Tweaking may be okay, but Pangram looks for AI-generated content, not just writing tweaked by AI. The Washington Post should annotate or even remove Schnell’s article, for 4/5 of it wasn’t written by him.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, it’s a big day tomorrow!

Hili: Tomorrow is the release of your book.
Andrzej: Yes, it’s going to be a busy day.

In Polish:

Hili: Jutro premiera twojej książki.
Ja: Tak, to będzie pracowity dzień.

As of yet the book is only in Polish, but you can see its website in English here (the title in English is The Blue Stone of Sisyphus.And I’m honored to have taken the cover picture:

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From Things With Faces; a pensive melon:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Meow Incorporated:

From Masih; these kinds of refusals seem rare:

From Rawan Osman, a lesson in hypocrisy:

From Malcolm; a baby caracal making laser-beam noises:

From Luana. You can read the new “definitions” here (section 2):

Two from my feed. Imagine how it would sound if the mother of a gay son wanted a straight son!

Flower birds!

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And one from Doc Cobb, which he sent in an email titled, “The audacity of these people.”  And he’s right.

New HHS Hall of Heroes: John Snow, Ignaz Semmelweis, Joseph Lister, Alice Stewart, Herbert Needleman, Frances Kelsey, Rachel Carson, Jay Bhattacharya bit.ly/4hg6Rn0

— Greg Folkers (@gregfolkers.bsky.social) 2026-09-26T17:49:37.851Z

Today’s music is a rare live performance from the wonderful Laura Nyro (1947-1997). Largely forgotten these daya, her influence nevertheless percolated through the industry (“Hello it’s me” by Todd Rundgren, a future selection, was influenced by her music), and she had many hits made famous by other artists: these include “Blowing Away“, “Wedding Bell Blues“, “Stoned Soul Picnic“, “Sweet Blindness“, and “Save the Country“; as well as Blood, Sweat & Tears and Peter, Paul and Mary singing “And When I Die“; Three Dog Night and Maynard Ferguson recording “Eli’s Comin'”; and Barbra Streisand recording “Stoney End“.  Nyro’s first album, containing at least four all-time classics (including the one below), was recorded when she was just nineteen. Sadly, Nyro died of ovarian cancer at only 49.

In my view, her best song was “And When I Die“. Here it is from her first album, and remember she’s nineteen when she’s singing here. But she wrote the song when she was just seventeen. Imagine a teenager producing such a complex and sophisticated classic!

I consider this better than the more famous Blood, Sweat & Tears version, which itself is very good.

Readers’ wildlife photos

September 29, 2026 • 8:15 am

Hallelujah, we have a contributor!  (Please send in your wildlife photos if you want this feature to continue.) The contributor is Jan Malik, who has birds and mammals from Poland. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

In this batch, I have included pictures of birds and mammals from the Tatra Mountains that I had a chance to photograph during my hikes over the last couple of years. They consist of both lowland generalists that have penetrated into the boreal forest zone and alpine specialists.

The Eurasian wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) is the only representative of the wren family in Europe. It was given the name “Troglodytes” (“cave-dwelling”) because it often searches for arthropods in rocky nooks and crannies; this behavior allows it to feed even in snowy conditions. Like the American marsh wren, males construct several nests, possibly both as a display of fitness for the female and as a decoy against predation:

The White wagtail (Motacilla alba) avoids dense forests but can penetrate from the lowlands into mountain valleys with meadows left from the earlier pastoral economy of the region or near ski slopes. This bird (just like the wren above, females and males are identical) was well aware of my presence and refrained from rushing to its nest so as not to betray its location:

Possibly a Water pipit (Anthus spinoletta), which is an altitudinal migrant—in summer it nests in the alpine zone, but in winter it relocates to wetlands or riverbanks. Its nest is well hidden in a rock crevice or in a tussock of grass:

The Alpine accentor (Prunella collaris) is a mountain specialist, staying in the alpine zone all year round except during very bad weather, when it can descend into lower valleys. A thick layer of down protects it against the cold.

It easily becomes habituated to people and is often seen on the highest summits, where it fearlessly scavenges for scraps of food among hikers:

This is a European robin (Erithacus rubecula), which, like the other birds mentioned above, is a species where females and males look alike. It is a generalist with a range that just penetrates the boreal montane forest. I saw them follow cattle or humans to catch insects fleeing from the disturbed ground. They look cute but are extremely territorial, and fights between two competitors can be deadly:

Not too many pixels on this Dunnock (Prunella modularis), which, unlike its cousin the Alpine accentor, is not limited to the mountains and does not go above the krummholz zone. It has a complex mating system consisting of a mix of polyandry and a “mating cooperative,” where a couple of males maintain a territory containing a couple of females:

The European goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis). I found this male (with a slightly larger red mask than the otherwise similar female) by first noticing a stream of thistle seeds drifting in the wind. This species stays in warmer lowlands with an abundant presence of thistles, which are used for both food and nesting material. In a fashion similar to the famous Galapagos finches, this species evolved a high-precision bill to extract nutritious seeds defended by thorns:

This Eurasian jay (Garrulus glandarius) is an edge-habitat dweller, hiding and nesting in lowland forests and entering only the lower boreal forest in the mountains. As a corvid, it is quite smart for a bird; however, with the many acorn and beech nut caches it makes for the winter, it always forgets a portion of them and thus contributes to forest growth. This one was patrolling a popular trail, looking for crumbs:

For the next two four-legged species, this is what their habitat looks like—an alpine tundra just below the barren high alpine zone:

Passing through it, finding a herd of Tatra chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra tatrica) is quite likely. The shaggy appearance of this individual is due to post-winter molting. Despite being commonly seen in the Tatras, it is an endangered subspecies; their numbers plummeted at the turn of the millennium to fewer than 200 individuals and have since increased to over 1,000 thanks to strict limits on tourist traffic in sensitive areas:

This mountain goat-antelope has close cousins in the Alps and parts of the Carpathian Mountains, but the Tatra population is completely cut off from them, since they are obligate mountain dwellers and do not tolerate dense forests or plains. The Tatra population has been isolated since the end of the Pleistocene, for at least 15,000 years. Over that period, the Tatra chamois evolved a special trait: unlike the Alpine chamois, it stays above the forest zone throughout the year. In the Ice Age, they populated the vast, ice-free montane tundra in that part of Europe (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Maps-showing-the-geographic-distribution-of-the-extant-subspecies-of-the-genus-Rupicapra_fig1_336957033):

The Tatra marmot (Marmota marmota latirostris) is another Ice Age holdover that became marooned on a high-altitude “island” as the climate warmed after the Pleistocene. It has had no contact with other groups of alpine marmots for at least 10,000 years. This site (https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/46082-Marmota-marmota#map-tab) shows how fragmented the marmot habitat is:

The marmot also stays above the forest zone all year round. Since summers in the Tatras last only about 5 months, all of the marmot’s active life must occur within that short period. In the winter, it hibernates in a deep burrow and emerges emaciated in the spring, when it must nearly double its body weight to prepare for the next winter and breeding season:

And as a reminder of how crowded the Tatras can get, here is a Red deer hind (Cervus elaphus) that was trotting along a trail and forced me to step aside to let her pass. As in many other national parks, animals in the Tatra Mountains become habituated to people. Red deer are vertical migrants—feeding on montane meadows and in boreal forests in the summer, but retreating to lowland pastures and forest edges in the winter:

Tuesday: Hili dialogue (and a note on AI in the classroom)

September 29, 2026 • 7:00 am

There will be no long Hili post this morning (though of course Hili’s dialogue is below) due to medical exigencies, i.e., visits to eye doctor (I’m ok).

But here’s one issue for discussion, taken from a new op-ed in the NYT. Joe Cruz, head of the philosophy department at Williams College, where Luana works, has a piece called “What if writing isn’t central to thinking?” (article archived here). If his thesis is true, it will give students license to use AI for essays and exams, which in fact Cruz allows. He has a workaround for that, but it’s not a good one.

His thesis:

Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing. At Williams College, where I am a professor, writing skills are among the very few general education requirements.

It’s no surprise, then, that universities see artificial intelligence as an existential threat, and have launched an arms race of countermeasures: more proctored essay exams; test-taking rooms shielded from the internet; requirements that essays be composed on platforms that track all edits, so the word-for-word genealogy can be verified. I’ve heard professors rejoicing when they see typos or grammatical errors in an essay, as if they proved that a student wrote it without any help from A.I.

But what if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought? The evidence that supports this belief is thin at best. Writing can be useful cognitive scaffolding for memory and self-regulated learning, but the notion that it is the best process for developing thinking skills is a fairly recent idea, traceable to the 1970s writing-across-the-curriculum movement.

His lack of evidence is merely a lack of relevant research. But Cruz finds support from none other than Socrates!

In Plato’s “Phaedrus,” Socrates offers a startling criticism of writing. Written words, he claims, are not the true children of knowledge, because writing cannot speak, answer questions or come to its own defense. [JAC: OF COURSE it can if the response is also in writing.] Only through conversation among minds, he suggests, does reason yield real insight. For the past two millenniums, this appraisal has seemed like a failure to appreciate the power of writing. But perhaps Socrates was right, and we think best by speaking, answering and defending of our ideas.

The problem here is that you can have back-and-forth discourses in writing (here’s one I had with Adam Gopnik about whether there’s truth in art.) And those are permanent, forcing you to think carefully, because once something’s published, it’s usually permanent.

But the essay gets worse:

I don’t rely on prepared scripts when I teach, and few of the teachers I most admire do. Instead, I engage my seminar students through messy, searching conversation, responding to their presence in the classroom to gauge whether we’re understanding one another. I want to make new connections in the immediacy of our back-and-forth. I want to recall a thread from two class meetings ago spontaneously and weave it into my improvised lecture while snapping into new ways of thinking about it in the moment.’

Here Cruz is talking about seminar classes—small discussion group with a back-and-forth in a small group.  You can have those in philosophy, but not when teaching basic physics, chemistry, or biology. This doesn’t work with a larger class, of course. He does admit some use for essays, though how will he ensure that the essays aren’t written by AI?:

Writing assignments serve practical needs of colleges and universities. When we receive a batch of 10-page essays, we can take them home, read a few, put them aside and grade the rest when the opportunity arises. If our minds wander, we can reread the prose before us. If we need to justify a grade, we can cite the record. Writing is a portable, compact trace of mind that is more manageable in a bureaucracy than is a conversation. But none of these conveniences is about developing the best thought.

And here’s his solution: we must “think aloud together”!

Last semester I permitted my students to use A.I. tools on their final essays in accordance with specific guidelines. Each then had a 45-minute oral exam in which I could audit their understanding of their claims and push them further in their analyses. I was reassured by the results. In no case did I suspect that an A.I. had written a student’s paper in the substantive, objectionable way that we are all concerned about. The students were all too sharp on the ideas, too deft in reconfiguring their thoughts and extending them dynamically. Moreover, at least half of the class was more agile, more reflective and clearer during oral exams than they were in their papers.

I believe colleges can permit the use of A.I. writing tools without undermining the next generation of thinkers. But to get there, we need to embrace a different image of a university education — one in which ideas are expressed in real time and analytical thought unfolds as a debate or an oral defense or a group discussion. It will take courage to demand that students demonstrate active, participatory mastery of ideas. And it will take courage on their part to abandon the safe recursion of revision and narrative refinement. To be sure, there will be challenges of scale, and not every kind of institution will be able to adapt. The benefits, however, may be enormous.

Well, if all learning occurred through Socratic dialogue between professors and students, that’s fine. But as we all know, that’s not the way it works. There are many courses with too many students  How do you have a 45-minute oral exam if you have 600 students? And Cruz seems too credulous to me:  “In no case did I suspect that an A.I. had written a student’s paper in the substantive, objectionable way that we are all concerned about. The students were all too sharp on the ideas, too deft in reconfiguring their thoughts and extending them dynamically.”  I call bullshit on that. Did Cruz think of putting essays through Pangram? As I’ve learned, AI can write essays that are better than students can write, even Williams students.

In my career, I’ve written a lot and published a lot, both in the scientific literature and—more germane here—in the popular press, where I’ve placed over 190 pieces. I’ve learned that trying to express your ideas lets you know whether you really understand them, for sometimes, when trying to explain something, you realize that your mind is not clear on an issue, and you have to think it out.  And for me, but perhaps not for many, I get great pleasure from writing, trying to produce prose that is incisive and, yes, beautiful. I have a long way to go, and will never get close to masters of this form, like Richard Dawkins in my field.  But once written, a published essay is permanent—there for all to see—in contrast to the spoken word, which is evanescent.  There is no substitute for an essay or article written and published, so long as the writing is not done by a computer program.

Please weigh in below, especially if you are a teacher of any sort.

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

And a felicitous Hili dialogue. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Her Highness gives us words of wisdom—somewhat of a redundancy:

Hili: What do you think of artificial intelligence?
Andrzej: I get the impression that the better it gets, the better plagiarism gets too.

In Polish:

Hili: Co sądzisz o sztucznej inteligencji?
Ja: Mam wrażenie, że wraz z jej postępem poprawia się jakość plagiatów.

 

Some English beers

September 28, 2026 • 3:48 pm

by Greg Mayer

In honor of Drink Beer Day, and following up on the offerings by Jerry and Andrew Berry, here are some beers I had on a trip to England in January. We of course must begin with Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, Jerry’s favorite.

This of course is the bottled variety, which was all they had at the aptly named Leopard Bar in Bloomsbury.

The lovely Radnor Arms in Coleshill, Oxfordshire, is a classic country pub.

But, unfortunately, I don’t recall what beers we had there; that’s them there, at the front of the bar.

At the Anchor, in Polstead Road in Oxford,

I had beers with both evolutionary

and naval connections (my father and daughter were/are in the US Navy, and our host was a former Royal Navy officer).

Swordfish is “very good“, fide Beer Advocate, but, as Jerry would appreciate, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord is “outstanding“! Just down the Road from the Anchor is the childhood home of T.E. Lawrence. Jerry and I are both Lawrence aficionados, and Jerry has shared his photos of Lawrence’s last home, Clouds Hill, so here’s where he lived from 1896-1921. (Note the Blue Plaque.)

In London, Punch and Judy in Covent Garden has a fine bar,

and fine food–beef & raclette cheese shortcrust pie–with accompanying pint, but, alas, I did not note what beer it was. (Note the HP Sauce.)

Besides traditional English pubs, London has many fine ethnic restaurants, and, at Oorja Indian Dining, the Indian beer Kingfisher was available. (It’s not great, fide Beer Advocate.)

Both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum have nearby pubs. In Kensington, near the latter, we found Timothy Taylor’s Landlord on tap.

Note the real pull handle.

Across the street from the British Museum, the Museum Tavern, adorned by an image of the Museum’s founder, Sir Hans Sloane,

had a fine bar (note the American style taps for Peroni and other beers at the near end of the bar, and the pull handles for English beers down by the gent who’s about to order),

where I had, of course, the house ale.

Finally, on the way out of England, I tried Aspall Cyder, made in Suffolk, at a hotel at Heathrow Airport.

 

Is this the world’s best beer?

September 28, 2026 • 11:59 am

At last I’m back from the eye doctor and I’m okay so far, having had a suprachoroidal hemorrhage during cataract surgery, a rare complication whose frequency is between 0.03% and 0.1%. (Mine was the first one my experienced ophthalmologist had ever seen.) Fortunately it was a small one, is contained, and while the clot will slow the healing process while it gets resorbed, so far it looks like eye #1 will be okay. For the time being I’ve canceled surgery on eye #2. But I looked up what I had, and here’s an object lesson—one I have not learned—never to look up symptoms on the Internet:

FEARED COMPLICATION!  That put my kishkes in knots, and it was with a heavy heart that I dragged my butt to the ophthomologist. Fortunately, a retinal specialist had already told me that my hemorrhage did not turn out not to be so fearful, as it was small and contained. Today the symptom I developed yesterday—stabbing eye pain—was diagnosed as “part of the normal healing process.” One of Coyne’s Rules for Life is this:

Never look up your symptoms on the Internet, for everything eventually devolves to cancer.

But in this case it devolved to a guide dog and a white cane. Warning: do not discuss my hemorrhage or prognosis as it will make me grumpy. You can tender well wishes if you want!

On top of this, I was way late for my appointment because there was a deadly crash that shut down inbound Lake Shore drive. Some joker, probably drunk, drove his car south into the northbound lane, killing a poor woman in a head-on crash that also involved another car. Not a good start to the day.

But eye digress. The point of this post was to be that this is Drink Beer Day and my friend Andrew Berry has a British Ale to recommend. You’ll remember from this morning that he sent me a photo of an empty pint of my favorite session beer, Timothy Taylor Landlord. But he claims (wrongly, I think) that there’s a better beer. I got this photo in an email titled “The best pint IN THE WORLD.”

I emailed back saying, “What is the beer?”

He responded, “Harvey’s Sussex Bitter. The best beer in the world, according to A Berry. Brewed in Lewes, Sussex.  You probably had some when you came to Down House with me and my summer school students.  Harveys is served in both pubs in the village of Downe.”

That was a great trip, as the tour of Down House, Darwin’s home, was led by none other than Janet Browne, who wrote the definitive biography of Darwin (now in one volume, condensed from the original two).

I then wrote Andrew this, “You haven’t tried all the beers!!! Plus you must mean session pint.”

His response?: “And, yes, I’ve tried ‘em all.  Every beer ever brewed anywhere ever.  And Harvey’s Sussex Bitter is indubitably the Best of them All.”

When I asked if he was in Downe (the village where Down House resides, he answered, “Downe?  Nope, this is Harveys pub in Sevenoaks, where my mother lives.  The Bricklayer’s Arms.”

And he sent a photo (below). Look at that place! The genuine pubs of England—the ones with real ales cellared well and without music—are one of that country’s great contributions to the planet. Let us hope they endure.

What’s your favorite beer? Answers below, please. And I abhor IPAs as they’re too hoppy, so I can’t entertain suggestions in that genre.

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

September 28, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the last Monday in September: September 28, 2026 and it’s National Drink Beer Day.  Here’s a helpful hint from the page:

HOW TO OBSERVE DRINK BEER DAY

The best way to celebrate is by enjoying a glass of beer.

I wouldn’t have known!  But here’s a good tipple (quaffed in Amsterdam):

And a beer that’s been drunk, sent to me from England by my friend Andrew Berry. He knows that Landlord is my favorite session beer, and was trying to taunt me:

It’s also Family Day and National Strawberry Cream Pie Day.

There will likely be no Hili (and probably no posting) tomorrow as I have a doctor visit.

And there’s a Google Doodle celebrating the Anniversary of Google. Click on the screenshot to go to the celebratory question (I answered correctly):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The White House produces more waffles than does Waffle House.  Now our “president” has changed his tune when it comes to the Kennedy Center after they took his name off it. Once he said it was refurbished and nearly done; now he calls it “dilapidated and dangerous.”

President Donald Trump stood on the red carpet at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in December and declared his mission to fix the building, to “make it beautiful,” all but accomplished.

“It was falling apart, and now it’s pretty much back,” Trump told reporters as he stood beside FIFA President Gianni Infantino ahead of the World Cup draw. “We’ve done a really great renovation job on it,” he added, predicting that remaining work would be complete within three or four months.

By Trump’s telling, it was the culmination of a transformation he had set in motion shortly after returning to office when, vowing to end “woke” programming, he purged the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees and became its new chairman.

But less than two months after Trump’s victory declaration — after his name was added to the building, artists balked at performing there and income dropped further — his assessment of the center’s condition soured.

In late January he hosted a starry red carpet premiere for the documentary “Melania” but days later announced that the center was so “tired, broken, and dilapidated” that its main building would need to close for two years. The building was “sort of dangerous,” he added that week, though it was deemed safe enough for Trump and the first lady to catch a performance of “Chicago” about two months later. By the end of April, executive director Matt Floca was testifying about dangerous roofing conditions and electrical equipment that he said posed a risk of fire or, in the worst case, explosion.

Over the following months, the descriptions grew more dire. Trump said people entering the building were in “serious danger.” The center’s lawyers called it “structurally unsound” and “fundamentally unsafe.” This month, after a section of ceiling plaster fell in the Grand Foyer, Trump described the building as being in a “virtual state of collapse” and said the incident could have “killed” people.

Yet many of the underlying physical problems cited by management were documented years before Trump took control — when Kennedy Center officials and their engineering consultants were planning to repair the aging building while continuing to stage performances.

A dozen current and former Kennedy Center staff members interviewed by The Washington Post described a building that needed substantial repairs and routine maintenance but said they had not experienced conditions that led them to believe the building as a whole was unsafe.

Truth be told, I never thought of the Kennedy Center as a particularly attractive building, inside or out, nor a fitting tribute to JFK. If nobody wants to go there, or perform there, perhaps it should be allowed to die. But that’s different from Trump’s changing description about a building based on whether his name’s on the outside.  All this behavior resembles that of a small, petulant boy. I suppose someone has pointed that out, but his whole Presidency resembles juvenilia.

*Oh, Lord, another despoliation. This time it involves a major league ballgame being held into a National Park. Guess who wants it? Yes, according to the WaPo, Major League Baseball approached the Trump administration to host a standalone game in a National Park. This may well not happen, and it shouldn’t, but a Park Service official is scouting locations in Grand Teton National Park.

Major League Baseball has approached the Trump administration about hosting a game at a national park, officials from the White House and MLB confirmed Saturday.

The administration has scouted locations in Grand Teton National Park to build a baseball park to host an MLB game, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Grand Teton is the country’s eighth-most-visited national park and is famous for its breathtaking views of the Teton Range of the Rocky Mountains. National parks are among the country’s most protected federal lands, and constructing a sports facility at Grand Teton could set a new precedent for the use of vast national park land in the Western United States.

An MLB official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the league approached the administration after the success of MLB’s other stand-alone events, such as the recurring Field of Dreams game in Iowa. The idea of playing a game in a national park is one of several that MLB is exploring.

The White House said in a statement that MLB asked the administration “if it was possible to host a game at a national park, similar to the Field of Dreams game.”

“This is not a Presidential directive, nor is it being directed by the White House. It’s also not being driven by the Department of Interior,” the statement said. “Therefore, this is not a White House or Administration priority.”

The White House said MLB has not made any decisions and the Park Service has not granted any permits. “If the MLB wants to go on site visits of national parks, that is their prerogative,” the statement said.

It referred additional questions to MLB.

National Park Service Deputy Director Frank Lands visited Grand Teton National Park in recent days and looked at three potential locations for a baseball park within the park’s boundaries, the two people familiar with the matter said.

Now wait a tick! You don’t have to build a permanent stadium there, but there will have to be some kind of stadium that holds many people, and that shouldn’t happen in a National Park. That’s not what those Parks are for! But if I know Trump, he’ll want to build a permanent grandiose facility there and call it Trump Teton Stadium.  I’m hoping these plans fall through completely.

*If you thought the Free Press was objective in its news coverage—and you really shouldn’t have—you’ll be learning that it is soft on religion, putting it on the front page, like this (click to read if you subscribe). Yes, the lead story of yesterday’s FP was how two Princeton philosophy students, one an atheist (Joe Schmidt) and the other a lukewarm Christian (Noah McKay), while both are vegans, came to wholly embrace Catholicism. “What,” I asked myself, “Is the point of this.” The author, Suzy Weiss, a nepoemployee, write about culture for the site.

I’d taken the train to Princeton because I wanted to find out what’s in the water in New Jersey. I assumed philosophy was a field where reason trumps faith, and that anyone who thinks about it long and hard enough, in the halls of the progressive Ivy League, will come to the conclusion that there is no Creator. I thought postmodern academia had made everyone believe in nothing. Did these grad students study their way into believing in God, or was the intervention more divine than that? And does it have something to do with America’s much-vaunted “Catholic boom”?

Both these gentlemen were clean-cut—polos, khakis, a leather messenger bag—and clearly brilliant. They talked fast and opined on the finer points of magisterial doctrine from the 18th century, between bites of vegan corn ravioli. They’ve both been studying and debating apologetics for years, and met each other a few years ago at a conference, before they were students at Princeton together.

When McKay and Schmid met—it was in October 2022 at the Rutgers Philosophy of Religion Conference, also in New Jersey—they discussed what arguments might actually convince them to become believers, and they were in agreement: miracles. They weren’t talking about finding the image of the Madonna in a slice of toast. What they wanted to find was “strong empirical evidence” for miracles, and instances of “medical documentation, X-rays, hundreds of thousands of witnesses, including skeptical and hostile witnesses.” So, they got to work.

They studied the Marian apparitions, like the one in Fátima, Portugal, where three shepherd children reported seeing “a Lady more brilliant than the Sun.” They studied the miraculous healings at Lourdes, in southwest France, where the waters are said to have cured more than 7,000 people in the last 150 years or so. (The Pope is visiting this weekend.) The Catholic Church has verified 72 of these healings, and McKay was impressed with their rigor—anyone healed at Lourdes goes back each year for reexamination—and the canonization process, in which a Catholic considered for sainthood has to have at least two miracles attributed to them. “I still think miracles are rare, and I still think most miracle claims are false,” said McKay. But by the end of 2025, “I believed that Catholicism was true.”

For Schmid, the tipping point was studying Padre Pio, a Catholic saint who died in 1968, and was said to exhibit stigmata: wounds that appear on the same parts of the body where Jesus was nailed to the cross. “Naturalistic explanations don’t seem to account for their persistence, their character,” said Schmid. He was working on the case of Padre Pio with Ethan Muse, a philosopher at Rutgers, who had likewise been convinced that Catholicism is the one true faith, after spending years as an atheist, by studying miracles. (“This New Jersey corridor between the Princeton philosophy department and the Rutgers philosophy department is very sympathetic to philosophy of religion,” said McKay.) Muse had begun seriously considering Catholicism around Easter 2025, after studying the Shroud of Turin, and had enrolled in the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults program.

There are alternative explanations for Padre Pio’s stigmata (some have evidence behind them), but the fact is that we don’t understand how they got there, and we can’t test them now. Curiously, no existing priests have stigmata that could be tested. At any rate, the miracles did the trick.

Then, in early January, Schmid was sitting in the gym, when “a feeling in waves” came over him, and he got the message “You could be a saint” over and over again. “I just sort of was like, Okay, I give up, I’ve lost, God has won, and I’ve got to become Catholic,” said Schmid. A month later, on February 7, he went to a general confessional—because Schmid’s family is Catholic, he had been baptized and confirmed as a kid—and considered himself officially converted. “Big news. God exists. Christ is Lord and he established the Catholic Church,” Schmid told his followers, in a video he posted to his YouTube channel, Majesty of Reason, where he’d previously made arguments against the existence of God. In the video, Schmid added, “I’m not kidding.”

This kind of stuff is all too frequent in the Free Press, yet we never read about how someone became an atheist or gave up faith. And I don’t think we ever will.

*Tomorrow we may learn if Lindsay Clancy will get a new trial after her last one resulted in a mistrial.

After her triple-murder case ended in a mistrial, Lindsay Clancy will appear in court Tuesday for a status conference that should signal how the controversial case will proceed following a month of uncertainty.

At the hearing, prosecutors and the defense are expected to address pending motions from Clancy’s attorney to stave off another trial, the defense’s attempt to obtain more information about the holdout juror and – if prosecutors decide to retry Clancy – the schedule for a new trial.

Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the divisive case on September 4 after the jury sent several notes saying they were deadlocked and that a single juror was preventing the panel from unanimously finding Clancy not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility for killing her children.

At trial, Clancy admitted to killing her children – Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months – but argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she fatally strangled them and then attempted suicide in January 2023.

Prosecutors have not announced whether they will retry Clancy, but experts said both sides are likely considering whether another jury would reach the same conclusion, largely siding with the defense. At least one of Clancy’s jurors believes they would.

“If they tried the trial again the way they did, nine times out of ten, I think a jury would come back with not guilty by reason of insanity,” juror Nick Dargie told ABC News. “No doubt in my mind.”

I suppose that’s the verdict I’d find, for Clancy, if she was truly mentally ill (and it seems that way), should be given a chance for psychiatric rehabilitation, though I wouldn’t want to see her walk free in a year or so (that, of course, is a possibility). What I don’t understand are those people who want her found “not guilty”, period. It’s almost as if she’s become a hero for the murders. At any rate, it’s unlikely that the prosecution and defense can find a compromise solution that will avoid a new trial, as the defense wants no resolution that will result in jail time. This is a tough one.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, it’s raining, Hili is outside, and Kulka’s occupying the inside windowsill. That means trouble. As you know, these cats hate each other.

Kulka: I have a feeling it’s raining.
Hili: I’m about to chase you out of that spot.

In Polish:

Kulka: Mam wrażenie, że pada deszcz.
Hili: Zaraz cię z tego miejsca wypędzę.

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

From Things With Faces, a sad alarm clock:

From Bad Spelling or Grammar on Signs and Notices:

From Kitty Litterposting (I haven’t looked). You are looking not for the cat but for Waldo, who looks like this:

From Masih. This Iranian woman is going to be lashed 74 times because she sang.

From Luana; fingernails and indicators of white supremacy:

Here’s Netanyahu’s speech at the UN last week (h/t Jez). The Times of Israel comments (not always favorably) on this speech, including this bit:

 there were surprising omissions from the address, omissions that reinforce the sense that Israel does not have a clear and viable plan right now for countering the central threat to its national security: Iran’s nuclear weapons program, its ballistic missiles, and its rapacious, tenacious regime.

Several people have told me the speech is good, and I will watch it, but of course approving of anything Netanyahu does is like approving anything that Hitler did.

Two from my feed:

I’m still baffled by the ubiquity of antisemitism in Ireland:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Matthew. First, the amazing reaction time of springtails:

Nature photographer 'pendra100legs' does these amazing macro shots of tiny bugs.This one is delightful (I'll link below to the full thing).It's a globular springtail in genus Sminthurides. These insect-relatives can launch themselves 60 times their height in 1.6 MILLISECONDS.*Voomp*. Gone.

— c0nc0rdance (@c0nc0rdance.bsky.social) 2026-09-27T17:44:08.582Z

Matthew’s in Seattle, went whale-watching, and saw an orca!

Success! Bigg’s Killer Whales

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-09-26T23:51:06.414Z

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