Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to Monday, April 20, 2026 and Big Word Day. My big word is probably the same as last year’s: “ratiocination.” It’s a word I learned from Hitchens and don’t usually remember what it means, so here we go from Merriam Webster:
A U.S. Navy destroyer on Sunday attacked and seized an Iranian cargo ship that defied an American blockade of Iran’s ports, President Trump said, posing a fresh threat to the fragile cease-fire that is set to expire this week.
Mr. Trump announced the attack hours after a White House official said the U.S. was dispatching a high-level delegation including Vice President JD Vance to peace talks in Pakistan, even as Iranian state media said Tehran had not yet agreed to a meeting.
The guided missile destroyer USS Spruance fired on the cargo vessel in the Gulf of Oman, Mr. Trump said on Truth Social, “blowing a hole” in its engine room before Marines took possession of the vessel. The president said the ship was under U.S. sanctions because of a “history of illegal activity” and that U.S. forces were “seeing what’s on board!”
Mr. Trump did not say whether there had been any casualties. Iran’s semiofficial Mehr news agency reported that U.S. forces had fired on an Iranian merchant vessel, but said naval units from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had forced the Americans to retreat.
The attack occurred in the Gulf of Oman, south of the Strait of Hormuz, the economically vital waterway that has become a flashpoint in negotiations. Iran imposed a blockade on the channel itself, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil normally travels, and the U.S. countered by blocking traffic to Iranian ports. On Saturday, Iran attacked two Indian vessels attempting a transit, acts Mr. Trump described earlier Sunday as a “total violation of our cease-fire.”
The fate of the strait is top of mind for American negotiators who Mr. Trump said would travel to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, this week for talks. The stakes for the negotiations, should they happen, are high: failure would risk reigniting the fighting and extending the global economic upheaval wrought by the war.
It’s Sunday, April 19, and according to Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei, “The statements by American officials are filled with contradictions and lies”—a sign, he claims, of their “desperation and helplessness.” Israel and the U.S. must have eliminated all the adults in the Foreign Ministry, because Baghaei is effectively playing a geopolitical game of “I know you are, but what am I?”
Despite Foreign Affairs Minister Abbas Araghchi’s announcement on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” to commercial traffic, the IRGC Navy attacked several commercial vessels the very next day, declaring that no vessel of “any type or nationality” is permitted passage. This jarring disconnect may be a sign of something more serious than desperation: a coup d’état.
It is quite the allegation, but let’s look at the evidence. Beyond the strait’s schizophrenic travel regulations, the Foreign Ministry confirmed that new talks will occur, even though a date has not yet been set. Meanwhile, IRGC-affiliated media simultaneously announced that Iran has refused to participate in another round of negotiations with the United States due to “excessive” U.S. demands.
Furthermore, the institutions of the Iranian state seem to be picking sides. The Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters—roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff—has released a statement defending the IRGC attacks in the waterway. The Supreme National Security Council joined the chorus, declaring that Iran will control the strait until the war ends.
The split runs along a well-trodden divide: On one side, the political leadership, represented by President Masoud Pezeshkian, Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf; on the other, the men with the guns, led by an IRGC firmly under the control of Ahmad Vahidi.
. . . If there is a coup underway, its most immediate effect will be on the negotiations. Despite his denials, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf is the official on the phone with the Americans. But even if he agrees to terms, the current power struggle does not bode well for his ability to hand over regular Iranian dust, let alone the nuclear enriched powder.
I’m not a pundit, so all I can do is report this speculation.
Hamas is ready to relinquish thousands of automatic rifles and other weapons belonging to its police force and other internal security services in Gaza, according to two officials of the group.
Such a step would be a remarkable concession from Hamas, which until now has publicly resisted giving up any of its arms.
The officials said Hamas would be willing to turn over these weapons to the Palestinian administrative committee that has been set up to govern Gaza by the Board of Peace, the international organization led by President Trump to oversee the cease-fire.
The proposal from the two officials falls well short of the full disarmament and demilitarization of Gaza — a core demand by Israel and a pillar of Mr. Trump’s peace plan for the territory. That plan would also remove Hamas from power and bar it from any role in governing.
Asked whether the committee would also be able to confiscate weapons belonging to Hamas’s military wing, the two officials did not provide a clear answer.
This is not nearly a “disarmament,” and Hamas remains firmly in command of southern Gaza. And it has expanded its influence into areas supposedly controlled by the Palestinian Authority, namely the West Bank. Remember that among all Palestinians, Hamas is far more popular than is the PA, which is one reason Israel is worried about the West Bank. If that area becomes a Hamas-run enclave, then we have another terrorist Gaza situation, but one embedded within Israeli territory.
Eight children ranging in age from 1 to about 14 were killed here Sunday in a shooting that police described as a domestic disturbance. It was the deadliest mass killing in the United States in two years, data shows.
A spokesman for the Shreveport police, Chris Bordelon, told reporters Sunday that seven of the children were believed to be “descendants of the gunman” and that two other victims survived. “This is an extensive scene unlike anything most of us have ever seen,” Bordelon said.
Later Sunday, police identified the gunman as Shamar Elkins. Public records show that Elkins was a 31-year-old Shreveport resident. Elkins served in the Louisiana Army National Guard from August 2013 to August 2020, according to an Army statement. He did not deploy while with the National Guard and left the Army as a private, an entry-level rank.
Elkins’s brother-in-law, Troy Brown, who lived with him, said Elkins’s wife had recently sought a divorce. Brown said Elkins acted normally on Saturday, the last time they saw each other, but had been distraught in a recent conversation about his marriage breaking up.
“After the first argument about the divorce, he acted like he was losing his mind,” Brown said late Sunday after leaving a Shreveport hospital where he had visited Elkins’s wife and two of his own family members who were injured in the shooting. “He was upset about it. I would talk to him and he would tell me, ‘Bro, I don’t want to lose my wife.’”
Police said the gunman stole a car after the shootings, leading to a police chase into neighboring Bossier City that ended with his death.Louisiana State Police are investigating Elkins’s killing.
A whole family and their futures wiped out. Another day in America.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is playing Pinker, and Hili his critics:
Hili: I dream of the return of the past. Szaron: I can smell the present.
In Polish:
Hili: Marzę o powrocie przeszłości.
Szaron: Czuję zapach czasu teraźniejszości.
From Masih: the regime killed an Iranian nurse who tried to help wounded protestors, and then tortured her husband, both psychologically and physically. He tried to kill himself:
After killing her, Iran’s security forces stormed the morgue, sexually abused, and sent the images to her husband as a weapon of terror.
Today in a deeply disturbing case, Ahmad Khodaei, husband of Salehe Akbari, an Iranian nurse who secretly helped wounded protester during the… pic.twitter.com/2g2djU8ctv
From Luana; I haven’t checked whether this “miracle drug” is really a cure for cystic fibrosis. It does appear to produce amazing results in 90% of patients–the ones with the right mutations.
Trikafta is one of the most inspiring medical advances in decades.
Approved in 2019, the drug at first makes cystic fibrosis patients vomit up mucus for a few days.
But while they lose those days, they gain a lifetime–a healthy, *normal length* lifetime.
A woman transporting rescue cats to their new homes had no choice but to put some in cargo. When the plane landed in Athens, Greece, she watched nervously through the window as luggage came down the ramp. Then she saw a baggage handler pick up each cat carrier slowly, crouch… pic.twitter.com/U630tODJMY
A soft little chirp, a gentle glide,
through waves that stretch the bounds of yesterday.
One brown heartbeat, eleven tiny hearts—
how beautiful pure existence can be.
Ein leises Pieps, ein sanftes Gleiten,durch Wellen, die das Gestern weiten.Ein Herzschlag braun, elf Herzen klein –so schön kann pures Dasein sein. 🤗
Well, I got my tuches to Savannah at about noon yesterday, and it was already steaming hot. Since our Air B&B didn’t open until 4 pm (why so late?), I had to cool my heels somewhere for a few hours, so I decided to visit the Telfair Museum (a trio of museums downtown), buy a pass, check my bags, get some food, and return for some art-gawking before making my way to the apartment (conveniently located in downtown Savannah).
I parked my luggage at the Jespson Museum, got a recommendation for lunch, and slowly ambled through the famous squares of downtown Savannah to the Little Duck Diner (!), which looks exactly like the picture at the link. It’s duck-themed and serves duck in various guises, but of course I eschewed the waterfowl dishes. Here’s how it looks from the outside:
A logo from the menu (artist unidentified).
The menu is here, and I asked the waiter for recommendations, which is how I came up with the avocado grilled cheese sandwich, with two types of cheese, bacon, avocado, and tomato. I ordered iced tea, and was asked “plain or sweet?”. You know you’re in the South when they ask you that, and of course I got the sweet tea, which, as usual, was so sweet it was almost like liquid dessert. That’s how the “table wine of the South” is served. Lunch:
On my walk to the restaurant, I noticed a small hole-in-the-wall store that sold only cobblers and variations on banana pudding—two dessert specialities of the South—and stopped in to plug the dessert-shaped hole in my being. Again, the place had a duck motif!
The place was The Peach Cobbler Factory, of which there are several branches After ascertaining that the Peach Cobbler was made from canned peaches (fresh fruits are out of season), I had the banana pudding instead. It was a generous portion of that Southern treat, embedded in which were two vanilla wafers (obligatory) and a huge hunk of red velvet cake. It was excellent, and filled the remaining lacuna in my stomach:
I passed this restaurant after lunch, which had a truly Southern seafood menu (click to enlarge). I must get shrimp and grits on this trip. And I would die for some boiled (green) peanuts, which are delicious and which I’ve had only in Georgia
Oy, was it hot! I ambled back to the Jepson Center (one of the trio of museums), where they featured the art of Ossabaw Island, one of the 100 or so Sea Islands near the coast of Georgia (Savannah’s on the ocean). Like most of these, Ossabaw is accessible only by ferry and guided tour. I’m keen to visit Sapelo Island, the home of the last community of Gullah people, a group of black Southerners with their own language and distinctive culture. (They were, of course, enslaved before and during the Civil War.) Here’s an example of the Gullah language, also called Geechee, a creole language that mixes English and African words:
The art was local, but I was most interested in two paintings by Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese emigrant whom most of us geezers know as a mystic and author of The Prophet(1923), a collection of quasi-mystical fables that many hippies and New Agers revered as “wisdom”. It was immensely popular and has been translated into many languages, but I wouldn’t recommend reading it.
I was surprised to learn that Gibran actually regarded himself more as an artist than a writer, and two of his paintings were at the museum. The first is a self portrait, which I photographed. The details of the painting are in the second photo below:
And a portrait of Gibran’s mother. The guy was a pretty good painter!
An artist from Ossabaw island painting in the Museum and photographed from above:
I might as well put up some photos from Botany Pond, as the ducklings will have hatched when I return (I timed this trip badly, but had no idea that Vashti would be nesting now). The eggs should hatch today or tomorrow, and apparently one was rejected from the nest, as it was found below it but some distance from the ledge.
First, turtles. I’ve now seen all five, so they survived the winter, and they love to bask on the rocks. I believe that there is one yellow-bellied slider (Trachemys scripta scripta) and two red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans; they are subspecies) in the photo below.
We call this “turtle yoga”:
Nuzzling:
The pair of wood ducks(Aix sponsa) are there nearly every day, but they really should be mating and nesting. We have no tree holes at the pond (a sine qua non for this species to breed), so I have no idea what they’re doing. They are gorgeous, though.
The male (I haven’t named either one):
And the female:
Finally, Vashti on her nest. I’m worried that when the ducklings hatch, they and Vashti will be assaulted by the undocumented drakes who visit the pond. It’s probably good that I’m gone, as I’d be beside myself with anxiety. I have two very reliable associates who are taking care of the waterfowl in my absence.
Note that the nest is lined with soft feathers that she plucked from her breast.
(Armon is still here, ineffectually trying to drive away interloper drakes.)
A close up. Vashti is immobile when on the nest, so I can get quite close to her, but do so only to ensure that she’s still there (she’s hard to see):
Welcome to the Sabbath that was made for goyische cats: Sunday, April 19, 2020, and Rice Ball Day. Here’s my favorite kind of rice ball: zongzi, rice wrapped around a savory or sweet filling and steamed in bamboo leaves. Here’s one unwrapped and one still in the bamboo leaves. It looks as though it’s filled with red beans.
I am now in Savannah, Gerogia for some R&R. Food reportage in the offing but Hili is truncated today. And oy, is it hot! Temperature predicted to reach 89° F (32° C) tomorrow.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 19 Wikipedia page.
Oh, and there’s a Google Doodle for the NBA playoffs; click to see where it goes. Basketball in April! This conforms to Coyne’s Sports Theory: “All major sports—baseball, football, basketball and hockey—will eventually be played at one time, as their seasons will overlap.”
Iran said Saturday that it had reasserted control over the Strait of Hormuz because the United States was maintaining a naval blockade, just hours after Iranian officials and President Trump had said that the critical waterway was open, raising hopes for an end to the six-week war.
The announcement added more confusion to the status of transit through the strait, where Iran had choked global energy supplies by menacing nearby ships during the war with the United States and Israel. Iran’s military, in a statement carried by government media, said it was now “under strict control” unless the United States ended its own blockade of Iranian ports.
A day earlier, Iran’s foreign minister called the strait “completely open.” At the same time, however, Iranian officials had insisted ships would still need Iranian permission and must travel an Iranian-designated route.
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump framed the Iranian announcement as a breakthrough and presented the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran as all but concluded. He immediately added, however, that the American naval blockade of Iran’s ports would remain in place until a deal was reached to end the war.
The president has often made overly optimistic claims about the war, which began in late February. Although Mr. Trump expressed confidence late Friday about the negotiations with Iran that he said would be happening over the weekend, no new face-to-face talks were announced as of Saturday morning.
Mr. Trump also claimed in a phone interview with CBS that Iran had “agreed to everything.” But Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, quickly denied Iran had agreed to any of their adversaries’ core demands.
And Iran fired on two Indian ships:
On Saturday, India summoned the Iranian ambassador about what it called “a serious incident” involving two Indian-flagged ships that were fired on. TankerTrackers.com, a company that monitors oil shipments, said two Indian-flagged vessels sailing through the strait had turned around.
A shipping monitor run by the British Navy, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, said it had received a report that one tanker had come under fire from two Iranian gunships. Another vessel, a container ship, was hit by an “unknown projectile,” it said.
The gratuitous Trump-dissing is par for the course at the NYT, but they happen to be right. The most egregious lie from the “President” is his claim that Iran really has undergone regime change, implying that the government could be taken over by the people and turned into a modern democracy. Ain’t gonna happen,
The U.S. military is preparing in coming days to board Iran-linked oil tankers and seize commercial ships in international waters, according to U.S. officials, expanding its naval crackdown beyond the Middle East.
The planning comes as the Iranian military continues to tighten its grip on the Strait of Hormuz, attacking several commercial vessels on Saturday as it declared the waterway was being “strictly controlled” by Iran. The developments sent shipping companies scrambling a day after Iran’s foreign minister said the strait was fully open to commercial traffic—an announcement that was welcomed by President Trump.
The Trump administration’s decision to step up the economic pressure on Tehran is intended to force the regime to re-open the strait and make concessions on its nuclear program, which has been the focus of negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.
Trump said Friday that Iran has already agreed to hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to the U.S., though Iran has rejected that claim. Also at stake is how long Iran might agree to forgo enriching uranium and whether Tehran would receive billions of dollars in frozen funds from foreign countries as part of a deal.
The U.S. has already turned back 23 ships that have sought to leave Iranian ports as part of a naval blockade of Iranian ports, according to U.S. Central Command. The broadening of the campaign will enable the U.S. to take control of Iran-linked vessels around the world, including ships carrying Iranian oil that are already sailing outside the Persian Gulf and those carrying arms that could support the Iranian regime.
Whether this will precipitate more violence in the war is unclear. I’m still worried that Trump is now backing off, and won’t insist that Iran completely abandon its mission to produce nuclear weapons. That prohibition was declared Goal #! in the Iran campaign, at least in Trump’s initial announcement.
*I didn’t know that this series was running at the NYT, but apparently each month they give you links to five good movies you can watch for free. Here are the latest five (with links): films that will discomfit you:
Are you allergic to the 20th century? Suffering and lost, Carol (Julianne Moore), a housewife from the San Fernando Valley, takes the flier bearing this message that she hopes will lead her to a solution about the mysterious physical maladies plaguing her. But ultimately, this is an omen for the century to come, for our pervasive sense of unease and overload in times that leaves you alienated at best, and perhaps genuinely sick at worst.
In Todd Haynes’s haunting masterwork, we follow Carol, struggling with an onset of various medical illnesses, as she goes down a rabbit hole to find answers. Decades later, a question still stirs fans: Is Carol actually sick?
A cheerleader, a barn, naked bodies, Hitler. Connect those images as you see fit — that’s the ominous montage flashing before Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty), a kind of psychological test, in this searing scene from Pakula’s film.
During this sequence, Frady, the cowboy journalist investigating a mysterious string of murders following a political assassination, has perhaps reached some inner sanctum. And yet, the quietly devastating revelation of “Parallax” is that there really isn’t one. When he follows the trail of the group’s latest violent conspiracy, he is only met by more shadows and the barrel of a gun at the end of a dark tunnel.
Coppola wrote the script before Watergate, but this is a defining work of the paranoid reality the scandal opened our eyes to, one in which you never know who’s listening and what’s operating in the dark. In the film, Harry (Gene Hackman) is an expert audio bugger who slowly spirals after believing he’s learned of a murder plot in a conversation he’s been hired to record.
Even if you already know where the movie goes, what makes it spellbinding each time is its profound sense of melancholy in observing Harry’s solitary life. When you know that anyone might be watching or listening, it’s only logical to not only accept but insist that it’s better if we’re all alone in this world.
“Nobody wants to know about conspiracy, I don’t get it!” says Jack Terry (John Travolta) in Brian De Palma’s spiraling stunner. After inadvertently recording the audio to a car crash that kills an American governor and presidential hopeful, Jack begins to suspect foul play. A sound man for B-movies, he uses his footage to meticulously reconstruct the sequence of events, like a filmmaker mapping out the montage to a murder scene.
But is anyone paying attention? As Jack’s rabbit hole leads him to the film’s thrilling climax at a patriotic Philadelphia parade, full of stars and stripes, he’s the only one attuned to the possibility of sinister agents — everyone else is too busy marveling at the fireworks.
For both how harrowing and humdrum Kitty Green’s film is, it stands as one of the best works to speak to the #MeToo era. As we follow Jane (Julia Garner), an assistant to a production executive, across one single day in the office, we observe the small signs that begin to tell her of the routine sexual harassment that happens behind closed doors.
We never see what really happens or who her boss is, but instead how the casually manipulative and misogynistic rhythms of the corporate setting make these dark realities just part of the furniture of a workplace. The more Jane reacts, the more she’s glaringly out of step with the program. Green is intentional about the film’s structure, never really moving the story into a climax or reveal — the insidious mundanity of it all is what is most horrifying.
I’ve seen only “The Conversation,” but it’s a fantastic movie.
*Tabloid item! Who remembers Kyrsten Sinema, the renegade Senator who didn’t run again and has dropped out of sight? The Wall Street Journal reports that she likely had an affair with her married security guard, and the guard’s wife is suing Sinema not for adultery, but for “homewrecking.”
In October 2024, Heather Ammel found a message from another woman on her husband’s phone. “I miss you. Putting my hand on your heart. I’ll see you soon,” it said.
Ammel decided to write back: “Are you having an affair with my husband?” she texted from her spouse’s phone. “You took a married man away from his family.”
Then Ammel took a surprising step: She sued—not her cheating husband, but the woman who was having a romantic relationship with him. This was Kyrsten Sinema, the former U.S. senator from Arizona. Ammel’s husband, Matthew Ammel, was employed as a security guard for Sinema at the time.
North Carolina, where the Ammels lived, is one of just a handful of states with a “homewrecker law” that allows a jilted spouse to sue a third party for damages for a marital breakup. And it isn’t just illicit lovers who might find themselves in the crosshairs. Meddling in-laws, persuasive friends, even a therapist or clergy member are all fair game.
To win an “alienation of affection” claim, as it is known legally, a plaintiff must prove three points: that there was genuine “love and affection” between the spouses before the third party intervened. That this love and affection was alienated and destroyed. And that the defendant’s “malicious acts” caused the loss of affection.
. . .Notably, plaintiffs don’t have to prove that adultery was involved, as the alienation-of-affection claim covers emotional persuasion. A sexual affair is covered by another homewrecker charge—called “criminal conversation”—that many spurned spouses file simultaneously.
While proponents of these cases say that they support and strengthen marriage—serving as a deterrent for bad behavior—most states have scrapped them as relics of a distant past.
A few other states have such laws, but they’re not as “aggressive” as North Carolina, which once awarded a wife who sued her husband’s mistress $30 million. I wondered what Sinema had been up to since she left the Senate. And do you think that the mistress should be the one to be sued? I guess a wife can’t get monetary damages from suing her husband; most states have “no fault” divorce laws in which the cheated-upon spouse gets no extra assets because of the adultery,
A life jacket worn by a passenger on RMS Titanic as she escaped the sinking steamship on a lifeboat sold at auction on Saturday for 670,00 pounds ($906,000).
The flotation device was worn by Laura Mabel Francatelli, a first-class passenger on the doomed ocean liner, and is signed by her and other survivors from the same lifeboat.
It was the star among items in a sale of Titanic memorabilia by Henry Aldridge & Son auctioneers in Devizes, western England, and sold to an unidentified telephone bidder for well over the presale estimate of between 250,000 and 350,000 pounds.
A seat cushion from one of the Titanic lifeboats sold at the same auction for 390,000 pounds ($527,000) to the owners of two Titanic museums in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri.
The prices include an auction-house fee known as the buyer’s premium.
“These record-breaking prices illustrate the continuing interest in the Titanic story, and the respect for the passengers and crew whose stories are immortalized by these items of memorabilia,” auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said.
A short video:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is licking her chops
Hili: What a beautiful little bird. Andrzej: I’m afraid you’re hiding your true thoughts.
In Polish:
Hili: Jaki piękny ptaszek.
Ja: Obawiam się, że ukrywasz swoje prawdziwe myśli.
Masih reminds us not to forget the executed protestors of Iran:
A hundred days since a massacre in Iran, and you know what? The bodies didn’t disappear, they just disappeared from your timeline.
We’re talking about body bags stacked in hospitals across Iran. This is only one video that I have received from one hospital in Tehran thanks to… https://t.co/BbrtJve7c5
From Luana, who is particularly interested in “Fat Studies” these days as its proponents often tell outright lies:
A new paper in Fat Studies is fighting for “social justice and equity in death” for fat people, and claims that fat people are “particularly likely to die of anti-fatness” (as opposed to obesity-related health complications?).
The Pompei galleries in the Naples Archaeological Museum are endless, amazing and also so sad. Here’s Terentius Neo the Baker and his wife looking intellectual. You hope they got out, or simply weren’t there that terrible day.
The number and variety contained in each box has varied over the years. In total, 53 different animals have been represented by animal crackers since 1902. In its current incarnation, each package contains 22 cookies consisting of a variety of animals. The most recent addition, the koala, was added in September 2002 after being chosen by consumer votes, beating out the penguin, walrus and cobra.
Here are some of them:
Baseball BugsUploaded by Baseball Bugs at en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I am flying to Georgia for a week, and posting will be light until my return. Bear with me; I do my best.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 18 Wikipedia page.
It’s Friday, April 17, and as of midnight, for the first time since Feburary 28 there is no fighting in the Middle East. While this 10-day ceasefire agreement ostensibly returns the northern front to a pre-Roaring Lion status quo—where Israel can routinely strike Hezbollah targets—it is decidedly not Jerusalem’s preferred outcome.
Nor is it the preference of the Israeli public: 61 percent oppose the current ceasefire deal according to a poll by the Institute for National Security Studies. But if U.S. public opinion wasn’t going to stop Trump, I doubt Israel’s will.
The ceasefire isn’t a sign of realignment, just different priorities and different timelines. The U.S. is looking to extract Iran’s nuclear materials, and Israel’s war in Lebanon was hindering that removal. But the ceasefire was only the first step in Trump’s plan.
The second is the White House meeting between Trump, Lebanese President Joseph Auon, and Netanyahu, expected next week. It is designed to project a united front and avoid unnecessary public escalation—a diplomatic optic Israel accepts as preferable, even as it resents the diversion from its own military objectives.
The third step is an American push to promote a broad political arrangement in Lebanon, an ambition Israel is deeply skeptical of, given Hezbollah’s continued dominance in the country. Furthermore, Hezbollah’s noted preference for maintaining a limited level of friction could preclude a return to full-scale conflict—provided it successfully keeps its provocations below Trump’s threshold of tolerance.
The fourth step involves stabilizing the arena through coordinated, extended ceasefires. Israel is especially unenthusiastic about this outcome. Jerusalem is functioning on a significantly more compressed timeline than Washington. Now that the Strait of Hormuz is at least partially reopened, the immediate pressure on the U.S. has abated somewhat. Meanwhile, the shadow of Hezbollah is still cast over Israel’s north. While Israeli society has miraculously rebounded to normalcy after the war, living for an extended period under the looming threat of escalation isn’t a condition any country accepts joyfully.
The two key questions right now are: What is the effect of the ceasefire in Tehran, and what is its effect in Beirut?
Regarding Iran, the assessment in Jerusalem is that Trump remains firm on the nuclear issue. The diplomatic gestures in the Lebanese arena are intended to clear the board—creating the space for the U.S. to focus less on fielding Iranian complaints over Lebanon, and more on hammering Tehran into surrendering its nuclear program.
In Lebanon, meanwhile, IDF forces remain in place. The immediate question is whether the ceasefire will be extended to maintain the current holding pattern, whether renewed escalation will necessitate further military action, or whether advancing diplomatic talks will require an eventual IDF withdrawal.
Ultimately, the question of whether this ceasefire was worth it can only be answered in Islamabad. If negotiations there are successful and the regime is effectively neutered, Lebanon will have been a small price to pay.
Amit Segal is being optimistic here. What are the chances that the reimg is “effectively neutered.” It angers me when Trump keeps proclaiming that there’s been “real regime change” in Iran.
A fine arts commission gave preliminary approval to President Trump’s plans for a triumphal arch in Washington, but the panel’s vice chairman suggested significant changes, including losing the statues of golden eagles and a winged angel atop the structure that account for a third of its height.
The Commission of Fine Arts, which is filled with Mr. Trump’s appointees, has an advisory role on the design of the project, but no enforcement power. It asked the administration to return with updated drawings before a final vote on the project.
The outcome reflected the tension at the heart of Mr. Trump’s efforts to leave his imprint on the architecture of Washington. Even as the president has sought to defang the entities that might normally stand in the way of his plans, the sheer scale and lack of consultation on his designs have fueled intense public resistance.
James C. McCrery II, the vice chairman of the panel who was also the original architect for Mr. Trump’s $400 million ballroom, took issue with the statues at the top of the 250-foot arch. Removing the statues would decrease its size considerably, to about 166 feet.
“I wonder if you need those up there,” Mr. McCrery asked, suggesting it might be “even a better, more Washingtonian design” without the statues.
Mr. McCrery, who while working on the ballroom project objected to its ballooning size, also asked for the replacement of the statues of gold lions included lower down on the arch.
“Work on the lions and find replacements for them,” he said. “As I said earlier, they’re not of this continent. They’re noble, they’re courageous, and they’re strong. They’re all those things. But maybe there are alternatives.”
He also raised concerns about a 250-foot tunnel that architects have planned to build underneath the arch as a path for visitors to cross under the busy roundabout. Mr. McCrery described it as “less than ideal” and a “security risk.
Before the vote, Thomas Luebke, the panel’s secretary, informed members that they had received a deluge of nearly 1,000 messages from the public: “One hundred percent of the comments were against the project,” he said.
Here’s who has to approve it further:
Plans for the arch have yet to go before the National Capital Planning Commission, which reviews structural proposals around the National Mall and is also led by Trump allies. There is also the question of whether the administration will seek congressional approval.
A group of Vietnam War veterans has sued to stop construction, citing a lack of congressional authority and arguing that the arch would obstruct the view between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.
The plaintiffs maintain that Mr. Trump cannot build it without the authorization of Congress. They cite the Commemorative Works Act of 1986, which details a multistep process for authorizing and designing commemorative works in the District of Columbia and says any such work must be “specifically authorized” by Congress.
Here’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, who can’t pronounce “arch”, nor has the ability to hold the picture right-side-up, announcing the monstrosity at a press conference:
*Ethan Norton, a senior at Wesleyan University, has written an op-ed at the Washington Post that is guaranteed to get me clicking: “Why Democrats are failing to reach young voters like me.” It’s that the Dems can’t produce clickbait!
That diagnosis overlooks the real problem: It’s not just what they’re up against, but how they’re communicating. Crying “constitutional crisis” won’t win votes — it’s hardly enough to get likes.
In the digital age, attention is earned, not assumed. In 2025, Media Matters reported that right-leaning digital programs commanded audiences nearly five times the size of those on the left — a disparity amplified by placement on social media. As MS NOW host Chris Hayes puts it, “if you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say.”
I know from experience. I study film and digital media, and as a young voter, I’ve scrolled past lifeless Democratic content, noticing how much more engaging posts from conservatives feel. It’s like eyeing your dinner companion’s unhealthy meal — you know it’s not good for you, but it looks so much better than what’s on your plate.
Friends who claim they don’t care about politics consume right-leaning media largely because it’s funnier and easier to share, such as the stand-up series Kill Tony — one of 80 right-leaning programs identified by Media Matters that are categorized as “comedy, entertainment, sports, or other supposedly nonpolitical topics.”
. . .Some Democrats understand how to capitalize on social media. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vertical shorts propelled him into office. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) answers questions from followers on Instagram. Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) — hardly a digital native — shows up daily with YouTube videos, Instagram clips and shareable quotes.
Contrast that with Vice President Kamala Harris missing a chance to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2024. Some saw it as a tacit surrender, leaving a huge swath of the electorate untouched. This episode also underscores a misunderstanding of the attention economy.
Yes, but I loved watching Kamala Harris because she’s just completely out of it, and I guess she’s been that way since she fell out of a coconut tree.
Like everyone else, young voters are looking for authenticity. And right now, that boils down to one question: Does this person understand how to reach me?
Too often, the answer from Democrats is no.
Conservatives do not have an ideological grip on young people. They just have our time and attention.
So get creative.
Stop obsessing over what the message is, and focus on how it’s being delivered.
Yep, the medium is the message, and to hell with substantive content. Gen Z has spoken: put candidates on Joe Rogan’s show. (That’s not a bad idea, actually.)
*As always, I’ll steal three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news-and-snark column in the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: The Luddite Party.”
→ NYC’s new government grocery stores: New York mayor Mamdani announced the first site identified for a city-owned grocery store. It shall be in an East Harlem marketplace called La Marqueta. Cute! It’s opening in 2029. The city will spend $30 million on the store.
In his 100 Day Address, the mayor said: “Some will insist that city-owned businesses do not work, that government cannot keep up with corporations. My answer to them is simple: I look forward to the competition. May the most affordable grocery store win.”
So, lemme get this straight: The La Marqueta store will pay no rent. It will pay no real estate taxes. And the city is putting $30 million into developing it. Totally fair and normal competition going on, nothing to see here. I’m so curious which will be cheaper, the stores that have to pay rent and property taxes—or the one that doesn’t!
→ A mystery that will never be solved: After affirmative action was banned and universities had to start judging kids on test scores and grades again, something strange happened at Johns Hopkins.
→ Quote of the week: “I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be. . . . My kids waited patiently in the car.” Who else could it be? It’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For those of you who might be freaked out by the admission, don’t worry. Bobby was cutting off the genitals of a dead raccoon apparently to “study them later.” It was research, heard of it? He’s a budding zoologist. It’s called primary sources. Onward.
*I found this video about Steinway Tower, the world’s thinnest skyscraper completed in 2022 in New York City. But nobody wants to live there! The 12.5-minute video below tells you why. I sure wouldn’t live there, even if I did have the dosh! There are 59 luxury residential units in the building, and many are unoccupied. As Wikipedia says,
The tower’s early condominium owners included the government of Canada (which bought an apartment for its consul general) and the developer Christian Candy. Sotheby’s International Realty took over as the building’s condominium sales agent in July 2024, and Bonhams auction house leased the former piano showroom that September. The building had 10 unsold apartments by April 2025, and two of the original condo owners were recorded as having sold their apartments by August.
It’s all about construction and wind and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live on the top floors, where swaying is intense.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is peeved:
Hili: It’s not easy to preserve dignity when you feel like biting someone.
Andrzej: Amen to that.
In Polish:
Hili: Trudno zachować godność, kiedy ma się ochotę kogoś ugryźć.
Ja: Święte słowa.
*From Luana, the fraught field of fat studies, many of whose activists insist that obesity does not produce morbidity.
A new paper in Fat Studies is fighting for “social justice and equity in death” for fat people, and claims that fat people are “particularly likely to die of anti-fatness” (as opposed to obesity-related health complications?).
From Ginger K., a civil discussion between a gender activist and Alex Stein, apparently a professional comedian. There’s some conflation between sex and gender.
This is a pretty extraordinary clip. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a trans ally going this far into the argument . Fair play to her for at least having the conversation, but it’s no surprise when she finally taps out where she does. pic.twitter.com/6FDlZNzdEL
From Malcolm, a cat doctor. Seems dubious to me, but I do like cats making biscuits.
In Russia, a woman notices that her cat comes every night and kneads her throat. Days later, she develops a slight swelling in her neck and, after seeing a doctor, learns that she has a thyroid issue. 🐾
When she looks into it, she comes across a fascinating idea: cats are… pic.twitter.com/HctQeL5fua
And two from Dr. Cobb, soon to go to Chile. First, hammer-headed flies (the males are the ones with the long heads). Males in other but similar species butt heads as a way of sizing each other up:
And Matthew recommends this 5½-minute video as a good explanation of the expanding Universe:
There’s a free new article in BostonMagazine called “Can Steven Pinker save Harvard?” (subtitle: “But the celebrity professor’s own record raises a question: Is he the right guy for the job?”) It’s the same-old-same old, recycling every accusation about Pinker that’s come down the pike (association with Bad People, unwarranted belief in progress, hereditarianism, love of capitalism, work on evolutionary psychology etc.), with nothing that you haven’t read before. And yes, they do provide talking heads to give some pushback, but it’s all irrelevant in light of the title question.
Pinker helped form the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, now comprising 200 people, and they’re working on issues like freedom of speech, institutional neutrality, defusing DEI, extirpating bias, and so on. It’s really a dumb question to ask whether just one of these people can “save Harvard”, and of course the answer is “we’ll see.” The article is totally a hit piece, but it’s slight for such a long piece, and adds nothing to the literature. But you can click below to read it for free.
The Boston Magazine piece is very long, but I’ll quote just the “j’accuse” bits and a few other things (indented). My own text is flush left.
J’Accuse!
Steven Pinkeris one of the most famous—and divisive—academics in America. A cognitive psychologist at Harvard, he’s spent five decades writing about how we think, picking fights with the left, and wading into culture wars that most professors avoid. Bill Gates calls him a favorite writer. His critics call him a cover for racists. He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories. He’s also, right now, one of the loudest voices pushing Harvard to change.
. . . But Pinker’s critics—and there are many, especially in academia—argue that he’s guilty of exactly what he decries: my-side bias, ideological blinders, a willingness to engage with far-right figures in ways that give them legitimacy. He says he doesn’t set out to spark controversy—though he seems to welcome it when it comes. But it’s a double-edged sword in a dangerous time: Pinker has leaped into the fray of what ails Harvard—and higher education in general—starting with his own questions about our universities: What are they doing? Who are they for? Where are they going?
. . . . In The Blank Slate, published in 2002, Pinker argued against a prevailing orthodoxy that we’re born without any innate characteristics, shaped entirely by environment and culture. Instead, he made the case that genetics plays a significant role in how our minds work and who we become. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) detailed the long-term historical decline in violence, and Enlightenment Now (2018) made the case for reason and science creating a world of well-being and possibility foreign to earlier epochs. Those last two got Pinker a lot of heat for putting a sunny spin on the way things are now, especially among left-leaning thinkers who have called him a cheerleader for Western capitalism, blind to the inequalities it produces. And The Blank Slate has gotten Pinker criticized over the idea that biology is destiny, which leads into dangerous territory: racial differences, eugenics, the question of who gets to define human nature and why.
Yadda yadda yadds. But wait! There’s more! Louis Menand, with whom I’ve crossed swords by claiming that there’s no “truth” that can be derived from literature, shows up again arguing that Pinker’s ideas “lack nuance.”
The Blank Slate was much praised for opening up the nature-nurture debate—it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, but it also garnered some now-wait-a-minute reviews that sometimes attacked Pinker for oversimplifying things. Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club, a Pulitzer-winning intellectual and cultural history of late-19th- and early-20th-century America, reviewed the book skeptically in the New Yorker. Pinker’s villains, Menand wrote, were “social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists.” His heroes were cognitive scientists and ordinary folks. “I wish I could say that Pinker’s view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this,” Menand wrote.
It isn’t just Pinker’s conclusions that have drawn fire—it’s his method. “By far the nastiest and most aggressive academic responses I have seen come from humanities professors when there are ideas from the sciences that they see as encroaching on their territories,” Pinker told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. “That’s when you get rage and withering condescension.” It’s not hard to find.
. . . And Daniel Smail, a Harvard history professor, wrote a withering takedown of The Better Angels of Our Nature for an academic journal, dismissing Pinker’s optimism about civilization as naive. His verdict: “Better Angels is not a work of history. It is best understood as a work of moral and historical theology.”
Give me a break. Pinker’s assessment of civilization’s progress is absolutely convincing. Would you reather live now, or in 1400? And although Pinker is optimistic in view of past progress, he constantly tempers his optimism by saying that we have no crystal ball that can tell us if, for example, there will be a nuclear war.
Now here’s an absolutely stupid accusation:
. . . . Still, the right had a field day. Neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer ran a headline that read, in part: “Harvard Jew Professor Admits the Alt-Right Is Right About Everything.” The left hammered Pinker for giving ammunition to extremists, regardless of his intent.
And this is the pattern: Bad actors and dark thinkers have appropriated Pinker’s research and writing for their own ends—and Pinker has done little to stop them.
I’m crying crocodile tears over that. Who among us can prevent the “bad actors and dark thinkers” from appropriating our ideas? If Pinker went after everybody who did, or who criticized him (he does from time to time engage in rebutting criticism), he’d have no time for his own work. Oh, and there’s Pinker’s involvement in the Epstein case–which he now regrets:
Then, of course, there is Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein collected heavyweight intellectuals, and in terms of funding and gifts seemed to have a particular affinity for Harvard. Pinker attended a few gatherings where he was present, but claims he never liked Epstein.
In 2008, Pinker’s friend and Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz defended Epstein, who had been charged with soliciting prostitution from a minor. Dershowitz had consulted Pinker for help interpreting the wording of a statute concerning the use of the mail to solicit minors to engage in prostitution or sexual activity. For that crime, Epstein pleaded guilty and served 13 months in prison.
Pinker says he doesn’t blame Dershowitz for defending Epstein, nor does he believe he did anything wrong by helping interpret the law. “I believe in the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of legal representation of the accused,” Pinker says. “If I had known then what I know now about the extent of Epstein’s crimes, and that it would be used in his defense, I might have second thoughts.”
How many times have you heard this? In fact, I wouldn’t even apologize were I Pinker. After all, I was on O. J. Simpson’s defense team, arguably doing something even worse than Pinker: giving help to someone who likely committed two murders (note that I didn’t testify or take money). Even rich or famous people deserve a fair trial. And yet author Robert Huber insinuates that the guilt-by-association trope does erode Pinker’s reputation, using this weaselly trio of sentences, unworthy of a serious journalist:
. . . Pinker dismisses criticism of his connections as guilt by association—whether it’s Murray or Epstein, he insists that proximity isn’t endorsement. But the pattern is visible: years of polite yeses, a willingness to lend his credibility to people and platforms that most academics would avoid. At some point, the accumulation starts to speak for itself.
A digression: Cowboy boots:
In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch.
Yeah, but he got the idea from me (I don’t wear them because I’m short, though I am.)
The Big Question: Can Pinkah save Hahvahd? Another quote.
But writing op-eds is one thing. Could Pinker actually change anything?
In 2023, Pinker and five copresidents, along with dozens of other Harvard faculty, formed the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, made up now of some 200 members, which regularly challenges university policies and pushes for change.
Whether and how much this Council changes Harvard is not up to Pinker, but to the President, the deans, and the faculty. At least he’s trying to do something according to his principles. And, to be fair to Huber, the article does note that some progress has already been made, like the Council having an unprecedented meeting with the Harvard Corporation, which really runs Harvard. Pinker is “cautiously optimistic” that the Council will effect salubrious change. In the end, however, Huber’s title question isn’t close to being answered, mainly because it’s early days yet:
As always, Pinker is convinced he’s pursuing the truth as he finds it. His method has made him a star. It’s also left a trail of complications—the associations, the bad actors who cite his work, the questions about what doors he’s opened and for whom.
Whether that makes him the right person to lead Harvard out of its current troubles is a question the university will have to answer for itself. Pinker, for his part, shows no signs of slowing down. He carries on as if he is certain his work and beliefs deserve whatever airing he decides to give them.
So, that’s the Big Conclusion. Clearly the University, not the author has to answer it. So why was this article written in the first place?
Jesse Singal wrote this piece about the Boston Magazine article. It’s paywalled, but read what you can by clicking below:
A couple of quotes:
Boston magazine just published an article about Steven Pinker headlined “Can Steven Pinker Save Harvard?” Subheadline: “But the celebrity professor’s own record raises a question: Is he the right guy for the job?”
First of all, I don’t get that “but.” It’s not referencing anything! It’s like the original headline was going to be something like “Steven Pinker Wants to Save Harvard,” and then someone changed the headline without changing the subheadline.
Setting aside my overreaction to a minor copy-editing error, this conceit is also a bit much — it’s very magazine-y. No one, including Steven Pinker, thinks Steven Pinker is (single-handedly) going to “save Harvard.” The article is really about a few different things, most of them summed up in the very first paragraph: “His critics call him a cover for racists,” writes author Robert Huber. “He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories.”
. . . I find it surprising, in 2026, that adherents of the more sweeping anti-Pinker view have done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position (I’m going to table the narrower and more standard academic debate over whether he has gotten this or that wrong in his books; obviously, it’s legitimate to closely read and critically respond to the work of as influential a figure as Pinker). Their myopia on this matter can, I think, be explained by their own form of blank slatism. They believe that people are more or less blank slates, with regard to political opinions, until they decide which scientific beliefs to adopt. Similarly, political ideologies are only adopted because they are seen as having scientific legitimacy.
So, the argument goes: Without figures like Pinker, who are at best useful idiots and at worst quiet but intentional enablers, the alt-right would have far less intellectual fuel and wouldn’t have gained the power it has gained. Or if they aren’t arguing this, I don’t understand how they could possibly have remained so mad at Pinker for so many years.
In the end, or so I think, a lot of opposition to Pinker, whatever form it takes, derives from people who buy into blank-slateism. Of course very few people are pure blank-slaters, but there are degrees, and in general “progressives” tend to be on the side of seeing differences between people as due very largely to environmental influences. This derives from a Marxist view of people as generally malleable, so that any genetic effect on differences should be ignored, minimized, or even demonized.
Pinker has spent much of his career emphasizing that a lot of what makes people different is due to their harboring different genes—genes that of course interact with different environments (language is a good example). And so he’s demonized.
Welcome to Friday, April 17, 2026, and Ellis Island Family History Day. Here’s a record that I believe is marks the arrival of my grandmother, Sali Mermelstein, at Ellis Island from Hungary on May 4, 1904. I am not 100% sure this is her, but if it is she was ten years old on arrival. My mother was born in 1919, which would make my grandmother 25 when she gave birth to my mother. Also, Sali went by “Sadie” in the U.S. I put the red box in; click to enlarge.
President Trump announced on Thursday that the leaders of Israel and Lebanon had agreed to begin a 10-day cease-fire at 5 p.m. Eastern time. If it indeed takes effect, the cease-fire could remove a major hurdle to the broader peace talks with Iran.
A truce would pause the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group. Neither immediately confirmed Mr. Trump’s announcement. The negotiations are complicated by the fact that Israel is discussing a cease-fire only with the Lebanese government, which does not have control over Hezbollah, a group considered more powerful than Lebanon’s own military. Hezbollah has long rejected any direct talks with Israel.
However, such a dynamic is not without precedent.
The cease-fire that ended the last war between Israel and Hezbollah, in November 2024, was negotiated indirectly between Israel and Lebanon’s government through U.S. mediators. Even though Hezbollah was not a formal signatory to the deal, the agreement would not have worked without its consent.
The fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has threatened to upend the cease-fire between the United States and Iran, which is set to expire next week. Hezbollah is Iran’s most powerful proxy in the Middle East and Iran has repeatedly insisted that the truce should extend to Lebanon. The United States and Israel have rejected that demand.
It was not clear whether more than a million residents who have been displaced in southern Lebanon would be able to return home; Israel has signaled recently that it was planning to occupy large parts of the area even after the current conflict with Hezbollah.
More than 2,100 people have been killed in Lebanon during the current conflict, Lebanese authorities have said. At least 13 Israeli soldiers have also been killed, along with two civilians, according to the Israeli authorities.
This is a cease-fire that will not last, especially if Hezbollah is not ordered to disarm, as a 2006 UN Security Council resolution stipulated. And Iran’s insistence that an Israel/Hezbollah truce be part of their own agreement with the U.S. and Israel shows more than anything that Iran still wants to support terrorism in the Middle East. That Trump agreed to this finally shows that he just wants the war to be over and doesn’t care much about the security interests of Israel.
UPDATE: The cease-fire began at midnight in Lebanon, and thousands of Lebanese are heading to their homes in the south. Hezbollah, though it stopped firing rockets, has not said it will abide by the truce. Nor has it said it will disarm, and since the truce is with the Lebanese government, that government would have to force Hezbollah to disarm. There is no obvious way to do so. Netanyahu has made disarming a sine qua non for any agreement, so once again we reach an impasse, one that will last ten days.
The Senate rejected a resolution Wednesday to block President Donald Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran, even as some Republicans raised increasing concerns about Congress’s lack of input on the war.
The vote was the latest test of lawmakers’ support for the unpopular conflict since Trump threatened last week to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” then hours later agreed to a two-week ceasefire. Democrats have forced votes on three other war powers resolutions since the war’s start, all of which have failed.
Wednesday’s procedural vote was defeated 52-47, with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) joining Democrats to support the resolution and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) voting against it. Sen. Jim Justice (R-West Virginia) did not vote.
Some Republicans who opposed the resolution said they nevertheless want Trump to consult Congress as the war approaches the two-month mark — an important legal deadline.
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 — the law Democrats are using to force the votes — requires presidents to remove U.S. forces from any conflict that Congress has not authorized within 60 days. Trump can obtain a 30-day extension if he certifies that it is an “unavoidable military necessity.”
Trump predicted shortly after the war started that it would be over within four or five weeks, but the 60-day deadline, which arrives May 1, is rapidly approaching. He has sent mixed signals about how long the conflict will go on, telling Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business on Tuesday that he the war was “very close to over” even as he imposed a naval blockade on Iran and sent thousands more troops to the Middle East.
“The president recognized ahead of time when he first went into Iran that this was going to be a short-term thing, right?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said. “We’re probably not going to be dealing with 60 days. Well, here we are.”
If three votes had been changed in favor of the resolution, it would have passed, though I don’t know what force the resolution would have had. Would Trump have stopped attacking Iran for good? I doubt it. And even if both houses of Congress turn Democratic in the midterm, Trump can still attack other countries, since the stipulation that only Congress can declare war no longer seems to be in force. Fetterman’s and Paul’s votes were predictable, and canceled each other out. Fetterman, much as I like him, is not going to be reelected should he choose to run.
It’s Thursday, April 16, and last night, the U.S. Senate voted on a pair of resolutions aimed at blocking $447 million in arms and bulldozer sales to Israel. While the measures ultimately failed, the final tally demonstrated a seismic political shift. The Democratic Party voted overwhelmingly in favor, with 40 of 47 Senate Democrats backing the embargoes. In the end, the sales were only saved by unified Republican opposition.
The resolutions were proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders. While similar measures brought by Sanders were rejected out of hand in 2024 and 2025, the political landscape has clearly shifted. The number of Democrats voting alongside the Vermont independent has more than doubled in less than two years.
Contrary to the media’s lamentations, Israel and the United States did not lose the war to Iran. Who decided that the temporary survival of a regime constitutes a victory?
The Middle East is full of despotic Muslim dictatorships that have never interested the United States, and rightfully so. America is the world’s policeman, not its educator. If a leader wishes to destroy the lives of their citizens, the U.S. military will not be sent to protect them. The strongest army in the world and the strongest air force in the region destroyed $200 billion worth of Iranian military assets because the country posed an existential threat.
Yet, on a different front, Israel suffered a worrying loss: the war for American public opinion. The scope of this shift is historic. For the first time since polling on the issue began, the number of Americans holding an unfavorable view of Israel has eclipsed those with a favorable one, tipping the scales at 48 percent to 46 percent.
The percentage of Israel’s supporters dropped to a low not seen since 1989, and the percentage of detractors hit an all-time high.
If there is a mitigating circumstance, it is that Israel’s global standing historically deteriorates during prolonged military conflicts. We saw this during the First Intifada with its knives and stones, the Second Intifada with its exploding buses, and the Second Lebanon War. The current decline is deeper primarily because the war is longer. However, there is reason to expect a recovery once the regional fighting concludes—hopefully soon, and with a decisive victory. Furthermore, Israel’s national standing is still faring slightly better than that of its leader: Netanyahu currently sits at minus 23 percent, compared to a positive 9 percent just two years ago.
But that’s not all. According to a CNN poll, the majority of Republicans under the age of 50 now view Israel negatively: minus 16 percent, compared to plus 28 percent just four years ago.
The primary negative development is the rise in support for the Palestinians. Thirty-seven percent of Americans view them favorably, a record high since measurements began in 2000. This indicates a profound shift—not necessarily localized anger toward Israel, but authentic support for its enemies. Netanyahu believes that those in America who have a problem with Israel have a problem with America itself. Meaning, it is not an issue of public diplomacy (hasbara) but a matter of the progressive worldview.
The last paragraph is distressing; if there is one earmark of a “progressive” Democrat, it is a loathing of Israel (and for some, of the West in general). Note that this is not a gift, but a sale to Israel. I’m a lifelong Democrat, and am deeply depressed at where my party is going. I won’t be driven into the arms of Republicans, but how do I vote for a candidate with the ideology of Bernie Sanders.
*Hasan Piker is a far-left “influencer”, and by far left I mean he harbors a love of Communism and a deep, deep hatred of Israel. He’s posing a problem for Democrats who are loath to align with his stands, but some want to have some of his “influence” rub off on them, and that includes Ezra Klein. Over at The Free Press, Peter Savodnik dissents, arguing that “Actually, Hasan Piker is the Democrats’ enemy.”
Democrats have a Hasan Piker problem. They seem not to know what to do with the über-lefty streamer-influencer with millions of followers—to engage or not to engage; to campaign with him, or to pretend he doesn’t exist. That is the question!
In recent days, Piker has doubled down on his claim that Israel is worse than Hamas and declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century. Last month, he took part in a propaganda mission to Cuba. In November, he was in China promoting all the Chinese Communist Party’s good works.
One would think Democrats would have no trouble dispensing with this radical chic retread.
And yet Piker is being defended by some of the most prominent voices on the American left—including, most recently, Ezra Klein, who has penned a column originally headlined “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy.”
Actually, if you believe that Donald Trump and his cult of personality pose a dire threat to the Constitution, if you believe that America needs a serious, substantive liberalism that narrows the gap between the 1 percenters and everyone else, then Hasan Piker is the enemy.
He’s the would-be savior of the Cuban people who showed up in Havana with his $1,300 Cartier sunglasses.
He’s the wannabe revolutionary who on October 8, 2023, while the Israelis were still counting corpses, issued a breathless defense of the freedom fighters of Gaza overthrowing the shackles of their oppressors. “You cannot push people into a fucking corner their whole lives and not expect them to fight back at a certain point,” he ranted. This was followed by a manly “Suck my dick,” after which Piker accused Israel of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”
And yes, he’s the perfect distillation of the new left antisemitism (his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding). You do not get to obsess over the Jewish state—amplifying its every misstep, deleting or distorting the long history of Jews across the Middle East—while claiming you are not obsessing over the Jewish state. (In his column, Klein defends Piker against the antisemitism charge by arguing that he’s just an “anti-Zionist” whose anti-Zionism, he later notes, “is rising as a response to what Israel is doing”—although, oddly, Klein fails to note that Piker had taken to calling Israel “genocidal” before it responded to the October 7, 2023, attack.)
The new Democratic Party has forgotten what the party is meant to be—why there is an American left. It has become weak, stupid, enamored of whatever the barely pubescent influencer class tells it it should be enamored of. It is far more vulnerable to the manipulations of the brand-builders: Believe all women. Take a knee. Or, more recently, declare that you’ll never take a dime from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbying group. These are all gestures, forms of appeasement, ways of signaling to the radicals (intentionally or not) that the mainstream of the Democratic Party is not safely cordoned off from its radical flank.
Piker poses an even greater threat to Democrats than the Black Panthers and Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society ever did.
Ezra Klein, apparently, is unaware of all of the above. Or unfazed by it. His column reads like a whitewash, a carefully worded statement meant to legitimize Piker, make him more palatable.
Make no mistake about it: Piker’s support is not going to make or break the Democratic Party. But I’m surprised that Ezra Klein would endorse such a hateful person—and on the grounds that he’s “just a Zionist, not an antisemite.” I have no respect for somebody who thinks it’s fine to be Jewish but it’s not fine to agree that the established Jewish state is legitimate. If that were the case, then Piker should be saying that all the explicitly Muslim Middle East states (like the Islamic Republic of Iran) are also invalid. And of course Israel is not a theocracy like many of those states.
*Over at the NYT, Carl Zimmer reports on a new paper in Nature by David Reich and many colleagues. The upshot is that humans are still evolving as measured by genetic change (that is evolution). It’s no surprise to an evolutionist, for we’re facing many new environmental challenges, though we have medicine to deal with many former sources of mortality. Click below to see the paper, but I will quote Zimmer.
Many scientists have contended that humans have evolved very little over the past 10,000 years.
A few hundred generations was just a blink of the evolutionary eye, it seemed. Besides, our cultural evolution — our technology, agriculture and the rest — must have overwhelmed our biological evolution by now.
A vast study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests the opposite. Examining DNA from 15,836 ancient human remains, scientists found 479 genetic variants that appeared to have been favored by natural selection in just the past 10,000 years.
The researchers also concluded that thousands of additional genetic variants have probably experienced natural selection. Before the new study, scientists had identified only a few dozen variants.
“There are so many of them that it’s hard to wrap one’s mind around them,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the new study.
He and his colleagues found that a mutation that is a major risk factor for celiac disease, for example, appeared just 4,000 years ago, meaning the condition may be younger than the Egyptian pyramids.
The mutation became ever more common. Today, an estimated 80 million people worldwide have celiac disease, in which the immune system attacks gluten and damages the intestines.
Here’s a genome-wide scan from the paper showing the loci on all 23 chromosomes likely to have been subject to directional selection (the authors used statistical tests as well as simulations to determine this). All bars that rise above the dotted line are considered genomic regions showing evidence for that selection to a significant degree. There are, by the report, 479 of them.
The question I get most often when lecturing on evolution is “Are humans still evolving?” The answer is “yes,” of course; we would stop only if there was no genetic variation adapting us to new environments (or anything else). ;This is the reference to give if you get asked that question.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a revelation:
Hili: Leaves are solar panels.
Andrzej: That is indeed true, unlike so many other reports.
In Polish:
Hili: Liście to panele słoneczne.
Ja: To akurat jest prawda, w odróżnieniu od tak wielu innych doniesień.
This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death when she arrived at Auschwitz. She was about ten years old, and would be 82 years old today had she lived.
Facilitated communication, or “FC,” is the supposed ability of people who can’t speak and are severely handicapped to “communicate” by having a “helper” guide them in pointing out letters or words. Wikipedia describes it this way:
Facilitated communication (FC), or supported typing, is a scientifically discredited technique which claims to allow non-verbal people, such as those with autism, to communicate. The technique involves a facilitator guiding the disabled person’s arm or hand in an attempt to help them type on a keyboard or other such device that they are unable to properly use if unfacilitated.
There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and among disability advocacy organizations that FC is a pseudoscience. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, rather than the disabled person. The facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board and dowsing rods. Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object). In addition, in numerous cases disabled persons have been assumed by facilitators to be typing a coherent message while the patient’s eyes were closed or while they were looking away from or showing no particular interest in the letter board.
James Todd called facilitated communication “the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities.”
And indeed, I thought FC had been discredited a long time ago. (I posted about it here in 2017 when the idea was used as an excuse for sexual assault.) But no, it’s reemerged with the publication of new bestselling novel, Upward Bound, touted by, among others, the New York Times, which lately has a real penchant for woo. The novel (#305 on the Amazon overall list today) has drawn huge attention because the author, 28 year old Woody Brown, is severely autistic and cannot speak. Yet he got a degree in English from UCLA followed by an MFA degree at Columbia, doing all assignments through a facilitator—his mother Mary. She herself worked as a “story analyst for Hollywood studios.”
I’ve put a video below showing Brown “writing” by pointing at a letter board held by his mother, who then interprets the pointing. It’s not convincing.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The novel is below (screenshot goes to publisher).
And yes, the NYT appears to have bought the whole thing, assuming that Woody actually wrote the novel. Read their article by clicking below, or finding the piece archived here).
A couple of excerpts from the NYT:
Woody Brown knew he wanted to be a writer when he was 8 years old. Around that age, he made up stories about his alter ego, Cop Woody, a hero who went around saving people.
The tales stunned his mother, Mary Brown. She’d been reading to him since he was a baby, but never imagined that he could create his own elaborate plots.
As a toddler, Woody was diagnosed with severe autism. Doctors concluded he couldn’t process language, and said it was pointless to explain things to him or talk to him in complex sentences. Whenever Woody spoke, it sounded like shrieks and gibberish.
But Mary came to realize that her son understood more than he appeared to. He would become hysterical if they deviated from their daily routine, but if she explained why they had to stop at Target before getting lunch at McDonalds, he would calmly follow her into the store. At 5, Woody learned to communicate by pointing at letters to spell out words, using a laminated card. He began responding to Mary’s questions, first with single-word answers, and later with short sentences. When he started spelling out his Cop Woody stories, Mary recognized some of the plots, which were lifted from the headlines. Woody had been following the news on the TV and radio.
“That’s how Mom figured out that I was listening to everything,” Woody told me when we met on a recent morning at his parents’ home in Monrovia, Calif., where he lives. To express this, Woody tapped letters on a board with his right index finger, while Mary, who was seated next to him on the couch, followed his finger taps and repeated the words aloud.
When he learned to communicate by spelling, it felt like an escape hatch had opened, Woody explained.
“Miraculous discovery,” he spelled. “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open — left ajar, not flung wide, because the majority of people still doubted me.”
. . .While not strictly autobiographical, the stories in “Upward Bound” are shaped by Woody’s experience. He describes the agony of being unable to share his thoughts or control his verbal and physical tics, and the frustration of being underestimated by people who look at him and see an uncomprehending, mentally disabled person.
“I wanted to reach neurotypical readers, the well intentioned people who don’t realize that we are the same inside,” Woody explained. “I have all the thoughts, dreams, longings and intelligence as any neurotypical person. I just present a little differently.”
The author of the piece, Alexandra Alter, visited Woody and his mom, and describes the interview as if Woody himself were answering her questions by pointing at the letterboard. The only reference to the possibility that it’s Mary rather than Woody who is speaking is this:
Some of the communication methods Mukhopadhyay teaches have drawn criticism from language experts who argue that the person holding the board might be influencing or misinterpreting comments from a disabled person. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association doesn’t recommend the method, and put out a statement in 2019 warning that the resulting words might not reflect the disabled person’s intentions.
There are also skeptics who doubt someone as severely autistic as Woody can form and express sophisticated thoughts, much less write a novel.
Mary said she isn’t surprised some people question Woody’s abilities — it took her years to recognize what he was capable of. But she bristles at critics who say the way they communicate is harmful or manipulative.
“How on earth am I harming him?” she said.
Mary has also faced questions over whether she’s influencing or shaping Woody’s writing, which she insists she isn’t. When Woody is conversing, his finger flies across the board, but when he’s writing, Mary makes him spell out each word slowly. He can also type on a keyboard, but prefers to write with the letter board, because his poor fine motor skills make it hard to hit the right keys, and the time spent fixing typos makes him lose focus.
That’s the only reference in this long, glowing article to the possibility of facilitated communication, and there is no reference to the long, sad history of FC—a history that has made investigators almost universally say that it’s the facilitator and not the disabled person who is doing the “speaking.” (For a free Frontline documentary showing this, go here.)
Now it’s time for you to see Woody communicate. This video comes from NBC’s Today show, and Woody’s novel is breathlessly pronounced “deeply heartfelt and moving” and “authentic” by Jenna Bush Hager (W.’s daughter). Pay attention to the pointing by Woody and interpretation by Mary. Seriously, I cannot see at all a string of meaningful words.
As one correspondent wrote, “[Woody] is frequently not looking at the board while pointing, AND, when they show what he’s pointing to, it doesn’t correspond at all to actual words. I’m actually blown away that they showed this so clearly.” Indeed! Didn’t NBC get a bit dubious about this, much less the NYT, whose reporter saw the same thing? All I can say is that if this is really facilitated communication from Woody, it would be the first real facilitated communication ever documented. But it wasn’t tested, as they did no test on Woody. (They could, example, test his abilities by having Mary interpret things that only Woody knows, or using another facilitator.) Has Jenna even heard of facilitated communication?
Now I’m not ruling this out as authentic communication, but the demonstration above doesn’t increase my priors. Shame on the NBC for buying this without doubts.
Fortunately, at least two people wonder if Woody’s novel is his own composition or Mary’s. The first is Daniel Engber at the Atlantic, who wrote the critical article below (archived here if it’s paywalled).
Engber watched the NBC clip, and says this:
But if you watch the footage closely, and at one-quarter speed, it doesn’t look like he is spelling anything at all. Brown’s finger can be seen, at several points, in close-up, from a camera just behind his shoulder—and what he taps onto the board seems disconnected from the sentiments that Mary speaks aloud.
Katharine Beals, a linguist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania who has a son with autism, has studied Brown’s controversial method of communication since the early 2000s, and she has cataloged the ways in which it fails. She told me that she found the clip from NBC to be upsetting. Beals conceded that it can be hard in some cases to say whether such communication is real—but not in this one. “This isn’t subtle,” she said. “You can see that he’s not pointing to the letters.”
On YouTube, where the clip from NBC is posted, viewer comments are aggressive, ranging from ridicule to accusations of fraud. These are snap judgments based on a single, highly edited video; in the end, there is no way to prove or disprove from afar Brown’s capacity to write. But several professional organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, have issued formal warnings against the use of Rapid Prompting, a training method for communication from which Brown’s approach is derived. “There is uncertainty regarding who does the spelling,” ASHA says. And given that the method may mislead, “children and their families can incur serious harm.”
Of course there is a strong desire by Mary, and all facilitated communicators, to believe that they’re merely translating someone else’s thoughts—all the more reason to do appropriate tests and controls.
More from Engber
I emailed Brown, directly and through his publisher, to request an interview and ask if he or his mother would explain the spelling process as it appeared on the Today show. I got an emailed statement back. “I can understand why people are curious—even skeptical—about my method of communication,” it said. The statement continues:
It is mysterious and confounding to see a severely autistic nonspeaker perform acts of scholarship and fiction writing if you don’t presume intelligence in a disabled person. I have been using the same green board since I was in middle school and I find the letters and colors very calming. A keyboard requires specific aim and is unforgiving of error. I have a distinct brain but imperfect aim. This may look chaotic but in this way I keep up a steady rhythm with my finger that helps me stay on track. I am no savant. I came to novel writing like most published authors. I have read many books, attended good colleges, and got my MFA in writing at one of the country’s best programs. The only difference is that I communicate in a different manner.
Clinicians quickly came to understand that the method was susceptible to a very powerful “Ouija-board effect”: A facilitator could unwittingly deliver subtle and subconscious prompts—gentle pressure on a person’s wrist, perhaps—that shaped the outcome of the process. When the typers were subjected to formal “message-passing tests,” in which they would be asked to name an object or a picture that they’d seen while their helper wasn’t in the room, they almost always failed. Even kids who had produced fluid written work seemed incapable, under those conditions, of saying anything at all.
By 1994, the method was broadly disavowed. Yet a core group of true believers continued to promote its use. The New Jersey professor was among them. So was Mary Brown. In 2011, Mary posted on an autism-community website that her son’s use of facilitated communication had “helped him keep up at grade level.” The post has since been taken down, and FC has given way in recent years to its purportedly more reliable offshoots: Rapid Prompting and a similar approach called Spelling to Communicate. Now, instead of holding the speller’s hand, most facilitators hold the letter board instead. At first glance, the risk of influence seems less acute.
But wait, another fan of pseudoscience likes it! Yep, it’s RFK, Jr.:
ASHA has described Rapid Prompting and Spelling to Communicate as bearing “considerable similarity” to FC and thus as “pseudoscience.” But a formal disavowal by experts simply isn’t what it used to be. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared himself a fan of these methods: Doubters are delusional, he said in 2021; they remind him of doctors who still deny the harms of childhood vaccines. In January, Kennedy appointed two letter-board users and an expert trainer in Spelling to Communicate to the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Meanwhile, an audio series about nonspeaking autistic children who allegedly display their telepathic and clairvoyant powers via letter board has been listed among Apple’s most popular podcasts for more than a year.
Sales of Upward Bound are soaring too. Following the Today show segment, Brown’s book reached Amazon’s top-10 list for books of any kind. This was preceded by a platinum-level rollout that included starred advance reviews, awestruck and largely uncritical features in The New York Times and The Guardian, and testimonials from A-list novelists including Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle, Rivka Galchen, and Mona Simpson. This is the kind of marketing that any debut literary author would kill to have.
Critics of Rapid Prompting and related methods are aghast. “This really feels like a crescendo,” Beals said. “It’s really, really out of control.”
. . . The problem is, reasonable doubts about the book have been overlooked as well—by Penguin Random House and by the media outlets that have hyped it. (The dewy-eyed feature in the Times does provide, in passing, an attenuated paraphrase of ASHA’s statement about Rapid Prompting.) Then there is the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work. Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”
It’s always unwise to take something on faith, particularly something that has been previously discredited and whose present instantiation can be tested but wasn’t. Although Engber likes the book and recommends it, he’s dubious about authorship. Likewise, I am not willing to accept Woody Brown as the author.
Neither is Freddie deBoer in the article he recently put up. Its title tells the tale (click to read):
deBoer is even more skeptical than Engber:
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novelUpward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.
The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests…. This is the inconvenient, damning reality.
So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling,” which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.
The Times article never grapples with the evidence. Instead, it substitutes anecdote for science: the mother “realized” her son understood more than expected; the facilitator “saw tension evaporate.” But these are precisely the kinds of subjective impressions that controlled studies were designed to test and, where appropriate, falsify. The best we get from the review’s author, Alexandra Alter, as far as an acknowledgement of FC’s discredited reality lies in these paragraphs:
It goes on, but you get the points: Woody is likely not composing anything himself, the writing is probably due to his mother, the NYT and NBC are uber-credulous, and the buying public, eager to embrace woo and a feel-good story, is making the book a best seller. Oh, and this credulous acceptance of a method discredited for years is harmful to autistic people, to science, and to reason as a whole.’
deBoer spends a lot of space attacking the NYT, as he’s done in the past, but he does give some insight into why the paper is touting FC so hard:
As with so many recent bad publicshing decisions, rehabilitating FC reflects the paper’s increasing dependence on a subscriber-driven business model, where maintaining the sensibilities and emotional investments of its core readership – affluent brownstone liberals who would prefer the pleasant version of reality, thanks – often takes precedence over adversarial truth-telling. In an earlier era, when advertising and broad retail circulation were more central to its finances, the Times had greater latitude to challenge its most dedicated audience. Today, with digital subscribers a) the dominant revenue base and b) heavily drawn from demographics that are highly educated, high income, and progressive-leaning, there’s a clear incentive not to alienate a readership that is drawn to narratives of underdog triumphs and redemptive uplift. Facilitated communication fits neatly into that worldview, offering a reassuring story about disability that flatters the moral intuitions of well-meaning readers while sidestepping the far more difficult reality. The result is a kind of audience capture that encourages credulity precisely where skepticism is most needed. Who wants to read a downer story about genuinely non-verbal, deeply disabled people on their phone while they ride the 4 train uptown to take Kayleigh to her $20,000/year dance lessons?
This may well explain the Times‘s recent touting of religion, whose factual claims could also be seen as pseudoscientific (indeed, Ross Douthat’s evidence for God, presented in the NYT, is based on science). It does no harm to criticize religion, for the NYT subscribers are likely soft on it. If they’re not believers, they’re “believers in belief”: people who aren’t themselves religious but see faith as an essential social glue essential for “the little people” who hold society together.But Ceiling Cat help you if you promote nonbelief!
h/t: Greg
Addendum by Greg Mayer
The Times just went deeper into the FC morass. The columnist Frank Bruni, who should know better– he’s a professor at Duke, fer chrissakes– just went all in on the dubious book:
Let’s leave readers with a happier thought. I’m reading a novel, “Upward Bound,” written by a young man named Woody Brown who was diagnosed with severe autism as a child and thought to be incapable of sophisticated communication. He still struggles with speech, as our Times colleague Alexandra Alter explained in an excellent recent profile of him. But he’s an effective writer, complaining in “Upward Bound” about caretakers’ tendency to let their autistic charges idle “as if time means nothing to people who have nothing but time.” His book takes readers inside the thoughts of someone like him. And it’s a revelation that forces you to ask: How much do we overlook in people — how many gifts do we fail to nurture — by making overly hasty judgments? Woody’s mom believed in him. Then college and graduate-school professors did. Then editors. Tapping letters on a board to spell out his answers to Alexandra’s questions, he told her: “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open.” Now he’s free — and he’s flying.
It’s in his weekly dialogue with Bret Stephens. While Stephens didn’t endorse FC, any sane journalist would have pushed back, so his silence on it in the column is a black mark on him, as well. If you want to see how FC works, watch the Frontline documentary “Prisoners of Silence” (available free here), which thoroughly debunked FC– in 1992! When I taught a course on “Science & Pseudoscience”, I used to show this to the class, because it shows how pseudosciences work, how they are evangelized, how their proponents reject criticism by employing well-known hedges and dodges, and the harm they can do.
