Readers’ wildlife photos

August 28, 2023 • 8:32 am

Today’s photos come from ecologist Susan Harrison at UC Davis.  Her captions are indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them.

Southeastern Arizona (part 1)

Sooner or later, a U.S. birdwatcher must go to Southeastern Arizona.   That’s because dozens of Mexican and Central American bird species make it just across the international border into the tree-lined canyons of Arizona’s Chiricahua Mts., Huachuca Mts., and other small north-south oriented mountain ranges.  Many of these birds are as dazzlingly colorful as you’d expect from their mainly tropical and subtropical distributions.

In August 2023 I made my pilgrimage to see these species.  Today I’ll show the most localized species, and next time I’ll show some of the ones that also range east into south Texas, west to the California deserts, and/or north to the Great Basin deserts.

First, a habitat shot of a canyon in the Chiricahua Mts.:

Next, the region’s most fabled bird, the Elegant Trogon (Trogon elegans):

Hummingbird diversity is perhaps the region’s greatest claim to fame besides Trogons. Over a dozen species can be regularly found here!  The technique for seeing them is to visit small eco-lodges and visitor centers where feeders have been set up.  Here are four species:

Rivoli’s Hummingbird (Eugenes fulgens):

White-Eared Hummingbird (Basilinna leucotis):

Violet-Crowned Hummingbird (Leucolia violiceps):

Lucifer Hummingbird (Calothorax lucifer):

Other colorful denizens include these warblers –

Red-Faced Warbler (Cardellina rubifrons):

Rufous-Capped Warbler (Basileuterus rufifrons):

Some Southeastern Arizonan birds are close southern relatives of birds that are familiar elsewhere in the U.S.  Here are four examples:

Mexican Jay (Aphelocoma wollweberi), almost identical to California Scrub Jay (Aphelocoma californica) but more social in its behavior; we always saw them in flocks:

Mexican Duck (Anas diazi) in front of a Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos); these two species often hybridize in urban settings like this Tucson pond:

Whiskered Screech-Owls (Megascops trichopsis), related to Western Screech-Owls (Megascops kennicottii) and living beside them in this area, but in slightly drier habitats:

Mexican Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis lucida), found in pine and fir forests at higher elevations, closely related to and just as threatened as the Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina).   This roosting pair is grooming each other’s facial feathers.  My title for this photo is “Get a room, owls!”:

Monday: Hili dialogue

August 28, 2023 • 6:45 am

Greeting at the beginning of the “work” week: Monday, August 28 2023. In one week I’ll be in Israel! (Posting will be light for three weeks after Friday, but I do my best.)  It’s National Cherry Turnover Day, second only to the strawberry turnover as a tasty species in this genus of pastries. 

It’s also National Bow Tie Day, International Read Comics in Public Day, National Thoughtful Day, Red Wine Day (I have mine for tonight), and the Christian feast day of Augustine the Hippo. (Yes, I know the right name.) I had to read tons of Augustine when I was writing Faith Versus Fact, and I have to laugh when he’s signled out as a great Church Father who did not take the Bible literally.  “A great thinker” about theology is like a great thinker about the Loch Ness Monster. And yes, Augustine did take the Bible literally, allowing a metaphorical dimension, too. But he was bonkers as well, writing at great length about the types of angels that existed and their nature. He was obsessed with angels!

Here’s Augustine the Hippo:

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

Da Nooz:

*Shooting of the day: It’s in Chicago again: three people were found wounded in a car yesterday morning in the Little Village area of Chicago’s West Side. All the victims will survive, but the shooter hasn’t yet been found. It’s the Second Amendment, folks: the shooter was part of a well regulated militia!

*FINALLY Russia has confirmed that Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin died in the plane crash last week.

The Russian authorities have officially confirmed the death of the Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, with investigators saying on Sunday that genetic testing showed that the victims of a plane crash last week matched all the names on the jet’s manifest.

The announcement put an end to several days of speculation over the fate of the mercenary chief, who was presumed to have died in the plane crash on Wednesday, just two months after he launched a failed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership. U.S. and Western officials believe the crash was the result of an explosion on board and several have said they think that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia may have had Mr. Prigozhin killed in retaliation for his mutiny — suggestions the Kremlin on Friday dismissed as an “absolute lie.”

Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for Russia’s investigative committee, said in a statement on Sunday that “the identities of all 10 victims have been established” and that “they correspond to the list stated in the flight manifest.”

. . .Tearful mourners gathered in Moscow over the weekend to pay muted respect to the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, and nine other people whom the Russian authorities said were killed in a plane crash last week.

Hundreds of people have placed flowers, photographs, candles and flags — including some bearing the private military group’s skull design — at a small sidewalk memorial near Red Square in Moscow.

Many wept openly, expressing shock over the death of a man they said they respected, and sadness at the loss of life. Almost all expressed their support for the invasion of Ukraine.

Pity they can’t be mourning Prigozhin for standing up to Putin and starting to instigate a mutiny. But of course they wouldn’t publicly criticize the invasion of Ukraine to a Western reporter.

*The AP documents how Trump continues to lie about the 2020 election. Here are a few choice highlights:

With Donald Trump facing felony charges over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the former president is flooding the airwaves and his social media platform with distortions, misinformation and unfounded conspiracy theories about his defeat.

It’s part of a multiyear effort to undermine public confidence in the American electoral process as he seeks to chart a return to the White House in 2024. There is evidence that his lies are resonating: New polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that 57% of Republicans believe Democrat Joe Biden was not legitimately elected as president.

The FACTS:

Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 was not particularly close. He won the Electoral College with 306 votes to Trump’s 232, and the popular vote by more than 7 million ballots.

Because the Electoral College ultimately determines the presidency, the race was decided by a few battleground states. Many of those states conducted recounts or thorough reviews of the results, all of which confirmed Biden’s victory.

. . . Trump was repeatedly advised by members of his own administration that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.

Nine days after the 2020 election, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a statement saying, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” The statement was co-written by the groups representing the top elections officials in every state.

. . . The Trump campaign and its backers pursued numerous legal challenges to the election in court and alleged a variety of voter fraud and misconduct. The cases were heard and roundly rejected by dozens of courts at both state and federal levels, including by judges whom Trump appointed.

. . . An exhaustive AP investigation in 2021 found fewer than 475 instances of confirmed voter fraud across six battleground states — nowhere near the magnitude required to sway the outcome of the presidential election.

The review of ballots and records from more than 300 local elections offices found that almost every instance of voter fraud was committed by individuals acting alone and not the result of a massive, coordinated conspiracy to rig the election. The cases involved both registered Democrats and Republicans, and the culprits were almost always caught before the fraudulent ballot was counted.

. . . Many of the claims Trump and his team advanced about a stolen election dealt with the equipment voters used to cast their ballots.

At various times, Trump and his legal team falsely alleged that voting machines were built in Venezuela at the direction of President Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013; that machines were designed to delete or flip votes cast for Trump; and that the U.S. Army had seized a computer server in Germany that held secrets to U.S. voting irregularities.

None of those claims was ever substantiated or corroborated. CISA’s joint statement released after the election said, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”

It goes on, but you’re familiar with the lies. As I’m not a psychiatrist or therapist, I violate no professional dictum when I say that the man is an arrant sociopath.

*Speaking of the Trumpster, Mark Meadows’ request to move his Georgia racketeering trial from Georgia state court to federal court (there are 18 defendants in total, including The Donald, and many of these may file similar motions), could provide an instructive preview of the prosecutors’ evidence against Trump. From CNN:

Why is Meadows doing this?

US law allows defendants in state civil suits or criminal cases to seek to move those proceedings to federal court if those defendants face charges based on conduct they carried out “under color” of the federal government.

While such proceedings are not uncommon in civil lawsuits against current and former federal officials, they are extremely rare in criminal cases, legal experts told CNN, meaning Jones will be navigating in uncertain legal territory.

“This is just that rare case where there is just not a lot of law,” Vladeck said.

Meadows is arguing that under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, the federal court should dismiss the charges against him, because the conduct underlying the charges was conducted as part of his duties as a close White House adviser to Trump.

Back to the juicy details:

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will lay out the first details of her sprawling anti-racketeering case against former President Donald Trump, his White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and 17 other co-defendants at a federal court hearing on Monday morning.

This will be the first time that substantive arguments will be made in court about the four criminal cases brought against Trump this year.

The subject of the hearing, set to begin at 10 a.m., is Meadows’ motion to move his case to federal court and possibly have it thrown out, but it’s much more than that – it could end up acting as a mini-trial that determines the future of Fulton County’s case against the former president.

Willis is expected to preview the case that she is planning to bring against the 19 co-defendants, getting on the public record some of her evidence and legal arguments for why Trump and his allies broke the law when pressuring Georgia election officials to meddle with the 2020 results.

. . .Beyond Meadows’ participation on the Raffensperger call, Willis has also highlighted as alleged acts in the racketeering conspiracy his surprise visit to an Atlanta election audit and a request Meadows and Trump are said to have made to a White House official to compile a memo on how to disrupt the January 6, 2021, election certification vote in Congress.

“In order to prevail, Meadows has to convince the court that when he was banging on the audit door he wasn’t representing the private interests of Donald Trump,” said Lee Kovarsky, a University of Texas law professor and expert in the removal statute.

Willis, in her response to Meadows’ filings, is leaning on a federal law known as the Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials from using their federal office to engage in political activity, including campaign-oriented conduct. She argues Meadows’ involvement in the pressure campaign on Georgia election officials is clearly conduct he was not allowed to engage in as a federal officer, and therefore he is not entitled to the federal immunity defense.

The Hatch Act framing is a “nice way of illustrating that he was acting outside the scope of his official duties,” Kovarsky said, adding that Willis will not have to prove that Meadows violated the federal statute to be successful in the argument.

Willis’ filings in the dispute also appear to be a shot across the bow at Trump and any attempt he could make with similar claims.

Several key witnesses may take the stand at Meadows’ hearing, and these could tell us some of the evidence that could be used against Tr*mp.

*Obsessed with mortality as I am, I’m a sucker for stories like this one in the WaPo: “I am dying at age 49. Here’s why I have no regrets.” Actually, she does have regrets, but also gratitude for the good things that happened to her (“She” is Amy Ettinger, who has stage 4 4 uterine leiomyosarcoma, an aggressive cancer that, doctors says, gives her just a few months to live.)

The good stuff she mentions is this:

  • I learned that lasting love is about finding someone who will show up for you [she wed a good man and they’ve never been apart for a day, even after 25 years of marriage]
  • I pursued my dream career with passion [she was a writer and published a guide to America’s best ice cream, a worthy endeavor]
  • I have never had a bucket list; instead I said ‘yes’ to life [she took a lot of trips on the spur of the moment]
  • I found people in my life who can accept me as I am [although she’s an introvert, she has some very close friends]
  • I live where I want even though the numbers never add up [she lives in hyper-expensive but beautiful Santa Cruz, California.

Her ending:

I am dying around people who love me and are bringing me meals when I need them. These are people who are willing to show up for me no matter what. And I know they will show up for my husband and daughter, even after I am gone.

The end of my life is coming much too soon, and my diagnosis can at times feel too difficult to bear. But I’ve learned that life is all about a series of moments, and I plan to spend as much remaining time as I can savoring each one, surrounded by the beauty of nature and my family and friends. Thankfully, this is the way I’ve always tried to live my life.

*And more clickbait (at least for me): a NYT op-ed called “We asked 16 writers to tell us about the immoral, indulgent things they do, and they confessed.” Oh dear, I had to read on. Here are three answers:

By Michael Arceneaux, author, speaker and someone who
usually eats according to his morals.

Chick-fil-A has historically been a very anti-gay company. It has donated to charities with anti-L.G.B.T.Q. stances, and its chairman, Dan Cathy, was once quoted saying he believes in the “biblical definition of the family unit.” Yet, traitorous and masochistic though it may be, I, a gay man, regularly consume its homophobic chicken.

What can I say? I know it’s wrong, but McDonald’s simply can’t compete, Burger King and Jack in the Box don’t compare, and while Popeyes and Wendy’s might come close, they’re not the same. And none of them offer what I find most appealing about Chick-fil-A anyway: the Southern charm of its employees.

It reminds me of home. And while that doesn’t make me any less guilty for pulling up to the drive-thru, I won’t apologize for the pleasure I feel driving away, crispy sandwich in hand.

I don’t think the company is still anti-gay, and I have to say that I partake of one of their delicious sandwiches once in a while.

This guy STEALS!

By Thomas Morton, writer, TV host and frequent flier.

Whenever I’m at the airport, I like to do a little shopping at the Free Store. The Free Store is any establishment that leaves its permanently price-gouged wares unsecured on shelves unattended by underpaid and overharried employees. I stroll in, select my items, then suddenly “receive a phone call” that “my flight is almost done boarding.” I’ve known people who get a rush from the act of stealing. Not me. What I love is having and using things I didn’t pay for.

By Megan Nolan, novelist, journalist and friend.

I sleep with my friends, and I befriend the people I sleep with. As a result, my social life mostly consists of a sort of merry traveling band of fellows with whom I have happily porous and shifting relationships. This is what we all used to do when we were young and then grew out of when we moved into the serious part of life. Except I just didn’t.

I know this sounds like hell to most people — the lack of boundaries and the mess and the logistics — and it certainly can be. I’ve been hurt and I have hurt people. It’s icky and embarrassing and kind of a pain in the ass.

When it works, though, it feels like a vindication that the worth men and women can hold for one another is beyond sexual and romantic and also that it can continuously change, like everything else. When it doesn’t, it’s still pretty hot.

Oh, and I have to add Paul Bloom:

By Paul Bloom, Yale psychology professor, author and
generally a balanced, open-minded guy.

Saint Augustine, in his “Confessions,” describes going into an orchard with his friends to steal some pears and writes: “I had no motive for wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it.”

As a psychologist who has spent my career studying transgression, I’m particularly attuned to my own Augustinian impulses. My most regular one is hate-reading. I can spend hours on end consuming the words of people whose views I find repugnant and unhinged, becoming inflamed in both anger and self-righteousness.

You can, of course, learn things from awful people. But there is also a simple evil pleasure in indulging in their wrongness.

Indeed, and there are certain websites that I can’t resist hate-reading.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is getting older and a bit chunky:

A: It’s been a long time since you jumped up on this shelf.
Hili: Unfortunately, it has begun to be difficult.
In Polish:
Ja: Dawno nie wskakiwałaś na tę półkę.
Hili: Niestety, to zaczyna być trudne.
And a picture of the loving Szaron:

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

From Barry. I think I’ve posted this one before, but I love the bit about theology:

From David, a Hilary Price cartoon:

From Harry:

From Masih, more Iranian women defying the hijab dictates of the theocracy big time. They could get into serious trouble for this.

From Malcolm, a cat discovers in the mirror that it has EARS!

Here’s a groaner from Barry:

And from Simon:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a survivor still alive—and it’s her birthday!

Tweets from Dr. Cobb, who’s beavering away on his biography of Crick:

Matthew says, “This is worth 10 mins of your time, with a cracking reveal that made me laugh out loud.”  It’s a (free) New Yorker piece:

Sound up to learn some biology (satellite flies lay live larvae on the bee’s prey, and the larvae consume the hard-won food):

Dan Dennett: a new book and an interview in the NYT

August 27, 2023 • 12:00 pm

I recently finished Dan Dennett‘s new autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking (cover below; click to get an Amazon link), and I was deeply impressed by what a full life the man has had (he’s 81).  I thought he spent most of his time philosophizing, writing, and teaching philosophy at Tufts; but it turns out that he had a whole other life that I knew little about: owning a farm in Maine, sailing all over the place in his boat, making tons of apple cider, hanging out with his pals (many of them famous), and traveling the world to lecture or study. Truly, I’d also be happy if I had a life that full. And, as Dan says in his interview with the NYT today, he’s left out hundreds of pages of anecdotes and other stuff.

Although I’ve taken issue with Dan’s ideas at times (I disagree with him on free will and on the importance of memes, for example), you can’t help but like the guy. He’s sometimes passionate in his arguments, but he’s never mean, and of course he looks like Santa Claus. Once at a meeting in Mexico, I was accosted by Robert Wright, who was incensed that I’d given his book on the history of religion a bad review in The New Republic.  Wright plopped himself down beside me at lunch, so I was a captive audience, and proceeded to berate and harangue me throughout the meal. It was one of the worst lunch experiences I’ve ever had.

Because of Wright’s tirade, I was so upset that, after the meal was done, I went over to Dan, jumped in his lap, and hugged him (telling him why). I was greatly relieved, for it was like sitting on Santa’s lap. Now Santa, who’s getting on, has decided to sum up his career. The book is well worth reading, especially if you want to see how a philosopher has enacted a life well lived.

In today’s paper there’s a short interview with Dan by David Marchese, who has been touted as an expert interviewer. I didn’t think that Marchese’s questions were that great, but read for yourself (click below):

I’ll give a few quotes, mostly about atheism and “other ways of knowing,” First, the OWOK. Marchese’s questions are in bold; Dennett’s responses in plain text. And there are those annoying sidenotes that the NYT has started using, which I’ve omitted.

Right now it seems as if truth is in shambles, politics has become religion and the planet is screwed. What’s the most valuable contribution philosophers could be making given the state of the world? 

Well, let’s look at epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Eric Horvitz, the chief scientist at Microsoft, has talked about a “post-epistemic” world.

How? 

By highlighting the conditions under which knowledge is possible. This will look off track for a moment, but we’ll come around: Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s last theorem. 1990s, the British mathematician Andrew Wiles proved a theorem that had stumped mathematicians since it was proposed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637.

It was one of the great triumphs of mathematics in my lifetime. Why do we know that he did it? Don’t ask me to explain complex mathematics. It’s beyond me. What convinces me that he proved it is that the community of mathematicians of which he’s a part put it under scrutiny and said, “Yep, he’s got it.” That model of constructive and competitive interaction is the key to knowledge. I think we know that the most reliable path to truth is through communication of like-minded and disparate thinkers who devote serious time to trying to get the truth — and there’s no algorithm for that.

Note this bit: “the most reliable path to truth is through communication of like-minded and disparate thinkers who devote serious time to trying to get the truth.” This means that all knowledge, including the “other ways of knowing” of indigenous people, has to be vetted by like-minded and disparate thinkers. If it hasn’t been, it’s not another way of knowing, but only a way of claiming to know.

But wait! There’s more!

There’s a section in your book “Breaking the Spell” where you lament the postmodern idea that truth is relative. How do we decide which truths we should treat as objective and which we treat as subjective? I’m thinking of an area like personal identity, for example, where we hear phrases like, “This is my truth.” 

The idea of “my truth” is second-rate. The people who think that because this is their opinion, somehow it’s aggressive for others to criticize or reject them — that’s a self-defeating and pernicious attitude. The recommended response is: “We’d like to bring you into the conversation, but if you’re unable to consider arguments for and against your position, then we’ll consider you on the sidelines. You’re a spectator, not a participant.” You don’t get to play the faith card. That’s not how rational inquiry goes.

Marchese asks too many questions about AI and ChatGPT, topics which, while they may be important, bore me to tears. He also gets a bit too personal. He should have stopped inquiring after the first answer below.

There was something in your memoir that was conspicuous to me: You wrote about the late 1960s, when your pregnant wife had a bowel obstruction. 

Yeah, we lost the baby.

You describe it as “the saddest, loneliest, most terrifying” time of your life. 

Yes.

That occupies one paragraph of your memoir. 

Yes.

What is it indicative of about you — or your book — that a situation you described that way takes up such a small space in the recounting of your life? 

Look at the title of the book: “I’ve Been Thinking.” There are hundreds of pages of stories that I cut at various points from drafts because they were about my emotional life, my trials and so forth. This isn’t a tell-all book. I don’t talk about unrequited love, failed teenage crushes. There are mistakes I made or almost made that I don’t tell about. That’s just not what the book’s about.

Finally, the good stuff about atheism and religion. Although regarded as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” along with Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, Dan has been the least demonized of them, probably because he’s not a vociferous anti-theist and regards religion as a phenomenon deserving more philosophical study than opprobrium. Nevertheless, he makes no bones about his unbelief:

We have a soul, but it’s made of tiny robots. There is no God. These are ideas of yours that I think a lot of people can rationally understand, but the gap between that rational understanding and their feelings involves too much ambivalence or ambiguity for them to accept. What is it about you that you can arrive at those conclusions and not feel adrift, while other people find those ideas too destabilizing to seriously entertain? 

Some people don’t want magic tricks explained to them. I’m not that person. When I see a magic trick, I want to see how it’s done. People want free will or consciousness, life itself, to be real magic. What I want to show people is, look, the magic of life as evolved, the magic of brains as evolving in between our own ears, that’s thrilling! It’s affirming. You don’t need miracles. You just need to understand the world the way it really is, and it’s unbelievably wonderful. We’re so lucky to be alive! The anxiety that people feel about giving up the traditional magical options, I take that very seriously. I can feel that anxiety. But the more I understood about the things I didn’t understand, the more the anxiety ebbed. The more the joy, the wondrousness came back. At the end of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” I have my little hymn to life and the universe.  That’s my God — more wonderful than anything I could imagine in detail, but not magical.

So how do you understand religious belief? 

No problem at all. More people believe in belief in God than believe in God. [Marchese takes issue with this in a sidenote.] We should recognize it and recognize that people who believe in belief in God are sometimes very reluctant to consider that they might be wrong. What if I’m wrong? That’s a question I ask myself a lot. These people do not want to ask that question, and I understand why. They’re afraid of what they might discover. I want to give them an example of somebody who asks the question and is not struck down by lightning. I’m often quoted as saying, “There’s no polite way of telling people they’ve devoted their life to an illusion.” Actually, what I said was, “There’s no polite way of asking people to consider whether they’ve devoted their life to an illusion, but sometimes you have to ask it.”

There are better questions that could have been asked. For example, I would have asked Dan, “What do you think has been your greatest contribution to philosophy?” and “What has been your biggest error in your work on philosophy?”  Readers might suggest other questions below, though I’m not going to convey them to Dan!

A photo of Dan en famille, with caption, from the interview. I knew him only after his beard turned white, so I wouldn’t have recognized him:

Two of my photos of Dan. The first is in Cambridge, MA, on the way to the “Moving Naturalism Forward” meeting in 2016. We drove the three hours from Boston to Stockbridge, and Richard had to fly back early because of a hurricane warning. Ergo Dan argued with me about free will for three hours’ return drive on the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston (it was not covered with snow). That was something to remember, but I gave no ground:

And Dan at a symposium on religion at the University of Chicago in 2019.  It was tedious at times, and I think Dan is showing some impatience here with the annoying lucubrations of Reza Aslan.

On Helen Joyce’s “Trans”

August 27, 2023 • 9:45 am

I’ve now finished Helen Joyce‘s 2021 book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, and I recommend it to everyone as a perceptive analysis of the growing transactivism in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.  Of course Joyce has been deemed “transphobic” for defending reserving some spaces for biological women only (sports, rape crisis centers, prisons, etc.), but she doesn’t hate trans people at all: she’s sympathetic to the plight of those with gender dysphoria or who have suffered after transition, and wants to curtail trans “rights” only insofar as they impinge on women-only spaces (see above).

Wikipedia summarizes the book’s reviews, and the majority are positive (a surprising admissing by Wikipedia), although of course you can expect some criticism from the woke, from trans activists, and from those who, while positive, have found some issues with the book.  Here are some excerpts from Jesse Singal’s review in the NYT in 2021, just to give a flavor of the last category:

There is a difference between believing in “trans rights” and believing in “gender-identity ideology.” That’s the subtly important distinction that fuels Helen Joyce’s “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality,” a book that offers an intelligent, thorough rejoinder to an idea that has swept across much of the liberal world seemingly overnight.

Singal then summarizes the book (see the video interview mentioned below that can also serve as a summary), and is favorable, but I’d be remiss not to mention his criticismsas well:

. . . So Joyce’s arguments are convincing. But here and there, I found myself wishing for a bit more nuance. For example, she leans heavily on the so-called desistance literature showing that childhood gender dysphoria often abates in time, but she doesn’t explain that some activists and academics have challenged its validity. These challenges happen to be overblown — my position is much closer to Joyce’s — but they warrant mention. It isn’t that some trans activists “forget that the majority of children will desist” if they don’t socially transition, as Joyce puts it — it’s that they deny that this is the case altogether. It’s important to render one’s opponents’ arguments as accurately as possible.

Similarly, in a section about the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s guidelines for treating gender dysphoria, Joyce writes: “New standards of care are being drawn up as I write. But I see no reason to expect any turn back from ideology and towards evidence.” My own reporting suggests things are more complicated than that, at least when it comes to the child and adolescent guidelines: The subcommittees responsible for writing those sections include a number of clinicians who openly share some of Joyce’s concerns and who think the climate surrounding youth transition is trending toward recklessness. Joyce’s narrative of radical activists having nearly routed sober-minded scientists is a bit too tidy, in this case.

“Trans” is also very thin on citations — this might seem like nit-picking, but in a book so focused on in-the-weeds political and scientific controversies of a morally supercharged nature, it isn’t. And it’s a small point, but Joyce repeatedly calls Martine Rothblatt, a famous transgender woman and entrepreneur, a “billionaire,” even though she doesn’t appear to be quite so wealthy.

Yes, references are thin (and there are no footnotes or citations), and there’s no index, which I found annoying. Nevertheless, I recommend the book highly as an introduction to the “unwoke but sympathetic” side of the debate, and Singal finishes his review this way:

In context, though, these are fairly minor shortcomings. “Trans” is a compelling, overdue argument for viewing self-ID more critically. Even those outraged by Joyce’s positions would benefit from understanding them, given that, as she notes, self-ID polls quite poorly when its actual tenets are fully described to Americans and to the British. The present situation, in which liberal institutions not only embrace these ideas unquestioningly but also, increasingly, punish dissidents, is unsustainable. Open conversation about such fraught issues is the only realistic path forward, and Joyce’s book offers a good, impassioned start.

As I always say, even if you’re opposed to an ideological position, you’re remiss if you don’t read the best arguments for that position. And though I agree with most of what Joyce says, those who don’t should still read her book.

I want to give one long quote from the book that struck me as I read it this weekend.  In the excerpt below, Joyce discusses why three other movements for minority rights—gay liberation and same-sex marriage, women’s rights, and civil rights for American blacks in the South—were slow in coming, and had to be built from the ground up, while the push for trans rights (Joyce argues that “transactivism is not a civil-rights movement at all”) is proceeding much more rapidly and becoming successful. Joyce claims that this is because well-meaning people simply don’t understand transactivism. Here’s a quote from page 224:

What same-sex marriage, women’s franchise and the end of segregation all have in common is that they extend the rights of a privileged group to everyone. And when people hear the phrase ‘trans rights’, they assume something similar is being demanded – that trans people be enabled to live without discrimination, harassment and violence, and to express themselves as they wish. Such goals are worthy ones, but they are not what mainstream transactivism is about. What campaigners mean by ‘trans rights’ is gender self-identification: that trans people be treated in every circumstance as members of the sex they identify with, rather than the sex they actually are.

This is not a human right at all. It is a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single-sex spaces, services and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans peoples’ subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws. All this explains the speed. When you want new laws, you can focus on lobbying, rather than the painstaking business of building broad-based coalitions. And when those laws will take away other people’s rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness – it is imperative to keep the public in the dark.

This stealthy approach has been central to transactivism for quite some time. In a speech in 2013, Masen Davis, then the executive director of the American Transgender Law Center, told supporters that “we have largely achieved our successes by flying under the radar. . . we do a lot really quietly. We have made some of our biggest gains that nobody has noticed. We are very quiet and thoughtful about what we do, because we want to make sure we have the win more than we want to have the publicity.”

The result is predictable. Even as one country after another introduces gender self-ID, very few voters know this is happening, let alone support it.

You can find more quotes from the book on GoodReads, or, if an entire book is too much for you, you can hear Joyce summarize many of her arguments in a video discussion with Richard Dawkins that I discussed a few days ago.

It is the demand for self-identification, which undergirds the insistence that trans people really do become complete members of the sex to which they transition (“trans women are women; trans men are men”), that has kept left-centrists like me from embracing the entire transactivist agenda. (Another stumbling block is the movement’s insistence that biological sex is arbitrary and not binary.)

Trans women, for instance, are not identical to biological women, who can get pregnant, have periods, and are usually fertile. (Trans women often become sterile when they transition medically.) Nor, if they’ve gone through male puberty before transitioning, are trans women equivalent to biological women in athletic ability, which is why in most sports they shouldn’t be allowed to compete with biological women.  And trans women tend to retain not only the strength of biological men, but also their aggressive and often their sexual proclivities, which make it dicey at best to put them into women’s prisons or rape-crisis shelters.

But I hasten to add that these curbs on “trans rights” are few and intended only to ensure the right of biological women to be safe and unthreatened. (This includes the right of women in changing rooms to not have to be confronted by transwomen with penises.) In all other ways trans rights should be guaranteed, and, in my view, trans people should be addressed in the manner they wish.

As far as “stealthy approaches” go, how many people know that the Biden administration has enacted policies that prohibit some bans on transgender athletes (including trans women) from competing against biological women in public school athletics, though the policy (which, I believe, defines “transgender” on the basis of pure self-identification) has a provision for bans to ensure fairness?

Under the Education Department’s proposed rule, no school or college that receives federal funding would be allowed to impose a “one-size-fits-all” policy that categorically bans trans students from playing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity. Such policies would be considered a violation of Title IX.

Still, the proposal leaves room for schools to develop team eligibility rules that could ultimately result in restrictions around trans athletes’ participation.

That would be allowed only if it serves “important educational objectives,” such as fairness in competition and reduction of injury risks.

Any limits would have to consider the sport, the level of competition and the age of students. Elementary school students would generally be allowed to participate on any teams consistent with their gender identity, for example. More competitive teams at high schools and colleges could add limits, but those would be discouraged in teams that don’t have tryouts or cuts.

That’s better than nothing, but in my view the ban should, on the ground of fairness, be total for people who have gone through puberty. And it’s not clear whether schools, under strong pressure from transactivists and organizations like the ACLU, would really enact such bans. Given the sciencitifc data, these bans, especially for post-puberty transwomen competing against biological women, should be absolute. Even for trans people who go beyond pure self-identification and have had medical treatment, data show that they retain most of the athletic advantages accrued during male puberty, and thus shouldn’t compete against biological women.  The public largely agrees with this, but, as noted above, a lot of transactivism occurs below the radar, or in the face of public ignorance.

What about “self identification”? Should a trans woman who simply says they’re a woman without medical intervention immediately accrue all the rights of biological women, including the right to change clothes in a locker room?  Joyce discusses this issue and what kind of interventions, if any, might allow a trans person to be recognized as a “woman”. These are issues that we all need to be thinking about, especially given the recent explosion of youngsters and adolescents identifying as members of their non-natal sex (gender dysphoria is now far more common among females than males).

Finally, I have to call out the ACLU, once my favorite civil-rights organization, for consistently being on the side of self-identification of trans people in cases that involve spaces that should be reserved for biological women. This includes the ACLU’s attacks on laws in both Idaho and Connecticut that allow self-identified trans women—biological men who have had no medical treatment—to compete against biological women in secondary-school sports. What has gotten into the mind of the ACLU that makes them argue that a biological male can accrue the rights of women simply by declaring a change of gender? Surely they must recognize that by defending such males, they are impinging on the rights of biological women?

Click on the image to go to the Amazon site for the book, where it gets 4½ stars. Frankly, that high review surprised me, as I would have thought that trans activists would have damned the book:

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 27, 2023 • 8:15 am

It’s Sunday, and John Avise is here with another batch of themed bird photos. The theme this week happens to be a place that I just visited!  John’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

A Few Galapagos Birds 

In recognition of Jerry’s recent trip to the Galapagos Islands, this week’s post consists of a few Galapagos birds that I photographed on my own trip to the Galapagos Islands back in 2005.  This was at a time before I became seriously interested in avian photography, and I had only a cheap little camera.  But many Galapagos birds are so tame that I still managed to get a few decent photos.  Now I’d really love to go back to the Galapagos with my good camera and more of an avian photographer’s eye!

Magnificent Frigatebird male in flight (Fregata magnificens):

Magnificent Frigatebird pair (the male has his bright red gular pouch inflated):

Great Frigatebird (Fregata minor), female with chick:

Blue-footed boobies (Sula nebouxii):

Blue-footed Booby with chicks:

Blue-footed Booby juvenile:

Brown Noddy (Anous stolidus):

Flightless cormorant with chick (Nannopterum harrisi):

Galapagos Doves (Zenaida galapagoensis):

Galapagos Penguins (Spheniscus mendiculus) (yes, the islands have their own endemic penguin species!):

Hood Mockingbirds (Mimus macdonaldi):

Lava Heron (Butorides sundevalli):’

Masked Boobies (Sula dactylatra):

Sunday: Hili dialogue

August 27, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the sabbath for goyishe cats: Sunday, August 27, 2023, and National Burger Day, celebrating a truly American sandwich. Here’s a big ‘un from Hodad’s in California, so big it has to be enclosed in a wrapper. This is often rated as the best burger in America:

Road food: The delicious route; Jul’12; Hodad’s, Pt. Loma, San Diego

It’s also National Petroleum Day, World Rock, Paper, Scissors Day, National Pots de Crème Day (blatant cultural appropriation), Kiss Me Day, National Banana Lovers Day, and, in Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson Day (he was born on this day in 1908).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the August 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Welcome to America. Here are yesterday’s shootings—four of them:

Three people were killed in a mass shooting at a Dollar General Store in Jacksonville Florida. The perp was white, the victims were black, and police are calling it a racially-motivated shooting.

Seven people were injured, none seriously, in a mass shooting at a Boston parade celebrating the J’ouvert Parade part of the city’s Caribbean Carnival. There is no word on whether the perp was apprehended or identified.

A 16-year old boy was killed and four people were injured in a shooting at a high-school football game in Choctaw, Oklahoma. The shooting followed an argument between two men, and there is no word on what happened to the shooter.

Two women were injured in a shooting here in Chicago during a game between the Chicago White Sox and Oakland Athletics at the stadium, Guaranteed Rate Field (that name has to change!). Again, there’s no word on who pulled the trigger or whether the shooter is known.

As CNN reports, it’s been a violent year:

There have been at least 471 mass shootings in the United States so far in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which like CNN defines a mass shooting in which four or more people are injured and/or killed, not including the shooter.

The nation surpassed the 400 mark in July. The Gun Violence Archive said it is the earliest month such a high number has been recorded in a decade.

But of course we have to have our guns because the Second Amendment guarantees that “a well regulated Militia [is] necessary to the security of a free State. . “. Unfortunately, I see no evidence of a militia in any of the incidents above, nor in the othe other 470 mass shootings this year.

*Mo Dowd, in her latest NYT column, on the candidates in the Republican debate:

At the Republican debate, no one was big enough to shove him aside. Nikki Haley seemed the most appealing. Ron DeSantis’s inability to smile is disqualifying. It was pathetic that the best the Florida governor could muster, asked if Mike Pence acted properly when he certified the election, was to say, “I got no beef with him.”

Vivek Ramaswamy seemed smarmy. Scott Jennings, a Republican commentator on CNN, said that Ramaswamy was Scrappy-Doo to Trump’s Scooby-Doo. That comparison is not fair to Scooby or Scrappy, who are positive forces in the world, helping to unmask crooks, unlike Trump and his mini-me.

If I had to vote for one Republican candidate (I won’t, of course), it would be Haley, who does seem to be the most sensible of a bad lot.

*Obituaries on a slow news day. Game-show host and household name Bob Barker has died at the age of 99.

A publicist says popular game show host Bob Barker, a household name for a half-century as host of “Truth or Consequences” and “The Price Is Right,” has died at his home in Los Angeles. Barker was 99.

Barker — also a longtime animal rights activist — died Saturday morning, according to publicist Roger Neal.

“I am so proud of the trailblazing work Barker and I did together to expose the cruelty to animals in the entertainment industry and including working to improve the plight of abused and exploited animals in the United States and internationally,” said Nancy Burnet, his longtime friend and caretaker, in a statement.

Barker retired in June 2007, telling his studio audience: “I thank you, thank you, thank you for inviting me into your home for more than 50 years.”

. . .Barker stayed with “Truth or Consequences” for 18 years [he started in 1956]— including several years in a syndicated version.

Meanwhile, he began hosting a resurrected version of “The Price Is Right” on CBS in 1972. (The original host in the 1950s and ‘60s was Bill Cullen.) It would become TV’s longest-running game show and the last on a broadcast network of what in TV’s early days had numbered dozens.

“I have grown old in your service,” the silver-haired, perennially tanned Barker joked on a prime-time television retrospective in the mid-’90s.

CBS said in a statement that daytime television has lost one of its “most iconic stars.”

I watched both of those shows when I was a kid, though “Truth or Consequences” was better.

*The Wall Street Journal got three analysts expert in plane crashes to examine the video of the plane crash that killed Yevgeny Prigozhin and nine other people. Click on the screenshot below to see the 3-minute video and hear the experts’s conclusion.  What was it? Well, without examination of the remains this is tentative:  probably not a missile, but a bomb or an explosion, and not any kind of structural or internal failure of the plane. In other words, the most likely explanation was “an assassination plot.”

That’s bizarre? Who would want to kill Prigozhin?

*Can you believe it?: they’re still looking for the Loch Ness Monster, and a search is going on as I write. The NYT recounts the history of “sightings” and attempts to find the creature in a new piece, “The 1,300 year search for the Loch Ness monster.”

Here’s what’s going on in “the biggest surface search in decades”:

Loch Ness Exploration, a volunteer research group, will lead the newest search, which is billed as the largest conducted from the surface since 1972. The group will scan the loch for unusual movements and will use tools including heat-detecting drones and a hydrophone, which detects acoustic signals under water.

Viewing slots have filled up, but people will still be able to eye the loch on a livestream.

There have been three purported monster sightings this year, according to the official register of sightings.

I think the search is over now, and I haven’t heard of any monster sightings. Here are two other more recent ones that also failed:

[2003] The British Broadcasting Corporation used 600 sonar beams to investigate the loch and concluded that Nessie did not exist. The BBC also tested the public by hiding a fence post beneath the surface of the loch and raising it in front of a tourist group. When members of the group were asked to show what they had seen, some drew monster-shaped heads.

[2019] Professor Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, presented findings from 250 water samples he had taken from Loch Ness and tested for DNA. He said that he found a “significant amount of eel DNA,” but no genetic information to support a popular theory that the monster might be a Jurassic-age reptile. Professor Gemmell said that “what people see and believe is the Loch Ness monster might be a giant eel.”

Beyond the early photos, like the infamous “surgeon’s photo,” there have been sonar sweeps and several underwater visual sweeps. What they found: bupkes. I think it’s time to stop looking for a giant aquatic reptile in the Loch.

*NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie, no fan of Trump, nevertheless wrote a short column called “The Republican debate proved that Trump has what it takes.” What does he mean? Not much, really; the headline is hyperbolic and somewhat misleading:

Like far too many of you, I watched the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, during which all of the most popular contenders in the field tried to stand out and establish themselves as a serious alternative for the Republican presidential nomination.

An alternative to whom? Donald Trump, who wasn’t on stage for the debate. And yet, despite his absence, there was no way that any of the candidates could escape his presence. The former president loomed over the proceedings, not the least because he is, so far, the uncontested leader in the race for the nomination. His nearest competitor, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, still trails him by nearly 40 points.

There’s also the fact that the candidates had no choice but to answer questions about Trump, who has been indicted on state and federal charges related to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The pretense of the debate was that the candidates could talk about themselves and the future of the Republican Party without the former president, but that was simply impossible.

But the issue wasn’t just that Trump was unavoidable; it was that none of the other candidates had much to say for themselves. Even the most dynamic of the contenders, Vivek Ramaswamy, was doing little more than his own spin on Trump’s persona. As I argued in our post-debate recap, none of the candidates had any of the charisma or presence or vision that might mark them as something more than just another governor or legislator.

. . . It is obviously true that a major reason for Trump’s dominance in the Republican primaries is the fact that at no point since the 2020 election have Republican officeholders and other figures tried to set him aside as the leader of the party. But we can’t underestimate the extent to which Trump has it what it takes — and most of his competitors simply don’t.

DUHHH!  They cannot set him aside because too many Americans love him (a real black mark on our country). And THAT is all you have to say in a column with the headline above.

*The WaPo describes America’s most endangered bird, a Hawaiian endemic honeycreeper called the ‘akikiki (Oreomystis bairdi), or the “Kauai creeper”.  The estimates of numbers in the wild vary; Wikipedia says this:

Of the Hawaiian birds known to be extant, it is thought to be the most endangered, with only 454 wild individuals known as of 2018. A survey report in 2021 estimated the population at 45 with a 5 percent annual decrease, and in July 2023 the remaining number of wild birds was estimated to be just 5 individuals. This species is predicted to be extinct in the wild in 2023.

And a photo:

The paper says that only five are left in the wild, and there’s a pair of them that scientists are desperately trying to breed. The thing is, that pair was kept on Maui, the site of recent fires. The paper tells about the birds’ fate:

This little, silver bird holds the unenviable title of being the most endangered bird in the United States. A grim census earlier this year found only five left in the wild on the neighboring island of Kauai, its native home.

So here at the Maui Bird Conservation Center, their human caretakers have brought the pair of potential lovebirds everything they need to weave a nest and save their kind: fern hair, forest moss, cocoa fibers, even spiderwebs. Plants sprouting from high shelves simulate the rainforest canopy. An overhead water system mists to mimic the wet weather of Kauai’s forests.

“It’s the last effort to save the species,” said Jennifer Pribble, who oversees operations at the bird sanctuary.

But this landlocked Noah’s ark was almost struck by the wildfires that raged across Maui earlier this month. The fires are first a human disaster, destroying the coastal town of Lahaina and killing more than 100. Yet as fire approached the sanctuary, Pribble and others fought the flames and kept the birds safe.

. . .In recent years, rising temperatures have expanded the range of avian malaria-carrying mosquitoes high up the hills, decimating the ʻakikiki and the islands’ other native songbirds.

In one of the most ambitious species conservation projects ever undertaken, a coalition of federal and state officials and nonprofit groups is preparing to release insects with a special strain of bacteria [Wolbachia] into Hawaii’s forests to suppress the pest.

I’m not sure the Wolbachia project will work, and at any rate, there are so few of these birds left, and the ones being bred in captivity will create a pretty inbred populations, that I fear this species will go extinct in the wild. This is one of the ones that has to be saved only by being kept and bred in captivity.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has taken a sudden interest in physics:

Hili: I see a black hole.
A: And so?
Hili: I wonder whether it can hide a mouse.
In Polish:
Hili: Widzę czarną dziurę.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Zastanawiam się, czy może ukrywać mysz?

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From reader David:

From Stash Krod, the product of a waggish barista:

From The Absurd Sign Project 2.0:

From Masih, an Afghan girl who is fighting to go to school, which is now impossible under the Taliban:

From Simon. This tweet from Stormy Daniels is hilarious.  “Tiny”!

From Malcolm, a night with a cat:

From Luana, squabbling about indigenous knowledge. This is only the beginning.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a boy who was about 18 when he died at Auschwitz:

Tweets from Professor Cobb. The first one is sort of gross, but every creature’s gotta eat!:

A rescued duckling, raised and somewhat bonded to the guy who saved him. Cheerio! (Matthew says, “It could be you, man!”)

A lovely free-swimming shrimp with long antennae:

Caturday felid trifecta: Man bitten by stray cat contacts infection new to science; funny cat memes; the inner life of a cat; and lagniappe

August 26, 2023 • 10:00 am

Here’s a story from Science Alert that might make you think twice about petting that stray cat you encounter on the street.  This cat carried some nasty bacteria in its mouth.

A summary:

In the United Kingdom, a 48-year-old who was bit by a stray feline ended up contracting a species of bacterium that scientists have never seen before.

His immune response to the foreign microorganism was a doozy. Just eight hours after receiving multiple bites, the man’s hands had swollen to such a great extent that he took himself to the emergency department.

His puncture wounds were cleaned and dressed and he was given a tetanus shot before being sent on his way with antibiotics.

A day later, he was back at the hospital. His pinky and middle fingers on his left hand were painfully enlarged and both his forearms were red and swollen.

Doctors had to surgically remove the damaged tissue around his wounds. He was also given three different antibiotics intravenously and was sent home with oral antibiotics.

This time, thankfully, the treatment worked and he made a full recovery.

The result of the bite (see the paper here):

(from the site and the journal): The UK man’s infected hand and forearm. A) shows his left little finger, B) his right forearm, C) his right middle finger, and D) his right hand. (Jones et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2023)

More:

Back at the hospital, however, doctors were busy trying to figure out what had happened. When they analyzed the microorganisms present in samples from his wounds, they found an unrecognizable Streptococcus-like organism.

Streptococcus is a genus of gram-positive bacteria that is linked to meningitis, strep throat, bacterial pneumonia, and pink eye, among many other ailments.

But when researchers sequenced part of this bacterium’s genome, it did not match any strains on record. This was a new germ that scientists had never formally documented.

As it turns out, the bacterium belongs to another genus of gram-positive bacteria called Globicatella.

Full genome sequencing of the bacterium suggests that it differs from other related strains, like G. sulfidfaciens, by around 20 percent, indicating a “distinct and previously undescribed species”.

Because G. sulfidifaciens is resistant to several common types of antibiotics, it can prove difficult to eradicate from the body. Thankfully, the new strain discovered in the UK responded well to at least some antibiotics, but the story holds a warning for the public.

“This report highlights the role of cats as reservoirs of as yet undiscovered bacterial species that have human pathogenic potential,” the authors of the case study write.

The lesson:  be wary about petting cats you don’t know.

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From Bored Panda we have 50 funny cat photos from an Instagram account. Click to see them all; I’ll show a few.

The source:

The Instagram account @happycat318 does a really good job of capturing [cats’] mischievous ways.

It shares memes about our feline friends being hellbent on world domination, and judging from the content, it’s only a matter of time before they get all the catnip they crave.

And eight examples:

I suspect this cat is Gli, the famous resident cat in Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia. I, too, met Gli, and fed him (see below):

Here’s me feeding Gli in the Hagia Sofia in 2008 (in Turkey I always carry a box of dry cat food in my daypack):

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This NYT article reviews a cat book, The Truth About Max, by Alice and Martin Provensen, a previously unpublished book that came out just a few days ago. If the article is paywalled, I found it archived here. I’ve put some illustrations from the NYT in the text; these drawings are courtesy of Alice and Martin Provensen.

An excerpt:

Alice and Martin Provensen were the American picture book’s Ginger and Fred: a supremely poised and stylish illustrator team who, in a collaboration that spanned nearly 40 years and more than 40 children’s books (19 of which they also wrote and edited), beguiled fans with their deadpan wit, far-flung curiosity and midcentury-modernist flair.

“The Truth About Max,” with a big, brassy cat as its protagonist, is a previously unpublished picture book that was discovered in the form of a dummy, or preliminary version, in 2019 among some papers held onto by Alice’s agent George Nicholson, who died in 2015. Martin Provensen had died in 1987; Alice died in 2018.

Over the years, the couple had come to appreciate as individuals many of the animals living in their midst and, in a series of droll, sketchbook-style volumes, had proved themselves to be canny naturalist-observers. In “Our Animal Friends” (1974), the first of these books, they gave the real Max pride of place by depicting him on the title page with burning bright eyes and an ear-to-ear grin. The book they left behind was clearly meant to be the star turn they felt their farm’s arch-rascal had earned.

The Provensens’ love for animals, like Beatrix Potter’s, was pointedly unsentimental. In “The Truth About Max,” the truth they record includes Max’s bad-cat high jinks and his raw knack for survival: his unfailing instinct for knowing who on two legs or four can be trifled with and who is not to be crossed.

The Max we meet is also quite the hunter, with sleeping quarters that resemble a trophy room “full of squirrel tails.” This casual, and shocking, revelation is enough to make young readers feel they are being treated like grown-ups — another Provensen hallmark.

The illustrations vary in their degree of finish, with the occasional figure or face merely roughed in and the backdrop left sketchy for later. A publisher’s note states that the spidery, faux-naïve cursive used for the text is a redo by skilled calligraphers of the artists’ own place-holder hand-lettering.

. . . The unpolished bits tell a truth of their own, exposing traces of the awkward, trial-and-error not-knowing in which creative work so often has its beginnings.

Max was one more kindred spirit. His story ends on another decidedly grown-up note, this one hauntingly beautiful.

Every evening, we learn, Max, having “tired” of the barnyard, “walks down the lane,/ into the fields./ You would not know him./ He looks like a tiger.”

On his own, just what threshold has he crossed? Perhaps the mysterious one that marks the limit of what anyone can know about anyone else. “Now,” write the Provensens, leaving us to imagine the rest, Max’s “real life begins.”

The reviews on the Amazon site (link above) are very good, and this might be a good Christmas stocking stuffer for an ailurophilic child.

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

Lagniappe: A friendly cat interrupts a BBC reporter. Click on the screenshot to go to the site and see the video. Here are the BBC’s notes:

This is the moment a cat stole the limelight from a BBC reporter during a live broadcast from Manchester.

As Dave Guest was reporting for BBC Breakfast on people being encouraged to transform alleyways into “ginnel gardens”, the feline ran out of nowhere and jumped onto the bench he was sitting on.

 

h/t: Ginger K., Jez