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.
And to complete the wildlife today, reader Rodger Atkin sent in some flowers. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
This flowered last night in our garden in Thailand. From Wikipedia:
“Dracaena fragrans (cornstalk dracaena), is a flowering plant species that is native to tropical Africa, from Sudan south to Mozambique, west to Côte d’Ivoire and southwest to Angola, growing in upland regions at 600–2,250 m (1,970–7,380 ft) altitude.”
Wikipedia does not mention it but ours flowers only at night, giving off a very heady perfume. I have never seen anything to pollinate it and have never seen fruit on the plant.
The second two pictures were from the next morning:all finished, and and we’ll wait for next year.
We now have 1.4 sets of photos besides this one, but that is not going to last long. However, yesterday Greg Mayer sent in two of his own animals, a ball python and a common snapping turtle (cleverly named “Snappy”), both decked out for the holidays.
by Greg Mayer
Having been treated to a a feline parade for the inauguration of Coynezaa, here, for day three, are some Holiday Herps, Vivian and Snappy.
Vivian the Ball Python (Python regius) in her Christmas scarf.
Snappy the Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina) in a Winter Wonderland.
These photos were entered in a “Whisker Wonderland” photo contest for holiday pet pictures. WEIT readers will be glad to know that cat photos won all the actual prizes (People’s Choice and Jury)–as the award announcement said, “…it was a cat sweep!” However, among the reptiles entered, Vivian got the most People’s Choice votes. Plus, a couple of non-domestic species gives at least a hint of wildlife for today.
Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, January 28 and the fourth day of Koynezaa, with two more to go. It’s also National Chocolate Candy Day, the best kind of candy, and the best species of which is See’s. If you’re near a shop, you can go in and construct your own box, chocolate by chocolate (their non-chocolate chocolates, like this one, are also great).
The Catholic Church elected Robert Prevost to become the first American pope. The Chicago native took the name Leo XIV. [I don’t see what’s so great about that.]
The U.S. maintained its role as the center of global medical innovation. The Food and Drug Administration approved a twice-a-year HIV shot, the closest thing to an AIDS vaccine. Scientists have also achieved multiple breakthroughs in genetic therapies, including the first-ever treatment for Huntington’s disease. Meanwhile, new blood tests show promise to detect signs of ALS years before symptoms emerge, and scientists have begun to uncover how faulty mitochondria can contribute to neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia, opening pathways for potential treatments.
NASA scientists published a study containing the most compelling evidence yet of ancient microbial life on Mars. [It’s traces of minerals in rocks, and suggestive but not that compelling.]
Support for nuclear energy reached new highs in 2025, with 59 percent of Americans backing it. That includes a majority of Democrats, up 15 points since 2020.
I like this next one:
Targeted conservation efforts managed to notch some wins for wildlife. Green sea turtles are no longer endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. A study out of India, home to 75 percent of the world’s wild tigers, found that the country’s population of the big cat doubled in the last decade. And after the removal of four dams in Oregon and California’s Klamath River, salmon returned after having disappeared for more than a century.
More:
More than 20 states enacted laws or policies banning or restricting cellphone use in K-12 classrooms, helping children focus again on learning.
California enacted a law to embrace phonics, an enormous victory for advocates of the science of reading. [John McWhorter will like this one.]
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado came out of hiding to collect the Nobel Peace Prize for her work promoting freedom under the nose of dictator Nicolás Maduro.
before he became Brian Cox, the particle physicist renowned for his adroitness in explaining the intricacies and magnificence of space, he was Brian Cox the rock star.
His first professional gig, in fact, was playing keyboards in the opening band on a tour with Jimmy Page, the lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin. His second band, D:Ream, had a song that hit No. 1 on the British pop charts in 1994.
Now, Professor Cox is the star of his own show, albeit one about science.
He has sold out venues often reserved for sports and pop stars, like Wembley Arena (not the stadium) and the O2 in London. His coming tour, “Emergence,” will take him to places like Singapore, Serbia and Australia, before arriving in the United States in late 2026.
“If you believe, as I do, that science is one of the necessary foundations of society, alongside the arts and politics,” Professor Cox said in an interview, “it has to be there with them on an equal footing.”
With his geniality, Beatles-esque haircut and a dazzling show that explores black holes, galaxies and the significance — and insignificance — of human beings in the universe, Professor Cox, 57, has reached mainstream audiences, when many scientists cannot.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and popular science communicator, said in an interview that Professor Cox, whom he has known for years, “has a force of rationality, and a force of reason, and a force of science.” He added, “Society needs all three, lest we regress back to the caves whence we came.”
In an era when science denial and disinformation are common, Professor Cox, who teaches particle physics at the University of Manchester, has sought to make science accessible through Peabody Award-winning BBC documentaries and podcasts, books and appearances on other media, like “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
. . . . The show in Redditch, about 45 minutes south of Birmingham, was the beginning of a slate of warm-up performances. For Professor Cox, they are a chance to work out new material. The show changes night to night.
. . . .Professor Cox’s enthusiasm is as much a character in the show as the planets and the stars. He kept the audience captivated, even on topics that might seem out of reach, like the origin of space and time or quantum entanglement.
David Attenborough, whose nature documentaries on the BBC helped carve out a place for science presenters on television, said in 2013, “If I had a torch, I would hand it to Brian Cox.”
. . .As for the music world, Professor Cox still has a toe in. He reunited with D:Ream, onstage at the Glastonbury Festival in 2024. And at another event, he said, he was approached by a fan who expressed his awe at a show Professor Cox had done about Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.
The fan was Paul McCartney.
I was on the Infinite Monkey Cage with Cox once (in Chicago) and saw him get the Richard Dawkins Award at CSICon in 2024. The guy is good, clearly in love with physics and without the hyperventilating, self-promoting style of Neil deGrasse Tyson. I bet Cox’s new show will be good, so keep your eyes open next year.
*Speaking of lists, Melissa Kirsch of the NYT, in the morning email, gives a list of “wisdom” and advice. Ignore the “drink more water” advice unless your doctor says so; the latest advice is just to drink when you’re thirsty. Plus I want people to get off my lawn who carry around water bottles that they occasionally sip from. This is a pacifier (or bottle) for babies, repurposed for adults. Here’s a few choice bits of advice along with Kirsch’s intro:
Each fall, I solicit advice from readers of The Morning, asking for the best wisdom they received in the previous 12 months. This year, as last year, I’m struck by how many people have been moved by Mel Robbins’s “Let Them” theory. I was intrigued by the couple of people whose best advice came from a chatbot (in my opinion, the human advice was better). Lots of you were changed by advice to stretch, drink water, walk more — these are perennials. I don’t know why I can’t seem to take the advice to drink a glass of water upon waking up. One reader suggested it’s watering yourself, as you would a plant. I like this — some mornings the only word that seems appropriate to describe how I feel is “wilted.”
The best advice I received this year was from my friend Lori, who, when I was expressing anxiety about some far-off worry, advised, “Move the horizon closer.” Another bit that I’ve returned to: “What if it all works out?” Taken together, the instruction seems to be: Keep your gaze in the present, and if you must consider the future, choose the best-case scenario to ponder. It’s just as likely to transpire as the worst-case one, after all.
With a name like Melissa Kirsch, the author is likely to be Jewish, but no Jew I know would concentrate the best-case scenario. That has never been adaptive for us. But on to the advice. . .
Write what’s bothering you down on a piece of paper; put it in a little box. A year later, read what’s in there and see if you don’t start laughing. — Diane Huebner, Merced, Calif.
Ask for a favor, get advice. Ask for advice, get a favor. Asking for a favor can put someone in an uncomfortable spot, but asking for advice taps into their intelligence and shows respect. It may feel slower, but it ultimately gets you what you want more effectively. — Max Zawacki, Conroe, Texas
Always have a bottle of Champagne chilling in the fridge. — Helen Labun, Montpelier, Vt.
In order to fall asleep, you pretend to fall asleep. Perhaps that’s how everything works … cheers to faking it ’til you make it. — Christen Bakken, Pine, Colo.
Sometimes, you have to let people lie to you. You don’t always have to be right or call people on their nonsense. — Rob Lancia, Nanuet, N.Y.
Put away your phone whenever there is a human being in front of you. — Emily Herrick, Vashon, Wash.
And these are the most cogent of many more. As you can see, they’re pretty lame, but there are two that I wholeheartedly agree with. Can you guess which ones they are?
*The Kennedy Center called off its Christmas concert because the boss musician didn’t like Donald Trump changing the name of the venue (it’s now “The Donald Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
The leader of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington has sent a letter threatening litigation against a musician who canceled an annual Christmas Eve jazz concert at the institution.
Richard Grenell, the Kennedy Center’s president, sent the letter after the musician, Chuck Redd, canceled the concert in protest of the site’s new name, the Trump-Kennedy Center.
Mr. Redd had hosted the show for nearly two decades. But he said he would not hold the concert after the members of the center’s board of trustees, handpicked by President Trump, voted last week to change the name.
Mr. Grenell, whom Mr. Trump appointed to lead the Kennedy Center as part of his second-term takeover of the institution, asserted that Mr. Redd had engaged in “sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left.”
“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” Mr. Grenell wrote.
He added, “This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt.”
The letter was sent Friday, according to the Kennedy Center, which provided a copy to The New York Times. The Associated Press previously reported on the letter.
Below is a law professor arguing that the name change is illegal, but it might be hard to find somebody with standing to sue. As for the threatened lawsuit against Redd, I doubt it will come to anything, but you have to admit that the guy has moxie. And the renaming of the Kennedy Center by Trump’s hand-picked board is offensive.
Kelly, who often covers his head with a camouflaged U.S. Navy hat, won elections twice with campaigns focused on governing from the center. Arizonans joked that he had so many ads focused on border security during his Senate campaigns that you would think he built the wall himself. His constituents voted for President Trump by more than 5 percentage points last year.
Lately, Kelly is breaking character as he embraces a public—and at times, profanity-laced—feud with the president. After the retired Navy captain filmed a video with other Democratic veterans, telling military members to refuse illegal orders, Kelly has cast himself as a fighter.
In one video filmed from the back of a car, Kelly said: “I think a lot of people see this is just like bull——.” He said lawyers would generally advise their clients to not talk about active investigations but “f—that.” The incident has raised his profile as he considers a run for president in 2028.
“I can’t decide what the right thing or the wrong thing is based on electoral politics, and I gotta stand up for who we are and what we gotta be as a country,” he said in an interview. The video in which he appeared has garnered millions of views and spurred investigations from the Trump administration, as well as a declaration from the president that Kelly should be punished by death.
Centrist politicians are expected to be evenhanded, staid and boring—they are the ones who bridge the extremes of their party and turn ideas into something that can get passed, leaving the loudest folks unhappy. But a crop of centrist Democrats, like Kelly, is increasingly deciding to dig in their heels and fight. These centrists aren’t just confronting Trump, they also don’t want to cede control over the party’s agenda to progressives who have typically been the ones with the louder microphone.
The strategy comes with risks—it could appear inauthentic to voters or play into the hands of Trump, who relishes conflict. It could also turn off independent or moderate voters who are looking for people to be dealmakers. Some liberals say it is more style than substance, and Democrats need to embrace progressive policies.
The shift comes after Trump’s return to power earlier this year set off chaos within the Democratic Party. Democratic base voters were furious at what they perceived as weak leadership. Many increasingly feel like Democrats can no longer play by old rules because Trump has decimated political norms.
. . . . Centrists are also seeking to counter what they say is the left’s focus on social issues, including the topic of transgender women competing in sports, which centrists say has hurt Democrats in competitive races. This group has argued the party needs to stop ceding ground to Republicans on key issues like border security and law and order. They want the party to keep the focus on kitchen-table issues. Progressive have also campaigned on affordability.
To do that, centrists have become more willing to take on hardball tactics, adopt a populist tone and—in some cases—a resistance to compromise that liberal activists have been pushing for years. Increasingly, they are even distancing themselves from their own party.
Sounds good to me! Ceiling Cat help us if the Democrats run another “progressive,” especially an incoherent one like Kamala Harris. (I’m still peeved that people saw her not only as a viable candidate, but as a great one—a “brat” candidate who would bring us “great joy.” How could Dems be so dumb? At any rate, I’ll be delighted to vote for a centrist Democrat in 2028; and given the way Trump’s ratings (and apparently his mentation) are slipping, we may have a chance.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s kvetching about Andrzej’s short absences:
Hili: Going somewhere again?
Me: Just to the store to get cigarettes.
Hili: You say that every time, and then you disappear for 20 minutes.
In Polish:
Hili: Gdzie znowu idziesz?
Ja; Tylko do sklepu po papierosy.
Hili: Zawsze tak mówisz, a potem cię nie ma całe 20 minut.
From Masih; another Iranian blinded by the regime for protesting. In 2022, Kosar Eftekhari was blinded in one eye by an Iranian security agent firing a paintball gun at her from close range. She’s still protesting.
From Luana: a 42-minute video about the big fraud in Minnesota in which fake businesses, including “childcare” and “medical” services, billed the government for billions of dollars. Because the perps were largely Somali, it hasn’t been publicized that much, though here’s an article from the NYT and here’s another from the WaPo. But have a look below at the facilities that supposedly house these businesses! Watch this one carefully, as it’s going to be big news in the near future.
🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable
Two holiday tweets from The Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office:
You don’t know what day it is.
You’re eating countless meals a day with lots of snacks in between.
You’re napping throughout they day.
Either it’s the time between Christmas and New Year or you’re a cat.
One from my feed; is this cat gonna sue? Sound up (NOTE: Everyone says this was done using AI, and that seems likely. I’m was too dumb to realize that.)
Cytoplasmic flow of Rhizosolenia styliformis. This chunky diatom rarely appears in my plankton samples, but when it does, you can’t miss it because it’s huge! So big, you can see the contents of the cell moving about, and the nucleus (the dark band)! #marineplankton 🦑
Well, at least we still have Caturday felids, as there is never any end to cats appearing on the Internet. But the dearth of comments always makes me think about dispensing with this feature, too.
. . . . . a huge and vicious cat from Icelandic folklore that is said to lurk in the snowy countryside during the Yule season and eat people who do not receive new clothing. In other versions of the story, the cat only eats the food of the people who had not received new clothing.
Here’s a short holiday ad for Icelandair featuring an interview with Jólakötturinn. He is not a crook! Sadly, Yule cat resents the lack of credit he gets for looming so large in the Icelandic psyche and for ensuring that many Icelandic children get new clothes.
. . . and one more, also from Icelandair. Here Yule cat, at first rejected by a family, is finally accepted—and allowed to go on a trip with them—after he gets cleaned up and has a shrimp dinner.
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Here is a happy Christmas tail that appeared in the Torygraph on Christmas Day. I’ve linked the screenshot below to an archived site, so click below to read about the reappearing Bindi.
The story:
Bindi the cat has been reunited with its family for Christmas, five years after it went missing.
The black feline “vanished into thin air” from its home in Haddenham, Cambridgeshire in August 2020.
Jilly Fretwell, Bindi’s owner, had moved house since the disappearance but thanks to microchip technology, vets were able to pull off “a real Christmas miracle”.
Ms Fretwell, 29, said: “She used to go out for a couple of hours and then come straight back, so it was really odd for her to be missing for more than a day.”
Despite posting appeals on social media and searching local walking routes for several months, the software project manager was unable to find her pet.
She had become convinced Bindi would never come home until a phone call from vets on Dec 18 brought welcome news.
Ms Fretwell said there were “no clues” about where Bindi may have been over the last five years, but that she had clearly been “looked after by someone” as she was in “great shape”.
She described her cat as “the most cuddly”, adding that it will “put her paws on either of your shoulders to give you a real cuddle”
Ms Fretwell said: “I think she’s been looked after by someone, she looks in great shape.”
Describing the moment they got the phone call, she said: “We were just in complete disbelief. It wasn’t really until we saw her that we believed it was her.
“We’re just so glad we had her microchipped and that she was alive and well. I’ve never heard of anyone’s cat going missing for so long and turning up absolutely fine.”
The cat, now 10, was in good health and had been ‘well looked after’ and ‘instantly’ recognised her family.
Jilly told the BBC: ‘She’s been missing for five years and we got a call on Thursday from the lovely vets in Witchford to say they had scanned her microchip and she was coming back home to us.
‘She had a couple of little scratches on her that the vet wanted to see to, but other than that, she looks great. She’s lovely and glossy, well-fed and has been looked after somewhere. But we have absolutely no idea where she has been the last five years.’
Bindi disappeared during the Covid pandemic and Jilly spent her daily walks searching for her, sharing appeals on social media and asking people across Haddenham to keep an eye out.
Despite being 10 years old and having spent so long away from her family, Bindi remains affectionate, happily cuddling up to Jilly and settling on her lap.
Other stories frequently use the word “miracle” to refer to Bindi’s reappearance. What tails she could tell, but nobody will ever know. (I suppose the vet could reveal who turned her in, but that may be unethical for vets.). We send Bindi and her staff thoughts and prayers for the holiday season.
Be sure to get your cat chipped, even if it’s an indoor cat.
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Finally, we have a story from the Guardian about Sylvia Townsend Warner (1973-1978), a lesbian writer described by Wikipedia as:
Warner was a bit of a polymath, and you can read about her accomplishments in several fields here, or in her biography at the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (with more pictures).
But today we’re featuring her role as an ailurophile, and of a new and wonderful statue of Warner—avec chatte—that has just been produced and unveiled.
Click headline to read:
An excerpt:
The thing all women hate is to be thought dull,” says the title character of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1926 novel, Lolly Willowes, an early feminist classic about a middle-aged woman who moves to the countryside, sells her soul to the devil and becomes a witch.
Although women’s lives are so limited by society, Lolly observes, they “know they are dynamite … know in their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they are”.
Warner herself was anything but dull: a writer, translator, musicologist and political activist who wrote seven novels, extensive poetry and contributed more than 150 short stories to the New Yorker, more than any other female writer. She was also a communist who volunteered for the Red Cross during the Spanish civil war and an LGBTQ+ pioneer, living with the poet Valentine Ackland for decades in a quiet Dorset village, in a partnership they described as a marriage.
In the 1930s, Warner was described as “famous in two continents for numerous and brilliant contributions to literature”, but though many of her works remain in print, her name has faded from widespread recognition, even in the county where she lived.
That is due to change this weekend, when a statue of Warner will be unveiled in Dorchester. The sculpture by Denise Dutton shows Warner sitting on a bench accompanied by a cat, in a nod to the creatures she loved and the witch’s companion in her best-known novel.
Anya Pearson, who led the campaign to erect the statue, said that by placing the lifesize figure in the town’s main shopping area, “we are saying very clearly that women’s stories and queer women’s stories belong in our public spaces”. “Sylvia pushed boundaries, wrote without fear and lived authentically. This statue finally allows us to celebrate her as her authentic self, proudly and openly, in the town she called home.”
Pearson is a veteran of this kind of thing, having previously been the force behind a statue of the Victorian fossil hunter and palaeontologist Mary Anning in nearby Lyme Regis. After that statue was unveiled to great local enthusiasm in 2022, Pearson set her sights on her home town of Dorchester, where statues commemorate the writers Thomas Hardy and William Barnes – but until now, no non-royal women.
The campaign, which asked for nominations of overlooked women, received more than 50 names that were shortlisted then put to a vote. Warner “won by a landslide”, says Pearson, who works at Arts University Bournemouth. The £60,000 cost was raised through crowdsourcing and a number of significant international donations.
Here’s a video of the appeal for funds for the statue, and gives more photos (a couple with cats) and info about Townsend:
Warner apparently loved cats, and had several. Like many artists, she tended to favor Siamese cats (some day I’ll figure out this correlation), and you can see two photos of her with her felids at the gallery section of her society.
It was hard to find a good picture of the statue that doesn’t appear to be copyrighted, and here is one, from Discover Dorchester., which has no photographer attribution. It’s a great statue, with Townsend sitting on a bench with books at her feet and a cat rubbing against her leg:
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Lagniappe: Four lion cubs and mom. It appears that there are more, but they are being taken care of by other lionesses in the pride (it’s not clear whether that mother had nine cubs, which would be a LOT for a single mother). This was shot at Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, adjacent to the Serengeti.
This is very sad, as there will be no photos on the third day of Koynezaa. We are at rock bottom, kaput, tan muerto como una roca, mort et bien mort. I have none in the queue save a few singletons, and that bodes ill for the future of the feature.
BUT, if you have good wildlife photos, send them in pronto.
Here are a few penguin and landscape pictures I took in Antarctica in 2022, just so you’ll have something:
Welcome to CaturSaturday, December 27, 2025: the third day of Koynezaa, the sabbath for Jewish cats, and National Fruitcake Day, the day you are supposed to receive one—which you’ll pass on to someone else. The only subspecies I like is Italian panettone. This Welsh one, from Wikipedia, reminds me of an elephant dropping, and may well taste like one. . . :
zingyyellow…! from Wales Cymru UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
. . . . But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology, and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology what the late Camille Flammarion was to astronomy, which is to say, its court jester and reductio ad absurdum. When he leaps into public notice with some new pearl of knowledge, it commonly turns out to be no more than the news that Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian lady walrus, has had her teeth plugged with zinc and is expecting twins. Or that Pishposh, the man-eating alligator, is down with locomotor ataxia. Or that Damon, the grizzly, has just finished his brother Pythias in the tenth round, chewing off his tail, nose and remaining ear
This summer, a team from Princeton and the Flatiron Institute released a paper showing evidence for four distinct autism phenotypes, each defined by its own constellation of behaviors and genetic traits. The dense, data-heavy paper was published with little fanfare. But to the Eastons, who are among the thousands of families who volunteered their medical information for the study, the findings felt seismic.
“This idea that we’re seeing not one but many stories of autism made a lot of sense to me,” Cristina said.
. . . For decades, autism has been described as a spectrum — an elastic term that stretches from nonverbal children to adults with doctorates. Beneath that vast range lies a shared pattern of social communication and behavioral differences, long resistant to neat explanations.
Now, advances in brain imaging, genetics and computational science are revealing discrete biological subtypes. The discoveries could one day lead to more accurate diagnoses and treatments — raising profound questions about whether autism should be seen as something to cure or as an essential facet of human diversity.
There are a few high-impact mutations that alone appear to lead to autism. But researchers now suspect that the majority of cases arise from a subtler genetic architecture — common variants scattered throughout the population that, in certain combinations and under certain environmental conditions, can alter development.
You can read the article for free by clicking below
Here’s a figure I pulled showing the frequency and direction of different types of behaviors in the four identified “clusters” (“DD” is “developmental delay”).
(From paper): b, To demonstrate differences in phenotypic patterns, we assessed the propensity of each class toward seven phenotype categories. Values close to 1 indicate that the majority of phenotypes within the category were significantly and positively enriched for the phenotype domain compared to probands in other classes (indicating higher difficulties), and values close to −1 indicate significant negative enrichment or depletion for a given phenotype domain compared to probands in other classes (indicating lower difficulties). Sample sizes for all analyses shown were as follows: Broadly affected, n = 554 (magenta); Social/behavioral, n = 1,976 (green); Mixed ASD with DD, n = 1,002 (blue); Moderate challenges, n = 1,860 (orange); unaffected siblings, n = 1,972.
I haven’t yet read this, but it’s always useful, especially given the history of psychiatric diagnoses and the fact that this malady appears to usually reflect the action multiple genes of small effect, to be skeptical. As always, the conclusions will be vetted and tested by other groups of workers. Stay tuned. Oh, and if what was previously recognized as a “spectrum” is now four fairly discrete classes, perhaps this will prompt people to recognize that biological sex is not a spectrum, either, but falls into two easily-recognized classes. Naah, won’t happen.
*In October of 2022 I gave a very enthusiastic to the novel Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, and I’ve simply forgotten about the book, which is terrific. It’s a fictionalized account of Shakespeare’s composition of Hamlet (he did have a son named Hamnet, who died young), but the bard himself makes almost no appearance in the novel, which largely recounts (with a bit of magical realism) the doings of his family while Shakespeare was away in London. Now it’s apparently been made into an eponymous movie. And, according to Sarah Wildman of the NYT, a very good movie, as we can see in her op-ed, “This is why ‘Hamnet’ made me cry.”
And yet some of the best art is art that does precisely this sort of imagining, refusing to look away from the very human condition of grief.
This season, the standouts of such work are “Hamnet,” the film directed by Chloé Zhao and adapted from the magnificent book by Maggie O’Farrell, and the surprise best-selling novel “The Correspondent,” by Virginia Evans.
“Hamnet” is an imagined narrative surrounding the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, in this telling, to the bubonic plague. In Ms. O’Farrell’s mind, it is this death that inspired “Hamlet,” the tragic play. But the brilliance of both book and film is to focus on the pain not of one of the world’s most famous men, but that of Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife.
. . . As heart rending as the scenes of illness and death are — and they are remarkable, in their rendering, the full-bodied scream of a mother who has released her own child from this mortal coil — part of the reason “Hamnet” had me still sobbing in my seat as the credits rolled is how well it captures the lingering drudgery of grief, the dull way in which it silvers the hair and deadens the eyes, the way in which time means so little. It captures completely how the very fact that a person could be here one day, and simply gone the next, scrambles sanity.
“I may run mad with it. Even now, a year on,” Shakespeare says to Agnes, both in the text and the film. “A year is nothing,” Agnes replies, dry-eyed, dry-toned. “It’s an hour or a day. We may never stop looking for him. I don’t think I would want to.” And then it all makes so much sense to see the ghost of Hamlet onstage, to hear the famous soliloquies rendered as not a call for applause but instead, perhaps, a means of resurrection.
In approaching “Hamnet,” novel or film, you know you are preparing for a story both about creation and about loss, about child death and about creativity.
Wildman also extols, for different reasons, the recent novel The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (you can read the archived piece here). The book is, says Wildman, “lauded for its remarkable depiction of a septuagenarian woman seeking to find her way in the world, through her own adoption story, her estrangement from her children and her former husband, and finding (however belatedly) new love.” I’ve ordered it via interlibrary loan.
And I will definitely see the movie “Hamnet”, for, says Wildman, the movie rivals the book in quality, and I see that the reviews are nearly all positive. Here’s the trailer:
*I’d never hjeard of Rook T. Winchester before, but reader Barry sent me a link to his piece on the Substack site Closer to the Edge, where Rook is an editor. The piece is called “A letter to Bari Weiss” (the subtitle is “The only thing you pulled is the mask off yourself”) and it’s a passionate attack on her decision to hold the “60 Minutes” segment about the U.S. sending Venezuelan immigrants to captivity at the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. Winchester does seem to think that the episode was pulled after it aired, though, which is not the case. Even in Canada, it aired only on the CBS app before it was taken down; it was never aired in the U.S.
Winchester:
Your explanation for pulling the 60 Minutes CECOT report wasn’t just weak. It was the kind of weakness that tries to pass itself off as seriousness, mistaking hesitation for wisdom and calling it leadership because admitting fear would be too honest.
Calling a fully vetted, corroborated investigation into torture “not ready” because the alleged torturers didn’t get enough airtime is not editorial judgment. It’s hostage negotiation with yourself. You didn’t uncover errors. You didn’t dispute facts. You didn’t challenge a single sworn testimony. You just decided that reality needed a permission slip from power before it could be broadcast.
That’s not journalism. That’s customer service for monsters.
. . .And the hypocrisy. My god, the hypocrisy. You made a career out of lecturing institutions about cowardice, censorship, and the moral rot of elite gatekeeping, then walked into one of the biggest newsrooms on earth and reenacted the exact behavior you built your brand trashing. Free speech, it turns out, is sacred right up until it becomes inconvenient for your job title. When the pressure arrived, courage was suddenly “not ready.”
Here’s the funniest part, though. It didn’t even work. The transcript exists. The testimony exists. The evidence exists. The reporting exists. The only thing you successfully buried was your own credibility. You didn’t protect CBS News. You stapled your name to the moment it flinched. History won’t remember the delay. It’ll remember who grabbed the wheel and swerved.
So let’s drop the pleasantries. If you can’t stand behind your newsroom when it publishes verified reporting that implicates power, you have no business running a news organization. If your first instinct when faced with documented human rights abuse is to ask whether the perpetrators feel sufficiently heard, then you are not an editor. You are a liability with a press badge.
For the sake of CBS News, its journalists, and the public that still believes journalism is supposed to punch up instead of bow down, you should resign.
It’s a bit over the top, but does make the point that no facts are in dispute, and asking yet another White House employee to badmouth the report adds nothing to what was already scheduled to be aired.
*Several editors of the Free Press give their funniest news items of the year. (I swear, the only reason to subscribe to this site is for the humor, and that mostly from Nellie Bowles). Here are two:
Oliver Wiseman, Deputy Editor
It has been a heavy year in news, but 2025 was not without its lighter moments. After all, this was the year someone known as “Big Balls” briefly held a very important government job. And the year that the leader of the free world sprayed an Islamist fighter turned Syrian president with cologne and asked him how many wives he has. And the year that FIFA, an organization charged with running international soccer tournaments, launched its own “Peace Prize” and awarded it to—who else?—Donald Trump.
But my personal favorite moment of levity this year came in September, with the publication of Kamala Harris’s election memoir, 107 Days.The book is not supposed to be funny, but it is. As I wrote at the time, the former vice president’s day-by-day account of her doomed White House bid is a petty burn book. It is strangely authentic. She roasts assorted senior Democrats (an odd thing to do if you plan on running for president again, as she seems to). When she’s not outwardly aggressive, she’s spectacularly passive-aggressive. And no one is spared, including her poor husband, Doug. The most entertaining entry in the book is for October 20, 16 days before the election and Harris’s birthday. The former vice president gives a detailed rundown of all the ways in which her poor Doug failed to meet the moment that was her 60th. It is amusing. Whether she meant it to be, I’m not so sure.
Another funny thing: The book tour is still happening. Harris has recently added dates through April next year, featuring a few stops in swing states. How will this work? Will she go straight from plugging 107 Days into the Iowa caucus, where she can start gathering material for the sequel?
River Page, Reporter
On Black Friday, a raccoon broke into an Ashland, Virginia, ABC store, got wasted, and passed out in the bathroom. There’s no footage of the incident because, apparently, the little guy—nicknamed “Rocky” by county officials—came in through the ceiling and “took the cameras down with him.” However, there is a hilarious and, for some of us, relatable photo of him passed out next to the toilet. Sadly, Rocky, after sobering up, was rereleased into the wild.
He doesn’t belong there.
Just a month before Rocky’s drunken escapade, researchers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock published an article claiming that raccoons are beginning to show early signs of domestication, like reductions in snout length. Rocky, as well as many of his compatriots, clearly wants to join our society—and he and they should be able to. Yes, Rocky has his issues. But there are resources available. He can go to Alcoholics Anonymous and smoke cigarettes in the basement of a Methodist Church. I have an uncle who did that and it kind of worked. The point is, it’s Christmas, and nobody should be left out in the cold, even raccoons. If you’re craving eggnog, they’re craving eggnog. Let them in.
Suze Lopez holds her baby boy on her lap and marvels at the remarkable way he came into the world.
Before little Ryu was born, he developed outside his mom’s womb, hidden by a basketball-sized ovarian cyst — a dangerous situation so rare that his doctors plan to write about the case for a medical journal.
Just 1 in 30,000 pregnancies occur in the abdomen instead of the uterus, and those that make it to full term “are essentially unheard of — far, far less than 1 in a million,” said Dr. John Ozimek, medical director of labor and delivery at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, where Ryu was born. “I mean, this is really insane.”
Lopez, a 41-year-old nurse who lives in Bakersfield, California, didn’t know she was pregnant with her second child until days before giving birth.
When her belly began to grow earlier this year, she thought it was her ovarian cyst getting bigger. Doctors had been monitoring the mass since her 20s, leaving it in place after removing her right ovary and another cyst.
Lopez experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt kicks. Though she didn’t have a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without one.
Lopez experienced none of the usual pregnancy symptoms, such as morning sickness, and never felt kicks. Though she didn’t have a period, her cycle is irregular and she sometimes goes years without one.
. . . . Shortly after the game, Lopez began feeling unwell and sought help at Cedars-Sinai. It turned out she had dangerously high blood pressure, which the medical team stabilized. They also did blood work and gave her an ultrasound and an MRI. The scans found that her uterus was empty, but a nearly full-term fetus in an amniotic sac was hiding in a small space in her abdomen, near her liver.
“It did not look like it was directly invading any organs,” Ozimek said. “It looked like it was mostly implanted on the sidewall of the pelvis, which is also very dangerous but more manageable than being implanted in the liver.”
Dr. Cara Heuser, a maternal-fetal specialist in Utah not involved with the case, said almost all pregnancies that implant outside the uterus — called ectopic pregnancies — go on to rupture and hemorrhage if not removed. Most commonly, they occur in the fallopian tubes.
A 2023 medical journal article by doctors in Ethiopia described another abdominal pregnancy in which the mother and baby survived, pointing out that fetal mortality can be as high as 90% in such cases and birth defects are seen in about 1 in 5 surviving babies.
But Lopez and her son beat all the odds.
On Aug. 18, a medical team delivered the 8-pound (3.6-kilogram) baby while she was under full anesthesia, removing the cyst during the same surgery. She lost nearly all of her blood, Ozimek said, but the team got the bleeding under control and gave her transfusions.
Since then, Ryu — named after a baseball player and a character in the Street Fighter video game series — has been healthy and thriving. His parents love watching him interact with his 18-year-old sister, Kaila, and say he completes their family.
With Ryu’s first Christmas approaching, Lopez describes feeling blessed beyond measure.
“I do believe in miracles,” she said, looking down at her baby. “God gave us this gift — the best gift ever.”
You can ignore the last line; all’s well that ends well.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, out on the veranda with Szaron, shows some literary acumen:
Andrzej: What are you guys doing here?
Hili: Waiting for Godot to let us in.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tu robicie?
Hili: Czekamy na Godota, żeby nam drzwi otworzył.
Masih is quiet but here’s J. K. Rowling not writing on sex. (I have enough socks, thank you, and they all match because I buy just one type.)
Yesterday my son pulled a box of new socks out of his stocking and said ‘ah, this is great because I’m down to only two matching pairs.’ I had no idea we failed to teach him that socks can be purchased by the prospective wearer themselves. https://t.co/mSkoca5bAL
Arrant ignorance, but you don’t need to go to college to learn this stuff.
Still one of the best videos made here.
I’m sure that even today most people at these universities don’t understand what they’re shouting about and why they hate Jews. pic.twitter.com/JUWXpW2IpP
Two from Dr. Cobb. I used to post about treehoppers because they are plain weird (we don’t know what these shapes are really for), and here’s a weird one:
Brazilian treehopper, is a small, bizarre-looking insect known for the cluster of hollow, ball-like appendages on its head, which are extensions of its pronotum. These growths likely confuse predators, making the insect appear larger or harder to eat.#science #biology#Entomology
Here is a specimen of the well-known podcast “Ask Haviv Anything”, with the moderator being Haviv Rettig Gur, described in a Sam Harris podcast as “a veteran Israeli journalist who serves as the senior analyst at The Times of Israel. He has covered Israel’s politics, foreign policy, and relationship with the U.S. and Jewish diaspora since 2005, reporting from over 20 countries. Since October 7, he has been touring the English-speaking world — the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K. — to discuss the war in Gaza, resilience, and antisemitism.” In this 70-minute video, Haviv interviews Ashley Rindsberg “an American writer and a senior editor at Pirate Wires, an American online media company. He is the author of Tel Aviv Stories and The Gray Lady Winked: How The New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions & Fabrications Radically Alter History.”
The subject is how Wikipedia, as well as reddit, have distorted the facts about Zionism and Israel by adopting a progressive, left-wing, and, yes, antisemitic stance. As I wrote a few days ago:
Wikipedia’s main “Israel” entry now declares that “following the October 7 attacks… Israel began committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” placing a blatant lie in the lead section meant for basic, non-contentious context.
As evidence, I heard from a reader who, upon sending me the video, added this:
As an example, a friend of mine noted that the Wikipedia article on Israel states that Israel started a genocide on Oct 7, 2023. She decided to try and edit it. She jumped through several hoops and I will share a quote from what Wikiedia sent her:
In short, you are not permitted to edit any page on Wikipedia related to the Arab-Israeli conflict until your account is 30 days old with 500 substantive edits (not edits made simply to reach 500). I will tell you that the current wording of the article was reached after extensive discussion and deliberation amongst Wikipedia contributors; you are free to review that discussion yourself, it may be accessed from Talk:Israel (see the FAQ at the top). 331dot (talk) 19:38, 23 December 2025 (UTC)
Edit requests are permitted if they are wholly uncontroversial (something that no reasonable person could possibly disagree with) and do not require extensive discussion to reach a consensus. 331dot (talk) 19:48, 23 December 2025 (UTC)
But this kind of redaction is only the tip of the iceberg. In this discussion you’ll learn about the “Gang of 40”, a group of ideologues who seem to spend nearly all their time as lay editors of Wikipedia articles about Israel, Palestine, and Zionism. (There is even an article on “Gaza genocide recognition.”) You’ll learn that Wikipedia either has no response to this kind of bigoted malfeasance or doesn’t seem to want to fix it. Yet Wikipedia was, at the outset, dedicated to giving just the facts and documenting them.
And it’s not just Judaica. Rindsberg notes that Wikipedia is also determined to ensure that the “lab leak theory” for the origin of covid remains a “conspiracy theory” (I myself am agnostic about the issue), and to the denigration of Trump.
The lesson: crowdsourcing does not ensure neutrality, and there is no chance to defeating a dedicated group of ideologue editors who dominate some topics. Rindsberg does discuss how to fix the problem of bias in Wikipedia, which is really a serious problem for some topics since Wikipedia is automatically given a #1 search rating by Google, making it the go-to source for people seeking information. The fixing begins with the kind of outing of sites instantiated in this discussion.
I am averse to long podcasts, but the eloquence of the discussants and my own interest in the topic kept me listening to the end. Even if you think Israel is committing genocide (and Ceiling Cat help you if you do), you will at least learn some things about the biases promulgated by one of the world’s most important sources of information. (Note the shorter discussion near the end arguing that reddit does the same thing.)
The piece ends with criticism of AI. Bogus AI writing and its bogus claims have apparently made their way into the scientific literature. Then these claims make their way back into popular culture when people cite “scientific information” that was actually written by AI in the first place. That doesn’t mean that we should stop using AI and ChatGPT, but that we have to carefully check any of their factual assertions.
