News Feeds

Scientists in Japan have developed a new way to instantly detect elusive quantum “W states,” a major milestone for quantum technology. The breakthrough could help unlock faster quantum communication, teleportation, and powerful new computing systems.

Scientists in Japan have developed a new way to instantly detect elusive quantum “W states,” a major milestone for quantum technology. The breakthrough could help unlock faster quantum communication, teleportation, and powerful new computing systems.

When NASA's Artemis II spacecraft carried four astronauts around the Moon earlier this year, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope was quietly watching from a quiet valley in West Virginia. The Green Bank Telescope tracked the Orion capsule across 213,000 miles of empty space with a precision that would embarrass most speedometers and what it produced isn't just an engineering triumph. It's a glimpse of how the world's most sensitive ears are becoming indispensable to the future of human spaceflight.

A new quantum-inspired algorithm has cracked a problem so massive that conventional supercomputers struggle to even approach it. Researchers used the method to simulate extraordinarily complex quantum materials known as quasicrystals, opening the door to powerful new quantum devices and ultra-efficient electronics. The work could help scientists design advanced topological qubits and materials for future quantum computers.

A new quantum-inspired algorithm has cracked a problem so massive that conventional supercomputers struggle to even approach it. Researchers used the method to simulate extraordinarily complex quantum materials known as quasicrystals, opening the door to powerful new quantum devices and ultra-efficient electronics. The work could help scientists design advanced topological qubits and materials for future quantum computers.

The little pauses, “ums,” and moments when you struggle to find the right word may reveal far more about your brain than anyone realized. Researchers discovered that everyday speech patterns are closely tied to executive function — the mental system that powers memory, planning, focus, and flexible thinking. By using AI to analyze natural conversations, the team found they could predict cognitive performance with surprising accuracy, potentially opening the door to simple speech-based tools that could detect early signs of dementia long before traditional testing does.

You’re an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet, it still lacks sufficient oxygen, so anaerobic life like yourself doesn’t need oxygen to survive. You’re chilling for several hours and eventually notice the water hasn’t touched you. You remember over-hearing some otherworldly fellows who briefly landed and discussed the landscape didn’t look well formed, so they left.

In 2025, a retreating glacier in Alaska caused a landslide into a fjord named Tracy Arm. The landslide triggered a tsunami that swept down the fjord into the ocean. The tsunami reached a height of more than 480 meters, the second highest tsunami ever recorded.

Jupiter, the gravitational behemoth that makes up a lion’s share of our solar system’s planetary content, is much more complicated than ever previously thought. Or so say leaders from NASA’s highly successful Juno mission.

The cosmological constant has been a problem in physics since Einstein, but new research may show why it takes the value that it does despite quantum fluctuations that should make its value practically infinite.

We’ve long tried to control the weather by engineering rainfall. Now such cloud-seeding efforts are escalating, creating conflict between countries and stoking conspiracy theories. But do they work?

A bit more than a week ago, I posted Rick Beato’s video critique of the NYTs list of the 30 Greatest Living Songwriters that you can find here (archived here).  Many of their choices, like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, were no-brainers, but Beato deemed others, like Bad Bunny, as bizarre. I agree.

Here he’s gotten his hands on some podcast footage of NYT staffers—three critics and the project’s editor—who helped compile the list, and for once he discards his geniality to make fun of these people in a nine-minute video. Beato even mocks the way they talk.  They do indeed come off as pompous and largely ignorant: Beato harps on their lack of formal musical education, though he says it’s not essential to evaluate music. (The participants went to Harvard, Yale, NYU, and Princeton; none has a degree in music.)

John Carmanica, the NYT’s pop music editor, is particularly annoying with his definition of a “songwriter” and his dismissal of Billy Joel as “not a hitmaker.”

As a whole, Beato says the NYT group is “Four Ivy League educated people—you’ve got two from Yale, one from Princeton, and Mr. Harvard there—that are the most pretentious, cork-sniffing, smug people that are all music critics with no background in music: exactly what you’d expect from a New York Times music critic.” He adds, “These people’s takes are absurd. All you need to watch them talk about music. It drove me nuts watching it.”

As for Carmanica’s claim that Billy Joel wasn’t a hitmaker but a person who wrote “one or 1.5 kinds of songs,” have a gander at this list:

Piano Man
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
She’s Always a Woman
Movin’ Out
My Life
Uptown Girls
Just the Way You Are
The Longest Time
Only the Good Die Young (This is my favorite of his; it’s extremely inventive and a good critique of Catholic repression of sexuality. The lyrics are a work of genius.)
New York State of Mind

And others. These run the gamut from hard rock to love ballads to biography, and how can you say his range is limited to one to 1.5 types of song? Cork-sniffing pedants!

And it’s great watching Beato blow off steam.

My favorite:

Most of us probably see Christian doctrine as a monolithic set of ideas that emerged within a few decades of the purported death of Jesus.  “Common wisdom” also maintains that Christianity transformed the world for the better, spreading a message of tolerance and love soon after the Roman emperor Constantine began promoting the new religion early in the fourth century A.D. Both of these views are exposed as myths in Catherine Nixey‘s new book Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God (2024; the book appears to be called Heresy in the UK).

This is Nixey’s second book, following the successful The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, a bestseller that was translated into quite a few languages.  Like Darkening Age, which I haven’t yet read, this one dispels myths about Christianity. Wikipedia describes The Darkening Age‘s thesis this way:

In the book, Nixey argues that early Christians deliberately destroyed classical Greek and Roman cultures and contributed to the loss of classical knowledge

Heretic has had mixed reviews, both glowing ones (e.g., here, here, and here), and critical ones (e.g., here and here). The critical reviews often argue that what Nixey says is well known, so she’s simply reiterating the accepted history of early Christianity while pretending she’s forged a new thesis.  That doesn’t bother me too much, as I was unfamiliar with this history and thought it eye-opening regardless of its novelty.  I found Andrew Copson’s review pretty fair; here’s the ending (Copson is head of Humanists UK):

In a way the strange thing is how novel the premise of the book might seem to its readers. Classicists have always known that the mediterranean world was full of god-men, miracles, and magic so why should it be shocking to read this now? A lot is down to a conspiracy of silence (Nixey calls it a ‘gentleman’s agreement’) between theologians and classicists or ancient historians is real. I once asked one of my ancient history tutors at university what he thought about the historical Jesus and he scoffed. ‘That’s myth – not history’, was his view. You might as well investigate whether Vespasian rose to the heavens as an eagle. But he never said that in print to my knowledge and certainly not in his lectures. Nixey’s book breaks an important taboo in a well-crafted and eminently readable combination of scholarship and polemic.

The book describes the many competing sects of early Christianity, some of which saw Jesus as either a magician or sorcerer (sometimes with a wand!), or a figure of fun, and followed alternative scriptures that were very different from the canonical texts we know today. In some, God is depicted as of uncertain sex (sometimes suckling Jesus), female, or even as more than one figure. Creation stories differ, and accounts about how Jesus’s mother got pregnant vary wildly.

What happened over time, as Nixey argues, is that Christianity coalesced around the present version, discarding other “noncanonical” gospels for various reasons. She argues further that there’s been a tacit agreement among Christians and theologians to downplay or erase these earlier versions, pretending that the current version of Christianity emerged sui generis as a monolith after Jesus’s death.

Now we already know that earlier gospels existed (Elaine Pagels has written at length about them), so perhaps there’s some justice in the criticism that Nixey is reiterating what’s already known. But for those of us who don’t know the history of Christianity (and that includes most Christians!), it’s worthwhile to discover how the diversity of Christian faiths has been pruned away to its present form.

Nixey’s other thesis is that the idea that earlier faiths of the Romans and others repressed the rise of Christianity is misguided and wrong. In fact, she says, it’s the reverse. Nixey gives many examples of how Christians themselves repressed other faiths, including torturing and killing their adherents and burning their books. And some sects of Christianity repressed others. Far from Christianity coming to the fore because of its message of love, it dominated via repression and the sword. I’m not a historian, so insofar as what Nixey says is true, I was edified, even if she reprised what’s already known.

One of the best aspects of Heretic is Nixey’s lively and informal prose, something unusual in books of this type. She’s an engaging writer, and I’ll give two examples. The first is in a discussion about how early Christians opposed the idea of a spherical Earth, claiming that people would have fallen off the part that was upside down (p. 246):

. . . However, the idea that a spherical earth is somehow ‘pagan’, and its opponents Christian, crops up in several other authors, too. The fourth-century Christian author Lactantius—a man whose intellect and education were rated highly enough that he was appointed as tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine—also considered the idea of a spherical earth to be pagan bunk. In a typically zesty passage, after Lacantius has laid into Socrates (‘ many of his actions are not only undeserving of praise, but also most deserving of censure’) and had a good go at Plato (his arguments are ‘impossible’ and ‘unjust’), Lactantius turns his attention to the idea of a spherical world.

And from the Epilogue (p. 279):

This is a story about how ideas are born, and how they die. It is also a story about how they survive. It is about how ancient stories linger, and divine whispers persist. It is about how religions change and change again, as they travel, and age, and spread into other lands, and other ages. It is about how long memory is, and how short. It is about what was, and what might have been. It is also about what is. And it is about why, when midwinter falls, and cribs are set out, an ox and an ass stand and watch over the baby Jesus in the manger. (p. 279).

The breezy prose does not denote a lack of scholarship: the book is heavily documented and footnoted.

I’d recommend Heretic for its combination of history and fine writing. You can find the Amazon site by clicking on the cover below. (The title, by the way, refers to the way that the dominant form of Christianity prevailed by deeming adherent to other faith as heretics.)

Here’s Nixey in 2018. She was the daughter of a monk and a nun:

A year before October 7, 2023, reshaped the political landscape, we founded a nonprofit organization called Antisemitism Watch. The decision followed decades of reporting on the Holocaust and its aftermath, and years of chronicling daily antisemitic incidents. What became unmistakable over time was not simply persistence, but normalization—antisemitism embedding itself across wide swaths of society with diminishing resistance.

In a Newsweek op-ed in which we announced the launch, we wrote that “few contest that antisemitism—history’s oldest hatred of a religious and ethnic group—has had an unmatched post-Holocaust resurgence.”1 The data confirmed record numbers of anti-Jewish attacks across the United States, Canada, and Europe, while social media accelerated newer conspiracies blaming Jews for everything from the slave trade to COVID-19.2, 3

Even then, our concern was not only the scale of antisemitism, but the way it was being confronted. The most prominent institutions tasked with addressing it were doing so selectively, not consistently. The Anti-Defamation League had diluted its core mission by repositioning itself as a more generic anti-hate organization and, in practice, mostly focused on right-wing antisemitism while giving a free pass to anti-Jewish hostility from the political left. 

In the months following the October 7 attack, antisemitism shed its inhibitions. 

What distinguishes this moment is the collapse of stigma. Expressions that would have ended careers a decade ago now generate applause, clicks, and campaign donations. Language that would trigger immediate condemnation if directed at other minorities is routinely excused, contextualized, or ignored when directed at Jews. Hostility that once hid at the margins has migrated inward—into campuses, political platforms, cultural institutions, and digital ecosystems. The result is an old hatred on steroids—newly unmoored from consequence. 

This normalization is not diffuse, but has taken shape through two distinct but mutually reinforcing channels. The progressive left frames Israel as fundamentally illegitimate, a country of inherent injustice. That creates an atmosphere in which hostility toward Israel is cast as an ethical obligation. And for many on the left—and their Muslim activist allies—the distinction between Jews and Israelis frequently collapses. 

Germany, September 2025. A storefront sign reads: “Jews are banned from these premises! Nothing personal—and not antisemitism either. I just can’t stand you.”

On parts of the populist right, antisemitism has reemerged through the architecture of conspiracy theory. Jews are cast not as oppressors, but as puppet masters—orchestrators of migration, finance, media narratives, and foreign entanglements. The vocabulary differs from that on the left, but the structural function is identical: Jews are assigned exceptional and malign agency. 

Political Normalization on the Left: From Policy Critique to Moral Indictment 

Criticism of Israeli government policy is legitimate. What has shifted in recent years—and accelerated sharply after October 7—is not the criticism, but its recasting into a moral indictment of all Jews, whether they have anything to do with the country or government of Israel or not. 

Beginning in the mid-2010s, segments of the progressive movement increasingly described Israel as a uniquely flawed state: a settler-colonial project, an apartheid regime, and a profoundly racist enterprise.4, 5 Universities helped entrench this view, often through curricula and campus programming that treated those claims not as arguments but as axioms.6, 7 Qatar, for example, the same country that has been a financial lifeline to Hamas, has given $6.6 billion to American educational institutions.8, 9

More foreign money boosted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) anti-Israel movement, once largely confined to activist circles, into footholds in student governments, academic associations, and local political campaigns.10, 11, 12, 13 Local chapters of major U.S. unions, including units within the United Auto Workers, adopted resolutions describing Israel’s actions as “genocide” and calling for arms embargoes and boycott campaigns.14

The antisemitism of the left and the right converge within the broader framework of modern populism.

At several American universities, diversity, equity, and inclusion offices came under criticism for omitting antisemitism or Jewish identity from their anti-discrimination frameworks. At Stanford, a DEI official told Jewish students that their identity was tied to “whiteness” and “colonialism,”15, 16, 17 while at UCLA, campus officials told Jewish students that “Zionism” placed them outside the scope of DEI protections, even when they were targeted as Jews.18, 19, 20

These developments began to erode an important distinction: in many campus protests after October 7, chants and signage moved quickly from condemning Israeli military actions into rhetoric that not only censured Israeli policies but questioned Israel’s right to exist.21, 22, 23 As harassment, intimidation and social exclusion of Jewish college students surged, they began hiding visible signs of their identity.24, 25, 26 Jewish students report pressure not only to criticize Israeli policy, but to disavow Zionism entirely as a condition of social inclusion.27, 28, 29

Language played a central role. The term “Zionist”—historically denoting support for Jewish national self-determination—increasingly appeared as a pejorative rather than a description. Our colleague David Christopher Kaufman has written about the rapid mainstreaming of the slur “Zio,” a diminutive form of “Zionist” historically popularized by white supremacist David Duke and long embedded in extremist discourse.30 The term has migrated from fringe spaces into activist debates, entertainment culture, and political rhetoric.31 Graffiti reading “Kill your local Zio Nazi” has appeared on American campuses, while demonstrators in London chant, “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zio in the ground.”32, 33, 34

When Zionism is defined as racism or genocide, those who identify as Zionists are implicitly placed beyond the moral community. Zionism is no longer treated as a political ideology open to debate, but rather as a moral stain. Empirical data confirm the broader climate. 

A March 2026 survey of 1,000 students across 170 British universities found that one in five said they would be reluctant to have a Jewish roommate.35 Nearly half reported witnessing slogans justifying the October 7 attacks, while among those frequently exposed to campus protests the figure rose to 77 percent. One in ten said Holocaust denial or minimization was not antisemitic, and more than a quarter believed that calls to remove “Zionists” from campus were not discriminatory. 

In these findings Israel is not described as acting disproportionately, imprudently, or even unlawfully; it is described as inherently genocidal. Holocaust inversion—labeling Israelis as Nazis or Gaza as Auschwitz—has appeared with increasing frequency at demonstrations and across digital platforms.36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 By depicting Jews as the new Nazis, such rhetoric reverses historical roles in ways that are psychologically potent and politically combustible, allowing hostility to be reframed as anti-fascist virtue. 

The same pattern has surfaced in cultural spaces. At the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival and related events, filmmakers and actors issued open letters accusing Israel of “genocide” and denouncing institutions that declined to take a maximalist anti-Israel stance as complicit in “anti-Palestinian racism.”43, 44 That same year at the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, Sweden, Israel’s representative, Eden Golan, performed under extraordinary security amid sustained protests and explicit death threats.45, 46 To protect her, Swedish authorities asked her to remain in her hotel room except for rehearsals and performances. 

Political incentives reinforce these dynamics. In several Western democracies, including the United States and the United Kingdom, some elected officials face organized blocs for whom anti-Israel activism is a defining issue. In the United Kingdom’s last general election, for instance, five independent candidates were elected to Parliament on only a pro-Gaza and anti-Israel platform.47, 48 In the U.S., public condemnation of antisemitic excesses within those political movements risks primary challenges, social media backlash, and accusations of complicity in alleged war crimes. Silence, by contrast, carries fewer immediate costs. That silence, of course, allows the most strident voices to have outsized influence. 

Mayoral election campaign billboard in Britain’s second largest city, Birmingham, focused exclusively on Gaza

This asymmetry matters. Political leaders routinely condemn antisemitism when it emerges from the opposing party. Far fewer are willing to confront it when it surfaces within their own coalition. The reluctance to draw internal boundaries contributes to the perception that such rhetoric is acceptable, even righteous. 

Political Normalization on the Right: The Return of Conspiratorial Antisemitism 

If the progressive left has contributed to normalization through moral absolutism, the populist right has done so through conspiratorial absolutism. 

Antisemitism on the right rarely presents itself as hatred, but rather as revelation. But its structure is familiar. Jews are not condemned as colonial oppressors but cast instead as hidden orchestrators—disproportionately powerful actors.49, 50 These tropes are recycled from earlier eras: insinuations of Jewish control over media and finance,51 suggestions of dual loyalty,52 and recycled speculation linking Jews to shadow networks of global power.53, 54, 55 These themes, once confined to fringe pamphleteers, now circulate widely through podcasts, livestreams, and social media feeds to audiences in the millions.56, 57

The accusation that Jews are omnipotent has long been one of antisemitism’s most durable adaptations. What distinguishes the present moment is scale—and monetization. Digital media ecosystems allow conspiratorial claims to travel instantly, stripped of context and insulated from institutional gatekeeping. Influencers with audiences in the millions can launder antisemitic tropes through the language of anti-elitism or investigative skepticism. 

Antisemitic conspiracies are algorithm-optimized, fusing centuries-old libels with modern virality. Figures such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have built massive audiences by not merely courting controversy—they have aired claims rooted in longstanding antisemitic conspiracy frameworks. Carlson has suggested, for instance, using genetic testing to determine Jewish legitimacy in Israel, “to find out who Abraham’s descendants are.”58 He has questioned whether Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has any connection to the land because his family is “from Poland.”59 The premise echoes the discredited Khazar theory, which casts Ashkenazi Jews as impostors.60

The danger is the quiet, cumulative expansion of what society is willing to excuse.

Carlson has also provided an uncritical platform to extremist figures, including Nick Fuentes,61 who has publicly denied aspects of the Holocaust, praised authoritarian regimes, and repeatedly argued that Jews wield disproportionate and harmful influence. Carlson did not substantively interrogate or rebut anything said.62 The significance lies less in any single statement than in the format: a two-hour content that allowed historically fringe antisemitic narratives to be presented to a mass audience without correction or context. 

Candace Owens, meanwhile, has made the Khazar claim explicit, writing to Sen. Ted Cruz on February 21, 2026, that “The people currently occupying Israel are Khazarian Turks,”63 while also promoting narratives of “Jewish supremacy,”64 depicting Jews as a “cult,”65 and claimed on the February 2, 2026, episode of her podcast that modern Jews are not actually Jews but “pagan gypsies wearing the cloak of Judaism.”66 In extended broadcasts, she has also revived claims that Jews dominated the slave trade and promoted classical antisemitic texts rooted in blood libel, and alleged that a secret Jewish cult, Sabbatean Frankists, practices pedophilia and conspires to control non-Jews.67, 68, 69

Candace Owens alleges Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, funds Islamic terrorism such as 9/11 in order to deceive non-Jews (goyim).

Monetization data reveal advertising rates of tens of thousands of dollars per episode and annual revenues reaching into the millions.70 Antisemitism has become lucrative content. 

Figures such as Owens, Carlson, Dave Smith, and others use social media not just to monetize their posts, but to clip, amplify, and circulate appearances, arguments, and narratives across a much larger ecosystem. Content that may begin in a podcast, livestream, or interview is rapidly fragmented into short, emotionally charged segments optimized for sharing. The result is a feedback loop in which inflammatory claims travel farther than careful rebuttals, and antisemitic insinuation is normalized through familiarity, repetition, and algorithmic lift. In that environment, the distance between coded rhetoric and explicit anti-Jewish abuse has grown perilously short. 

We saw that process directly in the responses to two of our recent posts on 𝕏,71, 72 one about a Miami Beach incident that led to an assault and hate crime arrest, and another about the persistent claim that Israel was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In both cases, the replies quickly filled with material that was not merely critical of Israel or political in nature, but floridly antisemitic: recycled conspiracy tropes, insinuations about Jewish power, and language that would once have been confined to the extremist fringe. Social media, by design, rewards provocation, virality, and repetition, allowing anti-Jewish hatred to appear in waves and then recede, only to surge again around the next triggering event. 

𝕏 is not alone as a visible accelerant of contemporary antisemitism. Other platforms have played a comparable role, especially since October 7. TikTok in particular helped drive a dramatic expansion of anti-Jewish hostility by turning complex events into emotionally saturated, highly shareable fragments that rewarded outrage over context. Younger audiences encountered not only intense anti-Israel content but also conspiracy narratives, moral inversion, and language that blurred any distinction between Israelis, Zionists, and Jews. 

What is unfolding is not simply another cycle of prejudice but rather the normalization of it. It is a structural shift.

Taken together, these platforms have created an information environment in which antisemitism is not merely tolerated but made to feel ambient. What appears in any single comment thread is therefore not an isolated spasm of hatred, but part of a broader digital culture in which antisemitism has become newly confident, newly networked, and far more public. This mode of thinking repackages antisemitism as inquiry and presents hatred as courage. 

The Convergence: How Opposite Narratives Produce the Same Result 

The antisemitism of the left and the right converge within the broader framework of modern populism. In periods of institutional distrust and geopolitical uncertainty, populist movements seek simplified explanations for complex realities, often attributing responsibility to elites or symbolic adversaries.73, 74 Jews, historically visible yet diasporic, have long served as convenient stand-ins within such narratives. 

The left assigns Jews excessive guilt while the right assigns them excessive power. Both frameworks transform Jews from individuals into symbols and reduce political disagreement to an artificial moral certainty. Jews cease to be a minority community with internal diversity and become symbolic actors—avatars of oppression or manipulation. That transformation flattens nuance, rewards ideological purity, and erodes the distinctions between critique and condemnation, skepticism and conspiracy. In doing so, it creates fertile ground for reemergence of antisemitism across ideological lines. 

Digital algorithms reward outrage and insinuation. Normalization requires only the erosion of consequences. When one in five university students in a liberal democracy reports reluctance to share housing with a Jew, prejudice has moved beyond rhetoric into social calculus. 

A corrosive development within this broader normalization has been the resurgence of Holocaust minimization and the emergence of October 7 denial narratives. On parts of the left, documented October 7 atrocities are questioned, minimized, or reframed as morally explicable resistance.75, 76, 77 When the mass murder of Jews becomes negotiable fact—contextualized beyond recognition or rhetorically inverted—antisemitism is normalized not through open hatred but through a gross and dangerous distortion. 

Antisemitism has always adapted to prevailing ideologies. While today’s rhetoric differs on the left and right, it is Jews who are again cast as the hinge upon which broader grievances turn: too powerful to be trusted, too illegitimate to be equal. 

Internal Validation and External Weaponization 

A particularly uncomfortable dimension of this moment is the role sometimes played by Jews themselves—as participants in an environment that helps destigmatize antisemitism. In cultural, academic, and political spaces, some Jewish figures have concluded—implicitly or explicitly—that open identification with Israel, or even with mainstream Jewish communal positions, carries professional and social risk.78, 79

Initial expressions of solidarity after October 7 were, in many cases, followed by quiet retreat—statements deleted, positions softened, or replaced by language that avoided any association with Israel altogether.80, 81 In parts of the entertainment industry, publishing, and academia, the boundaries have become clear: certain forms of speech carry consequences, while others confer acceptance. The incentives are not abstract. They shape behavior. 

In political life, the same pressures operate differently but with similar effect. Anti-Israel movements increasingly elevate progressive Jewish voices that validate their claims.82, 83 The argument is straightforward: if Jews themselves describe Israel as genocidal, or Zionism as inherently racist, then such claims cannot be antisemitic. The phrase “as a Jew” becomes a form of credentialing—used to shield arguments from scrutiny and to confer legitimacy. 

That reasoning is logically flawed yet rhetorically powerful. It is a form of rhetorical laundering in which claims that would otherwise be recognized as antisemitic are reframed as internal critique, even courageous dissent. 

Organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace have played a central role in this dynamic. Their activism—highly visible in post-October 7 protests, including organized demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol and on university campuses—has framed Israel in the language of genocide and colonialism, while advocating for boycotts and the dismantling of existing political frameworks.84, 85 In some instances, that rhetoric has extended into Holocaust-adjacent spaces, including efforts to insert contemporary political claims into memorial contexts at concentration camps like Buchenwald,86, 87 in ways that many Jewish institutions and historians have strongly rejected.88

This dynamic operates alongside a second, parallel force: organized Muslim activist movements that have fused opposition to Israel with rhetoric and practices that increasingly blur, and at times erase, the distinction between Israelis and Jews more broadly. 

In the months following October 7, protests across Western cities have frequently featured slogans such as “rape is resistance” or “globalize the intifada” that framed violence as justified resistance. Visual symbols, including the widespread adoption of keffiyehs as a form of political uniform, signal not only solidarity with Palestinians, but alignment with the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy. The widely used chant “from the river to the sea” is a call for Israel’s elimination, since a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea would leave no room for a Jewish state. 

Institutional actors have played a role in amplifying this environment. Advocacy organizations such as the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) have issued statements and hosted speakers whose rhetoric has fomented antisemitism and contextualized violence in ways that blur moral boundaries.89, 90 In parallel, documented incidents in countries including the United Kingdom and Australia have raised concerns about Jewish patients feeling unsafe in medical settings after Muslim healthcare workers expressed hostility over the Israel–Hamas conflict.91, 92

For example, two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney—Ahmad Rashad Nadir (male nurse) and Sarah Abu Lebdeh (female nurse)—recorded a viral social media video while in hospital scrubs, in which they made explicit antisemitic threats, including statements like “I won’t treat them, I will kill them,” “You have no idea how many Israeli dog[s] came to this hospital, and I sent them to Jahannam” (Jahannam means “hell” in Arabic), and a throat-slitting gesture and other dehumanizing comments.93 Separately, Dr. Omar Azzam, a nephrologist at Royal Perth Hospital, was suspended by AHPRA and referred to a professional standards tribunal for alleged professional misconduct involving harassing medical colleagues with antisemitic abuse (including “ZioNazi” slurs). 

Antisemitism has become ideologically portable, socially permissible, and, in many quarters, professionally and financially rewarding.

These developments do not define entire communities. But they illustrate how, within certain activist ecosystems, the distinction between opposition to Israeli policy and animus toward Jews has become increasingly unstable. 

The interaction between these forces—internal validation and external amplification—is what gives the current moment its intensity. When activist rhetoric expands the scope of acceptable hostility, and selected Jewish voices are used to legitimize it, the result is a feedback loop. Claims that would once have been rejected outright are normalized through repetition, credentialing, and the absence of consistent challenge. 

Institutional Courage and Consistency 

If antisemitism is now being normalized not only through ideology and institutions, but also through validation—external and internal alike—then the responsibility of institutions is no longer ambiguous. It is unavoidable. 

Moments like this inevitably invite historical comparison. The rhetoric and the polarization are familiar. But history does not repeat itself on command. The 1930s were not just an era of words, but of institutional collapse and state-sponsored persecution. The warning today is different, but it is unmistakable: the stigma that once made antisemitism politically radioactive has been stripped away. 

What has taken its place is something more insidious. Antisemitism has become ideologically portable, socially permissible, and, in many quarters, professionally and financially rewarding. When hostility toward Jews can be repackaged to fit almost any political narrative and still command applause, a line has been crossed. The danger is the quiet, cumulative expansion of what society is willing to excuse. 

This is not a problem that can be solved with selective outrage or partisan finger-pointing. It is a failure of institutional will. Organizations that claim to fight antisemitism have too often treated it as a conditional priority—forcefully condemning it in adversaries while rationalizing, minimizing, or ignoring it among allies. The result is not balance but complicity: warnings dismissed, evidence reframed, action delayed until it is no longer necessary. Institutions do not lack information. They lack willingness to incur the cost of acting on it. 

Antisemitism has always adapted to the dominant language of its time. What distinguishes this moment is not its evolution, but the degree to which that evolution is being tolerated—even legitimized—by those responsible for opposing it. 

This is the test. And institutions, political parties, and civic leaders are failing it. 

The consequences for such failure are no longer theoretical. What is unfolding is not simply another cycle of prejudice but rather the normalization of it. It is a structural shift. In the United States, Jews increasingly find themselves required to justify their identity and affiliations in public space,94, 95 while in Europe, Jews are reconsidering whether they can safely remain.96, 97

If this moment demands anything, it is not another task force or hashtag, but an unflinching commitment to a single standard of moral clarity. The oldest hatred has learned our newest languages; our institutions must relearn the courage to name it, wherever it speaks.

Dozens of people have e-mailed me about a recent article in the New York Times Magazine on the interstitium. The reason is not because of the interstitium itself, but because it is being used to retcon an alleged explanation for acupuncture.  The discussion of the interstitium itself is fine, but then the author veered off into gratuitous pseudoscience.

The interstitium was proposed in 2018 based on a study showing that the interstitial connective tissue spaces around organs and other tissues in the body are not separate spaces but all appear to be connected. Essentially the authors propose this is a body-wide fluid filled space in the body through which fluids flow and communicate. This adds to the other fluid systems in the body, such as the lymphatic system (which drains excess fluid from tissues), the circulatory system (which distributes oxygen and nutrients and carries away waste), and the spinal fluid system (which is inside and surrounds the central nervous system). Later studies have supported the evidence for one continuous interstitial space.

Of course, the more we know about how the body works the better we will be able to understand disease processes and design treatments. Cancer cells, for example might spread through the interstitium, resulting in distant metastasis.

The NYT, however, decided to tack onto this interesting update in our biological knowledge with a bit of rank pseudoscience. The author starts with the statement that Thiese, one of the original researchers, was approached at a talk in China by a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine who said, “We’ve been talking about it for 4,000 years.” He accepted this third hand information uncritically. Um…no they haven’t. No ancient culture had any significant knowledge of human anatomy. They didn’t know basic things about how the body works, such as how blood circulates. They didn’t know what all the organs did. They didn’t even know that tissues are made of cells until the 1800s. All this person was doing was taking a basic concept, like the body is connected, and applying it to this knew anatomical knowledge. It’s meaningless.

Further, what we currently know as acupuncture is actually only about a hundred years old. It was created by fiat to unite the various Chinese medical traditions, which were mutually exclusive, into one system.  They were not using filiform needles 4,000 years ago. We don’t know what they were doing. The first text which describes something like acupuncture is from 100 BC. But there was no unified theory or practice at this time. Needles were more like lances, and likely were used for multiple purposes. Acupuncture sometimes involved blood letting or lancing, and other times involved “chi”. However, there was also the belief that blood is what spread chi throughout the body, so they were not entirely distinct. Again, these various traditions were not brought together until the early 20th century.

In fact, descriptions of acupuncture from the 19th century bare little resemblance to the modern version. These did not always involve points or meridians, used large needles deeply inserted into tissues, usually at the point of pain or injury.

The notion of chi, or an energy vital force, which spreads through meridians seems to go back about 2,000 years in some traditions. But this had nothing to do with any knowledge of anatomy or physiology. In fact, for about 2,000 years, until 1923, dissection of dead bodies was banned in China, so they had very little knowledge of anatomy. The meridians were therefore not based on anatomy, but on their cosmology. It was essentially astrology. It is therefore completely pseudoscientific and ahistorical to argue that Chinese acupuncturists had detailed knowledge of the interstitium 4,000 years ago – this is nonsense from beginning to end.

The NYT author then provides some reference to studies apparently showing an alignment between the interstitium and acupuncture meridians. These studies all come from China, which has a documented history of poor science relating to acupuncture. But even taken at face value, the evidence appears worthless. Essentially, dye spread up the arm when pressed, and there is a meridian that goes up the arm. Wow. They don’t even closely align. It would be amazing if dye did not spread in a way that could be so loosely correlated with some meridian.

There is no credible evidence that meridians exist – and they were never meant to represent anything anatomical. There is no evidence that acupuncture points exist, and acupuncturists cannot even agree on where they are or what they do. There are different traditions of acupuncture that use entirely different systems of points. This is all culture, with no underpinning reality.

So no – the interstitium does not provide an explanation for how acupuncture works. That is all blatant retconning. Further, there is no credible evidence that acupuncture even works. After thousands of studies researchers have failed to definitive reject the null hypothesis. The best clinical studies show no difference between true acupuncture and sham acupuncture – it is all placebo. The media, however, has mostly bought into the propaganda, and continues to gullibly spread this pseudoscience.

The post NYT Epic Fail on Acupuncture first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

If you’ve ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you’ve probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has been a “cheat sheet” for stellar astrophysics for over a century. But the universe is full of more than just stars, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Gabriel Steward and Matthew Hedman of the University of Idaho, attempts to do for the density and mass of all objects what the HR diagram did for the lifecycle of stars - provide a coherent, visual map to represent them.

Life didn't just happen on Earth, a new study suggests that the slow, grinding rise of our planet's continents more than 3.7 billion years ago may have done something extraordinary. Instead it carefully calibrated the chemistry of the ancient oceans to create precisely the conditions life needed to get started. The unlikely hero of the story is a semi precious gemstone.

Since the James Webb Space Telescope switched on, astronomers have been puzzled by hundreds of tiny, ancient, red objects lurking at the edge of the observable universe. Nobody could agree on what they were but now, a single extraordinary discovery of a lone object that behaves differently from all the others may have just solved one of the biggest mysteries of the modern telescope era. In doing so it has revealed a previously unknown chapter in the life story of the universe's most extreme objects.

In February 2013, a 20 metre asteroid exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk without warning, injuring more than 1,600 people and releasing energy equivalent to 33 Hiroshima bombs. Nobody saw it coming but that sobering wake up call directly motivated ESA's Meerkat Asteroid Guard, an automated system watching the skies around the clock for rocks on a collision course with Earth.

Carbon credits bought by companies to offset their emissions really have reduced deforestation, but not by as much as credit developers claim, according to a rigorous analysis