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I’m a sucker for lists like the NYT’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (also archived here), though the list may be a bit premature given that the century is barely one-quarter over. The article notes that the list was compiled by “votes from 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics, and other book lovers—with a little help from the staff of the New York Times book review.”

From the intro:

Many of us find joy in looking back and taking stock of our reading lives, which is why we here at The New York Times Book Review decided to mark the first 25 years of this century with an ambitious project: to take a first swing at determining the most important, influential books of the era. In collaboration with the Upshot, we sent a survey to hundreds of literary luminaries, asking them to name the 10 best books published since Jan. 1, 2000.

Stephen King took part. So did Bonnie Garmus, Claudia Rankine, James Patterson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elin Hilderbrand, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Roxane Gay, Marlon James, Sarah MacLean, Min Jin Lee, Jonathan Lethem and Jenna Bush Hager, to name just a few. And you can also take part! Vote here and let us know what your top 10 books of the century are.

Sarah Jessica Parker? Jenna Bush Hager? Are those literary luminaries? I don’t think so. Well, there were many real luminiaries and real critics, so we’ll let it pass.

Is it a good list? Well, I’ve heard of many of the books, and the 18 I’ve read (see below) have been good ones. But seriously, there’s no mention of All the Light We Cannot See? (2014; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is perhaps the best book I’ve read written in this century). Or A Little Life (2015)?  Where is Hamnet (2020)? And for medically related nonfiction, I’d add Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018), about Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scam, and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty,(2021), about the Sackler family’s relentless pushing of opioids. And where, oh where is Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), a book I enthusiastically reviewed? 

I’d also kvetch because there’s only one nonfiction book about science (The Emperor of All Maladies; 2010), though two others are tangentially related to science.  This likely reflects the NYT’s general neglect of the wonders of science.

But I’m sure everyone will find lacunae, and if I thought hard I’d find others. But it doesn’t matter: use the list for suggestions of books to investigate. At least you can tick off the books you’ve read and the paper conveniently compiles a list—and a photo—of the ones you’ve read. Here’s my own list:

I’ve read 18 books on the list. . . .

The Warmth of Other Suns ● The Known World ● Austerlitz ● Never Let Me Go ● The Year of Magical Thinking ● The Road ● The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ● The Overstory ● Atonement ● H Is for Hawk ● A Brief History of Seven Killings ● The Vegetarian ● The Looming Tower ● Demon Copperhead ● The New Jim Crow ● The Passage of Power ● The Emperor of All Maladies ● The Sympathizer

Again, it biggest gap on their list is “All the Light We Cannot See,” a masterpiece of a book.

And it makes a photo you can use for bragging rights, though I don’t have many:

Some of the best books I’ve read have hyst missed this century, including A Gesture Life (1999) and Troubles (1970). As always, recommend books you like written recently, particularly ones not on this list.

I heard this song yesterday on Facebook, where the melody was used as background for a video of a man walking two kimono-clad cats in Kyoto.  I hadn’t heard “Sukiyaki” in many years (it came out in the U.S. when I was 13), but I remembered the tune instantly, though the words of course are in Japanese. The Japanese title was changed for play in other countries, but changed into the name of a dish, for crying out loud. And I didn’t know how popular the song was (see below).

It’s a song of loneliness, though it inspired by politics. The details below are from Wikipedia.

Ue o Muite Arukō” (Japanese: 上を向いて歩こう; “I Look Up as I Walk”), alternatively titled “Sukiyaki“, is a song by Japanese crooner Kyu Sakamoto, first released in Japan in 1961. The song topped the charts in a number of countries, including the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in 1963. The song grew to become one of the world’s best-selling singles of all time, selling over 13 million copies worldwide.

Sakamoto died at 43 in a plane crash.

“Ue o Muite Arukō” (pronounced [ɯeomɯiteaɾɯkoꜜː]) was written by lyricist Rokusuke Ei and composer Hachidai Nakamura. The lyrics tell the story of a man who looks up while he is walking so that his tears will not fall, with the verses describing his memories and feelings. Ei wrote the lyrics while walking home from participating in the 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, expressing his frustration and dejection at the failed efforts to stop the treaty. However, the lyrics were purposely generic so that they might refer to any lost love

In the US, “Sukiyaki” topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1963, one of the few non-English songs to have done so, and the first in a non-European language. It was the only single by an Asian artist to top the Hot 100 until the 2020 release of “Dynamite” by the South Korean band BTS. “Sukiyaki” also peaked at number eighteen on the Billboard R&B chart, and spent five weeks at number one on the Middle of the Road chart.

Can you name an American chart-topper in a European language? I can!

Here’s “Sukiyaki,” which has both the Japanese words written in English transliteration as well as the English translation.

Here we have Bill Maher kvetching about people who say that the rich don’t pay taxes, and about “progressives” who say that multimillionaires and billionaires should be taxed much more heavily. In this tirade against “progressives,” Maher also argues that the U.S., despite the plaints of Bernie Sanders and his ilk, already has a lot of socialism, including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, unemployment compensation, and so on.

His point is a bit obscure to me, but seems to be that there’s too much income inequality in America, so that a few people make a lot, while many make bupkes.  And prices continue to rise, putting stuff like concerts and Disneyland, not to mention Lego kits, out of reach of the middle class. And don’t even mention healthcare!   So what’s new?

The guests last week were Governor Wes Moore (Democratic Governor of Maryland), Chris Cuomo (NewsNation Host), and Sarah Isgur (ABC News Analyst and Contributing Editor at The Dispatch). Cuomo and Isgur show up in this clip. 

All in all, Maher seems to be complaining both about the super-rich and their failure to help the poor (beyond paying taxes), and also about income inequality.  What is he asking for?

Out of curiosity, I asked Grok what Maher’s net worth is. The answer is below: he’s about one-seventh of a billionaire:

Bill Maher’s net worth is estimated at $140 million.

This figure is consistently reported across reliable sources as of late 2025 and into 2026, including Celebrity Net Worth (the primary reference used by most outlets) and recent articles from TV Insider, Yahoo Entertainment, and others.

A big part of his wealth comes from his long-running HBO gig: he reportedly earns about $10 million per year as host of Real Time with Bill Maher (which he’s done since 2003, after earlier runs hosting Politically Incorrect).

Another major boost was a smart 2012 investment: he bought a minority stake (roughly 4%) in the New York Mets for around $20 million and sold it in 2020 when the team changed hands, netting an estimated $80 million profit.

His earnings also include stand-up tours, comedy specials, acting roles, producing projects (like the documentary Religulous and the series Vice), and his podcast Club Random. He’s known for being relatively frugal with his spending despite the high income.

Keep in mind that celebrity net worth estimates are approximate—they’re based on public data about salaries, investments, real estate, and other assets, minus expenses and taxes—but $140 million has been the stable consensus for several years with no major contradictory reports.

Just before and during my trip to Savannah, I started noticing that people are asking for tips everywhere, including when you buy bread at a bakery or food at McDonald’s.  And by “asking”, I mean that when you pay with a credit card directly or on your phone, a lit-up sign appears at the register asking “Do you want to leave a tip?” And then, helpfully, suggesting tips, usually starting at 20% and going up to 30%. (There’s an option for a “custom tip”.)  This is a form of unwarranted pressure on consumers to tip for things that, historically, didn’t require tips. It’s the capitalistic equivalent of grade inflation.

Here are a few of the places that asked me for tips in the last ten days. I left a tip for only the last one:

A $3.00 baguette I bought at a local Hyde Park bakery (from the counter, for crying out loud)

Ice cream served from the counter at Leopold’s in Savannah

Two double cheeseburgers from McDonald’s in the Savannah airport (takeaway counter service).  And don’t shame me about McD’s: my plane was leaving and I needed food after a 7-hour wait. I haven’t eaten this kind of fast food in over a year, but I needed nourishment—if you call that “nourishment”.  Actually, it did the job, but my tip was zero.

My Uber ride from Midway Airport to home.

Now I always leave a tip for Uber drivers, even though only 20% of customers tip and Uber itself says that tips can be given, but only for exceptional service.  Tips make up only 10% of the salaries of Uber and Lyft drivers, while they constitute about half the incomes of  those who deliver food and groceries. And yes, I tip when I am delivered cooked food at home, but that happens only about once very two years. (To me, food delivery feels too much like I’m a king or something.)

Because Uber rides are pleasant and cheaper than taxi fares, I usually leave about 10% of the fare as a tip.  But in the past you would leave the Uber tip some hours after the ride, and after the driver had rated you as a passenger.  In this last case, however, a screen was affixed to the back seat asking me to leave a tip for the driver, whose name was Muhammed.  That was unfair, as that makes you tip before the driver rates you, and you’re supposed to be rated on your conduct as a passenger, not for how much extra money you give. NeverthelessI left a tip as usual, though not until the next day.

The services I usually tip for, and about 20% on average, are haircuts, non-Uber taxi rides, sit-down service in a restaurant, the people who service my cabin on cruises (less than 20% of the price!, plus a group tip for the service staff), and a few other services I can’t remember.  But I refused to tip when just buying a hamburger or getting ice cream or bread to take away. I usually don’t tip when I carry out food, either, but it varies.

If this importuning for tips reflects a real deficit of salary in an establishment, I would much prefer that they raise their prices than put me in a guilt-trippy situation where I have to tip on the spot.

I’m not the only one who feels this way.  I found this story in USA Today about tip inflation in American institutions.  Click below to read the story for free.

A few exccerpts:

Has tipping gotten out of hand?

In a new survey by Popmenu, more than 3 out of 4 people or 78% said they believed that tipping practices have become ridiculous. Forty-four percent say they’re tipping less this year than last year.

Consumers aren’t shy about expressing their tip fatigue online and on social media sites.

“I can’t enjoy a weekend without at least 5 prompts to tip for doing absolutely nothing,” one user on Reddit said about tipping fatigue. “The anxiety that comes from this false pressure to tip a percentage on every bill is ludicrous.”

. . .People feel that “tipping has become maybe ubiquitous and that now we’re being asked to tip for everything all the time, even for things that we didn’t feel were customary or normal,” Brendan Sweeney, CEO of Popmenu, told USA TODAY.

Popmenu, which is a restaurant tech company, has been surveying customers about tipping for more than five years, Sweeney said.

Tipping really increased during the COVID-19 lockdown era and after when the hospitality industry was hurting and consumers started leaving tips for take-out or tipping more “as a warm and fuzzy” feeling, Sweeney said.

“But then I think we got to a point where it was like, wait.. is this still an emergency? Is it still we’re helping people? At the same time, people are really feeling the pinch of inflation,” he said.

But tip fatigue is starting to tell!

And more digital register systems at businesses have the tipping screen built into the software, Sweeney said.

Still, Sweeney said guilt tipping, or feeling guilted into leaving a tip to avoid the awkwardness, is a thing.

When a digital screen asks for a tip, 59% of the respondents said they feel compelled to leave one. But that’s down from 66% in September 2025. And the share of people who say they tip on a weekly basis at places where it isn’t warranted also fell from 44% to 39%. Over the last 12 months, consumers estimate they spent about $130 on tips they didn’t think were necessary, down from $150 when the same question was posed in September 2025.

. . . The percentage of consumers tipping 20% or higher for restaurant servers and delivery drivers fell over the last six months:

• 41% of consumers tip restaurant servers 20% or more, which is down from 45% in September 2025. Twenty nine percent of people said they tip servers 15%, which is similar to September 2025.
• 15% tip restaurant delivery drivers 20% or higher, down from 23% in September 2025.
• 27% tip delivery drivers 15%, which is similar to September 2025.

Tips at places other than restaurants also changed.

• 39% of consumers tip at coffee shops, down from 46% in September 2025.
• 27% tip at food trucks, down from 32% in September 2025.
• 22% tip at fast food restaurants, down from 27% in September 2025.
• Separate from the survey, Popmenu also tracked tipping on online orders received through its platform. Pickup orders with a digital tip declined from 78% in 2022 to 62% in 2026.

. . . Three in four consumers (74%) say they have noticed restaurants raising the minimum suggested tip on digital screens. Here’s what people said they did when they saw that screen:

• 36% typically leave a custom tip
• 17% choose the lowest suggested tip
• 32% choose the mid-tier tip
• 7% choose the highest tip
• 9% don’t typically tip

Consumers in the survey said they were willing to pay higher prices instead of tipping. If given a choice, 56% of consumers are willing to pay more for meals and beverages to provide higher wages for workers and eliminate gratuities.

What’s that, you say? If I buy an ice cream cone, there is labor involved in making the ice cream and scooping it out to put in a cone. Shouldn’t we pay for that labor? No—the workers should get a decent wage  and costs should be folded into the prices. In the past I’ve heard arguments that if labor is involved, tips should be given, but that’s always the case and, at any rate, such sentiments were covid-related.

I much prefer the French system, which applies especially at restaurants. The menu says explicitly that labor costs are included in the menu prices, and if you like the service, you can leave a couple of euros on the bill plate, regardless of what the meal cost.  There the pressure is off, and you don’t feel guilty about having to choose between a 15% tip and a 30% tip.  And you never are expected to tip when you take food away.

Of course you’re welcome to weigh in. How much and when do you tip, and do you feel pressured to tip in circumstances where you don’t think it’s necessary?

It’s well known that most American academics lean towards the Left (I’m one), and that this trend is increasing over time. Here’s a plot of the political leaning of academics made by Sam Abrams (a politics and government prof at Sarah Lawrence) shown on the website of the Heterodox Academy. The trend is clear, and it’s the same among many surveys of American academics.

If I was asked ten years ago to explain this difference and also the trend over time, I wouldn’t have been able to give an answer, though now various places have suggested self-selection: academia by its very nature of free expression and (supposed) favoritism of argument and open ideas, favors liberals over conservatives. Here’s from The Independent Review:

The very nature of political inquiry is implicated here as well. Some argue that because academia focuses on expanding ideas, it is inherently opposed to conservatism, which seeks, in a nod to Buckley, to yell “Stop!” In some respects, a liberal-leaning academia should be expected to some degree. The confounding reality now, though, is that many liberal academics agree it is vital to limit ideas they deem harmful.

This paper in Theory and Society gives multiple explanations, including self-selection:

Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas.

But lately I’ve been hearing another explanation, a self-aggrandizing one offered by liberal thinkers themselves. It was originally stated by Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Now what does that mean?  I suppose you can interpret it as another way of saying what’s above: universities, whose job is to find out the truth (“reality”) tend to attract liberals.  But I don’t think that’s what the phrase is supposed to mean. I think that Colbert meant, and others mean, that reality itself has a tendency to buttress Left-wing views.  That’s what Grok says when asked to explain how the Left uses the phrase:

Often deployed earnestly (or semi-earnestly) to argue that empirical evidence on topics like climate change, inequality, public health data, or social issues tends to support center-left policy conclusions more than conservative ones. The implication: “Stop calling facts ‘liberal bias’—reality just doesn’t align with your priors.”

And that may indeed be true, but it reverses the causes of what’s meant: “the views of liberals are more often supported by the facts than are the views of conservatives or moderates.”

Well, one can argue about even that (e.g., climate change on one hand and Israel on the other), but what bothers me is that the quote implies that reality itself leads to liberalism.  But reality has no ideology: it’s simply what’s true about the Universe. Evolutionary biology itself gives just the facts, though those facts can be accepted by liberals or rejected by conservatives like religious creationists. How one deals with the facts depends on one’s upbringing and predisposition.

Actually, anyone studying reality—trying to find the truth—had best abandon any ideological slant beforehand, as ideology impedes the search for truth. The methodology of science itself—hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, double-blind testing, the use of math and statistics, publication and communication, and empirical observation—is not ideological, and does not lead one to either the Left or Right.

This paper from BioScience, written by a philosopher and an evolutionary molecular biologist, shows that studying reality itself is best done in an atmosphere of ethnical neutrality. Click screenshot to read.

The authors argue first that ideological neutrality is important in finding the truth:

Arguably, a more feasible solution to the new demarcation problem is an old solution: when engaging in the core activities of scientific research, scientists should strive to eliminate the influence of all non-epistemic (e.g., ethical and political) values from the work they are conducting and (importantly) reviewing—at least to the extent that this is humanly possible. Like the ideal of a perfect democracy, the ideal of perfect ethical or political neutrality is probably never attainable in practice. Nonetheless, it is an ideal that motivates scientists to identify and hold each other accountable for any non-epistemic biases that might infiltrate and potentially distort scientific reasoning.

They then say that science is best conducted employing four Mertonian norms (Robert Merton was an American sociologists who wrote a lot about the sociology of science):

Merton’s first norm, perhaps inappropriately called “communism,” “prescribes the open communication of findings to other scientists and correlatively proscribing secrecy” (Zuckerman and Merton 1971).

. . . Merton’s second norm—universalism—states that personal attributes of a scientist, such as race, gender, nationality, religion, class, or political affiliation, are irrelevant when evaluating their scientific work. This norm functions epistemically as a corrective against all possible forms of discrimination other than merit.

. . . Merton’s third value, organized skepticism, encourages scientists to remain open to future falsification. This involves considering “all new evidence, hypotheses, theories, and innovations, even those that challenge or contradict their own work” (Anderson et al. 2010).

. . . Merton’s fourth norm called “disinterestedness” is perhaps the most controversial. Taken literally, this norm seems to require of scientists that they set aside personal goals in the pure pursuit of truth. Even the most careful scientist is vulnerable to confirmation bias (Wiens 1997). The expectation that scientists should behave as if they had no stake in the outcomes of their research is meant to counteract the effects of wishful thinking.

Now the authors discuss the opposition to these norms, and problems that arise when using them, but I think it’s useful to recognize that setting aside ideology is the best and fastest way to understand reality.

I suppose this post is a long-winded way of exporessing what I see as a self-aggrandizing phrase, and one that distorts the way that finding truth really works, but I’ve heard the phrase often enough to dissect it a bit.

The upshot: neither morality or ideology can be derived from reality, but those of a certain ideological or moral bent may rely on reality more than those of other stripes.

I think this was news commentary, but I didn’t hear the whole show: just a snippet on my car radio. At any rate, one commenter said this:

 “Joe Biden is probably the last Democratic President for generations who will be in favor of Israel.”

One could say that the Democrats are taking a position of neutrality, favoring neither Israel or its opponents (e.g., Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, or Hamas), but I doubt that is the case. The Democratic Party is being taken over by so-called “progressives,” and they are opposed to Israel in general—not just “Zionism” (which means Israel’s existence as a state), and not just Netanyahu.  This, according to a poll of Palestinians  taken in the West Bank and Gaza two years ago, is who the Democrats are and will be favoring:

According to the poll, only seven percent of Gazans blamed Hamas for their suffering. Seventy-one percent of all Palestinians supported Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on October 7 — up 14 points among Gazans and down 11 points among West Bank Palestinians compared to three months ago. Fifty-nine percent of all Palestinians thought Hamas should rule Gaza, and 70 percent were satisfied with the role Hamas has played during the war.

Before October 7, Fatah would have defeated Hamas in a head-to-head vote of all Palestinians 26 to 22 percent. If elections were held today, Fatah would lose to Hamas 17 to 34 percent. Eighty-one percent of respondents were dissatisfied with Abbas, up from 76 percent before the war. Sixty-two percent did not view the recent resignation of former PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh as a sign of reform. And 65 percent of Palestinians think the PA is a burden on the Palestinian people. Among likely voters, 56 percent supported Marwan Barghouti, who is serving multiple life sentences for his role in the murder of Jews during the Second Intifada. Thirty-two percent supported Qatar-based Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and 11 percent supported Abbas.

Only 5 percent of Palestinians think Hamas’s massacre on October 7 constitutes a war crime.

The poll was taken by a Palestinian organization, “the Ramallah-based non-profit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.”  And we have this breakdown of Democratic support (almost nil) from The Arab Center:

 On April 15, 2026, the United States Senate considered two resolutions to block nearly $450 million of arms sales to Israel over concerns about human rights violations and the US-Israel war on Iran. With pro-Israel Republicans controlling the Senate, the defeat of these resolutions, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), was predictable. Indeed, the first resolution, to stop a $295 million sale of bulldozers that Israel has used in the past to destroy civilian homes, lost in a 59-40 vote; the second, to halt a $151 million sale of 12,000 1,000-pound bombs, failed 63-36. The surprise was that more than three-quarters of the 47-member Democratic caucus voted to halt at least one of the sales—an unprecedented number.

Jews were reliably Democratic before the war, and Democrats were reliable friends of Israel. Brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, those days are gone. Democrats are not only ignoring Hamas’s war crimes and avowed desire to destroy Israel, but also favoring an oppressive, misogynistic, and truly genocidal regime against the only democratic state in the Middle East.  And no, I don’t think it’s just animus against Netanyahu or “Zionism” that’s motivating this change.  I think that Democratic opposition to Israel would be nearly as strong if Israel had some other Prime Minister. And it’s not “Zionism” they oppose, either, for that’s just the new euphemism for “Judaism”, for Zionism is just the recognition of the validity of the state of Israel as a refuge for Jews. (Do these people oppose the many explicitly Muslim states as examples of “Islamism”? If so, I haven’t heard about it.)

Israel (and Jews) are now seen as oppressors in the “oppressor-victim” narrative that’s behind wokeness. And the “oppression” by Israel involves the Two Big Lies: Israel is “genocidal” and “an apartheid state.” (For a refutation of the “genocide” canard go here, and of the “apartheid” canard go here).  We are seeing the Democratic Party becoming more antisemitic and anti-Enlightenment. For Democrats like me, this is depressing.  I’m not a one-issue candidate but I’m still Jewish, and how am I to vote for someone who is anti-Israel?

I now have three batches plus some singletons, and so we’ll have semi-regular photos for a while, at least.  Today’s batch of tidal invertebrate photos, and one video, comes from math professor Abby Thompson at UC Davis. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. The video is also hers.

April tidepools, and a mystery den.

Starting with a video of a Ctenophore, Pleurobrachia bachei (Pacific sea gooseberry, a ‘comb jelly’). All appearances to the contrary, this is in a different phylum (Ctenophora) from the “jellyfish” of my earlier post, which are in the phylum Cnidaria.   The flashing lights are the cilia in the “combs” that run down the sides, used for locomotion.  This one wasn’t moving very much, but I was surprised it was moving at all.   I picked it up off the sand quite a way above the water line, and dumped it into a shallow pool to take a photo.    It seemed to be recovering pretty well from what I thought was death.   It’s about the size of a walnut.

Sea urchin “test”, or internal skeleton. Probably Strongylocentrotus purpuratus:

Ophiopholis aculeata (daisy brittle star):

Bispira pacifica (feather duster worm):

Close up of ‘feathers’ of pacifica:

Genus Eupentacta (sea cucumber):

Phoronis ijimai (tentative- the white things). This is a species of horseshoe worm, which lives in tubes.   I haven’t seen this species before, and it was in an awkward spot, so it was hard to get a good photo.   The photo below that is from a few years ago of a worm from the same family, so you can see their general shape better:

Phoronopsis harmeri (from July 2021) (same family):

Anthopleura artemisia (moonglow anemone):

And a few nudibranchs:

Triopha maculata (nudibranch):

Tenellia laguna (nudibranch):

Acanthodoris rhodoceras (nudibranch):

Rostanga pulchra (nudibranch):

Lastly the mystery den. Our entire front yard seems to have been tunneled under, with at least three major entrances- this pair of holes is just one of them.  The holes are large, about 10 inches across.  We’re dreaming of badgers, would be very happy with foxes, and really hoping it’s not skunks (I love skunks, but not in the front yard).  A wildlife cam is the next purchase:

Camera: Olympus TG-7.   Thanks as usual to some experts on inaturalist.

This week’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “bite2”, is new but came out a bit late on Wednesday.  In response to last week’s criticism of Islam, Mo now gets the chance to make fun of Christian ritual.  He does a good job, but Jesus gets the last word.

It was a lazy day today, with one visit to an architectural/history site and then one big and delicious meal.  After we had a leisurely breakfast and did our ablutions, it was nearly 11 a.m.  We then walked the ten blocks to the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters:

The Owens–Thomas House & Slave Quarters (originally known as the Richardson House) is a historic home in Savannah, Georgia, that is operated as a historic house museum by Telfair Museums. It is located at 124 Abercorn Street, on the northeast corner of Oglethorpe Square. The Owens–Thomas House was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976, as one of the nation’s finest examples of English Regency architecture.

Renovations in the 1990s uncovered and restored one of the oldest and best preserved urban slave quarters in the American South.

. . . The house is notable for its early cast iron side veranda with elaborate acanthus scroll supports on which the Marquis de Lafayette addressed the citizens of Savannah on his visit in 1825.

The house was built between 1816 and 1819, designed by the architect William Jay of Bath and financed and occupied by Richard Richardson. It was then purchased by attorney and politician George Welshman Owens, who was briefly mayor of Savannah and later a U.S. Representative.

The Owens family lived in the house for a while, but after some decades turned it into a boarding house, which is when Lafayette stayed there on his final visit to America on the 50th anniversary of the American Revolution—in which Lafayette played a huge role.

In 1951 the family turned the house over to the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences , which still owns it (I visited the other two parts of the Museum on my first day here).

The sign below gives pretty much the same information above.

The front of the house (I forgot to photograph the famous balcony).  When Lafayette, an abolitionist, visited Savannah in 1825, the town kept all the slaves inside, along with the free blacks, so they wouldn’t be incited by Lafayette’s antislavery sentiments.

The back garden of the house, designed to be completely symmetrical. In the rear are the slave quarters.  This is only part of them: the small house held 12 people, and there were a bit more than 20 enslaved people working for the white residents.

This sign was in the slave quarters, explaining why the guides and many of the signs used the terms “enslaved people” instead of “slaves.”

Inside the quarters, which slept at least twelve people, though many of the enslaved, like the cook and those who took care of the chlldren, slept inside the big house.

The dining room.  Food was cooked in the basement, and since there was no dumbwaiter it was carried on trays up two floors from the basement and put in the butler’s pantry before being served.

The butler’s pantry was a small room, with four empty bottles of wine sitting on the sideboard. As the tour moved on, I picked up one of the bottles and saw what’s below: a bottle of Barton and Guestier bordeaux—from 1870! I’d never held a wine bottle that old before.  And this chateau is still going strong; it was founded in 1725.

The structural material of the house was tabby, an equal mixture of sand, burnt oyster shells, water, and ash. It was an early form of concrete, and was quite durable. As you see, the tabby was covered with wood paneling.

This room was presumed to be the library/study, though now they’re unsure what all the rooms were used for.

This is presumed to be the oldest son’s bedroom.

And a mirror, at the bottom of which you can see a selfie of Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus):

The (presumed) master bedroom, now a word that’s out of favor for obvious reasons (I can’t remember what it’s supposed to be called now).

After the tour we walked home and then got in the car to drive to a restaurant I’d scoped out as a likely prospect: great food, not overly expensive and, most important, Southern. Yes, we went to Erica Davis Lowcountry.  It turned out to be all I hoped for, though if you drove by this place you wouldn’t think to go in. But you’d be making a mistake if you didn’t.

We split two appetizers. First, oysters Rockefeller made with local oysters. Wikipedia describes the dish this way:

Oysters Rockefeller is a dish consisting of oysters on the half-shell that have been topped with a rich sauce of butter, parsley and other green herbs, bread crumbs, and then baked or broiled.

There were also collard greens, cream. and Parmesan cheese.  It was scrumptious—the first time I’ve had this dish. With all that garnish you could still taste the oysters, and I love oysters. You’d think the dish would be too busy with all the ingredients, but the flavors mingled perfectly.

Another Southern classic: fried green tomatoes, these with feta cheese and balsamic vinegar reduction.

The menu was so full of good stuff (see the link above) that I asked the waiter what she recommended. Without question she mentioned the shrimp, which are local, fresh, and delicious. So I got a half pound of boiled shrimp. They came with clarified butter, shrimp sauce, and two sides (I chose cheese grits and deep-fried okra).  And oy, were those shrimp good! I ate the shells, of course, as all good shrimp lovers do.

Tim had the Wassaw redfish, described as “pan-seared redfish filet, garlic beurre blanc, heirloom tomato, stone ground grits, fresh green beans.” He pronounced it excellent.

Betsy had two crab cakes along with green beans and cole slaw. As expected, the cakes were almost all lump crabmeat, with just a small amount of filling to hold them together. With a little bit of the sauce on the crab, it was a Platonic version of this dish.

And my Southern dessert: the third helping of banana pudding I’ve had on this trip—this time served in a Mason jar. This was the fanciest version of all I’ve had.  As you can see, it’s topped with whipped cream dusted with vanilla wafer crumbs, with a whole wafer on the side. (Banana pudding sans vanilla wafers is unthinkable.) Then there’s a layer of banana pudding, then a layer of cake, and then a bottom layer of pudding with chunks of banana. This was the best version I had on this trip, and probably the best version I’d ever had. (I’ve eaten it many times, often with BBQ or a meat-and-three plate in the South.)

The meal was terrific, not very expensive, and prepared with great care. I’d recommend this place very highly to anyone who visits Savannah.

It breaks my heart to have to report this, but somehow Vashti and her brood of seven ducklings vanished from Botany Pond sometime after Tuesday morning, and have not been seen since.

I have no idea what happened. They were last seen at the pond during Tuesday’s morning rain showers, with the brood warmly tucked under Vashti’s belly.  Now: no ducks—not a trace. The only one left is Armon, who swims disconsolately around the pond and refuses food. He has lost his family.

It was probably not predators: no bodies were found. I’ve ascertained that no workpeople were in the pond during the week.  Either someone scared them away or they walked away, something that hasn’t happened before.

Whatever is the case, the ducklings will probably perish, as the nearest body of water is too far away for little ones to walk.

The members of Team Duck and I are devastates. The seven ducklings were healthy, Vashti was being a great mother, and even Armon stepped up to protect the brood. The invading undocumented drakes left the brood alone. Everything promised a great duck season, and I was looking forward to helping the little ones grow up into adult mallards.

That, it seems, is not to be. This portends to be The Year Without Ducklings.

Bill Maher’s “New Rules” segment from the week before last is about AI, its history, its dangers, and its errors.  Maher doesn’t think too much of it, for, after all, AI can’t cure cancer.  I think he gives these bots overly short shrift, and neglects the productive things AI really can do.  But he then implies that it’s run by sociopaths and could drive humanity extinct.

The guests for that week were journalist Kara Swisher, politician Rahm Emanuel, and attorney and security advisor Jake Sullivan.

Without a doubt, the most famous “restaurant” in Savannah is Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room, formerly known as Mrs. Wilkes’ Boarding House (the apostrophe seems to be optional).  It is a stupendous all-you-can eat Southern homestyle meal, formerly served to the lodgers at a boarding house. A bit from Wikipedia:

Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room was previously the dining hall of the Wilkes House, a downtown boardinghouse. Today the restaurant is housed on the ground floor of the same historic house, built in 1870, at 107 West Jones Street. The restaurant was described by author William Schemmel as “a treasure hidden away in a historic district town-house”.  Its longtime owner, Sema Wilkes, published several cookbooks. As of 2024 her family continued to run the restaurant, serving lunch on weekdays.

We happen to be staying at about 200 Jones Street, so could walk get there in about 7 minutes, though waddling home the obligatory postprandial nap took a while longer!

More:

Mrs. Wilkes’ is noted for its homestyle traditions, in which guests are escorted in shifts of ten into the dining room, where a variety of dishes are freshly laid on one of several long tables. There is no menu; dishes are selected by the restaurant and change daily. Travel Holiday in 1993 recalled that the “tables were set with steaming bowls and platters of tasty Southern food”.

The guests sit at the table and pass the dishes around to one another like a family. There are usually long queues waiting to get in.

Usually?? Try “always”!

We tried to go on Monday, but didn’t make the first seating and so, lest we miss our Monday architecture tour, decided to return yesterday.  The first three pictures are from Monday, but the line was the same (long) yesterday. The difference was that yesterday got there a full hour before it opened at 11 a.m., and so were seated as soon as the doors opened.

I’ve put a lovely YouTube video about the place at the bottom of this post, so be sure to watch it. It perfectly captures the Wilkes Dining Experience.

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The line was longer than this but I wanted to fit in the house as well as the hungry customers.

I wanted Tim to photograph me holding a fried chicken leg (the place is famous for its fried chicken) and, sure enough, my chicken leg was on the sign by the entrance.

The place was about five minutes late in opening—a delay I couldn’t tolerate. Photo by Tim.

They take only case: no credit cards (there’s an ATM nearby).

Our table set up with some (but far from all) of the dishes we got, along with glasses of tea (sweetened, of course) and fresh roses. You can see collard greens, fried okra, macaroni salad, cucumber salad, and, well, I put below of what we were offered.

One of the two dining rooms after it filled up.

Immediately after sitting down, we were served both cornbread and fresh, hot biscuits.

And of course the food and atmosphere were conducive to making friends, and so we chatted with two amiable visitors from the UK, one from Manchester, where Matthew lives. I’m sure this is a particularly unique experience for Brits who aren’t familiar with southern American cuisine (the best in the U.S., in my view, especially if you throw in Texas brisket).

Here are the dishes that were put on the table, but we may have forgotten a few. There were more than two dozen, and you could help yourself to as much as you wanted. Our lunch took about an hour.

Fried chicken
Pulled pork
Macaroni and cheese
Macaroni salad
Sweet potatoes
Mashed potatoes
Biscuits
Cornbread
Stuffing
Rice
Rice with chorizo
Black-eyed peas
Green beans
Okra
Fried okra
Collard greens
Yellow squash
Rutabaga
Cucumber salad
Boiled cabbage
Cole slaw
Creamed corn
Gravy

Dessert:

Banana pudding
Peach cobbler with ice cream

Sweet ice tea

Below: my plate, the first of 2.5 platefuls I ate. Clockwise from 11 o’clock: biscuit, cornbread, collard greens, deep-fried okra, macaroni salad, pulled pork, black-eyed peas, stewed cabbage, rice with chorizo, sweetened yams, and fried chicken. As expected, the fried chicken was fantastic: among the best I’ve ever had. A crunchy, crackly exterior enshrouded juicy chicken.

This was, of course, only my first plate, as I wanted to try nearly all the dishes except stewed okra (okra is edible only when deep-friend, and ;then can be very good).

Me eating chicken–a breast this time, though I also had a thigh. Photo by Tim.

Here are Tim and Betsy digging in:

We were offered a choice of desserts: peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream or banana pudding studded with vanilla wafers. Since part of my stomach is reserved for desserts, I asked for (and got) both.

Cobbler:

Banana pudding:

We waddled home after that, and all of us needed a nap. I did not eat a bit of food until this morning, when I ate only two pieces of toast.

If you go to Savannah (and do go when it’s not summer), you MUST go to Mrs. Wilkes’.  This is not optional.

Here’s a great video about the place I found on YouTube.

Yesterday involved a lot of walking, much of it with no destination, but I did get in 12,000 steps. Our plan was to take a two-hour walking architecture tour at 9:30, followed by a search for lunch. Unfortunately, my friend Tim got lost on our walk to the tour’s starting point, and we missed the whole tour. The plan then changed to an attempt to have lunch at the famous Mrs. Wilkes’ Dining Room, an all-you-can eat dining experience with great Southern food. But we missed that, too: we found we could change our architecture tour to 1 p.m., and so missed the first seating at Mrs. Wilkes’s.

So it was back to Ogelthorpe Square for the second tour attempt, which succeeded. In between, we grabbed a forgettable lunch at a Mexican restaurant and some excellent ice cream at a famous place.

First, the street where we’re staying again: Jones Street, which our tour guide called “The most beautiful street in Savannah”, lined as it is with oak trees and old houses:

And a portion of the long line at Mrs. Wilkes’. This is an every day occurrence as the place is famous and it doesn’t take reservations. After one seating, you have to wait until a table vacates (you sit with nine strangers) before you can get in, and we missed the first seating. In the meantime, Tim managed to get us on the 1 p.m. tour without paying extra.

After lunch, the first stop was Leopold’s Ice Cream, founded in 1919.  From Wikipedia:

In August 2004, Leopold’s moved to its present home on East Broughton Street, in Savannah’s downtown, where it is known for regularly having a line of customers waiting outside.  Stratton Leopold hired Hollywood production designer Dan Lomino to recreate his father’s soda fountain from the original store.  The ice cream is made, using the same recipes developed by his father and uncle, at a former wholesale florist building at 37th and Price Streets and brought over to the store as necessary.

Leopold’s signature flavor is tutti frutti, a favorite of Savannah’s Johnny Mercer, who worked in the shop as a ten-year old, sweeping floors,  while former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s favorite was the butter pecan. Carter wrote the foreword to Leopold’s Ice Cream: A Century of Tasty Memories, 1919–2019 (Melanie Bowden Simón, 2020).

The outside:

The inside; I didn’t see a soda fountain (perhaps this counter is the remains), but they had a gazillion flavors of ice cream. And yes, there was a line outside.

The newest flavors were also listed outside, and I immediately decided to get the top two, neither of which I’d had before:

My double scoop of lavender and cherry blossom (I ascertained first that they used real flowers). It was terrific: high in butterfat content, dense, and with very subtle flavors. Two scoops after lunch made me walk slower on the architecture tour!

Our first stop was the house of Juliette Gordon Low (1860-1927), who married an uncaring git named William Mackay Lowe, who often cheated on her.  During her long periods of being alone, Low learned metalworking, pottery, and other skills. She in fact made this wrought-iron gate at her house:

Low had a tumultuous life, and was almost cheated out of her inheritance as her husband left his money to his mistress. But the will was successfully contested, Low got the dosh, and looked for a worthy project to occupy her. Her project was to found the American Girl Guides, which became the Girl Scouts of America. Eighteen girls were enrolled, and the organization continues today.

Below is a photo from Wikipedia labeled, “Juliette Gordon Low (center) standing with two Girl Scouts, Robertine McClendon (left) and Helen Ross (right).” They’re all in Girl Scout uniform. We were told that every summer Girl Scouts from all over America make a pigrimate to visit Low’s house in Savannah.

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Here’s the tallest structure in downtown Savannah, the Independent Presbyterian Church, with a steeple that’s 227 feet and 6 inches tall. Now, by law, no structure in the town can be higher than four stories. They take their historic preservation seriously here.

The bench where Forrest Gump (Tom Hanks) catches a floating white feather (symbolizing the “randomness” of fate) was located right next to the church above, but although the bench was a Hollywood prop and is no longer there, tourists still come in droves to be photographed at the bench site.  That famous scene is below:

A typical scene: Southern live oak (Quercus virginiana) covered with Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides), a flowering epiphyte that’s neither a moss nor Spanish.

Another epiphyte on an oak tree, Pleopeltis sp. or “resurrection fern,” The AI Google search explains the name:

The resurrection fern (Pleopeltis polypodioides) is named for its remarkable ability to survive long periods of drought by curling up its fronds, turning grey-grown, and appearing dead. When exposed to moisture—even just a little water—it rapidly uncurls and turns vibrant green within 24 hours, appearing to “resurrect”.

There is a drought in Savannah now, so you see the fern in its moribund state:

Below is the Green-Meldrim Mansion, built in 1853 and a National Historic Landmark.  The photo below the house explains its historical significance as Union General Sherman’s headquarters in Savannah (upper floor, two window to the right). While Sherman burned much of Georgia during his infamous 1864 March to the Sea that pretty much ended the Civil War, he spared Savannah because it expelled its Confederate troops and surrendered to the Union Army.

Click to enlarge:

One of the many buildings of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), one of the world’s most famous art schools.  Their philosophy is to have art taught by those who make art, not by academics, and I’m told they have a 99% placement rate of its graduates. The school is so wealthy that it participates in Savannah’s ongoing efforts to buy and refurbish historic buildings exactly as they were: a laborious and expensive effort.

In fact it occupies many of the buildings it’s bought and refurbished: this is Poetter Hall, the National Guard Armory in the late nineteenth century. It was SCAD’s first academic building.

A monument to (and burial place) of Casimir Pulaski, a Pole who moved to America and fought for the colonial army during the American Revolutionary War, saving George Washington’s life.  He’s a much beloved Polish-American.

Below is the Mercer House (now the Mercer House Museum), completed in 1868. It’s famous for reasons set out in Wikipedia:

The house was the scene of the 1981 killing of Danny Hansford by the home’s owner Jim Williams, a story that is retold in the 1994 John Berendt book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The house is also featured in the movie adaptation of the book, released three years later. Williams held annual Christmas parties at Mercer House, on the eve of the Savannah Cotillion Club‘s debutante ball, which were the highlight of many people’s social calendars.  Williams had an “in” box and an “out” box for his invitations, depending on whether or not the person was in Williams’s favor at the time.

The site of the killing was the room on the first floor whose window is bottome left.

Williams went through four trials for the killing, but no jury in Savannah would convict this popular man, so he esceped punishment, though he did spend some time in jail awaiting trial.

The house was build by the great-grandfather of lyricist Johnny Mercer (“Moon River,” “And the Angels Sing,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” etc.) but nobody named Mercer ever lived in the house.

Because of the movie “Forrest Gump,” Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and the subsequent movie, tourism in Savannah has increased by several-fold in recent years.

Another Historic District house. I can find its picture on Google Image Search, but not its name:

The Armstrong-Kessler Mansion, once owned by Jim Williams (see above): a lousy panoramic shot due to the absence of a viewpoint that didn’t endanger me. From Wikipedia:

The Armstrong Kessler Mansion (formerly known as Armstrong House) is a nationally significant example of Italian Renaissance Revival architectural style located in the Savannah Historic District. The structure was built between 1917 and 1919 for the home of Savannah magnate George Ferguson Armstrong (1868–1924). It was owned by the Armstrong family from 1919 to 1935. Afterward, the structure and grounds served as the campus of Armstrong Junior College. Threatened with demolition, the Historic Savannah Foundation purchased the Armstrong House along with five other threatened historic buildings from the college for $235,000 in 1967. Once saved, Historic Savannah Foundation sold the Mansion (and Hershel V. Jenkins Hall) at the exact purchase price to preservationist and antique dealer Jim Williams who restored it as his home. Eventually, both were sold to a major Savannah law firm as offices.

It’s HUGE and has lovely gardens that are not open to the public. Our guide got to see them, though, and showed us photos.

Finally, a Jew church in Savannah! Yes, a Gothic Revival style synagogue, the only one I know of.  Congregation Mickve Israel was founded in 1735, almost immediately after Savannah was settled. It was formed by Sephardic Jews and is now a reform temple . The building dates from 1876, and is built to look like a church as the Jews didn’t want to stick out in Christian Savannah.

A note from Wikipedia:

The Congregation was the first Jewish community to receive a letter from the President of the United States. In response to a letter sent by Levi Sheftall, the congregation’s president, congratulating George Washington on his election as the first President, Washington replied, “To the Hebrew Congregation of the City of Savannah, Georgia”:

… May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land – whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation – still continue to water them with the dews of heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.

“That people whose God is Jehovah”—as opposed to those people whose God was the REAL God!

The plaque outside (click to enlarge).

We had no food ot note yesterday save the ice cream, but in about an hour from this writing we’re off to Mrs. Wilkes’s Boarding House for a gigantic Southern meal

Just. a quick update on yesterday’s peramublations, which included sightseeing and food.

We’ve rented an Air BnB equivalent in downtown Savannah, and it’s on this lovely tree-lined street:

Only half a block away is Clary’s Cafe, an eatery made famous because it’s in the novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a semi-true tale of life and a murder in  Savannah in the 1980s.  I read it before I came here, and it was pretty good.

Here’s Clary’s with an old-time sign. When I went to get coffee at 8 a.m. it was empty, but when we returned at 10 a.m. there was a 25-minute wait. The cafe became a lot more popular after it was featured in the novel as well as in the eponymous film directed by Clint Eastwood. From Wikipedia:

The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt, described Clary’s as “a clearinghouse of information, a bourse of gossip,” where he came to know the characters who would animate his narrative.  James Gandolfini made an uncredited appearance as the cook in the two scenes filmed at the cafe.

A photograph of the cast hangs inside the restaurant, featuring Alison Eastwood (who plays Mandy), her father, Clint Eastwood (director), The Lady Chablis, John Cusack (John Kelso), Kevin Spacey (Jim Williams) and Jack Thompson (Sonny Seiler).

The unprepossessing interior, which does serve up good food.

Since one of my goals here is to eat as much Southern food as I can, I had that classic staple for breakfast: biscuits in sausage gravy. Very filling–and good.

And I decided to have dessert as well: bread pudding. (Do not food shame me! I don’t eat like this all the time!)

In the afternoon we spent walking around the Wormsloe Historic Site, From Wikipedia:

The Wormsloe State Historic Site, originally known as Wormsloe Plantation, is a state historic site near Savannah, Georgia, in the southeastern United States. The site consists of 822 acres (3.33 km2), protecting part of what was once the Wormsloe Plantation, a large estate established by one of the founders of colonial Georgia, Noble Jones. The site includes a 1.5-mile (2.4 km) dirt road lined with southern live oaks, the ruins of a small house with fortified walls built of tabby, a museum, and an area with recreations of colonial structures such as a blacksmithing forge and a house similar to those first built in the colony of Georgia (or as housing for enslaved people).

It was atmospheric even though not many of the original structures remain. Here’s part of the long and famous alley of live oaks. I love the Spanish Moss, which for some reason doesn’t seem to hang on the palm trees. Perhaps a botanical reader knows the reason.

I’m visiting with my oldest friends Tim and Betsy, whom I stay with when I go back to Cambridge, MA.  I’ve known Tim since 1967 when we lived in the same dorm at William and Mary; Betsy arrived as a transfer student two years later.

Here are the remains of Noble Jones’s house, a fortified structure built in 1745 not only as a home, but to withstand attacks by the Spanish and to monitor traffic passing through the narrows of the adjacent Skidaway River.  The walls were built of “tabby,” an early form of cement made of equal volumes of water, sand, lime, and ground oyster shells. (The shells were obtained from copious Native American middens.)

And after considerable discussion in the morning, we decided to have dinner at a place of great repute—the Driftaway Cafe, known for its seafood and excellent cooking. And yes, it lived up to its reputation.

As soon as I saw shrimp and grits on the menu, I wanted it. I asked the waiter if the portion was large, as I was famished, and she replied, “Yes, it’s very big.” And it was: a huge bowl of grits made with four types of cheese, loaded with plump fresh shrimp, and studded with bacon bits. I could barely finish it (washed down with sweet tea, of course), and I was glad I didn’t order the fried green tomatoes (another Southern dish) as an appetizer. All evening long I would groan sporadically, “Oy, am I full!”

This was by far the best shrimp and grits I’ve ever had: a Platonic dish!

I was pretty much spot on about predicting when Vashti and Armon’s brood would hatch. I guessed Saturday or Sunday and, sure enough, some time between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Sunday, a brood of eight was seen in Botany Pond.  I wasn’t there, but my colleague Peggy Mason, neuroscientist and member of Team Duck, spotted them.

Sadly, one duckling was “off,” and couldn’t swim or hold its head up. It got stuck in the drain, and then in the rocks, and finally expired. Peggy removed the little carcass from the pond and we were all very sad.

The good news is that we’re left with seven healthy ducklings, whose first job was a swimming tour of the pond behind Vashti to get their bearings (they do learn the layout of Botany Pond within a day, as they’re smart as well as cute).

Vashti is a good mom, even trying to help the “off” duckling by nudging it, but she couldn’t help it.  She’s very solicitous towards the ducklings, and Armon stays nearby but doesn’t bother them.

Two members of Team Duck will be feeding them and looking out for them until my return. Everybody got fed yesterday (tiny pellets for the ducklings), though it’s not clear that the ducklings ate, as they survive on the remaining yolk in their bellies during their first day on the water. They will be fed twice a day.

And so, here are Vashti and her hard-won brood of seven; all photos by Peggy Mason. I am jealous as I was not there to see Hatch Day.

Vashti and the Magnificent Seven:

They are of course heavily imprinted on Mom and stay very close to her.

I was glad to see that they all made it onto the rocks and then from the rocks to the ground, where they huddled under Vashti to get warm as well as to get coated in her feather oil, which waterproofs them until they’re old enough to produce their own

Huddling under Mom.  I hope they all make it to fledging!  But Vashti has proven to be a good mom.

Well, I got my tuches to Savannah at about noon yesterday, and it was already steaming hot.  Since our Air B&B didn’t open until 4 pm (why so late?), I had to cool my heels somewhere for a few hours, so I decided to visit the Telfair Museum (a trio of museums downtown), buy a pass, check my bags, get some food, and return for some art-gawking before making my way to the apartment (conveniently located in downtown Savannah).

I parked my luggage at the Jespson Museum, got a recommendation for lunch, and slowly ambled through the famous squares of downtown Savannah to the Little Duck Diner (!), which looks exactly like the picture at the link. It’s duck-themed and serves duck in various guises, but of course I eschewed the waterfowl dishes. Here’s how it looks from the outside:

A logo from the menu (artist unidentified).

The menu is here, and I asked the waiter for recommendations, which is how I came up with the avocado grilled cheese sandwich, with two types of cheese, bacon, avocado, and tomato.  I ordered iced tea, and was asked “plain or sweet?”. You know you’re in the South when they ask you that, and of course I got the sweet tea, which, as usual, was so sweet it was almost like liquid dessert. That’s how the “table wine of the South” is served. Lunch:

On my walk to the restaurant, I noticed a small hole-in-the-wall store that sold only cobblers and variations on banana pudding—two dessert specialities of the South—and stopped in to plug the dessert-shaped hole in my being.  Again, the place had a duck motif!

The place was The Peach Cobbler Factory, of which there are several branches After ascertaining that the Peach Cobbler was made from canned peaches (fresh fruits are out of season), I had the banana pudding instead. It was a generous portion of that Southern treat, embedded in which were two vanilla wafers (obligatory) and a huge hunk of red velvet cake. It was excellent, and filled the remaining lacuna in my stomach:

I passed this restaurant after lunch, which had a truly Southern seafood menu (click to enlarge). I must get shrimp and grits on this trip. And I would die for some boiled (green) peanuts, which are delicious and which I’ve had only in Georgia

Oy, was it hot! I ambled back to the Jepson Center (one of the trio of museums), where they featured the art of Ossabaw Island, one of the 100 or so Sea Islands near the coast of Georgia (Savannah’s on the ocean). Like most of these, Ossabaw is accessible only by ferry and guided tour.  I’m keen to visit Sapelo Island, the home of the last community of Gullah people, a group of black Southerners with their own language and distinctive culture.  (They were, of course, enslaved before and during the Civil War.) Here’s an example of the Gullah language, also called Geechee, a creole language that mixes English and African words:

The art was local, but I was most interested in two paintings by Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese emigrant whom most of us geezers know as a mystic and author of The Prophet (1923), a collection of quasi-mystical fables that many hippies and New Agers revered as “wisdom”. It was immensely popular and has been translated into many languages, but I wouldn’t recommend reading it.

I was surprised to learn that Gibran actually regarded himself more as an artist than a writer, and two of his paintings were at the museum. The first is a self portrait, which I photographed. The details of the painting are in the second photo below:

And a portrait of Gibran’s mother. The guy was a pretty good painter!

An artist from Ossabaw island painting in the Museum and photographed from above:

I might as well put up some photos from Botany Pond, as the ducklings will have hatched when I return (I timed this trip badly, but had no idea that Vashti would be nesting now).  The eggs should hatch today or tomorrow, and apparently one was rejected from the nest, as it was found below it but some distance from the ledge.

First, turtles. I’ve now seen all five, so they survived the winter, and they love to bask on the rocks. I believe that there is one yellow-bellied slider (Trachemys scripta scripta) and two red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans; they are subspecies) in the photo below.

We call this “turtle yoga”:

Nuzzling:

The pair of wood ducks (Aix sponsa) are there nearly every day, but they really should be mating and nesting. We have no tree holes at the pond (a sine qua non for this species to breed), so I have no idea what they’re doing. They are gorgeous, though.

The male (I haven’t named either one):

And the female:

Finally, Vashti on her nest. I’m worried that when the ducklings hatch, they and Vashti will be assaulted by the undocumented drakes who visit the pond. It’s probably good that I’m gone, as I’d be beside myself with anxiety. I have two very reliable associates who are taking care of the waterfowl in my absence.

Note that the nest is lined with soft feathers that she plucked from her breast.

(Armon is still here, ineffectually trying to drive away interloper drakes.)

A close up. Vashti is immobile when on the nest, so I can get quite close to her, but do so only to ensure that she’s still there (she’s hard to see):

On to more adventures in Savannah. Stay tuned.

There’s a free new article in Boston Magazine called “Can Steven Pinker save Harvard?” (subtitle: “But the celebrity professor’s own record raises a question: Is he the right guy for the job?”)  It’s the same-old-same old, recycling every accusation about Pinker that’s come down the pike (association with Bad People, unwarranted belief in progress, hereditarianism, love of capitalism, work on evolutionary psychology etc.), with nothing that you haven’t read before.  And yes, they do provide talking heads to give some pushback, but it’s all irrelevant in light of the title question.

Pinker helped form the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, now comprising 200 people, and they’re working on issues like freedom of speech, institutional neutrality, defusing DEI, extirpating bias, and so on.  It’s really a dumb question to ask whether just one of these people can “save Harvard”, and of course the answer is “we’ll see.” The article is totally a hit piece, but it’s slight for such a long piece, and adds nothing to the literature. But you can click below to read it for free.

Jesse Singal takes it apart at his Substack website, but you won’t be able to read his whole response. See the bottom for a screenshot.

The Boston Magazine piece is very long, but I’ll quote just the “j’accuse” bits and a few other things (indented). My own text is flush left.

J’Accuse!

Steven Pinker is one of the most famous—and divisive—academics in America. A cognitive psychologist at Harvard, he’s spent five decades writing about how we think, picking fights with the left, and wading into culture wars that most professors avoid. Bill Gates calls him a favorite writer. His critics call him a cover for racists. He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories. He’s also, right now, one of the loudest voices pushing Harvard to change.

. . . But Pinker’s critics—and there are many, especially in academia—argue that he’s guilty of exactly what he decries: my-side bias, ideological blinders, a willingness to engage with far-right figures in ways that give them legitimacy. He says he doesn’t set out to spark controversy—though he seems to welcome it when it comes. But it’s a double-edged sword in a dangerous time: Pinker has leaped into the fray of what ails Harvard—and higher education in general—starting with his own questions about our universities: What are they doing? Who are they for? Where are they going?

. . . . In The Blank Slate, published in 2002, Pinker argued against a prevailing orthodoxy that we’re born without any innate characteristics, shaped entirely by environment and culture. Instead, he made the case that genetics plays a significant role in how our minds work and who we become. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) detailed the long-term historical decline in violence, and Enlightenment Now (2018) made the case for reason and science creating a world of well-being and possibility foreign to earlier epochs. Those last two got Pinker a lot of heat for putting a sunny spin on the way things are now, especially among left-leaning thinkers who have called him a cheerleader for Western capitalism, blind to the inequalities it produces. And The Blank Slate has gotten Pinker criticized over the idea that biology is destiny, which leads into dangerous territory: racial differences, eugenics, the question of who gets to define human nature and why.

Yadda yadda yadds. But wait! There’s more! Louis Menand, with whom I’ve crossed swords by claiming that there’s no “truth” that can be derived from literature, shows up again arguing that Pinker’s ideas “lack nuance.”

The Blank Slate was much praised for opening up the nature-nurture debate—it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, but it also garnered some now-wait-a-minute reviews that sometimes attacked Pinker for oversimplifying things. Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club, a Pulitzer-winning intellectual and cultural history of late-19th- and early-20th-century America, reviewed the book skeptically in the New Yorker. Pinker’s villains, Menand wrote, were “social scientists, progressive educators, radical feminists, academic Marxists, liberal columnists, avant-garde arts types, government planners, and postmodernist relativists.” His heroes were cognitive scientists and ordinary folks. “I wish I could say that Pinker’s view of the world of ideas is more nuanced than this,” Menand wrote.

It isn’t just Pinker’s conclusions that have drawn fire—it’s his method. “By far the nastiest and most aggressive academic responses I have seen come from humanities professors when there are ideas from the sciences that they see as encroaching on their territories,” Pinker told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. “That’s when you get rage and withering condescension.” It’s not hard to find.

. . . And Daniel Smail, a Harvard history professor, wrote a withering takedown of The Better Angels of Our Nature for an academic journal, dismissing Pinker’s optimism about civilization as naive. His verdict: “Better Angels is not a work of history. It is best understood as a work of moral and historical theology.”

Give me a break. Pinker’s assessment of civilization’s progress is absolutely convincing. Would you reather live now, or in 1400?  And although Pinker is optimistic in view of past progress, he constantly tempers his optimism by saying that we have no crystal ball that can tell us if, for example, there will be a nuclear war.

Now here’s an absolutely stupid accusation:

. . . . Still, the right had a field day. Neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer ran a headline that read, in part: “Harvard Jew Professor Admits the Alt-Right Is Right About Everything.” The left hammered Pinker for giving ammunition to extremists, regardless of his intent.

And this is the pattern: Bad actors and dark thinkers have appropriated Pinker’s research and writing for their own ends—and Pinker has done little to stop them.

I’m crying crocodile tears over that.  Who among us can prevent the “bad actors and dark thinkers” from appropriating our ideas? If Pinker went after everybody who did, or who criticized him (he does from time to time engage in rebutting criticism), he’d have no time for his own work.  Oh, and there’s Pinker’s involvement in the Epstein case–which he now regrets:

Then, of course, there is Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein collected heavyweight intellectuals, and in terms of funding and gifts seemed to have a particular affinity for Harvard. Pinker attended a few gatherings where he was present, but claims he never liked Epstein.

In 2008, Pinker’s friend and Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz defended Epstein, who had been charged with soliciting prostitution from a minor. Dershowitz had consulted Pinker for help interpreting the wording of a statute concerning the use of the mail to solicit minors to engage in prostitution or sexual activity. For that crime, Epstein pleaded guilty and served 13 months in prison.

Pinker says he doesn’t blame Dershowitz for defending Epstein, nor does he believe he did anything wrong by helping interpret the law. “I believe in the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of legal representation of the accused,” Pinker says. “If I had known then what I know now about the extent of Epstein’s crimes, and that it would be used in his defense, I might have second thoughts.”

How many times have you heard this?  In fact, I wouldn’t even apologize were I Pinker. After all, I was on O. J. Simpson’s defense team, arguably doing something even worse than Pinker: giving help to someone who likely committed two murders (note that I didn’t testify or take money). Even rich or famous people deserve a fair trial.  And yet author Robert Huber insinuates that the guilt-by-association trope does erode Pinker’s reputation, using this weaselly trio of sentences, unworthy of a serious journalist:

. . . Pinker dismisses criticism of his connections as guilt by association—whether it’s Murray or Epstein, he insists that proximity isn’t endorsement. But the pattern is visible: years of polite yeses, a willingness to lend his credibility to people and platforms that most academics would avoid. At some point, the accumulation starts to speak for itself.

A digression: Cowboy boots:

In his office, Pinker, on sabbatical, is informal, wearing a sweater and jeans, and the cowboy boots he’s known for that give him another inch.

Yeah, but he got the idea from me (I don’t wear them because I’m short, though I am.)

The Big Question: Can Pinkah save Hahvahd? Another quote.

But writing op-eds is one thing. Could Pinker actually change anything?

In 2023, Pinker and five copresidents, along with dozens of other Harvard faculty, formed the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, made up now of some 200 members, which regularly challenges university policies and pushes for change.

Whether and how much this Council changes Harvard is not up to Pinker, but to the President, the deans, and the faculty. At least he’s trying to do something according to his principles. And, to be fair to Huber, the article does note that some progress has already been made, like the Council having an unprecedented meeting with the Harvard Corporation, which really runs Harvard.   Pinker is “cautiously optimistic” that the Council will effect salubrious change. In the end, however, Huber’s title question isn’t close to being answered, mainly because it’s early days yet:

As always, Pinker is convinced he’s pursuing the truth as he finds it. His method has made him a star. It’s also left a trail of complications—the associations, the bad actors who cite his work, the questions about what doors he’s opened and for whom.

Whether that makes him the right person to lead Harvard out of its current troubles is a question the university will have to answer for itself. Pinker, for his part, shows no signs of slowing down. He carries on as if he is certain his work and beliefs deserve whatever airing he decides to give them.

So, that’s the Big Conclusion.  Clearly the University, not the author has to answer it. So why was this article written in the first place?

Jesse Singal wrote this piece about the Boston Magazine article. It’s paywalled, but read what you can by clicking below:

A couple of quotes:

Boston magazine just published an article about Steven Pinker headlined “Can Steven Pinker Save Harvard?” Subheadline: “But the celebrity professor’s own record raises a question: Is he the right guy for the job?”

First of all, I don’t get that “but.” It’s not referencing anything! It’s like the original headline was going to be something like “Steven Pinker Wants to Save Harvard,” and then someone changed the headline without changing the subheadline.

Setting aside my overreaction to a minor copy-editing error, this conceit is also a bit much — it’s very magazine-y. No one, including Steven Pinker, thinks Steven Pinker is (single-handedly) going to “save Harvard.” The article is really about a few different things, most of them summed up in the very first paragraph: “His critics call him a cover for racists,” writes author Robert Huber. “He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories.”

. . . I find it surprising, in 2026, that adherents of the more sweeping anti-Pinker view have done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position (I’m going to table the narrower and more standard academic debate over whether he has gotten this or that wrong in his books; obviously, it’s legitimate to closely read and critically respond to the work of as influential a figure as Pinker). Their myopia on this matter can, I think, be explained by their own form of blank slatism. They believe that people are more or less blank slates, with regard to political opinions, until they decide which scientific beliefs to adopt. Similarly, political ideologies are only adopted because they are seen as having scientific legitimacy.

So, the argument goes: Without figures like Pinker, who are at best useful idiots and at worst quiet but intentional enablers, the alt-right would have far less intellectual fuel and wouldn’t have gained the power it has gained. Or if they aren’t arguing this, I don’t understand how they could possibly have remained so mad at Pinker for so many years.

In the end, or so I think, a lot of opposition to Pinker, whatever form it takes, derives from people who buy into blank-slateism.  Of course very few people are pure blank-slaters, but there are degrees, and in general “progressives” tend to be on the side of seeing differences between people as due very largely to environmental influences.  This derives from a Marxist view of people as generally malleable, so that any genetic effect on differences should be ignored, minimized, or even demonized.

Pinker has spent much of his career emphasizing that a lot of what makes people different is due to their harboring different genes—genes that of course interact with different environments (language is a good example).  And so he’s demonized.

Facilitated communication, or “FC,” is the supposed ability of people who can’t speak and are severely handicapped to “communicate” by having a “helper” guide them in pointing out letters or words.  Wikipedia describes it this way:

Facilitated communication (FC), or supported typing, is a scientifically discredited technique which claims to allow non-verbal people, such as those with autism, to communicate. The technique involves a facilitator guiding the disabled person’s arm or hand in an attempt to help them type on a keyboard or other such device that they are unable to properly use if unfacilitated.

There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and among disability advocacy organizations that FC is a pseudoscience. Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, rather than the disabled person. The facilitator may believe they are not the source of the messages due to the ideomotor effect, which is the same effect that guides a Ouija board and dowsing rods.  Studies have consistently found that FC is unable to provide the correct response to even simple questions when the facilitator does not know the answers to the questions (e.g., showing the patient but not the facilitator an object).  In addition, in numerous cases disabled persons have been assumed by facilitators to be typing a coherent message while the patient’s eyes were closed or while they were looking away from or showing no particular interest in the letter board.

James Todd called facilitated communication “the single most scientifically discredited intervention in all of developmental disabilities.”

And indeed, I thought FC had been discredited a long time ago. (I posted about it here in 2017 when the idea was used as an excuse for sexual assault.) But no, it’s reemerged with the publication of new bestselling novel, Upward Bound, touted by, among others, the New York Times, which lately has a real penchant for woo. The novel (#305 on the Amazon overall list today) has drawn huge attention because the author, 28 year old Woody Brown, is severely autistic and cannot speak. Yet he got a degree in English from UCLA followed by an MFA degree at Columbia, doing all assignments through a facilitator—his mother Mary.  She herself worked as a “story analyst for Hollywood studios.”

I’ve put a video below showing Brown “writing” by pointing at a letter board held by his mother, who then interprets the pointing. It’s not convincing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The novel is below (screenshot goes to publisher).

And yes, the NYT appears to have bought the whole thing, assuming that Woody actually wrote the novel. Read their article by clicking below, or finding the piece archived here).

A couple of excerpts from the NYT:

Woody Brown knew he wanted to be a writer when he was 8 years old. Around that age, he made up stories about his alter ego, Cop Woody, a hero who went around saving people.

The tales stunned his mother, Mary Brown. She’d been reading to him since he was a baby, but never imagined that he could create his own elaborate plots.

As a toddler, Woody was diagnosed with severe autism. Doctors concluded he couldn’t process language, and said it was pointless to explain things to him or talk to him in complex sentences. Whenever Woody spoke, it sounded like shrieks and gibberish.

But Mary came to realize that her son understood more than he appeared to. He would become hysterical if they deviated from their daily routine, but if she explained why they had to stop at Target before getting lunch at McDonalds, he would calmly follow her into the store. At 5, Woody learned to communicate by pointing at letters to spell out words, using a laminated card. He began responding to Mary’s questions, first with single-word answers, and later with short sentences. When he started spelling out his Cop Woody stories, Mary recognized some of the plots, which were lifted from the headlines. Woody had been following the news on the TV and radio.

“That’s how Mom figured out that I was listening to everything,” Woody told me when we met on a recent morning at his parents’ home in Monrovia, Calif., where he lives. To express this, Woody tapped letters on a board with his right index finger, while Mary, who was seated next to him on the couch, followed his finger taps and repeated the words aloud.

When he learned to communicate by spelling, it felt like an escape hatch had opened, Woody explained.

“Miraculous discovery,” he spelled. “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open — left ajar, not flung wide, because the majority of people still doubted me.”

. . .While not strictly autobiographical, the stories in “Upward Bound” are shaped by Woody’s experience. He describes the agony of being unable to share his thoughts or control his verbal and physical tics, and the frustration of being underestimated by people who look at him and see an uncomprehending, mentally disabled person.

“I wanted to reach neurotypical readers, the well intentioned people who don’t realize that we are the same inside,” Woody explained. “I have all the thoughts, dreams, longings and intelligence as any neurotypical person. I just present a little differently.”

The author of the piece, Alexandra Alter, visited Woody and his mom, and describes the interview as if Woody himself were answering her questions by pointing at the letterboard. The only reference to the possibility that it’s Mary rather than Woody who is speaking is this:

Some of the communication methods Mukhopadhyay teaches have drawn criticism from language experts who argue that the person holding the board might be influencing or misinterpreting comments from a disabled person. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association doesn’t recommend the method, and put out a statement in 2019 warning that the resulting words might not reflect the disabled person’s intentions.

There are also skeptics who doubt someone as severely autistic as Woody can form and express sophisticated thoughts, much less write a novel.

Mary said she isn’t surprised some people question Woody’s abilities — it took her years to recognize what he was capable of. But she bristles at critics who say the way they communicate is harmful or manipulative.

“How on earth am I harming him?” she said.

Mary has also faced questions over whether she’s influencing or shaping Woody’s writing, which she insists she isn’t. When Woody is conversing, his finger flies across the board, but when he’s writing, Mary makes him spell out each word slowly. He can also type on a keyboard, but prefers to write with the letter board, because his poor fine motor skills make it hard to hit the right keys, and the time spent fixing typos makes him lose focus.

That’s the only reference in this long, glowing article to the possibility of facilitated communication, and there is no reference to the long, sad history of FC—a history that has made investigators almost universally say that it’s the facilitator and not the disabled person who is doing the “speaking.” (For a free Frontline documentary showing this, go here.)

Now it’s time for you to see Woody communicate. This video comes from NBC’s Today show, and Woody’s novel is breathlessly pronounced “deeply heartfelt and moving” and “authentic” by Jenna Bush Hager (W.’s daughter). Pay attention to the pointing by Woody and interpretation by Mary.  Seriously, I cannot see at all a string of meaningful words.

As one correspondent wrote, “[Woody] is frequently not looking at the board while pointing, AND, when they show what he’s pointing to, it doesn’t correspond at all to actual words. I’m actually blown away that they showed this so clearly.” Indeed!  Didn’t NBC get a bit dubious about this, much less the NYT, whose reporter saw the same thing?  All I can say is that if this is really facilitated communication from Woody, it would be the first real facilitated communication ever documented. But it wasn’t tested, as they did no test on Woody. (They could, example, test his abilities by having Mary interpret things that only Woody knows, or using another facilitator.)  Has Jenna even heard of facilitated communication?

Now I’m not ruling this out as authentic communication, but the demonstration above doesn’t increase my priors. Shame on the NBC for buying this without doubts.

Fortunately, at least two people wonder if Woody’s novel is his own composition or Mary’s. The first is Daniel Engber at the Atlantic, who wrote the critical article below (archived here if it’s paywalled).

Engber watched the NBC clip, and says this:

But if you watch the footage closely, and at one-quarter speed, it doesn’t look like he is spelling anything at all. Brown’s finger can be seen, at several points, in close-up, from a camera just behind his shoulder—and what he taps onto the board seems disconnected from the sentiments that Mary speaks aloud.

Katharine Beals, a linguist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania who has a son with autism, has studied Brown’s controversial method of communication since the early 2000s, and she has cataloged the ways in which it fails. She told me that she found the clip from NBC to be upsetting. Beals conceded that it can be hard in some cases to say whether such communication is real—but not in this one. “This isn’t subtle,” she said. “You can see that he’s not pointing to the letters.”

On YouTube, where the clip from NBC is posted, viewer comments are aggressive, ranging from ridicule to accusations of fraud. These are snap judgments based on a single, highly edited video; in the end, there is no way to prove or disprove from afar Brown’s capacity to write. But several professional organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, have issued formal warnings against the use of Rapid Prompting, a training method for communication from which Brown’s approach is derived. “There is uncertainty regarding who does the spelling,” ASHA says. And given that the method may mislead, “children and their families can incur serious harm.”

Of course there is a strong desire by Mary, and all facilitated communicators, to believe that they’re merely translating someone else’s thoughts—all the more reason to do appropriate tests and controls.

More from Engber

I emailed Brown, directly and through his publisher, to request an interview and ask if he or his mother would explain the spelling process as it appeared on the Today show. I got an emailed statement back. “I can understand why people are curious—even skeptical—about my method of communication,” it said. The statement continues:

It is mysterious and confounding to see a severely autistic nonspeaker perform acts of scholarship and fiction writing if you don’t presume intelligence in a disabled person. I have been using the same green board since I was in middle school and I find the letters and colors very calming. A keyboard requires specific aim and is unforgiving of error. I have a distinct brain but imperfect aim. This may look chaotic but in this way I keep up a steady rhythm with my finger that helps me stay on track. I am no savant. I came to novel writing like most published authors. I have read many books, attended good colleges, and got my MFA in writing at one of the country’s best programs. The only difference is that I communicate in a different manner.

Clinicians quickly came to understand that the method was susceptible to a very powerful “Ouija-board effect”: A facilitator could unwittingly deliver subtle and subconscious prompts—gentle pressure on a person’s wrist, perhaps—that shaped the outcome of the process. When the typers were subjected to formal “message-passing tests,” in which they would be asked to name an object or a picture that they’d seen while their helper wasn’t in the room, they almost always failed. Even kids who had produced fluid written work seemed incapable, under those conditions, of saying anything at all.

By 1994, the method was broadly disavowed. Yet a core group of true believers continued to promote its use. The New Jersey professor was among them. So was Mary Brown. In 2011, Mary posted on an autism-community website that her son’s use of facilitated communication had “helped him keep up at grade level.” The post has since been taken down, and FC has given way in recent years to its purportedly more reliable offshoots: Rapid Prompting and a similar approach called Spelling to Communicate. Now, instead of holding the speller’s hand, most facilitators hold the letter board instead. At first glance, the risk of influence seems less acute.

But wait, another fan of pseudoscience likes it! Yep, it’s RFK, Jr.:

ASHA has described Rapid Prompting and Spelling to Communicate as bearing “considerable similarity” to FC and thus as “pseudoscience.” But a formal disavowal by experts simply isn’t what it used to be. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared himself a fan of these methods: Doubters are delusional, he said in 2021; they remind him of doctors who still deny the harms of childhood vaccines. In January, Kennedy appointed two letter-board users and an expert trainer in Spelling to Communicate to the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Meanwhile, an audio series about nonspeaking autistic children who allegedly display their telepathic and clairvoyant powers via letter board has been listed among Apple’s most popular podcasts for more than a year.

Sales of Upward Bound are soaring too. Following the Today show segment, Brown’s book reached Amazon’s top-10 list for books of any kind. This was preceded by a platinum-level rollout that included starred advance reviews, awestruck and largely uncritical features in The New York Times and The Guardian, and testimonials from A-list novelists including Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle, Rivka Galchen, and Mona Simpson. This is the kind of marketing that any debut literary author would kill to have.

Critics of Rapid Prompting and related methods are aghast. “This really feels like a crescendo,” Beals said. “It’s really, really out of control.”

. . . The problem is, reasonable doubts about the book have been overlooked as well—by Penguin Random House and by the media outlets that have hyped it. (The dewy-eyed feature in the Times does provide, in passing, an attenuated paraphrase of ASHA’s statement about Rapid Prompting.) Then there is the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work. Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”

It’s always unwise to take something on faith, particularly something that has been previously discredited and whose present instantiation can be tested but wasn’t. Although Engber likes the book and recommends it, he’s dubious about authorship.  Likewise, I am not willing to accept Woody Brown as the author.

Neither is Freddie deBoer in the article he recently put up. Its title tells the tale (click to read):

deBoer is even more skeptical than Engber:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novel Upward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.

The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests…. This is the inconvenient, damning reality.

So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling,” which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.

The Times article never grapples with the evidence. Instead, it substitutes anecdote for science: the mother “realized” her son understood more than expected; the facilitator “saw tension evaporate.” But these are precisely the kinds of subjective impressions that controlled studies were designed to test and, where appropriate, falsify. The best we get from the review’s author, Alexandra Alter, as far as an acknowledgement of FC’s discredited reality lies in these paragraphs:

It goes on, but you get the points: Woody is likely not composing anything himself, the writing is probably due to his mother, the NYT and NBC are uber-credulous, and the buying public, eager to embrace woo and a feel-good story, is making the book a best seller. Oh, and this credulous acceptance of a method discredited for years is harmful to autistic people, to science, and to reason as a whole.’

deBoer spends a lot of space attacking the NYT, as he’s done in the past, but he does give some insight into why the paper is touting FC so hard:

As with so many recent bad publicshing decisions, rehabilitating FC reflects the paper’s increasing dependence on a subscriber-driven business model, where maintaining the sensibilities and emotional investments of its core readership – affluent brownstone liberals who would prefer the pleasant version of reality, thanks – often takes precedence over adversarial truth-telling. In an earlier era, when advertising and broad retail circulation were more central to its finances, the Times had greater latitude to challenge its most dedicated audience. Today, with digital subscribers a) the dominant revenue base and b) heavily drawn from demographics that are highly educated, high income, and progressive-leaning, there’s a clear incentive not to alienate a readership that is drawn to narratives of underdog triumphs and redemptive uplift. Facilitated communication fits neatly into that worldview, offering a reassuring story about disability that flatters the moral intuitions of well-meaning readers while sidestepping the far more difficult reality. The result is a kind of audience capture that encourages credulity precisely where skepticism is most needed. Who wants to read a downer story about genuinely non-verbal, deeply disabled people on their phone while they ride the 4 train uptown to take Kayleigh to her $20,000/year dance lessons?

This may well explain the Times‘s recent touting of religion, whose factual claims could also be seen as pseudoscientific (indeed, Ross Douthat’s evidence for God, presented in the NYT, is based on science).  It does no harm to criticize religion, for the NYT subscribers are likely soft on it. If they’re not believers, they’re “believers in belief”: people who aren’t themselves religious but see faith as an essential social glue essential for “the little people” who hold society together.But Ceiling Cat help you if you promote nonbelief!

h/t: Greg

Addendum by Greg Mayer

The Times just went deeper into the FC morass. The columnist Frank Bruni, who should know better– he’s a professor at Duke, fer chrissakes– just went all in on the dubious book: Let’s leave readers with a happier thought. I’m reading a novel, “Upward Bound,” written by a young man named Woody Brown who was diagnosed with severe autism as a child and thought to be incapable of sophisticated communication. He still struggles with speech, as our Times colleague Alexandra Alter explained in an excellent recent profile of him. But he’s an effective writer, complaining in “Upward Bound” about caretakers’ tendency to let their autistic charges idle “as if time means nothing to people who have nothing but time.” His book takes readers inside the thoughts of someone like him. And it’s a revelation that forces you to ask: How much do we overlook in people — how many gifts do we fail to nurture — by making overly hasty judgments? Woody’s mom believed in him. Then college and graduate-school professors did. Then editors. Tapping letters on a board to spell out his answers to Alexandra’s questions, he told her: “I thought I would be caged my whole life, and then the door was open.” Now he’s free — and he’s flying. It’s in his weekly dialogue with Bret Stephens. While Stephens didn’t endorse FC, any sane journalist would have pushed back, so his silence on it in the column is a black mark on him, as well. If you want to see how FC works, watch the Frontline documentary “Prisoners of Silence” (available free here), which thoroughly debunked FC– in 1992! When I taught a course on “Science & Pseudoscience”, I used to show this to the class, because it shows how pseudosciences work, how they are evangelized, how their proponents reject criticism by employing well-known hedges and dodges, and the harm they can do.

Today’s photos are of lizards, come from Ephraim Heller, and were taken in Trinidad and Tobago. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Many people have said to me “the hummingbirds are nice, but what about the lizards of Trinidad and Tobago?” Perhaps not literally true, but grant me poetic license. Preparing this post gave me an opportunity to learn about lizards. Trinidad and Tobago is home to about 49 species of lizards in 11 families in 4 clades.

Clade #1: T&T is home to four iguanian families (Iguania): Dactyloidae (anoles), Iguanidae (iguanas), Polychrotidae (polychrotids), and Tropiduridae (treerunners). Iguania are characterized by visual communication (dewlaps, crests, color change), fleshy non-forked tongues, and sit-and-wait predatory behavior, along with various osteological arrangements.

Here’s a Caribbean treerunner (Plica caribeana):

The green Iguana (Iguana iguana) possesses a parietal eye, a small, pale scale on the top of the head that is a photosensory organ, connected to the pineal gland via its own nerve pathway. It cannot form images, but it detects changes in light intensity and shadow, giving the animal an early warning system against aerial predators approaching from above. It also contributes to circadian rhythm regulation and thermoregulation, which is particularly important for a reptile that ferments its food. Green iguanas eat leaves, relying on a hindgut microbial fermentation system to break down plant fiber.

Green iguanas have a social structure. Dominant males hold territories that contain smaller males, females, and juveniles, with larger males claiming better display perches and more access to females. During mating season males shift toward red or orange hues, becoming more conspicuous; a defeated male that loses his territory returns to a dull brown within hours and holds this color until he reclaims his position.

This one is angry with me:

Trinidad has only one native anole, the leaf anole (Anolis planiceps). Other species are introductions that arrived from other Caribbean islands, likely through human commerce. When a leaf anole detects a threat it can run bipedally, a behavior seen in a number of small lizards and interpreted as a burst-speed adaptation.

Here’s an unidentified anole. Perhaps a reader can identify it:

Clade #2: T&T is home to three gecko families (Gekkota): Gekkonidae (true geckos), Phyllodactylidae (leaf-toed geckos), and Sphaerodactylidae (sphaerodactyl geckos).

Gekkota are distinguished primarily by their feet and eyes. Most geckos have adhesive toe pads with microscopic hair-like structures (setae) that generate van der Waals forces, allowing them to cling to smooth surfaces. The eye is typically large with a vertical or elliptical pupil, and the eyelid is fused into a fixed transparent scale (the “spectacle”) rather than a moveable lid.

I photographed the northern turnip-tailed gecko (Thecadactylus rapicauda). The name comes from the tail, a fat-storage organ. It is also detachable: autotomy (self-amputation) serves as a predator-distraction mechanism. The regenerated tail is typically wider at the tip than at the base, allegedly looking like a turnip. One cool but useless fact: this gecko is able to lick the transparent scale covering each eye.

For completeness, here’s a bit of information about the two lizard clades that I did not photograph.

Clade #3: there are two species of Amphisbaenia in the family amphisbaenidae. These are legless worm lizards. Adapted for living underground, the key distinguishing features are: annular (ring-like) body scales arranged in complete rings around the body, which no true lizard possesses; a highly consolidated, rigid skull adapted for head-first burrowing, with the two sides of the skull fused to form a battering ram; vestigial or absent eyes covered by scales; no external ear openings; and reduced or absent limbs in most families. They move using a unique accordion-like rectilinear locomotion rather than lateral undulation. Sadly, I have no photos of worm lizards as they live underground.

Clade #4: finally, there are three scincoid families (Scincoidea): Scincidae (skinks), Teiidae (teiids), and Gymnophthalmidae (microteiids). Scincoidea is defined primarily by molecular phylogenetics, not by a single morphological characteristic. Bony plates underlaying the scales are present in skinks, giving them their characteristic armored, smooth texture.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “rock2“, comes with a note that says this: “An oldie from 2006 today. Next week’s will also be a resurrection.” The artist must be on hols.

Is Mo right about the black silk and the meteorite?  Well, at least half right. The Kaaba is indeed covered with a cloth made of silk, but the meteorite is questionable. Here’s what Wikipedia says, along with a picture. (The stone is called Ajar al-Aswad.)

The Black Stone (Arabic: الحجر الأسود, romanized: al-Ḥajar al-Aswad) is a rock set into the eastern corner of the Kaaba, the ancient building in the center of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is revered by most Muslims as an Islamic relic which, according to tradition, dates back to the time of Adam and Eve.

The stone was venerated at the Kaaba in pre-Islamic Arabia. It is sometimes considered a baetyl. According to tradition, it was set intact into the Kaaba’s wall by Muhammad in 605, five years before his first revelation. Since then, it has been broken into fragments and is now encased in a silver frame on the side of the Kaaba. Its physical appearance is that of a fragmented, dark rock, polished smooth by the hands of pilgrims. It has often been described as a meteorite,  but it has never been analysed with modern techniques, so its scientific origins remain the subject of speculation.

Muslim pilgrims circle the Kaaba as a part of the tawaf ritual during the Hajj and many try to stop to kiss the Black Stone, emulating the kiss that Islamic tradition records that it received from Muhammad.While the Black Stone is revered, theologians emphasize that it has no divine significance and that its importance is historical in nature.

Saudi Press Agency (SPA), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons