Why Evolution is True Feed

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

It was 12 years ago when I posted the first video below of Sarah McLachlan singing what is perhaps her most famous song, “Angel.” I came across it again yesterday and decided to pair it with another version.  The first one, recorded in her home studio, shows her well-known ability to go between her “chest voice” (normal range) and “head voice” (high notes, like a falsetto or yodeling). It’s a lovely song, and was written by her and usually performed only with her own piano accompaniment (there are a lot of versions on the Internet). My earlier post describes what the song’s about.

When I looked up the song on Wikipedia, I found this:

On 8 April 2000, McLachlan performed “Angel” with Carlos Santana on guitar at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in Pasadena, California. The show was televised on Fox TV and released on the DVD Supernatural Live – An Evening with Carlos Santana and Friends.

And of course I hoped that song was on video, too, as I’m a Santana fan. Sure enough, it was, though Santana humbly embroiders the voice and piano with soft accompaniment and a short solo (starts at 2:24).  I would have preferred to see him cut loose with an electric solo, but of course it’s not appropriate for this song. Santna’s bit, though, was apparently improvised.

I can’t say that the version with Santana is better than the solo version, but how often do you get to hear two such different musicians play together?

It’s one of the commonplaces that young people who have gender dysphoria (“GD”) will experience both reduced psychiatric problems and reduced suicides if they proceed on to gender reassignment (GR) via “affirmative care”. The suicide claim was dispelled in 2024 by the Finnish investigators given below, who showed that both GD and GR, when compared to controls, do not show increased suicide beyond that predicted from psychiatric problems alone (they used controls).  That dispels the common claim by gender activists pushing GR: “Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?” (That’s for transitioning to female gender, but it can be reversed.)

A new paper from the same group, published in Acta Paediatrica, looks not at suicide but psychiatric “morbidity” (psychiatric problems).  The study was large, controlled, and takes advantage of the fact that in Finland every doctor visit is recorded for every citizen because of the country’s national health system.

The upshot is simple: children and young people (they used subjects up to 23 years old; henceforth called “subjects”) who sought treatment for GD had significantly more severe psychiatric problems and were referred far more often for “specialist level” treatment than were controls.  Those GD subjects were parsed into two groups: those who were given gender reassigment, and those who were not. The conventional wisdom is that if you have GD, then gender reassignment should significantly alleviate their dysphoria, measured by a reduced need for specialist psychiatric treatment.

The conventional wisdom was wrong: gender reassignment didn’t alleviate psychiatric compared to GD people who didn’t get reassignment. The conclusion is that gender reassignment, with its deleterious side effects, was not a good way to improve quality of life, at least measured by the need for psychiatric intervention.

Here’s how the term “gender reassignment” is used in the paper:

Medical GR interventions included masculinising/feminising hormonal treatments, chest masculinisation, and/or genital surgery (vaginoplasty/phalloplasty/metoidioplasty).

These treatments are all irreversible except that removed breasts can be restored by replacements.

Click below to access or download the pdf, or you can see the original paper online here.

As I mentioned, the sample size was large: there were 2,083 GD subjects who presented themselves for treatment, and for each of these subjects the investigators chose eight controls, four males and four females matched to the GD subjects by age and place of residence. The final controls numbered 16,643.

Here are the percentage of subjects who sought specialist-level psychiatric treatment between 2011-2019 (differences from 1996-2010 were in the same direction, but far more people who sought GD treatment had a history of specialized treatment in the later period. The authors don’t know the reason for the rise in GD-associated psychiatric difficulties, but it matches the rise in gender dysphoria in other places, including the U.S.

GD subjects

Sought specialized psychiatric treatment before the presentation for GD (“index date”):  47.9%
Sought specialized psychiatric treatment ≥2 years after the presentation for GD:               61.3%

Controls

Sought specialized psychiatric treatment before the presentation for GD (“index date”):  15.3%
Sought specialized psychiatric treatment ≥2 years after the presentation for GD:               14.2%

This shows that GD subjects, whether or not they went on to GR, initially had about three or more times the rate of psychiatric difficulties than did the controls. That is not new, as GD is generally related to psychiatric difficulties, and it’s likely that some people look for gender reassignment as a way to alleviate their gender dysphoria, or even as a way to alleviate general mental difficulties.  But GD subjects in general did not in general show a lessening of psychiatric difficulties after their presentation; in fact, the rate was increased by about 13.4%.

The important figures, though, are those showing whether or not GR treatment alleviated psychiatric difficulties. After all, that is the rationale for gender-reassignment treatment, whether it be hormones or surgery.  Here is Table 3 from the paper, with the last two columns being the important ones. They’re divided up by sex, and “GR-” means GD subjects not given gender reassignment, while “GR+” means GD subjects who were given gender reassignment. Click table to enlarge; I’ve put a red rectangle around the area of most importance:

This shows that GD subjects, both those who transitioned to female and those who transitioned towards male, did not have a reduction in psychiatric treatment contact (all contact, whether “specialized” or not) after their transition began or was completed. Au contraire: the psychiatric treatments went up sixfold for those transitioning to female genders and 2.5-fold for those transitioning towards male.

If you look at the third and four data columns, you can see the percentages of GD subjects who got psychiatric treatment for GD but who did not go on to reassignment. Curiously, the psychiatric treatment was more frequent in this group than in the group that went on to reassignment, but only before the data of first consultation for GD.

This difference between the third and fourth and the fifth and sixth data points on the first line is curious.  But what’s important here is that there is no marked alleviation of psychiatric contacts for GD subjects who went on to reassignment. They continue to consult psychiatrists, and at about the rate of GD subjects who didn’t go on to reassignment. Again, we don’t see the mitigation of psychiatric difficulties in GD patients that go on to surgery or hormones.  Since those procedures have deleterious side effects (anorgasmia and pronounced difficulties after surgery on genitals or even breasts), there is not a strong case to be made for gender reassignment of gender-dyphoric patients, at least in terms of alleviating mental illness.

The first two columns show the data for both male and female controls. Since they didn’t have consultations for GD, the “index date” for controls was given as the date that their matched GD subjects first had a consultation.  And, as expected, their psychiatric visits were far less numerous than the GD subjects two years after the index date (though the low levels of consultations for GR+ subjects compared to GR-subjects before the index date is still curious, and I may have missed the authors’ explanation).

This is just a cursory interpretation I’ve made after reading the paper twice, and I may have missed some data that feed into the authors’ conclusion below. What’s clear is that GD is associated with psychiatric disorders, though it may not be causal, and that gender reassignment does not improve mental health compared to dysphoric subjects who didn’t get reassigned.  All this suggests that “affirmative care” that puts GD subjects on the path to GR doesn’t, at least in this study, have the salubrious effects that are touted—as measured by the intensity of psychiatric treatment. Gender-reassigned subjects continue to suffer from mental disorders at a rate threefold to fivefold that of controls without gender dysphoria, so GR doesn’t come close to giving subjects the mental stability of controls.

The last paragraph of the paper gives what the authors see as the “Clinical Implications” of their results:

Regardless of gender, adolescents suffering from GD present with excessive psychiatric morbidity. Subsequent to medical GR, psychiatric treatment needs appear to increase. It should be noted that in some individuals, medical GR appears to be linked to deterioration in mental health. Possible mechanisms and vulnerable subgroups should be explored in future studies. The effects of medical GR and the expectations of the patient must be addressed before commencing the treatment. The considerable severe psychiatric morbidity prior to contacting the GIS, and its increase over time, suggest that for some of these adolescents, GD may be secondary to other mental health challenges. This underscores the need to thoroughly assess and appropriately treat mental disorders among those seeking GR before and after undergoing irreversible medical treatments. Psychiatric needs must be adequately met.

 

h/t: Christopher

Today I’m stealing (with permission) the photos of Aussie biologist Scott Ritchie, whose Facebook page is here.  And what better subject than kangaroos? Scott’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

My last report from my Melbourne to Sydney trip. From Depot Beach in New South Wales. It was epic. Stayed in a National Park cabin that looked out over the ocean. And at 5 o’clock our front lawn became the bar for Eastern Grey Kangaroos [Macropus giganteus]. And in the morning, you could take pictures of the kangaroos watching the sunrise. What could be better for a boy from Iowa?

We had a ring-side seat for roos. There would have been over a dozen here, not including joeys in the pouch:

The boys like a bit of rough and tumble:

They are smart to avoid those claws:

. . . just barely:

Squaring off:

I missed the kick shot. A sudden loud thump. Then the fight was over. One kick!

I don’t know how this is going to work!:

But somehow it does:

 

White-faced Heron [Egretta novaehollandiae] loves a roo too:

Cute:

Hanging loose:

Don’t trip, mom!:

Just in time for a smoke:

I hate pan pipes!:

It’s a tight fit:

Come on big fella. I’m already familied up:

Sunrise at Depot Beach:

There’s no real “rule” here, but simply Maher’s assertion—one that many people won’t sccept in the Time of Demonization—that people can do both good and bad things (it’s better to say that then brand someone as good or evil, though of course people can lean toward one side or another).

This monologue was prompted, of course, by recent revelations that Cesar Chavez was a sexual predator and rapist. Maher mentions others with such ambitendencies, including Thomas Jefferson, Michael Jackson, and Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who’s particularly vexing.

Maher tries to accept the fact that sometimes the bad comes with the good, and that’s really the only life lesson you can derive from this monologue. But it’s worth pondering. For if you see what happens to people like Chavez, who are written off as too evil to extol in any way, you see the inability of many people to accept nuance (and no, I’m not saying that there should be Cesar Chavez high schools.)

The other guests include Lloyd Blankfein (former CEO of Goldman Sachs), Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted a mere ten days as Trump’s communications director.

For a long time the otherwise admirable organization Doctors Without Borders (also known as “MSF” for its French name Médecins Sans Frontières) has been accused of antisemitism.  The accusations have been credible enough to make me curb my donations to the group.  I still regret having donated over $10,000 to the organization after Kelly Houle and I auctioned off a copy of Why Evolution is True that I got autographed by multiple scientists and celebrities, including two Nobel Laureates. Kelly had also beautifully illuminated and gilded the book, so it was quite the showpiece.  I don’t know where that money went after we sent it to MSF, but the organization won’t be getting any more dosh from me. That’s a pity, as otherwise they’d be in my will and lined up to get a lot more money: in the six figures.  Well, such is the result of Jew hating.

Since the book auction, which occurred well before the Israel/Hamas war, more evidence has come out about MSF’s antisemitism. First, Israel expelled the organization from Gaza this year because it wouldn’t provide the names of its staff and operations in Gaza so they could be checked for membership in Hamas or terrorist activities. Second, as documented in the Jewish Chronicle article below, the organization has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide” while condemning Hamas only once (for the October 7 attack). The genocide canard, as Maarten Boudry shows in his article “They don’t believe it either,” is without merit; there’s no evidence that Israel has been on a campaign to wipe out Palestinians.  And since MSF’s accusations of genocide are public, you can’t say that Israel or Jews are making them up. (You can see one on MSF’s own site.)

Since any support for terrorism or ideological tilting towards Gaza and against Israel violates MSF’s own policy of political neutrality, there’s even less justification for its accusations. I’ve called out the organization before (see my posts here and here), and this will be the third and probably last time. Click below to read the Jewish Chronicle piece.

A few excerpts (indented):

. . . interviews and internal material reviewed by the JC suggest that the organisation’s principle of témoignage, or “bearing witness”, has taken on a political character in relation to Israel.

MSF public statements started using the term “genocide” to describe the Gaza war in November 2024.

One former employee described “pushback” when it was first adopted, citing concerns about the lack of “legal rigour” behind the claim.

MSF leaders have for years made such similar statements about the Jewish state. In January 2025, shortly before becoming international president of MSF, Javid Abdelmoneim reposted a message on X claiming that Israel had “transformed Jewish symbols into symbols of genocide” and was “the greatest threat to Judaism & the Jewish people on planet earth”.

In another repost, Abdelmoneim – who has endorsed a full boycott of the Jewish state – shared a message describing Israel as “a colony of settlers that continue to ethnically cleanse the native Palestinian population”.

Michael Goldfarb spent more than 15 years at MSF US. He claimed anti-Israel sentiment was at times “tolerated” by those at the top.

He said: “European colleagues freely told me, knowing I am Jewish, that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.”

He recalled one colleague expressing outrage at being mistaken for Israeli while abroad.

At a restaurant with MSF colleagues in northern Italy, in a town’s former Jewish quarter, one colleague told Goldfarb: “There better not be Israeli flags here.”

He said: “Nothing meaningful has been done to address antisemitism, to show solidarity with Jewish staff, or call out this hate. That creates a permissive environment in which it flourishes.”

And there’s this:

On October 17, 2023, after an explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, MSF’s international account posted that it was “horrified by the recent Israeli bombing… This is a massacre”. The blast was later attributed to a misfired Palestinian rocket. The MSF post remains online.

In November 2023, as Israeli forces said they would target Hamas operatives allegedly using Al-Shifa Hospital, MSF staff were present at the facility. The organisation said it had “seen no evidence” that Hamas was using the hospital as a military base. Months later, US intelligence confirmed Hamas had used parts of the complex for storing weapons and holding hostages.

This one is particularly telling, as everybody now knows that the rocket that exploded in the Al-Ahli parking lot was fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not Israel. But MSF won’t take down its false accusation. I’ve put its tweet below

We are horrified by the recent Israeli bombing of Ahli Arab Hospital in #Gaza City, which was treating patients and hosting displaced Gazans. Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed. This is a massacre. It is absolutely unacceptable…

— MSF International (@MSF) October 17, 2023

Of course MSF says that the “genocide” canard is justified, but read Boudry’s article to see the “genocidal statements” that supposedly support the canard. They were few, were directed at Hamas. and have not been translated into action. Futher, Hamas, despite its agreement for the cease-fire, has not disarmed and is still in charge in southern Gaza, and it’s still stealing and diverting humanitarian aid to Gaza. Hamas must be not only disarmed but dissolved.

The [MSF] spokesperson went on: “Like many others, we were horrified by Hamas’ massacre in Israel on October 7, and we are horrified by Israel’s response. While providing extensive humanitarian assistance in Gaza we have witnessed mass killings, indiscriminate attacks, repeated failures to protect civilians, immense destruction by Israeli forces, the near-total dismantling of the healthcare system, and the weaponisation and restriction of lifesaving aid. Israeli officials have made multiple, well-documented dehumanising statements calling for the annihilation or forced transfer of the population.

“The only reasonable conclusion is that the intention is to erase the Palestinian people from Gaza. For this reason, we believe a genocide is taking place.

So MSF won’t get dime one from me.  However, if you do want to donate to the civilians of Gaza through NGOs that have not been banned by Israel, and have a decent reputation, here’s what Grok suggests. I’ve added links:

ANERA (American Near East Refugee Aid): A U.S.-based, non-political, non-religious organization providing food parcels, hygiene kits, medical care, and livelihoods support directly in Gaza (with recent distributions in 2026, often partnering with WFP). It holds 4-star Charity Navigator ratings and GuideStar Platinum Seal for transparency and impact.

 

PCRF (Palestine Children’s Relief Fund): U.S.-based nonprofit specializing in pediatric medical care, surgeries, mental health, and emergency aid (food, supplies) for children in Gaza. It has earned consistent 4-star Charity Navigator ratings (one of the highest for accountability) and focuses on long-term recovery without political affiliations.

DIRECT RELIEF. Delivers medical supplies, kits, and grants to health facilities in Gaza via partners. It is internationally respected with 4-star ratings and focuses purely on health aid in crises. I haven’t checked all those organizations myself, so follow the instructions below before you give.

Tips for donating effectively:

• Visit the organizations’ official websites and designate funds for “Gaza” or “Palestine emergency” where possible.
• Check current Charity Navigator, CharityWatch, or GuideStar ratings for the latest financial transparency data (most listed above score highly).
• Aid delivery remains extremely challenging due to access issues, but these groups have documented recent distributions and work within approved coordination mechanisms.

This post-Easter cartoon of Jesus and Mo is presented as a “Friday Flashback: from 8 years ago, now that ‘Easter’ is over”.  Note that ‘Easter’ is in quotes. Mo continues to tease Jesus about Christian doctrine.

Once again I present the last photos I have in the queue. If you got ’em, and they’re good, please send them in.

Today’s wildlife pictures come from reader Jan Malik, and concentrate on one act of predation. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them.

In early April, I visited the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey, which encompasses both brackish coastal marshes and lowland mixed forest. The refuge, previously known by the more graceful name Brigantine, features a wildlife drive where a car serves as the ultimate “blind,” allowing for the close observation of birds.In one section, a group of herons assembled, intently staring at a culvert outlet—a sort of fast-food restaurant for wading birds. The Great Blue Heron (GBH, Ardea herodias) in the center has already caught a small fish, though this is not a meal an adult heron finds satisfying:

The same was true for this Great Egret (Ardea alba) with a small fry. All the birds were patiently waiting for a main course:

Finally, one heron caught a fish worthy of the hunting effort. Visible in this picture are the nuptial plumes of this GBH—wispy feathers on the lower neck, similar plumes on the wing coverts, and a long, elegant black plume on the head. These grow only during the breeding season:

The fish, likely a White Perch (Morone americana)—a predator of mollusks, arthropods, and small fish—displays a defense reflex here. It has two dorsal fins: the posterior fin is soft, while the spiny anterior fin is raised when the fish is in danger. This reflex is intended to make the fish harder for a predator to swallow:

The heron has speared the fish through its posterior region, but the prey is still alive, writhing to get free. The heron, now knee-deep in water, must finish the fish off and reposition it to be swallowed head-first:

To do that, the bird first walks to shallower water where it can momentarily drop the fish without risk of escape. Additionally, moving away from the group decreases the chances of the catch being stolen by a competitor:

Catch and release (but not for long): In the shallow, muddy water, the GBH releases the fish; it cannot swim away and is visible as a dark blob below the bird. Whether this GBH is male or female cannot be determined from these pictures, as the sexes are monomorphic. This suggests that both sexes are “choosy” in mate selection, as both provide significant parental care and investment:

The GBH delivers the coup de grâce—the perch is now speared through the head. For me, looking at these pictures raises the question: how many bird species are sexually dimorphic versus monomorphic and why? Some are strongly dimorphic—ducks, songbirds, turkeys, and grouse—while others, like herons, gulls, parrots, corvids, and raptors, are not. Others fall somewhere in between, like the American Robin. While males have darker heads and more vibrant breasts, they do not incubate the eggs, though they do guard the nest and feed the chicks.  Are these differences exclusively the result of parental care roles?  Or is it an adaptation to the environment?  For instance, a GBH cannot be too flashy, or the fish would easily spot its silhouette against the grey sky:

In one smooth move, the heron tosses the fish into the air and catches it head-first. The fish is now incapacitated, no longer resisting, and bleeding heavily. With its defensive fins down, it can finally be swallowed:

Only once have I seen a GBH unable to swallow a large eel—mostly due to its length rather than its girth. Otherwise, once prey is caught—be it a fish, a duck, or a rodent—it is swallowed whole, sometimes after a brief struggle:

The fish is now in the esophagus; the heron’s flexible neck tissue expands to accommodate the meal until it can be digested:

Here is a picture of a Great Egret also in breeding plumage, sporting its long, wispy feathers (aigrettes). These will be lost through molting or wear shortly after the breeding season ends:

A Great Egret in flight, with its head retracted—a trait that makes them easy to distinguish from cranes. While they occupy similar ecological niches to the Great Blue Heron, they are not identical.Egrets often hunt “on the move,” flying or hopping, while GBHs prefer ambush hunting or slow, deliberate wading. Egrets typically target smaller prey, while GBHs: