This piece is as maddening and fantastic as everyone says (no surprise, @Tyler_A_Harper has a gift for storytelling), but the best part might be this sense-making bit at the end; the hollowing of journalism and the arts flows at least in part from this same dynamic

This is utterly perfect and should stand forever as a go-to representation of a major problem with education in our era. It also happens to give a look-in at what I describe in my piece today about Arday.

"The other [plagiarism] examples are similar...we aren’t talking about innocuous phrases commonly seen in dissertations, such as 'I’d like to thank my advisor for their support' or 'Death to America'; or quotations of common definitions..."

"Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate Was a Warning We Ignored," write biologist Colin Wright @SwipeWright. [It] seems to have aged in reverse... Pinker’s great achievement in The Blank Slate was not simply showing that genes matter, as many competent scientists have demonstrated before. Rather, it was exposing the way that fear of human nature had distorted entire fields of study...."

Glad that we're able to give a home to this kind of thoughtful commentary! We hope you enjoy this piece on teaching great books at @MIT from MIT Concourse's Linda Rabieh. Link in next post.

@hoovlet knocked it out of the park at NIH today, giving an extremely scientifically-based and thoughtful talk, which showed enormous respect for others, and for science. She is a national treasure, and a hero to those aching for restoration of trust in science/scientists.

"Associating testosterone with 'lethality' is 'a damaging narrative,' Carole Hooven, [previously an] evolutionary biologist lecturer at Harvard and author of T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, told me. 'That’s not what testosterone is about. It’s not about killing other humans.'''

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s supplement to the Vanderbilt/WashU report takes up literary studies. Len Gutkin reads it — alongside Gabriel Hankins’s sharper critique. Also in The Review: Alex Byrne on Carole Hooven, legacy admissions in California, and college finances.

The farther I traveled from poverty, the more fashionable it became to romanticize the conditions I had escaped. I grew up in poverty in Los Angeles and was taken from my mother when I was three. She had immigrated from South Korea, but her life unraveled amid drug addiction. I never met my father and learned only as an adult, through a genetic ancestry test, that he was Mexican. I spent the next several years moving through foster homes and chaotic circumstances. At seventeen, I enlisted in the United States Air Force. After some setbacks, I arrived at Yale at twenty-five and studied on the GI Bill. Along the way, I climbed nearly every rung of the American class ladder. I moved from poverty through working-class and lower-middle-class homes. In the military, I encountered the middle class. At Yale, I was surrounded by the upper-middle class and the wealthy. Moving through these worlds, I noticed that beliefs changed with social class. At Yale, I heard ideas I had never encountered before: abolish the police, empty the prisons, promote polyamory, dismantle traditional marriage, and decriminalize drugs. These ideas were popular among elites, but their costs often fell on communities like the ones where I grew up. I had seen addiction, abuse, neglect, abandonment, and disorder up close. At Yale and later during my Ph.D. at Cambridge, I studied research on class and social status. It helped me understand what I had witnessed and led me to some startling statistics about social class.

"They will not treat dissent from their opinions as if it amounted to a personal assault. They will be willing to change their minds--and, indeed, their lives...They will be empowered, in other words, to lead examined lives."

I offer some general thoughts here on civil discourse, civic friendship,and civil liberties. I'll have more specific things to say about the importance of these things, and how they are related, going forward.

Sex Differences Above the Neck (TLDR: they are real & important) "We should let people be themselves, but in a world where both sexes have equal opportunities and where sex differences aren’t socially harmful. Given the copious data that [@SteveStuWill] presents, who can object to this path?"

"Harvard's writing Center, under [@RosenzweigJane]'s directorship, has always emphasized the interrelation of writing, speaking, and thinking... these fundamental skills remain central to Harvard College’s stated commitment to 'the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education.' Closing [it] and removing its leadership now sends a disturbing signal about how seriously Harvard actually takes that mission."

I understand that Harvard needs to lay off a bunch of staff. But this one is a shock and a shame. @RosenzweigJane, who led Harvard's writing center, was an invaluable resource for students and writing education at Harvard. Huge loss.

From "Sex, Medicine and Moralization" in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. By @byrne_a and me in special issue edited @jflier, out this month. "The dry scientific issue of the number and nature of the sexes was recast as a matter of justice, inclusion, validation, and harm prevention, with the outmoded binary position on the wrong side of history. The motives and character of those who defended the sex binary were—and still are—questioned by a prominent faction on the progressive left." Examples of moralization from, respectively, Scientific American, American Scientist, and The Lancet: "Given what we know about biology across animals and in humans, efforts to represent human sex as binary based solely on what gametes one produces are not about biology but are about trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society." (Fuentes 2023) "Worryingly, even within the sciences, the term biological sex has become a transphobic dog whistle. Whereas once some of us used this term to differentiate the biological factors we study from social or cultural ones, it has now been co-opted by those who insist on a sex binary and who deny the relevance or even reality of diverse bodies and of gender identities, roles, and expressions in humans." (Clancy et al. 2024: 81) "Although the gametic definition makes reference to biological systems, it is sophistry, not science. Those who promote this definition favour the assertion that sex inheres in gamete (sperm and egg) production because, in part, it facilitates their political aims by fueling unhinged panic in some quarters about transgender threats to traditional gender roles." (Richardson 2025, 436)