"Evaluations are also vulnerable to just about every bias imaginable. Course-evaluation scores..."

"... are correlated with students’ expected grades. Studies have found that, among other things, students score male professors higher than female ones, rate attractive teachers more highly, and reward instructors who bring in cookies. 'It’s not clear what the evaluations are measuring, but in some sense they’re a better instrument for measuring gender or grade expectations than they are for measuring the instructor’s actual value added,' Philip Stark, a UC Berkeley statistics professor who has studied the efficacy of teacher evaluations, told me.

From "How Teacher Evaluations Broke the University/'We give them all A’s, and they give us all fives'" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

From the last paragraph: "There’s another reason to keep them around. If universities ever did away with students’ ability to grade their professors, college kids—and their tuition-paying parents—might revolt." Isn't that how student evaluations came about in the first place? The students were revolting. 

"A rat walked across my foot the other day. They’re bold. You can stomp your foot all you want, but they’re New York City rats. They are not afraid."

Said one New Yorker, quoted in "Rats in a Stroller: The Central Park Playground Panic/City data actually suggest that rat sightings are declining. But horror stories are everywhere, and a single rat in a stroller is enough to set off a panic" (NYT).

The last 3 paragraphs of this article are about Curtis Sliwa:

"Skeptics doubted that diners would pay hundreds of dollars for vegetables and fruit, no matter how artfully prepared."

"Others dismissed it as another high-end stunt from a chef who had taken the restaurant through a series of different menus since he took over in 2006, including one that required waiters to perform card tricks.... The meat-free menu met with mixed reviews. Although the restaurant retained the three stars that Michelin first awarded it in 2012, other critics were not as impressed. Pete Wells, then The Times’s restaurant critic, described vegetable dishes that... 'are so obviously standing in for meat or fish... that you almost feel sorry for them.'"

From "Meat Is Back at Eleven Madison Park, After 4 Vegan Years/The Manhattan restaurant drew global praise and skepticism with its climate-minded, all-plant menu. Now its chef wants to be more welcoming — and popular" (NYT).

"The restaurant has had varying levels of financial success since introducing the vegan menu.... Bookings for private events, an essential stream of income, have been particularly sparse. 'It’s hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant'...."

Maybe there's just no way to be expensive and vegan. Pick one. It is, apparently, too much of a strain to shore up the customer's delusion that nonmeat items are very, very posh. We're told there was "tonburi, the seeds some call land caviar."

"Once people realized my glasses were full of tech, conversations often took a turn for the awkward — and they mostly unfolded the same way:"

"'Are you recording me?' (No, I’m not.) 'Where are the cameras?' (There aren’t any!) 'You’re really not recording me?' (No!)... Most of the time, people chose to take me at my word and the conversation continued (if a little icily.) Even in tech-heavy San Francisco, casual chats with people I have known for years sometimes turned tense after the glasses’ true nature were revealed. When asked, the most common reason people gave for why interactions took a turn for the awkward was a lingering concern that the glasses were listening anyway — even though they weren’t. The other big reason some people didn’t seem thrilled was a surprise: They thought I was ignoring them.... My wife still sometimes thinks I’m reading news headlines through the glasses even when I’m looking right at her.... [It's hard] to stay fully present with someone when a neon-green notification slides down in front of your eyes.... Some of these social issues may iron themselves out over time.... Until that happens, though, wearing smart glasses can make moving through the world feel a little socially graceless."

Writes Chris Velazco "I spent months living with smart glasses. People talk to me differently now. Eyeglasses are being augmented with screens, artificial intelligence and the power to unnerve people. We tested a pair to see how" (WaPo).

There's also this video. The most interesting part of that is Velazco's admission that his favorite use of the technology is to view inspirational messages that he has chosen for himself, such as: "You can do anything. You have what it takes. Just BELIEVE."

Imagine someone talking to you in person, looking in the direction of your eyes, but actually reading bullshit they've loaded into their glasses. May I suggest the inspirational message: Stay in the moment. Be spontaneous. The person in front of you might be a fully engaged HUMAN BEING!

"L.L.M.s are gluttonous omnivores: The more data they devour, the better they work, and that’s why A.I. companies are grabbing..."

"... all the data they can get their hands on. But even if an L.L.M. was trained exclusively on the best peer-reviewed science, it would still be capable only of generating plausible output, and 'plausible' is not necessarily the same as 'true.' And now A.I.-generated content — true and otherwise — is taking over the internet, providing training material for the next generation of L.L.M.s, a sludge-generating machine feeding on its own sludge. Two days after MechaHitler, xAI announced the debut of Grok 4.... X users wasted no time asking the new Grok a pressing question: 'What group is primarily responsible for the rapid rise in mass migration to the West? One word only.' Grok responded, 'Jews.'"

Writes Zeynep Tufekci, in "Another Day, Another Chatbot’s Nazi Meltdown" (NYT).

MechaHitler = Grok's anti-Semitic screwup.

"Restaurants will have to tell the government what their customers order under plans drawn up by Labour to tackle Britain’s obesity epidemic...."

"Under the proposals outlined by Wes Streeting, the health secretary, restaurants employing more than 250 workers are expected to report the average number of calories that diners consume. The government will then set targets to 'increase the healthiness of sales.'... Streeting said:'“Obesity has doubled since the 1990s and costs our NHS £11 billion a year, triple the budget for ambulance services. Unless we curb the rising tide of cost and demand, the NHS risks becoming unsustainable. The good news is that it only takes a small change to make a big difference. If everyone who is overweight reduced their calorie intake by around 200 calories a day — the equivalent of a bottle of fizzy drink — obesity would be halved.'"

From "Restaurants to report diners’ calorie counts in obesity drive/The Department of Health says the data will be used to set targets and increase the ‘healthiness of sales’ — but the industry says it was ‘totally blindsided'" (London Times).

The problem with driverless cars is that they don't make mistakes.

OK, this is an original and good point.

pic.twitter.com/CmAHI9fUnr

— Bojan Tunguz (@tunguz) June 29, 2025

"When the officials don’t get control of the ballgame, when they allow stuff to happen, and it’s been happening all season long … this is what happens. You’ve got competitive women..."

"... who are the best in the world at what they do, right? And when you allow them to play physical, and you allow these things to happen, they’re going to compete."

Said Fever Coach Stephanie White, quoted in "Caitlin Clark, a night of skirmishes, and a WNBA product out of control/After a night of physical fouls and hurt feelings, the WNBA clearly has an officiating problem. Will the league fix it?" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Top-rated comment over there: "Why are so many WNBA players jealous of Caitlin Clark? She is the league's meal ticket. Without Clark, WNBA games would have lower ratings than infomercials."

Just fix the officiating. You can't restructure human behavior — jealousy, violence, competition. That's the way of the world. People don't go into sports to find opportunities to express loving kindness. 

"Civilizations age and die. It’s acknowledged in one of the most beloved charades of wokeism: apologies to (selected) preliterate civilizations..."

"... that once were based in the area now inhabited by the apologists. What, however, would the enlightened have happen? Their fantasy casts them as champions of the Stone Age folks who once enjoyed the real estate we currently inhabit. But stone axes and buffalo hunting could have continued only as behaviors protected by a civilization not only technologically superior but of sufficient surplus of goods and Christianity to still the westward American migration in service of an ideal. The fantasy, in effect, of a historical reenactment or theme park. The fantasy was attempted in 1870 when the U.S. Department of the Interior put the Quakers in charge of various Indian reservations for the maintenance and order and the distribution of government welfare. The results were malfeasance and theft greater than the previous administration’s crony capitalism, since the peaceful Quakers were laissez-faire fools. Do homo sapiens seek out descendants of Neanderthals and apologize?"

Writes David Mamet, in "The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment" (p. 230)(commission earned).

"The mayor of a city in southwest Russia encouraged men to 'sneak up on their women so that 10,000 children will be born in exactly nine months.'"

"Some regions are giving lump-sum bonuses to women who become mothers while they’re still in school, and a Russian version of MTV’s '16 and Pregnant,' which originally discouraged teen pregnancy, has been rebranded as 'Mom at 16,' in order to promote it. One politician encouraged women to wear miniskirts to increase births, while an official in the country’s Education Ministry advocated 'school discos' to foster 'romance for children.' A regional health minister has told Russians to have sex during work breaks. Now, a hodgepodge of religious conservatives and techno-futurists are leading the United States into the fray...."

From "A Bold Idea to Raise the Birthrate: Make Parenting Less Torturous" (NYT).

The article is by Anna Louie Sussman who says she's keeping "a running list of harebrained schemes various governments and officials have proposed to raise the birthrate in their aging countries."

"It’s possible that within the MAGA bubble, some aspiring tradwives might genuinely be motivated by the prospect of a medal, or perhaps a memecoin, from Mr. Trump (though whether they’ll get all the way to baby No. 6 by the time his term ends is an open question).... The ideas currently being floated... prompt mockery and horror, at least among my cohort of reproductive-age women. 'This is nuts,' said one friend.... 'God help us,' wrote another."

The incentives will just have to get better, but they probably won't until the decline becomes more obvious, and then, they still won't, because it will be too late, and who will want to pay for all that free childcare and so forth when it's easy to see there's no hope? But aren't those Russians crazy?

"I don’t know how one changes the minds of others. Through fifty years of writing, I’ve regularly heard that film and drama..."

"... should be enlisted in the service of good works; but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie. That’s not how they function—they’re entertainment, with as little ability to alter ones thinking as does a meal. Exodus no more reduced anti-Semitism than tacos clarify the border crisis.... Islamists at home and abroad have been demonizing the Jewish State since 1948: Why would a bunch of septuagenarian Jews in Hollywood conclude they could be defeated by 'changing the narrative'? The answer: they did not conceive of them being defeated; they merely wanted peace, which to their minds might be achieved rationally, without war, through mere dialogue, as if murderous savagery were the result of misunderstanding...."

I'm reading "The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment" by David Mamet (Amazon Associates link).

Wait. What about "The Birth of a Nation"? Did Mamet consider the movies and plays that have changed people for the worse? How about all the pornography? 

"Exotic" mushrooms “just taste more interesting" — "They tasted good and I didn’t get sick."

Said Erin Patterson, the Australian woman accused of murdering three relatives by serving them lunch laced with deadly mushrooms, quoted in "Australia mushroom trial: Erin Patterson ‘drawn to exotic varieties’/Woman accused of murdering three relatives by serving them death cap mushrooms, says she is adept at foraging and can identify different species" (London Times).

I know not to eat them, and I don't have a decent sense of taste, so it's not for me to say... but just supposing you ate one, unwisely — don't do it! — answer this: Do death cap mushrooms taste good?

Nibbling around the edges of research, I think the answer is they taste like fairly ordinary mushrooms, which is why a fool might think they're edible.

Democrats attempt to teach themselves how to speak with American men.

We were talking about Trump not being "polished or smooth" and about a place called "Creatable World."

The first post of the day, here, quoted a NYT writer who said: Trump "wasn’t polished or smooth. His appearance was shoddy, strange, lacking all polish." Trump has tarted up the Oval Office with gold, but he's still rough, lumbering, and orange.

And here's the post this morning about Mattel's line of "gender-neutral" dolls called "Creatable World." But somehow the kids did not flow into the world that Big Toy had envisioned for them.

So this NBC headline caught my eye: "Obama world loses its shine in a changing, hurting Democratic Party."

You see the resonance.

There was once a place called "Obama World" and it was shiny.

Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot/For one brief shining moment that was known as... Obama World!

A brief shiny glimpse at the NBC News article:

"I think there was a feeling — like, a lot of members of the Democratic Party that were seeing this or saw moments um of him seeming out of it — um that going public was not going to change [Biden's] mind."

"It was only going to help Donald Trump, um, and I think that's how a lot of them rationalized it. Now whether or not history will judge them, you know, as being right for doing that, um, you know, we will see, but this is also part of the reason why the White House was shielding him from as many people as possible including Cabinet secretaries because sometimes, you know, you see him once maybe it's just a bad day you can just say, like, you know, maybe I just had one bad meeting. You're not really sure..."

Said Alex Thompson, co-author of "Original Sin," on "Fox News Sunday" yesterday.

The interviewer, Shannon Bream, quotes from the book (on page 85): "[A longtime Biden aide said] 'He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years — he'd only have to show proof of life every once in a while. His aides could pick up the slack." She asks: "Who would have been running the White House in a second Biden term?"

Thompson responds: "Well, this person went on to say that when you're voting for a President you're voting for the aides, uh, around him. But these aides were not even Senate-confirmed aides. These are White House aides. These were unelected people. And one of the things that really I think comes out in our reporting here is that if you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy you can rationalize anything including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which, I think, is what this person is talking about."

It's like fighting fire with fire — fighting the destruction of the democracy with the destruction of democracy. You had to destroy the village to save it. Noted. 

"Walking is a way to slow oneself down, to cultivate attentiveness and to return to the elements, as the roundabout entrances to the museums on the islands..."

"... of Naoshima and Teshima encourage visitors to do. A country that lacks Western-style addresses, where simply extricating yourself from a train station can take 10,000 steps, is made for the flâneur who recalls the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s observation that not finding your way is very different from getting lost...."

From "Why Japan Is Best Experienced By Foot/In Japan, the simple act of walking has long been connected to working toward enlightenment" (NYT).

Every place worth living in or traveling to is best experienced by foot. That's what I say. If you want to feel that you are on a path toward enlightenment through walking, it's a bit insane to begin by flying half way around the word — racking up a massive regression — and needing to extricate yourself from or into complicated buildings.

I remember something about walking meditation from "Dharma Bums," the Jack Kerouac book I listened to — while walking — recently. I was searching the text for "walking," thinking I'd find the exactly right text, but I found this: "Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boasting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and plants and Plantagenets was built out of the primordial essence."

"I do a weird little thing that really works. I tuck the hem of my pants underneath my heel inside my shoe while I’m walking outside."

"I know it sounds strange, but it keeps them from getting filthy on the street or the train. Once I’m indoors, I just pull them back out and let them drape as they’re meant to."

Said the designer Hillary Taymour, quoted in "Are My Pants Really Supposed to Drag on the Ground? Puddle pants, or trousers with floor length, pooling hems, are everywhere right now. Our critic offers tips for wearing them without tracking dirt around with you" (NYT).

Don't we all have pants like that? Too long, and we're too busy to get them re-hemmed. We can just wear them now and inform people that they are "puddle pants."

"It’s kind of hard to make a funny video about that. Like, ‘Yeah, they died. This is the end of the content.'"

"[Said the father, who] was burned out on social media and worried about disappointing people. He didn’t want to answer any more questions. Ultimately, he simply deleted TikTok from his phone and left the story unfinished. 'I mean, what do you think?' Dr. Clifford asked me. 'How would you have finished it?' He was finishing it now, I said. What did he want people to know? He paused and then said that he wanted to thank his followers for their support and tell them that he had given these octopuses his all. 'I think the obvious lesson is that they’re not good pets,' he said. 'They’re not durable pets, they’re not cheap pets, they’re not easy pets....'"

From "A Cautionary Tale of 408 Tentacles/One pet octopus suddenly became more than four dozen. They went viral. Then it all went south" (NYT).

To see the story of the little boy who loved octopuses and the dentist dad who made the boy's dream come true and displayed the the dream — while it lasted — go to the doctoktopus TikTok page: here. 

About that lovely "eco-friendly" "forest resort" with its supposed "enchanting luxury" and "soul-driven entrepreneurs"...

Link to The Guardian: here.

In the words of the head of building and environment for the county: "Voilà. Over 150 barrels of human shit."

"The Supreme Court appeared split along partisan lines Monday over the creation of a second Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana...."

Writes Justin Jouvenal, in "Supreme Court seems split on Louisiana voting map, majority-Black districtsSeveral conservative justices were skeptical that the Voting Rights Act’s attempts to redress past discrimination can coexist with the Equal Protection Clause" (WaPo).

The legal arguments in the case center on the extent to which states can consider race in drawing legislative maps, a power they were granted as part of the Voting Rights Act in an attempt to address discriminatory electoral practices.

I wouldn't have written "granted."

Such maps cannot, however, be explicit racial gerrymanders.

Whatever happened to implicit racism?