An academic takedown of The New York Times

I know that many of the readers of this blog also read PZ’s Pharyngula so this post may be a bit redundant for them but I followed a link he gave in a recent post that was so good that I wanted to give it more publicity. The link was to an essay by Peter Coviello who used to be the chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, an expensive elite liberal arts college in Maine. It was also the department in which Zohran Mamdani majored while in college.

Coviello says that whenever an alumnus of a college becomes famous, and especially if they are controversial, reporters come calling to get some background on that person and this was no exception. Reporters approached him to ask about Mamdani. He warns that little good comes of talking to the reporters because they usually have an ax to grind and they will take what you say and make it fit their agenda, which will often be opposed to what you stand for. But it is hard to resist such an approach. For one thing, academics love to have the opportunity to spread greater awareness of their work and the popular media provides a major platform. There is also the issue of vanity. Being quoted in the media can be seen as a feather in one’s cap, a sign that one has had some impact, and can improve one’s standing among colleagues, provided it is not a takedown of you.
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TV review: Maigret (2025)

Georges Simenon was a prolific author who wrote a large number of novels featuring the French detective Jules Maigret. There have been many dramatic incarnations of this iconic character as this article discusses. About a year ago, I reviewed the 2016 British TV series Maigret starring Rowan Atkinson in the title role.. That series stayed close to the original in terms of period and the way that Maigret, his wife, and his supporting team were portrayed.

Now there is yet another version of the Maigret series, again called simply Maigret, that makes quite dramatic changes, while still keeping him as a chief inspector in Paris. For one thing it takes place in the present time so this Maigret has all the modern technology at his disposal. Maigret himself and his wife have been transformed from a sedate couple in their mid-fifties where the wife is a homemaker, to a hot young couple where his wife now works as a medical professional. Maigret’s team, all white men in the original, while retaining their old names, has also become younger and gender and ethnically diverse, with the addition of an insubordinate and insolent inspector who is jealous of Maigret and thus provides some internal tension within the team. The actor who plays Maigret, Benjamin Wainwright, has a disconcerting physical similarity to the actor who plays the annoying goofball Jonah Ryan in the comedy series Veep which I found a bit disconcerting at first, but that feeling soon passed.
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The oddities of the English language

I like puns and other plays on words. This is why I like doing cryptic crosswords, which depend more upon linguistic puzzles than the recall of facts, far more that the standard type. For that reason, they are harder to construct. Cryptic ones are more popular in the UK and other non-US English speaking countries, where newspapers often offer them on a daily basis. In the US The New Yorker magazine at one point offered a good cryptic crossword puzzle every Sunday but stopped doing so a few months ago, I presume because not enough people were doing it.

Because of my liking for word play, I often find humor in interpreting things differently from what the writer or speaker intended. And for someone like me, English idioms can be endlessly fascinating.
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Film review: Bad Shabbos (2025)

In these days of relentlessly depressing news, a good comedy comes as a welcome relief and this is such a film.

It is about an observant Jewish family in New York who host a Sabbath dinner to meet the Midwestern Catholic parents of their son’s fiancée, when something happens that leads to the evening going completely awry.

The humor depends on some extent on the practices of observant Jews on the Sabbath, especially the many restrictions on what you can do, but I thought that it was not offensive. But then, I am not Jewish and hence not the best judge.

Here’s the trailer.

Meet Tilly Norwood, who may be the next big star

She is introduced in this clip.

As you would have read in the first frame, she and everyone else in that clip are entirely the creation of AI.

Meet Tilly Norwood, an up-and-coming on-screen talent who might just be the next big thing.

Norwood, as can be seen in the exclusive clip above, appears to be a talking, waving, bona fide person – she can even cry.

Except she’s not a real-life person: she doesn’t exist off a screen (yet), having instead been birthed via the increasingly sophisticated capabilities of AI software.

But then again, so has the entire sketch above, including all the other actors you see.

Norwood and the sketch are both the work of Particle 6, the UK production company created and led by Eline van de Velden, a former actor-turned-producer who also happens to have a Master’s degree in physics from London’s Imperial College.

“We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman, that’s the aim of what we’re doing,” van der Velden tells Broadcast International.
…

The sketch is also acting as the first on-screen appearance for Norwood, and discussions are now in the works to see if talent agencies want to sign up the AI creation.

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WNBA in MAGA’s crosshairs

Professional sports in the US is dominated by male teams whose players get the big contracts and media focus and thus are able to build up a big fan base. Soccer is one instance where the women’s teams have been much more successful than the men in international competitions and thus get a lot of attention though this has still not translated into financial parity.

Now it appears that women’s basketball, after a rocky start, is gaining in popularity and not just with female fans.

This season, the W.N.B.A.’s fan base was 57 percent male and 43 percent female, according to statistics provided by the league. Men have actually made up more than half of viewership for years, but they were mostly middle-aged before. Now they’re skewing younger. The number of boys under 18 who watch W.N.B.A. games has grown by 130 percent over the past four years.
…

“The quality of the players has definitely gotten better,” said Joe Lacob, the billionaire who owns both the Valkyries and the Warriors. He said 55 percent of ticket holders at the women’s games in San Francisco were male.

The women are gritty and fierce, playing fast and sinking more 3-pointers than ever before.

Lacob sits courtside for most Valkyries games, and his guy friends are constantly asking him for tickets, he said. At one recent game, I spotted several heavily tattooed football players for the 49ers sitting beside him.

“People are not dumb,” Lacob said. “They see that it’s better. It just clicked.”

The Valkyries managed to become the first W.N.B.A. team to sell out all their home games, helping to propel the league to record attendance numbers. When you’re in their arena, the Chase Center, it feels like one big party.

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Jimmy Kimmel keeps hammering Trump and Conservative networks put him back on the air

He is not letting up in his attacks on Trump.

Now conservative networks Sinclair and Nexstar that own about 25% of ABC affiliates and who had vowed to not show Kimmel’s show have reversed course and now say that he will be back on.

In a statement, Sinclair said it received “thoughtful feedback from viewers, advertisers and community leaders representing a wide range of perspectives”.

“Our objective throughout this process has been to ensure that programming remains accurate and engaging for the widest possible audience,” the firm said.

The company said that it had “ongoing and constructive discussions” with ABC where Sinclair proposed measures to strengthen accountability and viewer feedback, including having a “network-wide independent ombudsman”. ABC and Disney have not agreed to the measures, and Sinclair noted that it “respects their right to make those decisions under network affiliate agreements”.

Nexstar separately said: “We have had discussions with executives at [Disney] and appreciate their constructive approach to addressing our concerns.”

I suspect that the ‘thoughtful feedback’ consisted of furious viewers yelling at them. Basically, they ended up getting exactly what Al Pacino offered a senator in The Godfather: Part II who tried to strong arm him into giving him a bribe.

I predicted that since money is their god, if Kimmel’s ratings stayed high, as they have, they would cave. It is interesting that they announced this decision on a Friday when most of the late night comedy shows do not have new shows, so that they would be spared immediate ridicule.

But I expect them to be mercilessly lampooned by all of them come Monday.

Trump must be bigly annoyed but hasn’t said anything yet.

Eddie Izzard on the Daleks

Based on my personal experience, there seems to a correlation between skeptical thinking and science fiction. I attend functions of a group of skeptics, sometimes physically at local venues, and at other times online with people around the world and I find that a large number of them are aficionados of science fiction and are knowledgeable about the minutiae of those stories.

Recently I created some mild astonishment within this group by saying that I had never actually watched any complete episodes of favorites like Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, or Dr. Who. I knew about them of course and had read about them and seen the odd clip of something from them. It is not that I avoid them. I do read the occasional science fiction but had never had any great interest in seeing science fiction on TV or the big screen. This surprised others who seemed to expect that with my science background, I would find them appealing.

One thing that had always puzzled me were the Daleks, the evildoers in the Dr. Who stories. They seemed to me to be laughably comical and totally not frightening. Eddie Izzard shares my puzzlement as to what the creators were thinking when they created them as conical objects with flat bottoms, like pepper and salt shakers, who moved on wheels and had weird appendages where arms would be.

The precursor to Sherlock Holmes

As long-time readers know, I am big fan of murder mysteries, in books and in TV/film forms. Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie constituted much of my reading as a boy. Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes has often been seen as the archetype of the private detective, able to see clues and solve crimes where the official police force could not, and his biographer John Watson served the role of the narrator, observant enough to be a surrogate for the reader and was able to tell us broadly what was seen by Holmes, without being able to distinguish between what was relevant and what was superfluous, and thus unable to make the crucial inferences that Holmes did.

But recently I came across the story The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe that was published in 1840 and is credited as being the first modern detective story and it is clear that Doyle was inspired by Poe’s story.

In the earlier story, we again have a friendship between two men, the unnamed narrator in Poe’s case who meets and befriends an eccentric acute observer in August Dupin and the two share lodgings in Paris. Poe’s narrator records his observations of Dupin, and we immediately see the similarities to Holmes, in that Dupin also has acute powers of observation and superlative analytical and deductive skills.
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So much available, so little to watch

In a comment to my blog post reviewing the film The Penguin Lessons, commenter jimf wrote:

I understand it was an offhand comment that had little to do with the post, but I can’t agree that Netflix has “seemingly infinite options”. I find the vast majority of Netflix content to be virtually unwatchable. The majority seems to be either mindless filler or hopelessly violent “action” pictures, or worse, stars Adam Sandler. Most of the comedy specials are flat and predictable. And good luck trying to find any classic pics made prior to 1960.

I actually agree with jimf. After all, I did not say that Netflix had “seemingly infinite good options”. The trope of people wasting their time surfing the site, trying and failing to find something that they really want to watch finally settling for some dreck just to kill time, has become a cliche.
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