I spend perhaps an unhealthy amount of time staring at the Maps app on my phone, zooming into remote roads, tiny islands, or the middle of vast plains peppered with isolated buildings. One place I always come back to – via satellite image, that is – is the Shetland Islands, or more specifically, Out Stack, a small skerry in the North Atlantic Ocean marking the northerly point of the British Isles. There’s just something so satisfying about an endpoint, an extreme boundary, that keeps piquing my curiosity during my late-night virtual explorations.

So when I found myself this summer standing on the cliffs of Shetland’s Hermaness National Nature Reserve, looking directly out at the uninhabited rocky islet that poses as the final full stop of Britain, I finally understood why Romantic poets found our country’s nature so powerfully awe-inspiring. Other walkers we chatted to along the cliffs also shared these feelings; we were all harbouring a triumphant secret that day about what it’s like to be the most northerly people in the country.

One night at Smalls, the venerable jazz club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, I asked Spike Wilner, the venue’s proprietor, “Whatever happened to that beautiful cat that used to haunt this place?” (Though I can’t verify it as fact, it’s possible that across America, many jazz clubs have an official house cat that slinks around the club. A cat amongst cats, as they say in the jazz world.)

Spike raised an eyebrow. “Minnow. Do you know the story about Minnow?”

I did not know the story about Minnow, though I remember that regal feline creature with a spectacular mane that used to sit atop the piano, but only when certain musicians played. “Tell me about Minnow,” I said, encouraging the club owner.

The band was between sets, patrons coming and going. It was spring 2019. I sipped some tequila. Smalls is a basement joint known for its lively mix of students, hipsters, and true jazzheads from back in the day. “Well,” answered Spike, “to tell you about Minnow, I first need to tell you about Harry Whitaker. Do you remember Harry?”

I did remember the late Harry Whitaker. Beginning in the late 1990s, Harry was a regular performer at Smalls. He was a piano player of prodigious talents. I never met Harry, but I saw him play a few times at the club. I was stunned by his facility on the piano and wondered why I was unaware of this artist, who was maybe the best pianist I ever heard perform live. By then, Harry was in his 60s, heavy-set, like a big African American buddha. His hair was gray, and he had a pronounced lower lip that seemed to protrude as he got into a groove on the piano. He often slumped on the piano bench when he played, as if he were under hypnosis, eyes closed, his mind and spirit in some other place, but his artistry present in ways that tended to hush an audience into awe.

Spike’s voice became somber when he mentioned Harry’s name. I gathered that Whitaker had special meaning to him. “Okay, then,” I said. “Tell me about Harry.”

What followed was the beginning of a dialogue that started that night and would continue, off and on, over the next year. What Spike told me about Harry lingered in the ether of my imagination. As well as being a club owner, Spike Wilner is also an accomplished piano player. Harry had played a crucial role in Spike’s development as a musician, and taxed his emotions, as Harry succumbed to bouts of mental illness that would eventually be his undoing. The club proprietor and the piano legend became the inheritors of a spiritual symbiosis that is at the essence of jazz. Minnow the cat also played a role.

Of all the Homeric translators and commentators over the millennia, Nolan seems most explicitly in dialogue with Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who discovered the therapeutic value of reading The Iliad with Vietnam veterans. Through his clinical practice, Shay came to believe that Homer’s Achilles is suffering from all the symptoms of complex PTSD as we now recognize it. But unlike the American military, Greek culture had numerous cultural means of treating this trauma that have since been either lost or actively suppressed.

From that experience came Shay’s 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Shay pinpoints the beginning of Achilles’s suffering—what he would come to call his “moral injury”—to when Agamemnon betrays him (paralleling how many Vietnam vets felt betrayed by their government). “When a leader destroys the legitimacy of the army’s moral order by betraying ‘what is right,’” Shay writes, “he inflicts manifold injuries on his men. The Iliad is a story of these immediate and devastating consequences.” Numbed by wrath, Achilles turns his back on the fellow Greeks for whom he formerly cared deeply. In this compromised state, the death of Pátroklos destroys him, engendering a berserker rage in which he desecrates the corpses of his fallen enemies, unable to control himself or observe the traditional laws of war.

For Shay, “The Iliad is the tragedy of Achilles’ noble character brought to ruin—moral ruin in his own terms … Achilles’ moral unluckiness, his tragedy, was that events—simply what happened—created the desire to do things that he himself regarded as bad.” It is something he found again and again in the American veterans he was treating.

I asked my friend Mike the other day, “What’s going to happen to science fiction when readers realize that interstellar travel will be next to impossible, and no one will want to live on the Moon or Mars?” He answered back, “Nothing will happen to science fiction; it’s only stories.” But I replied, “But some people read science fiction because they believe that someday humans will colonize the solar system and eventually the galaxy.” And he replied, “Nobody really believes that. It’s just fun stories.” I thought for a few seconds, “Don’t you think Star Trek fans believe in their hearts that the final frontier is humanity’s future?” Mike said, “No, I don’t.”

I think Mike is far more realistic than most people.

In 1960, a young hematologist named Madison Cawein began hearing rumors at the University of Kentucky. People spoke about the blue hill folks of the Cumberland Plateau. There were blue Stacys, Combses, Smiths, and Fugates at that time as a result of inbreeding and the small gene pool from which many of Eastern Kentucky’s families came.

Cawein was an accomplished doctor. He helped isolate the antidote for cholera and helped create a drug for Parkinson’s Disease. He was, however, a hematologist at heart. Cawein said that “blood cells always looked beautiful to me,” so when he began hearing about the blue people, his interest was piqued.

Cawein, along with Ruth Pendergrass, a nurse from the American Heart Association clinic in Hazard, scoured the hollers for blue people. Pendergrass was fascinated with the blue people since she gave a blood test to a woman who identified herself as a blue Combs from Ball Creek. Cawein and Pendergrass went on daily missions to find blue people until they were frustrated and near giving up. After all, Cawein was forced to drive eight hours one way, from Lexington to Hazard, when he wanted to go on a search. Then a pair of siblings, Rachel and Patrick Ritchie, walked into the heart clinic in Hazard. They were blue, and Cawein had found his white (or blue) whale.

I’ve been a Cardinals fan since I was a boy, and when I think about my life, I can mark parts of it by home runs.

I was listening on KMOX radio as a boy of 11 in 1964 when Ken Boyer hit his grand slam against the Yankees in Game 4 of the World Series, turning a 3–0 deficit into a 4–3 Cardinals victory. Three years later, Bob Gibson—my boyhood hero—did something that somehow seemed perfectly normal for Bob Gibson: He pitched a complete-game victory in Game 7 of the World Series at Fenway Park, struck out ten, and hit a home run, too.

By 1982, I was an Army officer, married with children, when rookie Willie McGee hit two home runs in Game 3 of the World Series—and robbed Milwaukee’s Gorman Thomas of one. Baseball had marked the time.

Collins claims that wisdom contains four essential ingredients: truth, science, faith, and trust. There is a certain paradox here. Collins’s fourfold prescription is considerably more problematic than he suggests. But the path to wisdom is much simpler than he proposes: not a better method for vetting experts, but the cultivation of humility in the seeker.

What follows is not an indictment of Dr. Collins, whose leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic saved countless lives. His treatise serves as a helpful springboard for a continuing conversation about what truly is “the road to wisdom.” What are perhaps lacking in his analysis are two major issues: first, that the case for science skepticism is much stronger than he allows; second, that humility on the part of the observer is fundamental to all other elements.

Einstein could never forgive Heisenberg and Schroedinger for the latter.

Much has been made of this album’s cover art — by the noted photographer William Claxton — of city guy Rollins in the Mojave Desert with cowboy hat and holster, armed with his tenor horn, but the backstory to the recording session, detailed in Koenig’s original liner notes included here, is still more revealing. (For fans of Claxton, who did several books of jazz photography, a more conventional portrait of the urbane Rollins, in dark suit and dress shirt, is also included in the new box.) Since all three musicians were performing at night, and Manne and Brown — both of whom, as Koenig noted, were just voted number one in the popularity polls of Down Beat, Metronome, and Playboy — had gigs during the day, the recording session took place between 3 and 7 in the morning.

According to Koenig, the three had never played or recorded together before. Clearly, though, they had an intuitive simpatico. Manne — who also raised horses in his ranch outside L.A. — sets the tone immediately by perfectly mimicking the clippety-clop of a Standardbred’s slow gait in “I’m an Old Cowhand.” Throughout, he and Brown are like two middle-infielders so sound they can turn a double-play blind-folded and still afford to showboat now and again. (A few years ago, when I reported on the bassist Linda May Han Oh and observed her teaching at the Manhattan School of Music, she consistently brought up Brown to her young students. “In terms of fundamentals,” she would tell me later, “if you want to be a solid working bassist and Ray Brown is all you checked out, that would be great.”)

Way Out West is traditional, at least superficially. It has a standard (“There Is No Greater Love” — Rollins wows on both takes) and a piece of Ellingtonia (“Solitude”); two originals by the leader (“Come, Gone” and the title track); and, extending the cover concept, two cow-poke ditties from the old westerns Sonny so enjoyed as a child (“Wagon Wheels” and that opener “I’m an Old Cowhand”), albeit with a modernist, hard-bop spin. But then look at the trio again, and how emphatically untraditional it is: tenor saxophone, bass, drums. It’s a configuration that had hardly been used at that point. As critic Neil Tesser writes in his informative new essay for this re-issue, “Only Lucky Thompson had recorded in this format, and he did so in only one song, in early 1956.”

It was Rollins who established and popularized this combo: He would play with just a drummer and bassist often after Way Out West and again post-hiatus — as would Albert Ayler and Dewey Redman later in the 1960s, David Murray in the ’70s, Joe Henderson in the ’80s, to Mark Turner into this century, Ingrid Laubrock, and now the 26-year-old Kevin Sun, who has absorbed Turner and so much of the jazz canon, and advances the concept in his excellent debut album Trio, just out, in which he’s joined by bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Matt Honor. A sixty-year line, however undulating, from Sonny Rollins to Kevin Sun.

Without the chordal structure of the piano, Way Out West anticipated free jazz. As Rollins told Tesser last year in preparation for this re-issue, “[In the trio] I could have the rhythmic support of a drummer, and then I could have the harmonic support of a bassist. But that’s the thing about it: It wouldn’t be more intrusive on what I might be playing. It’s still very freeing to just have the bass providing harmonic content.”

Almost exactly 50 years ago, in late November 1936, a 25- year-old blues singer from Mississippi made his first records in San Antonio, Tex­as: among them “Terraplane Blues,” “Come on in My Kitchen,” “Walking Blues,” “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” In January 1970, just a month after Altamont, the all-day Rolling Stones rock festival, where I’d witnessed the worst violence I’d ever seen in the flesh, I walked into a record store, not looking for anything in particular; I just wanted to buy a record. I flipped through the blues rack and saw the name Rob­ert Johnson. It didn’t mean much to me; I’d noticed it as a songwriting credit on Cream LPs, for tunes called “Crossroads” and “Four Until Late.” The previous fall, I’d watched the Rolling Stones play a pristine version of “Love in Vain,” a track on their then new Let It Bleed, but I hadn’t known it was Johnson’s — for rea­sons I’ve never figured out, they credited it to someone called “Woody Payne.”

I was just starting out as a rock critic, though after Altamont I felt a hundred years old; I thought I ought to know where Cream songs came from, so I bought the Robert Johnson album, King of the Delta Blues Sing­ers. It was one of those moments when you get your life changed — like picking a college course that leads you to think for the first time, or walking thoughtlessly into a room and falling in love.

In the formative years of my baseball fandom, I spent a lot of time listening to Mets games on a transistor radio tucked under my pillow. Extending my bedtimes were the voices of the Mets’ mighty broadcasting triumvirate of Bob Murphy, Ralph Kiner, and Lindsey Nelson. It was music to my ears. And now, in the gift shop, I could barely believe my eyes. There in front of me was an album cover bearing big yellow letters reading “Ya Gotta Believe.” Underneath, smaller type promised “all the exciting play-by-play action highlights and interviews of the amazin’ Mets 1973 end of season play-offs and World Series Championship Games.”

I had struck gold. “Ya Gotta Believe” was the battle cry of the 1973 Mets. The memories of that season were still fresh in my head — what an opportunity to relive the favorite year of my so-far brief life. If I could have traveled back to any year back then, or even now, it would have to be 1973, the defining season of my life as a Mets fan.

The music Parker innovated in conjunc­tion with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Max Roach, and others is still known by the onomatopoeia bebop. But bop was not created in a vacuum. Such epochal Parker-Gillespie masterpieces as “Shaw Nuff,” “Salt Peanuts,” and “Koko” define a very different tableau from that imagined by Lester Young or Roy Eldridge, yet the styles of the younger players were originally mod­eled after their idols. Bop became a tradition unto itself when a new wave of players came along drawing exclusively on the achieve­ment of Parker’s generation. The originators of bop, however, were intimately involved with the playing of Young, Eldridge, Art Tatum, Jo Jones, Sid Catlett, Charlie Chris­tian, Bobby Hackett, Jimmy Blanton, Teddy Wilson, and other masters of the swing period. They must certainly have recognized the falsity of some of the claims made on behalf of bop.

It is easy enough to recognize bop as a style of music different from, say, swing or avante-garde, but attempts to isolate the distinguishing characteristics of bop can be treacherous. We hear a great deal about the complexity of bop, for example, yet nothing in its fabric was foreign to Ellington. Much has been made of the intensity and speed demanded by most bop compositions, but speed was also endemic to Eldridge, Tatum, and Armstrong. Bop musicians have been credited with first superimposing their own compositions on familiar chord progres­sions; but earlier examples of this practice include Benny Moten’s “Moten’s Swing” (based on “You’re Driving Me Crazy”), Sidney Bechet’s “Shag” (”I Got Rhythm”), and Ellington’s “In a Mellotone” (“Rose Room”). Most dramatically, bop musicians are said to have been the first to improvise on chords, rather than simply embellishing the given melody. Almost any handful of classic jazz recordings from the ’30s will refute this.

Another area of confusion concerns the relationship of bop to the big bands. The instrumentation of the Charlie Parker Quin­tet — sax. trumpet, piano, bass, drums — became the standard instrumentation for jazz until the ’60s, but it wasn’t the nature of the beast that required a small-group context nor did the musicians reject big bands entirely for musical reasons. The key figures in bop were actually trained in big bands: Parker with Jay McShann, Gillespie with Cab Calloway, Dexter Gordon with Armstrong, Max Roach with Benny Carter. Economic considerations have played a de­cisive role in every phase of jazz. The shoestring labels that recorded bop were hardly able to offer a musician the freedom to hire 15 men for a record date. But bop, like most schools of jazz, aspired to larger en­sembles. Gillespie formed a big band as soon as he could get the backing, Woody Her­man’s second herd was a bop band, and Tadd Dameron, the preeminent composer-ar­ranger of the movement, wrote for orches­tras whenever possible. Parker himself toured with a string ensemble of his own vo­lition.

The distinguishing characteristics of bop are immediately recognizable. The absence of vibrato and tonal coloration is necessitat­ed by the blazing tempos and the many-noted character of the solos. The techniques with which a bop solo is constructed might be discussed in jargon like flattened fifths, the higher intervals of chords, diminished scales, and chromaticism, but while the musician has to understand these terms, the listener doesn’t. In order to hear the melo­dies of a bop improvisation, one simply has to become familiar enough with the idiom to hear the component phrases of a solo. There is no greater melodist in jazz than Parker.

The central innovation in Parker’s music was rhythmic.

Typically, when climbing records are broken, Climbing reporters like me are quick to celebrate and share the details. But this one felt different. From my view in Yosemite, where I’m based for the season, most of the climbers I know regard the ascent—and specifically the dad in the equation—with dismissal or disdain.

Soon I heard the rumors: “It’s all for publicity.” “It’s such a junk show.” “The kids were crying the whole time.” “The dad’s got this weird, conservative agenda.” Climbers accused Joe Evermore of various crimes: hiring illegal and unqualified guides, getting in the way of a search and rescue operation, dragging up children who didn’t want to be there. Over breakfast tables and birthday dinners, I watched my friends and former colleagues debate whether the seven-year-old deserved to say he’d “climbed” El Cap: After all, neither he nor his dad led or even cleaned any of the pitches. Yet while many members of the climbing community condemned the Evermores, the world of non-climbers could not stop celebrating.

To suss out some truth from these clashing versions of the story, I spoke with Joe Evermore himself, one of his hired guides (who agreed to be interviewed in exchange for anonymity), the director of the Yosemite Mountaineering School, and two Yosemite Search and Rescue (YOSAR) members who encountered the Evermores at the summit. What I found was a complicated picture of media, climbing achievement, and parenting—and a much bigger story than what’s been told.

1978, Kenyon College, sophomore year. Bill Watterson is lying on his dorm room bed, staring up at the ceiling. He hasn’t yet invented six-year-old Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes — though his studies have made him familiar with their philosophical namesakes — because the strip that will make Watterson’s name is almost a decade away. Right now, he’s thinking that his dorm room needs an amateur rendition of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam”.

There’s a number of problems up front. The first is that (as Watterson will tell you himself) he’s not a talented painter. Still, what the work will lack in “colour sense and technical flourish” it’ll make up for with comedy — specifically “the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakeable odour of old beer cans and older laundry”. Besides, Michelangelo wasn’t Michelangelo until he’d painted and kept painting and became Michelangelo the painter. Watterson decides to go ahead and start painting.

The next problem is structural: how to reach the ceiling? He can stand on the bed, but that’ll mean hours with his head cocked all the way back, a young man developing an old man’s spine. He needs a way to paint the ceiling without permanently disfiguring his posture. His friends help him with a solution: they stand two chairs on Watterson’s bed, then lie a table across the chairs. By climbing up this tower and lying on the table, he comes two feet away from the ceiling. Watterson gets to work.

He’s sunk hours into hours of weeks upon weeks on his back when a third problem occurs to him. He should have thought of this and acted on it before the first brush stroke. He needs permission to paint his dorm room ceiling. But Watterson once admitted, “I never spent as much time or work on any authorised art project or any poli-sci paper as I spent on this one act of vandalism.” He isn’t giving up on it now.

The housing director is understandably suspicious of this kid wanting to paint some elaborate picture on his ceiling with only a few weeks left of the academic year. He realises that the idea is being proposed retroactively. Maybe that’s why he plays along and grants permission for something that’s obviously already underway. Watterson is allowed to complete the painting on the condition that he returns the ceiling to normal before he leaves in summer. Watterson goes back to his room, climbs up the makeshift scaffolding, and gets back to work.

A few weeks later, the project is finished. Watterson probably takes a moment to stand in the middle of the room and look up, contemplating the months of work, the tins of paint he went through, the things he learned about technique, about the joy of a job done for its own sake, about himself. Then he opens a tin of whitewash, climbs up the bed-chairs-table one last time, and paints over his work. He leaves the ceiling white, empty, fresh.

The DEI machine has been running psychological operations against the public for decades now, using weaponry put together in the publicly funded but intellectually contaminated social science laboratories of our most respected universities. And we are not supposed to get to comment when the whole thing is shown to be fraudulent?

Addiction is much like this. It feeds off a need to recreate day-to-day fantasy vignettes, sometimes the more outlandish the better, because that way the agony that truth brings cannot prevail against it.

What happened to Arday was a kind of intervention. Those are brutal, harsh and painful and yet, when conducted in the right way and with love, purgative.

No one is more-ill-served by ideology than the adherents.

MORE:
Liberals and Conservatives Need a New Relationship with Minorities Like Jason Arday:
Both sides of the political spectrum have an unhealthy relationship with minorities. (Zaid Jilani, Aug 16, 2026, American Saga)

Conservatives obsessed with Arday’s case because they saw him as representative of negative trends in academia. Here was a black academic who specialized in racial theory who fudged his research. A story like that is crack-cocaine for the modern day British and American right. And where there’s demand, there’s coverage. There were hundreds of articles written in the British press about a singular academic and his misdeeds. While Arday’s behavior as an academic was clearly inappropriate, it’s hard to justify the disproportionate coverage of it. The man was being treated as if he was a supervillain. From his perspective, not only was his career finished but he was basically the Worst Man In the World.

But for conservatives, he was more than a man. He was a symbol of everything they’ve come to hate about Western culture. So he had to be made an example of. The fact he was clearly mentally unwell — we know, for instance, that he was on the autism spectrum — was not a consideration in the endless pile-on. Because for those who were crucifying Arday, the larger mission of winning the culture war was the ultimate goal.

(I don’t think it’s relevant to the accuracy of the charges against Arday, but an openly racist theorist, Nathan Cofnas, led the crusade against him.)

Yet we can’t let liberals off the hook here. Questions about the veracity of Arday’s work and his life story arose as early as 2023, shortly after his appointment to Cambridge as the university’s youngest black scholar ever. They were not taken seriously.

A report released over the weekend about the state of scholarly standards in the field said it had been compromised by politics that influenced the discipline’s values and priorities.

The report was produced by a commission led by Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, where leaders have argued that higher education is in need of reforms. The commission found that scholarship in the humanities and social sciences was sometimes in the service of political goals.

“Some topics cannot be studied or cannot be studied in an honest way,” said Jukka Savolainen, a Wayne State University criminologist and sociologist who is not part of the commission.

For scholars studying incarceration, he said, “the only research that’s rewarded and allowed and encouraged is to find the umpteenth way in which incarceration is harmful.” […]

Student interest in sociology has dramatically dropped in recent decades. One analysis found that since 2013, completions of undergraduate sociology degrees fell by 25 percent.

Sociologists cite factors like a broader societal shift toward degrees that are perceived as prioritizing trade skills. […]

The overall numbers mask that sociology is thriving in some liberal places, especially California. An analysis by Michel Estefan, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, found that two out of every five sociology bachelor’s degrees were earned in California.

The majority of them are students of color.

…by steering students of color towards useless degrees?

During the First Congress’s debate in which James Madison and others defended the ideas that the president had the constitutional power to remove department heads “at pleasure,” one of Madison’s opponents noted that, in Federalist #77, Alexander Hamilton had written that the Senate’s consent would be necessary not only for an official’s appointment but also “to displace” them. Madison and Hamilton, the two most influential expositors of the newly adopted constitution were seemingly at odds over how the government would remove senior administration figures.

Hamilton, alerted to the fact that his statement in Federalist #77 had been used to challenge Madison’s argument sent a note (see William Smith letter to Edward Rutledge, June 21, 1789) to a Madison ally in the House to let its members know that “upon more mature reflection,” he now agreed with Madison. The power to remove was the president’s alone as a constitutionally implied power of the office.

Forslund said that they designed the X1 to show that electric propulsion can work in an aircraft that is large enough for commercial airline operations. The plane is a demonstrator representative of Heart’s ES-30 production aircraft, that is currently being developed.

Since March, America has been running an accidental experiment and glimpsing what the country might look like without one of its dumbest statutes. The results are in, and they embarrass a century’s worth of U.S. lawmakers and defenders. […]

The numbers speak for themselves. The Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow documented that in under five months, Puerto Rico took in more mainland fuel than in any full year since 2015. Shipments to the West Coast, Alaska, and Hawaii hit nearly 14 million barrels, about 170 percent of the recent annual average. Whole trade routes quickly appeared: Gulf Coast fuel to Hawaii, New Jersey jet fuel to California, propane to Puerto Rico.

America’s government-protected fleet seldom served these locales. Remove a prohibition and the market pours resources where they are needed. As Grabow noted, “That’s strong evidence for the longstanding critique that the Jones Act suppresses domestic commerce by preventing economically viable trade between Americans.”

[T]he scientific evidence favors a natural origin. This includes epidemiological evidence showing that the first COVID-19 cases clustered around one corner of Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where wild animals were being butchered. Environmental samples taken from that same area of the market contain, in the same swab, the SARS-CoV-2 sequence and DNA from potential intermediate hosts such as the raccoon dog.

The accusation that Fauci lied to Congress rests on his denial, in a 2021 exchange with Paul, that NIH had ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. The point of such research is to learn what a virus would need to jump into humans before it does, so that vaccines and treatments can be ready.

The trouble is the term gain of function. In biology, it means research that gives an organism a new capability—engineering a bacterium to digest an oil spill is gain-of-function research. In politics, it has come to mean something narrower and more alarming: deliberately making a dangerous virus more dangerous. Federal rules use a third definition, narrower still. The federal framework adopted in 2017, after years of public debate, covers work to enhance a pathogen that is “likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations” and “likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.” It also excludes viruses, however dangerous, as they exist in nature. (The policy was revised in 2024.)

The gap between those definitions is the whole dispute, and it is why the perjury charge fails twice over.