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My closest encounter with a terrorist attack

April 30, 2026

Yesterday I heard a personal account of the aftermath of a terrorist attack from Sarah Levy. This made me think of an experience of my own. In 1995 I was living in Bures-sur-Yvette near Paris and working at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. I used to frequently travel into Paris in the evenings to go into the library of Pompidou centre. On one occasion the train I took stopped at the outer ring. It was announced that traffic was interrupted and that those who wanted to go into the centre of town should continue with the underground, which I did. No one seemed to know what was going on but from the conversations around me I got the idea that there had been a terrorist attack. I spent the evening in town and there was a very strange atmosphere. Nobody seemed to know what exactly was going on. There were red rescue helicopters landing on the square in front of Notre Dame.

What had happened is the following. A bomb exploded in a train of the RER line D, the one I usually took to go into town shortly before it reached the station Saint-Michel, the one I usually got out at. Eight people were killed and 171 injured. The helicopters were there to bring the injured to hospitals. If I had left home one hour earlier on that day I could have been in that train. The attack was carried out by a group called the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria. Around that time they also carried out several other bomb attacks in Paris and other parts of France. This was the time when suddenly dustbins became security risks and could no longer be used normally. Given the fact that there have been tens of thousands of violent attacks by people asserting their support for Islam it is not so surprising that I should come close to one of them. As far as I can remember in those days the attack was universally condemned in the media and the origin of the perpetrators was not kept secret so to avoid encouraging discrimination. Halcyon days.

Tags:politics, terrorism
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The Parasitic Mind by Gad Saad

April 20, 2026

I have just read the book ‘The Parasitic Mind’ by Gad Saad. Its subject is political correctness and the decline of rationality and freedom of speech in the West. The author was born in Lebanon and escaped with his Jewish family to Canada as conditions in Lebanon became unacceptable for them. His parents made the mistake of returning to Lebanon once. They were kidnapped by terrorists and presumably tortured before they were able to return to Canada. Saad explains his strong commitment to freedom and to truth. In these things he is uncompromising and he was told by his mother that his commitment to truth was too strong. Here I feel sympathy for him since I also have a strong commitment to truth and have been criticised for it.

Having escaped from repressive conditions in Lebanon Saad was confronted in Canada with postmodernism in universities. He describes it as a parasitic mind virus. He compares it with physical parasites. One example is Toxoplasma gondii, which when it infects mice leads them to become friendly with cats, too friendly for their own good. I find the analogy quite appropriate. Our intellectual discourse is affected (infected) by a nefarious influence which could lead to the death of the West. As a young researcher who did not yet have tenure I considered whether I should concentrate my efforts on the US or the European job market. One reason I chose the latter was the spectre of political correctness in the US. In fact many examples presented by Saad indicate to me how right I was although I had no idea of the reality at that time. The events described in these examples are at first sight ridiculous but in the end really shocking.

I am not so fond of Saad’s style and choice of words which seem to me often a bit crude. For instance the word ‘lunatic’ occurs a bit too frequently for my taste. It may be that this is necessary for combatting political correctness since it is necessary to fight fire with fire. My own aesthetic feeling causes me to prefer the suave prose of Douglas Murray, as it is found in the book of his I reviewed recently. There are some formulations in Saad’s book which I liked, whereby I do not know which of those are his inventions. For instance there is ‘testicular fortitude’ and ‘tyranny of the minority’. In the context of political correctness he talks about self-flagellation. The idea of comparing the woke to flagellants is one which had previously occurred to me spontaneously.

One of the most interesting parts of the book for me is the seventh chapter. It contains a lot of interesting statistics. One simple question posed (and answered) is how many Jews there are in the world and how many Muslims. If someone had asked me that question without warning then I think I would have got the orders of magnitude right. I nevertheless found it striking to see the numbers. In a large part of the chapter data are presented which serve to illuminate the question about the nature of Islam ‘Is it a merciful, tolerant and peaceful religion or is it a religion of violence, intolerance and domination’. The numbers speak for themselves.

The last chapter in the book is an appeal for people to speak up. In the recent past I have increasingly tended to formulate my political opinions clearly in public without worrying too much about the consequences. In fact this has not had negative consequences for me. There are a couple of reasons for this. One of these is that my circle of contacts, physical and virtual, is quite narrow. The other is that as a professor of mathematics rather than, for instance, sociology I am far away from the main sites of infection in the universities. In fact speaking openly has mainly led me to interesting and pleasant contacts. Why did I read this book? I did so because what I had heard about Gad Saad had aroused my curiosity. Another alterior motive is that this was a kind of preparation for reading Saad’s upcoming book ‘Suicidal Empathy’.

Tags:book-review, books, writing
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Is Springer Nature sacrificing scientific truth to political ideology?

January 7, 2026

I just saw an article by the chemistry professor Anna Krylov from October 2025 where she explains why she refused to review an article for a journal belonging to the Nature publishing group and more generally communicated to them that she will not cooperate with them in the future, unless they change their policies. The reason is that there are grounds to believe that they are sacrificing truth to political ideology. In this way they are undermining science and truth. She gives three examples to support this view. The first is that reviewers are to be selected ‘with diversity in mind’. In other words, at this point the criterion of competence is being replaced by one of identity politics. The second is so-called ‘citation justice’. This means that the criterion for citing a paper is not its relevance but biological and social characteristics of the authors. It suggests replacing criteria in science like ‘is it true’ or ‘is it interesting’ by ‘who said it’. The third is that results of research work should be suppressed if they are potentially harmful to certain groups, whatever harmful means.

I am very conscious that the influence of truth and science in society is declining but I was shocked to see that this process has affected science itself to such an extent. I suppose that I did not notice this directly since my field, mathematics, is presumably one of the least affected. The problems pointed out by Krylov do not apply equally to all journals. Despite this, since my most recent article appeared in a journal belonging to the Nature publishing group, I feel I have to pay more attention to this type of issue in the future. When I started publishing scientific papers there was no reason to doubt the integrity of any well-known publisher. The choice of a journal to publish in was based on the quality of the scientific content alone. More recently it has become necessary to more careful due to harmful economic influences and the rise of predatory publishing. Now we have an additional factor, where the quality of the scientific literature is under attack not only due to monetary influences but also due to political ideology.

Tags:philosophy, publishing, research, science
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On Democracies and Death Cults by Douglas Murray

November 27, 2025

I have just read the book ‘On Democracies and Death Cults’ by Douglas Murray. It is one of the most rewarding reads I have had for a long time and it has my highest recommendation. In recent months I have thought a lot about what is happening in Gaza and Israel but I was missing a lot of background information. I am now much better informed due to reading Murray’s book. One part of the new things I have learned concerns what has happened in Israel and Gaza in the aftermath of 7.10.2023 and this is based on Murray’s extensive research on the ground which in part was done a very short time after the attack on Israel took place. The other part consists of historical information about the conflict between Israel and its neighbours.

A starting point for the book is that while the attack on Israel took place on 7.10 there was already an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square on 8.10. Murray was there and taking photos. This was at a time when the rape and murder in Israel was still going on. Similar events were observed in other Western countries including Germany, France and Canada. They were out of control of the police. A theme which is central to the book is the paradoxical nature of the reactions to the attack on Israel in the Western world. Instead of the natural reaction of solidarity with Israel there was condemnation of Israel, a particularly blatant example of victim blaming. There was not a single protest against Hamas. All this can be seen as symbolic of a wider trend with Israel playing the role of the Western world. At present many people in the Western world who are publicly visible (such as politicians, intellectuals and journalists) tend to condemn the Western world, its traditions and culture. At the same time they generously pardon the crimes of its enemies to the point of even acting to prevent people from talking about those crimes and their perpetrators by any means possible. Murray feared that people would deny the atrocities that had happened in the attack and he travelled to Israel (and to Gaza) as soon as possible so as to document the events. He was able to view the famous compilation of videos showing the horror of the attack. He was struck by the fact that the terrorists appeared to be enjoying what they were doing and to be proud of it. One of them contacted his parents via WhatsApp and sent them pictures of about ten people he had killed with his own hands. His parents were delighted. Murray quotes the journalist, publisher and diplomat George Weidenfeld as stating that there are people who are worse antisemites than the Nazis. While the Nazis tried to hide their worst crimes from outside observers Hamas publicised their crimes as much as possible. To try to understand this phenomenon better Murray talked to many people, including survivors of the attack, families of those killed and those kidnapped to Gaza, members of the Israeli security forces and Israeli politicians including Benjamin Netanjahu.

Murray explains how the takeover of Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini is at the root of many of the present problems in the Middle East. The enemies surrounding Israel are now like the tentacles of the Iranian regime. The change of government in Iran was praised by many left-wing intellectuals in the West, including Michel Foucault. There may be an exceptional concentration of evil in Hamas but they could not have acted as they have done without weapons, training and other support from Iran. The question of how the disaster of 7.10 could have happened is not one which is answered in the book. However there is one suggestion of something which could have been an important contributing factor: hubris. Israel was known to others and to itself as being a master of defending itself and it seems that the Israeli authorities thought that they had Gaza completely under control, which turned out to be a grave error. A feature of the relations between Israel and Gaza has been the exchanges of huge numbers of Palestinians who were in Israeli prisons (of whom many had committed terrible crimes) for a few hostages. In this context Israel is the perfect target for blackmail. I learned from the book that Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the attack on 7.10, was one of more than a thousand Palestinians released in return for just one soldier who had been a hostage. While in prison a doctor discovered that Sinwar was suffering from a brain tumour. He was treated for this in an Israeli hospital. On 7.10 several relatives of that doctor were killed or kidnapped. One of them was an 85 year old holocaust survivor, Yaffa Adar, who had been in the Warsaw Ghetto. She was taken to Gaza and held for 49 days before being released.

Murray was shown around the village of Nir Oz where of about 400 inhabitants about 100 were killed or kidnapped and was told the stories of what had happened to them. There was for instance Bracha Levinson, 74 years old, child of holocaust survivors. The terrorists who came into her house took her cell phone and filmed her murder. Then they took a picture of her lying dead in a pool of blood and uploaded it to her Facebook page so that all her family and friends could see it. Murray visited a bomb shelter where at least 11 Thai workers had been taken and brutally murdered. There was blood everywhere, on the floor, on the walls (including hand prints of the victims) and on the ceiling. He met a young man who had escaped from the Nova festival and who told his story while showing what he had filmed with his phone. He had managed to reach his car but did not dare to drive off. It is important to know that the wave of Hamas terrorists from Gaza was followed by a wave of civilians who went around the scene of the carnage, looting everything they could find. A group of looters was coming closer, going from car to car. Outside the car was another man but he was afraid to get in in case he might be seen. Eventually the group came so close that the man in the car felt he had to drive away, leaving the other man behind. It was possible to escape in the car but the man left behind was lynched by the Palestinians.

One month after the attack on Israel Murray went into Gaza with the IDF. They passed through the hole in the fence where most Gazans had crossed into Israel on the day of the attack. Then they proceeded until they reached the main road from north to south where Gazans were following the Israeli orders to leave the north. Many of them were shot by Hamas to prevent them doing so. Murray saw them queueing up to pass the control post. The fact that he was deep inside Gaza makes his account more authoritative than those of people giving their opinions from Israel or from thousands of miles away from Gaza.

The book discusses the antisemitic activities in Ivy League Universities. This is a development which I had followed on my own from a distance but here I learned some more things. It is discussed how the German left moved from supporting Israel to supporting the ‘Palestinians’. This had to do with always wanting to be on the side of the oppressed. It has parallels with what has happened in the US and elsewhere in the West in the last two years. There is a description of the highjacking of a plane by Germans and Palestinians in 1976. The hostages were separated by the Germans into Jews, who were to be held, and non-Jews, who were to be released. The criterion was not being Israeli but being Jewish. One of the hostages showed the terrorists the number tattooed on his arm which showed that he had been in a concentration camp. He told them in German that he thought that something had changed in Germany since the time of the Nazis but that he suspected from the behaviour of these people that he had been mistaken. There is a discussion of antisemitism which contains two interesting quotes. The first, due to Vasily Grossman, is ‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of – I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of’. The second is an adaptation of this to the present, due to Murray, ‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of – I’ll tell you what you believe you are guilty of.

Murray talks about how impressed he was by some young women he met in Israel. One of them, nineteen years old, was an army recruit and was helping in an operation to collect the last human remains from vehicles which had been destroyed in the attack on the Nova Festival. Another, twenty-three years old, was working as an intelligence expert on Yemen. He was very impressed by these and other young women he met and contrasted them with women of the same age he had met in other Western countries and who often seemed to him like spoiled children. Being in a war can sometimes bring out the best in people. It is easy to see parallels between the Nazis and Hamas but it is not so well known that there is a direct connection. This connection is explained in the book. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was an ally of Hitler and collaborated with him in the annihilation of Jews. The Mufti was the one war criminal of the Second World War of this caliber who was able to live openly and without being brought to trial after the war. He was given a warm welcome in his home country of Egypt and praised in the highest terms by the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation of which Hamas is one of the descendants.

Murray visited some of the Palestinians who had been taken prisoner during the attack on 7.10. He was able to see them in their cells. He recognised some of them as the killers he had seen in the horrific videos. They looked surprisingly like normal human beings. When Sinwar was finally killed Murray heard about it and immediately travelled to the place in Rafah where it had happened. When Sinwar was shot (by a nineteen year old soldier) without his identity being known he was able to escape, badly wounded, into a building and sit in an armchair. There he bled to death. Murray saw the traces of blood Sinwar had left during his escape and sat in the bloodstained chair where his life had ended. He looked out at the ruins of Rafah and speculated about what thoughts might have gone through Sinwar’s mind as he sat there.

This book reports on many horrors but the author found something positive at the end. He was encouraged by seeing the heroism of young men and women in Israel who had risen to the occasion and shown what is possible. Anyone interested in Gaza should read this book.

Tags:gaza, hamas, israel, palestine, politics
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The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

May 12, 2025

I just read the book mentioned in the title of this post. It is almost 500 pages long and thus requires a certain investment of time. I started out with positive expectations based on my experience of Arendt’s book on Eichmann. I hoped to get some real insight into the phenomenon of totalitarianism. In the end I am disappointed with the book. It certainly contains various things which I found interesting but in the end I felt I had not understood the global message of the book. Correspondingly I felt that I had not really understood a lot about totalitarianism. The book begins with a long discussion of antisemitism. There also I would have hoped to get more insight. Later there are many comparisons of the flavours of totalitarianism which existed under Hitler and Stalin, their similarities and their differences. A big problem I have is that in the book many abstract ideas are introduced without really defining what they mean. Distinctions are made which I do not really grasp. In the end I feel that I do not understand the mechanisms by which totalitarian systems evolve and persist. I also do not understand the motivation of the individuals who participate in these mechanisms. Many of the mechanisms described reminded me of Trump and his followers. In the end my interest in this subject is not historical but arises from a hope to better understand what is going on in today’s politics. At the very end of the book I had the impression that the text was dissolving into meaningless words – at least they had no meaning for me.

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Medicine must be defended

December 10, 2024

A key element of modern life is medicine. It has extended the lifespans of those with access to it enormously and also makes a huge contribution to the quality of the life we have. In my opinion it is the most important thing which science has done for society. For many decades the US has been a powerhouse in the progress of medicine. This was the result of a curious accident. The development of medicine in the US was stimulated in an essential way by the money pumped into it by J. D. Rockefeller. The strange thing is that Rockefeller himself did not believe in medicine. He preferred homeopathy and other superstitions. Because he did not have enough time to think carefully about distributing his money to deserving causes he hired someone else to do it for him. Fortunately that person, Frederick Taylor Gates, did understand the importance of medicine and gave the money correspondingly. Now medicine is under threat due to the nomination of Robert Kennedy to a position where he could control the US health system. He is an enemy of medicine. He claims that AIDS is not caused by HIV and is an anti-vaccine activist. In other words he denies fundamental facts of modern medicine. I was happy to see that 77 Nobel Prize winners now wrote a letter urging the Senate not to confirm his nomination. Of course there is no guarantee that anyone will pay attention to the letter. Maybe it will only serve to ruin the reputation of the Nobel Prize with a certain public. The NIH is probably the most prestigious medical research institution in the world. The damage likely to result from the nomination of Kennedy could be aggravated by the fact that Jay Bhattacharya, the nominee to head the NIH, also has views on COVID-19 which are, to say the least, highly controversial. Not only all those who believe in medicine should do all they can to oppose these nominations. Anyone who believes in science and in rational thought should do so. For these nominations would set a precedent in which control of science is given to people who openly oppose consensus judgments of science.

Tags:education, health, news, science, wellness
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The truth between Scylla and Charybdis

November 21, 2024

I just saw a video on X where Marjorie Taylor Greene is putting up a sign outside her office with the following text ‘There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. ‘Trust The Science’. This made me think how without noticing I have landed in a world which during most of my life I would never have dreamed my world could become. It is a world in which a public statement of something which has been obvious to everyone for most of the history of mankind has suddenly become controversial. A sign of this kind is likely to generate condemnation, indignation and even violence in a certain group of people. In many parts of Europe it might be worth a jail sentence these days. I see myself, as a lover of truth, between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one side there is Donald Trump propagating lies (especially the lie about winning the election he lost) and forcing his allies to publicly agree with these lies. I would associate that side with the monster Scylla. MTG is if possible even worse than Trump in this sense. However in the case of the sign she is on the side of truth. She is making a statement against the other side, the woke faction. I would associate that side with the whirlpool Charybdis. Wokeness is a whirlpool which people get sucked into and it carries them to their (intellectual) destruction. It seems to me that both sides are a comparable threat to truth and reason. Coming back to the sign I mentioned at the beginning I think about the new law in Germany (Selbstbestimmungsgesetz) which allows people to define their own gender. Here we see an interesting phenomenon. A law (call it Law 1) can be changed fundamentally while keeping its wording identical. For this it suffices to pass another law (Law 2) which changes the definition of the words used in Law 1.

Tags:book-review, book-reviews, life, mythology, writing
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Words and freedom

November 17, 2024

A few months ago I bought a book called ‘The Collected Essays and Letters of Virginia Woolf’. I imagined reading this as a luxury and therefore I bought a hardback whose cover incorporates a picture of the author. I also planned to read it slowly and I have succeeded in doing so up to now. Today I read a chapter called ‘Craftsmanship’ which is based on a BBC broadcast from 1937. This text is concerned with words which are treated anthropomorphically or perhaps more as animals than as human beings. Here we read about words: ‘They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.’ When I read this I think of the fact that for me the possibility of using words is a certain part of my personal idea of freedom. Of course, almost everyone thinks that freedom is a good thing but the word means very different things to different people. For me the freedom to use language as I wish is a central part of freedom as a whole. The opposite of this is related to such concepts as censorship and political correctness. A concrete example is the political and social pressure arising through rules involving gender in the German language, which I have written about elsewhere. In the meantime I have learned about similar problems in other languages, e.g. Spanish. Another example is how certain words are banned from public use since they might offend someone. It has reached the point where many classic works are being rewritten. If I compare this to what Woolf writes I see the words as being like animals which are chained up, locked into small cages, mutilated and killed by modern trends in society. I feel the wish to speak out against this and find others who feel similarly.

Tags:books, freedom, language, politics, words
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Podcast about Grothendieck

November 2, 2024

In a previous post I wrote something about Grothendieck and his text ‘Récoltes et Semailles’. I learned a lot about his biography there and other things in the first of the three-volume series of books by Winfried Scharlau. Now I discovered a five-part podcast of France Culture about Grothendieck (in French), ‘Alexandre Grothendieck, légende rebelle des mathématiques‘, which contains a lot of information complementary to what I knew already. It is also interesting because it includes conversations with people who knew Grothendieck well, for instance Pierre Deligne, who sounds a lot nicer than his caustic portrait in ‘Récoltes et Semailles’. A daughter of Grothendieck tells the following stories. Grothendieck’s father (whose name was Shapiro) was an anarchist and was arrested in the Ukraine together with others and they were all sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out in all cases except that of Shapiro. In his case, because he was so young, the sentence was commuted to prison. He was in prison for many years. As a way of humiliating them the prisoners’ heads were shaved. When he eventually got out of prison Shapiro continued to shave his head as a sign of solidarity with his former comrades in prison. Grothendieck copied this habit from his father. In Grothendieck’s office he had a photo of the train which took his father to Auschwitz, where he was gassed. It is left open in the podcast how Grothendieck could have obtained such a photo. In the podcasts extracts from ‘Récoltes et Semailles’ and other texts of Grothendieck are read. They just serve to confirm my opinion that, contrary to his own statement, Grothendieck was a very gifted writer. His prose exerts a strong attraction on me.

What I have written up to now relates to the first and second parts of the podcast. The third part describes how Grothendieck became dominated by extreme left-wing politics. He travelled to Vietnam during the war there. He adopted an anti-scientific position, posing the question if scientific research should continue at all. I was interested to learn that after he had left IHES the fact that his position at the Collège de France was not made permanent was strongly influenced by Jean Leray. At this point I recall that Leray was not at all an apolitical person. He was a prisoner of war during the Second World War and organized a university in the camp for his fellow prisoners. He radically changed his own research to an area which he felt could not possibly be useful to the Germans. I feel that Leray was right in blocking Grothendieck’s remaining at the Collège de France because Grothendieck was locked in a mode of disrupting science and technology and more generally questioning western civilisation. Another interesting aspect of the third part is that it contains recordings of Grothendieck himself speaking, in particular of a talk he gave at CERN. A striking element of the fourth part of the podcast is the story of how Grothendieck fought against a law which made it illegal to help anyone who was living illegally in France. Grothendieck did help someone in this way and was tried. He said to those judging him that he was guilty of breaking the law but he asked them to realise that this law was unjust in terms of general morality. He said that if they decided to prosecute him in this case then the punishment should be a jail sentence which should not be suspended and that they should apply the maximum sentence allowed by the law in his case. He said that since he had spent two years in a concentration camp as a child he was sure it would be no problem for him to survive some time in prison. In the podcast the result of the trial is not given. In another source I found the statement that Grothendieck was fined 1000 francs and was given a six month suspended sentence. The fifth part of the podcast concerns the last part of Grothendieck’s life, more than twenty years in which he lived in almost complete solitude. One of his sons said that in later years Grothendieck’s German accent became stronger. He also believed that when composing his texts Grothendieck first thought of them in German and then translated the results internally into French. The last part of the podcast is concerned with artificial intelligence and the fact that the concept of topos as invented by Grothendieck might have important applications in that area. Interestingly the idea comes up that mathematics, because it could make things more effective, might be evil. In fact it seems that evil was the concept which Grothendieck was concerned with most in his later years.

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Trip to the US

October 7, 2024

I have been in the US many times for my work but in most places I visited I had little time for tourism. Now I have made up for this with a two week organised round trip with Eva. We flew to Boston. The things I saw there did not overlap too much with those I saw on my last visit. One part of the day was a guided tour of the Harvard campus given by a student. He introduced himself as a graduate student of mathematics and I asked him what his subject was. Actually he turned out to be more of a computer scientist than a mathematician. When walking in the Harvard Yard I could not help but think of the pro-Palestinian/antisemitic protests which took place there in recent months and of the resignation of Claudine Gay. I asked myself whether this was not a visit to the ‘heart of wokeness’. In this context I would like to mention an article in the Harvard Crimson which I was made aware of by an article of Maria-Sybilla Lotter in the magazine Forschung und Lehre. The Harvard article, by the student Sylvia Korn, is called ‘The Doctrine of Academic Freedom’ and has the subtitle ‘Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice’. I interpret this as the statement ‘Let’s give up on truth in favour of political activism’. When we were at Harvard there were no signs of protests and the recent political discussion did not play a significant role in what our Harvard guide told us. From the guide of our tour I was able to learn a lot about American history and politics. I was brought to thinking over aspects of the differences in political philosophy in the US and Europe. I thought of the fact that Boston is the site of the headquarters of Moderna just as Mainz, where I live, is the site of the headquarters of Biontech. Thus COVID-19 has established a connection between these two very unequal cities. From Boston we drove through Massachusetts and New Hampshire and visited the Enfield Shaker Museum, which gives a picture of an unusual philosophy of life. While approaching there I think I got glimpse of a Great Northern Diver (Common Loon) from the bus but it was too short for me to be sure. We continued into Vermont and spent the night in a hotel with a spectacular view in Chittenden. On the next day we proceeded through New York State to Buffalo. I presume that the principal reason the town was on the programme was not the chance to try the eponymous chicken wings but being there we did not miss the opportunity. During the trip I became acquainted with the notion of the Rust Belt. By coincidence we had lunch in Syracuse, a place where I worked for four months in 1992. I did not see anything I recognized from my previous stay. No doubt the real reason for visiting Buffalo was to use it as a base for a trip to the Niagara Falls and of course we went there and we spent some time in the idyllic village of Niagara-on-the-Lake.

From Buffalo we drove to Washington, where we stayed in a hotel we found surprisingly near to the White House. We saw a number of the standard sights and observed a lot of other activity. During a visit to the Lincoln Memorial a Bald Eagle flew over as if to complete the display of symbols of America. We saw a procession with flags bearing the names of the Jewish tribes. We were surprised to learn that the participants were not Jews but members of a Christian sect from Korea. I saw quite a few Mockingbirds flying around the government buildings and the thought crossed my mind that they might be mocking some of the politics which takes place in those buildings. There was also a big Latin American event going on in the street. My strongest impression is of the bright colours and the dancing. I was slightly disappointed that there was not more music. The event was loud enough but the sound seemed to be dominated by drumming, at least in the parts I experienced. I went into to a couple of museums. I had to take a look at the collection of stuffed birds in the Natural History Museum. I did enjoy seeing species that I had only seen pictures of before. For instance there was a Baltimore Oriole, which was smaller than I expected. Probably this false expectation was due to the fact that it is significantly smaller than the Golden Oriole, although I know very well that the two are not related, except in name. At the Korean War Veterans Memorial I was struck by the phrase ‘Freedom is not free’ and I immediately thought of Ukraine today.

Driving through Pennsylvania we visited the Amish Village in Lancaster County. In Philadelphia we got another lesson in American history. It should not be forgotten that William Penn was a Quaker. We visited the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. I was also conscious of the medical history linked to Philadelphia. It was the place where Katalin Karikó worked with the value of her work remaining unrecognized. The fact that infectious mononucleosis was caused by the Epstein-Barr virus was discovered at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Philadelphia was also the place where Baruch Blumberg made important discoveries. As I reported in a previous post he discovered the hepatitis B virus and developed the first hepatitis B vaccine at the Fox Chase Cancer Center.

The grand finale of the trip was New York, where our hotel was close to Times Square. When we arrived I had the impression of coming into a chaos of activity and noise. It took the hotel some time to programme the key cards for our group and I was glad that we had to wait. It was an opportunity to calm down. Later I was soon able to adapt to the New York pace. We visited the Rockefeller Center and went to the top of the tower. I also enjoyed seeing the Atlas statue there. I knew it as the picture on the cover of the version of ‘Atlas Shrugged‘ which I own. Visiting the One World Trade Center made me conscious of the extent to which the attacks on the World Trade Center have been forgotten. These memories seem very far away to me and I thought that perhaps they should not be so far away. We visited the Trump Tower. I recalled that the first time I encountered the name ‘Donald Trump’ was in the novel ‘American Psycho’ by Bret Easton Ellis which I read in 1992. There the idols of the serial killer who is the hero of the novel and his friends and colleagues from Wall Street are Trump and his tower. Somehow it all seems to fit. We spent the morning of our last day in Central Park. I saw a number of species of birds which, although I was seeing none of them for the first time, were a pleasure to see: Blue Jay, American Robin, Catbird, Yellow Warbler, Black-throated Blue Warbler.

This trip stimulated me to have a number of other general thoughts but since I have not yet thought them through to the end I will postpone discussing them to another occasion.

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