A Politician Destroys Her Career By Failing To Read The Room On Animals

Kristi Noem thought she was burnishing her image as America’s tough cowgirl politician by telling the story of how she shot her hunting dog. Instead, she united the country in disgust.

Before a commercial publishing house sends a book off to print — especially a political memoir expected to create buzz and move copies in high volume — dozens of sets of eyes have looked over the manuscript.

The author — in this case the author and ghostwriter — her PR team, consultants, editors, fact-checkers, attorneys and test readers all have eyes on the text as they prepare it for the printers.

Thanks to Politico’s reporting, we now know several of those people — including the ghostwriter, the imprint’s editors and her own advisors — actively discouraged South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem from including an ugly anecdote about shooting a “problem” dog in her book, but Noem was insistent on using it. She thought the story would burnish her brand and appeal to rural voters, signaling that she’s a salt of the earth type who doesn’t balk at making hard decisions.

That was an epic miscalculation, and as the fallout continues with backlash from Americans across the political spectrum, it shows the days of thoughtless disregard for animals are over in the US, at least as far as public life goes.

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South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

As most people know by now, Noem wrote about how she shot a 14-month-old dog named Cricket on her family farm for “ruining a hunt” and going after a neighbor’s chickens. Cricket, Noem wrote, was “worthless as a hunting dog” because she got overly excited and went into sensory overload during a pheasant hunt that Noem wanted to be memorable for a group of guests.

“I hated that dog,” she says in the book, via her ghostwriter, before describing how she dragged the excited puppy out of her truck and into a gravel pit, then ended the Cricket’s 14-month-old life with a gunshot to the face.

In a series of disastrous interviews over the past week, Noem has tried to reframe the story as an example of the hateful “fake news” media digging for dirt on her, but not only did the South Dakota governor enthusiastically include the dog-killing story in her new book, she was so confident it would win her points that she used the story as a teaser in social media posts and other marketing for No Going Back. (It’s her second book and follows 2022’s Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland. Noem really wants people to think she’s the embodiment of a Yellowstone character, a CrossFitting avatar of the real America.)

Noem thought she’d be hailed as the farm girl hero she wants to be, an image she’s cultivated during a political career that’s taken her from the state house to South Dakota’s lone congressional seat and, in 2019, the governor’s mansion.

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Noem’s book, No Going Back.

I’ve spent my entire life in urban and suburban environs and I’ve essentially taken a Jainist attitude toward animal life. I’ve never hunted an animal and never will, so I’ll defer to longtime South Dakota scribe and hunter Kevin Woster, who thoughtfully writes about the experience of raising hunting dogs and the challenges it involves.

Woster believes Noem put a puppy in situations that would challenge even an experienced hunting dog, says the dog’s “shortcomings” were the fault of her owners, and thinks the dog could have had a long and happy life with a little patience and love. (It’s also worth pointing out that by killing chickens, the dog was doing precisely what Noem trained her to do. It’s not the dog’s fault Noem didn’t differentiate between the types of birds she wanted Cricket to attack.)

Other rural scribes have echoed those sentiments and pointed out that even on farms, being forced to kill an animal is a solemn and personal thing. Even if Noem had justification, it’s one thing to handle a regrettable situation and another thing entirely to choose to celebrate it in a memoir, even using it as a marketing teaser.

Politics is performative, and Noem isn’t alone in that respect. Here in New York our disgraced former governor, Andrew Cuomo, speaks in a heavy New York accent that borders on parody. During the pandemic, he once interrupted Dr. Anthony Fauci to muse about how Fauci was the “Al Pacino of COVID” and Cuomo himself was the Robert DeNiro of the killer virus, then derailed an explainer on safety measures to wax poetic on the Italian bakeries of the Bronx’s Arthur Avenue and “the old neighborhood,” as if Cuomo grew up playing stickball on the street in Brooklyn instead of ping-ponging between New York, D.C. and Albany when his dad was a three-term governor.

George W. Bush, the scion of a generational political family and son of a former president, grew up in Connecticut. But he wanted the American public to see him as a cowboy, so he affected a Texas accent, peppered his speech with folksy-sounding nonsense and famously landed a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier to declare an end to the Iraq War on May 1, 2003, 18 years before the last US combat units left the country.

Politicians put on these costumes because voters respond to them. But the backlash against Noem — who’s now banned from 20 percent of the land in her own state and also in hot water for allegedly inventing anecdotes about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, French President Emmanuel Macron and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley — proves that, like a prince choosing to don a Nazi uniform for Halloween, a politician’s choice of costume says a lot about her judgment and values. In this case even the people of America’s heartland, the voters Noem was condescending to with her book, were horrified by the ambitious governor’s callous disregard for animal life.

The fallout has apparently destroyed any chance that Noem could be chosen as a vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket, and term limits mean the sun is setting on Noem’s time as a “public servant.” Good riddance.

Happy Mother’s Day To All Moms Human And Feline!

Moms are the best.

Moms are the best. They tell us we’re good at things even when we’re not, they put up with all our nonsense, and they never stop worrying about us even when we’re adults.

They make us feel better when we’re down and they don’t hesitate to tell us when we’re being stupid. They make the special meals that we love, and use love as a special ingredient. I can still taste the bologna sandwiches my mom used to make for me in my school lunches. Somehow they were always more delicious than any sandwich I could make. Now that I’m an adult and have been a vegetarian for years, she makes pastitsio for me on special occasions. Thanks, mom!

Animal moms love their kiddos too, as we can see in these photos. Happy Mother’s Day to all moms!

Buddy The Cat’s ‘The Art Of Napping’ Debuts Atop NYT Bestseller List

The book received glowing reviews for its comprehensive approach to the world of slumber and promises something for every type of napper.

A new book on napping from the world’s most prolific snoozer has taken the sleep enthusiast community by storm.

“The Art of Napping: The History and Technique of Dozing Off” by Buddy the Cat bills itself as “the world’s most comprehensive guide to taking a siesta” and a “manual on how to commit yourself to a lifestyle of leisure and laziness.”

It includes an illustrated history of sleep science, from its superstition-mired origins to the highly specialized field of modern-day napology, following the rich sedentary traditions of various cultures.

“The chapter contrasting ancient Sumerian nap-walking with Syracusan Somnambulism is not only heavy with detail, it’ll put you to sleep almost immediately,” said Rusty LeFelino, chaircat of the Snooze Studies Department at the University of Catlanta.

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“Nap on tatami mat under cherry blossoms” by Hirotaro Buddishida, 1646, is one of many historical depictions of shut-eye included in The Art of Napping.

Reviewers were equally effusive with their praise.

“Buddy the Cat dozes headfirst into the world of segmented slumber, documenting everything from Chicago-Style Snoozing to indigenous bedding techniques pioneered by the jaguars of the Pantanal,” reads a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. “Whether you’re a weekend warrior who enjoys drooling on your couch during baseball games or a committed napper who swears by episodic DaVinci Sleep, there’s something for everyone in this beautifully bound volume.”

The New York-based feline spent more than a year researching and getting paws-on experience for the book. He visited the California headquarters of Google with its famous employee nap pods, spent a week sleeping under the stars with the pumas of the Pacific Northwest, and interviewed lucid dreamers to find out whether it’s possible to nap within a nap a la Inception.

“Buddy leaves no pillow unturned in his quest for the truth, with spectacularly stale prose that will have even the over-caffeinated yawning into the back of their paws,” a reviewer for Narcolepsy Daily wrote. “Get yourself a cozy blanket, curl up with Buddy and let the Z’s commence.”

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Southern Siesta: The author spent several weeks in the Amazon napping with jaguars, jaguarundis and ocelots, an experience described in a yawn-inducing chapter of The Art of Napping.

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“The ability to nap anywhere at any time is the mark of a master snoozer,” Buddy writes in his new book. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Dividing Line Between Human And Animal Has Been Blurred Again As AI Reveals Startlingly Complex Whale Language

By unlocking the mysteries of how sperm whales communicate and demonstrating their impressive cognitive abilities, researchers hope to get people invested in the fate of these endangered animals.

Sperm whales are chatty.

Their language is markedly different from the deep cetacean moans associated with other whales, taking the form of Morse code-like clicks that boom through the ocean in a decibel range almost twice that of jet engines.

And while we’ve long known animals like monkeys assign specific meaning to short vocalizations varying from alarm calls to affirmations of social rank, sperm whale conversations can endure for an hour or more, with participants exchanging complex strings of clicks that vary depending on context, environment and even which pod family is speaking.

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An aerial view of a sperm whale near the ocean surface. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While artificial intelligence has been maligned over the past few years as people grapple with its rapid progress and potential for abuse, it remains the best tool we have for teasing out patterns that our human minds can’t discern, especially from large quantities of data.

With more than 9,000 recordings of sperm whales, Project CETI — Cetacean Translation Initiative, a non-profit effort to decode and translate sperm whale communication — had precisely the kind of huge data cache that AI excels at analyzing.

By feeding the recordings into specially trained machine learning algorithms, the research team was able to identify a wealth of new language patterns. While human languages are composed of quantized morphemes — prefixes, suffixes and root words — whale communication is broken down into sequences of clicks and pauses called “codas.”

Like Morse code, codas make a distinction between short clicks and long clicks. Sperm whales also vary the tempo of the clicks, which could represent inflection, “dialects” or concepts completely alien to the human mind.

“Some of what they’re doing might be totally different from our way of communicating and we’re probably never going to be able to fully grasp those differences,” Oregon State postdoctoral marine researcher Taylor Hersh told NPR.

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A sperm whale fluke visible above the surface of the ocean. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Researchers believe the “inter-click intervals” — akin to ghost notes in music — may be as significant as the clicks themselves. Importantly, while human ears were able to identify and catalog some of the codas, the machine learning algorithms found many that human analysis missed.

That’s not surprising considering sperm whales — the loudest animals on Earth, capable of generating sounds up to 230 dB — took a much different evolutionary course and, as ocean-dwelling creatures weighing up to 90,000 pounds (40,800 kg) likely have a radically different sensorium compared to humans.

The comparisons to music go further than ghost notes.

“This study shows that coda types are not arbitrary, but rather that they form a newly discovered combinatorial coding system in which the musical concepts of rubato and ornamentation combine with two categorical, context-independent features known as rhythm and tempo, by analogy to musical terminology,” CETI’s team wrote on May 7 while unveiling the most recent study.

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Sperm whale distribution based on human sightings. Sperm whales freely travel the oceans except in cold, ice-packed environs. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While people have used many abilities to mark the dividing line between humans and animals over the years — including the ability to use tools, experience emotions, and demonstrate self-awareness — human capacity for authentic language with syntax and context-dependent meaning was one of the stalwarts, standing the test of time as new research toppled the other dividers by showing animals do indeed use tools, experience rich emotions and have complex inner mental lives.

With this research, scientists are assembling a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” that will make it easier to discern and catalog whale codas.

To be clear, there’s still a lot of work ahead before scientists can prove sperm whale codas are comparable to human definitions of language, but whether they strictly meet that definition may not matter. After all, it’s clear the clicks and pauses of whale codas are imbued with meaning, even if it remains elusive to us for the moment.

Indeed, “sperm whale communication has both contextual and combinatorial structure not previously observed in whale communication,” the team wrote.

Proving sperm whale codas are tantamount to human language isn’t the goal anyway. The team has two overriding priorities — decode the meanings behind the codas, and get the wider public invested in the fate of these endangered animals by showing they’re not so different from us.

“Our results show there is much more complexity than previously believed,” MIT AI lab director Daniela Rus told NPR, “and this is challenging the current state of the art or state of beliefs about the animal world.”

Cat Mom Lupita Nyong’o Takes A Furry Friend To The Red Carpet

Lupita Nyong’o not only shares the screen with a feline co-star in the new film A Quiet Place: Day One, she’s also a devoted cat mom to a ginger tabby named Yoyo.

Although I haven’t seen most of Lupita Nyongo’s movies — I really liked her performance in Us and her voice work in Disney’s Jungle Book remake — I’m a big fan now that I know she’s a cat lover.

Nyong’o took to the red carpet for the premiere of her newest film, A Quiet Place: Day One in London on Wednesday, and her plus-one was a cat named Schnitzel, who also stars in the movie. Photos show Nyong’o posing along co-star Joseph Quinn, smiling as she cradles Schnitzel in her arms.

Lupita Nyong'o with her cat Yoyo
Lupita Nyong’o with her cat, Yoyo. In addition to posing with a cat on the red carpet premiere of her new film, Nyong’o proudly dotes on Yoyo and mentions him often. Credit: Lupita Nyong’o/Instagram

A Quiet Place is a 2018 film about a family that lives a completely silent life on a farm after the civilization has fallen to monstrous creatures that can’t see but are exceptionally sensitive to sound.

The film received nearly universal positive reviews for its use of sound — and the complete absence of it for long stretches — as a tension-building device, and a 2020 sequel continued the story.

Day One, which hits theaters on June 28, promises audiences a look at how the creatures appeared and civilization collapsed.

Schnitzel’s role isn’t entirely clear, but if it’s anything like 2022’s Prey, cats will fill their usual niche as predators, highlighting the difference between terrestrial and extraterrestrial hunters.

Caring for a cat in a world like A Quiet Place could be a double edged-sword: a super vocal cat like my Buddy wouldn’t last very long unless he quickly learned to keep a lid on his constant commentary, but cats are also incredibly sensitive to things that pass beneath the notice of us humans.

Thanks to their incredible hearing, exceptional sense of smell, the advantage of an extra olfactory organ and whiskers that pick up even the slightest stirring, felines are keenly aware of their surroundings.

As for Nyong’o, while Schnitzel is not her cat, she’s the proud cat mom of Yoyo, an orange tabby she fostered in late 2023. It only took her three days of fostering the little guy before she realized “I could not give him up,” she said last year shortly after the adoption was made official.

“I never understood people whose phones were full of photos and videos of their pets — now I am one of those people,” she wrote when she adopted the tabby. “It may look like I saved Yoyo, but really, Yoyo is saving me.”

Nyong'o and Yoyo the cat
Lupita Nyong’o with Yoyo. Credit: Lupita Nyong’o/Instagram