Ornithologist Jerry McGahan with a 6 month old Andrean Condor, the largest flying bird on earth.

Bari Weiss of The New York Times takes a fearful peek down the rabbit hole of the Intellectual Dark Web.

What is the I.D.W. and who is a member of it? It’s hard to explain, which is both its beauty and its danger.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

The closest thing to a phone book for the I.D.W. is a sleek website that lists the dramatis personae of the network, including Mr. Harris; Mr. Weinstein and his brother and sister-in-law, the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Sommers. But in typical dark web fashion, no one knows who put the website up.

The core members have little in common politically. Bret and Eric Weinstein and Ms. Heying were Bernie Sanders supporters. Mr. Harris was an outspoken Hillary voter. Ben Shapiro is an anti-Trump conservative.

But they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.

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Simona Sharoni, “College Professor, Author, Public Speaker, Curriculum Innovator, Facilitator, Activist,” Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, Merrimack College.

The Chronicle of Higher Education describes how a professor of Gender Studies was triggered by a standard “travelling-in-an-elevator” joke, leading to big trouble.

The fuss started when Richard Ned Lebow, a professor of political theory at King’s College London, and Simona Sharoni, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College, ended up in the same crowded elevator during a conference at a Hilton in San Francisco last month.

She said she offered to press the floor buttons for people in the elevator, whom she described as mostly conference attendees and all, except one other woman, white middle-aged men. Instead of saying a floor, Lebow smiled and asked for the women’s lingerie department “and all his buddies laughed,” Sharoni wrote in a complaint, the details of which he disputed, to the association later that day.

“After they walked out, the woman standing next to me turned to me and said, ‘I wonder if we should have told them that it is no longer acceptable to make these jokes!” she said in her complaint.

Sharoni, who wrote in her complaint that she has experienced sexual harassment in academe in the past and was shaken by the incident, said it took her a while to figure out that Lebow thought it was funny “to make a reference to men shopping for lingerie while attending an academic conference. I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that we froze and didn’t confront him,” she wrote.

After glancing at Lebow’s name tag, Sharoni says she went back to her hotel room to check out the association’s code of conduct. She then wrote to Mark A. Boyer, the association’s executive director. He forwarded the complaint to the group’s Committee on Professional Rights and Responsibilities, which determined that Lebow had violated the conduct code.

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Obvious craziness, but what can you expect when colleges and universities hire professional neurotics to teach whining and complaining in special Grievance Studies departments?

Mi-Young Choi (Korean, b. 1971), Enlightenment, 2013.

The (British) Mirror admires the feistiness of one American senior citizen.

Police have hailed the elderly hero, who walks with a stick, for the ‘bold’ move – which they say saved the life of the 18-year-old suspect.

An Ohio grandfather has been dubbed a hero after he tripped up a young armed suspect who was attempting to run away from police.

Video footage shows the brave man, named only as Bill, quickly step backwards and stick his leg out behind him as the suspect, identified as DeShawn Briggs, sprints past – causing him to fall to the ground.

A police van then descends on the scene and an officer jumps out of the moving vehicle moments later.

Columbus police posted the footage on Facebook on Thursday, and hailed Bill for his “fancy footwork” which enabled them to detain the suspect – who was holding a gun.

Bill was at west Columbus library with his granddaughter on April 3 when he heard police sirens and officers shouting “drop the gun”.

He says he turned around to see a man with his hand in his waistband running towards him, and officers were lagging behind.

The quick-thinking grandfather then made the brave decision to trip the 18-year-old up, in a bid to help police detain him.

Police confirmed a Glock 9MM pistol containing 29 rounds of bullets was recovered from the scene.

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Deshawn Briggs was lucky really that it was Ohio, not Texas or rural Pennsylvania. In the latter locations, old geezers would not only be packing a cane. They’d be carrying concealed.

Mad Lab surveys the growing field of ridiculously large super handguns. They forgot the custom guns by Linebaugh and Hamilton Bowen, alas!

Michael Daventry gives the inside scoop on the Intelligence coup of the century.

The spectacle of Benjamin Netanyahu barely able to contain his excitement as he paced back and forth around the stage, pointing out his props and slides, was remarkable enough.

But that was as nothing compared with what was truly remarkable — an intelligence coup that is already regarded as legendary.

The Israeli prime minister had just uncovered — literally, by pulling away dust sheets to reveal shelves of filing — the evidence that showed Iran had for years been engaged on a secret nuclear programme.

“Iran lied, big time,” Mr Netanyahu told a hastily-assembled room of journalists on Monday. “A few weeks ago, in a great intelligence achievement, Israel obtained half a ton of material”.

His presentation was closely coordinated with the United States, coming just days before President Trump decides whether to abandon the international deal that was said by its supporters to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Mr Netanyahu’s words were dramatic. But they barely came close to conveying the drama of the Mossad’s unprecedented operation.

The cache — containing tens of thousands of pages, many of them handwritten — was snatched by Mossad agents in a single night, from a ramshackle warehouse in a suburb south of Tehran, the Iranian capital. Sources say the building had been under constant surveillance by Israeli intelligence from the moment it was first discovered in February 2016 until the decision to act was taken.

That moment came one night in January this year.

This was not a data transfer of the kind that has made the Mission Impossible movies so thrilling. The documents were not copied onto a portable hard drive, nor transferred electronically back to Israel.

Every file and CD — weighing a collective half a ton — was transported physically in a single night.

And not one of Mossad’s “human assets” — Israeli agents and Iranian informants — was harmed in the operation, intelligence minister Yisrael Katz told Israeli radio on Tuesday.

It is no exaggeration to say that all of this happened under the Iranian government’s nose; Iran’s foreign ministry building was so close to the warehouse that the Mossad agents could have driven to it in the centre of Tehran in barely half an hour.

“This was a highly complex operation, over a long period of time, in a deeply hostile environment,” said James Sorene, chief executive of the Bicom think-tank.

“To remove so much physical material in such circumstances is nothing short of remarkable.

“When you consider it alongside Israel’s apparent ability to identify Iranian arms shipments to Syria as they leave Tehran, you can only conclude that the Iranian regime is severely compromised by the brilliance of Israeli intelligence.”

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France

Bored Panda:

In the global arena, every country has its image, but how would they look as people? That was the question that Russian artist Anastasia Bulgakova thought about for a year before starting her latest project. “I draw personifications of different countries,” she wrote. “All of them will be militant and warrior-like, with dirt and blood. Not because of some political persuasion, but simply because that what I always draw in any case, and the idea of warrior-countries gives a lot of creative freedom.”

“Every character is going to have some stereotypical attributes that I am going to use in one way or another.” From an American that’s a bit naive and idealistic to a silent Japanese guy with a suspicious smile, you’d easily recognize these ‘people’ if you met them in the street.

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The Telegraph causes jaws to drop by telling us what might have been:

The gentle, meandering drama of the Lord of the Rings trilogy won Peter Jackson and his team 17 Oscars and a place in the cinematic pantheon. But the fantasy epic very nearly didn’t happen: if Harvey Weinstein had his way, JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth would have been condensed into a snappy two-hour film, directed by none other than Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino, known for his gratuitous, cartoonish violence and provocative scripts in films such as Django Unchained and Pulp Fiction, was the back-up Weinstein had in store after Lord of the Rings director delivered a two-film script to Weinstein costing $12 million in development. This, Weinstein said, according to a new book on the film, was a “waste”.

“Harvey was like, ‘you’re either doing this or you’re not. You’re out. And I got Quentin ready to direct it’,” Ken Kamins, a producer who worked for Weinstein on the project, told Ian Nathan, author of Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-Earth.

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Of course, Quentin’s wiggerish devotion to African-American thuggery would probably have made his version of LOTR a lot more friendly to the Orc point of view. And the casting would have been so different! Samuel Jackson would make a great Uruk-hai chief, but Quentin would probably have made him Saruman. We might have had Brad Pitt for Aragorn and Steve Buscemi as Gollum. Uma would have definitely made a hotter Arwen or Galadriel. The possibilities are fascinating and frightening.