Cooper, photographed by James Garnett.

I’m reading Jon Ronson’s Shaming book so I’m reminded of Jonah Lehrer. Steven Poole wrote about his return last year.

The most vilified writer of modern times is back, and people are lining up to give him another kicking. Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 book Imagine: How Creativity Works was pulled from shelves after it was demonstrated to contain fabricated quotes purportedly from Bob Dylan and WH Auden. He subsequently admitted to plagiarising the work of others in his blogposts, while critics noted apparent plagiarism and disregard for facts throughout his published work. The pop-neuroscience whiz-kid had, it appeared, simply stolen or made a lot of it up.

Well, we are living in an era of post-truth politics, so why not post-truth nonfiction? Four years on, and the disgraced author – after publicly apologising for at least some of the above – has managed to publish another volume, A Book About Love. Naturally, onlookers are suspicious. In a brilliantly disdainful review for the New York Times, Jennifer Senior calls the book a “nonfiction McMuffin” and “insolently unoriginal”.

I like “insolently unoriginal.” I’ll have to steal it.

But Lehrer has his defenders. Booksellers tell the Wall Street Journal that the guy deserves a second chance (especially, one imagines, if it helps them sell books). And the New York Times columnist David Brooks handles Lehrer with kid gloves, offering excuses for the writer’s earlier misdeeds: “Success fell on Lehrer early and all at once – and it ­ruined him,” because he had too much work to keep up with honestly. This might seem insufficient justification, given that plenty of other people enjoy sudden success and do not start stealing and lying.

Yes but David Brooks. David Brooks has had decades of unearned success for uttering unremarkable platitudes, so I suppose he’s motivated to excuse unearned success in others.

The deeper problem, however, is that it was clear to some of us that his books were egregious even before it turned out they contained plagiarism and fabrication. As I and the psychologist Christopher Chabris have noted, for example, Imagine drew unwarranted conclusions from partial scientific evidence in order to promote an “uplifting moral” that was nothing more than syrupy conventional wisdom.

Much like David Brooks, or Thomas Friedman. I hate that kind of thing, myself.

Publishers love books that tell clear, simple stories sprinkled with cutting-edge science. Newspapers and magazines, too, are hungry for such articles. This is now, Engber argues, “less a Jonah Lehrer problem than a science journalism problem”. Jennifer Senior, for her part, says that it was all along: the “vote to excommunicate” Lehrer back in 2012 was not just about his lying, but was “a referendum on a certain genre of canned, cocktail-party social science, one that traffics in bespoke platitudes for the middlebrow and rehearses the same studies without saying something new”. If so, however, the excommunication was surely unfair, given that other notable practitioners of this sort of thing have happily carried on.

Exactly, and they’re highly paid and all over the airwaves. Alain de Botton is another.

Also in the Times – Andrew Gilligan:

The government has said the term “pregnant woman” should not be used in a UN treaty because it “excludes” transgender people.

Feminists reacted with outrage to what they said was the latest example of “making women unmentionable” in the name of transgender equality.

The statement comes in Britain’s official submission on proposed amendments to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the UK has been a signatory since 1976. The UN treaty says a “pregnant woman” must be protected, including not being subject to the death penalty.

Yet in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office submission, Britain opposes the term “pregnant woman” because it may “exclude transgender people who have given birth”. The suggested term is “pregnant people”.

Only two known UK cases exist of transgender pregnancy, where children are born to trans men who have had a sex change but retained a functioning womb and ovaries.

Sarah Ditum, a prominent feminist writer, said: “This isn’t inclusion. This is making women unmentionable. Having a female body and knowing what that means for reproduction doesn’t make you ‘exclusionary’. Forcing us to decorously scrub out any reference to our sex on pain of being called bigots is an insult.”

Janice Turner in the Times considers knowing and not knowing. Albert Speer claimed not to know about the fate of all those evacuated Jews, but eventually he admitted “sensing” it.

[Gitta] Sereny replies: “You say you sensed something. But you cannot ‘sense’ in a void; ‘sensing’ is an inner realisation of knowledge. Basically if you ‘sensed’ then you knew.” Speer shakes his head and thanks God that Gitta was not prosecuting him at Nuremberg.

The same applies to that much-abused word “intuition.” Intuition is based on what we know, but in such a way that the specific sources aren’t clear to us. “Educated guess” is a much better way of saying it. Sereny is so right that you can’t “sense” (or intuit or make an educated guess) in a void.

What is knowing, how do we know, how do others know, how do we know how they know.

When the horrifying scope of Jimmy Savile’s crimes was exposed I asked a former tabloid executive, a long-time trader in kiss-and-tells, if he’d ever heard rumours. Well, he said, the occasional young woman would pitch up claiming Savile had molested her, without proof, so she was sent away. But, no, he didn’t know. What about those girls? He bristled: look, nobody knew.

Jesus. Says it all, doesn’t it. “We were told, repeatedly, but no, we didn’t know.”

Mind you, I can see how it happens. People say things; people quarrel with each other; work life inevitably involves clashes; it’s not always wise to take every claim as entirely true and accurate.

But at the same time – people with less power are less believed than people with more. Male producers have more power than young female employees; it’s not always wise to ignore every claim, either.

Knowing is a strange business. You can “know” and yet not know. Evidence of dark deeds may present itself, dance right across your path, be the source of gossip and in-jokes; become so enmeshed in everyday life it sets the protocols by which people work. Yet when a scandal breaks people still cover their mouths and cry “Who knew?”

The fact that Weinstein was a running joke was very telling. Then again I think I read (I can’t remember where) that Seth MacFarlane’s “joke” about not having to pretend to be attracted to Weinstein wasn’t a joke but an angry pretend-joke, because MacFarlane knew one of Weinstein’s victims and was in fact angry.

Quentin Tarantino, whose career as a director was made by Harvey Weinstein, has said: “I knew enough to do more than I did. I didn’t take responsibility for what I heard.” No kidding. Not from second-hand rumours either. His drinking buddy Weinstein was preying upon his then girlfriend, Mira Sorvino, and she told him about the hotel room assaults. But Tarantino filed them under an infatuation, “a Svengali thing”, a “1950s secretary being chased around her desk by her boss” jape.

There are plenty of people – men and anti-feminist women – who think we should go on filing such things that way.

In her fascinating book Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril, Margaret Heffernan examines the prevalence of this mindset. In law, wilful blindness is information you could know, should know, but have chosen not to know. This principle means that if stopped at an airport with a suitcase full of heroin it is no defence to say that you did not look inside. Wilful blindness, Heffernan argues, is how an affair can remain unacknowledged for years, why US troops in Iraq were silent about human rights violations in Abu Ghraib, how the Catholic Church concealed endemic child abuse, why Enron bankers or those flogging sub-prime mortgages did not confront the financial apocalypse they sensed was looming. It was easier not to “know”.

There’s the bystander effect, and groupthink, and all that. It can be damn difficult to be the only one making a fuss. That’s one reason journalists are so useful: making a fuss is what they do. Janice has experience of that.

In Britain, there is no better example of wilful blindness than the Rotherham sex abuse scandal. Jayne Senior, the youth worker who blew the whistle, spent years listening to victims, collating reports. But as she shoved this material in the faces of councillors, police and social services, it was as though she was invisible. They simply refused to know.

Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham for 18 years, throughout the reign of the grooming gangs, has always maintained he knew nothing about the 1,400 victims. But he does not refute that on March 24, 2006 he attended a conference in Rotherham hosted by Jayne Senior called Every Child Matters where she and other experts gave presentations about the crimes. Indeed MacShane made a speech! Yet after my Times interview with Senior was published, he summoned me to his house to swear on his life that right until it broke he had no knowledge of the scandal. What about that conference? It was just another constituency event. So many, they blur into one. He repeated over and over: he did not know.

It’s the same with Irish industrial schools and Magdalen laundries: people knew but they didn’t know.

People who research military-civilian relations were not universally thrilled by Kelly’s talk the other day.

Kelly’s defense of Trump — beginning with a vivid description of how dead troops make their way home — turned into a lecture on how Americans do not understand the military community’s sacrifice. And it alarmed some of those who study relations between the military and society.

Former senior officials such as retired Gen. David Petraeus and retired Adm. Mike Mullen have argued that divisions between troops and civilians can exacerbate misconceptions about post-traumatic stress and make obtaining civilian employment difficult for veterans. And they have championed efforts to bridge the gaps in understanding.

Kelly’s remarks work against those efforts, said Kori Schake, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and co-editor of the book “Warriors and Citizens” with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. “My guess is that military families will pull themselves further into the community because they don’t want to be politicized,” Schake said.

And at the same time some of us civilians will be put off by many of Kelly’s assumptions…as well as his defense of Trump and his refusal to admit his untruths about Representative Wilson.

Kelly’s remarks broaden what had been a relatively insular discussion among military families, veterans and scholars. It begins with a basic premise — that civil society and military circles are culturally, socially and geographically distinct, a form of isolation with real consequences for the country.

“The last 16 years of war have been carried by a narrow slice of the population, and the burden is heavy but not wide,” said Phil Carter, a former Army officer and director of the military, veterans and society program at Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank.

Carter said that Kelly’s comments echo a prevalent attitude in some military and veteran circles — a feeling of pride for taking on a tough job in some of the most dangerous places on Earth, coupled with a simmering resentment of civilians oblivious to their mission.

Well for one thing the “mission” is only as good as it is. A bad or dubious mission isn’t the fault of the military, but “civilians” shouldn’t be expected to cheer every mission simply to cheer up the military. For another thing the danger of being in the military is not the only occupational danger there is.

Kelly’s words Thursday worried Carter and others. His somber ordering of how a dead service member is moved from battlefield to burial was a helpful glimpse for Americans who have not experienced that trauma. But Carter said he paired the idea with a belief that most civilians could not conceive — or intentionally fail — to understand that burden.

“It was odd. The military does not have a monopoly on loss and hardship,” Carter said.

Exactly. Kelly was basically bullshitting us, in a somewhat Hollywood way – as Trump always intended. He chose people who “look the part,” so he chose steely John Kelly rather than some moon-faced guy with a friendly smile. Kelly knows loss and hardship but so do most civilians; it shouldn’t be a tool for bullying people into not objecting when a president bullies black women he dislikes.

Another moment also struck a dissonant note. When Kelly ended his remarks by accusing Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) of using a dead soldier for political points, he told reporters he was only interested in questions from those who had a direct connection to those killed in combat.

“Is anyone here a Gold Star parent or sibling? Does anyone here know a Gold Star parent or sibling?” Kelly asked before taking a question about Niger.

Analysts were taken back by his stance, which they said suggested discourse about those killed in action can only reasonably occur in the walled-off segments of society where losses on the battlefield are most directly and painfully felt.

Which would translate directly into: civilians cannot question the military. No good.

That portion of Kelly’s reaction nagged at Phil Klay, an Iraq War veteran who wrote the short story collection “Redeployment,” winner of the National Book Award.

“Veterans feel very keenly that America is disengaged from these wars. The problem is not going to be fixed with the idea only people who are personally involved have the right to ask questions,” Klay said. “It’s the exact opposite.”

The notion of military service as the purest form of public virtue, at the cost of other kinds of service to others, is an alarming development, he said.

“Military courage is something society needs to have and we need to valorize it,” Klay said. “But we also need a civic body that makes this a country worth fighting for.”

In particular, Klay said, the politicized discourse around service, and who understands its burdens, obscures legitimate questions that all citizens need to engage with, beginning, in this moment, with why U.S. forces were in Niger in the first place.

Why indeed. From what I can gather it was something to do with assisting local resistance to Islamist groups (Boko Haram type groups), but it doesn’t seem to be clear what the something was and is.

Civilians get to ask.

Meanwhile Trump is getting his jollies by forcing women to have babies they don’t want to have.

Jane Doe is a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant detained in Texas who is 15 weeks pregnant and is seeking an abortion. The Constitution grants her that right, but the Trump administration is determined to subvert it as part of its war on women’s reproductive rights.

Late Friday, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the teenager must be allowed to have an abortion, but it gave the federal government until Oct. 31 to find her a sponsor so that the government itself does not have to arrange for the procedure.

She’s in Texas. Texas has passed a law outlawing abortion after 20 weeks.

The ruling came hours after the court heard the case, in which the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement said that if it released her to see a doctor it would “facilitate” an abortion, an action it said would contradict its interest in “promoting child birth and fetal life.”

What interest? Since when does the Office of Refugee Resettlement have an interest in promoting child birth? Let alone “fetal life”?

It doesn’t seem to matter to the government that adult women in detention by law have access to abortion, or that this teenager has followed Texas law and obtained a waiver from a state court allowing her to get an abortion without her parents’ consent. And while the Office of Refugee Resettlement refuses to let employees at the shelter where she is being held take her to get an abortion, it ordered them to bring her to a “crisis pregnancy center” with the goal of talking her out of the procedure.

Why? Because Trump put an anti-abortion maniac in charge of the ORR, and the maniac is using his new job to force women to bear children they don’t want to bear.

To all who wondered why religious conservatives struck a Faustian bargain with a morally compromised candidate, this case provides one answer. Anti-abortion advocates, from Vice President Mike Pence on down, find President Trump useful for converting their beliefs into policy.

At the health department, Teresa Manning, a former analyst with the conservative Family Research Council who opposes abortion and most forms of contraception, is deputy assistant secretary for population affairs, in charge of the Title X program. The program provides family planning funding for four million poor or uninsured Americans. Charmaine Yoest, former president for Americans United for Life, is the department’s assistant secretary of public affairs. Matthew Bowman, who worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian anti-abortion legal advocacy group, is now a lawyer at the department, and a reported architect of new Obamacare rules making it easier for some companies to claim religious or moral exemptions to requirements that they cover the cost of birth control. Katy Talento, an abortion foe who wrote an article beginning, “Is chemical birth control causing miscarriages of already-conceived children? What about breaking your uterus for good?” is now a health policy adviser on the White House Domestic Policy Council.

Trump doesn’t give a rat’s ass about The Holy Fetus but he does love making life hell for women.

Tariq Ramadan is accused of rape.

A rape and sexual assault complaint was filed on Friday in France against Swiss Islamist and Professor Tariq Ramadan by former Salafist Henda Ayari.

The complaint filed with the Rouen prosecutor’s office in northwestern France, by the Salafist turned secular activist, detailed criminal acts of rape, sexual assault, violence, harassment and intimidation, according to document reviewed by AFP.

The Liberators Association, which Henda Ayari is president of, said on Facebook that she was “a victim of something very serious several years ago” but did not reveal the name of her aggressor for safety reasons.

In her book “I Chose to be Free”, published in November 2016, she described her aggressor as Zubair.

She said in her writings that she met him at his hotel in Paris after the Islamist thinker gave a lecture.

“I will not give precise details of the acts he has done to me. It is enough to know that he has benefited greatly from my weakness,” Ayari wrote.

She said in her book that when she rebelled against him at one point he screamed at her, insulted her, slapped her and treated her violently.

“I confirm today, that the famous Zubair is Tariq Ramadan,” Ayari published on Facebook.

According to Jonas Haddad, Ayari’s lawyer, the plaintiff did not report the assault earlier, out of fear.

“After revelations over the past few days of rape and sexual assault claims in the media, Henda has decided to say what happened to her and take legal action,” he told AFP.

Ramadan has denied it.

Ayari’s police report was filed as millions of women across the globe in the past week have come forward to share personal accounts of sexual assault and sexual harassment following allegations recently made public against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Iceberg; tip.

Bottom line: Kelly should have apologized to Representative Frederika Wilson the minute the video surfaced. He should have admitted that he badly misrepresented what she said and did at that FBI event, and did it in a damaging harmful way. He claimed she did bad, shocking things that she didn’t do, and he claimed that he and many others there were stunned, stunned by those things – those things that she didn’t do. He’s the White House chief of staff, he said those things about a Congressional representative (and by the way a black woman, and his boss has quite a record of publicly trashing black women), he said those things that are harmful to her reputation, and they were false. He should have copped to it immediately and apologized energetically.

He has not done that.

So now what he said about her becomes a bunch of lies. He may well have thought they were true when he said them, but he knows they’re not true now – and he’s not admitting it and not apologizing. Conduct unbecoming, if you ask me.

In fact conduct cowardly and weaselly and self-serving.

Also – he may have thought they were true when he said them, but then we have to ask where did they come from. Why did his imagination conjure up such an ugly fiction about Frederika Wilson? We have to wonder.

Ryan Lizza says Kelly is paying the price for taking a job with Trump.

As was quickly reported, the video of Wilson’s nine-minute speech is online. Wilson did tell a story about how she; John Boehner, the House Speaker at the time; and Obama worked together to make sure that the building was named after the two slain F.B.I. agents in time for the event. She said nothing about securing funding (she was, in fact, not in Congress when the money was authorized) and nothing about “how she took care of her constituents.” She asked law-enforcement officials present to stand up “so we can applaud you and what you do,” adding, “we’re proud of you, we’re proud of your courage.” She then told the tragic story of the two agents who lost their lives. The speech bears no resemblance to the speech Kelly described. The White House chief of staff maligned a congresswoman, whose only crime seemed to be criticizing Trump, with a series of lies.

When a reporter at the White House on Friday asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the glaring discrepancy between Kelly’s account and the actual speech, she said that the White House stood by his remarks. “There was a lot of grandstanding,” she said. “He was stunned that she had taken that opportunity to make it about herself.” The reporter pressed: “He was wrong yesterday in talking about getting the money. The money was secured before she came into Congress.”

He was wrong that she didn’t mention the agents who were killed; wrong that she bragged about it; wrong that she took the credit; entirely wrong about the emphasis of what she said.

Sanders shot back with the kind of statement that would be normal in an authoritarian country, suggesting that Kelly’s previous military service placed him beyond criticism. “If you want to go after General Kelly, that’s up to you,” she said. “But I think that that—if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that’s something highly inappropriate.”

No, it is not. Kelly is the chief of staff and a political operative. He held a press conference and told a lie that smeared one of Trump’s political opponents. No government official’s military background, no matter how honorable, makes him immune to criticism, especially given the subject at hand. Sanders’s response was unnerving. But the bigger lesson of the episode is that no matter how good one’s intentions are, when you go to work for Trump, you will end up paying for it with your reputation. For Kelly, not even his four stars prevented that.

It’s morally revolting that he refuses to withdraw what he said and ap0logize.