Quick hits is back! Sorry, it’s been a busy end of the semester. Lots of good stuff for you to enjoy here…
1) Jeff Maurer with a really important point, often elided in coverage of the protesters, “The Groups Protesting on College Campuses Don’t Think Israel Should Exist”
But now it’s April, and the “I didn’t know” argument doesn’t work anymore. We have had the “from the river to the sea” debate — we have lived through several high-profile episodes of people co-signing hateful statements and then walking their words back. Remember the guy who was so bonkers that The Atlantic wrote an article basically saying “get a load of this clown”? That was less than a month ago. There have been many clues that you should think before you co-sign a movement’s actions, everyone has had ample time to get acquainted with the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and if you still don’t know that “75 year occupation” means “Israel shouldn’t exist,” then the difference between “filled with hate” and “so simple that you soaked up the hateful ideas that you happened to be standing near” is functionally unimportant.
People on the left often romanticize protest. Civil rights protesters, suffragettes, and other people who stood up for just causes are lionized. Mainstream liberals sometimes don’t know how to react to protest movements that are extreme, brian dead, or both — consider many liberals’ ambivalent response to Occupy Wall Street. It seems to me that the efforts to separate the protests at Columbia from antisemitism — and to make sure that the latter doesn’t taint the former — represent a belief that the protests are basically just, and that the problem is that a few zealots are going too far. I think the dynamic is different: I think that the protesters are openly calling for ethnic cleansing of the state of Israel, and even if you gave every protester an anti-antisemitism pill that magically purged their minds of all bigoted thoughts, they would still be calling for actions that are absolutely horrific.
Like many liberals, I support parts of the Palestinian cause. I’m appalled by Israel’s actions in the West Bank, and I have major misgivings about how they’re conducting the Gaza War. But I hope that everyone on the left understands: These protesters don’t want a Palestinian state next to an Israeli state. They want Israel wiped off the map. Their own words — written down and unchanged despite ample opportunities to do so — say that. A silver lining of the recent surge in left-wing antisemitism is that many liberals are waking up to the fact that wokeness (or whatever we’re calling it) is not liberalism-except-moreso: It’s a wholly alien, hideous movement. Even if you ignore the torrent of antisemitism that makes the “GOODBYE JEWS!” girl from Schindler’s Listlook like the head of the ADL, these groups are nakedly eliminationist. Any liberal who supports them assuming that they’re descended from the peaceful movements of years past is actually supporting something a whole lot darker.
2) Good stuff here on Harvey Weinstein’s overturned conviction. It’s complicated!
Harvey Weinstein long wielded his power to be treated better by the legal system than a typical person accused of violent crimes would be. On Thursday, New York’s highest court said that, nonetheless, he didn’t deserve to be treated worse. They overturned his conviction for assaulting two women, for which he had been sentenced to 23 years in prison, and ordered a new trial. (Weinstein will remain in prison for convictions in California.)
The narrow majority agreed with Weinstein that prosecutors shouldn’t have been allowed to bring into criminal court the cumulative testimonies of multiple women — the very things that helped Me Too grow from a hashtag to a movement — because their cases weren’t being directly charged. (He has been accused of sexual abuse or harassment by nearly 100 women.) The majority opinion and two dissents laid bare a simmering, unresolved conflict of Me Too and its aftermath: Does the gendered, intimate nature of sexual violence, weighted with power imbalances and complex questions of consent, require a systemic overhaul of the legal rules, or is that a slippery slope to the kinds of due-process violations that inevitably come down hardest on people far less privileged than Weinstein?
“With today’s decision, this Court continues to thwart the steady gains survivors of sexual violence have fought for in our criminal justice system,” wrote Judge Madeline Singas in her dissent. The majority responded, “On the contrary, consistent with our judicial role, our analysis is grounded on bedrock principles of evidence and the defendant’s constitutional right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial.”
That majority opinion couldn’t be dismissed as a bunch of clueless white guys protecting the powerful. Its author, Judge Jenny Rivera, worked as a public defender and civil-rights advocate. Singas, meanwhile, was a prosecutor whose official biography describes her as having focused on domestic and sexual abuse. She went so far as to accuse the majority of displaying “fundamental misunderstandings of sexual violence perpetrated by men known to, and with significant power over, the women they victimize.” Rivera responded directly to Singas that adopting her desired standard “would only amplify the risk that biased jurors would justify a vote to convict defendants of color on such uncharged conduct in cases where the evidence supporting the charged conduct is weak — an all too real phenomenon.”
It was a high-stakes revival of the perennial question of whether Me Too had gone too far. “For all those quick to jump to conclusions and unhelpful assessments about the power and reach of the survivor justice movement,” retorted Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center and a co-founder of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, in a statement, “today is a reminder that survivors often still live in the margins, with fine print and loopholes getting in the way of what looks like justice and healing for them.”
Under a 1901 precedent known as the Molineux rule, prosecutors can’t bring evidence of “prior bad acts” only to prove that someone has a propensity to commit a crime. But there are exceptions. In the Weinstein case, the trial-court judge allowed the testimony of three such witnesses, including actress Annabella Sciorra, if they could illuminate Weinstein’s intent and whether he could have understood that the victims he was charged with assaulting didn’t consent. Prosecutors had argued that they would add important context about the entertainment industry and Weinstein’s role in it. The witnesses also sought to counter myths about how a sexual-assault victim would behave — for example, to help the jury explain why someone might go on to have a consensual relationship with a man who she said had previously raped her. The majority said not only was the additional testimony not allowed, it wasn’t needed to convict because “there is no equivocality regarding consent when a person says ‘no’ to a sexual encounter, tries to leave, and attempts to physically resist their attacker before succumbing to the attacker’s brute physical force.”
3) Really liked Leonhardt on values and campus protests:
Arnold Kling, an economist, published a book a decade ago that offered a way to think about the core difference between progressives and conservatives. Progressives, Kling wrote, see the world as a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, and they try to help the oppressed. Conservatives see the world as a struggle between civilization and barbarism — between order and chaos — and they try to protect civilization.
Like many frameworks, Kling’s is a simplification, and it’s easy to find exceptions. But his book has been influential because the framework often sheds light on political arguments.
The debate over pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia and other universities has become an example. If you want to understand why university leaders are finding the situation so hard to resolve, Kling’s dichotomy is useful: The central question for colleges is whether to prioritize the preservation of order or the desire of students to denounce oppression.
In today’s newsletter, I’ll lay out the cases of the dueling sides.
Confronting injustice
For the student protesters, the injustice in Gaza is so horrific that it takes precedence over almost anything else.
The death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7 is more than 30,000, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports. Entire neighborhoods are rubble. Israel has slowed the entry of basic supplies into Gaza, and many families are hungry. (My colleagues Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair profiled two families trying to find their children enough to eat.)
The protesters view this suffering as an atrocity that demands action, much as Jim Crow laws, the Vietnam War and South African apartheid did for earlier students. In a statement yesterday, a pro-Palestinian group at Columbia cited as inspiration the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators who were killed at Kent State University in 1970.
If classes must be canceled and graduation ceremonies can’t happen, all the better, the students say. The disruptions will force the world to confront what the protesters describe as a genocide. “Big picture, genocide is happening, and this is where we stand,” one Columbia graduate student told the publication Hell Gate.
Many protesters specifically call for their universities to divest from companies that do business in Israel or help produce military equipment.
Some students have framed the debate as being about free speech, and free-speech principles do play a role. But I don’t think they are as central as Kling’s frame. Both sides, after all, have tried to restrict speech. Supporters of Israel have doxxed pro-Palestinian students and tried to penalize slogans like “From the river to the sea.” Pro-Palestinian protesters have ripped away Israeli and U.S. flags and tried to prevent pro-Israel students from speaking.
The protesters’ abiding principle is not freedom of speech. It is justice for the oppressed.
Preventing chaos
For the protesters’ critics, the breakdown of order is the central problem — because a community that descends into chaos can’t function.
Protesters have frequently violated colleges’ rules. They have erected tents in public places and overwhelmed those areas. Columbia has switched to hybrid classes because of the turmoil.
Even worse, some protests have involved harassment and violence. The University of Michigan had to cut short an honors ceremony for students. At Vanderbilt, more than 20 protesters stormed the president’s office, injuring a security guard and shattering a window. At Columbia, videos have shown protesters threatening Jewish students with antisemitic vitriol, including a sign talking about Hamas’s “next targets.”
If universities do not enforce their own rules against such behavior, the rules have no meaning, administrators fear. Other protesters, seeing their own causes as existential, could likewise halt normal life. Perhaps they would be climate activists or students outraged by China’s oppression of Uighurs — or even demonstrators with right-wing views unpopular on American campuses. If anti-abortion protesters were to take over a quad for days, would university administrators ignore their own campus rules?
After a day or two crunching data, Rothwell got back to me with the results. He told me that his analyses clearly confirmed Wilcox’s theory: Marriage definitely, definitely matters, a lot. It improves well-being in every dimension, for every level of income. Overall, the average marriage-happiness premium was about 18 percent. That is, among all adults aged 30 to 50, about 41 percent of unmarried adults said they were thriving versus nearly 60 percent of married adults.
But when he compared happiness across income levels, another story emerged. Income, he said, plays an enormous role in predicting happiness as well. Low-income adults in Gallup’s survey were mostly unhappy, whether or not they were married. The highest-income adults were mostly quite happy, whether or not they are married. For example, married couples who earn less than $48,000 as a household are as likely to say they’re happy as single adults who earn $48,000 to $60,000, and a married couple who makes $90,000 to $180,000 as a household is almost exactly as likely to say they’re happy as a single person making $180,000 to $240,000.
Finally, Rothwell ran a test to isolate the correlative strength of several factors, including education, religion, marriage, income, and career satisfaction. Marriage was strongly correlated with his measure of happiness, even after accounting for these other factors. But social well-being (Gallup’s proxy for what Waldinger and Schulz call “social fitness”, which includes rating on the quality of marriages and close relationships) was even stronger. Income was stronger still. And financial well-being—that is, having enough money to do what you want to do and feeling satisfied with your standard of living—was the best predictor of Gallup’s definition of thriving.
One could draw a snap judgment from this analysis and conclude that money, in fact, simply buys happiness. I think that would be the wrong conclusion. Clever sociologists will always find new ways of “calculating” that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount. But the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity. They rise together and fall together. Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness. High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives. In this light, the philosophical question of what contributes most to happiness is just the beginning. The deeper question is why the trinity of happiness is so stratified by income—and whether well-being in America is in danger of becoming a luxury good.
Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.
The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.
The Supreme Court, however, does not need to accept Trump’s absurdly broad claim of immunity for him to prevail in his broader legal battle. Such a ruling might damage the image of the Court, which has already been battered by a parade of hard-right ideological rulings. But if Trump can prevail in November, delay is as good as immunity. The former president’s best chance at defeating the federal criminal charges against him is to win the election and then order the Justice Department to dump the cases. The Court could superficially rule against Trump’s immunity claim, but stall things enough to give him that more fundamental victory.
If they wanted, the justices could rule expeditiously as well as narrowly, focusing on the central claim in the case and rejecting the argument that former presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president, without getting into which acts might qualify as official or not. Sauer also acknowledged under questioning by Justice Amy Coney Barrett that some of the allegations against Trump do not involve official acts but private ones, and so theoretically the prosecution could move ahead with those charges and not others. But that wouldn’t necessarily delay the trial sufficiently for Trump’s purposes.
“On big cases, it’s entirely appropriate for the Supreme Court to really limit what they are doing to the facts of the case in front of it, rather than needing to take the time to write an epic poem on the limits of presidential immunity,” Waldman said. “If they write a grant opinion, saying no president is above the law, but it comes out too late in the year, they will have effectively immunized Trump from prosecution before the election while pretending not to.”
6) Apparently, the original Alien movie is having a theatrical re-release. Maybe. Absolutely one of my favorite movies ever. Vulture ranks all Alien movies.
7) Drum, “America needs higher taxes”
David Brooks has a remarkable column in the New York Times today dedicated to one thing: our rising national debt. The reason it’s remarkable has nothing to do with the subject matter. I’m not a big deficit hawk, but the long and steady rise in the national debt is at least concerning:
Even after removing the pandemic spike, the trendline is pretty clear: the national debt is now growing $2 trillion per year and shows no particular sign of slowing down.
This is not sustainable forever, so it’s hardly remarkable that Brooks is worried about it. What’s remarkable is that in the entire column he mentions tax increases only once and in passing. Then there’s this:
Ultimately responsibility lies with the voters. In the 1990s, Americans saw how high government debt was raising their interest rates. Voters put tremendous pressure on politicians to get the fiscal house in order. Along came Ross Perot and deficit reduction plans under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Voters today have not yet made that connection. When they do, I suspect the political landscape will shift massively.
Again, no mention that these “deficit reduction plans” both involved higher taxes. But everyone who’s not merely shilling for Republicans knows this is the only way to rein in the deficit. You could completely eliminate Medicaid and the entire domestic budget and half the defense budget…….and you still wouldn’t cut the annual deficit to zero.
Everyone knows this. Federal spending isn’t rising because Congress is out of control. It’s rising because we have to spend more money on old people, something we’ve known forever. There’s nothing anyone can do about this.
So if you’re worried about the mounting national debt—and you should be, at least a little bit—there’s only one way to reduce it: tax hikes. Not huge ones, but not tiny ones either. That’s just the way it is. No one serious can avoid it.
8) This was good, “Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing: Somewhere along the line, the plane maker lost interest in making its own planes. Can it rediscover its engineering soul?”
The two scenes tell us the peculiar story of a plane maker that, over 25 years, slowly but very deliberately extracted itself from the business of making planes. For nearly 40 years the company built the 737 fuselage itself in the same plant that turned out its B-29 and B-52 bombers. In 2005 it sold this facility to a private-investment firm, keeping the axle grease at arm’s length and notionally shifting risk, capital costs, and labor woes off its books onto its “supplier.” Offloading, Boeing called it. Meanwhile the tail, landing gear, flight controls, and other essentials were outsourced to factories around the world owned by others, and shipped to Boeing for final assembly, turning the company that created the Jet Age into something akin to a glorified gluer-together of precast model-airplane kits. Boeing’s latest screwups vividly dramatize a point often missed in laments of America’s manufacturing decline: that when global economic forces carried off some U.S. manufacturers for good, even the ones that stuck around lost interest in actually making stuff.
The past 30 years may well be remembered as a dark age of U.S. manufacturing. Boeing’s decline illustrates everything that went wrong to bring us here. Fortunately, it also offers a lesson in how to get back out.
9) I’m a little limited in my running at the moment (more on that in another post), but once I’m fully back at it I do plan to add in sprints. “Why You Should Add Some Sprints Into Your Workout: Running all out, at least for short distances, can be a great way to level up your workout routine.”
Put simply, sprinting is running at or near your top speed. “It is one of the movements that gives the biggest bang for buck,” said Matt Sanderson, a director at the fitness brand SOFLETE.
Because sprinting engages so many muscles, “it’s going to do a better job of helping maintain your muscle mass and avoid muscle loss as you age,” said Christopher Lundstrom, a lecturer in kinesiology at the University of Minnesota who studies sports and exercise science.
10) Speaking of running, “The New Quarter-Life Crisis: Running a marathon has become a milestone for a growing number of young adults.”
Maybe you started running for fitness, or because it seemed like a good way to make friends. Or perhaps it was a distraction from an uninspiring and underpaid job. Maybe you wanted an outlet for the frustration you felt at being single and watching your friends couple up. But no matter the reason you started, at some point it became more than a hobby. Your runs got longer, and longer, and longer, until you started to wonder: Should you … sign up for a marathon?
This might sound like a classic midlife-crisis move. But these days, much-younger people are feeling the same urge. TikTok and Instagram are filled with videos of 20-somethings filming themselves running and showing off slick gear as they train for what some call their “quarter-life-crisis marathon.” And offline, more young people really have been running marathons in recent years. In 2019, only 15 percent of people who finished the New York City Marathon were in their 20s. By 2023, that share had grown to 19 percent. Similarly, at this year’s Los Angeles Marathon, 28 percent of finishers were in their 20s, up from 21 percent in 2019.
Setting out to run 26.2 miles is intense. But it also promises a profound sense of control that may be especially appealing to those coming into adulthood. For many of today’s 20-somethings, the traditional markers of maturity (marriage, kids, a stable career, homeownership) have become harder to reach. In this context, young people may feel “both logistically disoriented—genuinely not knowing how to pay rent or what to do—but also deeply existentially disoriented,” Satya Doyle Byock, a psychotherapist in Portland, Oregon, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, told me. When other big life milestones seem elusive, a marathon, though extreme, can feel like a surer route to finding meaning: If you stick to your training plan, this is a goal you can reach.
While reporting this story, I spoke with four young marathoners, who had all sorts of reasons for running—many of which were rooted in discontent. They told me about jobs that they hated or that were put on hold during the pandemic. I heard about unfulfilling personal lives, the loneliness of living alone during COVID or of moving to a new city, and the anxiety over political attacks against people like them. They wanted something, anything, to grab on to when they felt unmoored. Marathons were a natural solution. As Kevin Masters, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who began researching marathoners in the 1980s, has found, finishing one can help you find a sense of purpose or a new element of your identity—and he has reason to believe that those factors are motivating Gen Z runners too.
No marathons for this content-with-his-life fellow 🙂
11) So, you know that amazing research on how the reintroduction of wolves transformed the Yellowstone ecosystem for the better? Maybe not so much 😦
In 1995, 14 wolves were delivered by truck and sled to the heart of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, where the animal had long been absent. Others followed.
Since then, a story has grown up, based on early research, that as the wolves increased in number, they hunted the park’s elk herds, significantly reducing them by about half from 17,000.
The wolves’ return and predatory dominance was believed to have had a widespread effect known as a trophic cascade, by decreasing grazing and restoring and expanding forests, grasses and other wildlife. It supposedly even changed the course of rivers as streamside vegetation returned.
Yellowstone’s dramatic transformation through the reintroduction of wolves has become a global parable for how to correct out-of-balance ecosystems.
In recent years, however, new research has walked that story back. Yes, stands of aspen and willows are thriving again — in some places. But decades of damage from elk herds’ grazing and trampling so thoroughly changed the landscape that large areas remain scarred and may not recover for a long time, if ever.
Wolf packs, in other words, are not magic bullets for restoring ecosystems.
“I would say it’s exaggerated, greatly exaggerated,” said Thomas Hobbs, a professor of natural resource ecology at Colorado State University and the lead author of a long-term study that adds new fuel to the debate over whether Yellowstone experienced a trophic cascade.
“You could argue a trophic trickle maybe,” said Daniel Stahler, the park’s lead wolf biologist who has studied the phenomenon. “Not a trophic cascade.”
Not only is the park’s recovery far less robust than first thought, but the story as it has been told is more complex, Dr. Hobbs said.
12) What are ostriches doing swallowing things that will kill them (admittedly, there are no keys in the wild), “Beloved Ostrich Dies at Kansas Zoo After Swallowing Worker’s Keys: Karen, a 5-year-old known for her playful antics, reached beyond her enclosure, grabbed a staff member’s keys and swallowed them, the zoo said. Attempts to save her were unsuccessful.”
A beloved ostrich died last week after reaching beyond the confines of her Kansas zoo enclosure to grab and swallow the keys of a staff member, according to the Topeka Zoo & Conservation Center.
The five-year-old ostrich, Karen, had been a resident of the zoo for around a year and was renowned for her “playful antics,” which included swimming in the enclosure’s pool, playing in the sprinkler and “dancing,” the zoo said Friday on social media.
“Zoo guests and staff alike formed deep connections with her,” said the center, which houses more than 300 animals and is about 65 miles west of Kansas City, Kan.
Karen’s life, however, was cut tragically short after she “reached beyond her exhibit fence,” grabbed the keys and immediately swallowed them, the zoo said, noting that it had consulted with experts across the country in an attempt to save her by both “surgical” and “nonsurgical” means. “Unfortunately,” the zoo said, “these efforts were unsuccessful.”
Founders often fail as managers, Blank noted. “As Tesla struggles in the transition from a visionary pioneer to reliable producer of cars in high volume,” he wrote in 2018, “one wonders” if the generous compensation plan that the Tesla board awarded to Musk that year “would be better spent finding Tesla’s Alfred P. Sloan.”
I called up Blank. He told me that the flaws in Musk that he identified that year remain. “When you’ve been right in the beginning, you think you’re right forever,” he said. “You surround yourself with people who think you’re a genius forever. You run by whim rather than strategy.”
Edwin Land, a co-founder of Polaroid, was a technical genius but a terrible chief executive, Blank said. Steve Jobs bungled his job at Apple and was forced out as chairman, although he redeemed himself by doing better after returning as chief executive, Blank said. Then there’s Durant.
“Musk is very similar to Durant,” agreed Christopher Whalen, an investment banker who is chairman of Whalen Global Advisors and the author of a 2017 book on the history of Ford Motor titled “Ford Men: From Inspiration to Enterprise.” Whalen told me that with Musk, “We’re repeating ourselves in a way.”
A big difference between Durant’s days at G.M. and Musk’s at Tesla is that G.M.’s board was strong and independent of the C.E.O. (as evidenced by the fact that it booted him twice). It’s hard to say the same of Tesla’s.
14) Excellent post from Lee Drutman, “Are We Losing Our Democracy? Or Are We Losing Our Minds? Or Both? Is America Really in Crisis, or Are Our Brains Just Wired to Think So? Yes.”
There are real threats, and real injustices. But if we are going to address and solve these and other problems collectively, we need to have some faith and trust in the government to steer and implement the large-scale solutions necessary.
And yet, it really does feel like we have worked ourselves into a state of counter-productive exaggerated panic and anger, such that we can no longer solve these problems anymore. And the failure to solve these problems contributes to more panic and anger. Which further undermines our collective problem-solving capacity. Which leads for calls to blow up the system entirely. Which…. well you get the idea: a kind of doom loop, if you will.
And this is where I really struggle. As somebody who studies democracy, I see real warning signs. I see an illiberal, authoritarian movement rising on the political right. And it’s important to call it out for what it is. But am I being overly alarmist in a way that contributes to a collective sense of learned helplessness?
I also see how the far-right authoritarian movement, led by Trump, is catalyzed by both some real and significant crises in declining parts of the country. I see how that has mixed with distrust into a rumbling rage that “the elites” have failed them, which makes the idea of “democracy” seem like a farce. But it is also true that many Trump supporters are doing quite well financially. So some of this outrage is… maybe exaggerated? (Please, don’t make me revisit the whole “economic anxiety” debate).
Going back to the late 1970s, most Americans have been satisfied with their lives. The percentages go up and down here and there. But overall, it’s a country of mostly satisfied people. For a decade and a half, half of the country even describes itself as “thriving.”
But the direction of the country? This bounces around much more. Lately it has been pretty low.
Is there a relationship between the two questions? Yes, but it’s complicated. You might expect that when more people are satisfied with their own lives, more people are also satisfied with the direction of the country. And you’d be right. But in the last two decades, the connection has attenuated considerably.
If you are a careful and devoted reader of this substack, you may recall a similar chart in my essay on how economic sentiment had become de-linked from presidential approval over the last two decades. I am now sensing a pattern. In this current era (the last two decades or so), our own fortunes are increasingly de-linked from our feelings towards the government and towards our leaders.
So why this disconnect? Something important has changed. But to understand what’s going on, we need to understand ourselves better.
This essay is an attempt to unravel these complicated interrelated forces. Fair warning: I may pose more questions than answers. But these are hard questions, and I’m starting to think through them.
The short version of my argument is this: The current political-media environment is toxic for our brains. We can’t manage this amount of constant conflict.
15) This truly seemed not great. I hate when American institutions basically prove correct the worst fears that conservatives have about them, “‘Pedagogical Malpractice’: Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class: Top physicians, including former Harvard dean, say required course is riddled with dangerous falsehoods”
16) I’m not much of a drinker, but talk about unsurprising headlines! “Umbrella Dry Bar closing downtown Raleigh location after 4 months”
17) I loved the new “Civil War” movie. And this is a really good take on it.
If the American experiment finally decides to call it quits, how might a national breakup begin?
Perhaps California moves toward secession after the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the state’s strict gun control measures. Or Texas rebels when disputes over abortion laws grow deadly and the state’s National Guard remains loyal to the second Texan republic. Or a skirmish over the closure of a local bridge by federal inspectors escalates into a standoff between a beloved sheriff and a famous general, and the rest of the country takes sides. Or it’s the coordinated bombing of state capitols timed to the 2028 presidential transition, with right-wing militias and left-wing activists blaming one another.
In other words: It’s not you, it’s me hating you.
These scenarios are not of my own creation; they all appear in recent nonfiction books warning of an American schism. The secessionist impulses take shape in David French’s “Divided We Fall,” which cautions that Americans’ political and cultural clustering risks tearing the country apart. (French published it before becoming a Times columnist in 2023.) The statehouse explosions go off in Barbara F. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start,” which notes that when democratic norms erode, opportunistic leaders can more easily aggravate the ethnic and cultural divides that end in violence. The Battle of the Bridge is one of several possible Sumter moments in Stephen Marche’s “The Next Civil War,” which contends that our great divorce would flow from irreconcilable differences over what America stands for.
These authors offer examples of what could happen, not predictions of what will. Their point is that our politics and culture are susceptible to such possibilities. “The crisis has already arrived,” Marche writes. “Only the inciting incidents are pending.”
It is precisely the absence of inciting incidents that makes the writer-director Alex Garland’s much-debated new film, “Civil War” (its box-office success resulting in part from the multitude of newspapercolumnists going to see it), such an intriguing addition to this canon. We never learn exactly who or what started the new American civil war, or what ideologies, if any, are competing for power. It’s a disorienting and risky move, but an effective one. An elaborate back story would distract from the viewer’s engagement with the war itself — the bouts of despair and detachment, of death and denial — as lived and chronicled by the weary journalists at the center of the story.
18a) This is excellent from Jesse Singal, “The Cass Review Won’t Fade Away: How youth gender medicine broke almost every liberal institution it touched.”
Anyone who reads the Cass Review, and who then reads most recent mainstream American media coverage of youth gender medicine, will be gobsmacked.
The review, spearheaded by the respected British pediatrician Hilary Cass (and ably summed up in The Morning Dispatch last week), explains that youth gender medicine “is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint. The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”
Cass and her colleagues arrived at this conclusion after an ambitious yearslong effort to interview clinicians, parents, and patients about their experiences with the National Health Service’s youth gender medicine system. She also commissioned a sizable bundle of independent systematic reviews evaluating both the evidence for puberty blockers and hormones, as well as the quality of recommendations published by influential groups like the World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare. Overall, dozens of studies were collected and evaluated by the team at the University of York, and this culminated in Cass delivering a damning verdict on the present state of youth gender medicine and the professional guidelines surrounding it.
In her report, Cass clarifies that her goal is not to question whether some young people are “really” transgender. She acknowledges that some young people are in tremendous distress about their gender, and she doesn’t deny the fact that some may benefit from blockers and/or hormones. Her argument, which in any other context would not be controversial, is simply that powerful medical treatments should be underpinned by quality evidence—and that that clearly isn’t the case here. Cass also focuses on the need to ensure youth referred to gender clinics receive the proper screening and assessment before medical interventions are undertaken, especially for the growing subset of these youth who are autistic or who have mental-health comorbidities that, some experts believe, can significantly complicate the diagnostic process in these settings.
Cass’ findings led to significant new restrictions on puberty blockers and hormones for youth in the U.K. The changes follow similar decisions based on comparable (albeit less ambitious) reviews in countries like Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Other European nations seem poised to follow suit.
On the other hand, the vast majority of American media coverage has for years touted the safety and efficacy of these treatments. In some cases, writers and reporters denounced the foolishness (if not transphobia) of those who exhibit undue skepticism toward them. These articles are often festooned with quotes from psychologists, psychiatrists, and endocrinologists with extremely impressive credentials—the sorts of people we are told to trust—reinforcing the view that if these treatments have any risks or unknowns, they are small, easily swamped by their salutary effects. A certain message has been delivered with the repetition of a drumbeat: An informed, compassionate person should support access to youth gender medicine.
As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”
Cass focused on Britain, but her description of the intellectual and political climate is just as applicable to the U.S., where brutality on the left has been matched by brutality on the right, with crude legislation that doesn’t acknowledge the well-being of the young people in question. In 24 states Republicans have passed laws banning these therapies, sometimes threatening doctors with prison time if they prescribe the treatment they think is best for their patients.
The battle lines on this issue are an extreme case, but they are not unfamiliar. On issue after issue, zealous minorities bully and intimidate the reasonable majority. Often, those who see nuance decide it’s best to just keep their heads down. The rage-filled minority rules.
President Trump left office wildly unpopular. But in the past few years, some voters’ opinions about him have improved. Support for how Trump handled key issues as president — including the economy, and law and order — has risen by about six percentage points since 2020, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. A plurality of voters, 42 percent, now say the Trump years were “mostly good” for the country. Only a quarter say the same of President Biden’s tenure.
Biden says he finds the nostalgia “amazing,” and at a time when Trump is a defendant in four criminal cases, it may seem surprising. But former presidents often enjoy more positive assessments from voters in retrospect. The difference this year is that, for the first time in decades, a former president is running to reclaim his old office.
Today, I’ll explain why voter nostalgia seems to be helping Trump, and how that might change.
A longstanding pattern
Decades ago, the polling firm Gallup started asking Americans what they thought about past presidents. The results revealed a pattern: Almost everyone Gallup asked about, from John F. Kennedy to Trump, enjoyed higher approval ratings after leaving office than he did while holding it, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows.
Source: Gallup | By The New York Times
One explanation is political. As presidents leave office, partisan attacks recede. Some presidents, like Jimmy Carter, become well known for philanthropy or other good works. “You kind of move, as an ex-president, from being a political figure to someone who is above the fray,” Jeff Jones, a Gallup senior editor, told me.
Another explanation is historical. As years pass, popular culture and collective memory come to shape Americans’ views of presidents — especially for those too young to remember the actual events. History textbooks, for instance, tend to focus more “on the good things they did than the bad things, the historical contributions that they made as president rather than scandals or poor decisions or poor policies,” Jones said.
There are psychological explanations, too. Human memory is fallible. People often experience their current problems more acutely than they recall their past ones or think better of experiences in retrospect, which psychologists call recency bias. That can lead to a perpetual yearning for the supposed good old days.
A political boon
In Trump’s case, the result seems to be that voters are focused more on the inflation, record border crossings and overseas wars of the Biden years than on the administrative chaos, pandemic and insurrection of the Trump years. Voters “know about what they don’t like about Biden, and they have forgotten what they don’t like about Trump,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant, told The Times.
Changes of three points or less are not considered statistically significant. | Based on New York Times/Siena College polls in the fall of 2020 and April 2024
20) This is good, “There’s No Easy Answer to Chinese EVs: Supercheap electric cars or an American industrial renaissance: Pick one.”
Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives?
The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is something known as “the China shock.” American policy makers long considered free trade to be close to an unalloyed good. But, according to a hugely influential 2016 paper, the loosening of trade restrictions with China at the turn of the 21st century was a disaster for the American manufacturing workforce. Consumers got cheap toys and clothes, but more than 2 million workers lost their jobs, and factory towns across the country fell into ruin. Laterresearch found that, in 2016, Donald Trump overperformed in counties that had been hit hardest by the China shock, helping him win key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Upon taking office, the Biden administration committed itself to making sure nothing like this would happen again. It kept in place many of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and even introduced new trade restrictions of its own. Meanwhile, it pushed legislation through Congress that invested trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing. For Biden, the transition to green energy represented a chance to bring good jobs back to the places that had been hurt the most by free trade.
Then China became an EV powerhouse overnight and made everything much more complicated. As recently as 2020, China produced very few electric vehicles and exported hardly any of them. Last year, more than 8 million EVs were sold in China, compared with 1.4 million in the U.S. The Chinese market has been driven mostly by a single brand, BYD, which recently surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. BYD cars are well built, full of high-tech features, and dirt cheap. The least expensive EV available in America retails for about $30,000. BYD’s base model goes for less than $10,000 in China and, without tariffs, would probably sell for about $20,000 in the U.S., according to industry experts.
This leaves the White House in a bind. A flood of ultracheap Chinese EVs would save Americans a ton of money at a time when people—voters—are enraged about high prices generally and car prices in particular. And it would accelerate the transition from gas-powered cars to EVs, drastically lowering emissions in the process. But it would also likely force American carmakers to close factories and lay off workers, destroying a crucial source of middle-class jobs in a prized American industry—one that just so happens to be concentrated in a handful of swing states. The U.S. could experience the China shock all over again. “It’s a Faustian bargain,” David Autor, an economist at MIT and one of the authors of the original China-shock paper, told me. “There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 EVs. But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.”
21) Conor Friedersdorf, “Abolish DEI Statements: Assessing a debate about a controversial hiring practice”
This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.”
More and more colleges started requiring faculty to submit these statements in recent years, until legislatures in red states began to outlaw them. They remain common at private institutions and in blue states. Kennedy lamented that at Harvard and elsewhere, aspiring professors are required to “profess and flaunt” their faith in DEI in a process that “leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism.” He concluded that DEI statements “ought to be abandoned.”
But a “contrasting perspective” on diversity statements that the Crimson published argued that “furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring.” Edward J. Hall, a Harvard philosophy professor, acknowledged flaws in the way DEI statements are currently used, going so far as to declare, “I share my colleague professor Randall L. Kennedy’s anger.” However, he continued, “we should direct that anger at its proper target: not diversity statements themselves, but rather the horribly distorted view that has taken hold about what they should contain.”
The headline of his op-ed, “Don’t Eliminate. Improve,” seemed to endorse a reformist position on DEI statements that I’ve begun to encounter often in my reporting. Lots of liberal-minded academics feel favorably toward diversity and inclusion as values, but they also dislike dogmatism and coercion, qualities that they see in today’s DEI statements. If only there were a way for a hiring process to advance DEI without straying into illiberalism.
But people who see the flaws of the status quo should not be seduced by the illusion that tweaking how DEI statements are solicited or scored is a solution. In fact, interviewing Hall, the ostensible reformer in the Harvard Crimson debate, left me more convinced that abolishing DEI statements is the best way forward.
22) Meanwhile, this happened two weeks ago and has somehow made barely a ripple on my campus so far, “UNC System moves to eliminate diversity goals, jobs at public campuses across the state: A Board of Governors committee approved repealing and replacing the UNC System’s policies on diversity and inclusion at a Wednesday meeting in Winston-Salem. The full board will vote next month.”
Even after removing the pandemic spike, the trendline is pretty clear: the national debt is now growing $2 trillion per year and shows no particular sign of slowing down.
About Steve Greene
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