Last month, Seinfeld hit the interview circuit to promote Unfrosted. During one interview, The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick asked him why he keeps grinding after all these years and Seinfeld’s answer was glorious:
David Remnick: It is possible that you’ve probably made a dollar or two from Seinfeld, and yet you still work so hard. Why?
Jerry Seinfeld: Because the only thing in life that’s really worth having is good skill. Good skill is the greatest possession. The things that money buys are fine. They’re good. I like them. But having a skill [is the most important thing].
I learned this from reading Esquire magazine. They did an issue on ‘mastery’…a very zen Buddhist concept.
Pursue mastery that will fulfill your life. You will feel good. I know a lot of rich people and they don’t feel good as you think they…would. They don’t. They’re miserable. So I work because if you don’t in standup comedy — if you don’t do it a lot — you stink.”
2) Lessons for better marijuana policy in light of federal policy changes:
Learning from the experiences of states that have legalized marijuana is essential. For one, they have not seen the much-feared explosion of youth use. An April 2024 study in JAMA Psychiatry analyzed survey data from 1993 to 2021 and found that teen cannabis use was no more common in the 24 states that legalized adult recreational use than elsewhere. According to a systematic review published in 2022, 10 earlier studies found increases in adolescent use, but 10 others showed no effect, and two showed reductions…
Other drug use didn’t increase, either. Use of the deadliest drugs — opioids — dropped significantly among youth as marijuana legalization spread. Prescription opioid misuse by 12th graders fell from 9.5 percent in 2004 to 1 percent in 2023; heroin use declined similarly. Most states showed little change or even a decline in opioid misuse and overdoses after passage of recreational or medical marijuana laws. And legalized cannabis products have not been linked to fatal poisonings or injuries. (Deaths linked to lung injuries from vape pens seem to have been caused by illegal products and tended to be less common in legal states.)
Legalization isn’t without risks, of course. Some studies show that it increases stoned driving, with one linking a 16 percent rise in fatalities with recreational legalization. Others, however, find no effects or even a reduction, due perhaps to people using cannabis instead of alcohol. And some studies have associated marijuana with psychosis in some populations, but there has been no spike in psychotic disorders in legalized states, as evidenced by a recent study of medical records in 64 million Americans age 16 or older.
Bottom line: The most dire predictions about legalizing marijuana have not been borne out at the state level, which bodes well for federal legalization.
One serious issue that federal regulation is needed to resolve is the persistence of the black market. Historically, West Coast states have supplied most of the domestically grown cannabis in the United States. Since federal law bars interstate sales, Western markets are oversupplied with cannabis, keeping prices low. This makes it difficult for growers to profit without diverting some cannabis to the illegal market. Individual state licensing policies have also inadvertently protected black markets: New York, for example, is now flooded with illegal weed stores because it was slow in licensing legal ones.
Experience with regulation of other substances could guide the creation of federal marijuana policy. One key finding from alcohol and tobacco research is that price matters. Taxes that elevate prices reduceyouth use and lower consumption by those who have substance use disorders, in part because the heaviest users pay the most. But to be effective, taxes on marijuana must target potency and not just quantity — and may have to be adjusted regularly to deal with introductions of products with varied strengths. Regulators need to find sweet spots where prices are low enough to minimize illicit sales but high enough to discourage overconsumption.
3) This is from a year ago, but new to me and I really enjoyed it, “In the NHL playoffs, what’s more valuable: Star power or depth?”
It’s star power. (Sorry Carolina Hurricanes)
Unrelatedly, The Athletic is now simply, “https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/” I have separate accounts under seaparate email addresses for the Athletic and NYT and it’s driving me crazy.
4) Is Seth Masket said when sharing this, just not a serious political party, “Colorado GOP calls for all children to be pulled from public schools: The party’s latest move to the hard right is a directive to parents to remove kids from the public education system.”
5) Seems like we should do something about this. The Lancet, “Antimicrobial resistance: an enormous, growing, and unevenly distributed threat to global health”
6) I’ve felt lucky that I’ve had good female friends ever since I was a teenager and that my wife– who started out as a female friend– has never felt threatened by it. I enjoyed reading this, “Where Have All My Guy Friends Gone? As we couple off, it feels impossible for men and women to remain platonically close. What if we made it easier?”
7) John Sides, “What voters say is important doesn’t actually affect their vote: Polls measuring people’s political priorities can’t tell us why they’ll choose Biden or Trump.”
Over and over again this election season, you are going to see polls that try to assess which issues people think are important. Sometimes pollsters ask an open-ended question so respondents can state their priorities in their own words. Sometimes pollsters list issues and ask people how important each one is. Occasionally, pollsters will try to make respondents rank issues.
All of these exercises have their uses. But what are they not useful for? Identifying the factors that actually matter to voters at the ballot box.
Leeper and Robison have two key pieces of evidence. First, they look at seven national election studies in the United States between 1980 and 2008, each of which asked voters’ positions on a bunch of issues, where they perceived the presidential candidates to stand on each issue, and how personally important each issue was to them. The big question is whether the distance between voters’ positions and the two candidates – i.e., whether voters were closer to the Democratic or Republican candidate – was a stronger predictor of how they voted if they said the issue was important to them.
The answer? Not really. “We find little evidence of a consistent role played by subjective importance,” Leeper and Robison write. Here and there, they saw the expected finding: Proximity to the candidates on Issue X had a stronger relationship to how they voted if they said that Issue X was important to them. But at most the evidence was “very qualified” across a wide range of issues and elections.
Second, Leeper and Robison did an experiment where respondents chose between hypothetical candidates who varied randomly in their issue positions. Once again, the question was whether respondents were more likely to vote for the candidate closer to them on an issue when they said that the issue was important to them. And once again, Leeper and Robison didn’t find much evidence for this.
These findings fit with a long vein of research showing that people are not good at articulating the reasons for their choices. So they may say – and honestly feel! – that an issue is important. But when they say that, they are not revealing that this issue will affect how they vote. The same problem emerges even when pollsters directly ask people whether something would change their vote.
You’re going to read a lot of coverage over the next several months about what truly matters to voters in 2024. A lot of this discussion will rely on polls that ask for people’s subjective statements of their priorities (“Oh, the biggest issue for me right now is inflation/abortion rights/Gaza/whatever.”)
Just don’t assume that those are the issues that will actually affect their choices on Election Day.
8) I’ve never used MTurk for my data. And, oh my, this is not encouraging, “Psychology study participants recruited online may provide nonsensical answers: Data quality suffers in some studies using the MTurk platform—but participant screening and other safeguards can help”
In the new study, Union College psychologist Cameron Kay asked 400 participants on MTurk to respond to 27 pairs of “semantic antonyms” such as “I do not sleep well” and “I sleep soundly.” A participant answering carefully should “agree” or “strongly agree” with one of these statements and “disagree” or “strongly disagree” with the other, leading to a negative correlation between the statements in each pair. But Kay found that for 26 of the 27 pairs, responses were positively correlated—participants gave similar responses to both, suggesting they weren’t paying attention or answering honestly. Kay’s conclusion: Results from MTurk “cannot be trusted.”
Kay then applied exclusion criteria commonly used in research: removing data from anyone who took less than 2 seconds per question, gave the same response to many items in a row, or responded incorrectly to questions checking that participants were reading carefully, such as “Choose ‘strongly disagree’ for this item.” He was left with only 53% of his original data—and 67% of the opposing pairs still had nonsensical, positively correlated responses.
Hauser cautions these results should not be used to tar all online studies. “Out-of-the-box MTurk doesn’t really do much vetting, which is why it’s kind of a Wild West,” he says. He notes that alternative platforms exist that filter out participants who routinely give poor data—a more effective form of quality control than researchers screening poor responses one by one.
9) This is a huge, huge problem from today’s MAGA Republican party that is not getting near the attention it deserves, “‘We’ll See You at Your House’: How Fear and Menace Are Transforming Politics: Public officials from Congress to City Hall are now regularly subjected to threats of violence. It’s changing how they do their jobs.”
This was just a typical month in American public life, where a steady undercurrent of violence and physical risk has become a new normal. From City Hall to Congress, public officials increasingly describe threats and harassment as a routine part of their jobs. Often masked by online anonymity and propelled by extreme political views, the barrage of menace has changed how public officials do their work, terrified their families and driven some from public life altogether.
By almost all measures, the evidence of the trend is striking. Last year, more than 450 federal judges were targeted with threats, a roughly 150 percent increase from 2019, according to the United States Marshals Service. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated more than 8,000 threats to members of Congress last year, up more than 50 percent from 2018. The agency recently added three full-time prosecutors to handle the volume.
More than 80 percent of local officials said they had been threatened or harassed, according to a survey conducted in 2021 by the National League of Cities.
“People are threatening not just the prosecutor, the special counsel, the judge but also family members,” said Ronald L. Davis, director of the U.S. Marshals Service. Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said she saw “an environment where disagreement is increasingly tipping over” into “violent threats.”
It is still rare for those threats to tip into action, experts said, but such instances have increased. Some capture national attention for weeks. The mass shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the Tops Friendly supermarket in Buffalo in 2022 were both carried out by perpetrators who expressed extreme right-wing views. Trump supporters’ riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was one of the largest acts of political violence in modern American history.
10) And rarely is that extra runtime actually worth it, “You’re not imagining it — movies are getting longer: Albums are too, and it has everything to do with our anxious relationship to technology.”
Swift is not alone in being dinged for lack of brevity. Lately, it’s come to seem as though everything, all of pop culture, is too long. Albums. Movies. It all just goes on and on forever, the complaint goes, and we don’t have the time for it.
These criticisms are mostly true, with some caveats. Movie lengths on average have plateaued since the introduction of the talkie 60 years ago, but the length of the average top 10 movie is up from two hours in 1993 to 2 hours and 23 minutes in 2023. Albums, meanwhile, have been trending longer for decades, ever since the CD boom of the 1990s put an end to the space constraints of vinyl. That means they’re longer now, albeit not that much longer than they were a few years ago — an average of 80 minutes in 2022 compared to 73 in 2008.
It’s normal for critics to worry that formats have been corrupted and that while art was perfectly figured out a little while ago, before our time, it’s now on the verge of ruin. That’s a familiar argument. Yet there’s a particular vehemence to the concern about how long runtimes have gotten that suggests this conversation reflects our fears about all the ways the world is changing.
Albums and films used to be shorter because they had to be; the technology they existed on demanded it. With those constraints gone, they exist in a free, wide-open space — and all the rest of us are there too. What, we worry, are we going to do there?
How albums got long and songs got short
Albums used to be confined to the length of a vinyl record: about 45 minutes, counting both sides. Likewise, songs were about three to four minutes long because that was the length that a radio station was willing to go without an ad break. For your album to go longer than that meant that you were making a statement; you were doing something that could not be contained by the physical limitations of your form. For your single to go longer meant that you were so popular and dominant and high-minded that you could simply dare the radio stations not to play your song. You were the Beatles with The White Album, making a double record. You were Don McLean with “American Pie,” making an eight-minute single and charting at No. 1. You were a very big deal.
Then CDs came, and albums started to meander. There’s a limit to how much music you can cram onto a CD, but they’re a lot more expansive than vinyl is, and the new lack of restraints showed. You were free to explore, to be playful, to experiment. Going long didn’t mean you were making some kind of genre-defining statement so much as it meant you were feeling out a way forward in the new world. Pitchfork reports that by the 2000s, at the end of the CD era, the average hip-hop album was 17 tracks and 67 minutes long.
As MP3s took over, the physical constraints that kept albums short vanished completely. In their place came new, less obvious constraints. The post-Napster music industry of the 2010s was a winner-take-all economy in which it was vital to chart on Billboard if you wanted a sustainable career. Starting in 2007, Billboard incorporated streams into its ratings process, and artists quickly figured out the best way to chart was to give fans as many songs as possible to stream. The thinking went that the shorter the song, the more times people would stream it. Albums kept getting longer, but songs started to contract, from four minutes and 14 seconds in 2008 to three minutes and 8 seconds in 2022. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which went to No. 1 in 2019, was just one minute and 53 seconds long…
Movies, too, have been reshaped by their technology, but in different ways than music. Movie length used to be limited to the size of a film reel, which plays about 11 minutes of footage. The standard length of a film is still, to this day, nine reels, or about 90 to 110 minutes long. Even now, when we can shoot movies on digital film and not have to worry about how much it weighs, that average length tends to hold.
11) Ezra Klein, “Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It)” Gift link.
12) Quite the story here. And the month is almost up, so I might as well use up the NYT gift links, “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel: After 50 years of failure to stop violence and terrorism against Palestinians by Jewish ultranationalists, lawlessness has become the law.”
13) It’s so long it gets it’s own summary article:
Settlers Pursuing a Theocratic State Have Become Lawmakers
Officials told us that once fringe, sometimes criminal groups of settlers bent on pursuing a theocratic state have been allowed for decades to operate with few restraints. Since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government came to power in 2022, elements of that faction have taken power — driving the country’s policies, including in the war in Gaza.
The lawbreakers have become the law.
Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and the official in Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank, was arrested in 2005 by the Shin Bet domestic security service for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He was released with no charges. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student.
Settler Violence Has Been Protected and Abetted for Decades
All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.
After the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel controlled new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. In 1979, it agreed to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Credit… The New York Times
The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet known commonly as the Jewish Department. But it is dwarfed both in size and prestige by the Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism.
Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial leniency, which has included reductions in prison time, anemic investigations and pardons. Most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause.
The two-tier situation has only become worse during the past year. We scrutinized a sample of three dozen cases from the West Bank since Oct. 7 that shows how much the legal system has decayed. In cases ranging from stealing livestock to arson to violent assault, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes and never as a criminal suspect.
Ami Ayalon, the head of Shin Bet in the late 1990s, told us that government leaders “signal to the Shin Bet that if a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”
But Jews have also been targets of ultranationalists. Prime Minister Rabin was murdered after rabbis passed what amounted to a death sentence on him for his support of the Oslo peace process.
14) Emily Oster, “Do Girls Like Reading More Than Boys? A new paper suggests they might”
This new paper aims to use non-self-reported data to measure how much boys and girls are reading. The researchers have data on about 2,600 Danish fifth-graders, whose time reading is measured by a commonly used reading app. The app is used in school but is accessible outside of school.
What the authors find is that during school hours, reading time is similar for boys and girls. But when they look at time outside of school, girls are reading about 25 more minutes per day on average on school days and an average of 10 minutes more on non-school days. In other words: the female reading advantage looks to them like it is driven at least in part by girls reading more for leisure than boys do.
A notable fact is that this difference appears even between boys and girls who are academically strong. It just seems like girls enjoy reading books more.
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