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.”
These winners of British Wildlife photography awards are fantastic. This is my favorite:
Day Walker. Urban Wildlife, Winner. “This vixen had taken up residence in an electricity substation after being pushed out of her parental territory. The fenced-off area provided her with a quiet place to rest away from the busy city. She would often walk along this wall, and I was able to capture this photo through the gaps in the metal fencing, while making the most of some striking lens flare.” #
The Northern Virginia real estate market of the 1970’s and 80’s helped provide me a comfortable upbringing and a private university tuition. But, as long as I understood it have I hated the commission model of real estate. I really came to hate it– even as a buyer, when my real estate agent in Lubbock, TX worked his butt off for us in 2002 but got 1/4 as much money as my dad would have made selling the same house back in Virginia simply because the markets are so different. And the whole buyer pays 6% or else bit– ridiculous! But, it’s finally changing. Leonhardt with a recent summary:
Free-market economic theory suggests that the American real estate market should not have been able to exist as it has for decades.
Americans have long paid unusually high commissions to real estate agents. The typical commission in the U.S. has been almost 6 percent, compared with 4.5 percent in Germany, 2.5 percent in Australia and 1.3 percent in Britain. As a recent headline in The Wall Street Journal put it, “Almost no one pays a 6 percent real-estate commission — except Americans.”
If housing operated as an efficient economic market should, competition would have solved this problem. Some real estate brokers, recognizing the chance to win business by charging lower commissions, would have done so. Other brokers would have had to reduce their own commissions or lose customers. Eventually, commissions would have settled in a reasonable place, high enough for agents to make a profit but in line with the rest of the world.
That didn’t happen. Instead, an average home sale in the U.S. has cost between $5,000 and $15,000 more than it would have without the inflated commissions. This money has been akin to a tax, collected by real estate agents instead of the government. [emphasis mine]
The situation finally seems to be ending, though. On Friday, the National Association of Realtors, the industry group that has enforced the rules that led to the 6 percent commission, agreed to change its behavior as part of an agreement to settle several lawsuits.
The settlement is important in its own right. Americans now spend about $100 billion a year on commissions. That number will probably decline by between $20 billion and $50 billion, Steve Brobeck, the former head of the Consumer Federation of America, told my colleague Debra Kamin.
There is also a broader significance to the settlement. It’s a case study of a central flaw in free-market economic theory. That theory suggests that capitalist competition can almost always protect consumers from businesses that charge too much.
To be clear, competition is indeed a powerful force that frequently makes both consumers and businesses better off. That’s why capitalist economies have such a better record than communist or socialist economies. Just look at South Korea and North Korea. (Are you familiar with the satellite images that compare the two Koreas at night?) Or consider the recent economic struggles of Venezuela.
Market competition, however, isn’t the panacea that free-market advocates claim. Sometimes, businesses can amass enough economic power to squash competition — as real estate brokers did.
Power meets power
Decades ago, the National Association of Realtors set the standard commission at 6 percent, to be split between an agent representing the seller and an agent representing the buyer. If a home seller tried to negotiate, an agent would often issue a veiled threat: You won’t find a good seller’s agent to work with you, and buyers’ agents won’t show your house to clients.
Joanne Cleaver, for instance, tried to negotiate with agents when selling her house last year in Mint Hill, N.C., a suburb of Charlotte. “They laughed at me,” Cleaver told The Times.
The Realtors’ hardball tactics succeeded because they operate much of the network that’s crucial to the housing market, such as the database of listings. They could keep out agents who would have competed on price.
The solution to this concentration of economic power often requires political power — namely, antitrust enforcement by the government. After years of refusing to change their tactics, the Realtors’ agreed to a settlement now because they were vulnerable to government action.
Hooray! It will be interesting to see just how this plays out and how much better homeowners are doing and how much less well realtors are doing within a few years. There’s a lot of way over-compensated professions out there, but, honestly, in my experience realtors are near the top of the list and it’s sure good to bring some rationality back to that to the benefit of homeowners.
Hey remember the not so good old days when I used to post about Covid all the time? Me, too. Obviously, that doesn’t happen so much these days, but I still find the scientific advances (or lack thereof) pretty interesting. Nice post from Katelyn Jetelina on what progress is being made on future vaccines:
NextGen Category #1: Variant-proof vaccines
One NextGen solution is a universal coronavirus vaccine that would protect against not only SARS-CoV-2 but also other coronaviruses that might cause future animal outbreaks and pandemics. However, this is a long way away.
We have made progress towards a pan-Covid-19 vaccine. This class of vaccines aims to be “variant-proof.” The idea is that these vaccines would induce an immune response that would make it impossible (or at least very difficult) for newer variants to escape antibodies, like Omicron did in 2021. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we would no longer need boosters or that these vaccines could stop transmission. Only time would tell us that.
Around 20 variant-proof vaccines are in the early stages of this process (preclinical), but 5 have reached human trials…
NextGen Category #2: Mucosal Vaccines
The next category is mucosal (i.e., nasal) vaccines. These induce antibodies in a person’s nose and throat—the major site of infection by SARS-CoV-2—so they attack the virus at the starting line. Theoretically, this would better prevent infection and transmission than current vaccines. As previously covered on YLE, this is a hard scientific road for multiple reasons.
Twenty-seven clinical trials of mucosal vaccines have reached human trials, including a few in the U.S. A lot are still in the beginning stages, though.
Mucosal Covid-19 vaccines that have made it to clinical trials. Figure by YLE; Data from Hilda Bastian.
A few have reached later phases, and some have even been approved in other countries. However, they haven’t been authorized by a drug regulatory agency considered “stringent” for the WHO or the U.S. In the U.S., these manufacturers would have to submit their materials to the FDA and, after review, may have to run another clinical trial if they don’t have certain data. It’s not clear if this is happening (or not)…
Don’t forget about T cells! Some have developed vaccines to maximize our T cell responses by targeting other parts of the coronavirus (not the spike). These vaccines wouldn’t have much effect on transmission or infection, but they could be very valuable in preventing hospitalizations if/when we get another coronavirus pandemic.
Pfizer and BioNTech have reported preclinical data, which showed robust immune responses to non-spike targets.
The big challenge with this approach is manufacturers would need an absolutely huge trial (given the outcome is hospitalizations). They could try to justify the vaccine based on the T cell responses, but we don’t know how to interpret those in terms of real-world outcomes. This will take some work.
Bottom line
We need better Covid-19 vaccines. Biomedical innovation, such as the licensure of mRNA vaccines, was a huge scientific win during the emergency, and thankfully, scientists are not stopping there. While these will not likely be available this year, we can cross our fingers and toes that better ones are on the horizon.
I’ve been saying for as long as I can remember, imagine when we’re well into the campaign and Biden’s campaign is able to run ads saying that Trump’s former chief of staff, VP, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of Defense (and others) think he’s a threat to America’s national security. Maybe some of them will even agree to appear in ads. Sure, ads only do so much, but that’s pretty damn damning.
I was thus quite encouraged to read just now that anti-Trump Republican pollster/analyst Sarah Longwell sees this as the way to go:
For Longwell, the key to changing this dynamic is to do to Trump what Democrats did to Trump-like candidates like Lake, Walker, and Masters in the midterms: portray them as far outside the mainstream. “If voters are concerned about January 6th, you have to use that to show what a Trump second term is going to be like, which is that he is going to be a lunatic surrounded by lunatics,” she says. “The other thing that I think is key for these voters is the fact that Donald Trump is not in it for Americans. He’s in it for himself. People cannot tell these court cases apart, but they can understand that Donald Trump is running for himself to stay out of jail and because he needs money.”
In her focus groups, Trump-Trump-Biden voters seemed to get this with one saying that even Trump’s former Cabinet members “that he hand-chose, that worked with him on a daily basis that now want nothing to do with him” and who call him “unhinged” was enough to tip him into the Democratic column.
Kristol says the next order of business for him and Longwell is to roll out a group of “former Trump officials against Trump,” recruiting a group that could theoretically include not just his former vice-president but his former attorney general, two former secretaries of defense, his former secretary of state, two former national security advisers, two former chiefs of staff, two former communications directors, and other aides and advisers.
Importantly, much sometimes ads become a news story themselves (Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, anyone) which really amplifies their impact and there’s every reason to believe that’s possible here. I think the ads will be much more powerful with some of these former high-powered administration officials speaking directly to the threat that Trump represents (rather than news clips, which people can write off as “media bias”), so I do hope that many of them are up to the challenge.
A couple weeks ago I presented our latest research on abortion at the Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting. You can download the paper here. Rather than just posting the abstract, I uploaded the paper to Claude Pro (I subscribed this month and I am loving it) and asked it to write a blog post for me. Here it is…
Title: New Research Reveals How Personal Experiences Shape Abortion Attitudes in Post-Roe America
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, abortion has become a highly salient and divisive political issue. While general public opinion on abortion had been quite stable for decades prior to Dobbs, the new restrictive state laws being passed in many states have put the real-world impact of abortion policy in the spotlight.
Our new research, based on a September 2023 national survey, reveals that personal experiences play an important role in shaping attitudes on abortion, even after controlling for the major political and demographic factors that typically predict views on this issue. Here are some of our key findings:
Women who have had an abortion are the most supportive of abortion access and strongly identify as pro-choice. A full 74% of women who have had an abortion identify as pro-choice, compared to 51% of women overall. Women who know someone who has had an abortion are also distinctively pro-choice.
Young women under 30 are much more likely than older women to identify as pro-choice (67% vs 51% of women overall) and to believe abortion should be legal. Young women seem particularly attuned to how state abortion restrictions could impact them.
In contrast, being a parent predicts less support for abortion access. Mothers are less likely than women without children to identify as pro-choice (46% vs 62%) and both moms and dads score lower on support for legal abortion compared to their counterparts without kids.
Knowing someone who has had an abortion is correlated with greater support for abortion access for both women and men. A full 58% of men who know someone who has had an abortion identify as pro-choice, compared to 44% of men overall.
In summary, while partisanship and religion remain major drivers of abortion attitudes, it’s clear that people’s lived experiences also significantly shape their views, even after controlling for demographics. With more people directly impacted by state abortion restrictions post-Dobbs, these personal experiences may take on even greater political significance going forward. Policymakers should take note that key groups like young women and those who have had or know someone who has had an abortion are especially supportive of protecting abortion access.
Steve here again. And here’s a few helpful charts (Thelast two are regression models, showing the relative impacts of the various factors. Right of the 0 midline is more pro-choice. Each line is a point estimate with error bars– if it does not cross 0, it is statistically significant).
Sorry, been a busy boy. Hope to provide a lot more good content once I get back in the swing. Here’s some quick hits for now…
1) These seem good… “10 Impressive Questions to Ask in a Job Interview“
2) So much, this. I grew up in the suburb of Springfield, VA and Cary, NC just felt like home to me. “What the Suburb Haters Don’t Understand: The homogeneity of the suburbs has an upside: If strip malls and subdivisions remind you of home, you can feel nostalgic almost anywhere.”
Yet the majority of Americans live in this “nowhere.” Being precise about the proportion of the U.S. that is suburbia is difficult—the federal government, in much of its data, doesn’t distinguish “suburban” as a category distinct from “rural” and “urban” (perhaps implying that it, too, considers these places not worth caring about). But in the 2017 American Housing Survey, the government asked people to describe their own neighborhoods, and 52 percent classified them as suburban. These neighborhoods aren’t frozen 1950s stereotypes, either; they are evolving places. For instance, once synonymous with segregation, the suburbs are now more diverse than ever.
The point is: A lot of life happens in these places. Where there is life, there is connection and emotion. Where there is connection and emotion, nostalgia follows. And so, yes, decades of policy decisions and corporate development have led to what Kunstler calls the “depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading” landscapes of the suburbs. But at the same time, many people who have called these places home still have a sentimental connection to them, any spiritual degradation notwithstanding. And a curious side effect of the ubiquity of suburban institutions is that I can feel that small spark of recognition—of, dare I say it, “home”—anywhere I encounter it.
3) A massive problem with Trump that receives way too little attention his how he encourages violence in our politics. Tom Nichols, “Supporting Trump Means Supporting a Culture of Violence: The former president is encouraging threats against his enemies—again.”
On Good Friday, Donald Trump shared a video that prominently featured a truck with a picture of a hog-tied Joe Biden on it. I’ve seen this art on a tailgate in person, and it looks like a kidnapped Biden is a captive in the truck bed.
The former president, running for his old office, knowingly transmitted a picture of the sitting president of the United States as a bound hostage.
Of course, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly began the minimizing and what-abouting: “That picture,” he said in a statement, “was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway. Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”
I cannot recall prominent elected Democrats calling for hurting Trump or his family. The closest Biden got was when he once lost his temper six years ago and said that if he and Trump were in high school, he’d have wanted to beat him up behind the gym, a comment Biden later said he regretted. And there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Biden or his spokespeople ever promoted the idea that the 45th president should be taken hostage. Over the weekend, Trump’s defenders took to social media to keep raising the 2017 picture in which the comedian Kathy Griffin held up an effigy of Trump’s severed head. So let us all stipulate: Her stunt was ghastly. Griffin’s comedy—or parody, or protest art—was in bad taste and potentially a risk to a sitting president. She paid for it: The Secret Service investigated her, and her career at CNN was torched…
Trump’s fan base will shrug off its leader’s condoning of violent fantasies and implied threats of violence as more harmless lib-owning. But what Trump is doing is dangerous, and the time is long past to stop treating support for his candidacy as just one of many ordinary political choices. As the historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted on Friday on X: “This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.”
Other Americans are well within their rights to wonder if this is what Trump supporters actually want to see in 2024.
Perhaps a thought experiment might help: Would today’s Trump supporters think it hilarious, say, to see Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter bound in the same way that Biden was depicted? Perhaps Bill Clinton or the Bushes tied up like hostages? (We can only begin to imagine what kind of ugly end the truck Rembrandts might have portrayed for Barack Obama.)
After seeing Trump post this video, I found myself wanting to ask his voters the questions that always occur after one of his outrages: Is this okay with you? Is this something you’d want your children to see?
4) Tom Edsall on North Carolina’s politics this year. Much to my dismay, he emailed me for my take and didn’t even bother to thank me for my answers (which you know were quote-worthy!) that he did not use. Apparently, NYT’s new gift link policy is that I can share as many as I want, but they expire after 30 days. Going to start sharing a lot more gift links, like this one.
5) Thomas Mills has been writing great stuff on NC lately:
The Republican assault on public education in North Carolina began as a lie. They took power after the GOP wave of 2010 and immediately began saying that our public schools were “broken.” They attacked teachers, claiming they had cushy jobs with too much leave time. Their solution, now clear, was to really break them and the consequences to children be damned.
In reality, North Carolina’s public schools were improving steadily. Teacher pay and per pupil spending were reaching the national average. Test scores improved and so did graduation rates. Sure, some schools suffered, especially in economically disadvantaged areas where tax bases were too low to supplement legislative allocations, but the Leandro court decision required more state money to flow to those school systems. Progress from the 1990s through 2010 was slow but steady.
Republicans, though, had different ideas. They have never been focused on the quality of our public schools. Their priority is removing societal responsibility for educating children. They would “fix” public schools by starving them.
They cut per pupil spending and teacher pay to among the lowest in the nation. They expanded charter schools, allowing them to operate with little oversight and jump-started a massive educational industrial complex of for-profit schools with powerful lobbyists. They implemented a voucher program, initially claiming to give poor kids an opportunity to go to private schools to avoid the failing public ones, then lifting the income cap and allowing the richest families in the state to apply for subsidies.
Republicans’ educational “reform” has been a lie from the beginning because, in reality, they don’t believe in public education at all. Their claim that schools were broken was a lie. Their insistence that “opportunity scholarships” were a way to give poor kids the chance to go to private schools was a lie. Their claim that they are paying teachers more is a lie. They have broken our educational system and in nominating Mark Robinson for governor and Michele Morrow superintendent of public instruction show they don’t mind doing more damage to the morale of teachers or the quality of our schools.
But really, it’s not even about schools. It’s about taxes. In their radical belief in self-reliance and the free market, they don’t believe government should be offering anybody either a hand out or a hand up. They are so twisted in their ideological zeal to keep money in the pockets of the wealthy and corporations, that they will let public school die and support a guy like Donald Trump with no morals and a disdain for the Constitution.
Self-interest and taxes drive the Republican elite. Do you really think they would support Trump if he said he would raise taxes on corporations or the richest Americans? Of course not, but they’ll tolerate an attempt to undermine our democracy, foment political violence, cavort with corrupt and vicious dictators, and exploit the presidency for political gain as long as he won’t tax rich people.
6) Good stuff on the pig kidney. This really could prove revolutionary. “He Got a Pig Kidney Transplant. Now Doctors Need to Keep It Working: Researchers think a combination of genetic edits and an experimental immunosuppressive drug could make the first pig kidney transplant a long-term success.”
Other than rejection of the organ, one of the most common transplant complications is infection. Doctors have to strike a balance when prescribing immunosuppressive drugs: too low a dose can lead to rejection, while too much can make a patient vulnerable to infection. Immunosuppressants are powerful drugs that can cause a range of side effects, including fatigue, nausea, and vomiting.
Despite the deaths of the two pig heart recipients, Riella is optimistic about Slayman’s transplant. For one, he says, Slayman was relatively healthy when he underwent the surgery. He qualified for a human kidney but because of his rare blood type he would likely need to wait six to seven years to get one. The two individuals who received pig heart transplants were so ill that they didn’t qualify for a human organ.
In addition to close monitoring and traditional immunosuppressants, Slayman’s medical team is treating him with an experimental drug called tegoprubart, developed by Eledon Pharmaceuticals of Irvine, California. Given every three weeks via an IV, tegoprubart blocks crosstalk between two key immune cells in the body, T cells and B cells, which helps suppress the immune response against the donor organ. The drug has been used in monkeys that have received gene-edited pig organs…
Riella is also hopeful that the 69 genetic alterations made to the pig that supplied the donor organ will help Slayman’s kidney keep functioning. Pig organs aren’t naturally compatible in the human body. The company that supplied the pig, eGenesis, used Crispr to add certain human genes, remove some pig genes, and inactivate latent viruses in the pig genome that could hypothetically infect a human recipient. The pigs are produced using cloning; scientists make the edits to a single pig cell and use that cell to form an embryo. The embryos are cloned and transferred to the womb of a female pig so that her offspring end up with the edits.
“We hope that this combination will be the secret sauce to getting this kidney to a longer graft survival,” Riella says.
7) One of my very favorite books to read to my kids was Sandra Boynton’s Hippos Go Berserk. I loved it so much that even though my youngest is 13, I can still recite the whole book from memory (which, yes, I do as a party trick on occasion– I”m so much fun). And now there’s a sequel. To give to my grandkids some day, I guess.
8) Fair to say most people are not as disciplined about sports gambling as I am. Good stuff from Ben Krauss, “The Take Bakery: How to reform the sports gambling industry”
If you’re a devout sports fan, you see bets discussed during every pre-game show. If you flip through cable television, you’re bound to catch Kevin Hart or Jaime Foxx extolling the virtues of wagering on professional athletes. Even if you live under a rock, I’m confident you’re aware that Charles Barkley has a “can’t miss parlay.” And that he wants you, yes YOU, to stop reading this article and bet right now.
But if we reduce the sports gambling demand, we will in turn cut off the pernicious supply of gambling content that has ingrained itself so deeply in the zeitgeist.
The reasoning is fairly intuitive: These ads constantly implore consumers to download the app and start betting now, and they usually include special offers to kick-start that compulsive behavior immediately. According to Nielsen, 93% of sports gambling ads in 2022 were aired by mobile sports gambling companies.
But if we ban mobile sporting apps, and limit the demand of compulsive gambling behavior, there is just less of an incentive for companies to advertise. The cost of paying celebrities and buying expensive ad spots won’t be worth the potential return due to the lack of customers.
There are, of course, other ways to tamp down the sports advertising industry. Rep. Paul Tonko introduced legislation banning sports gambling advertisements that is modeled after the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act. And in my last piece, I also suggested that the FCC take action to ban discussion of gambling during sports broadcasts.
But these will all likely face free and commercial speech challenges, and frankly, it’s more effective to treat the source of the issue. By implementing the brick and mortar rule and introducing a tax that deters high-use gambling behavior, we can hopefully drive the sports gambling industry to the annals of oblivion.
But not too far into oblivion because I actually have a really great NBA finals futures bet. And I’d still like the opportunity to place it.
9) And this part of the problem just disgusts me. I hate the people who behave this way so much, “Gambling has made ends of games miserable for college basketball benchwarmers”
Carson Barrett tore his meniscus earlier this year. The injury required surgery, but this is the last run for the Purdue senior. Though he’s never seen a whole lot of playing time in his career, he wanted to at least have a shot at getting on the court this season. So Barrett delayed the repair work, gladly taking the exchange of some pretty painful nights with a throbbing knee in favor of even a few minutes of hooping.
This season he’s played a grand total of 21 minutes and scored six points. Three of them came in the NCAA Tournament. With 37 seconds left in a game long decided, Barrett drained a baseline 3 against Grambling State, putting himself in the box score of Purdue’s first-round victory. As the ball swished through the net, the bench erupted, Barrett’s teammates knowing full well what he’d sacrificed and endured. His bucket would be the last for the Boilermakers as Purdue cruised to a 78-50 win. Back in the locker room, Barrett picked up his phone and scrolled through the congratulatory texts from friends and started to search through his DMs on social media.
He stumbled on this:
You sure are a son of a b—. Hope you enjoy selling cars for the rest of your life.
Followed by:
I hope you f-ing die.
And then the kicker:
Kill yourself for taking that 3 you f-ing worthless loser. Slit your f-ing throat you f-ing f– that was completely uncalled for. I hope you f-ing kill yourself.
The Boilermakers were 27-point favorites against Grambling. Barrett’s bucket meant they won by 28. “I had no idea what the line was,” Barrett said. “I’m just out there, making memories with my friends.”
10) I cannot remember if I shared this one already. Even if I did, it’s excellent. Gift link here, “Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed: The sponsors of the law fundamentally misunderstood the nature of addiction.”
Though our polarized politics tends to frame policy choices as on-off switches, in truth they are more like a dial with many intervening settings. That dial can be productively turned in many parts of the country. Many states are far more punitive toward drug users than Oregon was before Measure 110 passed. They overemphasize incarceration of people who use drugs, they do not provide adequate, publicly funded health treatment and health insurance, and they do not use criminal justice productively to discourage drug use (for instance, by using arrests and probations as leverage to get people into drug courts and treatment). If these states could be persuaded to dial down their criminal-justice approach to approximate what Oregon had before Measure 110, except with adequately funded, evidence-based prevention and treatment, substantial gains in public health and safety would likely follow. The future of successful drug-policy reform is not greater laxity in states that are already quite progressive in their approach to drug use; it is using criminal justice and public health together in a balanced, pragmatic fashion, as Oregon is now poised to do.
11) I’m honestly amazed at Brian Klaas’s ability to just keep on coming up with great essays like this, “Why We Need Fools: Jesters, Power, and Cults of Personality: The history of court jesters and fools reveals lessons about the nature of modern power, from narcissistic hubris to cults of personality—and the necessity of being told when you’re wrong.”
IV: No Jesters in the Courts of Trump or Putin: Cults of Personality and the “Dictator Trap”
The wisdom of jesters lies with rulers who recognize that truth is more valuable than fawning admiration. And yet, we are often ruled by people who can’t take a joke—thin-skinned authoritarians who demand fealty. When they make a catastrophic mistake, it’s reality that’s wrong, never themselves. So, they make up lies— and then demand that their disciples parrot their lies as a loyalty test.1
To Trump, there is no worse fate than being laughed at. On social media, Trump routinely suggested that our enemies were “laughing up their sleeves” at America. And when NBC’s Saturday Night Live ridiculed him, he called for “retribution” against the network. For Trump, being reduced to a punchline is the pinnacle of humiliation. (There is some speculation that Trump decided to run for president in 2016 after Obama mocked him at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner).2
In an even more colorful example from Turkey, President Erdogan pressured the German government to prosecute a comedian who implied that Erdogan has sex with goats. In another case, as I previously highlighted:
A civil servant was arrested and tried for sharing a meme that compared Erdogan to Gollum, the miserable creature from The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. (The defense argued that the memes actually depicted Smeagol, Gollum’s alter-ego and his goodness within, forcing the judge to call for a recess to better understand the character, since he had not read the books or seen the films). Such absurdity is inevitable when rulers try to police comedy.
Thin-skinned egotism from narcissistic autocrats is exactly the opposite of the ethos of the jester, an inversion of a tried-and-tested system that, for thousands of years, allowed leaders to get honest feedback without losing face.
Today, for many (bad) leaders, truth spoken to power is viewed as an unforgivable affront, not an indispensable necessity. After all, anyone who has ever challenged Trump has been purged from his entourage, denounced as a RINO (Republican-in-Name-Only) even for the most minor transgressions. Regrettably, while there are plenty of unserious clowns surrounding them, there are no truth-telling jesters in the courts of Trump or Putin.
Instead, modern autocrats thirst only for unwavering fealty, eliminating those who question the myths that surround the leader. Through endless loyalty tests and public displays of unquestioning devotion, a cult of personality emerges.
No need to speak truth to power, because the powerful determine the truth.
While jesters puncture the myths and combat the lies that surround powerful figures, cults of personality do the opposite: they perpetuate falsehoods so effectively that the dictator begins to believe their own lies. The fake world constructed through displays of slavish devotion becomes the dictator’s reality.
When this happens, you end up with a phenomenon that I call “The Dictator Trap”:
They hear only from sycophants, and get bad advice. They misunderstand their population. They don’t see threats coming until it’s too late…despots rarely get told that their stupid ideas are stupid, or that their ill-conceived wars are likely to be catastrophic. Offering honest criticism is a deadly game and most advisers avoid doing so. Those who dare to gamble eventually lose and are purged. So over time, the advisers who remain are usually yes-men who act like bobbleheads, nodding along when the despot outlines some crackpot scheme.
For vast stretches of history, kings, queens, and other autocrats have understood this informational dilemma between loyalty and truth. For thousands of years, erudite rulers engineered an ingenious solution to become wiser—the jester. And yet, our modern despots, aspiring despots, and boardroom tyrants have forgotten that lesson, which, through their unchecked hubris, has meant the joke is on us, suffering from needless stupidity emanating from overly fragile egos.
V: Long Live the Jester
We need jesters.
Humor, the great disarmer, is the surest way to give “happy unhappy” answers, to ignore the decorum of deferential niceties—to keep the focus on what’s true, rather than what’s comforting. Though we need not dress modern jesters up in harlequin hats with baubles and force them to don special cloaks, good leaders understand the most potent lesson of the fool: that eliciting honest criticism—delivered good-naturedly—is the secret weapon of wisdom.
12) Nate Cohn, “How ‘All in the Family’ Explains Biden’s Strength Among Seniors: Yesterday’s hippies have become today’s seniors — and they’re still voting Democratic.”
To understand why, consider Archie Bunker, the working-class “lovable bigot” from the 1970s hit sitcom “All in the Family,” and his TV family.
The show revolved around Archie’s feuds with his 20-something feminist daughter, Gloria, and his liberal son-in-law, Michael, over race, gender and politics. (The existence of a 30-minute-long YouTube video called “Racist Archie Bunker Compilation” — which has nearly two million views — tells you most of what you need to know about the show and his character.)
It’s not unreasonable if Archie is your image of an older voter. As recently as 15 years ago, every single voter over age 65 was born before the end of World War II and came of age before the cultural revolution of the 1960s that shaped the views of many baby boomers voters for a lifetime.
Archie’s generation was the only one that reacted to the 2008 nomination of Barack Obama by shifting right: A higher share of them voted for John McCain in 2008 than for George W. Bush in 2004.
But in 2024, Archie shouldn’t be your image of a senior. Archie would be 100 years old today; his generation, called the Greatest Generation, has almost entirely died. The generation that came after Archie’s — the conservative Silent Generation, who grew up during the popular Eisenhower presidency in the “Leave It to Beaver” 1950s — has mostly died, too. Just 20 percent of the Silent Generation is alive today.
Instead, you may be better off thinking of Michael and Gloria. They are boomers, and they would be in their 70s today.
As a result, today’s seniors bear little resemblance to those from 10 or 15 years ago. Today, Madonna is a senior. So are Ellen DeGeneres and Katie Couric. By Election Day, Magic Johnson will be 65. Even though they may not feel like older voters to you, these boomers are the new seniors.
13) Love this. Needed to be said, “The Problem With Saying ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’”
The shift to “sex assigned at birth” may be well intentioned, but it is not progress. We are not against politeness or expressions of solidarity, but “sex assigned at birth” can confuse people and creates doubt about a biological fact when there shouldn’t be any. Nor is the phrase called for because our traditional understanding of sex needs correcting — it doesn’t.
This matters because sex matters. Sex is a fundamental biological feature with significant consequences for our species, so there are costs to encouraging misconceptions about it.
Sex matters for health, safety and social policy and interacts in complicated ways with culture. Women are nearly twice as likely as men to experience harmful side effects from drugs, a problem that may be ameliorated by reducing drug doses for females. Males, meanwhile, are more likely to die from Covid-19 and cancer, and commit the vast majority of homicides and sexual assaults. We aren’t suggesting that “assigned sex” will increase the death toll. However, terminology about important matters should be as clear as possible.
More generally, the interaction between sex and human culture is crucial to understanding psychological and physical differences between boys and girls, men and women. We cannot have such understanding unless we know what sex is, which means having the linguistic tools necessary to discuss it. The Associated Press cautions journalists that describing women as “female” may be objectionable because “it can be seen as emphasizing biology,” but sometimes biology is highly relevant. The heated debate about transgender women participating in female sports is an example; whatever view one takes on the matter, biologically driven athletic differences between the sexes are real.
When influential organizations and individuals promote “sex assigned at birth,” they are encouraging a culture in which citizens can be shamed for using words like “sex,” “male” and “female” that are familiar to everyone in society, as well as necessary to discuss the implications of sex. This is not the usual kind of censoriousness, which discourages the public endorsement of certain opinions. It is more subtle, repressing the very vocabulary needed to discuss the opinions in the first place…
The problem is that “sex assigned at birth”— unlike “larger-bodied”— is very misleading. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” suggests that the person’s sex is at best a matter of educated guesswork. “Assigned” can connote arbitrariness — as in “assigned classroom seating” — and so “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer.
Contrary to what we might assume, avoiding “sex” doesn’t serve the cause of inclusivity: not speaking plainly about males and females is patronizing. We sometimes sugarcoat the biological facts for children, but competent adults deserve straight talk. Nor are circumlocutions needed to secure personal protections and rights, including transgender rights. In the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020, which outlawed workplace discrimination against gay and transgender people, Justice Neil Gorsuch used “sex,” not “sex assigned at birth.”
14) These threads on the Comanche Indians were amazing.
Part 2 of a thread on the Comanche, their reign as the horse lords of the Southern Plains, and how they were eventually defeated by the Anglo-Texans. 🧵
15) And, of course, I love this from deBoer, “Treating Every Meaningless Cultural Issue as a Racial Proxy War Helps No One”
Yesterday, the South Carolina Gamecocks women’s basketball team completed a magical undefeated season to win the NCAA tournament, beating the Iowa Hawkeyes and avenging their only loss of last season in doing so. South Carolina coach Dawn Staley solidified her position as the best in the business, while Iowa breakout superstar Caitlin Clark was again denied a championship to cement her record-breaking career. Two worthy adversaries went up against each other on the largest stage, traded blow for blow, and drew record ratings in doing so. What a game, what a season, what a wonderful outcome for women’s basketball and women’s sports.
Except, no. Because we live in culture war hell.
You see, somewhere along the way, Clark became a target of scorn for left-leaning people, in a transitive kind of way, and of praise for right-leaning. Despite all of her accomplishments – this season she became the highest-scoring player in college basketball history, regardless of sex – many liberals have decided that Clark’s awards and acclaim are a result of racism. Basketball is the quintessentially Black sport, after all, and because liberals are most powerful in media and messaging and image and culture, they took to the ramparts to police that boundary, wondering why Black athletes haven’t received the same acclaim in a just-asking-questions kind of way. In particular, Clark has been unfavorably compared to LSU forward Angel Reese, who bested Clark in last year’s title game but who lost to the Hawkeyes in the Elite Eight this year. Reese has, for whatever weird habit of the white liberal mind, become a totem to use as the anti-Clark. Meanwhile, because conservatism essentially only exists now as a concerted crowdsourced attempt to exist as the negation of what liberals like, some MAGA lunatics have represented Clark as a symbol of the volk, though as always with them it’s hard to know how ironic they’re being. It’s not basketball, it’s race war! Everybody start recording your TikToks!
What we’re left with is not a celebration of a remarkable year for women’s basketball, competitively and in terms of attention, but just another grimy episode in the forever war that takes place on Twitter and TikTok and Facebook and on podcasts and talk radio and in the comments section of your local paper’s website.
16) Still no prostate cancer screenings for me. Jeremy Faust, “New research: Razor thin margins at best on prostate cancer screening benefits.”
For reasons that I can’t entirely understand, PSA testing just does not save many lives, if any. No less august a body than the United States Preventive Services Taskforce (USPST) states that men ages 55-69 should consider PSA testing, while weighing the harms and benefits with their doctors. The USPST recommends against PSA testing for men ages 70 and up. Hardly a ringing endorsement. The CDC says no different.
This all surprises a lot of people. I think the messaging in the medical and public health community has often been different from this—a bit too rah-rah in light of the science.
Take a look at new data, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association over the weekend. In the United Kingdom, researchers randomized men to either get an invitation to do prostate cancer screening or not. Then, they followed outcomes for 15 years. If prostate cancer screening made a difference, the mortality curves should have daylight between them. They basically didn’t.
Top: Prostate cancer mortality per 100 men over 15 years. Bottom: All-cause mortality per 100 men over 15 years. There are two lines in each curve. It’s just really hard to see because the differences were so small on the top, and non-existent in the bottom. Image: Martin and colleagues, the CAP Trial. JAMA.
17) Because, of course…”Embattled Harvard honesty professor accused of plagiarism: Academic chapter and two books authored by Francesca Gino appear to copy from sources including student theses, blogs, and news reports”
18) Mark Jacob has been writing great media criticism, “When media ‘objectivity’ is dereliction of duty: Journalists aren’t bystanders – they’re key players in a democracy”
You see, the real problem in American journalism isn’t that some outlets have values; it’s that some outlets spread disinformation. The main reason Fox News is bad for democracy is not because it’s right-wing – it’s because Fox lies to support criminals.
In my four-decade career as a daily newspaper editor, I assigned reporters to cover plenty of stories, and I wasn’t objective. I chose stories I thought would benefit our audience and our community. I was undoubtedly wrong sometimes. But it’s impossible to be unbiased. The very act of assigning a story is a value judgment. Every story is shaped by multitudes of biases, from who gets quoted to how they’re described to what gets edited out. Pretending otherwise is, as McGowan put it, a fallacy.
A few years ago, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote about “viewpoint disclosure.” He said one way for journalists to build trust would be to compose “here’s where I’m coming from” statements to disclose their biases and values. My “coming from” statement might say that I’m pro-democracy, anti-racism, pro-LGBTQ rights, in favor of women’s body autonomy, and supportive of Joe Biden as the candidate standing in the way of a disastrous Trump presidency. But I am not a Democratic partisan. I’m glad that Andrew Cuomo was forced out of office, and I think Robert Menendez ought to get the hell out too. Most of all, I am not objective. I believe in being fair to the facts and the public, not to political operatives.
Of course, “where I’m coming from” statements would blow the minds of news executives who want to pretend their journalists don’t let their opinions affect their work. Frankly, I want journalists who have deeply studied a subject to draw rational conclusions. If someone has been on the climate change beat for years and doesn’t have any strong opinions about it, they won’t be my go-to expert on the subject.
19) I loved tracking changing hotel prices in South Carolina around the 2017 eclipse. Totally loved this, “Eclipse’s Path Is Also Leaving a Trail of High Hotel Prices” I hope some Economists are using this data.
20) If truly consensual, okay, but this seems profoundly not great,
Debby Herbenick is one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior. The director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University and the author of the pointedly titled book “Yes, Your Kid,” she usually shares her data, no matter how explicit, without judgment. So I was surprised by how concerned she seemed when we checked in on Zoom recently: “I haven’t often felt so strongly about getting research out there,” she told me. “But this is lifesaving.”
For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.
As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk Q. and A. at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, “How come boys all want to choke you?” In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, “Why do girls all want to be choked?” They do? Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.
I started to ask more, and the stories piled up. Another sophomore confided that she enjoyed being choked by her boyfriend, though it was important for a partner to be “properly educated” — pressing on the sides of the neck, for example, rather than the trachea. (Note: There is no safe way to strangle someone.) A male freshman said “girls expected” to be choked and, even though he didn’t want to do it, refusing would make him seem like a “simp.” And a senior in high school was angry that her friends called her “vanilla” when she complained that her boyfriend had choked her.
21) I was initially sad to see Duke (my alma mater) lose out on going to the Final Four), but OMG has this been amazing for NC State. Even NYT coverage! “Welcome to Raleigh, the New Epicenter of College Basketball: Students at Duke and U.N.C., both basketball powerhouses, have long labeled North Carolina State their “little brother.” But little brother — and sister — are off to the Final Four.”
Then there is N.C. State.
Students at Duke, which is in Durham, and U.N.C. have long labeled N.C. State their “little brother” — an uncompetitive, weaker sibling in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Sometimes, the trash talk feels like it extends beyond sports. Duke is a premier private university, and U.N.C. is the state’s public flagship, its oldest educational jewel and itself a top school. N.C. State is known for its robust agricultural and engineering curriculums, but it does not have the national allure of the other two.
Yet in the men’s tournament, the No. 1-seeded U.N.C., lost to Alabama in the Sweet 16. And Duke, a No. 4 seed, fell last weekend to none other than N.C. State.
“Now they can’t talk,” Tyler Sherman, a freshman at N.C. State, said of both teams as he decided between a gray and a red Final Four T-shirt at the university’s store on Tuesday.
Still, it has been an arduous journey for the Wolfpack. In the 1950s, the N.C. State men’s team was considered the best in the A.C.C., and for the next three decades, the rivalry between N.C. State and U.N.C. was the biggest in North Carolina, said Tim Peeler, who wrote a book on the team that won N.C. State’s last national title, in 1983.
1) Jay Caspian Kang, “Online Gambling Is Changing Sports for the Worse: Betting should be legal, but pro leagues and major networks are undermining the value of sports in a bid to get in on the action.”
And there’s a much more concerning subset of the integrity problem, one that feels more permanent and specific to the style and ubiquity of online gambling. Sports betting may be a trenchant vice, but the bets themselves have changed dramatically. Single-game parlays, or S.G.P.s, in which a bettor strings together multiple wagers on individual statistical outcomes—how many points, rebounds, turnovers a certain player will accumulate—for potentially lottery-like payouts, have exploded in popularity. These bets are far more profitable for the books. According to a study by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a typical bet on whether a team will cover the spread will deliver a five- or six-per-cent return for the casino. An S.G.P., by comparison, will typically return up to thirty per cent. As a result, nearly every sports-betting company relentlessly pushes S.G.P.s, which, in turn, has led to a greater focus on individual players. It’s not that easy to fix a basketball game—you have nine other guys on the court affecting the outcome, not to mention the coaches and the officials. It’s a lot easier to fix your own performance. You just have to grab an extra rebound away from a teammate or maybe kick the ball out of bounds at the end of a blowout, and the odds will be ever in your favor…
On Monday, while I was typing the first draft of this column, the news broke that Jontay Porter, of the N.B.A.’s Toronto Raptors, was under investigation for possible gambling infractions involving prop bets—which include wagers based on the stats a player will accrue over a game. N.B.A. Twitter, perhaps the fastest archivists on the Internet, quickly uncovered amusing footage of Porter engaged in all sorts of on-court activity that now seemed suspicious. (Porter, who has not been available for the Raptors’ past three games for what the team describes as “personal reasons,” has yet to comment on the allegations.) Many of these clips were offered in jest, but, truthfully, this is how many fans now interact with sports. When the player is the prop and the prop fails, the player then becomes suspect. And, when an increasing number of bets are props based on individual player performances, rather than team outcomes, it doesn’t take much to prompt cheating, or to trigger the suspicion of misconduct. At some point, that toxic cloud changes the whole atmosphere of sports fandom. “To half the world, I’m just helping them make money on DraftKings or whatever,” Tyrese Haliburton, an all-star guard for the Indiana Pacers, recently told a reporter. “I’m a prop.”
2) Interesting, “In the eye of the beholder: Situational and dispositional predictors of perceiving harm in others’ words”
One manifestation of society’s increased sensitivity and reactivity to harm is the notion that words can be labeled as harmful, regardless of how subtle and regardless of their intent, if perceived as harmful by the receiver of that speech (Haslam, 2016). However, it is unclear what specific words should be considered harmful, particularly if harm is in the eye of the beholder (Lilienfeld, 2017). Here, we tested the hypothesis that situational and dispositional factors can prime individuals to interpret others’ verbal communications as harmful. In Study 1 (n = 217 U.S. college students), a one-sentence prime about harmful words led individuals to perceive ambiguous phrases from others as harmful. In Study 2 (n = 1092 U.S. college students), participants showed far more within-person than between-person consistency in their emotional reactions to widely varying ambiguous statements, and negative emotionality was a consistent predictor of between-person differences in feeling hurt and anxious by such statements. Taken together, findings from the two studies raise the possibility that well-intentioned efforts to boost awareness of the potential harm conveyed in others’ words may have the inadvertent effect of exacerbating perceptions of harm, particularly among individuals already inclined toward such perceptions.
3) This is good. “Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside”
A widespread misconception in much of psychology is that (a) as vertebrate animals evolved, “newer” brain structures were added over existing “older” brain structures, and (b) these newer, more complex structures endowed animals with newer and more complex psychological functions, behavioral flexibility, and language. This belief, although widely shared in introductory psychology textbooks, has long been discredited among neurobiologists and stands in contrast to the clear and unanimous agreement on these issues among those studying nervous-system evolution. We bring psychologists up to date on this issue by describing the more accurate model of neural evolution, and we provide examples of how this inaccurate view may have impeded progress in psychology. We urge psychologists to abandon this mistaken view of human brains.
4) Quite insane is the answer. “What RFK—And the Libertarian Party—Have Become: An increasingly reactionary candidate is courting an increasingly reactionary party.”
Here’s some background. The Libertarian Party has been completely transformed since its heyday in 2016 when it nominated a presidential ticket of New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld. At the 2022 national convention, the party experienced a hostile takeover by far-right culture warriors under the banner of the “Mises Caucus” (named for the 20th century economist Ludwig von Mises) incensed that the party had nominated socially liberal moderates like Johnson and Weld.
I was an active member of the party for nearly 10 years, until I resigned in 2021 along with many others unwilling to stick around for a takeover by the illiberal far right. The caucus has supplanted the ideologically libertarian orientation of the party with a program of openly bigoted authoritarianism. Overt antisemitism, anti-LGBT animus, and explicit racism are now common from the party’s leaders, candidates, and official social media accounts.
5) I think some of AI’s greatest potential is in medicine, “NHS AI test spots tiny cancers missed by doctors”
6) Disappointed to see the AAP being luddites about GMO food: (I’m always here for “the dose makes the poison”)
What did the AAP report get wrong?
The AAP report went awry in its discussion of pesticides and health, especially regarding glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide (weedkiller). First, they misrepresent the scientific consensus about the safety of glyphosate in our food supply. Second, they promote organic diets as a healthier choice for families, based on flawed data and reasoning.
Glyphosate is commonly used when growing a certain type of GMO crop called “Roundup Ready.” Roundup-ready crops (e.g., soy, corn, canola) are genetically modified to tolerate this herbicide. Farmers plant Roundup-ready crops because it simplifies weed management (they can kill nearby weeds without harming the crop), reduces use of more toxic pesticides, and reduces the need for environmentally harmful tilling.
The AAP report suggests that we should be concerned about glyphosate levels because: 1) the International Agency on Research for Cancer (IARC) rated glyphosate as a “potential carcinogen” and 2) glyphosate has been detected in many Americans’ urine samples.
This argument makes sense at first glance but is actually deeply flawed because it ignores the central tenet of toxicology: “the dose makes the poison.” Everything we consume can be harmful at extremely high doses, and everything also has a dose that is so low that it’s safe. For example, while 1-2 pills of Tylenol is safe, a whole bottle is not.
Levels of glyphosate and other pesticides are closely monitored by food safety regulators, with very reassuring results. The US Pesticide Monitoring Program and Health Canada consistently find that over 99% of foods are well below the safe limit. Furthermore, the levels of glyphosate that are detected in urine studies are consistent with exposures that are far below the safe limits. Detectable does not mean harmful!
In their report, the AAP report not only fails to put glyphosate levels in context but also presents a distorted view of the international consensus on the risks posed by glyphosate. It highlights the IARC’s determination that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen” (Group 2A). Yet it fails to mention that the IARC is an outlier – many other health and safety organizations, including the European Food Safety Authority, the US Environmental Protection Agency and Health Canada, have determined that glyphosate levels in our food supply do not pose a health hazard to consumers.
Why are different agencies reaching different conclusions? A big part of the answer is that the IARC assesses whether or not a substance is a hazard, whereas most other organizations assess whether or not something poses a risk (at a given exposure level). Unfortunately, the AAP report conflates hazard and risk.
A hazard is something that has the potential to harm you, while a risk is the likelihood of harm when exposed to a hazard. UV light is a hazard, but the resulting skin cancer risk depends on exposure: a few minutes a day in weak sunshine won’t move the needle on our skin cancer risk, while a few hours a day in peak sun could. Hazard determinations don’t tell the whole story because they ignore dose (exposure). Other hazards in the same category as glyphosate include extra hot beverages, red meat, working night shifts, and hairdressing.
We feel that it’s misleading of the AAP to present only the hazard-based view of glyphosate while ignoring the risk-based scientific consensus that glyphosate is safe for consumers at the levels in our food supply. Note: The level of risk for farmers who work directly with pesticides is less clear and warrants more studies and attention.
We hope that this post helped clear up any confusion that the American Academy of Pediatrics’ report may have caused. For a healthy diet, focus more on eating nutritious foods and less on GMOs and pesticides.
Ask why. Why, beyond petty vendettas and a lust for dominance does Trump single out places like Baltimore. Or Puerto Rico. Why does he think there’s a political edge for him in kicking them when they’re down?
I know why! Republicans see it as an opportunity, like so many others, to pander to bigots under the cover of some other excuse. Trump would notionally pretend that the places he shook down “horribly run” and thus undeserving of government largesse—at least that’s what Trump would have you believe. But the racists know: it’s because they’re filled with non-white people.
There are obvious moral problems with GOP race politics. But the biggest practical one is that, under Trump, the swapping out of dog whistles for train whistles means Republicans can no longer pander to reactionaries without kicking open the door to the most vile of bigots.
Trump’s supporters have filled his void of silence just as you’d expect. They’ve blamed “DEI” for the accident, because the political leadership of the city and state is black. They’ve fanned antisemitic conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories about terrorism and immigrants because a) that’s what bigots do, and b) if they have no legitimate basis to blame bad news on their perceived enemies, they can always be counted on to fabricate one.
If you squint at the polls just so, you can find Republicans on the majoritarian side of narrow “DEI” controversies, just as you can find them on the majoritarian side of the narrow issue of trans high-school sports athletes. But Republicans plainly have no first-principles commitments on either matter. They dredged them up for the purposes of anti-black and anti-trans pandering. And so there’s no principle limiting the political appeals to the narrower issues. They aren’t really fixed solely on the merits of white-guilt seminars or the tiny number of trans girls outcompeting cis girls. And so, by picking these fights, they made it open season on whole races and genders.
Americans might have nuanced misgivings about this or that—who has to make wedding cakes for whom, for instance—but given a choice between siding with a tolerant faction or a bigoted one, most will flock to the former.
8) I quite enjoyed this. Elite college admissions is just so insane, “Inside the Craziest College-Admissions Season Ever More applicants, new rules, and even less clarity from schools.”
College admissions has always been filled with uncertainty, especially at schools like Duke where applications are plentiful and seats scarce. But when Guttentag started as dean three decades ago, the process was more forgiving: Duke accepted some 28 percent of applicants, and about 41 percent of them attended — the university’s yield rate. Since the turn of this century, the number of applications to the 67 most selective colleges in the nation, which includes Duke, has tripled — to nearly 2 million a year. That has translated into more stress and longer odds for a lot of applicants, and a much more complicated set of considerations for colleges, in terms of who to admit and when to admit them.
Yield rates — a truer gauge of popularity than acceptance rates when students have multiple options — have plummeted at all but the most selective schools. For colleges and universities, yield is an institutional status symbol, but it is also a important signal of financial strength. Duke’s yield rate is now 60 percent — nearly 50 percent higher than it was when Gettentag started here. Many schools that had similar yield rates to Duke three decades ago have seen theirs go in the opposite direction, including Brandeis University (now 25 percent), George Washington University (19 percent), and Syracuse University (16 percent)…
A decade ago, admissions officers at Duke regularly talked about a “wall of 5s” among applicants on Advanced Placement tests — the top score. “You’d just see this long list of eight or ten or 12 5s on AP scores,” Guttentag recalled. “That’s the sort of thing that would by itself have moved the needle and now doesn’t.” Only 14 percent of the 4.39 million AP tests administered last year were scored a 5, according to the College Board; only half of American public high schools even offer more than five AP courses. Yet the fact that they were so commonplace among Duke’s applicant pool didn’t seem to shock him.
9) Totally loving “The 3 Body Problem” on Netflix. I gave up on the book when I tried a few years ago. But I quite enjoyed learning about Ken Liu, who did the English translation.
10) I always read what Phil Klay has to say, “U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible A good pretext for war is not enough to make a war just.”
The war Israel is actually fighting in Gaza bears little resemblance to that brutal and far from perfect, but necessary, campaign. Rather, in Gaza, Israel has shown itself willing to cause heavy civilian casualties and unwilling to care for a population left without basic necessities for survival. It has offered no realistic plan for an eventual political settlement. Far from the hypothetical war for Israeli security, this looks like a war of revenge.
Israel’s approachto civilian lives and infrastructure is the first and most obvious problem. John Spencer, the chair of urban-warfare studies at West Point, told The Wall Street Journal this month that Israel sets the “gold standard” for avoiding civilian casualties. Defenders of Israel cite its use of precision munitions and its distribution of leaflets and phone calls warning civilians to evacuate combat areas.
But evacuation orders can only do so much for a trapped population facing destroyed infrastructure, dangerous exit routes, and unrealistic time frames. Israel’s original evacuation order for northern Gaza gave 1.1 million people just 24 hours to leave. As Paula Gaviria Betancur, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, noted at the time, “It is inconceivable that more than half of Gaza’s population could traverse an active war zone, without devastating humanitarian consequences, particularly while deprived of essential supplies and basic services.”
And precision munitions are good only when used precisely. Senior Israeli officials complained even before the war that the list of possible military targets in Gaza was “very problematic.” Then Israel dropped a massive amount of ordnance on Gazan neighborhoods—6,000 bombs in the first six days of the war alone. For comparison, the international coalition fighting ISIS dropped an average of 2,500 bombs a month across all of Syria and Iraq. To think that Israel was precisely targeting 1,000 strikes a day strains credulity. Satellite images do not show pinpoint strikes but whole flattened neighborhoods. From October 7 to November 26, Israel damaged or destroyed more than 37,000 structures, and as CNN reported in December, about 40 to 45 percent of the air-to-ground munitions used at that point were unguided missiles. Certainly Hamas’s practice of building its tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure means that destroying the tunnels will cause widespread damage, but the scale of this bombing campaign goes well beyond that.
By many measures, President Biden is very unpopular. Since at least World War II, no president has had a worse disapproval rating at this point in his term.
Relative to his international peers, however, Biden looks much better. Many leaders of developed democracies have disapproval ratings even higher than Biden’s, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows:
Source: Morning Consult | Data was collected from Feb. 26 to March 6, 2024. | By The New York Times
Many world leaders are also up for re-election. More than 60 countries — half of the world’s population — will vote or have voted this year. Most of the countries in the chart above will vote in national or European Union elections in the coming months.
Why are people so upset with their leaders? Some explanations are local, but four global issues have driven much of the public’s anger. Call them the four I’s: inflation, immigration, inequality and incumbency.
12) The most thorough review of zoonosis versus lab leak and how we can know things that you’ll see. Courtesy of Scott Alexander.
16,000 words from @slatestarcodex summarizing the COVID origins debate.
13) The Post has had great coverage of the bridge collapse, “How a cargo ship took down Baltimore’s Key Bridge”
14) David Epstein interviews Jon Haidt on his new book.
David Epstein: A main argument in the book is that, between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens and adolescents moved from in-person to smartphones, and you call this the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” You suggest that it’s the single biggest cause behind a wave of mental health problems since 2010. To start with, I know there are skeptics of this wave to begin with. What is some of the evidence, beyond just self-report, that this is a real thing?
Jonathan Haidt: Right, so let’s start with the question of: Is there a mental health crisis? And before Covid, so in 2019, is when I joined this debate, and some critics challenged me and said it’s just another moral panic. That’s a very reasonable view. There has always been a moral panic around whatever technology kids are using. And some of these skeptics said there isn’t even a mental health crisis, it’s just that kids are more self-reporting of depression, and that’s a good thing. You know, that view was defensible at one time. But by 2019 we already had very clear evidence that the exact same patterns were happening for hospitalization and for self-harm. Suicide was very similar. Suicide, there’s a weird dip in 2008. For some reason, the rate goes way down. I don’t know what that was in 2008. So it looks like it starts rising in 2009. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. But it clearly is rising very rapidly in the 2010s. So given that we are seeing self-harm and suicide rising, and given that the percentage rises are faster for girls, everything matches that it’s not just self-report. This is not just a change in Gen Z’s willingness to talk about mental illness. This is a giant increase in mental illness, that has hit girls especially, and not just in English-speaking countries. Zach Rausch and I have documented it now in about 15 nations.
15) Bruni on Biden’s age, “The president is a decision maker, not an action figure”
Even so, aspects of the subject actually get too little consideration, starting with this crushingly obvious and yet frequently overlooked fact: The presidency isn’t a solo mission. Not even close. It’s a team effort, and the administration that a president puts together matters much, much more than his brawn or his brio.
To listen to the fretting over how many hours a day Biden can vigorously work, how many speeches he can authoritatively deliver and how many miles he can comfortably travel is to get the sense that he’s independently on the hook for the nation’s welfare. That he’s more action figure than decision maker. That, um, he alone can fix it. That he shoulders all the responsibility.
But he’s not Atlas; he’s POTUS. And the president of the United States is only as good as the advisers around him, whose selection reflects presidential judgment, not stamina.
We acknowledge as much when we discuss how a president might fill or has filled his cabinet. We recognize that many vital decisions are made — and that most important policies are realized — outside of the Oval Office.
But that recognition weirdly dissipates when we start tallying Biden’s birthdays. We attach as much weight to digits as to discernment, or we imply that the former wipes out the latter. Yes, age can erode judgment — if a person’s cognitive health is in marked and clear decline. But Biden’s situation is more cloudy than clear, and nothing about it suggests to me that he’d treat governing as cavalierly as Donald Trump would (and did) or assemble a team as ragtag as Trump’s — or, for that matter, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s.
He wouldn’t elevate a conspiracy theorist like the quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who was on a short list of potential running mates for Kennedy before, on Tuesday, Kennedy chose Nicole Shanahan, a philanthropist (and vaccine skeptic) with zero experience in public office. He wouldn’t invite anyone as unhinged and reprehensible as Rudy Giuliani, who led Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, into his inner circle.
Yes, Trump is about three and a half years younger and often peppier than Biden. Biden is about 300 times saner and always more principled than Trump. That’s the infinitely more important contrast between the two men, and we should never, not for a nanosecond, sweep it aside.
We should also call nonsense on many of the people who signal or say that Biden’s age is propelling them toward Trump. Obviously, that’s a dynamic for some of them, but it can’t be all that common because it defies common sense. Voters who’d be content to back a version of Biden with more spring in his step and less stammer in his voice have values, priorities and policy leanings that would probably render Trump an unconscionable choice. They’re not going to throw in with Trump because he throws himself around more forcefully.
Really, how many people say to themselves: Heck, Biden may be the guy with a proper respect for democracy, won’t blow air kisses at murderous tyrants and doesn’t sound like a fascist, but that Trump sure can shout louder, talk faster and clomp around more thuddingly! He’ll bring the vim to trashing democracy that Biden can’t muster for preserving it. I guess I’ll go with Trump!
No, many of these Trump supporters like what he’s selling — maybe the lower taxes for corporations and wealthy Americans, maybe the promised crackdown on immigration, maybe the nihilism, maybe just the vitriol — and have found a way to defend a vote for him (Biden’s decrepit!) without fully owning up to it.
In an age of rampant falsity, let’s be honest about that.
16) Enjoyed this from Yglesisas, “17 thoughts four years after Covid”
As liberals flailed, a distressingly large share of conservative commentary on Covid centered on just making things up. Instead of making all these good points that I am making about Covid NPIs, they would say the disease was no worse than the flu. Or that it would magically evaporate by April. Or that the Covid deaths were a result of classification error. None of that is true, and its widespread circulation contributed to the much lower vaccine uptake among conservatives, and ultimately, the much higher death toll of the disease among conservative Americans.
If you compare the US to other countries with much lower death tolls, you can see that post-vaccine the gap narrows considerably (without coming close to closing). Even a really successful lockdown regime couldn’t be sustained forever, and there was a price to pay in Australia and Finland and everywhere else once you opened up.
17) Knowing lots of people with PhD’s that I’m not that impressed by and lots of people without higher degrees that I am impressed by, I’m not much of a “credentialist.” Here’s my result from the ClearerThinking.org test.
Your score puts you at this percentile for credentialism: 20%
This means you are less of a Credentialist than 80% of the people who took this test.
18) Good interview on developing the “3 Body Problem” for TV. I watched episode 5 yesterday and was just phenomenal.
19) John McWhorter on “centering” antiracism on broadway and universities.
And this got me thinking about how much less vibrant, or even constructive, the antiracist mission feels at universities. Remember when, in 2020, the new idea was for them to “center” antiracism as their focal mission? One may have thought this was more trend than game plan, but it remains very much entrenched nationwide. According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm, first-year law students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison just this semester were required to attend a “re-orientation,” learning that explained that white people have a “fear of people of color and what would happen if they gained ‘control’” and will never be free of “racist conditioning.” A University of Notre Dame “inclusive teaching” resource from last year notes that “anti-racist teaching is important because it positions both instructors and students as agents of change towards a more just society,” emphasis theirs, with the implication that this mission has unquestionable primacy in a moral society. Statements that antiracism (and battling differentials in power more generally) are central to university departments’ missions are now almost common coin. I just participated in a discussion of antiracism as universities’ central focus at the University of Texas at Austin and am regularly asked to do so elsewhere.
And I think the persistence of this centering of antiracism at universities is kind of scary.
It may understandably seem, after these four years as well as the ones preceding, that for universities to maintain antiracism as the guiding star of their endeavors is as ordinary as steak and potatoes.
But in the spirit of John Stuart Mill advising us to revisit even assumptions that feel settled, imagine a nationwide call for all universities to “center” climate change as the singular focus of their mission. Or STEM subjects, historical awareness or civic awareness, each of these positioned as the key to serious engagement with the challenges of the future. We might imagine the university is to “center” artistic vision or skill in public expression, or even physical culture.
Note that all of these centerings would be about things most consider good, and even crucial, but the question would be why the university, as a general rule, should make any of those things the essence of what an education should consist of. Any university that did so would openly acknowledge that its choice was an unusual, and perhaps experimental, one.
One might propose that antiracism deserves pride of place as a kind of atonement for the sins of slavery and Jim Crow. But while getting beyond evils requires being aware of them, redressing past injustices — in fact, redressing just one past injustice — is not the basic mission of a university. The Scholastics of the Middle Ages “centered” education on Christianity, with the idea that education must explore or at least be ever consonant with the essences of natural law and eternal grace. Today we may view this focus as antique or unintentionally parochial. But it’s not just Christianity: We should question the idea that that any one issue, even one that feels urgent at this particular moment, must be regarded as the heart of education.
20) And a fun note to end, “Bears take a ride on swan pedalo at Woburn Safari Park”
Woburn Safari Park
The group of bears, also known as a sleuth, crowded on to the watercraft
I’ve written time and time again that I think the single most important thing we can do about education, within the education policy area, is simply to pay teachers more. Alas, we are moving in the wrong direction. Drum with a couple of charts today:
When you see figures for K-12 teacher pay it’s normally an average of all teachers, including those who have master’s degrees and PhDs, or specialized skills such as ESL. But what about your garden variety fourth-grade teacher with a BA? They now make less than the average for all workers:
The average base pay for teachers with a BA is $53,000, with a range of $42,000 to $59,000 depending on experience. This doesn’t count potential extras, like pay for coaching or for teaching summer school. It’s also for a 37-week year.
Note that $53,000 is a national average. Pay ranges from a low of $37,000 in Missouri to a high of $69,000 in California.
Sure don’t love NC near the bottom of this list. But, that’s what making sure rich people in NC have low taxes gets you.
1) Helen Lewis with a great take on the recent insane, everybody should be trans!, essay:
For Chu, the primacy of rights means that evidence is irrelevant to medical decisions—even when children are involved. This view has two logical implications: The first is that, if we are now just letting kids do whatever they want with their bodies, why not let them get married at 12, or drink alcohol at 13, or consent to sex at 14 with an adult partner? “Toddlers have the right to get tattoos” might be the worst political slogan I have ever heard.
The alternative argument is that gender—however you define it—is so unique and important that it alone justifies total bodily autonomy for minors…
But even in America, the debate is shifting. Quite a bit of Chu’s essay is devoted to complaints about media organizations that have not sufficiently echoed the activist line—that puberty blockers are safe and reversible, and that the “science is settled.” TheNew York Times is deemed to have fallen into the hands of barbarians, or at least failed to stop them from storming the affirmative gates. (Its recent publication of more skepticalarticles has led to staff revolts.) “The paper consistently refuses to treat transition-related care the way it would any other health-care matter … as an issue of access,” Chu laments, ignoring the fact that if rates of women seeking abortions, say, rose by thousands of percent in a decade, the Times probably would write about the phenomenon.
The loss of the Times as a reliable ally matters because the American model of youth transition is best described as consensus-based rather than evidence-based—which is to say, it rests on the agreement of credentialed experts rather than on the conclusions of highly rigorous studies. And when the clinical rationale for underage medical transition disappears, what is left is ideology. “The belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism,” Chu writes. She would prefer to make a radical claim for unfettered personal freedom, even for minors: “Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again. Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others.” (It doesn’t, of course—it means that male puberty and higher male testosterone levels confer significant sporting advantages, but that’s me being a reality-accepting nihilist again.)
Above all, Chu argues, we should treat children’s statements about their identity with unquestioned reverence: “To make ‘thoughtfulness’ a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege. That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom.”
In making a case this way, Chu shows a titillating disdain for respectability politics—and will surely irritate many people who share her political goals. For skeptics of puberty blockers like me, who are used to arguing against people who claim that any overreach in gender medicine is not really happening, or that too few patients are involved to be worth caring, or that we should be writing about something more important instead—all the riotous flavors of denial and whataboutism—Chu’s case for unlimited agency for teenagers is refreshing. She said everything out loud, and her argument is logical, coherent, and forcefully delivered. You just won’t hear it made very often, because it’s about as popular as the case for letting 9-year-olds get nose jobs.
2) Love this. Disabilities actually suck. So many disability advocates are the worst. Amy Lutz, “When Everything is Eugenics, Nothing Is: Preventing severe disability is a laudable goal. Crying eugenics renders the word meaningless.”
Papers published in academic journals rarely capture public attention, but last year a study from Social Science and Medicine – Qualitative Research in Health was picked up by a variety of mass media outlets. The paper focused on whether testosterone therapy should be discontinued in transgender men during pregnancy, but that wasn’t the reason for the coverage. What got everyone’s attention was rather the authors’ shocking dismissal of the increased risk of metabolic, urogenital, and neurodevelopmental conditions in babies exposed to testosterone. One of the reasons given was: “The desire to maximize the ‘fitness’ of offspring, and guard against development of conditions or human characteristics considered ‘unhealthy’ or less than ideal, may reflect troubling eugenicist and biomedical moralist underpinnings in ways that further harm already socially-marginalized people.”
The belief that disability is not inherently bad isn’t new. Social models that locate disability in the mismatch between people and their environments, not in individual bodies, have long been endorsed by some disability studies scholars—most recently by Elizabeth Barnes in her “value-neutral” model, in which she defines disability as “mere-difference.” But this has never been a consensus position. As feminist philosopher Susan Wendell pointed out almost thirty years ago, there is “much suffering and limitation” that social justice and cultural change cannot fix.
So I was surprised when, six months after the paper was published, the very mainstream National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that they were considering removing the goal of reducing disability from its mission statement at the recommendation of an advisory committee that blasted the idea that disabled people need to be “fixed” as “ableist.”…
In his recent memoir Troubled, Rob Henderson articulates the concept of luxury beliefs: “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” He focuses on socioeconomic status, but I can’t help thinking that perhaps the greatest luxury belief of all is that disability is neutral. It sounds progressive and empowering—yet betrays complete ignorance of what severe intellectual and developmental disability looks like, or how it impacts affected individuals and their families. Perhaps ignorance is the wrong word. More accurately, some disability advocates aggressively shut down incongruent narratives with accusations of “eugenics”and “ableism,” to the point that even the NIH would rather abandon its founding mission than challenge this stunningly obvious fiction…
Because disability is not neutral in our house. Jonah will never have a meaningful career or a romantic relationship. He will never understand politics, geography, history, or philosophy. He can’t follow the plot of Star Warsor even Paw Patrol, choosing instead the Sesame Streetmusic compilations we had on VHS when he was a toddler, which kind souls have since uploaded to YouTube. There’s nothing wrong with Sesame Street—we quote it so often, even when Jonah isn’t around (“I told you, it wouldn’t be easy”; “I guess not every crazy idea works”; “I might even say it’s Oscar-worthy!”) that I think of it as our family’s love language. But no one would choose this extraordinarily constrained life—not for themselves, or for their children.
Over the last year, the insurrection has gradually assumed a more central place in Trump’s campaign…
Among what remains of the traditional Republican Party Establishment, this display prompted the same baffled objections that have followed Trump’s periodic racist attacks on fellow Republicans, threats to take revenge upon his enemies, and insistence that any electoral defeat of his is illegitimate. Why must he run such an undisciplined campaign?
“Joe Biden’s team has elevated the ‘threat to democracy’ posed by Trump and his movement to a place of prominence in its appeals to voters,” complained National Review’s Noah Rothman, who has written elsewhere that Trump is no more a threat to democracy than Biden. “Making the cause of the January 6 rioters into a central feature of Trump’s campaign plays directly into Biden’s hands.” This is the extent of the Republican concern: Trump is alienating swing voters who might be receptive to messages about high grocery prices but respond nervously to blood-soaked vows to redeem his martyrs and purify the fatherland.
But there is a perfectly cogent reason why Trump continues to press his most extreme demands, even at the cost of repulsing potential voters. He is no longer willing to accept the alliance of convenience with reluctant partners that held traditional Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Reince Priebus by his side during his first term. Trump has long demanded fealty from his party, which has made it harder to discern the acceleration and intensification of his work in the days since he effectively clinched the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday. Trump’s primary focus is not outward but inward, tightening his control over the GOP to almost unimaginable levels of personal loyalty.
Trump’s elevation of the insurrection to a matter of holy writ within the party is a matter of both conviction and strategy, consistent with his intention to stifle even the quietest forms of dissent. This is why Trump deposed Ronna McDaniel as head of the Republican National Committee in favor of election deniers Michael Whatley and Lara Trump. McDaniel had dutifully jettisoned her maiden name (Romney). She had strongly suggested the 2020 election was stolen, saying the vote tabulations had “problems” that were “concerning” and not “fair,” without quite stating as fact that Trump absolutely won. All her genuflections were not enough.
4) This is really good, “Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed: The sponsors of the law fundamentally misunderstood the nature of addiction.”
The key elements of Measure 110 were the removal of criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of drugs such as methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl, and a sharper focus, instead, on reducing the harm that drugs cause to their users. More than $260 million were allocated to services such as naloxone distribution, employment and housing services, and voluntary treatment. The original campaign for the measure was well funded by multiple backers, most prominently the Drug Policy Alliance, based in New York. Supporters hoped that ending penalties—and reducing the associated stigma of drug use—would bring a range of benefits. Once drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, the thinking went, those who wanted to continue using would be more willing to access harm-reduction services that helped them use in safer ways. Meanwhile, the many people who wanted to quit using drugs but had been too ashamed or fearful to seek treatment would do so. Advocates foresaw a surge of help-seeking, a reduction in drug-overdose deaths, fewer racial disparities in the health and criminal-justice systems, lower rates of incarceration, and safer neighborhoods for all…
Both of us have spent the better part of our careers studying and working on drug policy. Both of us watched this deterioration in Oregon’s public health and safety with dismay, and tried to help stanch the damage. We testified before the Measure 110 legislative implementing committee in 2022 in the hopes that the spirit of Measure 110 could be maintained if some reforms were allowed, such as the elimination of open-air drug markets and the resumption of mandated treatment for those suffering from severe addiction. But tweaking the measure proved very difficult. Last year, one of us, Rob Bovett, began working closely with a number of groups trying to reform Measure 110 through legislation, including a bill based on a proposal developed by Oregon’s city governments, sheriffs, police chiefs, and district attorneys, and a bill based primarily on a petition filed by a coalition of Oregonians that had grown weary of the measure’s ongoing failure. He testified before the Measure 110 reform committee and participated in negotiations that led to the reform package that just passed.
We were not surprised that a trivial pressure to seek treatment was ineffective. Fentanyl and meth addiction are not like depression, chronic pain, or cancer, conditions for which people are typically motivated to seek treatment. Even as it destroys a person’s life, addictive drug use by definition feels good in the short term, and most addicted people resist or are ambivalent about giving that up. Withdrawal, meanwhile, is wrenchingly difficult. As a result, most addicted people who come to treatment do so not spontaneously but through pressure from family, friends, employers, health professionals, and, yes, the law.
5) The people are right. Someone needs to tell Democrats, “After Four Years, 59% in U.S. Say COVID-19 Pandemic Is Over”
Majority of Americans, but Not Democrats, Say Pandemic Is Over
Gallup has tracked Americans’ perceptions of whether the pandemic is over in the U.S. since June 2021, during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout when most Americans received their first shot. But it was not until late May/early June 2023 that a majority thought it was over. This was shortly after President Joe Biden signed a congressional resolution to end the nation’s state of emergency and the U.S. and global public health emergency declarations ended. Fewer, though still a slim 53% majority, continued to believe it had come to an end in late August/early September.
The latest 59% of Americans who believe the pandemic is over is up slightly from late last summer but is still shy of the positivity expressed last May/June.
Republicans (79%) are almost twice as likely as Democrats (41%) to say the pandemic is over, while 63% of independents agree.
6) Kristof is right. We need to take this problem much more seriously:
Alarms are blaring about artificial intelligence deepfakes that manipulate voters, like the robocall sounding like President Biden that went to New Hampshire households, or the fake video of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump.
Yet there’s actually a far bigger problem with deepfakes that we haven’t paid enough attention to: deepfake nude videos and photos that humiliate celebrities and unknown children alike. One recent study found that 98 percent of deepfake videos online were pornographic and that 99 percent of those targeted were women or girls.
Faked nude imagery of Taylor Swift rattled the internet in January, but this goes way beyond her: Companies make money by selling advertising and premium subscriptions for websites hosting fake sex videos of famous female actresses, singers, influencers, princesses and politicians. Google directs traffic to these graphic videos, and victims have little recourse.
Sometimes the victims are underage girls.
7) Yes, yes, yes. What happened to the teen babysitter? My daughter is 13 and would be so great at this. When I was a kid 13 year old girls babysat all the time. “Don’t tell America the babysitter’s dead: For decades, sitting was both a job and a rite of passage. Now it feels more like a symbol of a bygone American era.”
Babysitting used to be both a job and a rite of passage. For countless American teens, and especially teen girls, it was a tentative step toward adulthood—responsibility, but with guardrails. Perhaps you didn’t cook dinner, but you did heat some leftovers for the kids. Maybe you arrived to find them already tucked in, and you read them a story, turned out the lights, and watched TV until the car turned into the drive. You knew whom to call if anything serious came up. Paula Fass, a historian of childhood at UC Berkeley, told me that she started sitting around 1960, when she was 12 or 13. By the time she’d arrive, she remembers, the parents had put their kids to bed and stocked the fridge for her to raid. They recognized that she was grown-up enough to be an extra eye in the home—but childlike enough to go looking for snacks.
Sitting was a “quintessentially American experience,” Yasemin Besen-Cassino, a Montclair State University sociologist and the author of The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap, told me. For decades, working a part-time job was common for teens in the U.S.—perhaps a reflection of the cultural emphasis on hard work, discipline, and financial independence. Even tweens would babysit. And something about that position, teetering between dependence and independence, got lodged in our cultural imagination. Starting in the mid-20th century, the young sitter became an emblem of American girlhood—both a classic coming-of-age character and a locus of anxieties about girls’ growing autonomy. Just how mature are these teens? How much control should they have? And what kind of adults are they on the cusp of turning into? Those concerns preoccupied people not only in real life but also in a plethora of books, shows, and movies.
Today, the teen babysitter as we knew her, in pop culture and in reality, has all but disappeared. People seem to worry less about adolescents and more for them, and for their future prospects. As Fass put it, “Teenagers don’t seem very grown-up these days.” There’s not much reason to fear or exalt babysitters anymore—because our society no longer trusts teens to babysit much at all.
8) In a rational political world, this matters. Hopefully we still live in one. “The House GOP just gave Biden’s campaign a huge gift: Roughly 80 percent of House Republicans just lined up behind a plan to cut Social Security and ban all abortions.”
9) As is typical from Radley Balko, too long, but also fantastic. “The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers: Their flagship publication, The Free Press’, failure to correct an error-filled defense of George Floyd’s killer demonstrates that they are just another partisan tribe”
10) This is good from Steve Stewart-Williams, “The Worst Economists in the World: Laypeople’s intuitions about economics are systematically misguided”
Humans are fairly good folk physicists: We know that unsupported objects tend to fall, and that solid objects can’t pass through one another.
We’re fairly good folk biologists: We know that living things, but not rocks or mountains, exhibit spontaneous, goal-directed movement, and that organisms are permanent members of their species: Once an aardvark, always an aardvark.
And we’re fairly good folk psychologists: We know that people’s behavior is guided by their desires and beliefs, and that past behavior is usually a good guide to future behavior.
In contrast to all this, we’re fairly terrible folk economists. If we were to make a list of all our everyday intuitions about economic matters, and then a separate list of economists’ views on the same topics, we’d find almost no overlap between the two lists.
I’m quite confident about this, because that’s roughly what the economists Amit Bhattacharjee and Jason Dana did in a fascinating recent paper titled “Lay Economic Reasoning: An Integrative Review and Call to Action,” published in the journal Consumer Psychology Review. Bhattacharjee and Dana make a persuasive case that laypeople’s views on economic questions routinely part company with those of the experts, and thus that folk economics – unlike folk physics, biology, and psychology – is systematically misguided.
Of course, in principle, the laypeople could be right and the experts wrong. But if I had to bet money on it, I know which way I’d go. Aside from anything else, it makes good sense that our untutored intuitions about economics would tend to fall short of the mark. Whereas humans have dealt with the physical, biological, and psychological worlds for as long as we’ve existed on this planet, not so the modern economic world. Thus, biological evolution hasn’t equipped us for it, and culture hasn’t either – not unless we’ve studied economics.
11) Good stuff from Jesse Singal, “Why Is The Same Misleading Language About Youth Gender Medicine Copied And Pasted Into Dozens Of CNN.com Articles?”
Yesterday CNN published an article by senior writer Tara John about the UK National Health Service’s newly skeptical stance toward youth gender medicine. The main takeaway, which is big news to observers of this debate, is that the NHS will no longer provide puberty blockers to young people, other than in research contexts. (As for cross-sex hormones, a relatively strict-seeming regime is set to be implemented, and they will be offered to youth only “from around their 16th birthday.”)
As myself and a number of others pointed out, the article contains a sentence that is, in context, rather wild: John writes that “Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender — the one the person was designated at birth — to their affirmed gender — the gender by which one wants to be known.” But of course, whether youth gender medicine is medically necessary and evidence-based is exactly the thing being debated, and anyone who has been following this debate closely knows that every national health system that has examined this question closely, including the NHS, has come to the same conclusion: the evidence is paltry. That’s why so many countries, including Sweden, Finland, the UK, and Norway have significantly scaled back access to these treatments for youth.1 So it’s very strange to see this sentence, which reads as though it comes from an activist press release, published in a news article in CNN, an outlet that generally adheres to the old-school divide between news and opinion…
This copy-paste job is journalistically problematic for a number of reasons. For one thing, it suggests that CNN has decided, at the editorial level, that its institutional stance is that youth gender medicine is “medically necessary” and “evidence-based.” While they’re being used somewhat colloquially in these articles, these terms have fairly specific definitions in certain medical and legal contexts, and treatments only qualify for such designations if they have exceeded a certain evidentiary benchmark based on solid published research. That is not the case here — far from it, actually. As written, this is a deeply misleading sentence.
The language also puts CNN writers in an awkward position. Does each and every bylined author of these stories believe that youth gender medicine is “medically necessary” and “evidence-based”? Maybe they do (which would be disturbing), but the fact is that they didn’t write these sentences — they, or one of their editors, grabbed that language from somewhere else and pasted it in. They are effectively outsourcing their own judgment on a hotly contested controversy to their employer. This is not what journalists are supposed to do, and, at the risk of repeating myself, it’s significantly different from a reporter rolling their eyes when using language like “undocumented immigrant” or “sex assigned at birth,” rather than their own preferred verbiage.
12) True. “The D.E.A. Needs to Stay Out of Medicine“
Even when her pancreatic cancer began to invade her spine in the summer of 2021, my mother-in-law maintained an image of grace, never letting her pain stop her from prioritizing the needs of others. Her appointment for a nerve block was a month away, but her pain medications enabled her to continue serving her community through her church. Until they didn’t.
Her medical condition quickly deteriorated, and her pain rapidly progressed. No one questioned that she needed opioid medications to live with dignity. But hydrocodone and then oxycodone became short at her usual pharmacy and then at two other pharmacies. My mother-in-law’s 30-day prescriptions were filled with only enough medication to last a few days, and her care team required in-person visits for new scripts. Despite being riddled with painful tumors, she endured a tortuous cycle of uncertainty and travel, stressing her already immunocompromised body to secure her medications.
My mother-in-law’s anguish before she died in July 2022 mirrors the broader struggle of countless individuals grappling with pain. I’m still haunted by the fact that my husband and I, both anesthesiologists and pain physicians who have made it our life’s work to alleviate the suffering of those in pain, could not help her. It is no wonder that our patients are frustrated. They do not understand why we, doctors whom they trust, send them on wild goose chases. They do not understand how pharmacies fail to provide the medications they need to function. They do not understand why the system makes them feel like drug seekers.
Health care professionals and pharmacies in this country are chained by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Our patients’ stress is the result not of an orchestrated set of practice guidelines or a comprehensive clinical policy but rather of one government agency’s crude, broad-stroke technique to mitigate a public health crisis through manufacturing limits — the gradual and repeated rationing of how much opioids can be produced by legitimate entities. This is a bad and ineffective strategy for solving the opioid crisis, and it’s incumbent on us to hand the reins of authority over to public health institutions better suited to the task.
I can tell you from the front lines that that’s not quite right. Prescription opioids once drove the opioid crisis. But in recent years opioid prescriptions have significantly fallen, while overdose deaths have been at a record high. America’s new wave of fatalities is largely a result of the illicit market, specifically illicit fentanyl. And as production cuts contribute to the reduction of the already strained supply of legal, regulated prescription opioids, drug shortages stand to affect the more than 50 million people suffering from chronic pain in more ways than at the pharmacy counter.
13) We need to learn from Boston, “In remarkable start to 2024, Boston has had only 2 homicides this year”
A combination of factors has been credited for the figures, including strengthened police-community partnerships, a strong network of community-based groups working with young people most prone to violence, and outreach by faith leaders. At the center of the violence reduction in the mid-1990s, however, was a focused law enforcement strategy that involved identifying gang members known to be involved in gun violence and a delivering no-nonsense message that they could stop shooting and be steered to jobs and services, or feel the full weight of prosecutorial muscle.
The web of community organizations and city service providers working alongside police has evolved and changed shape over the years, but it has remained a more robust approach to violence prevention than what’s present in most other cities.
“Violence reduction is a team sport, and if the team is not working well together the team cannot succeed,” said Thomas Abt, who directs the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland. “Boston has a history of positive collaboration between police and community, between police and community service providers and public health workers.”
14) This is honestly about the best thing I’ve read on the subjectivity of basketball officiating. “Purdue’s Zach Edey is difficult to defend. The 7-foot-4 star is even harder to officiate“
The game is different down on the low block. Looks different, feels different and is, frankly, officiated differently. On the perimeter, where spacing is key, a guard might be whistled for a hand check foul because that hand check is truly influencing the play. “The closer you get to the basket, you’re playing in a phone booth,” says an active official who asked not to be named so he could speak candidly. “And when you play in a phone booth, you’re going to have contact.”
Refs do, in fact, recognize the absurdity of the situation. Most chat prior to the game to compare notes. They know who the key players are, and very often understand how the game is going to be played. Edey, for example, is going to get a lot of touches. Cynics might argue that leads to officials looking for fouls; on the contrary, they say. It means they legitimately try to discern between incidental contact and illegal, fully aware how a ticky-tack foul can change the course of the game.
On most rosters, big men aren’t as abundant as guards. Two quick tweets of the whistle can equate to an extended first-half bench visit, severely limiting a team’s ability to defend and perform. “You gotta be sane and figure out what can be called a foul and what can’t be,” Higgins says. “You have to survive a game. If it’s whoop, whoop, whoop with the whistle, and foul, foul, foul, you’re going to hear it. But the numbers aren’t shocking. I’d bet if you broke down a game film, he’s probably drawing 10 to 15 more fouls than we’re calling.”
There is, of course, a flip side to this – when Edey is the defender. To the consternation of his detractors, Edey gets fouled a lot but rarely fouls opponents. He’s averaging just 1.9 whistles per game and has not fouled out since Purdue’s Sweet 16 matchup against Saint Peter’s on March 25, 2022. He’s played 67 games since then and been whistled for four fouls just six times.
To the naked eye that reads preposterous. How can one man possibly absorb such contact and yet never dish it out on his own? Officials don’t hide that they are keenly aware of how critical Edey is to a game. “You don’t want to put gray area fouls on him,’’ says a current coordinator of officials who asked not to be identified so that he could speak candidly. “You want to make sure the fouls he commits are more or less so obvious that everyone in the arena can say the ref had no choice.”
Is that favoritism? “Fans want to watch the best players play,” Boyages says. “As long as it’s balanced with the other great players on the other side. Every team has one or two players they need to have in the game for 30 minutes, and the refs are aware of it.”
15) Brian Klaas‘ substack is just so good. I read this and the next day the insights came up in a conversation with a friend about policing, “How to stop social dysfunction: wide vs. narrow problems: Many social problems can be sorted into two groups—wide problems and narrow problems. Treating one kind as the other creates catastrophe, but we do it all the time, from policing to politics.”
16) Interesting article that could’ve been way shorter. “Why Do Men Dominate Chess? FIDE’s new policy governing who can compete in women’s categories highlights the persistent sex imbalance at the game’s elite levels.”
That said, I don’t see evidence for the idea that socialization alone explains the stronger male tendency to focus obsessively on doing whatever is necessary to win, even at board games. And there are good reasons to think that this tendency has an evolutionary basis: In the animal kingdom, males tend to devote more time, energy, and risk to status competition, since this tends to pay more reproductive benefits for males than females. So it’s not unreasonable to suspect that boys and men have some kind of biological advantage—possibly underpinned by higher lifetime exposure to testosterone—that helps explain their over-representation in tournament-level competition in general. (While this particular brand of competitiveness may have a strong evolutionary explanation, it is unlikely to be the wisest reproductive strategy in today’s world.)
Ultimately, sex differences in complex behaviors and skills are always a product of interactions between biology on the one hand (that is, our genes and their relatively fixed effects, such as hormone levels and body size) and our environment on the other (that is, factors such as our family circumstances, social dynamics, and cultural norms). Interactions between the two shape not only our skills and abilities, but also any emerging group differences. But none such complicating factors change the fact that the sex gap in chess is real and persistent. Given the circumstances that led to the creation of the female category, and the fact that many girls and women appreciate what this category offers, FIDE is correct to take the steps necessary to protect its integrity.
17) I had no idea that NC State star DJ Horne was actually from Cary, not Raleigh, and clearly really near by. He played basketball at my kids’ middle school and was at there and Cary High (for three years) only a year behind my oldest son.
18) If you’ve read Sapiens (and if not, why haven’t you), nothing new here, but Brian Klaas with a great summary on a fascinating theory, “Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation: Did the watchful gaze of moralizing gods produce the rise of complex civilizations?”
19) Of all the articles I’ve read recently, this is the one I’ve been thinking about the most, “What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet: Disturbances on the sun may have the potential to devastate our power grid and communication systems. When the next big storm arrives, will we be prepared for it?”
If a solar flare is something like the muzzle flash of a cannon, a coronal mass ejection is the cannonball: slower, but more destructive. It takes anywhere from fifteen hours to several days to reach our planet, by which time it has expanded enormously in volume. Once it arrives, it smashes into our magnetosphere, flattening whichever side is facing the sun (that is, the daytime side) and sending the nighttime side streaming away from the Earth, like a wind sock in a gale. If you remember Faraday’s law, you know that moving a magnetic field around produces an electric current. And so it is ultimately the Earth’s own storm-tossed magnetosphere that induces excess electricity in our planet, thereby initiating the third and final phase of a space-weather event: the geomagnetic storm.
Although that storm can affect anything long and metal (pipelines, railroad tracks), it poses the gravest danger to power grids. In the United States, our grid is divided into three regions. The Eastern Interconnection runs from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains; the Western Interconnection runs from the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean; Texas, in true Lone Star style, goes it alone. For the most part, power can’t flow from one region to another—which is why, when seventy-five per cent of Texas suffered blackouts during a winter storm in 2021, no outside energy providers could help. But, within each region, electricity flows freely—and so can electrical problems, as when, in 2003, a shorted power line in Ohio caused a blackout across much of the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast, leaving fifty-five million people in the dark.
All this infrastructure, which continues across the border into Canada to form the North American Power Grid, is also known as the bulk-power system, because it handles energy transmission, not energy distribution. Distribution involves sending electricity from a local substation to everything nearby that needs it—schools, stoplights, factories, the toaster in your kitchen. Transmission gets power to that substation, from one of the more than six thousand generation facilities on the North American grid (nuclear plants, hydroelectric dams, solar farms, etc.), via more than half a million miles of line.
The crucial nodes in this vast network are transformers. Power enters your home at a hundred and ten volts, but voltage that low can’t be sent from a coal plant in West Virginia to your laptop charger in Alexandria; too much energy (in the form of heat) would be lost in transit. Instead, a transformer at the power plant ramps up the electricity to hundreds of thousands of volts, so that it can be transferred efficiently over long distances; once it reaches a substation, another transformer ramps the voltage back down until it can safely enter your home. Whatever its voltage, all that power flows through the grid as alternating current, moving at a constant frequency of sixty hertz.
Hold that thought; here comes the coronal mass ejection. It smacks into our magnetic field, warping it—or, in severe storms, temporarily ripping part of it open—and setting in motion the chain of events that sends additional electric charge into the planet. Some of that charge, which is known as geomagnetically induced current, dissipates harmlessly, because it flows into a part of the Earth that excels at conducting electricity—salt water, say, or sedimentary rock. But, in places where the underlying rock is a poor conductor, the current must go elsewhere. Like all current, it follows the path of least resistance, and the least resistant path of all is the one designed to conduct electricity: the power grid.
By unfortunate chance, some of the least conductive bedrock in the United States is the very old metamorphic and igneous rock of the Appalachian Mountains and the New England Highlands—the geological substrates of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and much of the rest of the Eastern Seaboard, home to half the country’s population. As detailed hazard maps recently created by the geophysicist Jeffrey Love and a team of his colleagues at the United States Geological Survey show, some other parts of the country, notably the Midwest, are likewise vulnerable to geomagnetically induced currents.
Been meaning to write this post for a while and keep not getting around to it. But that’s okay, because I keep finding more good takes to add to it.
Short version: if the election were held today, I think Trump would win. The election will not be held today. There will be a campaign. And though campaigns only have modest impact, I think all the fundamentals suggest it will likely serve to benefit Biden and he will be in a notably better position in November than he is now. As I like to say, presidential campaigns generally don’t matter (it’s so much the economy and presidential approval), except when they do. And I think 2024 will fall into that category. Anyway, variety of takes I like, starting with a couple from
….The poll asked them about 10 of Trump’s most authoritarian statements, including: the two mentioned above, Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” his vow to pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol, his promise to prosecute the Biden family without cause, his threat to inflict mass persecution on the “vermin” opposition, and a few more. Result? “Only 31 percent of respondents said they previously had heard a lot about these statements by Trump.”
Only 31%? Compare that to various questions asked in recent YouGov polls:
Hell, only 34% had heard about the Hur report. Only 24% knew we were striking back against the Houthis. And the fact that a star witness had lied about bribes paid to Hunter and Joe Biden? Only 22%.
Most people don’t know anything about anything. In fact, I’ll bet that even these numbers are inflated, with lots of respondents saying they’ve heard a lot about these things because they watched a segment on the evening news or got pointed to a Facebook post.
This is why I think Biden has a fair amount of upside in the presidential race. In September, when people start paying attention, what are they going to learn? Mostly bad stuff about Trump and good stuff about Biden’s little-known positive accomplishments. That’s where the greatest ignorance is right now, so it’s also where there’s the greatest potential for change.
I feel especially validated when a political commenter I like independently comes to the same conclusion that I do.
I remain unmoved by the liberal panic over Joe Biden’s weak poll numbers. However, I keep getting asked why, so here it is:
Right now the race is basically a tossup.
But it’s still very early. The vast majority of swing voters aren’t paying attention yet—and won’t until after the conventions.
As voter attention shifts to the campaign it will hurt Trump. Historically, the more people hear from Trump, the less they like him.
Trump has a lower ceiling than Biden. There are just too many people who flatly won’t vote for him. Biden has more upside.
Many of the people who say they won’t vote for Biden will come around later in the year. As always, the prospect of a Republican winning—especially Trump—will overcome their early doubts.
Biden hasn’t even begun to campaign yet. He has a lot of money, and when the ads start running they’ll hurt Trump a lot.
Biden has an obvious problem with his physical condition, which reads as old. But his mental condition is fine. Trump, by contrast, shows signs of serious mental deterioration. This hasn’t gotten a lot of attention yet, but it will.
Trump has a big potential downside from all his trials. His MAGA fans might not care, but centrist voters do, and it could spell big problems if prosecutors are getting headlines for Trump’s misdeeds when October rolls around.
So that’s that. But I have two big worries. The first is that the economy might go south, though that’s looking less and less likely all the time. The second is that although the race is a tossup nationally, it really does seem like Biden is weak in the battleground states that matter. I’m not sure how that will play out.
Biden benefitted in an obvious way from a relentless Republican effort to set the bar low—if Barack Obama had delivered the same speech, with the same enunciation, we’d know he’d had a weirdly off night. But Republicans (and media figures who play sucker to them) managed to greatly reduce expectations, such that millions of Americans saw Biden do something they’d been assured wasn’t possible: speak energetically, passionately, and coherently about a variety of topics, while mixing it up extemporaneously with heckling House Republicans.
Something similar happened during the 2020 campaign. Republicans mocked “Sleepy Joe,” running for president “from his basement,” and insisted he was campaigning virtually not because of the pandemic, but because he was incapable. Then Trump and Biden debated one another on live television and Biden managed to show the public (without having to tell anyone) that this was all propaganda. Biden is not actually a sleepy person with dementia, and even if he was, what does that say about Trump, who lost to him?
Republicans fell into the same trap ahead of and during last year’s State of the Union address, too—ever fanning doubts about Biden’s acuity, only for him to maneuver them into disavowing their desire to roll back Social Security and Medicare in real time.
I take two lessons from this recent history, one of which bears on the question of Biden’s campaign. The first is that Republicans could benefit from a little subtlety. The second is that memories are short and nothing is ever settled—Republicans have set the stage for Biden to prove them wrong over and over again, but that’s only possible because they’re able to will the same doubts into existence repeatedly, even after Biden has allayed them. By summer or fall, we may be feeling like it’s Groundhog Day again…
This is why I appreciated Simon Rosenberg’s conversation with the New Republic’s Greg Sargent. Given his role in Democratic Party politics, Simon is unsurprisingly not on Team Panic, but he offered a theory of the case that’s much more constructive than just insisting the haters and losers are wrong; that Biden’s gotta be the nominee no matter what.
One of the explanations for [Biden’s polling deficit] is that we’ve had asymmetrical engagement, meaning that the Republicans have had a primary, we haven’t, the Republican party leader is being challenged in the courts and he’s sort of facing an existential threat by the judicial system, and so if you’re a marginal Republican voter you have much more reason to be engaged in the election than the marginal Democratic voter….
I’m not saying we’re ahead, I’m saying it’s a close competitive election, and a big chunk of our coalition is wandering right now and we have to go get them and bring them home. I don’t think, though, that that’s a big surprise. I don’t think the Biden campaign was spending money communicating with voters. They weren’t trying to turn things on. We’re really at the very beginning of the election…and we’re going to know a lot more about this election by late April or early May. My view…is that what’s the likely scenario at this point is that Biden’s up by two-three points by late April or early May as the Democratic coalition begins to come home. And then we’ve got to campaign to go get the rest. And hopefully even go beyond what we did in 2020 and win the election by an even bigger margin than we did last time.
Bookmark this: Biden will likely be up two or three points by the end of the next month, with room to grow.
And, lastly, John Sides. More measured, but, I think making a reasonable case for Biden optimism:
At this early date, approval ratings actually predict the eventual outcome better than polls do – according to the book The Timeline of Presidential Elections by political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien. On average, about 38% of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president and 56% disapprove.
That’s obviously a low number. In net approval (the percent approve minus the percent disapprove), Biden’s rating puts him behind every single president since Harry Truman at this point in their term. His net approval is even lower than Trump’s was at this point in 2020.
If that 38% approval rating did not change between now and the summer, it would likely translate into a little over 48% of the two-party vote. This is based on the historical relationship between June presidential approval ratings and election outcomes between 1952-2020:
If you want to think about the forecast in terms of Biden’s margin against Trump, a 38% June approval rating would translate into about a 3-point loss for Biden. That is a little larger than the 1 to 2 point gap separating Biden and Trump in trial-heat poll averages.
Now, such a forecast is simplistic and comes with considerable uncertainty. Nevertheless, presidents with approval ratings this low in June during an election year have been likely to lose or see their parties lose.
Could Biden’s approval rating improve?
Biden supporters could find optimism in this trend, however: A president’s approval rating often increases in the election year. This happened to Richard Nixon in 1972, Bill Clinton in 1996, and, to a lesser extent, to Ronald Reagan in 1984, George W. Bush in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2012…
Now, should we expect this pattern for Biden? Here are some reasons to say yes.
By far the biggest reason is what we can call the low-hanging fruit: plenty of Democratic or Democratic-leaning groups that haven’t yet come home to Biden…
We’d expect Democratic voters to come around because campaigns tend to rally partisans or partisan-leaning groups to their party’s candidate. This is a venerable finding, dating back to early political science research on campaigns. Biden experienced exactly such a rally in 2020, as his favorability rating among Democrats increased by almost 20 points.
One way to simulate this is to push partisans in polls to say whether they lean toward Trump or Biden. Once the Marquette Law School polls did this, 93% of Republicans backed Trump and 90% of Democrats backed Biden. That’s the level of partisan loyalty we’d typically expect on Election Day.
To be fair, Sides follows up with the case for why Biden’s approval will not increase. That said:
The takeaway
In the New Yorker article, a senior Biden aide dismissed the polls showing Biden trailing Trump: “Polling is broken.” What is less easy to dismiss is that important voter attitudes do not favor Biden right now. At the same time, Biden’s situation could improve, as it did for other incumbent presidents.
He has just over 7 months between now and November 5.
So, no, I’m not predicting Biden will win (though I really think he will), but saying there is a strong, empirical case for thinking that he will and that is largely ignored by the “Biden will lose” panic.
1) Realtor commissions are simply way too high. This is great news, “Powerful Realtor Group Agrees to Slash Commissions to Settle Lawsuits”
Americans pay roughly $100 billion in real estate commissions annually, and real estate agents in the United States have some of the highest standard commissions in the world. In many other countries, commission rates hover between 1 and 3 percent. In the United States, most agents specify a commission of 5 or 6 percent, paid by the seller. If the buyer has an agent, the seller’s agent agrees to share a portion of the commission with that agent when listing the home on the market.
An American homeowner currently looking to sell a $1 million home should expect to spend up to $60,000 on real estate commissions alone, with $30,000 going to his agent and $30,000 going to the agent who brings a buyer. Even for a home that costs $400,000 — close to the current median for homes across the United States — sellers are still paying around $24,000 in commissions, a cost that is baked into the final sales price of the home.
The lawsuits argued that N.A.R., and brokerages who required their agents to be members of N.A.R., had violated antitrust laws by mandating that the seller’s agent make an offer of payment to the buyer’s agent, and setting rules that led to an industrywide standard commission. Without that rate essentially guaranteed, agents will now most likely have to lower their commissions as they compete for business.
2) Totally agree with Drum here, “Biden’s SOTU flipped the media narrative”
New tracking polls have started coming out and they pretty consistently show that Joe Biden didn’t get a bounce from his State of the Union address. But even if that’s true, I think it misses the real impact of the speech.
State of the Union addresses never have much effect on a president’s approval ratings. But this one had a big impact on the media narrative. When was the last time you saw a story about Biden being too old and infirm for the job? About a week ago Wednesday, I’d say. Outside of Fox News, they just disappeared after Biden’s address.
So was the speech a big win? Oh yes indeed.
3) And Drum again, ““Americans” don’t think Biden is too old”
In polls, about half of Americans think Joe Biden’s age would affect his ability to do the job. As usual, though, it’s instructive to see how this breaks down:
It’s not “Americans” who think Biden is too old. It’s Trump supporters.
4) This is interesting, but I think the central thesis is just plain wrong. The reality is that Sinema was run out of town because she’s a uniquely awful politician, not because she’s a “moderate” or “centrist.” Politico, “An Obscure Group Hounded Kyrsten Sinema for Years — and It Worked. Is This a Sign of Things to Come? The Replace Sinema super PAC had the sole goal of ousting the senator — but may inspire a new model of endless campaigning.”
No, this is not going to be a thing now.
5) This is the NYT at it’s best. Really cool visualizations and analysis. Check it out with a gift link, “Can You Create a Diverse College Class Without Affirmative Action?”
6) I wasn’t paying any attention to the Republican primary for the 6th district until I realized the winner was the younger brother of a former student of mine (now a gun rights lobbyist in NC):
Addison McDowell is the candidate who seemed to come out of nowhere for a lot of people.
He was not a well-known political figure when he announced he was running for the newly-redrawn North Carolina 6th Congressional District seat currently held by Democrat Kathy Manning.
Although his most recent job was working as an advocate for health insurance, he does have some political background. In fact, he says the event that changed his life happened while he was working for Senator Ted Budd when Budd was still in the US House representing North Carolina’s 13th District…
McDowell got the endorsement of former President Donald Trump which has given a big boost to his campaign. Like his opponents in the primary, McDowell strongly backs Second Amendment rights.
I’m pretty sure I have the answer for how he “came from out of nowhere” to be endorsed by Trump. His older brother is literally hunting buddies with Donald Trump Jr. I regularly see Instagram photos of them together with dead large mammals. And simply having an “in” with Trump is how you make it in today’s GOP.
7) Atlantic, “Are Gen Z Men and Women Really Drifting Apart? The much-theorized political rift has yet to show up in actual voting behavior.”
But nearly as quickly as the theory gained attention, it has come under scrutiny. “For every survey question where you can find a unique gender gap among the youngest age cohort, you can find many other questions where you don’t find that gap,” John Sides, a political-science professor at Vanderbilt University, told me. “Where we started with this whole conversation was that there’s this big thing happening; it’s happening worldwide. Then you just pick at it for a few minutes, and it becomes this really complex story.” Skeptics point out that, at least as far as the United States goes, the claims about a new gender divide rest on selective readings of inconclusive evidence. Although several studies show young men and women splitting apart, at least as many suggest that the gender gap is stable. And at the ballot box, the evidence of a growing divide is hard to find. The Gen Z war of the sexes, in other words, is probably not apocalyptic. It may not even exist at all…
Why indeed? Several factors present themselves for consideration. One is social-media-induced gender polarization. (Think misogynistic “manosphere” influencers and women who talk about how “all men are trash.”) Another, as always, is Donald Trump. Twenty-something-year-old women seemed repelled by Trump’s ascendance in 2016, John Della Volpe, who heads the Harvard Youth Poll, told me. They were much more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Then there’s the #MeToo movement, which emerged in 2017, soon after Trump took office. Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market-conservative think tank, argues that it durably shaped young women’s political consciousness. A 2022 poll found that nearly three-quarters of women under 30 say they support #MeToo, the highest of any age group. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade also seems to have been a turning point. Going into the 2022 midterm election, 61 percent of young women said abortion was a “critical” concern, according to a survey conducted by AEI. “Young women increasingly believe that what happens to any woman in the United States impacts their lives and experiences as well,” Cox told me. “That became really salient after Roe was overturned.” Gen Z women are more likely than Generation X or Baby Boomer women—though slightly less likely than Millennial women—to say that they have been discriminated against because of their gender at some point in their life.
8) There was an incredibly awful take on Transgender kids in New York magazine recently. DeBoer completely takes it apart:
Andrea Long Chu, a writer who has made a living nibbling around the edges of profound-seeming ideas but never rises to the occasion of actually taking a bite, has written a meandering thinkpiece about medical transition for trans youth, which among other problems troubles the core definition of youth trans medicine – she in fact believes that we should stop thinking of medical care for trans children in medical terms at all. I think this is a terrible idea for trans people and their advocates, and I think Chu’s relentless efforts to be interesting have made her essay effectively contrary to the effort to defend the right of everyone to live in a way that’s consistent with their sincerely-felt gender identity. I also think that a lot of well-meaning people are praising her essay because it’s “pro trans,” which means nothing.
Chu writes
The right to change sex that has been enjoyed for decades by their parents, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, and representatives, especially if those people are white and affluent — this right belongs to them, too. We should understand this right as flowing not from a revanchist allegiance to an existing social order on the perpetual verge of collapse but from a broader ideal of biological justice, from which there also flows the right to abortion, the right to nutritious food and clean water, and, crucially, the right to health care.
Well, that’s swell. However I must note that the right to abortion, to nutritious food and clean water, and crucially, the right to health care have proven remarkably fragile in the face of something we call politics, by which we mean the steady course of ritualistic combat between warring tribes who vie for control of society, most certainly including its apparatus for dictating life and death. And so I think your essay here sucks, Andrea, because it speaks to those rights with nothing resembling a plan to secure them. It seems designed, instead, to flatter the moral vanity of the kind of people who read New York magazine.
Chu thinks physiological or hormonal or anatomical transition for minors should not be subject to the influence of parents or doctors. Trying to subtract parents and doctors from medical care for children is like trying to subtract the state from the “free market”; whether you believe it would be better or worse to do so, the debate is pointless, because you can’t. Like so much else of what Chu advocates for, I can refute it simply by saying “that will not occur.” Any attempt to do so, meanwhile, will have potentially terrible political consequences. It’s difficult to think of a policy stance more likely to enflame otherwise disengaged parts of the electorate than the notion that we should cut parents out of medical decisions about their children. And when it comes to physiological transition for children, these are medical decisions, both in terms of basic reality – surgeons perform gender confirmation surgery, doctors prescribe hormone therapies, sorry – but also in terms of political necessity. The entire edifice of trans medicine rests on the fact that it is in fact medicine, which is a domain of human life that’s afforded special independence. Doctors have been able to help trans adolescents transition because they are doctors and because doctors practice medicine; that is the special space in which certain core elements of our halting efforts to advance trans rights have grown. Why give that up? To be the smartest kid in class? To impress the kind of people who read Bookforum? Please.
9) Honestly, I was more interested in the ideas in this new book than the man behind them, but, the author was not. But, here you go, “Hal Malchow Is Going to Die on Thursday. He Has One Last Message for Democrats.”
That is the urgent message of his new book, Reinventing Political Advertising, where, using reams of empirical research and decades of personal experience, Malchow implores his peers to rethink their entire approach to paid communication, especially on television. It is time, he argues, not to reengineer the targeting of 30-second spots, direct-mail pieces and digital pre-roll ads but to rethink their basic purpose.
Political communicators are sticking to approaches developed for an era when ticket-splitters and swing voters composed a sizeable chunk of the electorate. But with a body politic that has sorted into two highly polarized parties — with just one-tenth of voters torn between them — the logic of persuading voters to support a candidate has grown obsolete. Ad campaigns should instead promote the Democratic Party itself, Malchow proposes, particularly at moments when news events might help it win new adherents, such as after a mass shooting, when gun-control policy is thrust back into the news and voters might be ready to reconsider their allegiances.
“Ninety percent of voters are choosing parties,” he writes. “Yet our approach to advertising has not changed at all. Almost 100 percent of our advertising dollars are spent on candidate choice. The decision driving 9 out of 10 votes is not being addressed at all.”
Malchow, who spent his partial retirement writing fantasy novels and political thrillers, jokes that he is happy to be certain he will never have to see Donald Trump sworn in again. He is optimistic that if Trump is convicted of a crime the dynamics of the presidential race will change. But he doubts the apex predators of his party’s consulting ecosystem have the proper mindset to seize the opportunity to change voters’ opinions.
“The data is threatening to the TV people, they don’t pay attention to it. They’re doing their targeting in exactly the wrong way,” he says. “If I ever go back to Washington,” he adds, before unleashing a familiar, mischievous cackle, “the media consultants will kill me.”
10) I regularly hear people suggest that drinks with caffeine will dehydrate you. They are simply wrong. “Caffeine and diuresis during rest and exercise: A meta-analysis”
Conclusions—Caffeine exerted a minor diuretic effect which was negated by exercise. Concerns regarding unwanted fluid loss associated with caffeine consumption are unwarranted particularly when ingestion precedes exercise
11) It’s amazing just how awful the ACLU has become. Matt Breunig, “The ACLU Is Trying to Destroy the Biden NLRB”
Why Is the ACLU Doing This?
Given that the ACLU is a progressive organization that sits in a broader ecosystem that includes the labor movement, it is hard to understand why it is pursuing such aggressive and reckless legal theories at the NLRB. Their posture becomes even more puzzling after you read the details of the underlying dispute, which seems to have no real stakes for the practical operation of the organization and appears to just be the result of a DEI-crazed HR department.
The dispute centers around the termination of ACLU staffer Katherine Oh. According to the ACLU:
[Ms. Oh was] terminated for violation of her obligation to maintain a workplace free of harassment, including in her engaging in repeated hurtful and inciteful conduct for colleagues that impugns their reputation and her demonstration of a pattern of hostility toward people of color, particularly black men, and her significant insubordination.
What exactly did Ms. Oh, an Asian woman, do that is being characterized like this?
After the national political director, a manager that Ms. Oh and her colleagues had submitted complaints against, left the organization, Ms. Oh joked in a meeting announcing the departure that “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” The ACLU DEI officer said this comment was racist because the former national political director is a black man.
Ms. Oh said in a phone meeting that she was “afraid to raise certain issues” with her direct supervisor. This was also described as racist because that supervisor is a black man.
Ms. Oh claimed that another manager “lied to her when she identified the members of management who had ultimate responsibility over whether to proceed with a particular campaign.” This was also racist because that manager is a black woman.
If you think I am being selective or mischaracterizing the claims here, I welcome you to read the arbitration transcript attached as Exhibit 3 here.
The ACLU fired her for this behavior, which is a problem because complaining about supervisors in a concerted way is protected activity under Section 7 of the NLRA, something that has not changed just because certain HR departments have realized that, in the current DEI-inflected environment, they can lodge baseless racism accusations against outspoken workers to provide cover for firing them.
Thus, on the merits, this is an open and shut ULP case. Ms. Oh engaged in protected complaints about workplace conditions. The ACLU fired her explicitly in retaliation for those complaints and thereby violated Section 8(a)(1) of the NLRA.
Instead of owning up to this, the ACLU has decided to pay a fortune to management-side lawyer Kenneth Margolis to advance boutique legal theories arguing, not that the ACLU’s conduct respected Ms. Oh’s Section 7 rights, but rather that the NLRB, either because of the constitution or the ACLU’s arbitration policy, has no authority to enforce Ms. Oh’s rights. In the unlikely scenario where these theories succeed, the ACLU will strike a blow, not just against Ms. Oh, but every worker across the country and the labor movement more generally.
12) Not great… “The Terrifying A.I. Scam That Uses Your Loved One’s Voice”
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.
Fully Myelinated 
Recent Comments