The term “enshittification” was coined by Cory Doctorow, one of my favorite sci-fi authors, and a keen observer of internet trends. In a Medium post in 2022 and an article in Wired in 2023, he argued that a social media platform has a predictable life-cycle:
First it lures a bunch of users with a great (and free) user experience, to create a network effect that makes it hard for people to leave.
Then, in order to make money, it attracts a bunch of business customers by doing things like selling user data and spamming users with ads. This makes the user experience worse, but the users are trapped on the platform by a network effect.
Finally, the platform tries to extract more value from its business customers by jacking up fees, offering its own competing products, etc. This makes the platform a worse value proposition for the business customers, but because all the users are still on the platform, and because of their own sunk costs, the advertisers can’t leave. This is what Tim O’Reilly calls “eating the ecosystem” — mainly hits businesses.
This is a very plausible model of how social media platforms work. And since platform network effects draw users away from traditional websites, it’s increasingly a description of how the entire public internet works.
But for most regular folks, the only step that matters here is Step 2 — the relentless proliferation of ads and other ways that previous user-friendly social-media platforms monetize their eyeballs.
Google is a great example. For many years, Google was the front page of the internet — a plain, simple text bar where you could type what you were looking for and immediately find websites offering you information about what you wanted. In recent years, though, Google has relentlessly monetized its ad search monopoly by increasing the amount of advertising on the platform. For example, if I want to learn about drones on the Web, there was a time when I could just search for “drones”. Now, the first and second pages of results are all ads trying to get me to buy a drone:
And when I get to the actual search results on the third screen down, it’s all just e-commerce sites offering to sell me more drones. I don’t even get to the Wikipedia link until the fifth screen down!
In other words, using Google is now akin to a video game, where the challenge is to craft a search query that avoids ad spam and gets you to the well-hidden information that you actually want. That’s not the most fun video game in the world, so when I can I now use ChatGPT (which is not yet enshittified). But ChatGPT doesn’t work for a lot of things, and so I’m stuck playing this awful, boring video game of “dodge the ads”.
2) As somewhat of a weather forecast junkie, I loved this, “Weather forecasts have become much more accurate; we now need to make them available to everyone: A four-day forecast today is as accurate as a one-day forecast 30 years ago.”
Three-day forecasts — shown in blue — have been pretty accurate since the 1980s, and have still gotten a lot better over time. Today the accuracy is around 97%.
The biggest improvements we’ve seen are for longer timeframes. By the early 2000s, 5-day forecasts were “highly accurate” and 7-day forecasts are reaching that threshold today. 10-day forecasts aren’t quite there yet but are getting better.
The first big change is that the data has improved. More extensive and higher-resolution observations can be used as inputs into the weather models. This is because we have more and better satellite data, and because land-based stations are covering many more areas around the globe, and at a higher density. The precision of these instruments has improved, too.
These observations are then fed into numerical prediction models to forecast the weather. That brings us to the next two developments. The computers on which these models are run have gotten much faster. Faster speeds are crucial: the Met Office now chunks the world into grids of smaller and smaller squares. While they once modeled the world in 90-kilometer-wide squares, they are now down to a grid of 1.5-kilometer squares. That means many more calculations need to be run to get this high-resolution map. The methods to turn the observations into model outputs have also improved. We’ve gone from very simple visions of the world to methods that can capture the complexity of these systems in detail.
The final crucial factor is how these forecasts are communicated. Not long ago, you could only get daily updates in the daily newspaper. With the rise of radio and TV, you could get a few notices per day. Now, we can get minute-by-minute updates online or on our smartphones.
3) This was good. Everything in moderation… including sunscreen, “Against Sunscreen Absolutism: Moderate sun exposure can be good for you. Why won’t American experts acknowledge that?”
Then, in 2023, a consortium of Australian public-health groups did something surprising: It issued new advice that takes careful account, for the first time, of the sun’s positive contributions. The advice itself may not seem revolutionary—experts now say that people at the lowest risk of skin cancer should spend ample time outdoors—but the idea at its core marked a radical departure from decades of public-health messaging. “Completely avoiding sun exposure is not optimal for health,” read the groups’ position statement, which extensively cites a growing body of research. Yes, UV rays cause skin cancer, but for some, too much shade can be just as harmful as too much sun.
It’s long been known that sun exposure triggers vitamin D production in the skin, and that low levels of vitamin D are associated with increased rates of stroke, heart attack, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, depression, osteoporosis, and many other diseases. It was natural to assume that vitamin D was responsible for these outcomes. “Imagine a treatment that could build bones, strengthen the immune system and lower the risks of illnesses like diabetes, heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure and cancer,” The New York Times wrote in 2010. “Some research suggests that such a wonder treatment already exists. It’s vitamin D.” By 2020, more than one in six adults were on that wonder treatment in the form of daily supplements, which promise to deliver the sun’s benefits without its dangers.
But sunlight in a pill has turned out to be a spectacular failure. In a large clinical trial that began in 2011, some 26,000 older adults were randomly assigned to receive either daily vitamin D pills or placebos, and were then followed for an average of five years. The study’s results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine two years ago. An accompanying editorial, with the headline “A Decisive Verdict on Vitamin D Supplementation,” noted that no benefits whatsoever had been found for any of the health conditions that the study tracked. “Vitamin D supplementation did not prevent cancer or cardiovascular disease, prevent falls, improve cognitive function, reduce atrial fibrillation, change body composition, reduce migraine frequency, improve stroke outcomes, decrease age-related macular degeneration, or reduce knee pain,” the journal said. “People should stop taking vitamin D supplements to prevent major diseases or extend life.”
Australia’s new guidance is in part a recognition of this reality. It’s also the result of our improved understanding of the disparate mechanisms through which sunlight affects health. Some of them are intuitive: Bright morning light, filtered through the eyes, helps regulate our circadian rhythms, improving energy, mood, and sleep. But the systemic effects of UV light operate through entirely different pathways that have been less well understood by the public, and even many health professionals. In recent years, that science has received more attention, strengthening conviction in sunlight’s possibly irreplaceable benefits. In 2019, an international collection of researchers issued a call to arms with the headline “Insufficient Sun Exposure Has Become a Real Public Health Problem.”
4) This is encouraging, “Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity: They’re delivering solar power after dark in California and helping to stabilize grids in other states. And the technology is expanding rapidly.” Gift article with cool visuals, check it out. And a nice summary tweet.
5) Yglesias on, “How to make a difference in the 2024 election”
That said, notwithstanding my love for the Le Tigre song “Get Off The Internet,” I think it’s actually true that two of the best things you can do to defeat the MAGA movement do, in fact, happen online: giving money intelligently and posting mindfully.
I’m of course not against finding a way to volunteer for political campaigns, especially if you live in a swing state or a place with a contested Senate race or near a frontline House district. But I do think there is a romance to political volunteerism that is not borne out by the facts. There’s a reason commercial enterprises don’t typically market their products by having strangers knock on doors, telling people about the Verizon 5G network. Advertising campaigns and free communication in the media are much more efficient ways to get a message across. There can be lots of benefits to volunteering, including that you may build your own sense of agency or be able to recruit friends to do it with you and create longer-term social capital. I definitely don’t discourage it.
But if you’re really worried, give money. If you’re interested in maximizing your efficacy, give money. If you want to dedicate time and not just money to good causes, then consider getting a part-time job and giving that money.
Something that I think isn’t widely understood is that hard money contributions to political candidates are a lot more valuable, dollar-for-dollar, than Super PAC contributions. Part of this is because the coordination rules, though full of holes, are genuinely not meaningless, and it’s a lot easier for the campaign proper to use resources effectively. The biggest reason, though, is that campaigns receive (by law) preferential rates from television stations. So $1 million of small contributions genuinely buys more ads than $1 million from an outside group. And last but not least, as a donor to a campaign, you can communicate with the candidate you are supporting and urge them to emphasize electability and winning. A lot of candidates believe that hard-core progressive messages are needed to keep the money flowing, and the best way to change that is to send money and speak your mind.
But give money to who? One obvious choice is Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. If you want to beat Trump, then supporting Trump’s opponent is a very good idea.
That said, money is more valuable down-ballot, and I also don’t think you need me to tell you that Trump is running against Biden. After consulting with the smartest people I know in the business, my recommendation is to prioritize eight House seats, a couple of state supreme court elections, and the best funder of abortion ballot campaigns. More details below.
6) Sad. “They gave local news away for free. Virtually nobody wanted it.”
When 2,529 people were offered a free subscription to their local newspapers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Philadelphia Inquirer, only forty-four accepted—less than 2 percent—according to an academic study set to be published this year in the American Journal of Political Science.
Dan Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted the study, titled “Unsubscribed and Undemanding,” in 2021. The purpose of the research, Hopkins said, was to assess practical ways to increase interest in local or regional news for an audience that seems more interested in national, partisan media outlets. (The pool of those offered subscriptions was made up of locals who had previously responded to political surveys.) Hopkins said that he was “surprised and dismayed” when he realized that only 1.7 percent had accepted the free subscription.
The findings add context to what has been a difficult start to 2024 for American media. There have been hundreds of layoffs across the industry—the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, and Business Insider, among others, have all downsized. At the local level, half the counties in America have either one news outlet or none at all, according to Medill’s 2023 State of Local News Project. Of those counties, over two hundred are “news deserts,” without any local media whatsoever.
7) I always enjoy reading Johann Hari, “A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong”
The primary reason we have gained weight at a pace unprecedented in human history is that our diets have radically changed in ways that have deeply undermined our ability to feel sated. My father grew up in a village in the Swiss mountains, where he ate fresh, whole foods that had been cooked from scratch and prepared on the day they were eaten. But in the 30 years between his childhood and mine, in the suburbs of London, the nature of food transformed across the Western world. He was horrified to see that almost everything I ate was reheated and heavily processed. The evidence is clear that the kind of food my father grew up eating quickly makes you feel full. But the kind of food I grew up eating, much of which is made in factories, often with artificial chemicals, left me feeling empty and as if I had a hole in my stomach. In a recent study of what American children eat, ultraprocessed food was found to make up 67 percent of their daily diet. This kind of food makes you want to eat more and more. Satiety comes late, if at all.
One scientific experiment — which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park — seemed to me to crystallize this effect. Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, grew up in Ireland. After he moved in 2000 to the United States, when he was in his 20s, he gained 30 pounds in two years. He began to wonder if the American diet has some kind of strange effect on our brains and our cravings, so he designed an experiment to test it. He and his colleague Paul Johnson raised a group of rats in a cage and gave them an abundant supply of healthy, balanced rat chow made out of the kind of food rats had been eating for a very long time. The rats would eat it when they were hungry, and then they seemed to feel sated and stopped. They did not become fat.
But then Dr. Kenny and his colleague exposed the rats to an American diet: fried bacon, Snickers bars, cheesecake and other treats. They went crazy for it. The rats would hurl themselves into the cheesecake, gorge themselves and emerge with their faces and whiskers totally slicked with it. They quickly lost almost all interest in the healthy food, and the restraint they used to show around healthy food disappeared. Within six weeks, their obesity rates soared.
After this change, Dr. Kenny and his colleague tweaked the experiment again (in a way that seems cruel to me, a former KFC addict). They took all the processed food away and gave the rats their old healthy diet. Dr. Kenny was confident that they would eat more of it, proving that processed food had expanded their appetites. But something stranger happened. It was as though the rats no longer recognized healthy food as food at all, and they barely ate it. Only when they were starving did they reluctantly start to consume it again.
Though Dr. Kenny’s study was in rats, we can see forms of this behavior everywhere. We are all living in Cheesecake Park — and the satiety-stealing effect of industrially assembled food is evidently what has created the need for these medications. Drugs like Ozempic work precisely by making us feel full. Carel le Roux, a scientist whose research was important to the development of these drugs, says they boost what he and others once called “satiety hormones.”
8) Jonathan Bernstein on the Democrats saving Mike Johnson:
That leaves the Democrats, who saved Johnson after letting former McCarthy be defeated last year.3 The situations seem similar; last October a handful of Republicans tried to oust McCarthy after he first agreed to a debt limit increase and then an extension to expiring spending bills, thus preventing a debt limit breach and then a governnment shutdown. This time, Johnson allowed a vote on Ukraine aid. In each of these cases, a House majority favored the bill – but enough Republicans opposed the measures that they would have failed without Democratic votes.
Some of the difference, according to reporting, was that Johnson simply proved more trustworthy than McCarthy.
The truth is, however, that these seemingly similar situations were actually quite different. The impasses that McCarthy eventually “solved” were phony ones that he and other Republicans created out of nothing. Republicans aren’t actually in favor of the US defaulting on its debt or the government shutting down; they were merely using those threats to blackmail Democrats into agreeing to policy concessions. And McCarthy was – at least until he wasn’t – fully on board with that strategy, which Democrats were correct to oppose.
Indeed, given that the (supposedly unpopular) debt limit vote is properly the responsibility of the majority party and that the spending bills were real compromises, Democrats were doing McCarthy a favor by supplying the votes.
On the other hand, quite a few Republicans appeared to sincerely oppose aiding Ukraine, while Democrats were eager to vote for it. Democrats may not have liked the policy implications of the long delay, but Johnson wasn’t manuevering them into casting tough votes, as McCarthy had. No wonder they were eager to dump McCarthy. And that they are now willing to live with Johnson.
So far. Congress still have a number of key deadlines between now and the election, the most notable of which is the end of the fiscal year, at which point temporary spending extensions will once again be needed to prevent a government shutdown only weeks before the election.
The normal procedure when Congress can’t finish it’s work is to simply pass short-term extensions – in this case, until they return for a lame-duck session after the election. Radical Republicans, however, may push for a government shutdown – and for other popular programs with upcoming deadlines to expire, causing chaos during the peak of the campaign, on the assumption that the Democratic president will suffer.
House Democrats are basically acting sensibly in bailing Johnson out in the aftermath of the Ukraine vote. But to keep saving him from the next round of radical Republican sniping, Democrats should insist on, well, business as usual. Either Congress gets things done on time, or Johnson allows votes on temporary extensions for spending bills, farm programs, the FAA, and anything else that’s needed.
If not? Well, there’s still plenty of time in this Congress for another Speaker.
9) I heard about this first-hand! The 4-year old victim is the daughter of a good friend of mine (and NCSU PS grad), “Rabies alert: 4-year-old girl bitten by rabid fox in Raleigh neighborhood: Wake County Public Health has issued a rabies notice after a rabid fox bit a child in a Raleigh neighborhood.”
10) Some cool social science, “The Causal Effects of a Trump Endorsement on Voter Preferences in a General Election Scenario”
Former President Trump’s persistent influence over Republican politics divides those who argue that he mobilizes otherwise apathetic voters against those contending he mobilizes Democrats at down-ballot Republicans’ expense. Scholars and pundits alike question whether policy still matters in the face of increasingly strong personas like the former president’s. Using a survey experiment, we find suggestive evidence that Trump’s endorsement in a general election reduces the likelihood of voting for a hypothetical Republican candidate. We also test the effect of policy stances and find evidence that Republican respondents value policy stances over an endorsement, but Democrats show no signs of prioritizing one more than the other. However, when shown a hypothetical candidate with unorthodox policy stances, the mere mention of a Trump endorsement leads members of both parties to demonstrate significant changes in the likelihood of voting for that candidate. Ultimately, we show that elite signals can attenuate support derived from policies.
Big Five Superiority: The Big Five personality test framework outperformed the other two frameworks that we tested – Jungian (MBTI-inspired) and Enneagram in predicting life outcomes.
Neuroticism’s Impact: Removing Neuroticism from the Big Five resulted in a substantial drop in predictive accuracy.
Continuous vs. Binary: Continuous scores in the Jungian (MBTI-style) framework predicted outcomes substantially better than binary categories (which is important since MBTI-style tests are usually presented in a categorical form)
Trait Distribution: Most personality traits approximately formed bell curves, meaning that most people fall near the middle on each trait, suggesting binary categorization (as is typical with MBTI-style tests) might introduce substantial noise.
Jungian (MBTI-style) Limitations: The Jungian 4-letter framework showed less predictive accuracy than the Big Five, mostly due to its use of binary types (splitting participants into letters like I vs. E and N vs. S) and its failure to measure Neuroticism. By adapting the Jungian framework to give continuous scores (rather than categories) and excluding Neuroticism from the Big Five, then the predictive gap between the two frameworks narrows. However, even with these adjustments, the Big Five (without Neuroticism) still slightly outperformed the modified Jungian test (with continuous scores, not binary types).
Cross-framework Relations: Almost every Jungian trait correlated with a specific Big Five trait: the Jungian Extraversion/Introversion aligned with Big Five’s Extraversion, Intuition/Sensing with Openness, and Feeling/Thinking with Agreeableness. However, the Judging/Perceiving trait was associated with three of the Big Five traits.
Integration Ineffectiveness: Combining the Big Five and Jungian test results didn’t improve prediction accuracy over using just the Big Five alone. This suggests that the Jungian test does not add significant predictive value beyond what is already captured by the Big Five.
Enneagram’s Surprisingly Good Performance: Despite its simplicity, the Enneagram binary (using only the 1-digit Enneagram variable – e.g., Type 9) performed better than the binary Jungian Type at predicting life outcomes. However, the Enneagram still underperformed the Big Five.
Participant Perception: Despite the Jungian test’s lower predictive accuracy, participants felt better after reading their Jungian assessments than their Big Five assessment, likely due to the Jungian test’s positive framing — it feels better to be called “Thinking” than someone “with low Agreeableness”.
In short, our study suggests that if you care about how well a personality test can predict outcomes in your life (or other people’s), then the Big Five test is likely superior to a Jungian (MBTI-style) and Enneagram approach. It also suggests that dichotomizing traits into binaries (rather than using continuous scores) substantially reduces predictive accuracy for these tests.
And hooray for me for being about 1st percentile in neuroticism.
12) Interesting, “Powerful Psychedelic Gains Renewed Attention as a Treatment for Opioid Addiction: New research is stirring interest in ibogaine, which appears to help ease the agony of detox and prevent relapse. Used in other countries, it remains illegal in the U.S.”
Ibogaine, a formidable psychedelic made from the root of a shrub native to Central Africa, is not for the timid. It unleashes a harrowing trip that can last more than 24 hours, and the drug can cause sudden cardiac arrest and death.
But scientists who have studied ibogaine have reported startling findings. According to a number of small studies, between a third and two-thirds of the people who were addicted to opioids or crack cocaine and were treated with the compound in a therapeutic setting were effectively curedof theirhabits, many after just a single session.
Ibogaine appears to provide two seemingly distinct benefits. It quells the agony of opioid withdrawal and cravings and then gives patients a born-again-style zeal for sobriety.
Now, after decades in the shadows, and with opioid overdose deaths exceeding 100,000 a year, ibogaine is drawing a surge of fresh interest from researchers who believe it has the potential to treat opioid use disorder.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that ibogaine saved my life, allowed me to make amends with the people I hurt and helped me learn to love myself again,” said Jessica Blackburn, 37, who is recovering from heroin addiction and has been sober for eight years. “My biggest frustration is that more people don’t have access to it.”
That’s because ibogaine is illegal in the United States. Patients have to go abroad for ibogaine therapy, often at unregulated clinics that provide little medical oversight.
13) I found the struggle of girls’ HS basketball in NC very interesting:
Whatever it is, in the 2023-24 season, a theme has emerged in girls’ basketball and it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon:
You’re either really good these days — or you’re not.
The gap between North Carolina’s haves and have-nots has perhaps never been wider.
Just two years ago, for example, West Mecklenburg didn’t win a game, but the Hawks’ average margin of defeat was about 25 points per game.
Two years ago, West Meck’s conference had four teams with a winning record and the Hawks were the only team with fewer than seven wins.
This year?
Three league teams have three or fewer wins, and the scores in that Queen City 3A/4A conference — and around the state — are often eye-popping.
These are some real scores that have been reported to The Charlotte Observer this season: 96-7, 97-5, 102-5. Those types of scores make some other results — 83-34, 74-27, 90-23 — almost seem normal.
And those types of scores are reported every Tuesday and Friday.
“I don’t know what a coach thinks about when you lose 109-5,” Hopewell’s Brown said. “One thing is (your team’s) morale. We address it by saying, ‘We’ve got to put it behind us. We’ve got to persevere.’ That’s an adverse situation. But even though we’re taking a lot of lopsided defeats, we haven’t had the issue with bad body language, demeanor and lack of hope. Anybody that has seen us play knows we play from beginning to end, 32 minutes, hard. That’s whether we’re up or down by 80, 40, 20, 15.”
Where did the girls go?
Area coaches, like Brown, said the Charlotte area has a smaller pool of players than in the past and that more talented players — sometimes directed by summer basketball coaches — are finding ways to come together on a handful of teams.
Taking good players from other schools makes those teams weaker, coaches say, and creates that situation where you have no middle class.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools did not respond to an Observer request for girls’ basketball participation figures, but anecdotally, coaches have said fewer junior varsity teams are playing and there are fewer players on many varsity teams now, too.
14) It really bugs me that a piece of art can be seen as not all that special and valued at $17,000. Then figure out it was painted by Rembrandt and it’s worth $14 million. It’s either great art or it’s not, regardless of who painted it. In this case, also a really interesting debate about whether it’s really a Rembrandt. A lot going on here visually you should check out– gift link.
15) This is pretty wild, “Gut Bacteria May Play Role in Vision Loss”
Summary: Researchers found a surprising connection between gut bacteria and inherited eye diseases, potentially opening new treatment avenues using antimicrobials. They discovered that a specific genetic mutation could weaken the body’s defenses, allowing gut bacteria to infiltrate the eye and cause sight loss.
The study focused on the CRB1 gene, crucial for maintaining the integrity of the eye’s and gut’s barriers. By treating affected mice with antimicrobials, the team successfully prevented blindness without repairing the damaged cellular barriers, suggesting a novel treatment strategy for CRB1-linked eye diseases.
Key Facts:
The study identifies a link between gut bacteria and blindness in mice with a specific genetic mutation affecting the CRB1 gene.
Antimicrobial treatment prevented sight loss in mice, indicating a potential new therapy for inherited eye diseases.
This research could transform the treatment landscape for CRB1-associated eye conditions and possibly extend to other eye diseases.
16) This was a really good piece on suicide in the Morning newsletter a while back:
But something is changing in the United States, where the suicide rate has risen by about 35 percent over two decades, with deaths approaching 50,000 annually. The U.S. is a glaring exception among wealthy countries; globally, the suicide rate has been dropping steeply and steadily.
Barriers are in the works on the William Howard Taft Bridge in Washington, D.C., the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Maine and several Rhode Island bridges. Universities in Texas and Florida have budgeted millions of dollars for barriers on high structures. Scores of communities are debating similar steps.
Policymakers, it seems, are paying attention. I have been reporting on mental health for The New York Times for two years, and in today’s newsletter I will look at promising, evidence-based efforts to prevent suicide.
A single element
For generations, psychiatrists believed that, in the words of the British researcher Norman Kreitman, “anyone bent on self-destruction must eventually succeed.”
Then something strange and wonderful happened: Midway through the 1960s, the annual number of suicides in Britain began dropping — by 35 percent in the following years — even as tolls crept up in other parts of Europe.
No one could say why. Had medicine improved, so that more people survived poisoning? Were antidepressant medications bringing down levels of despair? Had life in Britain just gotten better?
The real explanation, Kreitman discovered, was none of these. The drop in suicides had come about almost by accident: As the United Kingdom phased out coal gas from its supply to household stoves, levels of carbon monoxide decreased. Suicide by gas accounted for almost half of the suicides in 1960.
It turns out that blocking access to a single lethal means — if it is the right one — can make a huge difference.
The strategy that arose from this realization is known as “means restriction” or “means safety,” and vast natural experiments have borne it out. When Sri Lanka restricted the import of toxic pesticides, which people had ingested in moments of crisis, its suicide rate dropped by half over the next decade.
Arresting an urge
More than half of U.S. suicides are carried out with firearms. Guns are a reliably deadly means, resulting in death in about 90 percent of attempted suicides; intentional overdoses, by contrast, result in death about 3 percent of the time.
When an attempt fails, “these folks generally survive and go on to get past these thoughts, go on to live happy, full lives,” said Dr. Paul Nestadt, a suicide researcher at Johns Hopkins. “If you are a gun owner, that brief moment where the suicidal thoughts exceed the desire to be alive for tomorrow, that’s all it takes.”
Other countries, like Israel, have brought down suicide rates dramatically by restricting access to guns. But in the U.S., about 400 million guns are circulating in private hands, said Michael Anestis, who leads the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. “We don’t know where they are, and even if we did, we would have no way of getting them,” he said.
Twenty-one states have passed red flag laws, which allow the authorities to remove firearms temporarily from individuals identified as dangerous to themselves or others. A follow-up study found that firearm suicides dropped 7.5 percent in Indiana in the decade after the law’s passage; Connecticut saw a 13.7 percent drop over eight years as the state began to enforce the law in earnest.
Another promising approach is to change gun storage habits, which Anestis likened to public health campaigns around smoking or drunken driving. He threw out some ideas, including financial incentives, such as providing gun owners with a hefty coupon for a gun safe, and encouraging gun shops to install lockers so people could temporarily store their guns outside of the home.
Even brief counseling sessions can change a gun owner’s habits, trials show. Anestis recalled one subject who was particularly dismissive of the counselor’s advice but returned six months later with a different outlook. “Since I was last here, I broke up with my fiancé and I let my brother hold my guns. If I hadn’t done that, I’m pretty sure I’d be dead,” the subject told researchers.
17) Good NYT Editorial on campus speech and protests:
The point of protest is to break such rules, of course, and to disrupt daily routines so profoundly as to grab on to the world’s attention and sympathies. Campuses should be able to tolerate some degree of disruption, which is inherent to any protest. That makes it even more important that school administrators respond when the permissible limits for speech are violated.
During the current demonstrations, a lack of accountability has helped produce a crisis.
It has left some Jewish students feeling systematically harassed. It has deprived many students of access to parts of campus life. On campuses where in-person classes or commencement exercises were canceled, students have watched their basic expectations for a university experience evaporate. And at times, the protesters themselves have been directly endangered — the disarray and violence of the past weeks has been escalated by the continued involvement of both the police and external agitators.
Amid the protests, there has been much discussion of both antisemitism and Islamophobia, and when the line is crossed into hate speech. There are profound risks to imposing overly expansive definitions of inappropriate speech, and universities have been rightly chided for doing so in the past. But it should be easy to agree that no student, faculty member, administrator or university staff member on a campus should be threatened or intimidated. School policies should reflect that, and they should be enforced when necessary.
In the longer term, a lack of clarity around acceptable forms of expression, and a failure to hold those who break those norms to account, has opened up the pursuit of higher learning to the whims of those motivated by hypocrisy and cynicism…
The absence of steady and principled leadership is what opened the campus gates to such cynicism in the first place. For several years, many university leaders have failed to act as their students and faculty have shown ever greater readiness to block an expanding range of views that they deem wrong or beyond the pale. Some scholars report that this has had a chilling effect on their work, making them less willing to participate in the academy or in the wider world of public discourse. The price of pushing boundaries, particularly with more conservative ideas, has become higher and higher.
Schools ought to be teaching their students that there is as much courage in listening as there is in speaking up. It has not gone unnoticed — on campuses but also by members of Congress and by the public writ large — that many of those who are now demanding the right to protest have previously sought to curtail the speech of those whom they declared hateful.
Establishing a culture of openness and free expression is crucial to the mission of educational institutions. That includes clear guardrails on conduct and enforcement of those guardrails, regardless of the speaker or the topic. Doing so would not only help restore order on college campuses today, but would also strengthen the cultural bedrock of higher education for generations to come.
18) Science/biotechnology for the win again, “UK toddler has hearing restored in world first gene therapy trial”
A British toddler has had her hearing restored after becoming the first person in the world to take part in a pioneering gene therapy trial, in a development that doctors say marks a new era in treating deafness.
Opal Sandy was born unable to hear anything due to auditory neuropathy, a condition that disrupts nerve impulses travelling from the inner ear to the brain and can be caused by a faulty gene.
But after receiving an infusion containing a working copy of the gene during groundbreaking surgery that took just 16 minutes, the 18-month-old can hear almost perfectly and enjoys playing with toy drums.
19) Excellent from Thomas Mills, “Rules for vouchers: If we’re going to have state-funded private schools, they need standards and conditions.”
North Carolina Republicans came into power screaming that our public schools are broken and promptly began cutting resources. They would like to shift the financial responsibility for schools to local government, but North Carolina’s constitution says that the state has the responsibility to provide children with a sound basic education. Now, 13 years after they first began writing public school budgets and eight years in control of the Department of Public Instruction, they are still claiming schools are broken. If that’s true, then they broke them, or at the very least, they have failed to fix them. For all of their complaints about public schools, the one thing they have never tried is adequately funding them.
Republicans claim that they want to make schools compete for students. In reality, they want to provide tax breaks for the rich because they don’t believe those who benefit the most from our economic system and society have any obligation to those who struggle. They claimed for years that the purpose of vouchers was to allow financially struggling families to send their children to private schools. Now, they are giving vouchers to families who already send their children to private schools in a direct transfer of money from underfunded school systems to the state’s wealthiest families. Yeah, I’m opposed to that.
I also don’t believe we should be funding private schools that discriminate. Any school that denies entry based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender or national origin should not receive public funds. If we’re going to ask people who meet those criteria to pay taxes, they should not be forced to have their tax dollars used against them.
Private schools and charters should be held to the same standards and regulations as public schools if they are accepting tax dollars. If public school teachers must post their lesson plans to increase accountability, private school teachers should be required to do the same. Test scores of private schools that accept public money should be made public. Teacher and administrative salaries should be publicly available. Private schools that accept tax dollars should be subject to audits from the state auditor to ensure our money is not being misspent. We should watch over our tax dollars in private schools just as carefully as we watch them in other government programs.
20) Always love reading deBoer on disability issues:
And it’s difference that, I think, needs to really be pulled apart here. Because Rosenbaum is guilty of a kind of slippage that has become very common to disability talk: conjoined twins are normal when normal is a desirable thing to be and not normal when normal is not a desirable thing to be. It’s reminiscent of one of the default images of disability discourse in the 21st century, an autistic person who wants their autism to not result in any special treatment or consideration whatsoever, except in those moments when they think their autism entitles them to special treatment or consideration. It’s the era of “my condition is not a disability, now give me accommodation for my disability or you’re a bigot.”
Throughout, Rosenbaum suggests that normalcy is a bad thing, arguing that the pursuit of normal has hurt the rights of conjoined twins (including through surgically separating them, which she disdains) and of trans people. She goes so far as to mock the Hensel twins for their performance of normalcy; no word on whether it’s possible that they’re acting that way because that is what is natural or comfortable or best for them. That “normal” is not a status to be pursued or lionized is a matter of holy writ in many corners of the disability activist world. And yet you’ll note that it’s also considered a terrible insult to suggest that the disabled are not normal, that to call them abnormal or different or unusual is also assumed to be offensive. I would argue that this is internally contradictory – if you reject normalcy as a goal state then you should embrace abnormality – but this is one of many arguments in this domain that I’ve clearly lost.
I suspect that in fact a good portion of the disabled community writ large wants exactly to be normal, to receive normal treatment, to live normal lives. I suspect that very many of them want elevators and braille and closed captions and a legal doctrine of reasonable accommodation so that they can better achieve normal existence. And I further suspect that the disability activist class has embraced the rejection of normalcy in large part because that class is largely made up of people with the least-debilitating, most-manageable conditions, who suffer little from being not-normal and therefore have far less reason to aspire to normal experience than the average disabled person. I would argue that an essential part of evaluating the claims of a disability activist is to assess to what degree their condition has rendered them unable to live without severe restriction or discomfort. It’s not that, say, the self-diagnosed autistic Harvard student with big ideas and an unflinching attitude doesn’t have anything useful to say or isn’t really disabled. (I mean, they may not be, but who’s to say.) The problem is that most people with disabilities are a) not activists and b) do not confront disability through abstract and deracinated concepts of societal respect and normative judgment but rather through the painful experience of navigating the world with physical and mental impairments (disabilities, problems, disorders, less good things) that hurt them. Meanwhile, we live in a culture where diagnosis increasingly collapses into yet another stab at identity. And the loudest tend to be the ones who have the ability to slip back into normal when they want.
21) Ugh. “Schools in One Virginia County to Reinstate Confederate Names”
After a meeting that lasted for hours, the Shenandoah County school board voted early Friday morning to restore the names of three Confederate officers to schools in the district.
With the vote, the district appears to be the first in the country to return Confederate names to schools that had removed them after the summer of 2020, according to researchers at the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative.
The vote rolled back a decision made four years ago, when the killing of George Floyd prompted nationwide demands for a racial reckoning. At a virtual meeting in July 2020, the summer of pandemic and protests, the board voted 5-1 to drop the names of two schools — Ashby-Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High — that it deemed incompatible with a recently passed resolution condemning racism. The schools were renamed the next year as Honey Run and Mountain View.
But a fury had been unleashed in the rural county in the mountains of Virginia. People crowded into school board meetings, denouncing the name changes as secretive and rushed through with little advance notice, and voicing deeper resentments about cultural shifts they saw as being foisted upon them.
1) Annie Lowery on the mistreatment of dairy cows on even “organic” farms. Our treatment of the animals for meat and dairy is really unconscionable. We should all simply pay more so the animals can have a more humane existence. People say the care about animal welfare, but not enough to pay more or pass laws that truly protect it:
Most american consumers abhor animal cruelty and support laws preventing it. In a recent ASPCA survey, three-quarters or more of respondents said they were concerned about farm-animal welfare and supported a ban on new factory farms. Yet cruelty, even egregious cruelty, against farm animals is often legal, provided that the suffering is “necessary” and “justifiable” by the need for farms to produce food, David Rosengard of the Animal Legal Defense Fund told me.
To determine what is “necessary” and “justifiable,” lawyers and juries often look at what farms are already doing, what agricultural schools are teaching, and what Big Ag publications recommend. In effect, I gathered, animal-welfare law is slanted toward the needs of farms much more than the experience of animals.
Even gratuitously abusive treatment often goes unpunished. Local authorities have jurisdiction over most animal-cruelty complaints. But cows, pigs, and chickens are not great at picking up the telephone to call those authorities. Animal-rights activists are able to perform investigations only sporadically, and at significant legal risk to themselves. Farm workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, rarely report violations.
What is a consumer who wants to support a gentle, green system of agriculture to do? DeCoriolis of Farm Forward had a blunt answer: Give up dairy. “As a consumer, you’re just playing roulette,” he told me. Yet the overwhelming majority of American consumers are unwilling to give up milk or cheese for ethical reasons. What they are willing to do is support stricter rules for agricultural producers and pay more for milk and cheese from farms that treat their animals well. The country is failing to provide those consumers with a reliable and navigable system. That’s a policy problem, and a solvable one.
At a minimum, the USDA should require third-party certification of animal-welfare and animal-raising claims, and apply strict regulations to certifiers: preventing conflicts of interest, requiring surprise inspections, and cracking down on rubber-stamping of industry norms. To meet American consumers’ more ambitious demands, Congress should create a farmed-animal welfare standard and an agency separate from the USDA to enforce it, akin to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Such changes would improve the welfare of billions of animals in our food system. Yet any changes would be too late for one. In the end, nobody stepped in to aid Cow 13039—not law enforcement, not the state veterinarians, not the auction employees. Alexandre Family Farm gave her vitamins and an eye patch, Nunes told me. They should have sold her sooner, she said. Cow 13039 was ailing. And ailing cows are not worth much.
2) I suspect that there’s long been a relatively-silent majority of university faculty who hate mandatory diversity statements, but figured best to keep one’s head down and not be labeled “racist.” Good to see that this is changing:
In what’s likely to be a watershed moment, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has ended the use of diversity statements for faculty hiring, making it the first elite private university to backtrack on the practice that has been roundly criticised as a political litmus test…
MIT embraced the diversity statement trend. In late 2023, the university’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering sought an assistant professor “in fields from fundamental nuclear science to practical applications of nuclear technology in energy, security and quantum engineering”. Applicants were required to submit “a statement regarding their views on diversity, inclusion, and belonging, including past and current contributions as well as their vision and plans for the future in these areas”.
Such requirements have long been controversial, and the basic argument against them is simple: “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has come to connote a set of controversial views about identity, power, and oppression. Universities which require scholars to “demonstrate” their “commitment” to DEI can easily invite ideological screening, as well as potentially unlawful viewpoint discrimination. Many groups thus oppose the diversity statements on the grounds of academic freedom and free expression.
At MIT, these arguments seemed to have won the day. In a statement provided to me via email, president Kornbluth notes: “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
This is momentous. The pushback against diversity statements has succeeded almost exclusively at public universities in red states, encouraged or enacted by lawmakers. Conservative states such as Florida, Texas, and Utah have passed laws banning diversity statements at state universities. Some appointed state university leaders, such as the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, have also barred the practice.
The decision at MIT is different — reform from within, prompted by a university president alongside deans and provosts, at a private institution.
It’s very possible that more private universities, and state universities in blue states, will eventually follow MIT’s lead for one basic reason: a significant number of faculty from across the political spectrum simply cannot stand mandatory DEI statements. Last month, Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy — a self-described “scholar on the Left committed to struggles for social justice” — described the general sentiment: “It would be hard to overstate the degree to which many academics at Harvard and beyond feel intense and growing resentment against the DEI enterprise because of features that are perhaps most evident in the demand for DEI statements.”
3) I’ve never used MTurk as I prefer the simplicity of other low-cost survey providers like Lucid. But, I imagine my data is not necessarily a lot better than what MTurk is getting and the latest evidence on that is not great: “Extraverted introverts, cautious risk-takers, and selfless narcissists: A demonstration of why you can’t trust data collected on MTurk”
Over the last several years, a number of studies have used advanced statistical and methodological techniques to demonstrate that there is an issue with the quality of data on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The current preregistered study aims to provide an accessible demonstration of this issue using a face-valid indicator of data quality: Do items that assess clearly contradictory content show positive correlations on the platform? We administered 27 semantic antonyms—pairs of items that assess incompatible beliefs or behaviours (e.g., “I am an extrovert” and “I am an introvert”)—to a sample of MTurk participants (N = 400). Over 96% of the semantic antonyms were positively correlated in the sample. For example, “I talk a lot” was positively correlated with “I rarely talk”; “I am narcissistic” was positively correlated with “I am a selfless person”; and “I like order” was positively correlated with “I crave chaos.” Moreover, 67% of the correlations remained positive even after we excluded nearly half of the sample for failing common attention check measures. These findings provide clear evidence that data collected on MTurk cannot be trusted, at least without a considerable amount of screening.
4) Love this from Drum, “Stop telling everyone life is horrible”
Just stop it. Joe Biden ended the Afghanistan war and cut American drone strikes nearly to zero. The US is not currently fighting any major wars and in 2022, for the first time in decades, reported no civilian deaths due to US combat.
Health insurance coverage has steadily increased among the young for the past decade:
And infrastructure is not “crumbling” by any stretch of rhetoric. Even the always dour American Society of Civil Engineers says as much: its most recent report gives US infrastructure its highest grade in more than a quarter of a century.¹ Spending on infrastructure has increased by a quarter since 2000:
There is a relentless drumbeat of claims on both sides of the aisle that America is falling apart at the seams and _________ has it worse than ever in living memory. But it’s just not true. Wages are high for every demographic group you can name; life satisfaction is steady; unemployment is low; drug abuse overall is down; our educational system is good; poverty is declining; we have more entrepreneurs than any country in the world by a wide margin; democracy is alive and well; our economy is the envy of the world; social welfare spending is generous; and a future of driverless cars, artificial intelligence, medical revolutions, and abundant energy is practically on our doorsteps. Even our demographic problems are about the least bad of any advanced economy—thanks, in part, to our supposed problem of too much illegal immigration.
Everyone has personal problems. Every country has national problems. The fact that we have problems is completely normal. But honestly, our problems right now are about as mild as they’ve been in our entire history.
5) This is so dumb and so anti-free market. A perfect example of Republican being pro (entrenched) business rather than pro-market, “‘We Will Save Our Beef’: Florida Bans Lab-Grown Meat Other states have also considered restrictions, citing concerns about farmers’ livelihoods and food safety, though the product isn’t expected to be widely available for years.”
Actually it’s even worse than that– just complete culture war BS
Florida has banned making and selling meat that is grown in a laboratory, a move several other states have considered amid worries about consumer safety and concerns that the technique could hurt the beef and poultry industries.
A number of start-up companies are developing technologies to grow beef, chicken and fish by using cells taken from animals without harming or slaughtering them. The process is expensive and the widespread availability of so-called lab-grown meat is years away. Beef and poultry associations, as well as some conservatives, have opposed the industry, calling it anti-farmer.
He also cast the ban as pushback against “global elites” who have a “plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.” The news release linked to a 2021 article on the World Economic Forum website discussing global food shortages and lamenting that insects are often overlooked as a source of protein.
Also, I don’t like the opening citing “safety ” when those are almost certainly bad faith arguments, rather than legitimate concerns. In fact, nowhere else in the story are their any actual safety concerns cited. Bad journalism.
6) How the Libertarian Party went insane (and they have):
THE FIRST AND MOST OBVIOUS CHANGE that the new crew brought about concerned the party’s messaging. For many in the Mises Caucus, the question of whether the party’s Twitter account was sufficiently “owning the libs” was more important than workaday political-organizational concerns like ballot access or running candidates.
Shortly after their victory in Reno, the Mises Caucus removed a longstanding plank of the Libertarian party platform that had said, “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” One has to wonder: What kinds of would-be Libertarians were being held back from joining the party by those words—and, more importantly, why did the Mises Caucus want to court them?
The messaging got worse from there. Since the takeover, the official Libertarian party Twitter account has become a hotbed of conspiracy theories, inflammatory rhetoric, and scorn. State affiliates quickly followed in its wake, with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire recently tweeting a revised version of the “14 words,” a white-supremacist slogan.
The Mises Caucus faithful were thrilled by this change in the party’s public stance. Still, beyond this contingent, the party struggled to make inroads to new members.
Contra McArdle’s stated commitment to the broader liberty movement, the Mises Caucus has always been pugnacious toward its intramural competition. One of their prime longstanding targets is “regime libertarians,” shorthand for nonprofits like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. Those organizations’ perceived compromise and lack of radicalism, as well as their willingness to accept imperfect and incremental improvements towards libertarian ends, meant they deserved scorn and sanction from the party.
For example, following the publication of a Cato Institute blog post praising the COVID-19 vaccines as a triumph of globalization and international cooperation, McArdle herself wrote that the Cato Institute “should be excommunicated from the liberty movement” and “has nothing to do with our political movement.” If one of the major, long-established national centers of libertarian thought and policy wasn’t aligned with the new Libertarian party, who is? (Besides, apparently, Donald Trump, who supervised the government-led effort to develop the vaccines in the first place.)…
ALL THIS THRASHING FOR RELEVANCE amid internal chaos helps to explain the Libertarian party’s embrace of bizarre strategies: Its leadership is desperate, out of ideas, and willing to try anything. That’s how the caucus of principle and radicalism has come to court the likes of cracked Democrat-turned-independent RFK Jr. and former Republican president Trump.
In this, the party’s current leadership shows that it is willing to abandon libertarian principles built in the party’s platform—and to do so for the sake of visibility and influence. They’re not minor principles, either, but core principles, such as those expressed in the party’s positions on free trade and migration (“Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders”), industrial policy (“We oppose all forms of government subsidies and bailouts to business, labor, or any other special interest”), and justice (“We support the abolition of qualified immunity”). What would DJT or RFK Jr. have to say to a gathering of libertarians on those topics?
7) I quite liked this from Chait, “In Defense of Punching Left”
“Don’t punch left” is the core tenet of Solidarity, a new book by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix. In a laudatory interview with the Washington Post, Hunt-Hendrix said the book was aimed not only at progressives in general but also specifically at liberals who criticize the left, naming me and newsletter author Matthew Yglesias as “falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy.”
Solidarity provides the lengthiest and most serious case I’ve seen for why liberals should withhold criticism of the left. And since the basis of my refusal to take this advice is no longer self-evident to all my readers and colleagues, and appears increasingly deviant to some, their book provides a useful occasion for me to lay out my reasons why liberals should feel free to express criticisms of the left…
Since their goals are both to move the Democratic Party leftward and to hold together the progressive coalition, it follows that criticism from liberals poses a significant strategic threat. “Too often, liberals seek to legitimize their positions by punching left, distancing themselves from social movements to make themselves appear reasonable by comparison, which only strengthens the hands of conservatives and pulls the political center to the right,” they write, urging liberals to instead accept “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements.”
Liberal criticism of the left corrodes solidarity among the oppressed, albeit in a weaker fashion than do conservative attacks. “If conservatives wield a scythe, demonizing different groups with sinister and destabilizing abandon,” they write at another point, “their liberal counterparts prefer to use garden shears, perpetually trimming solidarity back to manageable, and certainly not transformative, proportions.”
Notably, while they urge liberals not to criticize the left, they do not make any similar demand that leftists withhold criticism of liberalism. The requirements of factional quietude run one way. There’s a reason why the catchprase is “don’t punch left,” rather than “don’t punch anybody left of center.” Hunt-Hendrix’s radical activists frequently make scathing critiques of mainstream liberals and Democratic politicians, and she seems to have no intention of stopping pouring money into these efforts even as she implores her critics to stand down.
This reflects a common assumption among leftists, conservatives, and even many liberals that liberalism is simply a more pallid, fearful version of leftism. Left-wing critique makes liberals better, by this reasoning, because leftists are braver, more authentic and advanced in their thinking, than liberals. Their criticism drags us to where we must (and, in most cases, eventually will) go. Our criticism is divisive and reactionary…
I don’t want to bore you by attempting the umpteenth definition of liberalism, so I will lay out the distinction as briefly as possible. On economic questions, leftists have an overwhelming bias for state action over markets, while liberals are more selective. (As an example, in dealing with the problem of inflation, state-enacted price controls or restrictions on profiteering are a popular option on the left, while liberals prefer using interest rates and fiscal measures.) On politics, liberals take very seriously notions of individual rights and universally applicable principles, while leftists tend to criticize political liberalism as a recipe for maintaining inequalities of power between the privileged and the oppressed. The debate over speech norms within the left over the past decade has divided political liberals from our more radical critics.
On both economics and politics, the distinction between liberalism and leftism is a spectrum, wherein the differences tend to blend in around the margins without clear-cut borders between them.
One important distinction between the two tendencies is that liberals tend to understand policy as a search for truth and politics as a struggle to bring a majority around to their position, while leftists understand politics as a conflict to mobilize the political willpower to implement the objective interests of the oppressed. “Some see politics as a game of persuasion, not a power struggle,” Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix write critically. “This optimistic view ignores the fact that those with power and motivated by self-interest, including the vast majority of Republican Party operatives and their private sector allies, have little interest in dialogue, let alone compromise.”
8) What the heck, let’s just do two Chait’s in a row, “Why President Biden Is Correct to Denounce Campus Antisemitism The problem is not physical violence.”
The crisis, instead, is the intensification of a long-standing phenomenon. For many years, it has been common for deep criticism of Israel to be a litmus test for participation in left-wing activist spaces. Most American Jews are liberal, and most support Israel’s existence. This litmus test essentially forces many young Jewish people seeking to participate in progressive life to choose between their cultural heritage and full acceptance in a broader community.
The fact that anti-Zionist groups not only allow but encourage and celebrate membership of Jewish students is not a refutation of this problem. It is a description of the problem.
While students are often attracted to the anti-Israel groups out of admirable sympathy for the plight of Palestinians, the beliefs of the organizations behind the protests are murderous and horrifying. They support Hamas and the indiscriminate slaughter and rape of Jewish civilians.
As Jill Filipovic points out, the Columbia encampment’s list of mandatory principles one must align with to join includes support for the right to resist “by all available means.” The demands of the protest coalition at the University of Michigan, which has the support of 81 campus progressive groups, call for “power to our freedom fighters, glory to our martyrs. All eyes on Gaza, the Thawabit is our compass.” (Thawabit is a list of Palestinian political principles, including “the right to resistance in all forms.”)
Media accounts have often described these protests as antiwar, but this is flatly inaccurate. They support one party to the war and call for its victory. Likewise, news accounts have inaccurately depicted the protests as arising in response to Israel’s counterattack (i.e., the Washington Post: “Campus rallies and vigils for victims of the war in Gaza have disrupted colleges since October”). But the groups in fact mobilized in response to, and in support of, Hamas’s attack, and were preparing demonstrations to support what they anticipated would be a war to destroy Israel. (“This action of resistance shatters the illusion of Israel as an impenetrable, indestructible entity. The zionist entity is fragile, and Palestinian resistance is alive. The iOF are still in disarray and the resistance fighters are still launching new attacks into 48,” wrote Students for Justice in Palestine’s central organization in the plans for a “Day of Action” in the United States in the immediate wake of October 7.
These beliefs, which are spelled out clearly in the protesters’ foundational documents, have received astonishingly little attention. Their demands have attracted a bit more scrutiny, but much of that commentary has missed the real significance.
My problem is not that the protests in general are “antisemitic” — I would not use that word to describe them, and indeed, I am deeply uncomfortable as a Jew with how the charge of antisemitism is thrown about on the Israel-Palestine issue. My problem is that I am a hardheaded pragmatist who lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, cares about people on all sides and knows one thing above all from my decades in the region: The only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous people.
If you are for that, whatever your religion, nationality or politics, you’re part of the solution. If you are not for that, you’re part of the problem.
And from everything I have read and watched, too many of these protests have become part of the problem — for three key reasons…
First, they are virtually all about stopping Israel’s shameful behavior in killing so many Palestinian civilians in its pursuit of Hamas fighters, while giving a free pass to Hamas’s shameful breaking of the cease-fire that existed on Oct. 7. On that morning, Hamas launched an invasion in which it murdered Israeli parents in front of their children, children in front of their parents — documenting it on GoPro cameras — raped Israeli women and kidnapped or killed everyone they could get their hands on, from little kids to sick grandparents.
Again, you can be — and should be — appalled at Israel’s response: bombing everything in its path in Gaza so disproportionately that thousands of children have been killed, maimed and orphaned. But if you refuse to acknowledge what Hamas did to trigger this — not to justify what Israel has done, but to explain how the Jewish state could inflict so much suffering on Palestinian men, women and children in reverse — you’re just another partisan throwing another partisan log on the fire. By giving Hamas a pass, the protests have put the onus on Israel to such a degree that its very existence is a target for some students, while Hamas’s murderous behavior is passed off as a praiseworthy adventure in decolonization.
Second, when people chant slogans like “liberate Palestine” and “from the river to the sea,” they are essentially calling for the erasure of the state of Israel, not a two-state solution. They are arguing that the Jewish people have no right to self-determination or self-defense. I don’t believe that about Jews, and I don’t believe that about Palestinians. I believe in a two-state solution in which Israel, in return for security guarantees, withdraws from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab areas of East Jerusalem, and a demilitarized Palestinian state that accepts the principle of two states for two people is established in those territories occupied in 1967…
My view: Hamas was ready to sacrifice thousands of Gazan civilians to win the support of the next global generation on TikTok. And it worked. But one reason it worked was a lack of critical thinking by too many in that generation — the result of a campus culture that has become way too much about what to think and not how to think.
I highly recommend a few differentarticles about how angry Gazans are at Hamas for starting this war without any goal in mind other than the fruitless task of trying to destroy Israel so Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, could get his personal revenge.
10) Krugman on the absurd anti plant-based meat culture posturing of RDS:
Sure enough, eating or claiming to eat lots of meat has become a badge of allegiance on the right, especially among the MAGA crowd. Donald Trump Jr. once tweeted, “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday,” improbable for someone who isn’t a sumo wrestler.
But even if you’re someone who insists that “real” Americans eat lots of meat, why must the meat be supplied by killing animals if an alternative becomes available? Opponents of lab-grown meat like to talk about the industrial look of cultured meat production, but what do they imagine many modern meat processing facilities look like?
And then there are the conspiracy theories. It’s a fact that getting protein from beef involves a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from other sources. It’s also a fact that under President Biden, the United States has finally been taking serious action on climate change. But in the fever swamp of the right, which these days is a pretty sizable bloc of Republican commentators and politicians, opposition to Biden’s eminently reasonable climate policy has resulted in an assortment of wild claims, including one that Biden was going to put limits on Americans’ burger consumption.
And have you heard about how global elites are going to force us to start eating insects?
By the way, I’m not a vegetarian and have no intention of eating bugs. But I respect other people’s choices — which right-wing politicians increasingly don’t.
11) I love my VW Jetta and have driven small sedans forever. I had no idea how endangered they were here in the US:
General Motors said on Wednesday that it would stop making the Chevrolet Malibu, the last affordable sedan in its U.S. model lineup and a venerable nameplate that was introduced in the 1960s when the company was a dominant force in the U.S. economy.
For years, American drivers have been gravitating toward sport utility vehicles and away from sedans, compacts and hatchbacks. G.M.’s two Detroit rivals, Stellantis and Ford Motor, have also largely wiped their slates clean of cars in the United States.
Foreign automakers such as Toyota, Honda and Hyundai still sell hundreds of thousands of sedans and compacts each year, but far fewer than in previous decades when the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord ranked among the most popular vehicles on American roads. Last month, Subaru, a Japanese automaker, said it would stop making its Legacy sedan next year…
Several years ago, Ford eliminated sedans from its lineup. The Mustang is the only car that Ford makes for the U.S. market. Stellantis, the owner of Chrysler, now focuses mainly on trucks, S.U.V.s and minivans, though the company has said it will start making an electric version of its Dodge Challenger muscle car in 2025.
12) But I like routine. “If You Want to Get Stronger, Routine Is the Enemy: To get the most out of your strength training, try progressive overload.”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a 10-year-old on a soccer team, a 30-year-old interested in general fitness or a 70-year-old trying to reduce the risk of falling — some type of overload is needed,” Avery Faigenbaum, a professor of health and exercise science at the College of New Jersey, said.
Overload doesn’t mean you have to clean and jerk 200 pounds, however. It doesn’t even require lifting heavier weights. You can challenge your muscles by doing a more difficult movement — lunges instead of squats — or doing it faster.
13) Bad week for routine (okay, this is old, but a friend sent it to me this week), “Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization”
Habits involve regular, cue-triggered routines. In a field experiment, we tested whether incentivizing exercise routines—paying participants each time they visit the gym within a planned, daily two-hour window—leads to more persistent exercise than offering flexible incentives—paying participants each day they visit the gym, regardless of timing. Routine incentives generated fewer gym visits than flexible incentives, both during our intervention and after incentives were removed. Even among subgroups that were experimentally induced to exercise at similar rates during our intervention, recipients of routine incentives exhibited a larger decrease in exercise after the intervention than recipients of flexible incentives.
14) Excellent piece, “Bird flu keeps rewriting the textbooks. It’s why scientists are unsettled by the U.S. dairy cattle outbreak”
Most scientists that STAT has spoken to since the H5N1 outbreak in cattle in the United States was confirmed are unsettled by the notion that the virus is spreading in mammals with which humans have close contact. “That’s a different ball game altogether,” said Malik Peiris, chair of virology at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health. “That hadn’t happened in Asia all this time.”
Nancy Cox, who for years headed the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said this particular lineage of H5N1, a descendent of a virus first spotted in a goose in China’s Guangdong province in 1996, is unlike any other family of flu viruses she recalls.
“It seems that these viruses must have some kind of ‘special sauce’ that has allowed them to find ways to persistently spread, evolve, and cause what appear to be increasingly serious problems in both wildlife and domesticated animals,” Cox, who is now retired, told STAT in an email. “There is an element of unexpected robustness and malleability that has surprised even seasoned influenza watchers.”
15) The type of excellent and fair-minded overview of a complex problem that is why I’m such a fan of Leonhardt, “The Debate Over Rafah”
In today’s newsletter, I’ll lay out the conflicting views of Biden and Netanyahu and summarize The Times’s latest coverage of the war.
Israel’s view
To Netanyahu and his aides, the destruction of Hamas is a vital goal. Israel’s military has already made progress, having dismantled at least 18 of Hamas’s 24 battalions since the Oct. 7 attacks. But Hamas’s top leaders and thousands of fighters have survived, many evidently fleeing to tunnels under Rafah.
Allowing a cornered enemy to escape violates basic precepts of military strategy, Israeli officials believe. “Ending the war without clearing out Rafah is like sending a firefighter to extinguish 80 percent of the fire,” Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet and Netanyahu’s chief political opponent, has told U.S. officials. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which tends to support Netanyahu, has called Rafah “the crucial city for the terrorist group’s future.” …
America’s view
To Biden — and many leaders of other countries — the destruction of Hamas is simply not a realistic goal. The group’s fighters are in deep, fortified tunnels that could take months if not years to eliminate, U.S. intelligence officials say. Even if Israel killed most remaining fighters, new ones would emerge.
Not only might the benefits of trying to wipe out Hamas be small, but the costs seem large, U.S. officials believe. The hostages Hamas still holds — who are likely being kept alongside the group’s leaders — could die. And the humanitarian toll in Rafah, where many Gazan refugees have fled, could be horrific. “Smashing into Rafah,” a Biden aide said yesterday, “will not get to that sustainable and enduring defeat of Hamas.”…
A third option
Ultimately, the debate may be less binary than it sometimes seems. There is a third option, and it’s one that the Biden administration seems to prefer, notes my colleague Julian Barnes, who covers intelligence.
In this scenario, Israel would agree to end major military operations — accepting a “sustained calm,” as negotiators call it — and release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. In exchange, Hamas would return all hostages, in phases.
Israel could then pursue a diplomatic deal with Saudi Arabia, in which an Arab coalition would run Gaza, sidelining Hamas. And Israel would retain the right to conduct targeted operations against top Hamas officials, like Yahya Sinwar. U.S. officials doubt the wisdom of a full-scale invasion, but not the strategic value of eliminating the Hamas leaders who planned Oct. 7.
Third option sounds great, if it’s actually possible.
16) I’m with the student on this one, “NC student was suspended after saying ‘illegal aliens’ need green cards. He’s suing.
A North Carolina family has filed a federal lawsuit against a school district that suspended their son for saying in class that “illegal aliens” need green cards.
Christian McGhee asked his English teacher at Central Davidson High School whether her reference to the word aliens referred to “space aliens, or illegal aliens who need green cards.”
Christian was suspended for three days in April, according to school records, for making a “racially motivated” and “racially insensitive” comment.
The family filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court accusing the Davidson County school system of violating their son’s rights to free speech, education and due process. The family wants monetary damages and for the suspension to be removed from school records.
“There is nothing inappropriate about saying aliens need green cards, and there certainly isn’t a case for racism due to the fact that alien is not a race,” Leah McGhee, Christian’s mother, said during public comments at this week’s Davidson County school board meeting.
17) This was great from Jeff Maurer, “You May Have to Wait Longer at Airports Because Jeff Merkley is Afraid of Robots and Can’t Read: He also has other reasons, but they’re not as good”
Congress is set to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday…now THAT’S a lede! Quite the sexy, clickbait-y first sentence, no? There so much to draw in the reader: Congress, the FAA, a pro-forma continuation of existing policies — that lede is sex on toast! And I’ve paired it with a thirst trap pic of Senator Jeff Merkley — this article is on a bullet train to Viral City!
But there’s a reason why we should care about this: A bipartisan group of senators led by Jeff Merkley is trying to use the reauthorization to force a change that could make us wait longer at airports. Their beef is with facial reauthorization, which the FAA wants to use to speed up check-in lines. If Merkley and his group succeed, airport lines that could move quickly will move slowly, and we’ll be less safe. Merkley has reasons for doing what he’s doing, but, unfortunately, they’re the worst reasons I’ve heard since I roasted Merkley for doing a different dumb thing a few months ago.
In 2019, the TSA started testing facial recognition technology at airports; today, about 301 US airports use facial recognition. Its most common use is during the part of Check-In Hell when you give your driver’s license and boarding pass to an understandably bored person, and that person pretends to match your ID to your face, though they clearly don’t give a fuck. At airports that have facial recognition, you can (but don’t have to) do things a different way: You can place your ID on an iPad, the TSA takes a photo (which is then deleted), and facial recognition matches your face to your ID (plus, if you have TSA pre-check, you don’t even need the ID). This process is faster: An airline official said it reduced the interaction from about 25 seconds to ten. By my math, that’s 15 seconds per person, which doesn’t sound like much, but adds up to 25 saved minutes in a line with 100 people. The TSA also says that the process is more accurate, because of course it is: Nothing could possibly be less accurate than our current system of having a bleary-eyed guy who just looked at a thousand faces try to discern if young, three-hairstyles-ago you is the same as old, tired, half-pulling-your-mask-down-because-fuck-this-let’s-get-a-move-on you.
So, this seems like faster, better way to do things. And the TSA would like to expand the technology to 430 airports. But Merkley wants to stop them because he saw some movies 20 years ago:…
I can’t believe that he started his speech by citing Gattaca and Minority Report. The connection to those movies is something Merkley is supposed to vociferously deny when the debate gets heated — someone like me will say “You just saw Minority Report and freaked out,” and Merkley is supposed to say “How dare you! My concerns are well-founded!” But he’s admitting that part of what’s going on here is that he saw a movie with a bunch of computers and robots in it and got scared. I guess if he saw Harry and the Hendersons, he’d be warning that deforestation is the slippery slope to having a sasquatch come live in your house.
18) I really enjoyed the new Anne Hathaway movie (on Prime), “The Idea of You.” Apparently it’s based on a romance novel I’ll never be reading. Lots of changes were made and from what I can tell, they really worked.
19) Noah Smith, “Biden is right that we need to raise taxes”
Perhaps the MMT people would advise us to just keep borrowing more and more to cover these interest costs, and then borrow even more to cover that interest, etc. That is a bad idea; eventually something in the economy will break. We’ll eventually get a default premium on government bonds, or hyperinflation, etc. In order to avoid the possibility of that, and to avoid having the rest of the budget crowded out by interest costs, the U.S. government will have to get deficit spending under control.
There are two ways we can get deficits under control: 1) cut government spending, and 2) raise taxes. That’s it — those are the only options. So which should we do in this case? Breaking down the deficit into taxes and spending (both as a percent of GDP, of course), we can see that spending is historically high right now, while taxes are historically low:
I drew the purple lines to mark where we are right now. As you can see, spending is higher than it’s been in recent history, except for during the Great Recession. And taxes are lower than they were under Reagan, Clinton, and (mostly) Bush. If we think that the 80s, 90s, and early 00s are a good guide to what our taxes and spending should be, it means we should cut spending and raise taxes right now.
Now you could make a libertarian argument that we should do deficit reduction entirely with spending cuts, because taxation is theft, because government spending is wasteful, and so on. And you could make a progressive argument that we should do deficit reduction entirely with tax increases, because reducing inequality is good, and because pretty much everything the government is spending money on now is good and important. I could argue with both of these cases, but I’m not going to, because A) a political compromise on deficit reduction will inevitably end up with some mixture of spending cuts and tax increases, B) this is what we did in the 90s and it worked, and C) this is what other countries do when they successfully reduce deficits.
So taxes should go up. And two of the best kinds of taxes we could raise right now are capital gains taxes and estate taxes.
Capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and accrual taxes
Biden’s plan has three ideas for tax hikes:
Raise capital gains tax rates to the same rate as the tax rate on other kinds of income,
Eliminate the “step-up basis” that allows people to dodge capital gains taxes if they inherit assets, and
Create a 25% minimum income tax for the wealthy that includes unrealized capital gains as income.
Basically, I think the first two of these are good ideas, and the third should be dropped.
So it would seem from this pretty cool new PS research. It’s mostly focused on the growth of inexperienced candidates for Congress:
From the 1980s to the mid-2010s, nearly three-quarters of members newlyelected to the US House of Representatives had previous elected experience;however, only half of the freshmen elected from 2016 to 2020 held prioroffice. In this article, we investigate emergence- and success-driven expla-nations for the declining proportion of experienced officeholders enteringCongress. In our analyses, we find that the advantages traditionally affordedto experienced candidates are waning. First, we show that inexperienced candidates’ emergence patterns have changed; amateurs are increasingly apt to emerge in the same kinds of contests as their experienced counterparts. We then show that experienced candidates have lost their fundraising edgeand that—for certain kinds of candidates—the value of elected experience itself has declined. Lastly, we identify other candidate characteristics as strong predictors for success in modern elections. We demonstrate that these electorally advantageous identities overwhelmingly belong to candidates who lack elected experience.
There’s a nice section specifically on race and gender effects at the end:
The left panel of Figure 8 demonstrates that moving from a male to female identity increases a Democrat’s predicted probability of primary election victory by nearly 8%, holding all else constant. Moving from a white to non-white identity increases a Democrat’s predicted probability of primary election victory by 15%. Turning to the right panel of Figure 8, possessing a female identity decreases a Republican’s probability of primary election victory by about 7%. Republicans possessing a non-white identity were not any more likely to win an open-seat primary.
This actually comports quite well with what I’ve heard from many Democrats (of both genders) here in NC, expressing an inherent skepticism towards white male candidates. Of course, it’s also pretty interesting to see Republican women paying a penalty.
Of course, it’s worth mentioning that there are still plenty of very successful white male Democratic candidates, but this is a pretty interesting result.
I am so tired of those on the left reacting so negatively to universities removing tent encampments as an awful violation of college students’ free speech. A foundational principle of free speech policy is that government and organizations can make “time, place, and manner” restrictions that they apply neutrally, without regard of the content of speech. A university cannot choose to run-off a pro-Palestinian protest but allow a pro-Israel protest. They can’t say, “sorry, no protesting. But, what they absolutely can do is say, “you cannot take over the main quad with tents.” And, if you don’t take your tents down after repeated requests, the police remove will remove them. And, this shouldn’t have to be said, if you resist the police actions, you will be arrested.
The protests are all about media coverage. And, honestly, far too much about virtue signaling and trying to win more clout with fellow leftists than actually doing the hard work of winning over hearts and minds to the cause. You know what doesn’t get a ton of media coverage? A bunch of students standing in the quad, not harassing fellow students, not setting up tents, just genuinely peaceful protests. And, I say, good for them!
But, like I said, not a ton of media coverage. So they intentionally set up tent encampments because they are against university policy to provoke a conflict. And it works. And they get media coverage. And that’s, okay, but own it. Admit that this is not free speech, but civil disobedience. Admit that police actually have the right to come in and remove the tents and arrest people who don’t comply and that, of course, police should not use excessive force in so doing so. Alas, all I seem to see is completely unfounded allegations of police acting as “fascists” and universities not respecting “free speech.” But, this is not the case at all and it’s not hard.
At UNC some faculty and graduate students are refusing to turn in grades for all their students (collective punishment, anyone) unless the administration grants amnesty to those arrested. But they were not arrested for their speech! They were arrested because they refused to follow a completely lawful order to clear a tent encampment and it was made very clear to them this would be the consequence. As for those professors, a professor friend said to me, “part of me wants to see them do it and get fired. Is that wrong”? No. The idea of collectively punishing your students to make a point on your political views is just unconscionable as a professor.
And, lastly, because we’re here. I want to say that I think Israel has acted too harshly, too disproportionately, and shown far too little concern for Palestinian lives. I completely get why so many students are out there protesting and convinced of the moral rightness of their cause. I get that they want to end the violence. But, alas, the leaders of these protests don’t want an end to violence. Great Jill Filipovic piece on this in the Atlantic (gift link), “Say Plainly What the Protesters Want”
According to some news outlets, the protests are best characterized as “anti-war.” And that’s true insofar as the groups leading the protests do oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, and no doubt many of the demonstrators show up because they’ve watched horror after horror unfold, sympathize with a long-oppressed population that is now being killed by the thousands, and want to voice their desire for the violence to cease. But the protests—both on college campuses and those led by broader, noncampus groups—have articulated demands and ideologies. News outlets have a responsibility to report what those are, and are largely failing.
Many of the protest groups agree with that critique of the coverage. National Students for Justice in Palestine posted on Instagram, “Do not cover our protests if you will not cover what we are fighting for.” On-campus demands vary from college to college, but generally include that the university divest from companies doing business with Israel, cut ties with Israeli universities and academics, offer amnesty to all student and faculty protesters who have broken laws or campus rules, and implement total transparency for all university investments and holdings.
But those demands are not the sum total of the protest groups’ aims. Two of the student groups coordinating the encampments at Columbia, for example, published a guide answering the question “What principles must one align with in order to sign onto our coalition?” and clarifying “the cause we are fighting for.” The core principles include the Thawabit, originally published in 1977 and characterized as nonnegotiable Palestinian “red lines” (albeit ones from which many advocates for peace and statehood who actually live in Palestine have since deviated). Those include a right to Palestinian statehood, making Jerusalem the capital of Palestine, the right of return, and the right to resistance, even armed resistance, or “struggle by all available means.”
These groups have also routinely refused to condemn the Hamas attacks of October 7 that led to the Israeli incursion, even while they have found time to condemn far less egregious acts…
Similar ideologies and goals have taken center stage at off-campus protests as well, with banners pledging to secure Palestinian freedom by any means necessary and chants cheering on Hamas and rejecting a two-state solution in favor of the end of Israel (“We want all of ’48”). Protesters should be free to gather and make their demands, of course, but these particular demands are not, by any reasonable definition, “anti-war.” Protesters who endorse these ideas are against Israel’s war in Gaza, but do not seem to be opposed to bloodshed if it’s in the service of extinguishing the world’s only Jewish state.
Okay, that’s a lot I had to get off my chest about the protests. Back to just re-tweeting other people’s takes for a while.
Republicans have been dishonest about their plans for public education for years. Before they took power, they complained that Democrats’ warnings that the GOP would cut funding to public schools was little more than scare tactics. Once they took power, though, they took a hatchet to the education budget, leaving North Carolina with one of the lowest per pupil spending rates in the country. The state also has among the lowest teacher pay rates in the nation.
When Republicans first launched their voucher scheme, they insisted the program was designed to help poor students escape failing public schools. They vehemently denied that the vouchers would become tax cuts for millionaires, yet here we are. Republicans lifted the cap on Opportunity Scholarships, making the name a misnomer. Instead, they are tax cuts for rich people that are coming out of the education budget. They lied again about the purpose of the so-called scholarships.
Ever since they’ve taken power, Republicans have seen teachers as the enemy. In their telling of public education, teachers are devious, indoctrinating students in radical ideologies and turning them against the culture. They need heavy-handed regulation from their masters in the state legislature. The proposed bill is meant to either expose the radical agenda of teachers who want to turn society into a Marxist hellscape or prevent them from implementing their agenda in the first place. It’s a signal to parents that teachers are not to be trusted…
The 2024 legislative session marks the thirteenth year of the GOP offensive against public schools. They have demeaned the teaching profession and cut funding for schools while claiming that our schools are broken. They are now paying families to abandoned the public schools for private ones with no accountability.
If public schools are broken, then Republicans broke them. They’ve had thirteen years to fix the problems they claimed the schools had and their solution is to empty them of the most privileged students, leaving them for kids of underprivileged families. Republicans don’t believe that those who have benefited most from our society and government have any obligation to those who have been left behind. They are trying to turn public schools into second-rate institutions reserved for the poorest members of society by making teaching an unattractive proposition and encouraging privileged families to leave. It’s a radical notion.
Democrats need to launch a vigorous counter offensive. They need to regain the trust of parents by laying out an agenda that pushes back against the Radical Republicans and stands up for public schools. They need to educate the public about transferring tax dollars from public schools to wealthy families supporting private ones with no accountability. They need to let the public know that tax dollars are going to support religious institutions who are, in fact, indoctrinating children. The assault on our public schools cannot go unanswered.
We know all about how the youth are extremely liberal and driven primarily by issues of climate and Gaza… right? Perhaps the ultimate case of twitter (and college protests) are not real life is the recent data showing this is decidedly not the case. First, Yglesias, “Young voters care about the same stuff as everyone else: Inflation and health care, not climate and student loans”
The youngest cohort of Americans is less white, less religious, and better-educated than the national average, so naturally it’s more Democratic-leaning and less conservative than older cohorts.
But young people also pay less attention to politics, know less about politics, are less rooted in their communities, and are less likely to vote than older people. So across multiple cycles now, Democrats have understandably tried to “mobilize” young people — i.e., get them to actually vote. Younger Democratic Party primary voters (a group that is distinct from young people writ large) also famously did not love Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in their respective primary campaigns, preferring the more left-wing Bernie Sanders. As a result, progressive advocacy groups often argue that the key to youth mobilization is adopting strident progressive stances on the groups’ issues.
Note, though, that this is largely a fallacy.
Here are two true propositions:
Young people are less engaged than older people
The young people who are engaged love Bernie Sanders
Logically, nothing about (1) and (2) implies that if more Democratic candidates were more like Bernie Sanders, more non-engaged young people would engage with politics.
In fact, the median young person self-identifies as moderate, just like the electorate as a whole. And at all ages, less-engaged people are less ideological and more moderate than consistent voters. Your socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe is not representative of the typical member of her generation, who is on the bubble as to whether to vote for Joe Biden. You probably don’t hear a lot about the political opinions of politically disengaged young people because they are politically disengaged. Into the void step opportunists who try to convince Democrats that they have the key to the youth vote, even though on the most plausible measurements, the stuff that young people care about is very similar to the stuff that everyone else cares about.
In particular, the idea that there’s some magic trick to mobilize young people via progressive messages on climate change has basically no evidence behind it.
Young voters care about inflation and health care
Despite all my moaning and complaining, I am actually quite a bit more progressive than the average American, so I think it would be great to have a reasonably high carbon tax and split the revenue between a Child Tax Credit and deficit reduction. But as even the most strident climate change advocates in the world agree, a broad-based carbon tax is toxically unpopular. When gasoline prices spiked early in Joe Biden’s presidency, nobody stood and cheered and said “hooray, we are getting closer to our climate goals!”
And that’s the basic paradox of climate politics…
The Harvard Institute of Politics did a good polling exercise in their most recent youth poll where they gave respondents a bunch of pairwise comparisons — they asked them to consider two issues and pick which one is more important. Then they aggregated the winners of the head-to-head matchups to see which issues young voters care about most. Climate does not crack the top 10.
Note that two other issues that are frequently said to be politically important to young people — student loans and Israel — ranked even lower than climate change.
The top issue for young people is inflation. [emphases mine]
Inflation, of course, is a tough issue for Biden. So he is lucky that number two is health care, which remains the thing that I think Democrats should talk about more. Unfortunately for Democrats, abortion rights rank higher than climate, but still not that high.
I think this carries a few implications. The main one is that if you’re a Democrat and you need to address a persuadable group of young people, you should probably talk about the same stuff you’d talk about to any audience…
In terms of organizing and mobilizing work, I know that Israel critics like to say they are trying to help Biden by coercing him into shifting his position to one that’s more popular with the Democratic base. But look at these numbers — most people don’t care about this issue. When you stage protests and do other things to try to drive up its salience, you are driving up the salience of a Trump-friendly wedge issue and making it more likely that a candidate who is relentlessly hostile to Palestinian interests will win. If you can’t in good conscience actively work to help Biden get elected, that’s fair enough, but don’t be deluded about what’s happening here. Conversely, if we’d had University of Texas students getting arrested last week staging a pro choice protest at the Texas Capitol, that would have driven up the salience of an issue that is much better for Democrats. Organizing on abortion rights is very valuable precisely because this issue has a tendency to fall out of the headlines…
And a recent piece in the NYT, “Gaza Isn’t Root of Biden’s Struggles With Young Voters, Polls Show: Young voters are far more likely than other Americans to support Palestinians. But few cite the conflict as a top source of discontent with the president.”
But these headlines are not reflective of young voters’ top concerns this election year, according to recent polls. Surveys taken in recent months show young voters are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians in the conflict, but few of them rank the Israel-Hamas war among their top issues in the 2024 election. Like other voters, young people often put economic concerns at the top of the list.
And while young voters are cooler to Mr. Biden than they were at the same point in 2020, there is little evidence that American support for the Israeli invasion of Gaza is a critical factor in their relative discontent…
The latest polling from the Pew Research Center finds 18-to-29-year olds three times more likely to sympathize with Palestinians in the conflict than those over 65, and twice as likely as adults as a whole.
“Not necessarily everyone is as fired up about it as we see from those out protesting,” said Laura Silver, the associate director of global research for Pew. “But 18-to-29-year-olds are far and away different from older Americans.”
Recent polls suggest these sympathies have yet to translate into prioritizing the war as a voting issue in 2024.
In the Harvard Institute of Politics’ Youth Poll conducted shortly before the past month’s wave of campus demonstrations and crackdowns, 18-to-29-year-old Americans overwhelmingly faulted Mr. Biden for his handling of the conflict in Gaza, with 76 percent disapproving and 18 percent approving. But only 2 percent of them rated it their top concern in the election, compared with 27 percent who said they were most concerned about economic issues.
In an Economist/YouGov poll taken more recently, in late April, 22 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 listed inflation as their most important issue. Two percent named foreign policy as their top concern. (The poll did not specifically ask about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)
So, short version, as I saw someone put it on twitter yesterday, young people are basically normie liberals. And there’s only so much Democrats can do on inflation, so just focus on health care and abortion, damnit (while continuing to make the case that the economy is actually really good, damnit).
I’ve been meaning to write a post about the subjective experience of racism, but before I got to it, there was this NYT story that I think is actually quite related, “Are We Talking Too Much About Mental Health?”
In recent years, mental health has become a central subject in childhood and adolescence. Teenagers narrate their psychiatric diagnosis and treatment on TikTok and Instagram. School systems, alarmed by rising levels of distress and self-harm, are introducing preventive coursework in emotional self-regulation and mindfulness.
Now, some researchers warn that we are in danger of overdoing it. Mental health awareness campaigns, they argue, help some young people identify disorders that badly need treatment — but they have a negative effect on others, leading them to over-interpret their symptoms and see themselves as more troubled than they are.
The researchers point to unexpected results in trials of school-based mental health interventions in the United Kingdom and Australia: Students who underwent training in the basics of mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy did not emerge healthier than peers who did not participate, and some were worse off, at least for a while.
And new research from the United States shows that among young people, “self-labeling” as having depression or anxiety is associated with poor coping skills, like avoidance or rumination…
In a paper published last year, two research psychologists at the University of Oxford, Lucy Foulkes and Jack Andrews, coined the term “prevalence inflation” — driven by the reporting of mild or transient symptoms as mental health disorders — and suggested that awareness campaigns were contributing to it.
“It’s creating this message that teenagers are vulnerable, they’re likely to have problems, and the solution is to outsource them to a professional,” said Dr. Foulkes, a Prudence Trust Research Fellow in Oxford’s department of experimental psychology, who has written two books on mental health and adolescence.
Until high-quality research has clarified these unexpected negative effects, they argue, school systems should proceed cautiously with large-scale mental health interventions.
“It’s not that we need to go back to square one, but it’s that we need to press pause and reroute potentially,” Dr. Foulkes said. “It’s possible that something very well-intended has overshot a bit and needs to be brought back in.”
This remains a minority view among specialists in adolescent mental health, who mostly agree that the far more urgent problem is lack of access to treatment.
It may be a minority view, but it sounds pretty damn right to me. Not to mention, I think we can both work to increase access and destigmatize while also trying to avoid prevalence inflation (then again, maybe we can’t).
As for the racism angle, Verasight conducted a poll on behalf of the MPSA conference I attend annually and this result really stuck out to me:
Of course the older a Black person gets, the more likely they are to have had negative experiences with racism. Yet, that’s the opposite of what we see here. But, the answer is in the question wording and the emphasis on the subjectivity of the experience, “experiences with racism that have negatively affected them behaviorally and psychologically in the long term.” Now, when you put it that way, it’s not surprising– especially in light of the first part of this post– that this negative subjective experience is far more common among the youngest cohort. And, obviously, racism remains a serious problem that we as a society need to continue to work hard on. But, I also think it is not great that the youngest generation believes they are the most likely to suffer psychological harm from it.
This gallery of “Winners of the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards Open Competition” is full of stunning photos.
Caiman Crunch. Winner, Natural World & Wildlife. “We had bid farewell to our São Lourenço River lodge, marking the end of our Pantanal adventure, but as we were leaving we heard that a jaguar had been spotted roughly 30 minutes away. We raced to the scene and encountered this sleek female jaguar stalking her prey. Our boat—and my camera—was perfectly positioned as she pounced on an unsuspecting caiman.” #
Semaglutide and other GLP-1 (and GLP 1 and GLP 2) inhibitors may not be “miracle” drugs, but all the evidence so far suggests that are pretty damn amazing and really life-changing for a substantial number of their users. That’s good! What’s kind of amazing, though, is how much some people just seem to want these drugs to actually be bad. I actually think it’s pretty similar to my “diet soda is a free lunch” theory. This even came up in a recent episode of Science Vson these drugs:
WZ Yeah exactly, so all over social media you see a lot of scare mongering about these drugs … but then there’s studies like this! I mean, that’s that’s huge – less heart attacks!
RR Yeah, the whole thing is a it’s all about the pluses and the minuses, right? Like all medications. And so,Vibha – who’s the doctor that we talked to earlier in the episode about muscle loss. This is one thing that she and I talked about. And she said that at the end of the day, we know that for a lot of people and a lot of her patients specifically, the pluses here outweigh the minuses.
RR My pet theory is that people are overstating some of these downsides because they’re morally opposed to the medications because it looks like an easy way out, what do you think, do you agree with that?
VS I agree, yknow there are definitely– even amongst my colleagues, physician colleagues, it’s a new concept. These are tools.They’re no magic wand but they’re a beautiful tooland should be used appropriately
I really enjoyed David Wallace-Wells take, “This Is What a Miracle Drug Looks Like, and It Costs Only $5 to Make”
If anything, though, we’ve probably talked too much about cosmetic weight loss and Hollywood vanity — and certainly made too many comparisons to fen-phen, Botox and Viagra. The GLP-1 drugs have been shown to cut risk of heart attacks, strokes and death from coronary disease by 20 percent among overweight and obese patients, presumably through the salubrious effects of weight loss, though the researchers can’t yet say for sure. Semaglutide has been shown to eliminate or reduce the need for insulin among those with recent-onset Type 1 diabetes. In a clinical trial of people with Type 2 diabetes and moderate to severe kidney disease, the drug reduced the risk of kidney disease progression and cut the death rate from cardiovascular and kidney-related causes by 24 percent — such a clear result that the trial was ended early. Semaglutide has reduced fatty liver deposits in patients with H.I.V. and nonalcoholic steatotic liver disease. It has normalized the menstrual cycles of those with polycystic ovary syndrome. (It has also, somewhat mysteriously, seemed to produce a wave of unintended pregnancies among women taking birth control, at least if TikTok videos are to be trusted.)
Studies have shown promise in treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s with GLP-1 drugs, perhaps by regulating insulin levels and reducing inflammation, and the drugs may yet prove useful in treating many other conditions made worse by chronic inflammation. Some studies have found large decreases in the risk of depression and anxiety; others found smaller but still positive effects. There are potential applications for schizophrenia and neurological dysfunction, thanks to the role that insulinlike hormones like GLP-1 play in the development of the central nervous system and the way semaglutide reshapes the brain’s chemical reward system. It seems to bend the curve on alcoholism and drug addiction and curb other addictive behaviors, as well — compulsive shopping and sex addiction, gambling and nail biting, smoking and skin picking. A compulsive nation has stumbled into what looks like a treatment for compulsion and one that happens to protect against some of the country’s biggest killers and curb some of its most pervasive pathologies and inner demons…
Americans love to dream of miracle drugs, but hardly anything ever seems to fill the bill. True, semaglutide has arrived with real questions trailing like bunting: Much of the weight loss is from lean muscle mass, which isn’t ideal, and there are reasons to worry over the possibility of thyroid problems, loss of bone density and sarcopenia, a weakness disorder associated with aging. There are potentially other serious long-term side effects, though millions of Americans have been taking Ozempic for Type 2 diabetes for years without serious issues. (Some of them do report more familiar side effects, like nausea.) The GLP-1 drugs aren’t a permanent fix in a single shot — whether the thing being addressed is body mass index or cardiac risk or the progression of Alzheimer’s — but a permanent disease-management program. They also haven’t exactly cured cancer, although more than a dozen cancers are linked to obesity, and in at least one case, colorectal cancer, there is reason to believe GLP-1 drugs may directly cut the chances of developing the disease.
All that means that semaglutide isn’t exactly a cure-all, in the vernacular sense. But it seems to be about as close as we’ve gotten, even in a time of racing biomedical progress, to that old science-fiction proposition — one pill for almost everything and almost everyone forever.
Yglesias on a piece about the extreme negativity bias in reporting about everything these days:
Something that I do note about the GLP-1 drugs is that the media coverage of them has been oddly negative, almost obsessively focused on downsides, to the point that Rachael Bedard’s piece arguing that actually it’s good that we had a medical breakthrough on a serious problem counts as a contrarian take.
Elite media discourse around Ozempic can meaningfully influence public opinion and health-care policy. Right now, the most urgent concern about Ozempic is the fact that everyone who needs and wants it cannot get it. Recently, the state of North Carolina had to rescind its policy of paying for the drugs for people who do not have diabetes — in other words, people prescribed the medications primarily for weight loss — because it could no longer afford the ballooning costs. The drugs can cost up to $16,000 a year (depending on the one prescribed), an out-of-pocket cost few people can bear.
So far, the public discussion of Ozempic’s daunting economics have been consistently fatalistic. At the end of the summer, the columnist Megan McArdle and the physician Leana Wen wrote op-eds in the Washington Post within two months of each other saying the cost benefit for the drugs may not pencil out. Nearly every story I’ve read has used the current access challenges as reason to doubt the drug’s miracle status: If it’s only going to be available to the luckiest few, what makes it any better than Botox? Jia Tolentino, in The New Yorker, wrote, “It is possible to imagine a different universe in which the discovery of semaglutide was an unalloyed good … In the actual universe that we inhabit, the people who most need semaglutide often struggle to get it, and its arrival seems to have prompted less a public consideration of what it means to be fat than a renewed fixation on being thin.”
As long as we talk about these medications primarily as“weight-loss drugs”— as medications that have prompted “a renewed fixation on being thin” — insurance companies and policymakers will remain incentivized to treat them as a luxury good. We’ll never ask the questions that need to be asked: If such a large percentage of the country wants Ozempic, and if we now have good-quality evidence that it helps with a variety of serious conditions beyond diabetes, what is our cutoff for determining who truly needs it? And how do we make it available to them? Price is not an inherent feature of most pharmaceuticals. Ozempic already costs less in other countries, and in the U.S., the president recently took the extraordinary step of lowering drug costs for some of the most commonly prescribed medications by using his executive authority. Ozempic presents a radical opportunity to change the chronic-disease landscape in this country. It may require radical policy to make it accessible, and what that policy looks like is the conversation I want to have.
So, sure, I’m entirely open to the possibility that we may yet discover some real problems with this class of drugs. But, honestly, at this point, the balance of evidence is definitely closer to the “miracle drug” side of the scale and we should just be honest about that, while admitting we need to remain open to ongoing evidence.
1) I’m quite confident that micro-managing teachers and having them waste even more time on pointless bureaucracy will decidedly not result in better educational outcomes for students. But, NC Legislators are taking no chances against woke indoctrination! “GOP lawmakers want to make NC public school teachers post all lesson plans online”
2) Speaking of indoctrination. This is one helluva an email I just got!! Honestly, it’s kind of surprising I don’t get more like this:
I just caught your act on the news. What an embarrassment you are to education & I say this as a retired teacher (32 years) who taught multiple subjects including history. You’re not a teacher, you’re a Marxist indoctrinating stupid, foolish kids to do your sick bidding. I could clearly see, the barely suppressed smile & excitement over the chaos you, & other subversives like you, have created. Palestinians don’t exist. Islamic radical terrorists called Hamas & Hezbollah… do exist. Nobody in the region wants them… not Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan or any other Islamic country. Why? Because they’re destroyers. In Gaza they had a choice in the early 2000’s & they chose HAMAS!!! 86% of the population in Gaza supports HAMAS!! They are keeping 130 hostages.. if they’re still alive… in horrific conditions. This war would stop TODAY if Hamas laid down their arms & released the hostages or their bodies. YOU KNOW THIS! Israel is not the offender. They’re trying to survive after being attacked & murdered & their women & children brutally raped & no doubt, still being raped. Whatever number of “dead Gazan’s” that the terrorists give you, I guarantee the number is 1/2 what they say & the majority are … wait for it.. HAMAS!! You disgust me on every level. You’ve disgraced the very word education. You should be removed, along with any other teacher, from any teaching position, for the lies you’ve spread to these silly, snowflake kids who couldn’t find Israel on a map.
Yowza!! Speaking of teachers, here’s one insane person who should never have been in the classroom. If you are curious, my relatively innocuous (and so not pro-Hamas) comments are here.
3) This was really good, “Disaffection and Despair: Behind the Military’s Recruitment Woes. ” As was this link within it.
First, DoD needs to lower its force-protection threshold and allow civilians back on base. Pre-9/11 restrictions were nowhere near as tight, allowing more interactions between civilians and the military. There were still restricted areas, and there always will be. But some areas could be open to the public like they used to be.
Second, we need to start educating our children about the armed forces. Recruiters would have an easier time fighting military stereotypes if our children understood the basic structure of the military—not to mention the reality of military life as distinct from what’s in movies and video games.
Third, to restore confidence in the AVF, the military must start holding its senior leaders accountable. It’s been nearly two half years since the fall of Kabul, and nobody in uniform has been relieved of duties. During World War II, generals were routinely removed from command for being ineffective. That only happened once in Afghanistan, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates relieved General David McKiernan of command in 2009.
“There needs to be more accountability throughout the military, and not just for poor battlefield decisions, but also for problems in garrison too,” Allison Jaslow, the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told The Bulwark.
The liberal international order depends on the strength of the United States Armed Forces. Great power competition has returned. Spending more is necessary but not sufficient for the national defense. The United States must find a way to rebuild, reinforce, and reinvigorate its military—and quickly.
4) Just listened to an interview with this author on The Gist. Good stuff, “Beth Linker Is Turning Good Posture on Its Head A historian and sociologist of science re-examines the “posture panic” of the last century. You’ll want to sit down for this.”
Our obsession with great posture is fake news? I’m off the hook!
Concern for posture, as a matter of etiquette, has been around since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, but poor posture did not become a scientific and medical obsession until after the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859. He posited that humans evolved through natural selection, and that the first thing to develop was bipedalism; in other words, standing upright preceded brain development.
This idea was controversial because convention taught that higher intellect distinguished humans from nonhuman animals, and now it appeared that only a mere physical difference, located in the spine and feet, separated humankind from the apes.
In other words, bad posture was primitive.
Actually, quite the opposite. Bad posture was assumed to primarily affect “civilized” individuals — people who no longer engaged in physical labor but instead enjoyed the fruits of mechanized transportation, industrialization and leisure.
With the rise of eugenics in the early 20th century, certain scientists began to worry that slouching among “civilized” peoples could lead to degeneration, a backward slide in human progress. Posture correction became part of “race betterment” projects, especially for white Anglo-Saxon men but also for middle-class women and Black people who were trying to gain political rights and equity. Poor posture became stigmatized and defined as a disability. As I show in my book, people with postural “defects” were regularly discriminated against in the American workplace, educational settings and immigration offices. People with disabilities had no legal protection at the time.
Also, this was an era when physicians and public health officials began to focus more on disease prevention to control the spread of infectious contagions like tuberculosis. Good posture was understood to be an effective way to stave off deadly diseases, leading to campaigns that taught Americans how to stand up straight.
5) Kristof, “How Protesters Can Actually Help Palestinians”
Student protesters: I admire your empathy for Gazans, your concern for the world, your moral ambition to make a difference.
But I worry about how peaceful protests have tipped into occupations of buildings, risks to commencements and what I see as undue tolerance of antisemitism, chaos, vandalism and extremism. I’m afraid the more aggressive actions may be hurting the Gazans you are trying to help.
I’m shaped in my thinking by the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Students who protested then were right on the merits: The war was unwinnable and conducted in ways that were reckless and immoral.
Yet those students didn’t shorten that terrible war; instead, they probably prolonged it. Leftist activists in 1968 didn’t achieve their goal of electing the peace candidate Gene McCarthy; rather, the turmoil and more violent protests helped elect Richard Nixon, who pledged to restore order — and then dragged the war out and expanded it to Cambodia.
I think that history is worth remembering today. Good intentions are not enough. Empathy is not enough. I’m sure we all agree that it’s outcomes that matter. So the question I would ask you to ask yourselves is: Are your encampments and sacrifices — more than 1,000 protesters have been arrested so far, and unknown numbers have been suspended or expelled — actually helping Gazans?
I’ve been strongly criticizing Israel’s conduct in Gaza since last fall, and President Biden’s unconditional support for the war. So while my heart’s with the cause, it seems to me that the campus upheavals have distracted from the crisis in Gaza, rather than called attention to it.
6) Really been enjoying the emergence of 13-year periodical cicadas in my area. Not as much as my dog, Beau, who is just going to town on them. This was pretty damn interesting, “Cicadas Are Emerging Now. How Do They Know When to Come Out?”
How cicadas manage to rise en masse after spending so long underground remains largely a mystery. “There’s surprisingly little information about cicadas that you’d like to know,” said Raymond Goldstein, a physicist at the University of Cambridge.
Once a brood climbs out of the ground, the cicadas crawl up trees to mate, and the females lay eggs in tree branches. After hatching, the young insects drop to earth and burrow into the soil. Then, each cicada spends the next 13 or 17 years underground before emerging to mate and repeat the cycle.
That means that trillions of insects have to track the passage of time in the soil. It’s possible that they detect annual changes in tree roots. But how can cicadas add up those changes to divine when 13 or 17 years have passed? Scientists cannot say.
da expert at the University of Connecticut, suspects that some answers will be found in the insects’ DNA. “Is there a consistent difference between something that has a 13-year cycle and a 17-year cycle?” she asked.
Dr. Simon and her colleagues recently sequenced the genome of a cicada for the first time. They caught the insect, which belonged to a brood with a 17-year cycle, in Tennessee in 2021. They hope to sequence the genes of insects from other broods as well, and compare their DNA.
Once cicadas recognize — somehow — that they’ve reached their special year, they need a way to emerge together. Evolutionary biologists have proposed that cicadas come out in vast numbers as a survival strategy. Their enemies, such as birds and parasitic wasps, can attack only a small fraction of them, leaving the rest free to reproduce.
One crucial signal is the temperature of the ground. The soil needs to pass a threshold of about 64 degrees before broods start to appear.
But cicadas cannot surface together simply by sensing the warming soil. An immature cicada that happens to be a couple feet underground will experience cooler temperatures than one just a few inches below the surface. If cicadas paid attention only to the temperature they felt nearby, they would come out in small groups and be quickly wiped out by predators.
Dr. Goldstein and his wife, Adriana Pesci, a mathematician at Cambridge, recently became intrigued by this paradox. “We’re attuned to mysteries,” Dr. Goldstein said.
7) As a huge fan of the museum of the WWII battleship, USS North Carolina (at Wilmington, NC), I loved reading about the renovations of the USS New Jersey, “The Most Decorated Battleship in U.S. History Gets an Overdue Face-Lift It has been 34 years since the Battleship New Jersey was last pulled out of the water for maintenance.” Lots of cool photos with this one, so gift link.
8) Hell, yeah it is. Gabriel Zucman, “It’s Time to Tax the Billionaires”
9) In light of all the copyright controversies, this was so good. Another gift link worthy piece, “What Is a Song? Is it simply the music flowing out of your earphones? According to the law, the answer is a bit more complicated.”
In other words, what, exactly, is a song, in the eyes of the law?
In many music copyright disputes, one of the main issues is originality, or how the law sets a boundary between creative expression that is the property of a single artist versus material in the public domain. Last year, a federal jury in New York heard hours of expert testimony about whether a syncopated four-chord sequence in Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” was distinctive enough that Sheeran’s song “Thinking Out Loud” infringed on it — or whether, as Sheeran’s lawyers contended, those parts are generic “building blocks” that no musician can own. The jury ruled in Sheeran’s favor, finding that he and a co-writer had created their song independently and not copied from Gaye’s 1973 classic.
But a key question running through that trial was about something even more fundamental: whether the core of “Let’s Get It On” — and what is protected by its copyright — is determined by the sounds we hear on its original recording, or the notes written on yellowing sheet music stored at the Library of Congress…
“It is completely divorced from actual music-making practice,” said Joseph P. Fishman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School.
Jenkins, of Duke, said these cases point to one of the basic complexities of applying copyright — a concept originally made for books and other written material — to music.
“Music is first and foremost an auditory art form, but for most of copyright’s history it’s been defined as something you see,” Jenkins said. “There’s this disconnect, where the signifier — that written thing — is what a composer owns, but the signified is what the song actually is. It’s what we’re listening to.”
10) Oh man I loved this from Hannah Ritchie. How have I never heard of this concept? “The Moloch Trap of Environmental Problems: Zero-sum thinking will get us nowhere.”
The heart of her podcast is about the so-called “Moloch Trap”. A Moloch Trap is, in simple terms, a zero-sum game. It explains a situation where participants compete for object or outcome X but make something else worse in the process. Everyone competes for X, but in doing so, everyone ends up worse off.
It explains the situations with externalities or the preference for short-term gains at the sacrifice of the long-term future.
The problem is that it’s incredibly hard for any “player” to break the trap. If they do, they will lose out in the short term (and they might still be exposed to the downsides in the long term). Everyone is stuck in a “game” or “race” that they don’t want to be in, but it’s impossible to stop.
Some examples of the Moloch Trap
Maybe a few examples would help to explain it better. These are some I’ve heard Liv describe before.
1) Doping in sports. Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven consecutive Tour de France titles in cycling after admitting he was using performance-enhancing drugs. We can point the finger, but the reality is that almost everyone (or at least everyone with a chance of placing highly) was doping in the sport at the time. Apparently, only 1 of the 21 podium-finishers over Armstrong’s stint at the top was not later implicated in the doping scandal (Fernando Escartin).
This was a classic Moloch trap. No one really wanted to have to take performance-enhancing drugs, not least because of the fear of getting caught. But it was almost impossible to do well without taking them because everyone else was.
2) Beauty filters on social media. People put filters on their pictures to make themselves look “nicer”. It’s then difficult for anyone to post without using a filter because it falls far short of the expectations set by everyone else. Instagram users end up in a race where images become increasingly distorted from reality, but no one really knows how to be the one to break the cycle.
3) Artificial intelligence (AI). There are lots of safety concerns about the speed at which AI is developing. Almost every tech leader – Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, to name a few – has said they are worried about AI risk. Yet it’s impossible for any of them to slow down. AI companies are now in a race, and if they put the brakes on while others keep accelerating, they will fall behind.
AI companies are now locked into a race that they all recognise is a major threat to humanity (also with lots of potential upside, I should add) but it’s in no one’s interest to be the one that lets up.
4) Nuclear weapons. Country X might want to live in a world free of nuclear weapons, but if Country Y and Z have them, it’s in their short-term interests to also have a deterrent and not leave themselves exposed.
Almost every environmental problem is a Moloch Trap
In my podcast episode with Liv, we focused on the environment.
The Moloch Trap explains almost every one of the world’s environmental problems. I struggled to think of one that doesn’t fall into this camp.
Environmental problems are caused by a fight for scarce resources, activities that push externalities and negative impacts onto others, and the sacrifice of long-term sustainability for short-term gains.
People overfish because they know that other fishermen are doing the same. If they don’t maximise their catch now, they’ll be left with none. This is not optimal for anyone in the medium to long term because the fish stocks will be depleted.
We cut down forests because there are economic gains – from using that land for something else, such as farming – to be made in the short term. If we don’t cut it down, then someone else probably will.
11) PEN America has gone nuts. George packer on a perfect example of the authoritarian left.
The organization PEN was founded more than a century ago to provide an international community of support for embattled writers. Today PEN’s American chapter is in crisis, because a group of writers has chosen to turn their community against the organization.
Last week a boycott forced PEN America to cancel its annual World Voices literary festival. The boycott’s leaders included authors of best-selling books and winners of prestigious fellowships and prizes—Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Hari Kunzru, Michelle Alexander, and others. According to someone with intimate knowledge of the boycott, its pressure campaign, carried out strategically through online attacks and direct personal messages, was “merciless.” Invited panelists found themselves threatened with isolation by their colleagues or their communities. Some joined the boycott out of conviction. But others fell in line out of fear of harassment or concern for their careers, or they withdrew from the festival when they saw who else was withdrawing, or they worried about the “optics” of sitting on a depleted panel that lacked the requisite diversity. As the dominoes fell, there were more and more reasons not to be seen standing. After PEN America—on whose board I serve—announced the festival’s cancellation last week, a number of writers privately expressed their unhappiness, but almost nothing was said publicly…
It isn’t a pretty sight when writers bully other writers into shutting down a celebration of world literature—especially when big names with the most expansive free-speech rights in the world take away a platform from lesser-known writers hoping to reach an audience outside their own repressive countries. Leyla Shukurova, an Azerbaijani German writer who just finished her first story collection and was planning to attend the festival, wrote after the event was canceled to thank PEN for “upholding the values that this festival, as well as PEN America as an organization, represents,” but she added: “The suppression of political discourse that we are witnessing right now in the US is very alarming and unsettling.”
The cancellation of one literary festival by writers—a kind of man-bites-dog story—may seem small, but it is part of a much bigger thing. The cause of the boycott was Gaza. In many ways, it’s a compelling cause. PEN America, like so many other organizations, had fallen into the habit of releasing statements about issues tangential or unrelated to its essential purpose. After October 7, PEN was internally divided over the war between Israel and Hamas, and slow to report on the deaths of scores of Palestinian writers, artists, and journalists. This response was unfavorably compared with PEN America’s vigorous stand for Ukraine after the Russian invasion. When I joined the board at the end of last year, I found an organization under siege from inside and outside. A number of writers and staff members wanted a much stronger response from PEN—not just on behalf of Palestinian writers, but against Israel. They wanted the organization to call for an immediate and permanent cease-fire; they wanted it to denounce Israel’s “genocide.”…
This is how the authoritarian spirit plays out in a democracy. A party leader compels other politicians to defile their conscience and succumb to his dictates. A political rally turns into a violent effort to overturn an election. A student protest starts with calls for peace and ends in eliminationist chants, vandalism, closed campuses, and an invasion by police or state troopers. A group of writers bring an organization dedicated to their freedom to its knees.
I share the campus protesters’ opinion that the war in Gaza has become an atrocity. Israel had every right to defend itself after Hamas’s massacre, which itself was an atrocity. However, the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, with uncountable more left maimed or homeless, cannot be justified. I am increasingly dismayed that President Biden does not simply deny Benjamin Netanyahu any further arms.
Beyond a certain point, however, we must ask whether the escalating protests are helping to change those circumstances. Columbia’s administration agreed to review proposals about divestment, shareholder activism and other issues and to create health and education programs in Gaza and the West Bank. But the protesters were unmoved and a subgroup of them, apparently, further enraged.
Who among the protesters really thought that Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, and the board of trustees would view the occupation of Hamilton Hall — and the visible destruction of property — and say, “Oh, if the students feel that strongly, then let’s divest from Israel immediately”? The point seemed less to make change than to manifest anger for its own sake, with the encampment having become old news.
The initial protest was an effective way to show how fervently a great many people oppose the war, but the time had come for another phase: slow, steady suasion. This is not capitulation but a change in tactics, with the goal of making the activists’ work pay off. We recall King most vividly in protests, including being imprisoned for his participation. However, his daily life as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was about endless and often frustrating negotiations with people in power, which eventually bore fruit. In this, as much as in marches, he and his comrades created the America we know today. Smoking hot orations about Black Power might have instilled some pride but created little beyond that.
Richard Rorty wrote in “Achieving Our Country” of the sense in our times that self-expression alone is a kind of persuasion. Marc Cooper, describing the left in the George W. Bush years, wrote of the danger of viewing “rebel poses” as substitutes for how “to figure out how you’re actually going to win an election.”
In our times, when the personal is political, there is always a risk that a quest to heal the world morphs into a quest for personal catharsis. Keeping in mind the difference will get the Columbia protesters closer to making the changes they champion.
13) Casting is so important. I’m sure I’ve mentioned my pet peeve of casting people who are the wrong age. Casting people who are clearly to attractive for the role is an (understandable) problem, too. “Anne Hathaway Is Too Hot for The Idea of You“
The Idea of You is based on Robinne Lee’s book of the same name, and both the film and its source material intend to critique how society renders women obsolete once they reach middle age. As Lee described in an interview, The Idea of You is about a woman “reclaiming her sexuality and rediscovering herself, just at the point that society traditionally writes women off as desirable and viable and whole.” It’s a fine message but one muddled by the choice in casting. Who could believe Hathaway as a neglected matron convinced she’s not worthy of love? Yes, Solène is a fictional creation, but she is overpowered by Hathaway’s real-life renown. The actress is a world-famous beauty who descends down red carpets in latexcouture. Her long brown tresses waterfall down her unblemished back like she’s a walking commercial for both TRESemmé and Neutrogena. Everywhere she goes, she leaves a trail of admirers with their mouths agape.
14) I saw my first Tesla cybertruck in the wild last week, “That Strange Piece of Metal Origami Embodies All of Elon Musk’s Flaws”
Mr. Musk came into the auto business as an investor, with no expertise in the industry. Like many of his tech counterparts, he operates as though his knowledge and skills are essentially transitive to any business. He’s repeatedly told that he’s a genius, and the venture capitalists who fund his industry routinely insist that a talented founder can run any company. Tesla’s early success lent credence to this view. But recent events — and the heightened scrutiny that all public companies receive — have revealed the extent to which his ego drives the company. He has embellished his engineering credentials, dismissed or fired experts who disagree with him and spent a great deal of energy on X trying to manage his public persona and cheerleading right-wing trolls. (Ross Gerber, a shareholder, says that has damaged the Tesla brand; he may be right, considering that sales are down among Democrats, according to one poll.)
The Cybertruck is a manifestation of Musk’s immaturity, both as a person and as a chief executive. It is futuristic in a way that is adolescent and unprincipled. It is reflective of a mentality that says rejecting expertise is appealingly subversive instead of plainly dangerous. It is not yet ready to exist in the adult world.
15) Such an important point from Jamelle Bouie. I’ve been ranting about this for years, “The Price We Pay for Having Upper-Class Legislators”
Out of more than 7,300 state legislators in the country, 116 — or 1.6 percent of the total — currently work or last worked in manual labor, the service industry or clerical or union jobs, according to a recent study conducted by Nicholas Carnes and Eric Hansen, political scientists at Duke University and Loyola University Chicago. By contrast, about 50 percent of U.S. workers hold jobs in one of those fields.
This problem afflicts both parties. In the last legislative session, the study found, 1 percent of Republican lawmakers and 2 percent of Democratic lawmakers had working-class backgrounds. In 10 states — Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — not a single state lawmaker works or has recently worked in an occupation that researchers would define as working class. Three of those states, incidentally, are ones in which lawmakers recently loosened rules on child labor.
What explains the almost total absence of working-class people from elected positions in state government? It may have something to do with how we structure our legislatures. Let’s look at Congress as a base line. The House and Senate are full-time legislatures with considerable staffs and resources at their disposal. Members work through the year and are paid accordingly: $174,000 per annum, with pay increases for those in leadership positions.
Now, there is a case to make that Congress needs more staff and higher pay — that to attract the best candidates for federal office, compensation should be competitive with salaries in private-sector fields of similar power, prestige and responsibility. The main point, however, is that Congress is at least structured in a way that would make it possible for a working-class person to do the job without jeopardizing his or her financial security (although this still leaves us with the problem of actually winning a seat).
You cannot say the same for most of our state legislatures. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, only 10 states have full-time legislatures, in which lawmakers spend at least 84 percent of their time engaged in the position, including on the legislative floor, in hearings and in committee meetings and doing constituent service. They are paid full-time salaries as well, with average annual compensation of about $82,000. On the other end, there are 14 states where the job is essentially part-time and lawmakers are paid accordingly, earning an average salary of just over $18,000 a year. The remaining states are classified as hybrid legislatures, in which lawmakers devote about 74 percent of their time to legislative duties, with an average annual salary around $41,000.
16) Terrific post from Yglesias, “America should spend more on prison management: Safer, more humane, less gang-ridden incarceration” Claude’s summary:
The main idea is that American states should invest more money in their prison systems to make conditions more humane and reduce long-term crime rates, even though this idea may be politically unpopular. Yglesias argues that many American prisons are effectively run by violent, racially segregated gangs due to factors like understaffing, large prison sizes, and inmates being housed far from home. This gang influence undermines rehabilitation, perpetuates crime cycles, and results in the severity of punishment being determined more by gangs than the justice system. Yglesias suggests that by investing in higher staff-to-inmate ratios, smaller prisons, and keeping inmates closer to home, the power of prison gangs could be reduced. While this would require upfront costs, Yglesias believes it could lead to less recidivism, allowing for further improvements over time. Yglesias points to evidence from other countries and an experimental program in Pennsylvania to suggest that investing in better prison conditions and more intensive parole could pay off in terms of reduced crime rates.
17) On the sex binary, “Male–female comparisons are powerful in biomedical research — don’t abandon them Binary sex studies have been denounced as too simplistic, but dropping them altogether would impede progress in a long-neglected area of biomedicine.”
Sex has been with us since our species originated as a result of sexual reproduction. The division of humans and other mammals into two sexes, female and male, derives from the fact that each individual is created by the union of a sperm and an egg. On the basis of the type of germ cell (gamete) that reproducing individuals are able to produce, there are only two sex categories in mammals. (Intersex is not a third category with respect to the type of gamete individuals can produce.) Indeed, understanding of how the mammalian genome evolved and how it functions is based on the foundation of sexual reproduction.
In mammals, as in many other taxa, the biological difference between sexes starts with the genetic difference encoded by the sex chromosomes — typically XX and XY in mammals — which are the only features that differ in female and male zygotes at the beginning of life. The salient role of the sex chromosomes is determining whether the embryo will develop ovaries or testes, because this specifies the type of germ cell that will be made, and the level and secretory patterns of testicular or ovarian hormones. Sex-chromosome genes and gonadal hormones influence almost every tissue in the body. The result might be sex differences in tissue development and function, or similar phenotypes based on different underlying mechanisms7.
As in all things in biology, in humans and other mammals there are variations in the number and type of sex chromosomes and in the downstream mechanisms determining the phenotypic features associated with sex. This leads to variability among individuals in diverse sex-related traits, such as genital anatomy, body size and some behaviours. Also, particularly in humans, biological factors that drive sex differences in cells and tissues are confounded by social and environmental factors that also cause differences between individuals.
To serve all individuals equitably — including those who experience an incongruency between the sex they were assigned at birth and their current gender identity, and those who do not find that they align with either the male or female sex category — the medical profession and biomedical community must identify and interrogate these variations in biological attributes and in lived experiences, all of which can influence people’s physiology, risk of developing disease and prognosis8. This includes carefully attending to the distinctions between cisgender, transgender and non-binary individuals when reporting findings.
Yet we maintain that, in humans and other mammals, the comparison of individuals who have XX chromosomes and ovaries with individuals who have XY chromosomes and testes is a necessary component of basic and clinical research that seeks to improve human health.
Right now, the protesters on college campuses and elsewhere want the killing in Gaza to stop. Whether you agree or not, they have the right to express their opinion collectively. Their protests should be protected by the First Amendment. Removing them by force just satisfies their desire for attention, though I think the attention shifts from the reason for their protests to their plight at the hands of police.
While I think protests should be protected, the left’s insistence on using tactics that disrupt other people’s lives is counterproductive. Blocking streets doesn’t just draw attention to the cause. It costs support of people who are inconvenienced. Twenty people shutting down a freeway angers the hundreds stuck in the traffic jam. Today’s American left is one of the most incompetent, self-defeating political movements in modern history.
19) The decline of local newspapers really is a tragedy. The case of the decline of the Wilmington Star.
20) Sex is back in movies. (And I have enjoyed quite a few of the more “adult” features mentioned herein).
Eroticism used to be common in studio movies like “Challengers,” which was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “Body Heat,” “Basic Instinct,” “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Disclosure,” “Cruel Intentions” and “Eyes Wide Shut” are among the many examples from the 1980s and ’90s.
In the 2000s, however, film companies started to obsessively focus on PG-13 franchises and animation — genres that could play to a global audience and sell merchandise. Studios also wanted to expand into China, where censors do not allow sex scenes. As a result, steamy storytelling began to dwindle on the big screen (except at art house theaters). Premium television picked up the slack.
Sex in mainstream movies was “pretty much gone” by 2019, as Ann Hornaday, chief film critic for The Washington Post, wrote in a column that year. A few months later, Kate Hagen, writing in Playboy magazine, found that only about 1.2 percent of films released between 2010 and 2020 contained an overt sex scene, the lowest decade total since the 1960s. (It peaked in the 1990s. Coincidentally or not, that was the decade when pornography started to become available online.)
Now, some filmmakers are pushing back.
Awards season brought “Saltburn,” with its arousing-disturbing bathtub scene and Barry Keoghan’s twirling, full-frontal finale. “Poor Things” found an insatiable Emma Stone romping through a Paris brothel. Christopher Nolan filmed the first sex scenes of his 35-year career for “Oppenheimer.” (“More interested in the joys of sex than any recent season I can remember,” as Kyle Buchanan, awards columnist for The New York Times, described the crop of contenders in February.)
Over the past year, the trickle of R-rated sex comedies in theaters turned into a relative torrent. “Anyone but You” found Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell going at it. “No Hard Feelings” starred Jennifer Lawrence as a kinda-sorta prostitute on a mission to deflower an awkward student. The libidinous “Bottoms,” “Back on the Strip” and “Joy Ride” also tried mixing sex with laughs.
21) Good stuff from Nate Silver, “For most people, politics is about fitting in: On student protests, negative polarization, and the politics of identity.”
So let me outline my theory. I think political beliefs are primarily formulated by two major forces:
Politics as self-interest. Some issues have legible, material stakes. Rich people have an interest in lower taxes. Sexually active women (and men!) who don’t want to bear children have an interest in easier access to abortion. Members of historically disadvantaged groups have an interest in laws that protect their rights
Politics as personal identity — whose team are you on. But other issues have primarily symbolic stakes. These serve as vehicles for individual and group expression — not so much “identity politics” but politics as identity. People are trying to figure out where they fit in — who’s on their side and who isn’t. And this works in both directions: people can be attracted to a group or negatively polarized by it. People have different reasons for arguing about politics, and can derive value from a sense of social belonging and receiving reinforcement that their choices are honorable and righteous.1
There’s arguably a third category here — politics as group solidarity and grievance abatement. When a group has experienced a past traumatic event and sees politics as a way to protect its interests or extract revenge, that can obviously be a powerful motivating force. But let’s set that aside for now, since it’s sort of a combination of the other two motivations.
Notice what’s missing from my list? The notion of politics as a battle of ideas…
Spring semester grades are in, so I fully intend to up the tempo of posting shortly. No more just the quick hits.
1) Jesse Wegman, “Trump’s Immunity Case Was Settled More Than 200 Years Ago”
Did the American Revolution actually happen? If it did, was it a good thing?
This is more or less what Justice Elena Kagan seemed to be wondering during the oral arguments in Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 immunity case at the Supreme Court on Thursday morning. “Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?” she asked.
Like her, I had assumed those questions were answered decisively in the affirmative more than 200 years ago. But now, after almost three hours of circuitous debate and bizarre hypotheticals at the Supreme Court, I’m not so sure.
The right-wing justices seemed thoroughly uninterested in the case before them, which involves a violent insurrection that was led by a sitting president who is seeking to return to office in a matter of months. Instead, they spent the morning and early afternoon appearing to be more worried that prosecuting Mr. Trump could risk future malicious prosecutions of former presidents by their political rivals. And they tried to draw a distinction between official acts, for which a president might have immunity from prosecution, and private acts, for which no immunity would apply.
The upshot was that a majority of justices appeared prepared to send the case back down to the lower courts for further unnecessary litigation, which would almost certainly eliminate any chance of a trial being held before Election Day.
2) Nate Silver, “Don’t confuse attention-seeking activists for “the youth vote””
The reporting on young voters doesn’t match the reality
Another part of that Business Insider headline is probably a lie too: it’s unlikely that the student loan forgiveness program — announced by President Biden in August 2022, overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2023, now being partly restored by the White House — made much difference in the election either way.
A recent poll of Americans aged 18-29 by Harvard’s Institute of Politics asked them to rank the importance of different issues. The poll did this in a slightly unusual way, by randomly generating pairs from a list of 16 issues and asking respondents to pick the more important one. (For instance, you’d have to pick whether climate change or health care was more important to you.) I’m not sure I’ve seen this methodology used before, but I like it: making pairwise comparisons is often easier for people than picking from a laundry list of issues. Anyway, here were the results:
Student debt performed terribly, winning only 26 percent of its matchups, basically making it the political equivalent of the Charlotte Hornets.1 Despite the headlines, it’s a boutique issue that most people don’t care about all that much.
3) NYT on the crisis at NPR (gift link). Best part is the comments on this. A bunch of liberal NYT readers who are frustrated that NPR is all-in on identity politics (yet another article where I pretty much am the median NYT commenter).
4) Love this from deBoer, “Fat or Thin, We Are Not Meant to Feel Good About Ourselves All the Time”
My various diets and workout regimes and tricks and schemes are powerless in the face of forces I can’t control. And yet gaining or losing weight is widely thought to be a matter of simple virtue or lack thereof. I find this senseless and deeply cruel.
But, of course, that is not enough for people like Sole-Smith. The understanding that losing weight is hard and highly variable depending on genetics and environment, and a subsequent dedication to not blaming individuals for how fat they are (and to minding your own business), are not enough. The fat activists instead insist, as Sole-Smith does, that fat people should not attempt to control their appetites at all, and that doing so constitutes “diet culture,” which is presumed to be psychically unhealthy and a vestige of bigotry no matter what the circumstance. They also tend to minimize or dismiss decades of research findings that show that carrying around a lot of excess fat is dangerous in and of itself. (This is, indeed, why I’m on Rybelsus, on top of the fact that it simply became too physically uncomfortable to walk around with 270 pounds on a 6’2 frame.) “Fat activism” vs. “cruel and unscientific insistence that fat people can just choose not to be fat” is a perfect synecdoche of our rotten political culture, a diorama of our whole system, which amounts to a series of dueling incurious orthodoxies prompted by the desire to inflict cruelty on one’s enemies. Someone else’s obesity is none of your business; insisting that there are no health consequences for being obesity is both personally and socially destructive. [emphasis mine]
5) Michael Hobbes is honestly one of the absolutely worst people on twitter. And it’s amazing that he produces a podcast called “you’re wrong about” where he frequently wrong. Thus, loved this takedown of Hobbes from Jesse Singal. “Michael Hobbes Is Spectacularly Wrong About Youth Gender Medicine: That’s because he doesn’t care what the truth is”
Michael Hobbes insists, on Twitter, that the Cass Review (which I wrote about here) vindicates his own view that youth gender medicine is in solid shape, and that the various experts and clinicians to whom we entrust gender-questioning children’s and teenager’s well-being are doing a good and responsible job.
This has long been Hobbes’ stance. He simply cannot believe that some journalists have spent so much time covering this issue in a critical manner, given the overwhelming evidence that the system works. And plus, even if there were issues, so few young people are transitioning that who cares? Hobbes views this as a moral panic, full-stop — and this is a popular view on the left, often founded on distortions and misconceptions.
For those who are unfamiliar, Hobbes is a pundit whose voice on these issues matters: he has built a career as an exceptionally successful DIY podcaster, probably one of the few self-made podcast millionaires. He originally became famous as the co-host of the blockbuster You’re Wrong About, which mostly revisited past controversies and explained how, well, we were wrong about them. These days he co-hosts Maintenance Phase, which involves a lot of debunking of obesity and weight-loss research, and If Books Could Kill, which involves a lot of debunking of airport bestsellers. Debunking really is his thing: he is trusted by a huge audience that views him as the last word on all manner of scientific and societal disputes.
The problem is, he’s exceptionally bad at it. Find me an even mildly complex subject he has discussed, and I will find you countless errors, misunderstandings, and, in some cases, what can only be fairly described as lies. And it isn’t just that he errs and misunderstands and lies quite frequently; it’s that he does it with the maximum possible amount of sanctimony and a complete absence of good faith. He has built a huge listenership out of the idea that American intellectual life is full of vapid morons stoking moral panics and peddling false cures, and he, Michael Hobbes, can help guide the curious but less informed reader through this morass. Far be it from me to disagree with his overall diagnosis, but I don’t think Hobbes is on the side he thinks he’s on.
A lot of the things Hobbes gets wrong are relatively low stakes, but some aren’t. Maintenance Phase, for example, is a profound train wreck of misinformation, and unfortunately, people do take their health and wellness cues from Michael Hobbes–style demagogues. (Seriously, just click this link, peruse for 20 minutes, and tell me this is a man you would trust to accurately predict where the sun will rise tomorrow morning.)
I’d like to give Hobbes the longer treatment he deserves someday, but because he produces so much bullshit, and because the bullshit asymmetry principle tells us that debunking bullshit takes orders of magnitude more time than excreting it, that will have to wait. For now, I just want to tackle a few of the misconceptions about youth gender medicine he has been propagating for years, and with renewed vigor since the Cass Review was published.
6) Love this from Chait, “Biden Was Right About Both Antisemitism and the Palestinians Sometimes basic humanity means seeing “both sides.””
In the wake of the most recent spree of antisemitic harassment, President Biden made a statement denouncing the harassment of Jews, while gesturing toward sympathy for the plight of Palestinian Arabs: “I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
Unsurprisingly, this caused an outrage response from the eliminationist left. Somewhat more surprisingly, unless you are familiar with this particular pathology, Biden’s statement also generated outrage on the political right.
“Biden condemns ‘antisemitic protests,’ and ‘those who don’t understand’ Palestinians in echo of Trump ‘both sides’ remark,” blared the New York Post. The Federalist (“Joe Biden Says There Are Very Fine People On Both Sides Of The Oct. 7 Debate”), The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page (“Biden Has a ‘Very Fine People’ Moment”), and other conservative media have repeated the theme.
This is a familiar anti-anti-Trump tactic: finding Trump’s most indefensible moments and then attempting to blow up a minor or imagined Biden infraction to an equivalent size to neutralize the issue. In this case, they are pretending Biden’s expression of sympathy for Palestinians is the equivalent of Donald Trump calling the pro-Confederate demonstrators in Charlottesville “very fine people.”
But there was nothing in Biden’s remark that hinted of sympathy for the antisemitic protests he was denouncing. He was remarking that Palestinian people are suffering and deserve sympathy and attention, and not allowing his radical critics to take ownership of that sentiment.
Since both sides has now become an epithet used by, well, both sides, it is worth making a defense of the general construct. The term both sides became sarcastic shorthand for a common practice in the mainstream media of pretending offenses that were solely committed by the Republican Party were being shared by Democrats. You could find this trope in stories about subjects like, say, the debt ceiling, where fake neutrality would cause reporters to pretend both parties were using hostage tactics.
Yet the general idea of adopting a broad moral framework and balancing competing moral principles remains correct. The error is to misapply it to situations in which all fault is concentrated in a single party. But I do not think that is a useful way to approach all political conflict. And it is an especially poor one for the conflict in the Middle East.
Biden has taken abuse from all directions for attempting to hold multiple values in his head at once. The president has, at various times, expressed the following ideas:
1. Terrorist attacks on civilians are wrong. 2. Israel has a right to self-defense that is bounded by a requirement to minimize civilian casualties. 3. Bigotry against Jews, Muslims, or Arabs is categorically wrong.
7) Wired on the rusting of Tesla’s cybertrucks (saw my first one in the wild this week)
The Cybertruck does not ship with clear coat, that outermost layer of transparent paint that comes as standard on almost every new motor vehicle on the planet. Instead, each Cybertruck owner has the option to purchase a $5,000 urethane-based film to “wrap your Cybertruck in our premium satin clear paint films. Only available through Tesla.”
Who knew untreated stainless steel might not be such a good idea for the exterior of a motor vehicle, especially considering that cars typically get left sitting outside in all weather for 95 percent of their lives? The whole automotive industry, that’s who.
Aside from the 1980s DMC DeLorean and a shiny 1960s Porsche, car companies have long steered clear of stainless steel panels. The material is heavy, relatively expensive, and hard to work with. It’s also stiff, which makes it potentially more lethal to anybody unlucky enough to be struck by a vehicle built with the stuff.
Stainless steel also stains. “Stainless” does not mean “never stains,” just that it stains less than other steels.
Have you been keeping track of the brutal civil war in Sudan? No? Here are the basics:
Central government vs. paramilitary group. Check.
Millions forced to flee their homes. Check.
On the brink of mass famine. Check.
Atrocities by both sides. Check.
Woefully insufficient aid from the US and the rest of the West. Check.
Tens of thousands slaughtered. Check.
Ceasefire desperately needed. Check.
Just the latest in a long history of conflict. Check.
Country was originally under British rule, gained independence shortly after World War II. Check.
Sound familiar? Oh wait. There’s one more thing:
Jews vs Muslims? No.
So no one cares. I imagine most college students could barely find Sudan on a map,¹ let alone figure out which side they ought to support if they cared.² I mean, probably both sides have some legitimate grievances, right? Just like every other conflict in the world except for Israel vs. Palestine, where everything is pristine and clear with no room for doubt about who the warmongers are.
9) I did not know Scott McClurg all that well, but he was good friends with a number of my friends in political science and, in my limited experience, a heckuva guy. He was finally done in by a long fight with brain cancer. As for the brain cancer, that seems pretty clearly the fault of our government and unscrupulous contractors. “After Building the Atomic Bomb, the Government Dumped Deadly Toxic Waste in a Quiet Suburb”
10) Mona Charen is not wrong, “The GOP Is the Party of Putin: The Russians’ takeover of the Republican party is arguably the most successful influence operation in history.”
Most Republican officeholders are not sociopaths, but they take their marching orders from one and have adjusted their consciences accordingly. The talking point J.D. Vance and his ilk favor is that they cannot be concerned about Ukraine’s border when our southern border is also being invaded. Of course it’s absurd to compare immigrants looking for work or safety to tanks, bombs, and missiles, but that’s what passes for Republican reasoning these days. In any case, it was revealed to be hollow when Biden and the Democrats offered an extremely strict border bill to sweeten aid for Ukraine, and the GOP turned it down flat.
Russia’s fingerprints are all over the Republicans’ failed attempt to impeach (in all senses of the word) Joe Biden. Their star witness, Alexander Smirnov—who alleged that Hunter and Joe Biden had been paid $5 million in bribes by Burisma—was indicted in February for making false statements. High-ranking Russians appear to be his sources.
Whether the subject is Ukraine, Biden’s so-called corruption, or NATO, Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history. If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the GOP than anyone other than Trump. GOP propagandists indulge fictions that even many Russians can see through: Ukraine is governed by Nazis; Russia is a religious, Christian nation; Russia is fighting “wokeness.”
Republicans are not so much isolationist as pro-authoritarian. They’ve made Hungary’s Viktor Orbán a pinup and they mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin must be pinching himself.
11) I did not take Paxlovid when I got Covid last year. I’m definitely not taking it next time I get Covid, Jeremy Faust, “Paxlovid does not reduce symptoms, definitive Pfizer trial finds.”
Pfizer finally published its study of Paxlovid’s effects on symptoms for standard-risk and high-risk vaccinated patients with Covid-19.
No difference in symptoms.
The upshot of the trial, known as EPIC-SR and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is that Paxlovid did not reduce the amount of time until patients got symptom relief. For anyone who thinks Paxlovid helps reduce symptoms, we now have high-quality, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trial data—from the makers of the drugand published in the most prestigious medical journal in the world—saying otherwise. Of study participants randomized to receive Paxlovid, the median number of days until sustained symptom relief was 12 days, compared to 13 days among placebo recipients That difference was not statistically significant (and even if it were, it would hardly align with the anecdotes people tell about taking it and getting immediately better; Inside Medicine readers know better, of course).
12) Well isn’t this some cool political science: “Does Political Diversity Inhibit Blood Donations?”
Does political diversity affect the prevalence of selfless behavior across a society? According to a recurrent finding from the study of social capital, ethnic diversity reduces prosocial behavior. We ask whether the same applies to partisan identity, by turning to a frequently used proxy for social capital: blood donations. The question is especially timely: the United States is currently experiencing its worst blood shortage in over a decade. Using survey results covering over 275,000 individuals in the US from 2010 to 2020, and a preregistered survey of an additional 3,500 respondents, we show that not all measures of social diversity have analogous effects on prosocial behavior. We find mixed evidence for a region’s share of immigrants being linked to lower blood donation by US citizens, and no negative effect for racial diversity. By contrast, political diversity appears to be highly significant. Specifically, individuals are less likely to donate blood when their partisan position is farther from the mean political identity in their state or commuting zone, and when they perceive themselves to be political outliers in their community. Affective polarization is known to be a tax on social interaction with out-partisans; as we show, depending on an area’s partisan makeup, it can also be a tax on prosocial behavior writ large.
13) I’ve been vaguely aware of a long-term feud between a nearby quarry looking to expand and a citizen group trying to stop the expansion. After this article, you can put me on the side of the quarry (in large part, because I use the adjacent Umstead Park all the time and the quarry does not negatively affect my enjoyment of it one bit):
After it passes under Interstate 40, Crabtree Creek forms a boundary between William B. Umstead State Park and Wake Stone Corp.’s Triangle Quarry.
On one side, people hike under a canopy of trees on the Company Mill and Inspiration trails, getting exercise and seeking refuge from the traffic and noise that surround the park.
Across the creek, up a hill and behind a concrete barrier, workers have been blasting and crushing rock for 42 years. The trucks that haul it away to construction sites share the road that people use to enter Umstead from Cary.
An aerial view the Wake Stone Corp. quarry next to William B. Umstead State Park. Raleigh-Durham International Airport has leased 105 acres to Wake Stone so it can expand its existing quarry operation between the park and Interstate 40. Travis Long tlong@newsobserver.com
Whether the quarry and the park have been good neighbors is at the heart of the conflict over whether Wake Stone should be allowed to create a second quarry on property owned by Raleigh-Durham International Airport. The fight over the proposed quarry continues to drag on eight years after it appeared in a draft of the airport master plan.
Sam Bratton, Wake Stone’s president and CEO, thinks the existing Triangle Quarry has been more than compatible with the park. Bratton cites a letter that Jean Spooner, the head of a coalition of groups that aims to protect the park, wrote in 1999.
Wake Stone Corp. was seeking approval for a new quarry in Chatham County and wanted some character references. It asked Spooner, head of The Umstead Coalition, to write about the company and its quarry.
“In the 10 years that I have been a member of The Umstead Coalition, I have never heard a complaint about Wake Stone’s operation next to Umstead,” she wrote. “Our experience with Wake Stone Corporation has been positive.” …
Spooner, a retired extension professor from N.C. State University, speaks for people who love the park and its nearly 5,600 acres of wilderness in the middle of a metro area of more than 2 million people. Many oppose sacrificing 105 acres of forested land next to the park for an open pit mine.
“A heavy industrial site does not generally make a great neighbor to a park,” Spooner said during a walk in the woods near the RDU property. “And this one is no exception.”
Bratton, who heads the company his father, John, started 54 years ago, takes a more pragmatic view on the proposed quarry. Rock needed to build roads, parking lots, houses, restaurants and other buildings in the Triangle has to come from somewhere, he says, and a central location off I-40 near Cary means shorter truck trips to where it’s needed.
Besides, Bratton says, the Triangle Quarry has been a good neighbor to Umstead since the 1980s.
“We’re not going to damage the park, and we’re not hurting anybody,” Bratton said, standing on the edge of the pit across Crabtree Creek from the RDU property. “We’re going to exist over there like we’ve existed over here, and most people don’t even know we’re here.”
This is very true. In addition to never having any issues during my trips to the park, I’ve literally never heard of another park using having a problem because it’s next to a quarry. Sure, we need to protect our environment and outdoor spaces, but this really strikes me as simply being opposed to the quarry expanding because it’s a quarry and people would rather just have that expanded quarry in someone else’s neighborhood.
14) This was fun! “Selected negative teaching evaluations of Jesus Christ”
“Very inconvenient class! Always holds lectures on top of mountains, in middle of the Sea of Galilee—but never close to the main campus.”
“Inconsistent attendance policy. Said we had to be in class by 9:00 a.m. every day. Over half the class showed up late or didn’t attend until the last meeting, but we all got the same participation grade.”
“He’s nice enough, I guess, but he doesn’t vet his TAs: they all provide completely different, conflicting lecture notes. (TIP: Try to get in Luke’s section.)”
“By week one, I was already tired of his anti-rich, pro-Samaritan bullshit. I wanted to take a course in Christianity, not liberalism.”
“Wears sandals too much. No one wants to see your dusty feet.”
“Not what I expected. They say his area of specialty is carpentry, but we never built anything.”
“Kind of absent-minded. My name’s Simon, and he’s called me ‘Peter’ for the entire semester.”
“I wanted to like this class, but on the first day, he submerged us in a river instead of going over the syllabus, and that was kind of a lot.”
We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over.
This prompted so many questions. Does this mean the insect apocalypse is over? Are pollinators saved? Did we unravel the web of maladies known as colony collapse disorder?
What’s it worth to you to minimize the risk of cutting off a finger?
$300? $600? $1,200? Or perhaps it’s worth nothing, if you think you’re already careful enough?
If you’re a woodworker willing to spend enough money, you can buy a table saw that detects fingers and stops the blade like this:
Video
1.00
CreditCredit…Jonathan Katz-Moses
(The hot dog is your finger.)
So, would you pay extra for this feature? What if the government said you had no choice but to pay up? And what if only one company held the patents for the safety mechanism?
Government mandates of new safety technology are classic trade-offs, whether the product is a power tool or a car or a pill. In this case, regulations requiring that table saws be sold with this safety device might mean a few thousand fingers saved per year. But they might also lead to higher costs for consumers…
When the technologies are patented, the trade-offs can become even more clear, like the high prices (and high profits) of drug companies in exchange for the innovation of new drugs. With table saws, it might similarly lead to a period of less competition and more profit for the company that developed the safety mechanism.
Among tools likely to be found in someone’s garage, table saws are the biggest driver of serious woodworking-related injuries: Each year they are responsible for about 30,000 injuries that require emergency department treatment — and nearly 4,300 amputations.
By comparison, the thousands of other products tracked by the Consumer Protection Safety Commission, a federal agency, are responsible for roughly 3,600 amputations per year combined.
17) Conor Friedersdorf on Utah’s approach to DEI, “The State That’s Trying to Rein in DEI Without Becoming Florida”
Utah’s Equal Opportunities Initiatives, or H.B. 261, which was signed into law in January, is more promising. It attempts to end the excessive and at times coercive focus on identity in higher education while also trying to protect academic freedom with carve-outs for research and course teaching.
The law prohibits universities from giving individuals preferential treatment or discriminating against them based on race, color, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, or gender identity. It forbids offices that help students from excluding anyone based on their identity. It bans mandatory campus training sessions that promote differential treatment. It prohibits “discriminatory practices,” such as ascribing “values, morals, or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs to an individual” because of their identity.
Yet it makes real compromises with DEI supporters. Race-based cultural centers, like the Black Cultural Center at the University of Utah, will stay open. And Utah does not plan to fire all DEI staffers, as happened at the University of Florida––the law preserves the funding that DEI offices had while mandating that they refocus and rebrand as centers that attend to the needs of any student having trouble at college.
Hmmm, wait a second. That sounds a lot like what happened right here in NC.
18) Biotechnology for the win. “Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought: The personalized shot gives a standard melanoma treatment a huge boost.”
19) Cool, “Storing Renewable Energy, One Balloon at a Time: To decarbonize the electrical grid, companies are finding creative ways to store energy during periods of low demand.”
Central Sardinia is not generally considered a hotbed of innovation: Arid and rural, some of its road signs riddled with bullet holes made by target-practicing locals, the setting recalls a Clint Eastwood western. Yet in Ottana, on the brownfield site of a former petrochemical plant, a new technology is taking shape that might help the world slow climate change. The key component of this technology is as unlikely as the remote location: carbon dioxide, the chief cause of global warming.
Energy Dome, a start-up based in Milan, runs an energy-storage demonstration plant that helps to address a mismatch in the local electricity market. “In Sardinia during the day, everyone goes to the sea,” Claudio Spadacini, chief executive of Energy Dome, said. “They don’t use electricity, but there’s a lot of supply,” he added, referring to the Italian island’s abundant sunlight.
Energy Dome uses carbon dioxide held in a huge balloon, the “dome” in the company’s name, as a kind of battery. During the day, electricity from the local grid, some produced by nearby fields of solar cells, is used to compress the carbon dioxide into liquid. At night, the liquid carbon dioxide is expanded back into gas, which drives a turbine and produces electricity that is sent back to the grid.
Solar and wind power are fast-growing renewable sources, but they rely on nature’s intermittent schedule to produce electricity. Many researchers and policymakers say that storing such energy until needed, for hours or even days, is key to transitioning economies away from fossil fuels. “Advancing energy-storage technologies is critical to achieving a decarbonized power grid,” Jennifer M. Granholm, the U.S. energy secretary, said in a 2022 statement, when her department announced that it would commit more than $300 million for long-duration energy storage.
Companies are developing and marketing varied and creative ways to store renewable energy: liquefying carbon dioxide, de-rusting iron, heating towers filled with sand to temperatures almost hot enough to melt aluminum. But predicting our energy-storage needs in the future, after a huge energy transformation, is a daunting prospect, and which of these approaches, if any, will prove effective and profitable is unclear.
20) And this one is even cooler because I was part of the research study! “A Blood Test Shows Promise for Early Colon Cancer Detection: Many patients are reluctant to undergo colonoscopies or conduct at-home fecal tests. Doctors see potential in another screening method.”
Early detection of colon cancer can prevent a majority of deaths from this disease, possibly as much as 73 percent of them. But just 50 to 75 percent of middle-aged and older adults who should be screened regularly are being tested.
One reason, doctors say, is that the screening methods put many people off.
Or, as Dr. Folasade P. May, a gastroenterologist at UCLA Health puts it, “either you take this horrible laxative and then a doctor puts an instrument up your behind, or you have to manipulate your own poop.”
But something much simpler is on the horizon: a blood test. Gastroenterologists say such tests could become part of the routine blood work that doctors order when, for example, a person comes in for an annual physical exam…
About 53,000 Americans are expected to die from colorectal cancer this year. It is the second-most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States, and while the death rate in older adults has fallen, it has increased in people under age 55.
Current guidelines recommend screenings starting at age 45. The problem is convincing more people to be screened.
Enter the blood test. It takes advantage of the discovery that colon cancers and large polyps — clumps of cells on the lining of the colon that occasionally turn into cancers — shed fragments of DNA into the blood.
A study published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine found that a blood test searching for such DNA called Shield and made by the company Guardant Health detected 87 percent of cancers that were at an early and curable stage. The false positive rate was 10 percent.
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.”
Fully Myelinated 
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