Quick hits (part I)

1) So much good stuff in this Noah Smith interview with a futurist:

So oil is where Putin makes his money. Russia makes about three times as much money from sales of oi and oil products as it does from the sale of natural gas.  Why is natural gas interesting?

Because natural gas (methane) keeps the lights on. And because it’s a regionally traded commodity.  You see, oil is a global commodity. Oil is moved extensively in tanker ships around the world. Europe could stop buying Russian oil and buy oil (or refined oil products, like gasoline or diesel) from somebody else. There’s differences, but in general it’s a pretty fungible market.

Natural gas is different.  The world has relatively little shipping capacity. To move gas over oceans you have to chill it to -160 degrees C, and turn it into a liquid. That’s doable. But it’s relatively expensive. And so most gas is moved by pipeline. That means that if the gas link between Europe and Russia were shut down for any reason – political, economic, or physical – that you have a much harder time replacing that supply.

Now, this natural gas doesn’t really make all that much money for Putin. I mean, it’s on the order of $80B / year (before this crisis), which is a third of the amount Putin makes from oil. Yet gas is actually more important in terms of his leverage over Europe.  That’s because of the problems shipping gas around that I mention above, and also because gas is used to keep the lights on and houses warm.

If you look at where Europe uses methane gas, one third of it goes to buildings. That means building heat. Literally keeping your home or office warm.  Another third is “heat and power” – that’s electricity. That’s keeping the lights on.  Another third is “industry”. And that’s a mix of using natural gas to make ammonia, a key ingredient in fertilizer, which massively affects crop yields and thus food prices, and other industrial uses such as refineries, making plastics, and so on.  You can see this breakdown in this chart from Eurostat:

The combination of natural gas’s greater difficulty of transportation vs oil, along with its mission critical role in keeping buildings warm, the lights on, and making fertilizer to apply to fields, means that, even though it earns Putin less money than oil, it’s incredible leverage that he has over Europe.  

Gas is where he has Europe over a barrel. Or where he thinks he does. And reducing or eliminating the need for Russian natural gas is going to be and incredible driver of innovation…

N.S.: Of course we should be doing the same thing in the U.S., right? How good was the Build Back Better bill, and how much does that bill’s death set back U.S. and global decarbonization efforts? Is this a minor setback or a catastrophe?

R.N.: We absolutely should be passing more policy in the US. The energy provisions of the Build Back Better bill are fantastic. They’re not a panacea, but they would amount to the most substantial federal legislation advancing clean energy of all time. The provisions advance clean electricity, electric vehicles, expansion of the power grid, new technologies like green hydrogen, and even carbon capture and direct air capture. Multiple analysis found that BBB would have gone a long way towards the US hitting its Paris commitments and more. And it would most likely lead to lower energy prices for American consumers, as solar and wind are just plain cheaper than coal and gas, and electric vehicles are increasingly becoming cheaper than gas-guzzlers (especially when you include the cost of fuel and maintenance).

Unfortunately, Build Back Better appears to be dead. By which I mean that the omnibus bill is likely dead. Manchin has actually said that he would be open to an energy-only BBB bill, with some initiatives in it to increase US fossil fuel production as well. The theory is that increasing US fossil fuel production would help increase US resilience to oil price shocks. In reality, that doesn’t do much, and the private sector has all the approvals it needs to drill a whole lot more for oil and gas. Renewables and EVs really do much more for energy security. Even so, I’d take such a deal with Manchin. Deploying more renewables makes them cheaper. Deploying more electric cars and trucks makes them cheaper. Scaling green hydrogen technology makes green hydrogen cheaper. The same just isn’t true of fossil fuels. It’s a battle of technology’s always-improving economics on one side, vs a “resource” play that has supply / demand dynamics that cause prices to fluctuate, sometimes wildly, on the other side. Technology will always win. Subsidize both of them equally, and the tech side will gain more.

Alas, Sinema has thrown cold water on such a deal…

The other policy we don’t talk about nearly enough, that’s even more under-rated, is getting out of the way of building things. In the US, a host of regulations empower NIMBY activists, land owners, and conservatives who just don’t like clean energy to block the development of solar and wind. Even worse policies make it practically impossible to build new electricity transmission in the US. And long-range, coast-to-coast power transmission is actually one of the cheapest ways to increase how much solar and wind we can use on the grid, to increase grid reliability across the country, and to lower the cost of energy. But bad regulation at the federal, state, and local level makes it hard to build. We have to fix that. The Left has to own up to this and fix it. This is a complete moral failing on the left, in my opinion. You want more clean energy? Fix NEPA.  Get rid of the Jones Act so we can actually build offshore wind in the US. And Congress has to reform permitting of transmission lines to make it at least as easy to build a transmission line as it is to build an oil or gas pipeline. It’s hilarious that today it’s much much much easier to build a dirty, polluting natural gas or oil pipeline in the US than it is to build an electricity transmission line to carry clean electricity. And fixing that requires action at the Federal level. And it also requires defeating lefty NIMBYs at the state and local level. You want progress? Get out of the way…

N.S.: Is it possible to be any more specific at this point? Do you have a short list of technologies that are in the more nascent, research-intensive stage? 

R.N.: I don’t want to be too prescriptive on the “how” of the technologies. But in terms of the goals, yes. Here are some of the biggest unsolved climate problems:

• Ultra-long duration storage – economically storing weeks of electricity.

• Cheap clean industrial heat & industrial processes – making steel, cement, plastics, and chemicals without carbon emissions, at a price similar to or cheaper than how it’s done today with coal or natural gas.

• Clean “firm” energy resources – Next generation energy resources that can produce 24/7/365, anywhere on earth, in a compact footprint, including next generation advanced geothermal, advanced nuclear fission (thought that already gets the most funding of any energy technology), and energy fusion.

• Decarbonizing aviation and shipping – Super high energy density batteries, or more likely, clean “electrofuels” made from solar and wind, at the same price or cheaper than jet fuel or bunker fuel are today.

• Decarbonizing building heat – Can we make heating a building with clean electricity, including the installation and retrofit, as cheap as it is to burn natural gas.

• Decarbonizing agriculture and ending deforestation – This is a big one. A quarter of the world’s emissions come from agriculture forestry and land use – AFOLU in the IPCC’s lingo. That comes form deforestation which is mostly caused by using land to grow livestock or biofuels. And it comes from fertilizer applied to the fields, which decomposes into nasty stuff like N2O and NOX that are potent greenhouse gasses. And then the animals themselves, especially cows, burp up methane. Each of those could use billions and billions each year in R&D funding.

• Stabilizing fragile ecosystems – Even at 1.5 degrees C of warming (which we’re going to exceed) you’re going to see a lot more forest fires, and we could see a nearly complete loss of shallow water coral reefs. What can we do to intervene to make these ecosystems more resilient? Can we plant trees that don’t burn so easily? Grasses that sequester more moisture or carbon in the soils? Can we engineer corals that can survive higher temperatures and acidity? Or can we improve coral reef microbiomes to make them more resilient? Can we create robots or other ways of replanting corals that don’t require expensive, non-scalable human divers.

• Direct climate system interventions. Geo-engineering. Most controversially, I will say that our biggest single climate policy miss, by far, is that we are doing essentially zero to advance the state of science of intervening in the climate system. I’m talking about a range of things here, from cloud brightening, to stabilizing glaciers that are melting, or somehow intervening in methane release from a thawing arctic, and all the way up to solar radiation management geo-engineering. Everyone seems to hate this idea. But I have news for you. We are not going to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. It is just not going to happen. We have missed that boat. We might stay below 2 degrees Celsius if we get our act together and deploy the technologies we have ready or have in the pipeline. We have a really great shot at staying below 2.5 or 3 degrees C. And we could even pull it in to below 2, I believe. But we’ve just plain missed 1.5 degrees Celsius. I want people to get that in their heads. There is no plausible scenario in which the world decarbonizes fast enough to hit that goal. Unless… Unless you reflect a tiny bit of the sun’s energy back into space. You’d probably do it by spraying aerosols into the stratosphere. It looks like it would be really cheap. People are terrified of the idea. But in part they’re terrified because we don’t understand the side effects. Actually, we might understand them better than people think. But okay. If that’s a problem, let’s do some very small scale experiments. And let’s fund 100x as much modeling of this as we have today. Let’s get serious about understanding how geo-engineering would work. Let’s have it ready as an option. It’s far better to have these tools available and not use them, then to find out that we’re up against a wall, that some climate tipping point is going much faster than we expected, and that we don’t have the tools that could help save us. So I will plant my flag here. Today, the world spends roughly single digit millions of dollars a year on geo-engineering research. Does that sound like a lot? It’s not. We spent more than $60 billion. Billion with a B. On venture capital investments into clean energy last year. In 2022 we’re going to spend probably a TRILLION dollars deploying solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles.  That’s awesome.  But it’s not enough. Let’s spend an addition, say, 1/1000th of that amount, or $1 Billion / year, on researching solar radiation management geo-engineering and other direct climate interventions. That would increase research in the area by roughly a factor of 100, which is about right.

2) Lots of people talking about this Vanity Fair piece about the “new right” funded by Peter Thiel.  I didn’t actually read it closely, but tell me if I should. 

3) The case for new houses (my house was built in 1985, for what it’s worth):

And despite what old-home snobs may believe, new housing is also just plain nice to live in—in many ways an objective improvement on what came before.

Noise is now appropriately recognized as one of the biggest quality-of-life issues in cities. As I write this in the living room of my 1958 Los Angeles dingbat, I can hear the neighbor on my right shouting over the phone and the neighbor on my left enjoying reggaeton at maximum volume. The distant hum of the 405 is forever in the background. Back when I lived in a mid-2000s apartment building in D.C.—a relatively old building in our pro-growth capital—I had no such distractions. Double-paned windows kept out virtually all street noise, even on a busy downtown intersection, while fiberglass insulation kept neighbors from bothering one another. I wasn’t even certain that I had neighbors until we bumped into each other several months after I moved in.

Modern homes and apartment buildings are not only far better insulated—they also feature modern HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) technologies, such that homes can be warmed and cooled without using nearly as much energy as their older counterparts. Given that heating and cooling account for nearly half of all household energy use in the U.S., the savings from new housing could have serious implications for climate change. That little space heater struggling to keep your drafty old apartment warm—to say nothing of your window AC unit—isn’t just unsightly. It’s also a climate failure.

In smaller ways, too, new construction is nicer. Bathrooms and closets are larger, as are kitchens, which are no longer walled off from the rest of the home. Modern windows let you bathe a unit in natural light, without temperature or noise concerns. Smaller unit sizes—think studios and one-bedrooms—better reflect shrinking households. And in-unit laundry is more common now, as are balconies—amenities that have only grown in value amid recurring COVID-related shutdowns.

For comparison’s sake, consider the Japanese approach. The average Japanese home is demolished 30 years after construction, the realistic life span of a typical cheaply built structure. The Japanese have virtually no “used home” market: Fully 87 percent of Japanese home sales are new, compared with 11 to 34 percent in the West. As a result, most Japanese households enjoy a new house or apartment with all the modern amenities and design innovation that entails, including ever-improving earthquake standards. And this steady supply of new housing has helped make Tokyo one of the most affordable cities in the world, despite a growing population.

All that construction consumes a fair share of resources, and housing in Japan doesn’t double as an investment vehicle. But I, for one, would take that trade-off.

4) Jerusalem Demsas on what’s behind the current moment for student loan forgiveness.  A number of theories, but I think it’s mostly this:

Reason five: The power of college graduates

According to Catalist data, roughly 43 percent of the 2020 Biden electorate graduated from a four-year college or university. Compare that with 2012, when, according to Pew, just 36 percent of registered Democrats had completed a four-year degree or more. Given that trend, student-loan forgiveness may seem like the classic tale of a political party transferring a valuable benefit to a crucial constituency.

Although college-educated voters are an important segment of the Democratic Party, no one identity group is completely dominant. The party has long been a coalitional organization stitched together loosely and lacking a clear ideological core. Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, explained a coalitional shift within the party in recent years. “Democrats are becoming more consistently liberal in a variety of ways, and they’re becoming more upper-middle-class all at once,” he told me. “And that creates some awkwardness.”

Awkward indeed that so much energy has been spent on a policy proposal that would affect just 13 percent of the population, and that would send the most dollars to high-income earners and those with graduate degrees. The fervor with which student-loan advocates argue that these policies are in fact racially and economically progressive may be an attempt to resolve the awkwardness that Schlozman describes—advocates of debt cancellation are trying to build a coherent narrative for why a diverse coalition, many of whom have never attended college, should be in favor of forgiveness.

College-educated voters are not just dominant within the Democratic Party; they also dominate the media and, naturally, academia—two institutions that have significant power over what issues are brought to the fore. Importantly, academia and media have also become notoriously unstable work environments lacking sufficiently well-paying jobs. The demographics and precarity of these fields are likely playing a role in the prominence of the student-loan-forgiveness debate.

There are many good proposals for how to forgive student debt, particularly targeted programs aimed at helping those who attended predatory institutions or those who never received a degree and thus missed out on the higher earning potential that comes with it. But the issue’s prominence in our discourse has less to do with its merits than the changing political landscape that has stymied legislative efforts and given college graduates agenda-setting power.

5) Really, really good interview with Yashca Mounk on his new book about multiethnic democracy:

Gupta: Let’s discuss the ideal scenario. We talked a little bit about it in terms of the group dynamics we want to encourage. What changes would you make to American society and politics to make that a reality? 

Mounk: I actually think the most important reason why I’m optimistic about the future is not that I’ve come up with a great solution, and I’m going to tell you what that solution is, and then if only you will listen to me, we can right the ship—I think a lot of books have that kind of structure and it’s never very convincing. The reason why I’m optimistic is that when I look at Twitter, I despair. When I look at a lot of newspapers, I despair. When I look at the cable news shows, I definitely despair. But when I look at what’s actually going on in society, I don’t despair. America has become much more tolerant in the last decades. We have really rapid socioeconomic progress of minority and immigrant groups, in a way that’s rarely appreciated by either the left or the right. The best study suggests that immigrants from Central or South America, for example, are rising up the socio-economic ranks as rapidly as Irish and Italian Americans did a century ago. This shows that the far-right is wrong in believing that there’s something somehow inferior about them. But it also shows that parts of the left are wrong in thinking that our countries are so racist and so discriminatory that nonwhite people don’t have opportunity. Thankfully, actually, people have opportunity. We see that in the way in which their children or grandchildren in particular are rising up very rapidly. Now, there are also all kinds of sensible things we can do in terms of how we think about our country, the education we engage in, the kind of patriotism we embrace, the kinds of policies and acts of Congress that we should pass—and that’s important, too. But fundamentally, my optimism comes from the developments that I already see happening in society.

6) Jane Coaston on don’t say gay legislation:

I didn’t come out as bisexual when I was a kid. I grew up in Ohio in the ’90s and attended Catholic school. The message I received was that women who weren’t feminine by traditional standards were vaguely suspicious. So I was clearly in big trouble, and bisexuality seemed like something I’d only get to achieve if I could somehow make it to a safer place. If I had learned at some point when I was young that being L.G.B.T.Q. was a normal way to be a human being — not a sign that I was evil and disgusting or, even worse to a chubby girl in junior high, ugly — I could have avoided so much anguish and time spent trying to “fix” myself on evangelical Christian message boards. So to me, bills like Florida’s HB 1557, which bars “instruction” on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, are vague at absolute best and extraordinarily dangerous at worst, aimed at solving a “problem” that I do not think exists. This week, for “The Argument,” I was grateful to have had a chance to discuss the Florida bill, along with similar legislation, with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg, columnists for Times Opinion.

As Ross recently wrote, some of these bills have been put forward by people who see the growing number of L.G.T.B.Q. Americans as a bad thing. The share of younger Americans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender has risen over the last decade, including 21 percent of those born between 1997 and 2003. Ross wrote in his column that the reactions to these numbers can be sorted into three groups: “this is great news,” “we shouldn’t read too much into it,” and “this trend is bad news.”

 

I can be found resting happily somewhere in between the first two groups. That more people are L.G.B.T.Q. seems like what would logically happen in a society that is more affirming of being L.G.B.T.Q.

But having read a great deal by social conservatives about the new bills, it seems to me that these writers believe that there are simply too many L.G.B.T.Q. kids — “far in excess of what can be explained by more people coming out as stigma declines” — and that this must be the fault of teachers “grooming” them or a media environment that’s too permissive. Because otherwise, those kids would be, as conservative writer Rod Dreher might put it, normal.

I would love to know the degree to which LGBT-identifying young adults in other western Democracies mirrors the rise here in the U.S. or is different and I’ve not been able to find that.  I’d love to know the percentage in France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, etc.

7) Singal and Chait both pushing back against a common leftist trope on twitter, but Chait I can link and quote:

In a widely shared post, the left-wing writer Michael Hobbes expressed a popular progressive stance on the value of Twitter as a forum that has elevated the voices of “previously marginalized groups.”

Photo: @RottenInDenmark/Twitter

If we follow the most intuitive understanding of the term “marginalized groups,” this is the complete opposite of reality. The New York Times studied this dynamic and found that Twitter magnifies the voices of disproportionately white college-educated liberals. It marginalizes the views of Black and non-college-educated voters.

This all became glaringly evident during the 2020 presidential primaries, when almost nobody on Twitter supported Joe Biden — until it turned out the Democratic Party electorate looked very different. That same dynamic has repeated itself in numerous elections that have exposed the vast gulf between the white college-educated simulacrum of the Democratic electorate on Twitter and the brick-and-mortar version.

Yes, Twitter has been terrific for me. I enjoy the site as a way to make lots of jokes, find stories that might otherwise not come to my attention, and promote my work. If Twitter had never been invented, my career would probably be in worse shape. Of course, I’ve never been marginalized.

Now, it is true that Twitter has elevated the views of politically marginalized groups — specifically, people with very left-wing views. And those groups have gained dramatically greater levels of influence over the media, culture, and politics as a result. That is a change that has had some positive and some negative results.

But let’s be honest: What it actually means in practice is that it has made the Democratic Party, the news media, and culture more responsive and accountable to the views of white college-educated progressives like Michael Hobbes. And it has grown less responsive and accountable to the views of Americans who are working class and people of color.

8) This seems not great, “Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be”

As you gaze across the rows of brightly colored fruits and vegetables in the produce section of the grocery store, you may not be aware that the quantity of nutrients in these crops has been declining over the past 70 years.

Mounting evidence from multiple scientific studies shows that many fruits, vegetables, and grains grown today carry less protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C than those that were grown decades ago. This is an especially salient issue if more people switch to primarily plant-based diets, as experts are increasingly recommending for public health and for protecting the planet.

Nutrient decline “is going to leave our bodies with fewer of the components they need to mount defenses against chronic diseases—it’s going to undercut the value of food as preventive medicine,” says David R. Montgomery, a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington in Seattle and co-author with Anne Biklé of What Your Food Ate.

Even for people who avoid processed foods and prioritize fresh produce, this trend means that “what our grandparents ate was healthier than what we’re eating today,” says Kristie Ebi, an expert in climate change and health at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Scientists say that the root of the problem lies in modern agricultural processes that increase crop yields but disturb soil health. These include irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting methods that also disrupt essential interactions between plants and soil fungi, which reduces absorption of nutrients from the soil. These issues are occurring against the backdrop of climate change and rising levels of carbon dioxide, which are also lowering the nutrient contents of fruits, vegetables, and grains.

Experts say it’s important to keep these declines in perspective and not let this news deter you from eating a variety of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to maintain your health. But they hope the results will spur more people to care about how their food is being grown.

9) This is definitely not great, “Covid vaccine concerns are starting to spill over into routine immunizations”

Kids aren’t getting caught up on routine shots they missed during the pandemic, and many vaccination proponents are pointing to Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy as a big reason why.

Public health experts, pediatricians, school nurses, immunization advocates and state officials in 10 states told POLITICO they are worried that an increasing number of families are projecting their attitudes toward the Covid-19 vaccine onto shots for measles, chickenpox, meningitis and other diseases.

That spillover of vaccine hesitancy may also be fueling an uptick in religious exemption requests from parents of school-aged children and is making it more difficult for states to catch up with children who missed immunizations during the pandemic’s early days when families skipped doctor’s appointments, they say.

That has pediatricians, school nurses and public health experts worried that preventable and possibly fatal childhood illnesses, once thought to be a thing of the past, could become more common.

“We just want to keep measles, polio, and all the things we vaccinate against out of the political arena,” said Hugo Scornik, a pediatrician and president of the Georgia Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

He was alarmed by the introduction of several bills in the state legislature in the last year to limit vaccinations, including one that would have ended immunization requirements in schools. Several states considered similar pieces of legislation that would have either removed or whittled away at school vaccination requirements, though none moved forward.

10) NPR, “The education culture war is raging. But for most parents, it’s background noise”

Math textbooks axed for their treatment of race; a viral Twitter account directing ire at LGBTQ teachers; a state law forbidding classroom discussion of sexual identity in younger grades; a board book for babies targeted as “pornographic.” Lately it seems there’s a new controversy erupting every day over how race, gender or history are tackled in public school classrooms.

But for most parents, these concerns seem to be far from top of mind. That’s according to a new national poll by NPR and Ipsos. By wide margins – and regardless of their political affiliation – parents express satisfaction with their children’s schools and what is being taught in them.

11) I like this from Drum.  I want to actually look at the data on this some myself:

Why don’t Americans trust experts anymore? Sean Illing interviewed Michael Lewis about this recently, but they somehow managed to miss the obvious. Here are three charts from the GSS survey:

There are blip and bloops, but around 1990 Republican trust in experts started a steady downward trend compared to Democrats. Republican distrust of the press is a long-told story. Distrust in medicine, which far predates COVID-19, likely has something to do with abortion, treatment of addiction as a disease, and perhaps increasing physician support of national health care. And distrust of the scientific community is pretty obviously because the scientific community keeps producing inconvenient conclusions.

I’m not claiming this is the whole story. But overall, distrust of experts is a Republican-driven phenomenon. You’re missing a lot if you don’t acknowledge that.

 

12) Ian Milhiser on the latest school prayer case, “The justices may take a big bite out of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, or they might take a simply enormous bite out of it.”

Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, briefly explained

Kennedy involves Joseph Kennedy, a former public school football coach in Bremerton, Washington, who for many years would lead post-game prayer sessions for his players and for players on the opposing team. After his school district ordered him to discontinue these sessions, he largely did so, but he still insisted upon going to the 50-yard line after games and visibly praying in front of his players and the gathered spectators.

Kennedy also went on a nationwide media tour — at one point, Good Morning America did a segment on him — promoting his desire to tout his faith while he was coaching his students. This led many of Kennedy’s supporters to become disruptive during games. After one game, for example, so many people stormed the field to support Kennedy that a federal appeals court described it as a “stampede.” The district itself complained that this rush of people knocked over members of the school’s marching band, and that it was unable “to keep kids safe.”

Meanwhile, at least one parent complained to the school that his son “felt compelled to participate” in Kennedy’s prayers, despite the fact that he is an atheist, because the student feared “he wouldn’t get to play as much if he didn’t participate.”

Eventually, the school placed Kennedy on leave, after he rebuffed the school’s attempt to reach an accommodation that would allow Kennedy to pray without disrupting games or pressuring students into unwanted religious acts.

Under existing law, this should not be a difficult case. The Supreme Court suggested in Lee v. Weisman (1992) that public school-sponsored religious activity is inherently coercive, both because of the authority school officials wield over students, and because students who stand out are likely to face peer pressure to fall in line. Such pressure, the Court said in Lee, may be “subtle and indirect” but it also “can be as real as any overt compulsion,” as it leaves a young nonadherent with “a reasonable perception that she is being forced by the State to pray in a manner her conscience will not allow.”

But the Court’s 6-3 Republican majority has been quite clear about its eagerness to overrule longstanding religion cases. One of the new majority’s very first actions after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave Republicans a supermajority on the Court, for example, was to give churches and other places of worship a new right to defy public health orders during the Covid-19 pandemic.

13) I thought I’d give David French an open-minded read with his contention that the coach “should be allowed to pray.”  But the fact that French completely elides the key fact of the coach’s coercive power over his players made me even more firm in my opinions on this one. 

14) I think I missed this from Jeffrey Sachs in 2020, “No, Professors Are Not Brainwashing Their Students”

So What Does College Do?

It wasn’t always this way. Data from the 1940s to 1970s show that there used to be a strong relationship between college attendance and political liberalism. But the link has been weakening for decades, probably because of hardening political attitudes among freshmen. High schoolers also have a much wider range of colleges and universities to choose from, making it easier to find an institution that matches their pre-existing beliefs.

But none of this means higher education has no political effect. College graduates are more likely to be politically active than their non-graduate peers, especially if they major in the social sciences. They also tend to be more politically knowledgeable, as shown in a recent study of identical twins. And while college seems to have little impact on whether a student is liberal or conservative, a number of studies find that it does make them more supportive of civil liberties and gender egalitarianism, though not less religious.

However, even these changes are more likely due to the influence of peers (i.e., other students) than faculty. Indeed, one of the best predictors of whether a student’s political views will change in university is their degree of social embeddedness. The more involved a student is in campus clubs, Greek life, or athletics, the more likely he or she will adopt their peers’ political views. Students want to fit in, and that pressure affects their politics. But it’s not the approval of their faculty they crave. It’s their classmates.

Thus, while college graduates do tend to be more liberal than non-graduates, it is unlikely that college itself is responsible. On the contrary, someone who enters college a conservative will almost certainly leave as one. The same happens with liberals.

Some changes take place, especially in terms of general political knowledge, activism, and attitudes toward gender equality and civil rights. But anything beyond this is more likely due to socialization and peer pressure. Faculty have very little to do with it.

15) Love this from Pamela Paul, “The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’”

Did Dana Schutz, a white artist, have the right to paint Emmett Till? Was it fair that a white historian, David Blight, won a Pulitzer for his biography of Frederick Douglass? Should Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner be the ones to update “West Side Story,” a musical conceived by four Jewish men but fundamentally about Puerto Rican lives?

Let’s make it personal: Am I, as a new columnist for The Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?

Not according to many of those who wish to regulate our culture — docents of academia, school curriculum dictators, aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts. It’s the ultimate litmus test: Only those whose “lived experience” matches the story are qualified to tell the tale.

So what is this vaunted “lived experience”? You may recognize it by its longstanding name, “personal experience,” or less excitingly, “experience.” But “lived experience,” with its earthy suggestion of authority, says to other people: Unless you have walked in my shoes, you have no business telling my story.

Here’s the argument: The dominant culture (white, male, Western, straight) has been dictating the terms for decades, effectively silencing or “erasing” the authentic identities and voices of the people whose stories are being told. The time has come to “center” these other voices.

In practice and across the arts, this means that only those people who have directly experienced discrimination or oppression, for example, or who in some way embody that experience should be allowed to portray characters, create stories or drive programming about it. They’re the ones who can truly interpret those tales accurately. The goal is greater share of the narrative and greater stake in any profits.

It’s essentially a turf war. Only Latino authors can write novels about Latinos. Only Holocaust survivors can convey the truth of the Holocaust. Only disabled people can portray disabled people. Everyone else is out.

16) Fascinating in Smithsonian, “How Yellow Fever Intensified Racial Inequality in 19th-Century New Orleans: A new book explores how immunity to the disease created opportunities for white, but not Black, people”

17) I’m really intrigued by Katherine Harden’s work on genetics and I love Thomas Frank’s Success and Luck, so I quite enjoyed Frank’s review of Harden’s book:

That things like eye color, body mass, and longevity are heritable was known millennia before anyone even knew what genes were. Studies documenting the heritability of sexual orientation, academic achievement, schizophrenia, and political beliefs are relatively recent. As Kathryn Paige Harden notes in The Genetic Lottery, many social scientists are more comfortable acknowledging some of these linkages than others. Although it is uncontroversial to note that speech pathologies are heritable, for example, few seem comfortable discussing evidence suggesting that the same is true of a propensity to homelessness.

There’s an obvious explanation for this asymmetry. “For over 150 years,” Harden writes, “the science of human heredity has been used to advance racist and classist ideologies, with horrific consequences for people classified as ‘inferior’” (p. 12). A behavioral geneticist on the psychology faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, she is quick to disassociate herself from Social Darwinists and their ilk. An unapologetic egalitarian in the Rawlsian tradition, she argues that our efforts to construct a more just society will be more likely to succeed if we ground them on our best understanding of the forces that spawn existing social structures. She presents compelling evidence that genetic variation is one of the most important of those forces.

Income and wealth inequality clearly result in part from traits we inherit. Some of the relevant causal pathways have long been evident, as in studies linking earnings to IQ and good health, both of which are strongly heritable. Heritable traits like height and physical attractiveness are also associated with higher earnings. But Harden also describes new evidence linking genetic variation to less easily measured traits, such as openness to experience, ability to defer gratification, and grit—the ability to persist in the face of adversity. These traits also strongly influence someone’s ability to succeed in the labor market.

Studies showing that heredity’s role in economic success is far greater than many realized pose no challenge to the egalitarian position. On the contrary, Harden argues, they actually bolster it. Successful people have long been quick to attribute their accomplishments to talent and hard work alone. (As E. B. White memorably wrote, “Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”) But where do talent and the inclination to work hard come from? Scientists could once say only that they result from a poorly understood mix of genetic and environmental forces. The forces themselves remain poorly understood. But as Harden’s narrative makes clear, revolutionary advances in gene sequencing have shown that the genetic components of these forces are far more important than once believed…

Even without reference to genetic variations, it has long been beyond question that events over which individuals have no control have enormous influence on important life outcomes. For example, roughly half of the variance in incomes across persons worldwide is explained by country of residence and the income distribution within that country. Even within a country, children are far more likely to flourish in some family environments than in others. Chance events also matter in a variety of less conspicuous ways—as when Bryan Cranston, who had never before acted in a leading dramatic role, was cast as Walter White in Breaking Bad only after Matthew Broderick and John Cusack first turned the role down.

To all that, we now add Harden’s evidence that the genetic lottery is even more influential than we knew. In the face of this evidence, it is difficult to deny that success in life is almost entirely a matter of luck.

But to acknowledge the importance of chance events is not to deny the importance of traditional determinants of success. Most successful people are of course both talented and hardworking, as they are quick to remind us. When they try to explain their success to themselves and others, they easily retrieve examples from memory in which they came to work early and stayed late, solved difficult problems, bested formidable rivals, and so on. It is thus perfectly natural that many might feel offended when their success is attributed, even in small measure, to luck.

But even though talent and an inclination to work hard result from genetic and environmental forces over which we have little control, it may be disadvantageous to think in those terms. Working hard is, well, hard. To persist in the face of difficult challenges often means having to dig deep, to resist powerful impulses to quit. Imagine two people who have managed to persist under trying circumstances. One thinks to herself, “How lucky I was to draw the DNA card for persistence in the genetic lottery.” Her rival instead basks in pride for having summoned the will to persist. If you agree that the rival will be more likely to persevere when the next difficult challenge arises, you understand why few parents encourage their children to view being inclined to work hard as luck. It is luck, of course. But from the individual perspective, it may be disadvantageous to view it that way.

That same caveat doesn’t apply in the domain of public policy, where steps to reduce luck’s contribution to inequality promise benefits for all.

18) Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel” special was honestly like nothing I’ve ever seen.  I highly recommend it.  Also, I find most stand-up comics just not all that funny.  Carmichael, though, actually makes me laugh.

19) Meanwhile, hard to think of a show with a bigger drop off in quality than Russian Doll season 2.  They really should’ve stopped after season 1.  After falling asleep during each of the first 3 episodes of season 2, I called it quits. 

20) Such a sad story, “Millions of Bees Bound for Alaska Are Rerouted and Die in Atlanta
A shipment of five million honeybees was diverted to Atlanta and left out on a hot tarmac. Local beekeepers tried to come to the rescue, but very few survived.”

A few musings on Musk and twitter

1) I could be wrong here, but I feel like the total freakout here is a massive over-reaction.  I strongly suspect that for well over 90% of twitter users, the experience will not noticeably change.  I doubt that there’s going to be this pile-on of right-wing trolls attacking my every post that are now only unleashed because Musk has let them.  Or that I won’t want to logon and be confronted with a sea of awfulness in my timeline.

There’s interesting and worthwhile debates and discussions to be had about free speech and twitter’s moderation policy, but I truly think for the vast majority of users, it has very minimal effects on their twitter experience.

2) The whole thing is also bringing out so much twitter hate.  If you use twitter and you hate twitter, you are using it wrong!  I will immodestly say that I know more about Covid and vaccines than 90-95% of Americans.  And the bulk of that knowledge comes from twitter.  I can read vaccine researchers dissect the latest findings in a preprint.  I can read epidemiologists who study disease spread across many nations make sense of all the latest Covid numbers, I can read human immune system experts address key theories for long Covid.  It’s amazing.  On politics, I can read the smartest takes from political scientists who I would otherwise have no contact with; great takes from journalists where I don’t subscribe to their publication, amazing military expert analysis of what’s going on in Ukraine.  And, the occasional funny cat video or amazing astronomical photo.  What’s not to like?!  If you hate twitter, you are doing it wrong.  And call me crazy, but I don’t Elon Musk doing anything that would change that fundamental dynamic for me.

3) If for some reason, twitter does become this awful cesspit of meanness and abuse for somebody who just wants smart takes on politics, Covid, general science, and hockey analytics, then I would stop using it.  And so would millions of others and it would lose money so there’s a strong incentive– whomever owns it– to keep that from happening.  

4) I do get that there really is an abuse problem– especially for prominent women.  And that’s a real issue.  And there is a problem with misinformation, but it’s not obvious that some wizened twitter folks can simply solve this anyway.  These are real issues worthy of thoughtful discussion.  Not, “OMG Elon Musk is buying twitter and it’s going to ruin everything.”

 

Is America just less optimistic?

As you surely know, I’m definitely an optimist by nature.  And that’s certainly one of the reasons I enjoy Noah Smith.  Since that article in the Atlantic about teen depression, I’ve thinking a lot about whether our society is just less optimistic than it used to be.  As a social scientist, there’s got to be some way to measure that.  I don’t know about particular survey questions, but I’m going to go so far as to suggest “the vibes” are just more negative these days than they used to be.

Anyway, Smith uses all this for a jumping off point on thinking about optimism in the modern world:

Varieties of optimism

Optimism comes in a number of different flavors. One key distinction is how much you focus on your own actions and your own agency — whether you sit there and expect that things will get better, or whether you believe that you both can and must act to make them better. The philosopher Antonio Gramsci thought about this when he declared that he was “a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will”. Here’s a quote from Gramsci:

You must realize that I am far from feeling beaten…it seems to me that… a man out to be deeply convinced that the source of his own moral force is in himself — his very energy and will, the iron coherence of ends and means — that he never falls into those vulgar, banal moods, pessimism and optimism. My own state of mind synthesises these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle.

Optimism of the will isn’t necessarily about thinking that you yourself are going to be able to fix the world’s problems. It’s about the confidence and feeling of agency that comes from taking action. Yes, if you’re Volodymyr Zelensky, your decisions will have a big impact on the outcome of the Ukraine war. But if you’re a Ukrainian soldier fighting on the front likes against the Russian invasion, you know that your own antitank missile isn’t going to tip the balance of the war. Yet by shooting that tank anyway, you know that you’re simply being a spectator to the flow of history — not simply looking out the window and waiting for the world to happen to you.

Futurist Jason Crawford calls these “descriptive” vs. “prescriptive” optimism, while economist Paul Romer calls them “complacent” vs. “conditional” optimism. But it’s basically the same thing.

A second distinction is what kinds of things you’re optimistic about. The venture capitalist Peter Thiel distinguishes between what he calls “definite” and “indefinite” optimism — whether you think things will get better in general, or whether you have a specific idea:

You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it. … Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. … A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions.

Not everyone thinks this is a hard-and-fast distinction. My friend Ben Reinhardt points out that most visions of success are hazy at first; he argues that the real difference is whether you start out with a plan or not. In terms of public affairs, maybe the best way to think about this is the degree to which you think you know the concrete steps that need to be taken in order for the world to improve.

It occurs to me that all of these types of optimism have their uses, but in different situations. For people with clinical depression, who often suffer from persistent negative narratives, indefinite optimism of the intellect can be very helpful — the simple realization that things generally aren’t as bad as they seem can act as a lens through which all the events of life seem less catastrophic.

For people just starting out on solving a hard problem like climate change, where the solution isn’t yet apparent, an indefinite optimism of the will might be more appropriate — you don’t know what the solution is yet, but you’re determined to find it.

If you’re already doing all you can for the world, but the news is still getting you down, you might want a definite optimism of the intellect. For example, suppose you’re a battery engineer working hard every day to replace fossil fuels, who nevertheless is upset at the slow pace of policy change. It might help you stay motivated to keep an eye on the things that are going right, like bolder emissions pledges and faster progress in technology.

And if you’re in a situation where you know what you need to do to make the world better, but are daunted by the sheer scale and difficulty of the task, a definite optimism of the will could be just the push you need to get moving…

So what kind of optimism does America need now?

Which brings us to the present day. It’s possible to make an argument that what we need right now is a Reagan-like approach of laid-back sunny restraint, to chase away the post-Covid mental demons.

You can argue that with core inflation falling, stimulus spending over, and supply chain problems resolving, there’s essentially little we need to do about rising prices other than to wait it out and keep an eye on expectations to make sure they don’t get out of control.

You can also argue that the pandemic is over, thanks to vaccines (and to the unvaccinated acquiring immunity the old-fashioned way), and now we simply have to excise the pandemic mindset.

You can argue that Russia is a colossus with feet of clay, and that all we need to do is support Ukraine with weapons and encourage Europe to rearm, and keep up the sanctions that are choking Putin’s war machine to death.

And finally, you can argue that America’s age of division and unrest simply needs a cooling-off period. If we’re currently in the equivalent of the bitter and exhausted mid-70s, maybe we need something like the silly, shallow, materialistic 80s to distract us from our unhelpful mindset of incipient civil war.

So maybe we need sunny, calm, passive optimism of the Reagan type.

Then again, you can argue that this is not simply a replay of the 70s — that we got lucky back then, and that we’re unlikely to muddle through this time without vigorous national effort.

You can argue that China is very much not Russia, and is indeed the most populous and economically powerful rival we have ever faced. It’s possible China’s rise will simply fall flat on its face of its own accord, but it’s a remote possibility on which to bet our future. That’s an argument for the U.S. government to do a lot more — to actively move supply chains out of China and into allied countries or back to the U.S., to build the kind of weapons that might help us thwart a Chinese attack on Taiwan, and to vigorously seek out and strengthen alliances in Asia.

You can argue that climate change was still a distant threat in 1980 but is bearing right down on us now, that this is crunch time and we need to deploy a lot more green energy very rapidly. Yes, a livable climate is now within reach thanks to improved technology, but we’re going to need to install that technology faster.

And you can argue that there are a whole host of other deficiencies and inequities in the U.S. economic system that were not present in 1980, which are generating strains that exacerbate our recurrent bouts of social unrest. We need to reduce the price of health care, we need to build a lot more housing, and we could sure use a simpler and more effective social safety net. Doing all that will take more than some crappy tax cuts. It’s time to build, build, build.

In truth I think that both of these sets of arguments are convincing. Our problem now is that we have some problems where what makes sense is to just maintain a positive outlook and wait for the problems to resolve themselves, but other problems where a more activist approach is needed. We need to manage the trick of calming society down while also mobilizing it for action against some looming threats. That’s going to be a difficult needle to thread, and will take some bold leadership. In the end, I suspect the most effective method will be to redirect America’s attention away from social conflict (where vigorous efforts often become a negative-sum game) and toward the problems that we can all solve together — strengthening the nation, creating abundance, and pushing technology forward. A judicious combination of passive and active optimism.

Are we overall less optimistic as an American society than we used to be?  Honestly, I do think the answer is yes.  And, I think it’s actually probably right that we have less reason to be.  As for me, I’ll keep hoping for the best where I all I can do is hope and taking action for the best where I think my actions can make a difference?

Quick hits (part II)

1) Fun list of 50 best romantic comedies.  Definitely the right call that “When Harry met Sally” takes the top spot.

2) The human brain. Damn, “She Was Missing a Chunk of Her Brain. It Didn’t Matter”

EG, who has requested to go by her initials to protect her privacy, is missing her left temporal lobe, a part of the brain thought to be involved in language processing. EG, however, wasn’t quite the right fit for what the scientists were studying, so they referred her to Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist, also at MIT, who studies language. It was the beginning of a fruitful relationship. The first paper based on EG’s brain was recently published in the journal Neuropsychologia, and Fedorenko’s team expects to publish several more.

For EG, who is in her fifties and grew up in Connecticut, missing a large chunk of her brain has had surprisingly little effect on her life. She has a graduate degree, has enjoyed an impressive career, and speaks Russian—a second language–so well that she has dreamed in it. She first learned her brain was atypical in the autumn of 1987, at George Washington University Hospital, when she had it scanned for an unrelated reason. The cause was likely a stroke that happened when she was a baby; today, there is only cerebro-spinal fluid in that brain area. For the first decade after she found out, EG didn’t tell anyone other than her parents and her two closest friends. “It creeped me out,” she says. Since then, she has told more people, but it’s still a very small circle this is aware of her unique brain anatomy.

Over the years, she says, doctors have repeatedly told EG that her brain doesn’t make sense. One doctor told her she should have seizures, or that she shouldn’t have a good vocabulary—and “he was annoyed that I did,” she says. (As part of the study at MIT, EG tested in the 98th percentile for vocabulary.) The experiences were frustrating; they “pissed me off,” as EG puts it. “They made so many pronouncements and conclusions without any investigation whatsoever,” she says…

Remarkably, EG’s sister is missing her right temporal lobe and is largely unaffected by it, suggesting there’s likely some genetic component to the early childhood strokes that can explain the missing brain regions, Fedorenko says. Next up, the team wants to use both EG and her sister—who has also volunteered to be studied—to try to understand how social and emotional processing takes place predominantly in the right hemisphere. In fact, the whole family is getting involved. A third sibling and EG’s father have also had their brains scanned, although it turns out they each have two intact temporal lobes—or a “boring brain,” as EG dubs it. A fourth sibling will be scanned in the near future. For a long time, it had never occurred to EG that anybody would want to study her, so she is just glad that the neuroscience field has been able to learn something from her brain. “And I hope that it will also take some stigma away from atypical brains,” she says.

3) I’m a huge fan of reading aloud.  Alas, my kids are mostly done with it, but it’s definitely one of the joys of parenthood:

A miraculous alchemy occurs when one person reads to another, transforming the simple stuff of a book into powerful fuel for the heart, brain, and imagination. In The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction, Meghan Cox Gurdon discusses the scientific benefits – and joys – of reading aloud. This month, we were lucky enough to talk to Meghan about the importance of reading aloud, something that is a big part of our #ShareAStorycampaign, which encourages parents, carers, siblings and friends to read to one another for at least 10 minutes a day…

You carried out a lot of scientific and behavioural research. How did you research your books? And what was the most fascinating bit of information about reading aloud that you came across?
People who work at the cliff-face of clinical research tend to be wonderfully generous with their time and expertise. They want the world to know about their work, and are happy to share their findings with writers like me. I learned so many arresting things: That the language circuits in a new baby’s brain spring to life at the sound of a mother’s voice; that a child’s receptive vocabulary (what he understands) may be as many as 3 years ahead of his expressive vocabulary (what he can say); that a child’s ability to pay calm attention at 4 predicts whether he will graduate from university by the age of 25…

Reading aloud is not just for children and your book encourages readers to share stories with adults and the elderly. What are some of the benefits of reading aloud to older readers?
For older people, as for young ones, there’s a brain-kindling aspect, to start: Exciting research at the University of Liverpool, for instance, suggests that reading poetry aloud can help Alzheimer’s sufferers by stimulating their neural pathways. There’s a social aspect: It is a way for people to connect when age or illness makes conversation awkward or impossible, offering a balm for the heart and consolation for lonely.

4) New word for the vocabulary– snarge. “‘Snarge’ Happens, and Studying It Makes Your Flight Safer: When a bird collides with an airplane, determining its species can help prevent future collisions. To do that, scientists need snarge.”

5) As you know, I hate tipping.  Just charge me an appropriate price for a service and don’t expect me to pay your employees!  Now, where employee income is largely dependent upon wages (like restaurant servers who literally get lower wages because of expected tips), of course I’m a good tipper.  But, I hate the tipping creep where all sorts of services just ask you to pay them extra money when there’s no reason to.  NYT: “To Tip, or Not to Tip? Automated payment and the spread of tipping to every corner of the food-service business have helped workers weather the pandemic. But some consumers feel overwhelmed.”

6) I suspect I will be talking about Tucker Carlson and testicle tanning as one of the ultimate signs of the decline of the American right, years from now. Dana Milbank, “Why Tucker Carlson wants men to aim lasers at their private parts”

McGovern recommends that you “expose yourself to red-light therapy and the Joovv” — a brand of red light — “that we were using in the documentary.”

“Which is testicle tanning,” Carlson explains.

“It’s testicle tanning,” McGovern agrees, “but it’s also full-body red-light therapy.”

Carlson, the most-watched Fox News host, sums it up: “So, obviously, half the viewers are now like, ‘What? Testicle tanning — that’s crazy.’ But my view is, okay, testosterone levels have crashed and nobody says anything about it. That’s crazy.”

No, this is what’s crazy. To the extent declining testosterone levels are a problem, the correct solution would be to address a major cause: rising obesity. Instead of shining a red light on your private parts, dear Fox News viewer, turn off Tucker Carlson, get off the couch and go exercise.

But Carlson isn’t primarily hawking a genital-lighting device; he’s really touching all the erogenous zones of the Trumpian right.

There’s perceived loss of national pride: Carlson sees testosterone collapsing in “American men” (it’s a worldwide phenomenon). There’s paranoia about the government: “The NIH doesn’t seem interested in this at all,” Carlson says, impersonating some presumed official from the National Institutes of Health saying “it’s not a big deal” (the topic is widely studied). There’s paranoia about the media: McGovern claims the benefit of red-light therapy “isn’t being picked up on or covered” and says “there’s a lot of people out there that don’t trust the mainstream information.”

There’s the usual racist fearmongering: After the trailer shows several fit White bodies, the first Black body to appear is obese (as President John F. Kennedy intones that “there is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children”), and an image from a street riot is used to convey “weak” America. There’s obsession with gender and sexuality: A shirtless man throws a javelin that turns into a flaming rocket; a man squeezes a cow’s udder; and other men, several also shirtless, exercise, fire a gun, wrestle, flip a tractor tire, swing an ax, swallow raw eggs and, of course, stand naked in front of red lights.

There’s the Trump right’s celebration of masculinity as aggression rather than chivalry or gentlemanliness, a notion promoted lately by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka. In the trailer, words appear on the screen over President Biden stumbling on Air Force One’s stairs and Democratic senators kneeling in tribute to George Floyd: “Good times made weak men; weak men made hard times.”

Above all, there’s the unwavering faith in junk science — or, as Carlson’s “expert” calls it, “bromeopathy” (apparently a form of homeopathy in which you get advice from friends). Red-light treatment is used for various skin conditions, and it’s not impossible a man can boost his testosterone by plunking down four figures to aim such a device at his nether regions. But, as Marc Goldstein, a Weill Cornell Medicine male fertility expert told the publication Inverse, the claim lacks “convincing scientific evidence or properly done studies.”

7) I really like this, “Let Your Kids Be Bad at Things: When parenting becomes about perfectionism, you’re missing the point.”

8) Yes, we should totally let our kids be more independent at younger ages here in America.  But I got bored of the Japanese television show that’s kicking off all these essays in about five minutes.

9) Cathy Young is a heterodox thinker I’ve discovered through twitter.  I really like this, “The Messy Politics of Teaching Gender”

The controversy over Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, which severely curbs the ability of public schools to teach about sexual orientation or gender identity, has brought the spotlight on the extent to which the culture wars over public schools now have to do with transgender identities and the recent dramatic shifts in liberal and progressive views on the subject. Unfortunately, this controversy replicates an all-too-familiar pattern: Conservatives respond to a real problem—in this case, progressive overreach in proselytizing simplistic and strongly disputed beliefs on a contentious issue to often-young schoolchildren—in ham-fisted ways, resulting in accusations of both bigotry and speech suppression; liberals circle the wagons and deny that there is any real problem, attributing the conservative moves solely to intolerance and reactionary backlash against social progress; over-the-top accusations proliferate on both sides; and the chances of productive conversation dwindle from slim to none.

Make no mistake: Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which was signed by Republican culture warrior and likely presidential aspirant Gov. Ron DeSantis on March 28 and takes effect on July 1, is bad law. True, it does not prohibit anyone from saying the word “gay” in or out of public schools, and the groups paying for those “Say Gay” billboards in Florida could definitely find a better use for their money. On the face of it, the text of the bill may even seem reasonable: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” But it’s not clear whether, for instance, the prohibition on sexual orientation “instruction” in K-3 would cover such things as a parent volunteer during a class activity mentioning a same-sex spouse, or the use of any book or cartoon with a gay character.

The “age-appropriate[ness]” in later grades could also be a thorny issue—especially since, like some other recent social-issues legislation, the bill empowers ordinary citizens to serve as enforcers by suing. Given how stupid the culture wars have gotten, that’s worrisome.

It is also true that the anecdote DeSantis used as a justification for the bill—a supposed incident in which schoolteachers encouraged a 13-year-old student to explore a transgender identity without the parents’ knowledge or consent—turns out to have been substantially misreported: It seems that in reality, school staff was fully cooperative with the parents. (One of the bill’s provisions requires such cooperation, except in cases of a credible risk of abuse, when the child is making potentially life-altering decisions.)

But that doesn’t mean concerns about gender-identity extremism in educational settings are all made up.

Right now, for instance, these concerns are being aired in my own “blue” state of New Jersey as  health and sex education standards passed into law statewide in 2020 and now being implemented by local school boards have drawn objections not only from Republicans and conservatives but from some Democrats and moderates. For the moment, Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, has announced that the guidelines are being reviewed by the Department of Education and stressed that parents will always have the right to opt their children out of the lessons.

What’s so controversial? While some of the objections have focused on elementary-school materials that include overly explicit descriptions of sexual anatomy, proposed lesson plans dealing with gender identity issues have been a particular lightning rod. Thus, a cartoon video on “Puberty and Transgender Youth” suggested by one local school board as potential viewing material for fifth graders casually discusses the use of puberty blockers and shows a character experiencing anxiety because of by bodily changes (and apparently using a chest binder to hide developing breasts) and getting an injection of puberty blockers.

Meanwhile, a sample lesson plan recommended by that same school board for first graders instructs teachers to ask children how they know what gender they are, then explain the concept of gender identity as “that feeling of knowing your gender,” and elaborates:

You might feel like you are a boy, you might feel like you are a girl. You might feel like you’re a boy even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are “girl” parts. You might feel like you’re a girl even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are “boy” parts. And you might not feel like you’re a boy or a girl, but you’re a little bit of both. No matter how you feel, you’re perfectly normal!

A second-grade lesson from the same curriculum more specifically identifies “male genitals” and “female genitals,” but also offers this disclaimer: “There are some body parts that mostly just girls have and some parts that mostly just boys have. Being a boy or a girl doesn’t have to mean you have those parts, but for most people this is how their bodies are.” (While the Washington Post has pointed out that these lessons plans are not mandatory but are simply offered as potential resources, they are still among the approved material for the curriculum.)…

Are parents reactionary if they think the claim that sex at birth is established by the doctor “making a guess” is not only terrible science, but a highly confusing message for children whose sense of themselves and the world is still developing and for whom the boundaries between fantasy and reality may be still unstable? (Like many other children, I went through an “I’m a boy” phase when I was 7, not long after other phases in which I was a dog, the goddess Artemis, a prehistoric cave child, and a variety of fairly-tale characters of different sexes and species.) Or if they think that the schools should not be in the business of endorsing puberty-blocking drugs whose long-term effects are still poorly understood?

Other parents who are not GOP activists from Florida but suburban liberals from places like Stamford, Connecticut have pushed back against reading materials like The Pants Project, a book about a transgender boy assigned in grades 3 to 5. The objections have been not only to overly sexualized material—the main character, Liv, muses at one point, “Last week, Chelsea loudly told Jade that she’d seen a bulge in my underwear (I wish!)”—but to “gender stereotypes”: the book, one mother complained, seemed to imply that all girls are girly and that wearing pants, as Liv hankers to do, is a boy thing…

A full analysis of today’s gender identity debates is certainly beyond the scope of this article. However, it is worth noting that extremism in the transgender rights movement is being increasingly challenged across the political spectrum. Jonathan Rauch has recently written a thoughtful essay on the subject for the American Purpose, arguing that the movement needs to reject ultra-radicalism the way the gay rights movement did to win its civil rights victories. The Los Angeles Times last week reported on clinical psychologist Erica Anderson, who is herself transgender and has worked with numerous transgender patients; Anderson has broken ranks with the trans advocacy community by arguing that too many teenagers are being rushed into transitioning and that being transgender or “genderqueer” has, in some cases, become a trendy thing among progressive young people. Science journalist Jesse Singal, who is no one’s idea of a conservative or a right-winger, has been writing for several years about the bad science and bad ideas of radical trans advocacy.

There has been extreme and genuinely bigoted rhetoric about transgender people, both from the right and from radical feminists—but there has also been a disingenuous and deeply counterproductive campaign to equate all dissent from transgender-movement orthodoxy with bigotry and hate. It is entirely possible to believe that transgender identities are valid and worthy of social respect and that gender transition is in many cases the best solution to gender dysphoria, and yet also to believe that transgender advocacy in its current form raises many difficult issues that are far from settled—including hard questions related to gender transition for minors.

Unfortunately, our toxic political scene is the worst possible arena to address these complicated issues. Right now, the right is screaming “groomer” at anyone who believes sexuality and gender identity should be even mentioned in a school setting, while the left is screaming “murderer of trans kids” at anyone who thinks we should be careful about letting a 16-year-old get a mastectomy to fit a male or nonbinary gender identity. The moderate voices are essential—but too often they are getting drowned out. Today, responsible liberals and centrists are well aware of the bigotry and extremism of the anti-trans right; but they should pay more attention to the intolerance and extremism of the militant trans-advocacy left.

10) It’s good that the Supreme Court ruled that, yes, the military can require soldiers to be vaccinated for Covid.  But, plenty disturbing that somehow Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito think themselves above this chain of command.

11) Really enjoyed this from Derek Thompson, “A Stanford Psychologist Says He’s Cracked the Code of One-Hit Wonders: What separates Blind Melon from Shania Twain?”

For decades, psychologists have puzzled over the ingredients of creative popularity by studying music, because the medium offers literally millions of data points. Is the thing that separates one-hit wonders from consistent hitmakers luck, or talent, or some complex combination of factors? I did my best to summarize their work in my book, Hit Makers. This month, the Stanford psychologist Justin Berg published a new paper on the topic and argued that the secret to creative success just happens to hinge on the difference between “No Rain” and Shania Twain.

Berg compiled a data set of more than 3 million songs released from 1959 to 2010 and pulled out the biggest hits. He used an algorithm developed by the company EchoNest to measure the songs’ sonic features, including key, tempo, and danceability. This allowed him to quantify how similar a given hit is to the contemporary popular-music landscape (which he calls “novelty”), and the musical diversity of an artist’s body of work (“variety”).

“Novelty is a double-edged sword,” Berg told me. “Being very different from the mainstream is really, really bad for your likelihood of initially making a hit when you’re not well known. But once you have a hit, novelty suddenly becomes a huge asset that is likely to sustain your success.” Mass audiences are drawn to what’s familiar, but they become loyal to what’s consistently distinct.

Blind Melon’s “No Rain” rated extremely low on novelty in Berg’s research. Dreamy, guitar-driven soft rock wasn’t exactly innovative in 1992. According to Berg, this was the sort of song that was very likely to become a one-hit wonder: It rose to fame because of a quirky music video, not because the song itself stood out for its uniqueness. After that hit, the band struggled to distinguish their sound from everything else that was going on in music.

By contrast, Twain’s breakout hit rated high on novelty in Berg’s research. She was pioneering a new pop-country crossover genre that was bold for her time but would later inspire a generation of artists, like Taylor Swift. “Twain is a great fit for the model, because her blending of pop and country was so original before she had her breakout,” Berg told me. After her second album, he said, her novelty, which had previously been an artistic risk, helped her retain listeners. She could experiment within the kingdom of country-pop without much competition from other artists, and this allowed her to dominate the charts for the next decade.

Berg’s research also found that musical variety (as opposed to novelty) was useful for artists before they broke out. But down the line, variety wasn’t very useful, possibly because audience expectations are set by initial hits. “After the first hit, the research showed that it was good for artists to focus on what I call relatedness, or similarity of music,” he said. Nobody wants Bruce Springsteen to make a rap album.

This second finding about the benefits of early variety is similar to a model of creativity known as explore-exploit. The Northwestern University economist Dashun Wang has found that artists and scientists tend to have “hot streaks,” or tight clusters of highly successful work. When he looked closer at what preceded these hot streaks, he found a similar pattern. First, artists and scientists would “explore,” or experiment with a bunch of different ideas, styles, jobs, or topics, before they really got in the zone. Then they would “exploit,” or productively focus on one particular area.

Berg’s and Wang’s research suggests three rules of thumb that may come in handy for creative work.

First, extremely new ideas are unlikely to initially find a large audience. But if they break through, artists and entrepreneurs may find that uniqueness is an asset, the same way that Twain’s country-pop hybrid style switched from a burden to a benefit after her first hit. Second, early-career exploration can pay dividends in the long run. This is as true of the broader labor force as it is in music. A 2014 study of young workers found that people who switch jobs more frequently early in their career tend to have higher incomes in their prime working years. Third, the difference between one-hit wonders and hitmakers isn’t just novelty; it’s also focus, or what Berg called “relatedness.” Hot streaks require creative people to mine deeply when they find something that works for them.

But where does Chumbawamba fit into this?!

12) Why would Jay Wright retire from college basketball?  This sounds good:

I joked often this winter that when I talk to college basketball coaches these days, the conversations feel less like interviews and more like therapy sessions. That doesn’t seem so funny now that the sport is losing one of its leading men just when it needs him most. Put simply, the job is exhausting — physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The travel is a killer. The parents wear you out. The press is always on your ass. The fans shout obscenities from the bleachers and hurl insults on social media. Your wife gets harassed at the grocery store, your kids get teased at school, and your very livelihood is dependent on the whims of 19- and 20-year-old kids who are under enormous pressure to succeed, and quickly. If things don’t go their way, they’re on to another school or off the pros. And you’re out of a job.

Coaching is a great job but a lousy profession. It pays well if you make it big, but it also chews you up and spits you out, because there’s always fresh meat on the way.

13) NYT on the subway shooter, “Why No One Died When a Gunman Opened Fire on the Subway: Luck and poor marksmanship appear to have saved the victims of the subway attack.”

Also, he was using a handgun, not an assault rifle.  I guarantee you some of these people would be dead if had been using an AR-15.

14) This is good, “THE UNSEEN SCARS OF THOSE WHO KILL VIA REMOTE CONTROL”

In the Air Force, drone pilots did not pick the targets. That was the job of someone pilots called “the customer.” The customer might be a conventional ground force commander, the C.I.A. or a classified Special Operations strike cell. It did not matter. The customer got what the customer wanted.

And sometimes what the customer wanted did not seem right. There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy. Crews had to watch it all in color and high definition.

15) Damn, the full-on censorious book-banning of conservatives is just completely nuts.  (And, yet, that does not excuse the censoriousness of campus leftists, just because it’s worse), “Censorship battles’ new frontier: Your public library: Conservatives are teaming with politicians to remove books and gut library boards”

Wallace’s list was the opening salvo in a censorship battle that is unlikely to end well for proponents of free speech in this county of 21,000 nestled in rolling hills of mesquite trees and cactus northwest of Austin.

Leaders have taken works as seemingly innocuous as the popular children’s picture book “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak off the shelves, closed library board meetings to the public and named Wallace the vice chair of a new library board stacked with conservative appointees — some of whom did not even have library cards.

With these actions, Llano joins a growing number of communities across America where conservatives have mounted challenges to books and other content related to race, sex, gender and other subjects they deem inappropriate. A movement that started in schools has rapidly expanded to public libraries, accounting for 37 percent of book challenges last year, according to the American Library Association. Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures…

Leila Green Little, a parent and board member of the Llano County Library System Foundation, said her anti-censorship group obtained dozens of emails from country officials that reveal the outsize influence a small but vocal group of conservative Christian and tea party activists wielded over the county commissioners to reshape the library system to their own ideals.

In one of the emails, which were obtained through a public records request and shared with The Washington Post, Cunningham seemed to question whether public libraries were even necessary.

“The board also needs to recognize that the county is not mandated by law to provide a public library,” Cunningham wrote to Wallace in January.

16) From a few years ago, but anybody who knows rich people knows this to be so true, “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? Turns Out It’s Just Chance.: The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.”

17) This is also true, “Enough About Climate Change. Air Pollution Is Killing Us Now.”

In the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, doctors noticed a surprising silver lining: Americans were having fewer heart attacks.

One likely reason, according to an analysis published last month by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, is that people were inhaling less air pollution.

Millions of workers were staying home instead of driving to work. Americans were suddenly burning a lot less gas. And across the country, the researchers found that regions with larger drops in pollution also had larger drops in heart attacks.

The menace of air pollution doesn’t command public attention as it did in the 1960s, when thick smog yellowed urban skies. But evidence has piled up in recent years that the real progress the United States has made in reducing air pollution isn’t nearly good enough. Air pollution is a lot deadlier than we previously understood — and, in particular, studies like the analysis of heart attacks during the pandemic show that the concentrations of air pollution currently permitted by federal policy are still far too high.

In an assessment of recent research, the World Health Organization concluded last year that air pollution is “the single largest environmental threat to human health and well-being.”

The low quality of the air that we breathe should be regarded as a crisis. It also presents an opportunity. The existential threat of climate change has come to dominate debates about environmental regulation. Proposals to curb emissions, once presented as public health measures, are now billed as efforts to limit global warming.

The solution to both threats is the same: We need to stop burning fossil fuels, preferably yesterday. But there is cause to wonder whether a greater focus on the immediate dangers posed by air pollution, rather than the more distant specter of global warming, might help to muster the necessary support for changes that are going to be expensive and disruptive.

18) Great thread from Noah Smith on climate optimism.

Real progress has been made against climate change. Global CO2 emissions have been flat for a decade.

Obviously we need to get them to 0, but just getting total emissions to stop increasing is a huge accomplishment. pic.twitter.com/pC0I2J2IwD

— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) April 23, 2022

 

Quick hits (part I)

1) deBoer on pragmatism (and the lack of it from the far left)

I come from a tradition with radical demands but which also recognizes that we can’t actually get most of those demands yet, that we need to do a lot of organizing and persuading to get there. But so many leftist Democrats now insist that

1. Their agenda is already popular with Americans

2. You only need to juice turnout, not to change minds, evidence be damned

3. If the Democrats only embrace a left-wing agenda, they’ll sweep to power

None of this is persuasive to me, but it’s become holy writ on social media. And here’s an example of where the left being shut out of power becomes a vicious circle. Centrists are correct that left Democrats are often deeply averse to compromise and bargaining, but this is in part because they’ve never had the power with which to make a compromise. What would they bargain with? Shut out of power for so long, leftist Democrats have no practice with having the juice to force a compromise and are so convinced of the fundamental corruption and fecklessness of the overall party that they recoil at the idea of making one. Meanwhile, I’m constantly told that message discipline – not abandoning any of your principles, but highlighting the ones that are most popular – is not only undesirable but actively impossible.

For example. I’m a “let them all in” guy when it comes to immigration. Those are my values, and I do think that someday we’ll have a vastly more open and humane immigration system. But someday is not today. Liberal views on immigration are deeply unpopular in this country right now. If Democrats run hard on mass immigration increases, they will lose more elections and the Republicans will be empowered to make the immigration situation even worse. I don’t have any sort of simplistic schema for when you have to compromise and when you have to fight; it’s complicated. But so many further-left Democrats I encounter presume that there’s never any time when compromise is necessary and who view strategic calls for moderation as inherently bad faith, as the province of the wicked. It’s a terribly unhelpful way to do electoral politics in our stupid system.

2) Love this from Frank Bruni:

Enough about “parental rights.” I want to talk about nonparental rights.

I want to talk about the fact that a public school, identified that way for a reason, doesn’t exist as some bespoke service attending to the material wants and political whims of only those Americans with children in the science lab and on the soccer field. It’s an investment, funded by all taxpayers, in the cultivation of citizens who better appreciate our democracy and can participate in it more knowledgeably and productively.

Each of us has skin in the game. And each of us, even those of us without children, has the right to weigh in on how the game is played.

But you wouldn’t know that from the education conflagrations of the moment — from the howls of protest from parents about what their children are or aren’t exposed to, what their children are and aren’t taught.

You wouldn’t know it from the arguments for Florida’s recently enacted ban on talk of gay and trans people with young schoolchildren. That measure, nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” initiative by its opponents, was called the Parental Rights in Education bill by its promoters — as if it were restoring and safeguarding some fundamental prerogative that should never have been challenged, as if parents’ sensitivities and sensibilities hold extra-special sway.

They matter, definitely. But one parent’s sensitivities and sensibilities don’t reliably align with another’s. Or with mine. Or with yours.

And raising the banner of “parental rights,” which is being hoisted high and waved with intensifying passion these days, doesn’t resolve that conflict. Nor does it change the fact that the schools in question exist for all of us, to reflect and inculcate democratic values and ecumenical virtues that have nothing to do with any one parent’s ideology, religion or lack thereof.

If the prevailing sensitivities and sensibilities of most parents at a given moment were the final word, formal racial segregation of educational institutions would have lasted longer than it did. There’d still be prayer in some public schools, and I don’t mean nondenominational.

I’m not equating those issues with current fights over L.G.B.T.Q. content in curriculums. Nor am I pushing specifically for that content, whose prevalence and emphasis remain murky to me, as they do, I’d wager, to most of the Americans who have vociferously entered the fray.

I’m sympathetic to the perspective that there’s a time, place and tone for such discussions. Too much too soon can be a clumsy, politically reckless provocation. So can vaguely worded, spitefully conceived, intentionally divisive laws, like the one in Florida, that encourage parents specifically to file lawsuits if they catch the scent of something they find unsavory in their children’s classrooms.

Parents do and should have authority over much of their children’s lives. No quarrel from me there. I’m in genuine awe of the responsibilities that parents take on, and I feel enormous gratitude toward those who approach those responsibilities with the utmost seriousness.

But public education is precisely that, and it’s both inappropriate and dangerous to treat the parents who have children in public schools as the only interested parties or as stakeholders whose desires are categorically more important than everybody else’s. The spreading cry of “parental rights” suggests as much. And the wrongness of that transcends any partisan affiliation.

3) OMG this book banning on the right these days.  Apparently, the picture book “Everywhere babies” is getting banned because some of the parents are same-sex couples.  God forbid kids get the idea that actually happens in the real world. 

4) Pet rental is a thing? Sort of. What the hell? Of course, it all starts with buying a pet from a pet store which, lets be honest, no responsible pet owner does (I’m not talking about pet stores that facilitate adoptions). 

5) Now Florida is trying to do away with tenure for its universities to stop all the liberal indoctrination.  Glad we have state legislators like this on the case ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

He also said it would increase transparency with a provision that would require course syllabuses to be posted online, preventing attempts by professors to “smuggle in ideology and politics.” Sprowls said it would prevent students from signing up for a class on “socialism and communism” when they thought they were signing up for “Western democracy” and classes about “what it means to be an actual American.”

“That’s what this bill is about,” Sprowls said. “Are (students) going to walk into a university system that’s more about indoctrination than it is about getting getting jobs someday and learning skills and the subject matter necessary to get a job? Or is it about some sort of radical political agenda that a particular professor that’s been told they get a lifetime job is going to tell them they have to believe to get an A in their class?”

6) And, as long as we’re on Florida, Chait is on the case when it comes to DeSantis:

I’ve been focused on Ron DeSantis because I believe he represents the party’s future, which involves unifying its right and center wings while discarding the left. The candidate who ultimately leads the party might not be DeSantis himself, but he is the leading figure of the moment, and I believe whoever emerges, if it isn’t him, will copy his approach. DeSantis addresses the fundamental concerns the middle faction has with Trump — namely, his lack of discipline and governing competence. Importantly, the terms of internal rapprochement include continuing the party’s embrace of the far right and growing disdain for democracy.

That last fact has been on bright display in DeSantis’s attack on Disney. After the company came out against his anti-gay law, which DeSantis’s spokespeople have described absurdly as an “anti-grooming” law, DeSantis retaliated by pushing through a law to strip Disney of a self-governing arrangement it has enjoyed since the 1960s.

The episode’s significance lies in the merits of neither the anti-gay law nor Disney’s municipal relations. What matters is DeSantis establishing the principle that the state can credibly threaten to punish private firms for taking adverse public stands.

DeSantis has taken several steps before to threaten democratic norms. He signed into law the first poll tax since Jim Crow. He has never acknowledged that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. But these anti-democratic measures have already been normalized within the Republican party. DeSantis is now plowing new ground.

Crucially, he demonstrated that he can wield this crude strongman weapon while still enjoying the support of the GOP’s middle faction… Of course, authoritarianism is rarely a black-and-white matter. Healthy democracies do not usually turn into North Korea overnight. The demise of democracy is generally a matter of iterative decay — norms and rules deteriorating one by one with a single moment when democracy perishes all at once. Defenders of this democratic backsliding always have the easy option of mocking opponents by pretending the absence of a wholesale fascist coup is absence of grounds for serious concern. DeSantis is discovering that his party’s appetite for further attacks on democratic norms has only been whetted.

7) This is a terrific and, dare I say, heartening interview on the limited and corrupt Russian military:

Could the Russian military say, in its defense, that the military-modernization project was done with a different kind of war in mind than the one in Ukraine? Or do you see the failure being broader than that?

I think it’s broader than that. It seems like one of the priorities for their modernization project was the air-defense systems, and also their precision-guided munitions—both aircraft-borne and surface-to-surface missiles—and ballistic missiles. But those all failed. You have Turkish-made U.A.V.s flying over the Russian air-defense systems and zapping them from the air—that’s not supposed to be happening. So I don’t really buy it. Even the quality of the things that did get modernized seems like smoke and mirrors. I find it hard to swallow that they’ve been spending fifty billion, sixty billion, seventy billion dollars a year on modernizing these forces, and, after almost fifteen years of that, they didn’t get around to modernizing their T-72 tank fleet or retiring it. I think the most logical conclusion is that a large portion of that budget was evaporated in corruption…

There is a difference between trying to modernize your army and hiring the wrong person to do it versus not even hiring someone and having the money siphoned off in a corruption scheme. Those seem like different critiques. What do you think was going on here?

It looks like their officers have been promoted based on patronage as opposed to military ability. We had some exposure to them when I was working on the Syria portfolio at the State Department. A lot of them are the same generals and colonels who are involved in the Ukraine situation. We know a lot of the names, including the guy [General Aleksandr Dvornikov] who’s been named the over-all commander now. In Syria, it looked to me like their focus was not really on effective military operations but, rather, on trying to acquire assets—trying to acquire property and revenues for themselves from the Syrian regime or from other actors—and, secondly, on using Syria as a test bed for weapons systems. But they were not terribly impressive in their planning or decision-making in Syria. And I think that’s coming out now even more clearly. They’re a poor-quality military with poor-quality leadership and poor logistics—and seemingly highly inclined to corruption.

 

8) John Cassidy on McCarthy and McConnell:

It’s eminently clear where Republican candidates are learning the techniques of prostration: from their own leaders. And this abject situation isn’t likely to change. If the events of January 6, 2021, weren’t sufficient to embolden the likes of McCarthy and McConnell for more than a few days, could anything effect such a transformation? Probably not. To be sure, there are some individual elected Republicans, such as Cheney and Mitt Romney, who are still willing to criticize and challenge Trump, but none of them are in positions of authority within the Party.

Taken as a whole, the G.O.P. is still in the same position it has been in for the past five and a half years: beholden to a narcissistic demagogue who has no respect for democracy or the law. In fact, the situation is even worse than it used to be, because the demagogue is now explicitly demanding that Republican candidates sign on to his Big Lie about 2020—a modern version of the “stab-in-the-back” conspiracy theory that helped undermine the Weimar Republic. In one sense, it’s fun to read yet another story confirming the utter spinelessness and cravenness of McConnell, McCarthy, et al. Ultimately, though, the joke is on us.

9) Fascinating deBoer piece about the explosion of claims of multiple personality disorder among teenagers on TikTok and what it says about current pathologies in our culture [emphases in original]

You might very well ask how it could possibly be the case that a notoriously controversial and historically extremely rare disorder would suddenly bloom into epidemic proportions among teenagers with smartphones and a burning need to differentiate themselves. How could that happen? The standard line on these things is that expanding public consciousness about such illnesses reduces stigma and empowers more people to get diagnosed with conditions they already had. But with dissociative identity disorder, I can only ask… really? One of the rarest mental illnesses in the medical literature has had thousands of people walking around undiagnosed, despite the fact that it’s perhaps the single hardest psychiatric condition to hide? It’s one thing to say that there’s tons of, say, autistic people walking around who are undiagnosed because of stigma around the diagnosis. It’s another to say that thousands of people’s conditions have gone unnoticed when they experience the world as a number of distinct and incompatible personalities which they switch between in jarring and disorienting moments.

None of this is healthy. None of it will result in better treatment or results for those who have legitimate psychiatric disorders. Ideas core to the toxic mental health ideology that kids are absorbing on TikTok include

• That intense childhood trauma is universal or near-universal, despite the fact that it simply isn’t, and thank god

• That trauma is somehow ennobling, a maker of meaning, a creator of identity, a way to be unique and special, rather than something terrible we should do everything we can to prevent

• Correspondingly, that to be mentally healthy is undesirable, when it’s a condition we should aspire to secure for everyone

• That mental illness is an identity, the most important and central element of someone’s self, rather than an unfortunate detail, and that the right way to have a mental illness is to revel in it, celebrate it, fixate on it completely, act as though there’s nothing else interesting or meaningful about you than your mental illness

• That any critical thinking or questioning of their rhetoric about mental illness is inherently a matter of “stigma” and thus illegitimate, and that the job of doctors and therapists is always to affirm their self-diagnoses, not to act as independent and dispassionate agents

• That anything they feel is valid, that their emotions are a perfect guide to their reality, and that anything that contradicts their intuitions or their desires is by definition the hand of oppression.

And the core point here is that the people who are being hurt by this are these kids themselves. Sucking up scarce mental health resources with fictitious conditions is irresponsible, yes, and pretending to be sick for clout is untoward. But setting that aside, self-diagnosis is dangerous. Playacting a serious mental illness is harmful to your actual mental health. Fixating on the most broken part of yourself is contrary to best medical practices and to living a fulfilled life. Defining yourself by dysfunction is a great way to stay dysfunctional. And everything about mental illness that seems cool and deep and intense when you’re 18 becomes sad and pathetic and self-destructive and ugly by the time you’re 40. Take it from me. These kids are hurting themselves. I don’t want to ridicule them. I’m not even angry at them. I’m angry at their adult enablers. That includes the vast edifice of woowoo self-help bullshit Instagram self-actualization yoga winemom feel-good consumerist tell-me-I’m-special psychiatric medicine, and a media that loves the prurient thrills of multiple personalities and never saw a vulnerability that it couldn’t exploit.

10) Loved this piece.  I’m glad hockey has evolved to become a sport with much more emphasis on skill.  I would not be the fan I am if it were otherwise, “‘It’s almost like the game has been reinvented’: Players, coaches and GMs on the NHL’s scoring boom”

This is a new age in the NHL, a far cry from the dead puck era that saw a sharp decline in goal scoring from the 1980s. In 1980-81, teams averaged 4.01 goals per game. In the decade, there was never a year below 3.67 goals per game.

By 2003-04, goals per game fell to 2.57 — the lowest in a half-century.

This season, teams are averaging 3.09 goals per game, the highest average since 1995-96, when it was 3.14 per game. The league-wide save percentage of .907 is the lowest since 2006-07 (.905). The average penalty kill is 79 percent, which is frankly unbelievable. The average power play is 21 percent. As Edmonton Oilers coach Jay Woodcroft notes, “It wasn’t that long ago when if you had a 19, 20 percent power play, you were in the top five in the National Hockey League.”

The Florida Panthers are averaging 4.17 goals per game, the highest by a team since the Pittsburgh Penguins averaged 4.41 per game in 1995-96. Eighteen teams (56 percent of the league) are averaging more than three goals per game. And it’s not just the teams with offensive superstars like the Panthers, Colorado Avalanche, Edmonton Oilers and Toronto Maple Leafs.

The Blues have shot up to fourth in the NHL in goals per game, at 3.74, thanks to recently scoring four or more goals in 12 consecutive games (62 goals, 5.17 per game). Heck, the Wild, for years considered one of the most committed defensive teams in the NHL with a foundation established by original coach Jacques Lemaire, have six 20-goal scorers, three 30-goal scorers and rank fifth in the NHL with 3.66 goals per game.

“Look how teams are made up now: four lines that can contribute offensively,” says 37-year-old future Hall of Fame goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, who debuted for the Penguins in 2003. “When I started, your third line was grinding, your fourth line was fighting. Now, look at our third line. We have two 20-goal scorers on there. Imagine having to defend (Jordan) Greenway, (Joel) Eriksson Ek and (Marcus) Foligno. Is there a bigger line in the league? Imagine having to defend them. They’re our checking line, but they check by playing in the offensive zone.”

There are 39 point-per-game players this season in the NHL (minimum 60 games) with another four hovering at 0.99. When the Blues scored seven second-period goals Sunday in Nashville and won 8-3, it was the 30th time since March 1 that an NHL team scored at least seven goals in a game. In 2015-16, 29 teams scored that many in a game in the entire season.

Last Saturday and Sunday, 153 goals were scored across the league — the highest-scoring weekend in NHL history.

You see the impact of the scoring increase in every facet of the game. 

11) Florida wants to ban K-12 textbooks for “social-emotional learning”  That’s nuts!  But, alas, everything is “critical race theory” now. 

Administrators in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District were already looking for ways to support students’ mental well-being before the pandemic, driven in part by a string of student deaths, including some suicides. Then covid-19 and remote schooling inflicted fresh emotional damage.

So, this past fall, the district implementeda social-emotional learning (SEL) program — a curriculum geared at helping students manage emotions, develop positive relationships and make good decisions. Schools have worked to develop these skills for decades, and in recent years, formal programming has proliferated coast to coast. In Anoka-Hennepin, elementary schools focused on themes such as respect, empathy, gratitude, kindness, honesty, courage, cooperation, perseverance and responsibility each month. Students learned how to ask for help and spot someone having a bad day.

The complaints began immediately, often from parents already upset about remote schooling and mask mandates. Minnesota’s Child Protection League, a group active on conservative issues, said social-emotional learning is a vehicle for critical race theory, an effort to divide students from their parents, emotional manipulation and “the latest child-indoctrination scheme.”

 

12) And Dana Goldstein in the NYT, “A Look Inside the Textbooks That Florida Rejected”

But many of the textbooks included social-emotional learning content, a practice with roots in psychological research that tries to help students develop mind-sets that can support academic success.

The image below, from marketing materials provided by the company Big Ideas Learning — whose elementary textbooks Florida rejected — features one common way teachers are trained to think about social-emotional learning.

 

Image

The diagram names core skills students should develop, and gives an example of how to conquer fear and build self-confidence. Credit…Big Ideas Learning

 

The circular diagram names the five core skills students should develop: self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, social awareness and relationship building. This framework was developed by CASEL, an education nonprofit.

Until recently, the idea of building social-emotional skills was a fairly uncontroversial one in American education. Research suggests that students with these skills earn higher test scores.

13) To be fair, Drum is right and stuff like this should not be in math books:

The Florida Department of Education finally released a few examples of “unacceptable” math problems today. Here is one of them:

So the lesson here is that conservatives are racist, as proven by a test that’s of dubious reliability.

Nice work, textbook people. This is insane. I can’t imagine there’s a conservative governor anywhere in the country who wouldn’t be offended by this. If this math book included a similar bar graph showing crime rates by race, do you think that liberal governors might be equally offended?

Also, the IAT is not a valid measure of racial prejudice!

14) Interesting story here, “How a Crime-Fighting Institution Took a Partisan Turn: Crime Stoppers of Houston built its reputation on a successful tip line. Then it decided to take on Democratic judges.”  And, the NYT takes so much heat, but they have revealing, deeply-reported stories like this every single day that would otherwise not see the light of day. It really is an amazing journalistic institution.  

15) Leonhardt (with an assist from Michael Osterholm) on mask mandates:

As Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota epidemiologist, puts it, a mask mandate with as many exceptions as the airline mandate is like a submarine that closes three of its five doors.

On the other hand, research shows that, when used correctly, masks can be a valuable tool for reducing the spread of Covid. How, then, should the country be thinking about masks during the current stage of the pandemic? Today’s newsletter tries to answer that question.

Broad and lenient

The trouble with the transportation mask mandate was that it was both too broad and too lenient.

Its breadth required people to muzzle their faces for long periods of time, and most people don’t enjoy doing so. (If you doubt that, check out the gleeful responses of airline passengers and school children when told they didn’t have to wear masks anymore.)

A central lesson of public health is that people have a limited capacity to change their routine. They’re not machines. For that reason, the best responses to health crises depend on triage, with political leaders prioritizing the most valuable steps that people can take. Whenever politicians impose rules that are obviously ineffective, they undermine the credibility of the effective steps.

The transportation mandate had so many exceptions that many Americans understandably questioned its worth. Travelers took off their masks to eat and drink. Some flight attendants removed their masks to make announcements. Some passengers wore their masks on their chins. The mandate also did not require N95 and KN95 masks, which are more effective against the virus than cloth masks or standard medical masks.

These problems — the open doors on the mask-mandate submarine — help explain a pandemic conundrum: Rigorous laboratory tests show that masks reduce Covid transmission, but supporting real-world evidence tends to be much weaker.

The most glaring example in the U.S. is that liberal communities, where masks are a cherished symbol of solidarity, have experienced nearly as much Covid spread as conservative communities, where masks are a hated symbol of oppression. Another example is school mask mandates, which don’t seem to have had much effect. A third example is Hong Kong, where mask wearing is very popular (although often not with N95 or KN95 masks, Osterholm notes); Hong Kong has just endured a horrific Covid wave, among the world’s worst since the pandemic began.

Osterholm, who spent 15 years as Minnesota’s state epidemiologist and has advised both Democratic and Republican administrations in Washington, argues that much of the U.S. public health community has exaggerated the value of broad mask mandates. KN95 and N95 masks reduce the virus’s spread, he believes, but mandates like the one on airlines do little good.

“Public health advice has been way off the mark, all along, about mask protection,” he told me. “We have given the public a sense of a level of protection that is just not warranted.”

Osterholm added: “Let’s just be honest.”

Narrow and strict

A more effective approach to mask mandates would probably be both narrower and stricter. It would close the big, obvious loopholes in any remaining mandates — but also limit the number of mandates.

The reality is that masks are less valuable today than they were a year or two ago. Covid vaccines are universally available in the U.S. for adults and teenagers, and the virus is overwhelmingly mild in children. Treatments for vulnerable people are increasingly available.

And consider this: About half of Americans have recently had the Omicron variant of Covid. They currently have little reason to wear a mask, for anybody’s sake.

Together, vaccines and treatments mean that the risks of severe Covid for boosted people — including the vulnerable — seem to be similar to the risks of severe influenza. The U.S., of course, does not mandate mask wearing every winter to reduce flu cases. No country does.

Another relevant factor is that one-way masking reduces Covid transmission. People who want to wear a mask because of an underlying health condition, a fear of long Covid or any other reason can do so. When they do, they deserve respect.

“One-way masking works,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University, said. When he is treating tuberculosis patients, they are typically maskless, and he wears an N95 mask to protect himself.

Still, if Covid illness begins surging again at some point, there may be situations in which mandates make sense. To be effective, any mandates probably need to be strict, realistic and enforced. Imagine, for example, that a subway system mandated KN95 or N95 masks inside train cars — but not on platforms, which tend to be airy.

Or imagine that the C.D.C. required high-quality masks in the airport and aboard a plane on the runway — but not in flight when people will inevitably eat and when a plane’s air-filtration system is on. “When I travel, I’m always more worried about in-airport exposures than I am the plane,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Brown University epidemiologist, said.

Unfortunately, the U.S. has spent much of the past two years with the worst of all worlds on masks. People have been required to wear them for hours on end, causing frustration and exhaustion and exacerbating political polarization. Yet the rules have included enough exceptions to let Covid spread anyway. The burden of the mandates has been relatively high, while the benefits have been relatively low. It’s the opposite of what a successful public health campaign typically does.

16) The Dead Eyes interview with Tom Hanks was about the perfect podcast episode.  And the 29 before it were well worth the trip. 

Immigration polarization

Recent Gallup daily with this headline, “Four in 10 Americans Still Highly Concerned About Illegal Immigration”

My headline would have been “Republicans way too concerned about Illegal Immigration”

The situation is obviously not ideal, but it’s not exactly decades-high inflation, a pandemic, or Russia invading Ukraine.  Yet:

Of course, what’s particularyl notable about immigration is that not only have Republicans shifted to the right, Democrats have moved dramatically to the left:

With polarization like that, it’s really no wonder this issue has come to play such an outsized role in our politics.

The final word on intermittent fasting diets

Well, the biggest study yet on intermittent fasting diets is in and… they don’t work.  Or do they?  All depends on your perspective.  NYT:

The weight-loss idea is quite appealing: Limit your eating to a period of six to eight hours each day, during which you can have whatever you want.

Studies in mice seemed to support so-called time-restricted eating, a form of the popular intermittent fasting diet. Small studies of people with obesity suggested it might help shed pounds.

But now, a rigorous one-year study in which people followed a low-calorie diet between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. or consumed the same number of calories anytime during the day has failed to find an effect.

The bottom line, said Dr. Ethan Weiss, a diet researcher at the University of California, San Francisco: “There is no benefit to eating in a narrow window.” 

The study, published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, was led by researchers at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, and included 139 people with obesity. Women ate 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day, and men consumed 1,500 to 1,800 calories daily. To ensure compliance, participants were required to photograph every bit of food they ate and to keep food diaries.

Both groups lost weight — an average of about 14 to 18 pounds — but there was no significant difference in the amounts of weight lost with either diet strategy. There also were no significant differences between the groups in measures of waist circumference, body fat and lean body mass.

The scientists also found no differences in such risk factors as blood glucose levels, sensitivity to insulin, blood lipids or blood pressure.

“These results indicate that caloric intake restriction explained most of the beneficial effects seen with the time-restricted eating regimen,” Dr. Weiss and his colleagues concluded.

The new study is not the first to test time-restricted eating, but previous studies often were smaller, of shorter duration and without control groups. That research tended to conclude that people lost weight by eating only during a limited period of time during the day.

Boom there you have it.  Time-restricted diets don’t work. Calorie restriction does.

And, yet, the people on the time-restricted diets did lose a good amount of weight.  Here’s what we know…

1) Calorie restriction leads to a loss of weight.

2) It doesn’t matter when the calories are consumed– less calorie intake means weight loss

3) There’s just no magical benefits to restricting calorie consumption to 6-8 hours a day

4) People using a time-restricted window kept to low-calorie diets just as well.

But…

What this does not tell us is whether you have an easier time cutting those calories by the restricted time period.  Presumably, the equivalent weight loss means there’s no real benefit, but, at least based on my own experiences, I do wonder if those on time restriction actually had an easier time sticking to fewer calories.  Eating less is hard and anything that helps is good.  And I cannot be the only person out here who finds it much easier to consume fewer calories if I keep my daily eating within a 6 hour window.

As always, the weight loss plan/diet that is best for you is the one that is easiest for you to maintain over the long term.  For a decent amount of people, I really do think that will be intermittent fasting.  It’s just important to recognize that there’s no magic benefits to this and if you fill your 8 hours with cookies and ice cream there will definitely not be any weight loss.  

Just clean the air already!!

Back in 2020 when I first started learning about the importance of ventilation and filtration (and UVC technology) in reducing respiratory virus transmission, I was really optimistic that we would learn, invest in and deploy these technologies, and make healthier indoor environments that would more than pay off in their costs by the substantial improvements in human health.

Silly me.

Conor Friederdorf with a nice piece on “The Simple Anti-COVID Measures We’re Not Taking” which, of course, addresses the air issue:

There’s the proven utility of deploying better ventilation…

And Columbia University flags technology that appears to make indoor air as safe as outdoor air:

A new type of ultraviolet light that may be safe for people took less than five minutes to reduce the level of indoor airborne microbes by more than 98%, a joint study by scientists at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and in the U.K. has found. Even as microbes continued to be sprayed into the room, the level remained very low as long as the lights were on. The study suggests that far-UVC light from lamps installed in the ceiling could be a highly effective passive technology for reducing person-to-person transmission of airborne-mediated diseases such as COVID and influenza indoors.

But rather than pushing to develop and deploy new technologies and approaches, Americans are still focused on arguing about masks

[Also, yes, Operation Warp Speed for nasal vaccines!!]

Relatedly, I really appreciate that this NPR story is one of the few places that admits there’s a trade-off in higher energy costs to cleaner air.  Worth it!!  But a real tradeoff because… physics:

Circulating fresh air helps flush viruses out of vents so they don’t build up indoors. But there’s a downside: higher cost and energy use, which increases the greenhouse gases fueling climate change. “You spend more because your heat is coming on more often in order to warm up the outdoor air,” Ward said.

Ward said his program can afford the higher heating bills, at least for now, because of past savings from reduced energy use. Still, cost is an impediment to a more extensive revamp: Ward would like to install more efficient air filters, but the buildings — some of which are 30 years old — would have to be retrofitted to accommodate them.

But, what presumably uses way less energy than heating cold (cooling hot) fresh air, is to deploy UVC technology to kill pathogens in the air.  The amazing thing is we’ve already had this technology in use in some locations for decades.  Honestly, it seems to me that it would be such a good investment to put this in every school building in America. 

Donald Milton (one of the people I’ve learned a lot about clean air from on twitter) and others with a very nice NYT op-ed making the case for the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of this technology.  I’m in!

There’s a better way to hold indoor events without masks, and it doesn’t rely on vaccines and rapid tests. Vaccinations can prevent the worst possible outcomes of Covid-19 but cannot always prevent infections. Pre-event testing is imperfect, and for it to be most effective, people need to test right before entering an event.

Putting this much of the onus of infection control on individuals is unlikely to work well to prevent superspreading and lets hosts of large events off the hook for keeping their attendees, workers and others safe. Instead, there are ways that building owners can make indoor environments safer by disinfecting indoor air. One of the best technologies to do so — germicidal ultraviolet light — has been studied for decades and can now be used safely…

The risk of catching diseases transmitted through the air like Covid, measles, tuberculosis and likely many other respiratory infections, including the flu, depends in large part on the amount of infectious viruses — or bacteria in the case of TB — in the air we breathe. The number of these germs in indoor air is controlled by two things: the rate at which infected people in a room exhale germs and the rate at which infectious germs are removed from the air.

Ventilation and filtration can remove germs floating indoors either by blowing them out of the building and replacing the air with fresh outdoor air or by capturing them while moving the indoor air through a filter. At two air changes per hour, which is commonly provided in large buildings, a little more than half of the existing germs are removed every 30 minutes. At six air changes per hour, which is common in hospital rooms and classrooms with multiple portable HEPA air filters, a little more than half of the germs are removed every 10 minutes.

That’s good, but there are a couple of challenges. Methods that move air through rooms can be energy intensive, expensive and noisy. A highly infectious person with the coronavirus could add enough germs to the air to infect over 16 people every minute, or over 900 people per hour, although in practice some of those viral doses would not find a person to infect. Omicron may now be approaching the infectiousness of the measles virus, the most contagious respiratory virus known; one highly infectious person can exhale enough measles virus to infect 93 people per minute, or over 5,500 per hour. Removing half that amount of virus every 10 minutes may make superspreading events smaller, but it’s not enough to prevent them in large indoor gatherings. That’s where air disinfection with germicidal ultraviolet light, or GUV, comes in.

GUV can easily and silently kill half of the germs floating in indoor air every two minutes or less. It was developed and tested beginning in the 1930s using some of the same technology in fluorescent light fixtures. It is still commonly used in TB wards, as well as some major hospital systems and homeless shelters…

Americans have long been able to turn on the tap with confidence that drinking the water will not give us cholera or another illness. Like drinking clean water, breathing sanitary indoor air, especially in crowded public places, will prevent respiratory epidemics. Outbreaks will become much easier to control without economic disruption and politicization. Ventilation and filtration will make important contributions to reducing transmission in homes and offices. Disinfecting the air can make higher-risk settings for superspreading — like conference rooms, restaurants, meat- and poultry-packing plants, nursing homes, prisons and more — safer.

GUV is commercially available right now, and building owners and operators should be encouraged to adopt it through subsidies and tax incentives. We can end superspreader events and make public events and dining safer for everyone. What are we waiting for?

Yes, yes, yes!!!  Let’s invest in this.  Let’s pas the right incentive policies.  Let’s make this happen!

It’s actually not so bad out there for the immunocompromised

Oh man is this a much-needed corrective from Benjamin Mazer in the Atlantic, “‘It’s Just Scaring People, and It’s Not Saving Lives’ Stories about the pandemic’s continuing risks for immunocompromised people may create unintended harms.”

So much of the response to the ending of mask mandates was “what about the immunocompromised?!” (who, of course, can still wear high quality masks to protect themselves).  Many immunocompromised people are not great at making antibodies based on the vaccines, but that’s really not even the most important part of the immune system. And I’m not just being callous here– two members of my household are “immunocompromised” and two very good friends are solid organ transplant recipients.  Anyway:

She went on to say, “It kind of feels like immunocompromised people are getting sacrificed.”

This dramatic coverage underscores the continuing risks of the pandemic, especially for those who are most vulnerable: Immunocompromised people who get vaccinated aren’t quite as safe as the general vaccinated population. (The degree of added risk depends on the underlying condition.) But well-intentioned stories on this issue sometimes overstate the case, claiming that COVID shots for the immunocompromised are “ineffective” or “cannot work on everyone.” That is incorrect, and it hinders uptake of vaccines. The shots do provide these patients with very meaningful protection as a rule, Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, told me. To suggest otherwise “is just a complete distortion … It’s just scaring people, and it’s not saving lives.”

When the mRNA vaccines finally arrived, at the end of 2020, their value for immunocompromised people remained unclear. Members of this high-risk group were specifically excluded from the first trials performed by Pfizer and Moderna. Patients and their doctors had only scientific scraps to guide them in the months that followed: small, preliminary studies that recorded antibody levels after shots. The initial results weren’t promising at all. One study found that just 54 percent of organ-transplant patients, who require the most powerful immune-dampening drugs, had detectable antibodies after two vaccine doses; and when present, these protective proteins accumulated in much lower quantities than were observed in the general population. Some astute patients had their own antibody levels measured and declared themselves “vaccinated but not protected” when the results came up short.

Sure enough, when Omicron arrived last fall, immunocompromised people were hit the hardest. A study conducted by Kaiser Permanente in California showed that immunocompromised patients who had received three Moderna doses were just 29 percent protected from Omicron infection—as compared with the 71 percent protection afforded others. Some patients’ antibody levels can still be low after three, four, or even five vaccine doses. (Three primary doses and two boosters are now recommended for this population.)

Yet there’s a silver lining. Antibodies matter, but they matter most for preventing illness, at any level of severity. Regarding the most dangerous outcomes from disease, recent research from the CDC indicates that—shot for shot—the immunocompromised achieve most of the same benefits as healthy people. One study, published in March, looked at the pandemic’s Delta wave and found that three doses of an mRNA vaccine gave immunocompromised people 87 percent protection against hospitalization, compared with 97 percent for others. Another CDC report, also out last month, suggested that on the very worst outcomes—the need for a breathing tube, or death—mRNA vaccines were 74 percent effective for immunocompromised patients (including many who hadn’t gotten all their shots), and 92 percent effective for the immunocompetent. A 10-to-20-percentage-point gap in safety from the most dire outcomes is consequential, especially for those who are most susceptible to the disease. Still, these results should reassure us that the immunocompromised are not fighting this battle unarmed... [italics in original; bold is mine]

A large CDC analysis of two-dose vaccine regimens within the immunocompromised population found that rheumatologic patients saw an 81 percent decrease in their risk of COVID hospitalization. Next came solid-cancer patients (79 percent protection), blood-cancer patients (74 percent), and those born with immune deficiencies (73 percent). Organ-transplant recipients were the least safe from COVID after vaccination, with just 59 percent of their hospitalizations prevented after two doses. Robert Rakita, a transplant-infectious-disease specialist at the University of Washington, told me that some of his patients have died from COVID despite having had three or four mRNA injections. He recommends that all vaccinated organ recipients continue to wear a mask and avoid crowded indoor activities. But such patients make up just 8 percent of the 7 million Americans estimated to be taking medications that weaken their immune system. When COVID reporting casually lumps together all “immunocompromised” patients, it papers over these differences. Readers are left to think that a fibromyalgia patient and a kidney recipient face similar risks…

When the vaccine campaign began, with shots for the oldest Americans in nursing homes and elsewhere, news coverage emphasized seniors’ feelings of joy and relief. But the immunocompromised have been described in very different terms, even as vaccines are saving their lives too. Stories focus on their uncertainty and fear—and may end up adding to the same.

So, unsurprisingly the vaccines aren’t as effective for the immunocompromised.  But, for the most part, they’re still really effective.  And that absolutely should not get lost in our policy discussions.

The low-hanging hemp of legal marijuana

Okay, I don’t even know how hemp grows, but I do like a good “low-hanging fruit” metaphor.  And that’s what legal marijuana is for Democrats and they are totally dropping the ball.  I meant to write this post a few days ago, but in the meantime, twitter was all abuzz for a day (as it will) about Joe Biden’s stark decline in popularity among young people.  And you know what young people really love? Legal marijuana.  A recent poll on the state of the issue in NC:

The poll also found:

• 75% of Democrats polled felt medical marijuana should be legalized, 15% of Democrats it should remain against the law and 10% weren’t sure.
• 63% of Democrats felt recreational marijuana should be legalized, 26% felt it should remain against the law and 12% weren’t sure.
• 64% of Republicans felt medical marijuana should be legalized, 26% felt it should remain against the law and 10% weren’t sure.
• 45% of Republicans felt recreational marijuana should be legalized, 45% felt it should remain against the law and 10% weren’t sure.

Got that– it’s even a break even proposition among all Republicans.  Here’s a chart with various breakdowns on legal recreational marijuana.

Sure, maybe Democrats might turn off some older voters who were culturally comfortable with Democrats but marijuana was the last straw (honestly, seems like that’s got to be a pretty small group), but I think the gains among young people would be quite meaningful.  And, a lot of young people who favor legal marijuana are otherwise disengaged from politics and just maybe this could help get some of them voting.  

This is a fight worth having because the status quo policy (federal schedule 1 is dumb) and because it is almost assuredly a political winner for Democrats.  I think this is where the party truly is hampered by having so much of their leadership having come of age in the “reefer madness” generation.  

[This is funny, I went to queue this up to post in the morning and I saw that I’m posting on 4/20— that was seriously not even my intent :-)]

Trans rights vs. radical gender ideology

I’ve had many thoughts about what’s so frustrating about the current political situation regarding trans people.  We absolutely should treat all trans people with kindness, dignity, and respect.  But that doesn’t mean we have to buy into every claim (many just completely belying science and human experience) about the nature of sex and gender.  Count on Jonathan Rauch to get right to the heart on how this has all gone so wrong.  This is a pretty succinct essay and it’s well worth reading the whole thing.  That said…

As Helen Joyce argues in her book Trans (2021), radical gender ideology (or gender identity ideology, as it’s also called) is a horse of a different color. [emphases mine] It is not at all the same as trans rights. Nor is it any one thing: It’s a conceptual mess, propounding some ideas that make sense (gender is socially conditioned) but also wild claims, such as that (as Joyce writes) “depending on its owner’s identity, a penis may be a female sex organ.” I take its central claims to include these:

·      Trans women are women and trans men are men, no difference, full stop;

·      Human gender and sex are social constructions and are not a binary but on a continuum, so concepts like “male” and “female” are relative and subjective;

·      Gender and sex are chosen identities, and an individual’s declared choice can never be doubted or challenged;

·      Denying or disputing any of the above is violence.

Even if you don’t agree me that the first three propositions are false and the fourth is intolerant, you might concur that they are not the only or best way to think about transgender civil rights. Rather, they are extrinsic notions that escaped from academia and attached themselves, limpet-like, in the same way that left-wing politics parasitized gay rights a generation ago.

The political play is the same now, too. Much as the Left sought to present itself as the take-it-or-leave-it alternative to the homophobic Right, so radical gender ideology insists that the choice is between itself and vicious transphobia. Both radicalisms—like all radicalisms—target centrism and compromise for extinction.

That may benefit people who drive academics from their jobs or call for “stopping the circulation” of books questioning gender ideology, but for everyone else, it’s bad. Concepts like “person with uterus” make nonsense of feminism by erasing the category of woman. (“As the class of women is rendered vacuous, feminism is, too,” writes Joyce.) The same is true of the categories gay and lesbian, whose reality my generation fought hard to establish, but which mean nothing in a de-gendered world.

Telling tomboyish girls or effeminate boys that they should identify as the opposite sex embraces all the hoary gender stereotypes that made generations of gay and lesbian people (and many straight people) miserable. Worse, it can cater to homophobic pressures not to be gay. (Evidence in this domain is thin, but one study found that almost a fourth of gender detransitioners cited homophobia or difficulty accepting themselves as lesbian, gay, or bisexual as a reason for transitioning.)

Insisting that it’s always hateful to draw distinctions based on biological sex in sports, prisons, and medical training strikes most of the public as nutty, unfair, and dangerous. The backlash that is forming will harm trans people, gay and lesbian people (who are already caught in the undertow), and everyone who hopes for candor and compromise. Radicalism makes the only path forward—social negotiation tailored to diverse situations—unattainable.

The first step out of the radicalization trap is what’s already happening: decoupling trans civil rights from radical gender ideology by recognizing that they are not at all the same. You can support the former and reject the latter. The excesses of activists, along with books and articles like Joyce’s, are bringing about that realization. But a second, equally important step remains: the emergence of an integrationist, accommodationist, and reality-based transgender center, led by trans moderates who have had enough. Only they can take back their movement. I can say from experience that once they do, they will win, and so will the country.

I’d like to think I had implicitly understood this distinction, but needed Rauch to so nicely formalize this for me.  So, there you go. I support trans rights and oppose radical gender ideology.

A few quick thoughts on masks and air travel

1) It’s patently ridiculous to have a single federal district judge make public health policy for the entire country.  I mean just insane.  And it’s not exactly impressive legal reasoning– a lot of the right-wing talking points, rather than cogent analysis you’d expect from a judge who clerked for Clarence Thomas and was appointed by Trump

2) On some level, I think, the Biden administration is not too unhappy with this.  Statements were not about urgent and vigorous court challenges.

3) Damn are the airlines happy about it.  Many literally dropped it in flight, which is truly ridiculous.  Whether rightly or wrongly (mostly the latter), many people believe their flying safety is dependent on others wearing masks and they arranged air travel thinking that would be the case.  Best take I’ve seen is that it is a giant pain in the ass for airlines to enforce it and they are happy to get out of the mask enforcement business.

4) My God did so many liberals just completely lose their shit over this.  Mass death from the skies!!  Seriously,  I’m not going to bother finding the representative tweets from seemingly otherwise reasonable people, but I did read about many children dying directly from this and “huge consequences” from people with serious public health credentials.  Get a grip!  There’s a reasonable debate to be had about when/how/if on airline mask mandates but to act as if this mandate is the difference between ending the pandemic and mass death from above (especially considering the terrific ventilation/filtration on flights) is just hysterical.  There’s less than 1000 American children total who have died from Covid and somehow the airline mask policy is going to make a big difference? Or the sentiments that anyone not wearing a mask on a plane now is some sort of misanthrope/psychopath.

Anyway, not to say that there’s not a good case to be made for continuing the mask mandate– I think there is– but omg the just completely irrational “we’re all going to die now!” from so many liberals is not all that much better than those on the right denying masks have any efficacy.

5) Yes, there is the occasional 3 year old cancer patient on a flight who cannot wear a mask, but please stop pretending that’s a common problem and take some agency for your own health.  You want to avoid Covid on a flight?  Wear an N95 and put some effort into making sure you have one that fits well (3m Aura anyone?).  You can do that and be quite safe and stop freaking out about whether the guy two rows over with a crappy cloth mask that keeps taking it off to drink is the one responsible for your safety.  Like, of course people freaked out about Yglesias tweeting this, but he’s right:

By far the most important article on mask mandates is this one @olgakhazan wrote in January.https://t.co/SoXvcEydSv

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 19, 2022

Personally, I’m not flying again till September, but would I wear a mask if flying today?  Absolutely.  I’d have on my 3m Aura N95 and not worry about what other people were doing.