Quick hits (part I)

Well, damn, this was supposed to be last week’s quick hits part II and looks like I forgot to post it.  Sorry!  So, I’ll start this weeks’ part I by adding on.

1) Chait, “Ron DeSantis’s Nazi Outreach Is a Strategy, Not an Accident”

Yesterday, as part of what it describes as a reboot — and what the campaign media describes as a breakdown — Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign fired another tranche of staffers, including speechwriter and right-wing activist Nate Hochman. The 25-year-old Hochman created a controversial social-media post that dissolves into a creepy fascistic scene with bayonet-wielding soldiers marching toward a strange rotating symbol. That symbol, a sonnenrad, is used by white supremacists as a kind of less obvious version of the swastika.

It would be easy to understand this development as simply more campaign dysfunction, perhaps poor vetting, or even a symptom of the campaign being “too online.” It is better understood as the result of a fundamental strategic decision by DeSantis to actively court the far right.

DeSantis’s campaign hired Hochman from National Review after it was reported he had participated in a Twitter Spaces with Nick Fuentes, who is at least Nazi-adjacent. “We were just talking about your influence and we were saying, like, you’ve gotten a lot of kids ‘based,’ and we respect that, for sure,” Hochman told him. “I literally said, ‘I think Nick’s probably a better influence than Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservative.’” (The comparison is instructive: The nicest and perhaps only good thing that can be said about Shapiro is that Nazis hate him.)

When I wrote a long feature about DeSantis’s campaign last year, one factor I identified was its decision to position DeSantis to Trump’s right. The most visible aspects of this strategy have involved mocking Trump as a supporter of the COVID vaccine and LGBTQ rights, both of which are themes in the video Hochman created. But it has also led the campaign to woo the extreme right…

It is certainly a relief to learn that DeSantis does not want his staffers to be creating official campaign videos with white supremacist imagery. Still, Hochman’s error here was not in the overall thrust of his project. He walked a very careful line of building bridges between the white nationalist right and the DeSantis campaign, and only fell off when the hidden message was sent a little too visibly.

2) I’m definitely a fan of lemon-lime soda, though I almost always prefer a cola except when I’m trying to avoid caffeine.  Anyway, had you ever thought about the fact that pretty much nothing else combines lemon and lime?  Loved this from Ian Bogost:

But wait: Why should “lemon-lime,” as a combination, be so ordinary? Lemons and limes are both tart citrus, but very few other foods or beverages, packaged or prepared, put the two together. Let’s face it: It’s not normal to squeeze both lemons and limes onto your tacos, or bake them into key-lime-and-lemon pies. And do Sprite or 7up or Sierra Mist or Starry really even taste like the merger of these fruits? Or is “lymon,” as Coca-Cola has sometimes characterized Sprite’s flavor, merely a marketing gimmick that has duped me, you, and the world?

Seeking answers, I embarked on a voyage into the history of citrus and soda—and learned from my travels that lemon-lime is less a flavor than an archetype, a bright, vibrant antidote to heat and sluggishness that gets delivered through the excited medium of carbonation. Indeed, a certain spectral lemon-lime-ness has been with us since the very start of manufactured fizzy water in the 18th century. It’s the ghost, you might say, in the soda machine…

But even then, why? “No idea!” Tristan Donovan, the author of Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World, told me. The beverage flavor pairing “just seems to have been around.” As commonplace as it seems today, lemon-lime is, or was, historically aberrant. Lemon and lime are related, both sour, small-bodied citrus fruits with tennis-ball-colored rinds. But in the long history of human gastronomy, the two rarely appear together. Try to name a classic dish that uses both lemons and limes? Albala couldn’t think of one. Likewise, lemon and lime are common mixers and garnishes for cocktails, but generally not together—a gimlet is a lime drink; a Tom Collins is a lemon one.

3) An early look (from last month) at the Electoral College from Kyle Klondik:

— Our initial 2024 Electoral College ratings start with just four Toss-up states.

— Democrats start with a small advantage, although both sides begin south of what they need to win.

— We consider a rematch of the 2020 election — Joe Biden versus Donald Trump — as the likeliest matchup, but not one that is set in stone…

Map 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College ratings

4) Freddie deBoer recently linked to a piece of his from 6 years ago that I really love, because damn if selection bias isn’t about the most powerful (and often underappreciated) factor in everything, not just education, “why selection bias is the most powerful force in education”

Thinking about selection bias compels us to consider our perceptions of educational cause and effect in general. A common complaint of liberal education reformers is that students who face consistent achievement gaps, such as poor minority students, suffer because they are systematically excluded from the best schools, screened out by high housing prices in these affluent, white districts. But what if this confuses cause and effect? Isn’t it more likely that we perceive those districts to be the best precisely because they effectively exclude students who suffer under the burdens of racial discrimination and poverty? Of course schools look good when, through geography and policy, they are responsible for educating only those students who receive the greatest socioeconomic advantages our society provides. But this reversal of perceived cause and effect is almost entirely absent from education talk, in either liberal or conservative media.

Immigrant students in American schools outperform their domestic peers, and the reason is about culture and attitude, the immigrant’s willingness to strive and persevere, right? Nah. Selection bias. So-called alternative charters have helped struggling districts turn it around, right? Not really; they’ve just artificially created selection bias. At Purdue, where there is a large Chinese student population, I always chuckled to hear domestic students say “Chinese people are all so rich!” It didn’t seem to occur to them that attending a school that costs better than $40,000 a year for international students acted as a natural screen to exclude the vast number of Chinese people who live in deep poverty. And I had to remind myself that my 8:00 AM writing classes weren’t going so much better than my 2:00 PM classes because I was somehow a better teacher in the mornings, but because the students who would sign up for an 8:00 AM class were probably the most motivated and prepared. There’s plenty of detailed work by people who know more than I do about the actual statistical impact of these issues and how to correct for them. But we all need to be aware of how deeply unequal populations influence our perceptions of educational quality.

Selection bias hides everywhere in education. 

5) I recently finished watching all of “The Other Two.” So funny and such good satire. 

6) Fareed Zakaria, “Russia’s biggest problem isn’t the war. It’s losing the 21st century.”

What is not a matter of speculation is the state of Russian society. I’ve been stunned by one statistic ever since I read it: A 15-year-old Russian boy today has the same life expectancy as a 15-year-old boy in Haiti. Remember, Russia is one of the world’s richest countries in terms of natural resources. And it is an urbanized, industrialized society with levels of education and literacy comparable to, and perhaps even exceeding, other European countries.

This analysis comes from an August 2022 working paper by scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, who has long studied demography. He points out that for three decades now, Russia has been depopulating. With a brief respite from 2013 to 2015, deaths have outpaced births, but he notes that this trend is one that we see in many industrialized countries.

What stands out in Russia is its mortality rate. In 2019 — before covid and the invasion of Ukraine — the World Health Organization estimated a 15-year-old boy in Russia could expect to live another 53.7 years, which was the same as in Haiti and below the life expectancy for boys his age in Yemen, Mali and South Sudan. Swiss boys around the same age could expect to live more than 13 years longer.

Education usually correlates with good health, but not in Russia. Eberstadt points out that shockingly, Russia is a country with “First World” education levels and “Fourth World” mortality rates for its working age population. He then digs deeper into the educational attainments and finds that the mystery deepens. With huge numbers of well-trained people, especially in the sciences, Russia performs miserably in the knowledge economy, much worse than did the Soviet Union. In 2019, Russia ranked behind Austria in international patent applications, despite having 16 times the population. Today, it ranks alongside Alabama in annual U.S. patent awards (the gold standard for companies everywhere), despite having almost 30 times the population. All these numbers will likely get much worse given the hundreds of thousands of (likely well-trained, urban, educated) Russians who fled the country after its aggression against Ukraine…

What explains this stunning mismatch in Russia? A new book by scholar Alexander Etkind, “Russia Against Modernity,” makes the case that Putin has created a parasitic state that gets revenue by extracting natural resources rather than any creative production and that fulfills none of the functions of a modern state in terms of providing welfare for its people. Corruption is intrinsic to this kleptocratic regime, Etkind wrote, noting that post-Soviet Russia has seen the fastest rise in inequality anywhere in the world. After the anti-Putin protests in 2011 and 2012 (which an enraged Putin blamed on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), the Russian state became even more anti-modern.

For Putin’s regime, the West now represents forces of social, economic and political modernization that could infect Russia. In his speech as he launched the invasion of Ukraine, Putin accused the United States of seeking to destroy Russia’s traditional values and impose new ones on it that directly lead “to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” For Putin, modernizing Russia would create a more active civil society, greater demands for better health care, more opportunities for ordinary citizens and a less kleptocratic state. And so he advocates a traditional Russia, which celebrates religion, traditional morality, xenophobia and strict gender conformity.

What does this all add up to? I am not sure. But it’s fair to say that Russia’s biggest problem is not that it is losing the Ukraine war but rather that it is losing the 21st century.

7) One of the better pieces I’ve read on the Hollywood writers’ strike (from a write), “The Businessmen Broke Hollywood: And now they don’t want to pay their employees.”

8) Cool social science here, “Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues”

Public attitudes that are in opposition to scientific consensus can be disastrous and include rejection of vaccines and opposition to climate change mitigation policies. Five studies examine the interrelationships between opposition to expert consensus on controversial scientific issues, how much people actually know about these issues, and how much they think they know. Across seven critical issues that enjoy substantial scientific consensus, as well as attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines and mitigation measures like mask wearing and social distancing, results indicate that those with the highest levels of opposition have the lowest levels of objective knowledge but the highest levels of subjective knowledge. 

9) Pretty epic piece here, so, gift link. “The Secret History of Gun Rights: How Lawmakers Armed the N.R.A.: They served in Congress and on the N.R.A.’s board at the same time. Over decades, a small group of legislators led by a prominent Democrat pushed the gun lobby to help transform the law, the courts and views on the Second Amendment.”

10) Very good from Seth Masket, “Is it still the economy, stupid? Biden isn’t benefiting from a good economy because presidential approval doesn’t really change much anymore”

There’s been some interesting commentary recently about just why Joe Biden’s approval rating remain mired in the low 40s in a period of low unemployment, modest inflation, and solid economic growth. (See Dan Drezner, Jonathan Bernstein, and Noah Berlatsky for a recent sampling.) I’d like to weigh in here with what I think is going on. Presidential approval is largely untethered from economic growth these days, and a big part of that is that presidential approval doesn’t really change much anymore…

There are a few ways to think about this. One is that, thanks to growing polarization, there just isn’t that much movement in presidential approval anymore. Pretty much every Democratic (or Democratic-leaning independent) will say they approve of Biden, and pretty much every Republican (or Republican-leaning independent) will say they disapprove, and there just aren’t that many independents left to change their mind.

Relatedly, Democrats and Republicans live in increasingly divergent news environments. Viewers of Fox News pretty much never hear anything positive about Biden, and they’ve heard some critical coverage of Trump but far less than viewers of CNN or MSNBC have heard.

Notably, this doesn’t mean that views of the economy have completely polarized to the point of rigidity; there’s plenty of movement of the economic needle here. But if the economic news is good (as it has been lately), Fox News viewers mostly won’t hear about it, while if it’s bad, Fox will hit on it hard.

Here’s another thought: the Fed (and even Congress) have gotten pretty good at managing the economy. That is, we haven’t seen a sustained and pronounced recession since 2008. Nor have we seen an overheated boom, arguably since the 1990s. Even during Covid, the shutdown was very brief, it was quickly followed by a useful economic stimulus, and sustained economic growth returned pretty rapidly. It’s possible that extreme economic conditions could produce extreme shifts in approval, but we (luckily) haven’t seen those lately.

So does this mean that the economy is no longer driving elections? I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s possible that the effect is substantially muted.

11) Tricia Cotham’s party switch makes it to the NYT with some juicy new details.  She is quite simply an awful person:

When Tricia Cotham, a former Democratic lawmaker, was considering another run for the North Carolina House of Representatives, she turned to a powerful party leader for advice. Then, when she jumped into the Democratic primary, she was encouraged by still other formidable allies.

She won the primary in a redrawn district near Charlotte, and then triumphed in the November general election by 18 percentage points, a victory that helped Democrats lock in enough seats to prevent, by a single vote, a Republican supermajority in the state House.

Except what was unusual — and not publicly known at the time — was that the influential people who had privately encouraged Ms. Cotham to run were Republicans, not Democrats. One was Tim Moore, the redoubtable Republican speaker of the state House. Another was John Bell, the Republican majority leader…

Interviews with former and current political allies depict her as someone who had grown alienated from Democratic Party officials and ideals. Republican leaders cultivated her before she ran and, seeing her growing estrangement, seized a chance to coax her across party lines…

Lacey Williams, a former advocacy director at the Charlotte-based Latin American Coalition who considered Ms. Cotham a friend for years, said Ms. Cotham “felt she did not get the gratitude or spotlight that she felt she deserved,” and added, “she was jealous that other Democrats were getting the adulation from the party.”

12) NYT with just how much legacy helps in college admissions, “How Big Is the Legacy Boost at Elite Colleges? In the same week as a civil rights inquiry into Harvard, new data shows legacies are slightly more qualified yet are four times as likely to get into top schools.”

13) This is so true! Great, under-appreciated movie and performance, “Stranger Than Fiction Should Have Been Will Ferrell’s Big Dramatic Break”

With the advantage of hindsight, one can sometimes look back at an actor’s filmography and point to a specific moment where a career could have diverged from the track it was on. These moments can be positive or negative, highlights or pitfalls in the resume of a Hollywood performer, but they’re inflection points where change was most likely to happen—“what if?” questions waiting to be asked. And of all these moments in prominent Hollywood careers, the one that always stands out to me is Will Ferrell’s inspired performance in 2006 fantasy dramedy Stranger Than Fiction, a role that earned him no small amount of critical praise at the time. But although the film was a modest success, the takeaway 17 years later is that it failed to act as a springboard for the big, dramatic breakout that Ferrell’s performance truly deserved. This was the moment when Ferrell could potentially have transitioned into the more thoughtful second act of an already wildly successful comedy career, the phase that perhaps could have involved awards statues and career-redefining performances. But instead, he continued to be cast almost entirely in the broad comedies that first earned him fame, playing to diminishing returns over the last decade in particular.

14) Thomas Pueyo’s geography threads are so much fun.  And here’s a megathread of all of them in one place. 

15) Seems like just straight up decriminalization of Fentanyl with basically no criminal sanction is probably not a good idea, “Scenes From a City That Only Hands Out Tickets for Using Fentanyl: Oregon’s experiment to curb overdoses by decriminalizing small amounts of illicit drugs is in its third year, and life has changed for most everyone in the city of Portland.”

For the past two and a half years, Oregon has been trying an unusual experiment to stem soaring rates of addiction and overdose deaths. People caught with small amounts of illicit drugs for “personal use,” including fentanyl and methamphetamine, are fined just $100 — a sanction that can be waived if they participate in a drug screening and health assessment. The aim is to reserve prosecutions for large-scale dealers and address addiction primarily as a public health emergency.

When the proposal, known as Measure 110, was approved by nearly 60 percent of Oregon voters in November 2020, the pandemic had already emptied downtown Portland of workers and tourists. But its street population was growing, especially after the anti-police protests that had spread around the country that summer. Within months of the measure taking effect in February 2021, open-air drug use, long in the shadows, burst into full view, with people sitting in circles in parks or leaning against street signs, smoking fentanyl crushed on tinfoil.

Since then, Oregon’s overdose rates have only grown. Now, tents of unhoused people line many sidewalks in Portland. Monthslong waiting lists for treatment continue to lengthen. Some politicians and community groups are calling for Measure 110 to be replaced with tough fentanyl possession laws. Others are pleading to give it more time and resources.

16) This is terrific. So much stuff in here on Happiness:

Since 1972 the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a representative sample of US adults “… [are] you …very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Overall, the population is reasonably happy even after a mild recent decline. I focus on differences along standard socio demographic dimensions: age, race, gender, education, marital status income and geography. I also explore political and social differences. Being married is the most important differentiator with a 30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap over the unmarried. Income is also important, but Easterlin’s (1974) paradox applies: the rich are much happier than the poor at any moment, but income growth doesn’t matter. Education and racial differences are also consequential, though the black-white gap has narrowed substantially. Geographic, gender and age differences have been relatively unimportant, though old-age unhappiness may be emerging. Conservatives are distinctly happier than liberals as are people who trust others or the Federal government. All above differences survive control for other differences.

17) Richard Hasen, “U.S. v. Trump Will Be the Most Important Case in Our Nation’s History”

18) We really need to do better here, “You’re probably recycling plastic wrong. And it’s not your fault.­­”

Picture this: You finish a drink from a red Solo cup, and before throwing it out, you check the bottom of the cup to see the iconic recycling symbol. That means it can be tossed in the recycling bin, right?

Wrong. Solo cups are made of polystyrene, a plastic that is very difficult to recycle. No one can fault consumers for not knowing that. The real blame lies with the government, which has failed to properly regulate claims that plastics manufacturers put on their products.

The core of the problem is that there is no recycling system in the United States; there are upward of 20,000 of them. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to say which items are actually recyclable. Without stricter standards, consumers will continue to be confused, seriously hampering the effort to divert waste from landfills…

 

Some people find the labels so confusing that they simply don’t recycle anything. In one 2019 poll, almost a quarter of Americans said recycling is more complicated than filling out their taxes.

And who could blame them? Unlike in countries such as Germany, which has standardized what can be collected for recycling and enforced presorting of waste, U.S. policymakers never sat down to figure out how to make this easy on consumers. In fact, it was the plastics industry that created the system of resin codes that include the “chasing arrows” and a number between 1 and 7 to denote the primary material included.

Nowadays, the only plastic items that are consistently recycled are bottles and jugs made out of polyethylene terephthalate (which is labeled with a “1”) and high-density polyethylene (labeled with a “2”), as a survey of recycling facilities by Greenpeace shows. Recycling plants typically reject almost everything else, meaning it ends up in landfills.

This wasn’t always the case. For years, the United States was able to send its plastic waste to China for recycling. But that changed in 2018, when China stopped accepting the material from the United States. No alternative destination has since emerged, yet plastics still regularly feature those codes with the recycling symbol…

One rule should govern waste management: Keep it simple. Determining whether a majority of local waste systems collect certain items for recycling is difficult, not just for consumers but for businesses and policymakers, too. More important is determining whether there’s a substantial market to turn items into something new. That should play a key role in labeling something as recyclable, as the EPA has advocated.

Doing so would likely disqualify all but a few plastic products from bearing the recycling symbol, which would likely anger many businesses. But the government should stand firm. Forcing companies to be honest about whether their products are recyclable could spur innovation to make that the case.

19) Talk about DEI amok. This story is very upsetting and totally nuts. “A Racist Smear. A Tarnished Career. And the Suicide of Richard Bilkszto.: A beloved educator was branded as a bigot in a series of DEI sessions. The Free Press reveals the details—and exclusive audio—from a story of public shame.”

Kike Ojo-Thompson, a diversity trainer in Toronto, was explaining to her class of 200 or so public school administrators that Canada is a much more racist country than the United States. 

“Canada is a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism,” Thompson said to a sea of nodding heads squeezed into Zoom. “The racism we experience is far worse here than there.” 

It was April 26, 2021, and Thompson was leading attendees through a session on systemic inequity. 

Thompson acknowledged that this might be hard for Canadians to accept, explaining that Americans “have a fighting posture against, at least, the monarchy. Here we celebrate the monarchy, the very heart and soul and origins of the colonial structure.” 

It was at that point that Richard Bilkszto, the principal of Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute and Adult Learning Centre, put his hand up. (Burnhamthorpe is a high school that caters mostly to students in their twenties who previously dropped out.) Bilkszto had trained in the United States, he was a devout progressive, and he was mystified by Thompson’s comments.

“I just wanted to make a comment about the Canada–U.S. thing, a little bit of a challenge to it,” Bilkszto offered. 

20) Of course, the awfulness on the right is pretty damn awful, “Top Texas A&M officials were involved in botched recruiting of journalism professor, who will receive $1 million settlement”

Multiple Texas A&M University System regents voiced concerns about the perceived left-leaning credentials of Kathleen O. McElroy, a Black journalism professor, hired to launch a new journalism program at their flagship school, according to an internal report released Thursday.

Top system leaders questioned the decision after a conservative website blasted the hiring of McElroy, a tenured professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a former New York Times editor. As Texas A&M University officials fielded pushback from regents and external concerns from conservative groups, McElroy’s offer was watered down after A&M held a public signing ceremony announcing her hire. She ultimately rescinded her acceptance.

A review of the failed hiring also revealed that former university President M. Katherine Banks was heavily involved in discussions about making changes to McElroy’s offer, contradicting Banks’ earlier claims that she was unaware that the school had weakened its proposed terms of employment. Banks abruptly retired last month amid turmoil spurred by the botched hiring.

The report summarizing the internal inquiry, which was conducted by the system’s general counsel, included hundreds of pages of text messages and emails. It provides new insight into the unusual involvement of system-level regents, who are gubernatorial appointees, in a university-level hire. And it reveals that university leadership tried to delay the announcement of McElroy’s hiring until after the Republican-controlled Legislature ended this year’s regular lawmaking session and approved the system’s budget.

21) Of course you are drinking enough water.  Your body is not an idiot. 

22) John Cassidy argues that all Trump’s legal troubles are starting to take at least a modest toll in public opinion towards him. 

23) I feel like this article too easily elides how insanely hot Phoenix is for much of the year– I don’t care how “dry” it is when it’s sunny and 110, but, it’s good stuff in here, “The Problem With ‘Why Do People Live in Phoenix?’”  Short version– as with so much– lower housing costs.  Also, forget the heat issue, I think the extraordinary number of sunny days is a huge draw.