1) Great stuff on Covid’s “new normal.” I fully endorse this:
Among people who are still paying attention to Covid-19, there’s been a recent surge — not just in viral activity but in the concern once again being paid to Covid.
Headlines announce that transmission is surging and hospitalizations for Covid are rising by alarming percentages. There’s debate in some places about whether or not to resume wearing masks. People are worrying about whether the latest subvariant, BA.2.86, spells bad news for our fall and winter, and whether soon-to-be-released booster shots will be a match for it or whatever variant follows.
While the angst is understandable, there’s something we need to grasp at this point in our coexistence with SARS-CoV-2: This is our life now.
“I see so many people say: ‘Remember, Covid’s not over,’” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center, told STAT.
“Covid’s never going to be over. You need to set expectations accordingly. It is never going to be over.”…
Covid is now like influenza, RSV, rhinoviruses, and a large number of other pathogens that will at some point or points in a year increase in transmission activity and then decline, ceding the stage to something else that can make people cough, sneeze, run a fever, feel lousy, and sometimes require medical care and can on occasion lead to death. To be sure, Covid currently is the worst member of that gang, still killing more people a year than influenza, which previously wore the worst actor badge.
But when we’re looking at Covid, it’s important to remember that we are in a markedly different phase in our experience with SARS-2 than we were even a year ago, experts insist. Yes, the number of new hospital admissions is rising, and the number of deaths may follow. But they are far below the figures of previous years. In the last week of August 2021, there were nearly 86,000 new hospital admissions. Last year at the same time, the number was 37,000. This year it was 17,400.
But that important context is often missing from headlines or social media posts warning of a doubling of this metric or a percentage spike in that metric.
“There’s no context to that,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “Are we doubling 650 deaths a week? Or are we doubling 15,000 deaths? We just have to help ourselves understand that we’re in a different place. We’re going to see Covid activity indefinitely into the future.”
2) Oh man do I totally love the idea of putting all the latest scientific/technological know-how towards manipulating our microbiome to help us be healthier:
I SEE YOU, reader. You drink the probiotic seltzer, with its gut-improving bacteria, and the fiber-filled prebiotic. You regularly consume eclectic fermented foods and burly amounts of kale to diversify those precious microbes in your digestive tract. Because, after all, what isn’t the microbiome responsible for? It’s been all the rage for the past few years, with scientists hoping it could help treat everything from immune disorders to mental illness. How exactly that will work is something we’re just starting to explore. This spring, the effort got a boost when UC Berkeley biochemist and gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, who won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for coinventing Crispr, joined the pursuit. Her first order of business, spearheaded by Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute: fine-tuning our microbiome by genetically editing the microbes it contains while they’re still inside us to prevent and treat diseases like childhood asthma. (Full disclosure: I teach at Berkeley.) Oh, she also wants to slow climate change by doing the same thing in cows, which are collectively responsible for a shocking amount of greenhouse gas.
As someone who has written about genetic engineering in the past, I have to admit that my first reaction was: No way. The gut microbiome contains around 4,500 different kinds of bacteria plus untold viruses, and even fungi (so far: in practice we’ve only just started counting) in such massive quantities that it weighs close to half a pound. (Microbes are so tiny that 30 trillion bacteria would weigh roughly 1 ounce. So half a pound is a lot.)
Figuring out which ones are responsible for which ailments is tricky. First you need to know what’s causing the problem: like maybe something is producing too much of a particular inflammatory molecule. Then you have to figure out which microbe—or microbes—is doing that, and also which gene within that microbe. Then, in theory, you can fix it. Not in a petri dish, but in situ—meaning in our fully active, roiling, squishing stomach and intestines while they continue to do all the stuff they usually do.
Until recently, it would have seemed insane—not to mention literally impossible—to edit all the microbes belonging to a species within a vast ecosystem like our gut. And to be fair, Doudna and her collaborator, Jill Banfield, still don’t know quite how it will work. But they think it can be done, and in April, TED’s Audacious Project donated $70 million to support the effort. My own gut feeling (right?) was that this was either brilliant or terrifying, or possibly both at once. Brilliant because it had the potential to head off or treat diseases in an incredibly targeted and noninvasive way. Terrifying because, well, you know … releasing a bunch of inert viruses equipped with gene-editing machinery into the vital ecosystem that is our gut microbiome—what could go wrong? With that in mind, I invited Jennifer Doudna to my house for a chat about the future of microbiome medicine.
3) Just love the writing about Manet’s “Olympia”
It is a cliché: the work of art that scandalizes audiences upon its debut, only to get its due once the shock of the new fades away. Édouard Manet’s 1863 masterpiece Olympia, the star of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gigantic new show “Manet/Degas,” in some respects fits this description. It was attacked when it was first exhibited at a salon in Paris in 1865, described as “ugly and repulsive” and “rancid.” Its subject, a nude courtesan who looks right at the viewer while a Black maid looks at her, was called a “female gorilla.” The painting was rehung near the ceiling to hide it from appalled critics, and it never sold during Manet’s lifetime. However, the difference between Olympia and other great works of art that initially faced comparable revulsion is that Olympia shocks still.
Manet was only 33 when Olympia received its rude welcome, but he had already established himself as a rule-breaker and a provocateur with the exhibition two years earlier of The Luncheon on the Grass, which featured two rakish men in modern dress and two women, one of them nude, in an Edenic landscape. Olympia was similarly perverse. While audiences were likely used to paintings of nudes — the courtesan’s languid pose appears to be based on Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which was painted in the 1530s — it was another thing to suggest that this slender jezebel was a Venus herself. Manet’s painting was seen as an offense, an affront, a joke. (Manet wrote to Baudelaire looking for comfort. The poet told him to take it on the chin: “Do you think you are the first man put in this predicament?”)
Viewers had come expecting handsome renderings of light and shadow done with little to no brushwork showing. But Olympia is not smooth or easy. The composition is awkward, exaggerated, blocky. The colors are harsh and high contrast, especially the two figures — one a creamy white, the other nearly as dark as the Japonisme backdrop — that dominate the painting’s shallow space. Olympia represents the beginning of the modern mind, the birth of a new consciousness. What shocks us now, though, is that servant and her enigmatic gaze, which seems to cast the whole order of the universe into fresh doubt.
The model for the courtesan is Victorine Meurent, who posed for Manet many times, including for Luncheon. Her nakedness is blatant, audacious, expunged of the godly glow that characterizes Titian’s Venus and other idealized mythic subjects. Her expression is unashamed and confrontational, so different from those of the passive odalisques that came before her. She reclines on a bed of white silken pillows and sheets, propped up on her right elbow. One hand holds a flowered shawl, but the other, covering her pudenda, is where the eye immediately goes. We are stopped here. So close, so far, so challenging, so “What are you looking at?” She wears a black bow adorned with a pendant around her neck while she kicks off one slipper, undressing before our eyes. Her whole demeanor is an invitation to approach and a warning to stay away. A black cat at her feet looks directly at us with big staring eyes and arches its back.
4) I had never really thought about the fact that microwaves have gotten fancier buttons, but basically haven’t improved in decades.
It may not seem like it today, but the microwave oven is a grand success story of American innovation. The first one, invented by a scientist at the military contractor Raytheon in 1945, weighed 750 pounds, stood more than five feet tall, and cost at least $2,000. Some 20 years later, the company released a countertop version that cost $500, pushing the United States into an era of frozen dinners that could be quickly defrostable. Most of today’s microwaves work in the same basic way as these early devices: They reflect microwaves produced by a magnetron around a cooking chamber. When the wavelengths strike the food molecules inside, they vibrate them and create heat. The turntable came soon after, and by the 1980s, it was included in basically every microwave. The appliances became smaller, too, but then the changes largely stopped. “For the last several decades, there have not been a lot of new paradigm-shifting innovations in the microwave oven,” says John F. Gerling, the president of the International Microwave Power Institute, a group that advocates for microwave safety and performance standards.
Part of the problem is that most companies don’t seem to be trying very hard to innovate on the device. The microwave is notorious for heating unevenly, rubberizing meats, and failing to brown or crisp. Even Kressy’s colleagues who also design and develop products, he said, “are skeptical and only use, like, two features on the microwave.” I asked five of the biggest microwave manufacturers in the U.S. about whether microwaves have advanced, and heard back from only Bree Lemmen, Whirlpool’s kitchen brand manager. She wrote in an email that “one of the biggest innovations in the microwave space over the past few decades is the Whirlpool® low profile microwave, which combines the power of a standard microwave and a vent hood into a sleek, compact appliance that mounts under your cabinets in place of a range hood.” Awesome.
And considerably better methods of microwave heating have long been available. In 1988, Panasonic debuted “inverter technology,” which allows the microwave to cook more precisely at lower power levels and prevent overheating. (Conventional microwaves operate at maximum power or not at all; when set to half power, they cycle on and off at equal intervals.) Lots of different companies now sell inverter microwaves, but the technology’s slightly elevated price has kept it lagging behind the conventional microwave from decades before. More ambitious microwaves have fared worse. General Electric’s Trivection oven—essentially a combination of microwave, convection oven, and conventional oven—flopped so badly that it became a gag on 30 Rock. “That’s too bad,” Gerling told me, “because I thought it was really cool.”
4) It’s been 30 years since “NYPD Blue” premiered. I loved that show. As far as I recall, I watched almost every episode. I’m pretty sure I cried when Bobby Simone died. My first exposure to internet tv culture was Alan Sepinwall’s amazing episode recaps in a usenet group. Sepinwall went on to be a big-time TV reviewer and, appropriately, has a terrific look back at the show and it’s impact.
5) It’s kind of amazing to me how much hate Yascha Mounk gets from the left, and judging by twitter and bluesky, he definitely gets it for this piece I quite liked, “How to Argue Against Identity Politics Without Turning Into a Reactionary”
Does it make sense to speak out against the well-intentioned, if wrongheaded, ideas that are circulating in progressive circles at a time when Mr. Trump retains a serious chance of winning back the White House? Is there a way to oppose such practices without turning a blind eye to genuine discrimination or falling for conspiracy theories? In short: Is it possible to argue against the identity synthesis without falling into the reactionary trap?
Yes, yes and yes.
There is a way to warn about these views on identity that is thoughtful yet firm, principled yet unapologetic. The first step is to recognize that they constitute a novel ideology — one that, though it has wide appeal for serious reasons, is profoundly misguided.
In recent years, parts of the right have started to denounce any concern about racism as being “woke” or an example of “critical race theory.” This right-wing hyperbole has, in turn, persuaded many reasonable people that critical race theory amounts to little more than a commendable determination to teach children about the history of slavery or to recognize that contemporary America still suffers from serious forms of discrimination. Critical race theory, they think, is simply a commitment to think critically about the terrible role that race continues to play in our society.
This soft-pedaled depiction of their ideas would come as a shock to the founders of critical race theory. Derrick Bell, widely seen as the father of the tradition, cut his teeth as a civil rights lawyer who helped to desegregate hundreds of schools. But when many integrated schools failed to provide Black students with a better education, he came to think of his previous efforts as a dead end. Arguing that American racism would never subside, he rejected the “defunct racial equality ideology” of the civil rights movement..
It is naïve to think that we face a choice between speaking out against wrongheaded progressive ideas or fighting against the threat from the far right. To breathe new life into the values on which American democracy is founded and build the broad majorities that are needed to inflict a lasting defeat on dangerous demagogues, principled critics of the identity synthesis need to do both at the same time.
Many people who were initially sympathetic to its goals have since recognized that the identity synthesis presents a real danger. They want to speak out against these ideas, but they are nervous about doing so. It’s not just that they don’t want to risk alienating their friends or sabotaging their careers. They fear that opposing the identity synthesis will, inevitably, force them to make common cause with people who don’t recognize the dangers of racism and bigotry, push them onto the “wrong side of history,” or even lead them down the same path as Mr. Weinstein.
6) This was quite good, “Residuals Are Key to Nearly Every Strike in Hollywood History — Here’s Why”
7) This is not easy stuff. “How a Yale Student’s Rape Accusation Exposed Her to a Defamation Lawsuit”
In a 2018 disciplinary hearing at Yale University, Saifullah Khan listened as a woman accused him of raping her after a Halloween party.
The woman, who had graduated, gave a statement by teleconference to a university panel, but Mr. Khan and his lawyer were not allowed in the room with the panel. Nor could his lawyer, under the rules of the hearing, cross-examine her.
Instead, they were cloistered in a separate room, as her testimony piped in by speakerphone. He felt, he said, “there is absolutely nothing I can do to change my situation.” As he feared, Yale expelled him.
Mr. Khan’s criminal trial, months earlier, was markedly different. His lawyer cross-examined the woman in ways that horrified women’s rights advocates: How were you dressed? How much did you drink? Did you send flirty texts? And unlike the Yale hearing, the prosecutors had to prove his guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
After barely three hours of deliberations, Mr. Khan was acquitted.
The difference between those two hearings — in process and outcome — led Mr. Khan to make an unusual move: He sued his accuser for defamation for statements she had made during the Yale hearing. That lawsuit, filed in 2019, is challenging the way universities across the country have adjudicated such sexual assault hearings.
Normally, such a lawsuit would not have much of a chance. In Connecticut and other states, witnesses in such “quasi-judicial” hearings carry absolute immunity against defamation lawsuits.
But the Connecticut Supreme Court in June gave Mr. Khan’s suit the greenlight to proceed. It ruled that the Yale hearing was not quasi-judicial because it lacked due process, including the ability to cross-examine witnesses.
“For absolute immunity to apply under Connecticut law,” the justices wrote, “fundamental fairness requires meaningful cross-examination in proceedings like the one at issue.”
Mr. Khan’s lawyer, the court said, was effectively reduced to the role of a “potted plant.”
The decision applies only to cases within the state, but it is reverberating at universities across the country. College officials consulted their own state laws, checking whether their disciplinary hearings could leave witnesses vulnerable to defamation lawsuits.
8) Interesting, “Conventional twin studies overestimate the environmental differences between families relevant to educational attainment”
Estimates of shared environmental influence on educational attainment (EA) using the Classical Twin Design (CTD) have been enlisted as genetically sensitive measures of unequal opportunity. However, key assumptions of the CTD appear violated for EA. In this study we compared CTD estimates of shared environmental influence on EA with estimates from a Nuclear Twin and Family Design (NTFD) in the same 982 German families. Our CTD model estimated shared environmental influence at 43%. After accounting for assortative mating, our best fitting NTFD model estimated shared environmental influence at 26%, disaggregating this into twin-specific shared environments (16%) and environmental influences shared by all siblings (10%). Only the sibling shared environment captures environmental influences that reliably differ between families, suggesting the CTD substantially overestimates between-family differences in educational opportunity. Moreover, parental education was found to have no environmental effect on offspring education once genetic influences were accounted for.
9) John McWhorter really doesn’t like “it is what it is” but I think that’s because he focuses too much on a less common usage that personally hurt him:
On a recent podcast, Bill Gates asked me my least favorite word or expression. On the fly, I chose “It is what it is.” As I explained, “People say it when really what they mean is ‘I don’t care.’”
Since the podcast aired, I have been surprised to see this passing comment getting around quite a bit in the media. And the verdict on my observation seems — at least from the missives sent to me — divided just about down the middle.
Many tell me that they, too, have always hated the phrase for the same reason. I even discovered in writing this newsletter that my colleague Frank Bruni had taken the phrase to task last year (“the most degrading sequence of five words in the English language”) and William Safire had commented on it in The Times all the way back in 2006.
But others, often oddly heated up about the matter, have scolded me that I am misreading the phrase. To them, “it is what it is” means merely that one must sometimes make one’s peace with misfortune or difficulty rather than getting torn up about it. On this reading, “it is what it is” is essentially an English version of “que sera sera.”
Yes, exactly that. And yes, I’m semi-heated that its common usage is just accepting an unpleasant reality.
The first encounter with the phrase that I remember was in 2005, when I was cast in a part in a play that was somewhat over my head. (You might think I’d be a good Bernard in Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” but you’d have to think again.) I thought I had mastered my lines for a rehearsal, but I wasn’t actually off-book the way I thought I was. My shortcoming had irritated the person with whom I shared the scene, and things had gotten a little messy.
Walking out after the rehearsal with someone else in the cast, I was beating myself up for not having done my job. But my inexperience wasn’t really his cup of tea. What he was interested in was seeing whether a woman in the cast he was attracted to was available to walk to the subway with him. Regarding my troubles, he detachedly intoned, “Well, it is what it is.”
In the podcast, I recounted thinking: What a gorgeously chilly way of saying “Your problems don’t matter to me.” He was not using the phrase’s other, “que sera sera” meaning, counseling me to accept how things unfold in a Zen-like way.
Those who think of the Zen version of “it is what it is” aren’t wrong, however: It is often used that way when referring to oneself, for example. But those who agree with me that the expression can be dismissive are also correct in thinking of dismissive exchanges such as my own. “It is what it is” has two meanings.
10) AI as a tool for educators, “Teachers Are Going All In on Generative AI: Surveys suggest teachers use generative AI more than students, to create lesson plans or more interesting word problems. Educators say it can save valuable time but must be used carefully.”
11) I love that I can get endless refills of Diet Dr Pepper at pretty much all NC McDonalds. This is awful news, “McDonald’s is slowly taking self-serve beverages off the menu”
12) Loved this from Brian Klaas, “How tall was Jesus? Or, measurement and the making of the modern world.: The mensura Christi provides insights into the making of modern measurement—and how the history of metrology created our modern world, subdivided into arbitrary units that define and shape our lives.”
We like to pretend that measurement classifies the world, slapping objective values onto reality. But what we often forget is that, in so many ways, measurement creates our world, changing the meaning of how we experience reality, and in the process, shaping so much of modernity that we take for granted.
Measurement is also part of what makes us human. No other species is capable of using abstractions to subdivide the world. Doing so has also allowed us to partition the interconnected wholeness of existence into more manageable, discrete parts. And that has allowed us to control an ever-larger slice of our existence.
The question, though, is this: have we gone too far?
Modern metrology—the scientific study of measurement—highlights the need to define measures; to implement them in practice; and to ensure traceability, which is the ability to verify relative to a standardized reference, whether a measurement has been accurately made.
There have been many units of measure mostly retired over human history precisely because they failed to provide traceability and therefore guaranteed confusion. For example:
- Furlong (the distance an ox could plow without resting)
- Ald (a Mongolian measurement of the distance of a man’s outstretched arms)
- Sana lamjel (the distance from the floor to the top of the fingertips of the king—Nongda Lairen Pakhangpa—when he raised his hand above his head)
- Butt (a measure of liquid volume equal to two hogsheads—obviously—or somewhere between 450 and 1,060 liters)
- Hobbit (not the hairy-footed variety, but a Welsh measure of volume/weight).
The biggest leap forward in modern metrology, which aimed to destroy such arbitrary metrics, emerged after Louis XVI was decapitated. On the eve of the French Revolution, the historian Ken Alder notes, there were 800 different names for measurements used in France, but in practice, these 800 terms represented 250,000 different standards. Killing the king and overthrowing his oppression meant uprooting the old ways. Central to that was also decapitating the broken royal system of measurement, from calendars to clocks and weights to lengths.
A decimal craze swept across France, where it was deemed right and proper to subdivide everything by ten. From 1793 to 1805, France replaced its calendar with a decimalized one—similar to a model used in ancient Egypt—in which months were subdivided into three weeks, each ten days long, a duration known as a décade. Days were broken down into ten hours, comprised of 100 minutes, with each minute divided into 100 seconds. To correspond to the Earth’s rotation, this meant that an hour was—in our terms—144 conventional minutes long and minutes were comprised of 86.4, instead of 60, conventional seconds.
There were also momentous scientific efforts unleashed to try to create more objective and pristine measures, including the expedition that provides the origin story of the meter. The calculation was to be based on one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator through Paris. Two scientists spent six years on the project. When they triumphantly returned with their calculated length, it was enshrined in a length of pure platinum, a measure we still use today.
But in the ultimate illustration of the fallibility and arbitrary nature of measurement, the two scientists made a small miscalculation, such that the meter—to this day—is 0.2 millimeters shorter than it should be. One of the scientists, Pierre-François-André Méchain, went mad with despair when he realized his mistake. In his crushing depression, he took off on an expedition in the hopes that he would cheer up. Instead, he got bitten by a mosquito, contracted malaria, and expired, taking his shameful secret of miscalculation with him to the grave. (It has recently been rediscovered).
13) This is potentially a really big deal, via Nate Cohn, “Trump’s Electoral College Edge Seems to Be Fading”
But there’s a case that his Electoral College advantage has faded. In the midterm elections last fall, Democrats fared about the same in the crucial battleground states as they did nationwide. And over the last year, state polls and a compilation of New York Times/Siena College surveys have shown Mr. Biden running as well or better in the battlegrounds as nationwide, with the results by state broadly mirroring the midterms.
The patterns in recent polling and election results are consistent with the trends in national surveys, which suggest that the demographic foundations of Mr. Trump’s Electoral College advantage might be fading. He’s faring unusually well among nonwhite voters, who represent a larger share of the electorate in noncompetitive than competitive states. As a consequence, Mr. Trump’s gains have probably done more to improve his standing in the national vote than in relatively white Northern states likeliest to decide the presidency, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin…
The shrinking gap between the key battleground states and the national popular vote wasn’t just because of Democratic resilience in the battlegrounds. It was also because Republicans showed their greatest strengths in noncompetitive states like California and New York as well as across much of the South, including newly noncompetitive Florida. Democratic weakness in these states was just enough to cost them control of the House of Representatives, but did even more to suppress Democratic tallies in the national popular vote, helping erase the gap between their strength in the battlegrounds and the national vote…
Together, the midterms, the state polling and the Times/Siena polls offer three serious if imperfect data points suggesting Mr. Trump isn’t faring much better in the battleground states compared with nationwide, at least for now.
But why? Broadly speaking, there are two major theories: the issues and demographics.
First, the issues. In the aftermath of the midterms, Democratic strength in key battleground states appeared attributable to specific issues on the ballot, like abortion, crime and democracy. This helped explain some aspects of the election, including the failures of anti-abortion referendums and stop-the-steal candidates — and perhaps New York Democrats.
It’s possible these new issues are helping to shift the electoral map heading into 2024 as well. New issues that have emerged since 2020 — abortion rights, trans rights, education, the “woke” left and crime — are primarily state and local issues where blue, red and purple state voters inhabit different political realities, with plausible consequences for electoral politics…
The polls so far this cycle suggest that the demographic foundations of Mr. Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College might be eroding. Mr. Biden is relatively resilient among white voters, who are generally overrepresented in the battleground states. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, shows surprising strength among nonwhite voters, who are generally underrepresented in the most critical battleground states. As a consequence, Mr. Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters nationwide would tend to do more to improve his standing in the national vote than in the battleground states.
Overall, 83 percent of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were white in the 2020 election, according to Times estimates, compared with 69 percent of voters elsewhere in the nation. Or put differently: If Mr. Biden struggled among nonwhite voters, it would do a lot more damage to his standing outside of these three states than it would in the states that make up his likeliest path to 270 electoral votes.
Is this enough to explain Mr. Trump’s diminished advantage? It could explain most of it. If we adjusted Times estimates of the results by racial group in 2020 to match the latest Times/Siena polls, Mr. Trump’s relative advantage in the Electoral College would fall by three-quarters, to a single point.
14) Trumpetfish are cool:
Trumpetfish like to snack on damselfish and shrimp in coral reefs and sea grass beds around the world. But with 20-inch long bodies and conspicuously large snouts, they need tricks to sneak up on their prey.
In a study, published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, scientists demonstrated the effectiveness of one trumpetfish strategy — hiding behind a larger, friendlier fish. The subterfuge of such a fakeout seems almost human in its cleverness, leading scientists to wonder whether other species are also making use of similar hunting strategies.
While many coral reef residents, such as groupers and moray eels, work together when hunting for their mutual benefit, the trumpetfish’s sneaky shadowing of larger fish seems to be solely for its own benefit.
It’s also not the trumpetfish’s only means of catching prey off guard. It can change color to blend into its surroundings or disguise itself as inanimate objects like a stick or seaweed. It can also attack from above, hanging vertically in the water column and darting down to suck prey into its gaping mouth.
However, hiding behind a larger nonpredatory fish, such as a parrotfish, until its prey is within striking range seems to be one of its favorite hunting strategies.
“For the last couple of decades, guidebooks, dive blogs and a couple of research papers have documented observations of this behavior,” said Sam Matchette, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Cambridge and an author of the new study.
Historically, humans have employed a similar strategy when hunting waterfowl. Hunters would hide behind “stalking horses,” which were horses or cattle, when approaching ducks to prevent the birds from seeing them and being spooked. Many hunters still use this strategy, but instead of farm animals they use blinds and cardboard cutouts.
Dr. Matchette heard reports that trumpetfish hid behind larger nonpredatory fish when hunting, and the tactic sounded strikingly similar to the stalking horse strategy used by humans. So last year, Dr. Matchette and his colleagues set out to see whether they could prove that trumpetfish were truly doing something much like that used by duck hunters of old.
15) Seems to me like it’s at least worth the investment to figure out if this is feasible and worth further pursuing, “U.S. to Fund a $1.2 Billion Effort to Vacuum Greenhouse Gases From the Sky: Many scientists are skeptical of the technology, and environmentalists have criticized the approach.”
16) This seems not great, “Faced With Evolving Threats, U.S. Navy Struggles to Change: A new generation of cheaper and more flexible vessels could be vital in any conflict with China, but the Navy remains lashed to big shipbuilding programs driven by tradition, political influence and jobs.”
A symphony of sorts echoed through the sprawling shipyard on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi — banging, hissing, beeping, horns, bells and whistles — as more than 7,000 workers hustled to fill orders fueled by the largest shipbuilding budget in the Navy’s history.
The surge in spending, $32 billion for this year alone, has allowed the Huntington Ingalls shipyard to hire thousands of additional people to assemble guided missile destroyers and amphibious transport ships. “More ships are always better,” said Kari Wilkinson, the president of the shipyard, pointing to the efficiencies that come with a steady flow of contracts and the jobs they create.
But the focus from Washington on producing a stream of new warships is also creating a fleet that some inside the Pentagon think is too wedded to outdated military strategies and that the Navy might not be able to afford to keep running in decades to come.
Half a world away, at a U.S. Navy outpost in Bahrain, a much smaller team was testing out a very different approach to the service’s 21st-century warfighting needs.
Bobbing in a small bay off the Persian Gulf was a collection of tiny unmanned vessels, prototypes for the kind of cheaper, easier-to-build and more mobile force that some officers and analysts of naval warfare said was already helping to contain Iran and could be essential to fighting a war in the Pacific.
Operating on a budget that was less than the cost of fuel for one of the Navy’s big ships, Navy personnel and contractors had pieced together drone boats, unmanned submersible vessels and aerial vehicles capable of monitoring and intercepting threats over hundreds of miles of the Persian Gulf, like Iranian fast boats looking to hijack oil tankers.
Now they are pleading for more money to help build on what they have learned.
“It’s an unbelievable capability — we have already tested it for something like 35,000 hours,” said Michael Brown, who was the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, which helped set up the unmanned drone tests in Bahrain. “So why are we not fielding that as fast as possible?”
17) “Google Says Switching Away From Its Search Engine Is Easy. It’s Not.”
Imagine if every time you went to the supermarket, your shopping cart came loaded with the same box of cereal.
This cereal happens to be the most popular, so it’s convenient for the store to have it in the cart. If you don’t like it, it’s simple enough to put it back on the shelf and grab a different box.
That’s essentially the crux of Google’s defense against the Justice Department in a consequential antitrust trial — the federal government’s first such case in the modern internet era — that is now unfolding in court.
The government has accused Google of illegally using partnerships with handset makers, computer manufacturers and browser developers to stifle competitors in online search. Under those partnerships, the Justice Department argues, Google made its search engine the default service on an overwhelming majority of consumer electronics, like smartphones. That then deterred people from trying alternative search engines, like Bing, DuckDuckGo and others.
Oh come on. Really, it is easy. Also, it’s like having Lucky Charms in my cart the first time I go to Food Lion, but once I change it to Frosted Flakes, that’s what comes in my cart every time I go shopping.
18) This is great. And so true. We should invest in and encourage more women police officers. It would help so much. “One simple fix for our broken policing system: Hiring more women”
This needs to change, and maybe will, if only out of necessity. Law enforcement agencies across the country are facing a personnel shortage that is “the number one issue in policing right now,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a leading research and policy organization for law enforcement agencies.
Gone are the days when police departments were seeing 100 or more applicants for every opening to join the force. Amid new standards of accountability and awakened mistrust in their communities, especially after the reckoning that followed George Floyd’s 2020 death under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman, there has been an exodus of seasoned officers. Meanwhile, the pool of candidates for the available openings has been drying up. In some cities, the number of recruits is down by 90 percent.
All of which is compelling police departments across the country to turn their attention to one of the most obvious and untapped solutions: attracting and retaining more female officers. Upward of 300 law enforcement agencies have joined what is known as the “30×30” initiative, signing a pledge to have at least 30 percent of their recruits be women by 2030…
The benefits of bringing more women into policing go well beyond the numbers. A host of research suggests female officers tend to be less likely than their male counterparts to use excessive force, and they are named in proportionally fewer citizen complaints. They also inspire more trust in the community, making fewer discretionary arrests, particularly of people who are not White.
A 2021 study of 4 million traffic stops made by the Florida State Highway Patrol and Charlotte Police Department found that female officers are less likely than male ones to search drivers but more likely to find contraband. “These results indicate that women officers are able to minimize the number of negative interactions with citizens without losses in effectiveness,” the researchers wrote in the American Journal of Political Science.
19) I had no idea there was a seasonality to human births, “The Calendar of Human Fertility Is Changing
American births have historically peaked in late summer. But our changing behaviors, technology, and environment are flattening that bump.”
Birth seasonality has been documented since the 1820s, if not earlier. But despite generations of study, we still don’t fully understand the reasons it exists, or why it differs so drastically among even neighboring countries. Teasing apart the contributions of biology and behavior to seasonality is messy because of the many factors involved, says Micaela Martinez, the director of environmental health at the nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice, who has been studying seasonality for years. And even while researchers try to track it, the calendar of human fertility has been changing. As our species has grown more industrialized, claimed more agency over reproduction, and reshaped the climate we are living in, seasonality, in many places, is shifting or weakening.
There is no doubt that a big part of human birth seasonality is behavioral. People have more sex when they have more free time; they have less sex when they’re overworked or overheated or stressed. Certain holidays have long been known to carry this effect: In parts of the Western world with a heavy Christian presence, baby boomlets fall roughly nine months after Christmas; the same patterns have been spotted with Spring Festival and Lunar New Year in certain Chinese communities. (Why these holidays strike such a note, and not others, isn’t entirely clear, experts told me.)…
But cultural norms have never been able to explain everything about the Homo sapiens birth calendar. “It’s pretty common for mammals to have a specific breeding season” dictated by all sorts of environmental cues, Martinez told me. Deer, for instance, mate in the fall, triggered by the shortening length of daylight, effectively scheduling their fawns to be born in the spring; horses, whose gestations are longer, breed as the days lengthen in the spring and into summer, so they can foal the following year.
Humans, of course, aren’t horses or deer. Our closest relatives among primates “are much more flexible” about when they mate, Élise Huchard, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Montpellier, in France, told me. But those apes are not immune to their surroundings, and neither are we. All sorts of hormones in the human body, including reproductive ones, wax and wane with the seasons. Researchers in the United States and Australia have found that couples hoping to conceive via in vitro fertilization have a higher chance of success if the eggs are retrieved during the summer. At the same time, summer conceptions appear to be less common, or less successfully carried to term, in some countries, a trend that sharpens at lower latitudes and, Lam told me, during hotter years. The subsequent spring lulls may be explained in part by heat waves dissuading people from sex. But Alan Barreca, an economist at UCLA, suspects that ultrahigh temperatures may also physiologically compromise fertility, potentially by affecting factors such as sperm quantity and quality, ovulation success, or the likelihood of early fetal loss.
20) This is good, “When Being Good Is Just a Matter of Being Lucky”
The punishment for murder is more severe than the punishment for attempted murder. But it’s not completely obvious why. The person who tried to kill but failed is just as bad a person.
One explanation is a term that I heard for the first time this week, “moral luck.” Bernard Williams, an English philosopher, coined the term in 1976, knowing it would blow people’s minds. “When I first introduced the expression moral luck, I expected to suggest an oxymoron,” he later wrote.
By one standard, morality should have nothing to do with luck. All that should matter is intent, not fate. Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, wrote that an act of good intent shines like a jewel whether or not it achieves its objective.
Even young children understand, by nature or nurture, that intent matters. By age 3, children will be nicer to “someone who has intended, but failed, to help another over one who intended, but failed, to harm,” researchers have found. (I wrote about child-raising and moral responsibility in April.)
Yet there’s this other intuition we have that intent is not all that matters. The lighter punishment that we mete out for attempted murder is an example. Another example is the awful feeling we get when we cause harm purely by mistake.
21) From the former head of Amazon Studios, “The Era of Prestige TV Is Ending. We’re Going to Miss It When It’s Gone.”
But the 2023 Emmys may ultimately be remembered less as a celebration than as a wake. Even before the twin strikes that have brought Hollywood production to a halt, prestige TV — that unofficial genre of quality programming that’s become a mainstay of the past 20 years — had a critical, and possibly terminal, diagnosis. Now it seems all but assured that when Hollywood resumes business, the landmark era defined by shows like “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire” and all their celebrated heirs will be over for good…
When streamers started producing their own shows, they followed the same model. Netflix made a mark with “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black” and “BoJack Horseman,” and at Amazon we launched “Transparent,” “Fleabag” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” The goal was attention and acclaim — and it worked. In 2015, “Transparent” was the first streaming show to win a best series award at the Golden Globes. By 2021, the streamers claimed the majority of outstanding comedy and outstanding drama Emmy nominations, with “Ted Lasso” (Apple TV+) and “The Crown” (Netflix) each winning. Yet none of these shows ever reached the huge audiences found by network hits like “The Big Bang Theory” or “Dancing With the Stars.”
Now the pendulum is swinging back toward shows with lower prestige but higher viewership. On Max, “Game of Thrones” and “Succession” share a home with “House Hunters” and “Dr. Pimple Popper.” While audiences still get the occasional edgy exception, like “The Bear” and “Squid Game,” there’s been a surge in conventional programming like tween shows and true crime.
If you’re in Hollywood, don’t bother pitching the next “Billions,” “Succession,” “Downton Abbey” or “Mad Men” — that’s considered too 1 percent. The next “Transparent” or “Atlanta”? Too small. And forget about the next “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or “Entourage.” That kind of comedy is far too niche for today’s marketplace. Edgy is out. Mass is in.
The problem with this move toward more broadly appealing programming — what some have called “CBS-ification” — is that mass-appeal shows aren’t what inspired millions of people to subscribe to these services in the first place. In fact, mass appeal shows may have the opposite effect: For 30 years, viewers have been taught that expensive prestige shows like “Game of Thrones” are what you pay for and shows like “Wheel of Fortune” are what you get on broadcast for free. If Netflix added, say, 5,000 hours of “Wheel of Fortune” and “Days of Our Lives” to its platform, it would likely increase total viewing hours, but it could erode the notion that the service is worth paying for in the first place. Yet many streaming services are raising their prices right now, in part to drive subscribers to cheaper, ad-supported tiers that promise additional advertising revenue.
I can imagine three possibilities for TV as we go forward. One is that prestige TV will be consigned to a specific moment in history, like the socially conscious sitcoms of the 1960s and ’70s. Another possibility is that auteur-style shows will live on, but they won’t dominate the TV conversation, and they’ll be fewer and harder to find.
Fully Myelinated 
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