Quick hits

1) Helen Lewis with a great take on the recent insane, everybody should be trans!, essay:

For Chu, the primacy of rights means that evidence is irrelevant to medical decisions—even when children are involved. This view has two logical implications: The first is that, if we are now just letting kids do whatever they want with their bodies, why not let them get married at 12, or drink alcohol at 13, or consent to sex at 14 with an adult partner? “Toddlers have the right to get tattoos” might be the worst political slogan I have ever heard.

The alternative argument is that gender—however you define it—is so unique and important that it alone justifies total bodily autonomy for minors…

But even in America, the debate is shifting. Quite a bit of Chu’s essay is devoted to complaints about media organizations that have not sufficiently echoed the activist line—that puberty blockers are safe and reversible, and that the “science is settled.” The New York Times is deemed to have fallen into the hands of barbarians, or at least failed to stop them from storming the affirmative gates. (Its recent publication of more skeptical articles has led to staff revolts.) “The paper consistently refuses to treat transition-related care the way it would any other health-care matter … as an issue of access,” Chu laments, ignoring the fact that if rates of women seeking abortions, say, rose by thousands of percent in a decade, the Times probably would write about the phenomenon.

The loss of the Times as a reliable ally matters because the American model of youth transition is best described as consensus-based rather than evidence-based—which is to say, it rests on the agreement of credentialed experts rather than on the conclusions of highly rigorous studies. And when the clinical rationale for underage medical transition disappears, what is left is ideology. “The belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism,” Chu writes. She would prefer to make a radical claim for unfettered personal freedom, even for minors: “Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again. Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others.” (It doesn’t, of course—it means that male puberty and higher male testosterone levels confer significant sporting advantages, but that’s me being a reality-accepting nihilist again.)

Above all, Chu argues, we should treat children’s statements about their identity with unquestioned reverence: “To make ‘thoughtfulness’ a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege. That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom.”

In making a case this way, Chu shows a titillating disdain for respectability politics—and will surely irritate many people who share her political goals. For skeptics of puberty blockers like me, who are used to arguing against people who claim that any overreach in gender medicine is not really happening, or that too few patients are involved to be worth caring, or that we should be writing about something more important instead—all the riotous flavors of denial and whataboutism—Chu’s case for unlimited agency for teenagers is refreshing. She said everything out loud, and her argument is logical, coherent, and forcefully delivered. You just won’t hear it made very often, because it’s about as popular as the case for letting 9-year-olds get nose jobs.

2) Love this.  Disabilities actually suck.  So many disability advocates are the worst. Amy Lutz, “When Everything is Eugenics, Nothing Is: Preventing severe disability is a laudable goal. Crying eugenics renders the word meaningless.”

Papers published in academic journals rarely capture public attention, but last year a study from Social Science and Medicine – Qualitative Research in Health was picked up by a variety of mass media outlets. The paper focused on whether testosterone therapy should be discontinued in transgender men during pregnancy, but that wasn’t the reason for the coverage. What got everyone’s attention was rather the authors’ shocking dismissal of the increased risk of metabolic, urogenital, and neurodevelopmental conditions in babies exposed to testosterone. One of the reasons given was: “The desire to maximize the ‘fitness’ of offspring, and guard against development of conditions or human characteristics considered ‘unhealthy’ or less than ideal, may reflect troubling eugenicist and biomedical moralist underpinnings in ways that further harm already socially-marginalized people.”

The belief that disability is not inherently bad isn’t new. Social models that locate disability in the mismatch between people and their environments, not in individual bodies, have long been endorsed by some disability studies scholars—most recently by Elizabeth Barnes in her “value-neutral” model, in which she defines disability as “mere-difference.” But this has never been a consensus position. As feminist philosopher Susan Wendell pointed out almost thirty years ago, there is “much suffering and limitation” that social justice and cultural change cannot fix.

So I was surprised when, six months after the paper was published, the very mainstream National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that they were considering removing the goal of reducing disability from its mission statement at the recommendation of an advisory committee that blasted the idea that disabled people need to be “fixed” as “ableist.”…

In his recent memoir Troubled, Rob Henderson articulates the concept of luxury beliefs: “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” He focuses on socioeconomic status, but I can’t help thinking that perhaps the greatest luxury belief of all is that disability is neutral. It sounds progressive and empowering—yet betrays complete ignorance of what severe intellectual and developmental disability looks like, or how it impacts affected individuals and their families. Perhaps ignorance is the wrong word. More accurately, some disability advocates aggressively shut down incongruent narratives with accusations of “eugenics”and “ableism,” to the point that even the NIH would rather abandon its founding mission than challenge this stunningly obvious fiction…

Because disability is not neutral in our house. Jonah will never have a meaningful career or a romantic relationship. He will never understand politics, geography, history, or philosophy. He can’t follow the plot of Star Warsor even Paw Patrol, choosing instead the Sesame Streetmusic compilations we had on VHS when he was a toddler, which kind souls have since uploaded to YouTube. There’s nothing wrong with Sesame Street—we quote it so often, even when Jonah isn’t around (“I told you, it wouldn’t be easy”; “I guess not every crazy idea works”; “I might even say it’s Oscar-worthy!”) that I think of it as our family’s love language. But no one would choose this extraordinarily constrained life—not for themselves, or for their children.

3) Great stuff from Chait:

Over the last year, the insurrection has gradually assumed a more central place in Trump’s campaign…

Among what remains of the traditional Republican Party Establishment, this display prompted the same baffled objections that have followed Trump’s periodic racist attacks on fellow Republicans, threats to take revenge upon his enemies, and insistence that any electoral defeat of his is illegitimate. Why must he run such an undisciplined campaign?

“Joe Biden’s team has elevated the ‘threat to democracy’ posed by Trump and his movement to a place of prominence in its appeals to voters,” complained National Review’s Noah Rothman, who has written elsewhere that Trump is no more a threat to democracy than Biden. “Making the cause of the January 6 rioters into a central feature of Trump’s campaign plays directly into Biden’s hands.” This is the extent of the Republican concern: Trump is alienating swing voters who might be receptive to messages about high grocery prices but respond nervously to blood-soaked vows to redeem his martyrs and purify the fatherland.

But there is a perfectly cogent reason why Trump continues to press his most extreme demands, even at the cost of repulsing potential voters. He is no longer willing to accept the alliance of convenience with reluctant partners that held traditional Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Reince Priebus by his side during his first term. Trump has long demanded fealty from his party, which has made it harder to discern the acceleration and intensification of his work in the days since he effectively clinched the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday. Trump’s primary focus is not outward but inward, tightening his control over the GOP to almost unimaginable levels of personal loyalty.

Trump’s elevation of the insurrection to a matter of holy writ within the party is a matter of both conviction and strategy, consistent with his intention to stifle even the quietest forms of dissent. This is why Trump deposed Ronna McDaniel as head of the Republican National Committee in favor of election deniers Michael Whatley and Lara Trump. McDaniel had dutifully jettisoned her maiden name (Romney). She had strongly suggested the 2020 election was stolen, saying the vote tabulations had “problems” that were “concerning” and not “fair,” without quite stating as fact that Trump absolutely won. All her genuflections were not enough.

4) This is really good, “Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed: The sponsors of the law fundamentally misunderstood the nature of addiction.”

The key elements of Measure 110 were the removal of criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of drugs such as methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl, and a sharper focus, instead, on reducing the harm that drugs cause to their users. More than $260 million were allocated to services such as naloxone distribution, employment and housing services, and voluntary treatment. The original campaign for the measure was well funded by multiple backers, most prominently the Drug Policy Alliance, based in New York. Supporters hoped that ending penalties—and reducing the associated stigma of drug use—would bring a range of benefits. Once drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, the thinking went, those who wanted to continue using would be more willing to access harm-reduction services that helped them use in safer ways. Meanwhile, the many people who wanted to quit using drugs but had been too ashamed or fearful to seek treatment would do so. Advocates foresaw a surge of help-seeking, a reduction in drug-overdose deaths, fewer racial disparities in the health and criminal-justice systems, lower rates of incarceration, and safer neighborhoods for all…

Both of us have spent the better part of our careers studying and working on drug policy. Both of us watched this deterioration in Oregon’s public health and safety with dismay, and tried to help stanch the damage. We testified before the Measure 110 legislative implementing committee in 2022 in the hopes that the spirit of Measure 110 could be maintained if some reforms were allowed, such as the elimination of open-air drug markets and the resumption of mandated treatment for those suffering from severe addiction. But tweaking the measure proved very difficult. Last year, one of us, Rob Bovett, began working closely with a number of groups trying to reform Measure 110 through legislation, including a bill based on a proposal developed by Oregon’s city governments, sheriffs, police chiefs, and district attorneys, and a bill based primarily on a petition filed by a coalition of Oregonians that had grown weary of the measure’s ongoing failure. He testified before the Measure 110 reform committee and participated in negotiations that led to the reform package that just passed.

We were not surprised that a trivial pressure to seek treatment was ineffective. Fentanyl and meth addiction are not like depression, chronic pain, or cancer, conditions for which people are typically motivated to seek treatment. Even as it destroys a person’s life, addictive drug use by definition feels good in the short term, and most addicted people resist or are ambivalent about giving that up. Withdrawal, meanwhile, is wrenchingly difficult. As a result, most addicted people who come to treatment do so not spontaneously but through pressure from family, friends, employers, health professionals, and, yes, the law.

5) The people are right. Someone needs to tell Democrats, “After Four Years, 59% in U.S. Say COVID-19 Pandemic Is Over”

Majority of Americans, but Not Democrats, Say Pandemic Is Over

Gallup has tracked Americans’ perceptions of whether the pandemic is over in the U.S. since June 2021, during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout when most Americans received their first shot. But it was not until late May/early June 2023 that a majority thought it was over. This was shortly after President Joe Biden signed a congressional resolution to end the nation’s state of emergency and the U.S. and global public health emergency declarations ended. Fewer, though still a slim 53% majority, continued to believe it had come to an end in late August/early September.

The latest 59% of Americans who believe the pandemic is over is up slightly from late last summer but is still shy of the positivity expressed last May/June.

Republicans (79%) are almost twice as likely as Democrats (41%) to say the pandemic is over, while 63% of independents agree.

6) Kristof is right.  We need to take this problem much more seriously:

Alarms are blaring about artificial intelligence deepfakes that manipulate voters, like the robocall sounding like President Biden that went to New Hampshire households, or the fake video of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump.

Yet there’s actually a far bigger problem with deepfakes that we haven’t paid enough attention to: deepfake nude videos and photos that humiliate celebrities and unknown children alike. One recent study found that 98 percent of deepfake videos online were pornographic and that 99 percent of those targeted were women or girls.

Faked nude imagery of Taylor Swift rattled the internet in January, but this goes way beyond her: Companies make money by selling advertising and premium subscriptions for websites hosting fake sex videos of famous female actresses, singers, influencers, princesses and politicians. Google directs traffic to these graphic videos, and victims have little recourse.

Sometimes the victims are underage girls.

7) Yes, yes, yes.  What happened to the teen babysitter?  My daughter is 13 and would be so great at this.  When I was a kid 13 year old girls babysat all the time. “Don’t tell America the babysitter’s dead: For decades, sitting was both a job and a rite of passage. Now it feels more like a symbol of a bygone American era.”

Babysitting used to be both a job and a rite of passage. For countless American teens, and especially teen girls, it was a tentative step toward adulthood—responsibility, but with guardrails. Perhaps you didn’t cook dinner, but you did heat some leftovers for the kids. Maybe you arrived to find them already tucked in, and you read them a story, turned out the lights, and watched TV until the car turned into the drive. You knew whom to call if anything serious came up. Paula Fass, a historian of childhood at UC Berkeley, told me that she started sitting around 1960, when she was 12 or 13. By the time she’d arrive, she remembers, the parents had put their kids to bed and stocked the fridge for her to raid. They recognized that she was grown-up enough to be an extra eye in the home—but childlike enough to go looking for snacks.

Sitting was a “quintessentially American experience,” Yasemin Besen-Cassino, a Montclair State University sociologist and the author of The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap, told me. For decades, working a part-time job was common for teens in the U.S.—perhaps a reflection of the cultural emphasis on hard work, discipline, and financial independence. Even tweens would babysit. And something about that position, teetering between dependence and independence, got lodged in our cultural imagination. Starting in the mid-20th century, the young sitter became an emblem of American girlhood—both a classic coming-of-age character and a locus of anxieties about girls’ growing autonomy. Just how mature are these teens? How much control should they have? And what kind of adults are they on the cusp of turning into? Those concerns preoccupied people not only in real life but also in a plethora of books, shows, and movies.

Today, the teen babysitter as we knew her, in pop culture and in reality, has all but disappeared. People seem to worry less about adolescents and more for them, and for their future prospects. As Fass put it, “Teenagers don’t seem very grown-up these days.” There’s not much reason to fear or exalt babysitters anymore—because our society no longer trusts teens to babysit much at all.

8) In a rational political world, this matters.  Hopefully we still live in one. “The House GOP just gave Biden’s campaign a huge gift: Roughly 80 percent of House Republicans just lined up behind a plan to cut Social Security and ban all abortions.”

9) As is typical from Radley Balko, too long, but also fantastic. “The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers: Their flagship publication, The Free Press’, failure to correct an error-filled defense of George Floyd’s killer demonstrates that they are just another partisan tribe”

10) This is good from Steve Stewart-Williams, “The Worst Economists in the World: Laypeople’s intuitions about economics are systematically misguided”

Humans are fairly good folk physicists: We know that unsupported objects tend to fall, and that solid objects can’t pass through one another.

We’re fairly good folk biologists: We know that living things, but not rocks or mountains, exhibit spontaneous, goal-directed movement, and that organisms are permanent members of their species: Once an aardvark, always an aardvark.

And we’re fairly good folk psychologists: We know that people’s behavior is guided by their desires and beliefs, and that past behavior is usually a good guide to future behavior.

In contrast to all this, we’re fairly terrible folk economists. If we were to make a list of all our everyday intuitions about economic matters, and then a separate list of economists’ views on the same topics, we’d find almost no overlap between the two lists.

I’m quite confident about this, because that’s roughly what the economists Amit Bhattacharjee and Jason Dana did in a fascinating recent paper titled “Lay Economic Reasoning: An Integrative Review and Call to Action,” published in the journal Consumer Psychology Review. Bhattacharjee and Dana make a persuasive case that laypeople’s views on economic questions routinely part company with those of the experts, and thus that folk economics – unlike folk physics, biology, and psychology – is systematically misguided.

Of course, in principle, the laypeople could be right and the experts wrong. But if I had to bet money on it, I know which way I’d go. Aside from anything else, it makes good sense that our untutored intuitions about economics would tend to fall short of the mark. Whereas humans have dealt with the physical, biological, and psychological worlds for as long as we’ve existed on this planet, not so the modern economic world. Thus, biological evolution hasn’t equipped us for it, and culture hasn’t either – not unless we’ve studied economics.

11) Good stuff from Jesse Singal, “Why Is The Same Misleading Language About Youth Gender Medicine Copied And Pasted Into Dozens Of CNN.com Articles?”

Yesterday CNN published an article by senior writer Tara John about the UK National Health Service’s newly skeptical stance toward youth gender medicine. The main takeaway, which is big news to observers of this debate, is that the NHS will no longer provide puberty blockers to young people, other than in research contexts. (As for cross-sex hormones, a relatively strict-seeming regime is set to be implemented, and they will be offered to youth only “from around their 16th birthday.”)

As myself and a number of others pointed out, the article contains a sentence that is, in context, rather wild: John writes that “Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender — the one the person was designated at birth — to their affirmed gender — the gender by which one wants to be known.” But of course, whether youth gender medicine is medically necessary and evidence-based is exactly the thing being debated, and anyone who has been following this debate closely knows that every national health system that has examined this question closely, including the NHS, has come to the same conclusion: the evidence is paltry. That’s why so many countries, including Sweden, Finland, the UK, and Norway have significantly scaled back access to these treatments for youth.1 So it’s very strange to see this sentence, which reads as though it comes from an activist press release, published in a news article in CNN, an outlet that generally adheres to the old-school divide between news and opinion…

This copy-paste job is journalistically problematic for a number of reasons. For one thing, it suggests that CNN has decided, at the editorial level, that its institutional stance is that youth gender medicine is “medically necessary” and “evidence-based.” While they’re being used somewhat colloquially in these articles, these terms have fairly specific definitions in certain medical and legal contexts, and treatments only qualify for such designations if they have exceeded a certain evidentiary benchmark based on solid published research. That is not the case here — far from it, actually. As written, this is a deeply misleading sentence.

The language also puts CNN writers in an awkward position. Does each and every bylined author of these stories believe that youth gender medicine is “medically necessary” and “evidence-based”? Maybe they do (which would be disturbing), but the fact is that they didn’t write these sentences — they, or one of their editors, grabbed that language from somewhere else and pasted it in. They are effectively outsourcing their own judgment on a hotly contested controversy to their employer. This is not what journalists are supposed to do, and, at the risk of repeating myself, it’s significantly different from a reporter rolling their eyes when using language like “undocumented immigrant” or “sex assigned at birth,” rather than their own preferred verbiage. 

12) True. “The D.E.A. Needs to Stay Out of Medicine“

Even when her pancreatic cancer began to invade her spine in the summer of 2021, my mother-in-law maintained an image of grace, never letting her pain stop her from prioritizing the needs of others. Her appointment for a nerve block was a month away, but her pain medications enabled her to continue serving her community through her church. Until they didn’t.

Her medical condition quickly deteriorated, and her pain rapidly progressed. No one questioned that she needed opioid medications to live with dignity. But hydrocodone and then oxycodone became short at her usual pharmacy and then at two other pharmacies. My mother-in-law’s 30-day prescriptions were filled with only enough medication to last a few days, and her care team required in-person visits for new scripts. Despite being riddled with painful tumors, she endured a tortuous cycle of uncertainty and travel, stressing her already immunocompromised body to secure her medications.

My mother-in-law’s anguish before she died in July 2022 mirrors the broader struggle of countless individuals grappling with pain. I’m still haunted by the fact that my husband and I, both anesthesiologists and pain physicians who have made it our life’s work to alleviate the suffering of those in pain, could not help her. It is no wonder that our patients are frustrated. They do not understand why we, doctors whom they trust, send them on wild goose chases. They do not understand how pharmacies fail to provide the medications they need to function. They do not understand why the system makes them feel like drug seekers.

Health care professionals and pharmacies in this country are chained by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Our patients’ stress is the result not of an orchestrated set of practice guidelines or a comprehensive clinical policy but rather of one government agency’s crude, broad-stroke technique to mitigate a public health crisis through manufacturing limits — the gradual and repeated rationing of how much opioids can be produced by legitimate entities. This is a bad and ineffective strategy for solving the opioid crisis, and it’s incumbent on us to hand the reins of authority over to public health institutions better suited to the task.

Since 2015, the D.E.A. has decreased manufacturing quotas for oxycodone by more than 60 percent and for hydrocodone by about 72 percent. Despite thousands of public comments from concerned stakeholders, the agency has finalized even more reductions throughout 2024 for these drugs and other commonly prescribed prescription opioids.

In theory, fewer opioids sold means fewer inappropriate scripts filled, which should curb the diversion of prescription opioids for illicit purposes and decrease overdose deaths — right?

I can tell you from the front lines that that’s not quite right. Prescription opioids once drove the opioid crisis. But in recent years opioid prescriptions have significantly fallen, while overdose deaths have been at a record high. America’s new wave of fatalities is largely a result of the illicit market, specifically illicit fentanyl. And as production cuts contribute to the reduction of the already strained supply of legal, regulated prescription opioids, drug shortages stand to affect the more than 50 million people suffering from chronic pain in more ways than at the pharmacy counter.

13) We need to learn from Boston, “In remarkable start to 2024, Boston has had only 2 homicides this year”

A combination of factors has been credited for the figures, including strengthened police-community partnerships, a strong network of community-based groups working with young people most prone to violence, and outreach by faith leaders. At the center of the violence reduction in the mid-1990s, however, was a focused law enforcement strategy that involved identifying gang members known to be involved in gun violence and a delivering no-nonsense message that they could stop shooting and be steered to jobs and services, or feel the full weight of prosecutorial muscle. 

The web of community organizations and city service providers working alongside police has evolved and changed shape over the years, but it has remained a more robust approach to violence prevention than what’s present in most other cities. 

“Violence reduction is a team sport, and if the team is not working well together the team cannot succeed,” said Thomas Abt, who directs the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland. “Boston has a history of positive collaboration between police and community, between police and community service providers and public health workers.”   

14) This is honestly about the best thing I’ve read on the subjectivity of basketball officiating. “Purdue’s Zach Edey is difficult to defend. The 7-foot-4 star is even harder to officiate“

The game is different down on the low block. Looks different, feels different and is, frankly, officiated differently. On the perimeter, where spacing is key, a guard might be whistled for a hand check foul because that hand check is truly influencing the play. “The closer you get to the basket, you’re playing in a phone booth,” says an active official who asked not to be named so he could speak candidly. “And when you play in a phone booth, you’re going to have contact.”

Refs do, in fact, recognize the absurdity of the situation. Most chat prior to the game to compare notes. They know who the key players are, and very often understand how the game is going to be played. Edey, for example, is going to get a lot of touches. Cynics might argue that leads to officials looking for fouls; on the contrary, they say. It means they legitimately try to discern between incidental contact and illegal, fully aware how a ticky-tack foul can change the course of the game.

On most rosters, big men aren’t as abundant as guards. Two quick tweets of the whistle can equate to an extended first-half bench visit, severely limiting a team’s ability to defend and perform. “You gotta be sane and figure out what can be called a foul and what can’t be,” Higgins says. “You have to survive a game. If it’s whoop, whoop, whoop with the whistle, and foul, foul, foul, you’re going to hear it. But the numbers aren’t shocking. I’d bet if you broke down a game film, he’s probably drawing 10 to 15 more fouls than we’re calling.”

There is, of course, a flip side to this – when Edey is the defender. To the consternation of his detractors, Edey gets fouled a lot but rarely fouls opponents. He’s averaging just 1.9 whistles per game and has not fouled out since Purdue’s Sweet 16 matchup against Saint Peter’s on March 25, 2022. He’s played 67 games since then and been whistled for four fouls just six times.

To the naked eye that reads preposterous. How can one man possibly absorb such contact and yet never dish it out on his own? Officials don’t hide that they are keenly aware of how critical Edey is to a game. “You don’t want to put gray area fouls on him,’’ says a current coordinator of officials who asked not to be identified so that he could speak candidly. “You want to make sure the fouls he commits are more or less so obvious that everyone in the arena can say the ref had no choice.”

Is that favoritism? “Fans want to watch the best players play,” Boyages says. “As long as it’s balanced with the other great players on the other side. Every team has one or two players they need to have in the game for 30 minutes, and the refs are aware of it.”

15) Brian Klaas‘ substack is just so good.  I read this and the next day the insights came up in a conversation with a friend about policing, “How to stop social dysfunction: wide vs. narrow problems: Many social problems can be sorted into two groups—wide problems and narrow problems. Treating one kind as the other creates catastrophe, but we do it all the time, from policing to politics.”

16) Interesting article that could’ve been way shorter. “Why Do Men Dominate Chess? FIDE’s new policy governing who can compete in women’s categories highlights the persistent sex imbalance at the game’s elite levels.”

That said, I don’t see evidence for the idea that socialization alone explains the stronger male tendency to focus obsessively on doing whatever is necessary to win, even at board games. And there are good reasons to think that this tendency has an evolutionary basis: In the animal kingdom, males tend to devote more time, energy, and risk to status competition, since this tends to pay more reproductive benefits for males than females. So it’s not unreasonable to suspect that boys and men have some kind of biological advantage—possibly underpinned by higher lifetime exposure to testosterone—that helps explain their over-representation in tournament-level competition in general. (While this particular brand of competitiveness may have a strong evolutionary explanation, it is unlikely to be the wisest reproductive strategy in today’s world.)

Ultimately, sex differences in complex behaviors and skills are always a product of interactions between biology on the one hand (that is, our genes and their relatively fixed effects, such as hormone levels and body size) and our environment on the other (that is, factors such as our family circumstances, social dynamics, and cultural norms). Interactions between the two shape not only our skills and abilities, but also any emerging group differences. But none such complicating factors change the fact that the sex gap in chess is real and persistent. Given the circumstances that led to the creation of the female category, and the fact that many girls and women appreciate what this category offers, FIDE is correct to take the steps necessary to protect its integrity.

17) I had no idea that NC State star DJ Horne was actually from Cary, not Raleigh, and clearly really near by.  He played basketball at my kids’ middle school and was at there and Cary High (for three years) only a year behind my oldest son. 

18) If you’ve read Sapiens (and if not, why haven’t you), nothing new here, but Brian Klaas with a great summary on a fascinating theory, “Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation: Did the watchful gaze of moralizing gods produce the rise of complex civilizations?”

19) Of all the articles I’ve read recently, this is the one I’ve been thinking about the most, “What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet: Disturbances on the sun may have the potential to devastate our power grid and communication systems. When the next big storm arrives, will we be prepared for it?”

If a solar flare is something like the muzzle flash of a cannon, a coronal mass ejection is the cannonball: slower, but more destructive. It takes anywhere from fifteen hours to several days to reach our planet, by which time it has expanded enormously in volume. Once it arrives, it smashes into our magnetosphere, flattening whichever side is facing the sun (that is, the daytime side) and sending the nighttime side streaming away from the Earth, like a wind sock in a gale. If you remember Faraday’s law, you know that moving a magnetic field around produces an electric current. And so it is ultimately the Earth’s own storm-tossed magnetosphere that induces excess electricity in our planet, thereby initiating the third and final phase of a space-weather event: the geomagnetic storm.

Although that storm can affect anything long and metal (pipelines, railroad tracks), it poses the gravest danger to power grids. In the United States, our grid is divided into three regions. The Eastern Interconnection runs from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains; the Western Interconnection runs from the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean; Texas, in true Lone Star style, goes it alone. For the most part, power can’t flow from one region to another—which is why, when seventy-five per cent of Texas suffered blackouts during a winter storm in 2021, no outside energy providers could help. But, within each region, electricity flows freely—and so can electrical problems, as when, in 2003, a shorted power line in Ohio caused a blackout across much of the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast, leaving fifty-five million people in the dark.

 

All this infrastructure, which continues across the border into Canada to form the North American Power Grid, is also known as the bulk-power system, because it handles energy transmission, not energy distribution. Distribution involves sending electricity from a local substation to everything nearby that needs it—schools, stoplights, factories, the toaster in your kitchen. Transmission gets power to that substation, from one of the more than six thousand generation facilities on the North American grid (nuclear plants, hydroelectric dams, solar farms, etc.), via more than half a million miles of line.

The crucial nodes in this vast network are transformers. Power enters your home at a hundred and ten volts, but voltage that low can’t be sent from a coal plant in West Virginia to your laptop charger in Alexandria; too much energy (in the form of heat) would be lost in transit. Instead, a transformer at the power plant ramps up the electricity to hundreds of thousands of volts, so that it can be transferred efficiently over long distances; once it reaches a substation, another transformer ramps the voltage back down until it can safely enter your home. Whatever its voltage, all that power flows through the grid as alternating current, moving at a constant frequency of sixty hertz.

Hold that thought; here comes the coronal mass ejection. It smacks into our magnetic field, warping it—or, in severe storms, temporarily ripping part of it open—and setting in motion the chain of events that sends additional electric charge into the planet. Some of that charge, which is known as geomagnetically induced current, dissipates harmlessly, because it flows into a part of the Earth that excels at conducting electricity—salt water, say, or sedimentary rock. But, in places where the underlying rock is a poor conductor, the current must go elsewhere. Like all current, it follows the path of least resistance, and the least resistant path of all is the one designed to conduct electricity: the power grid.

By unfortunate chance, some of the least conductive bedrock in the United States is the very old metamorphic and igneous rock of the Appalachian Mountains and the New England Highlands—the geological substrates of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and much of the rest of the Eastern Seaboard, home to half the country’s population. As detailed hazard maps recently created by the geophysicist Jeffrey Love and a team of his colleagues at the United States Geological Survey show, some other parts of the country, notably the Midwest, are likewise vulnerable to geomagnetically induced currents.