1) Jesse Wegman, “Trump’s Immunity Case Was Settled More Than 200 Years Ago”
Did the American Revolution actually happen? If it did, was it a good thing?
This is more or less what Justice Elena Kagan seemed to be wondering during the oral arguments in Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 immunity case at the Supreme Court on Thursday morning. “Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?” she asked.
Like her, I had assumed those questions were answered decisively in the affirmative more than 200 years ago. But now, after almost three hours of circuitous debate and bizarre hypotheticals at the Supreme Court, I’m not so sure.
The right-wing justices seemed thoroughly uninterested in the case before them, which involves a violent insurrection that was led by a sitting president who is seeking to return to office in a matter of months. Instead, they spent the morning and early afternoon appearing to be more worried that prosecuting Mr. Trump could risk future malicious prosecutions of former presidents by their political rivals. And they tried to draw a distinction between official acts, for which a president might have immunity from prosecution, and private acts, for which no immunity would apply.
The upshot was that a majority of justices appeared prepared to send the case back down to the lower courts for further unnecessary litigation, which would almost certainly eliminate any chance of a trial being held before Election Day.
2) Nate Silver, “Don’t confuse attention-seeking activists for “the youth vote””
The reporting on young voters doesn’t match the reality
Another part of that Business Insider headline is probably a lie too: it’s unlikely that the student loan forgiveness program — announced by President Biden in August 2022, overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2023, now being partly restored by the White House — made much difference in the election either way.
A recent poll of Americans aged 18-29 by Harvard’s Institute of Politics asked them to rank the importance of different issues. The poll did this in a slightly unusual way, by randomly generating pairs from a list of 16 issues and asking respondents to pick the more important one. (For instance, you’d have to pick whether climate change or health care was more important to you.) I’m not sure I’ve seen this methodology used before, but I like it: making pairwise comparisons is often easier for people than picking from a laundry list of issues. Anyway, here were the results:
Student debt performed terribly, winning only 26 percent of its matchups, basically making it the political equivalent of the Charlotte Hornets.1 Despite the headlines, it’s a boutique issue that most people don’t care about all that much.
3) NYT on the crisis at NPR (gift link). Best part is the comments on this. A bunch of liberal NYT readers who are frustrated that NPR is all-in on identity politics (yet another article where I pretty much am the median NYT commenter).
4) Love this from deBoer, “Fat or Thin, We Are Not Meant to Feel Good About Ourselves All the Time”
My various diets and workout regimes and tricks and schemes are powerless in the face of forces I can’t control. And yet gaining or losing weight is widely thought to be a matter of simple virtue or lack thereof. I find this senseless and deeply cruel.
But, of course, that is not enough for people like Sole-Smith. The understanding that losing weight is hard and highly variable depending on genetics and environment, and a subsequent dedication to not blaming individuals for how fat they are (and to minding your own business), are not enough. The fat activists instead insist, as Sole-Smith does, that fat people should not attempt to control their appetites at all, and that doing so constitutes “diet culture,” which is presumed to be psychically unhealthy and a vestige of bigotry no matter what the circumstance. They also tend to minimize or dismiss decades of research findings that show that carrying around a lot of excess fat is dangerous in and of itself. (This is, indeed, why I’m on Rybelsus, on top of the fact that it simply became too physically uncomfortable to walk around with 270 pounds on a 6’2 frame.) “Fat activism” vs. “cruel and unscientific insistence that fat people can just choose not to be fat” is a perfect synecdoche of our rotten political culture, a diorama of our whole system, which amounts to a series of dueling incurious orthodoxies prompted by the desire to inflict cruelty on one’s enemies. Someone else’s obesity is none of your business; insisting that there are no health consequences for being obesity is both personally and socially destructive. [emphasis mine]
5) Michael Hobbes is honestly one of the absolutely worst people on twitter. And it’s amazing that he produces a podcast called “you’re wrong about” where he frequently wrong. Thus, loved this takedown of Hobbes from Jesse Singal. “Michael Hobbes Is Spectacularly Wrong About Youth Gender Medicine: That’s because he doesn’t care what the truth is”
Michael Hobbes insists, on Twitter, that the Cass Review (which I wrote about here) vindicates his own view that youth gender medicine is in solid shape, and that the various experts and clinicians to whom we entrust gender-questioning children’s and teenager’s well-being are doing a good and responsible job.
This has long been Hobbes’ stance. He simply cannot believe that some journalists have spent so much time covering this issue in a critical manner, given the overwhelming evidence that the system works. And plus, even if there were issues, so few young people are transitioning that who cares? Hobbes views this as a moral panic, full-stop — and this is a popular view on the left, often founded on distortions and misconceptions.
For those who are unfamiliar, Hobbes is a pundit whose voice on these issues matters: he has built a career as an exceptionally successful DIY podcaster, probably one of the few self-made podcast millionaires. He originally became famous as the co-host of the blockbuster You’re Wrong About, which mostly revisited past controversies and explained how, well, we were wrong about them. These days he co-hosts Maintenance Phase, which involves a lot of debunking of obesity and weight-loss research, and If Books Could Kill, which involves a lot of debunking of airport bestsellers. Debunking really is his thing: he is trusted by a huge audience that views him as the last word on all manner of scientific and societal disputes.
The problem is, he’s exceptionally bad at it. Find me an even mildly complex subject he has discussed, and I will find you countless errors, misunderstandings, and, in some cases, what can only be fairly described as lies. And it isn’t just that he errs and misunderstands and lies quite frequently; it’s that he does it with the maximum possible amount of sanctimony and a complete absence of good faith. He has built a huge listenership out of the idea that American intellectual life is full of vapid morons stoking moral panics and peddling false cures, and he, Michael Hobbes, can help guide the curious but less informed reader through this morass. Far be it from me to disagree with his overall diagnosis, but I don’t think Hobbes is on the side he thinks he’s on.
A lot of the things Hobbes gets wrong are relatively low stakes, but some aren’t. Maintenance Phase, for example, is a profound train wreck of misinformation, and unfortunately, people do take their health and wellness cues from Michael Hobbes–style demagogues. (Seriously, just click this link, peruse for 20 minutes, and tell me this is a man you would trust to accurately predict where the sun will rise tomorrow morning.)
I’d like to give Hobbes the longer treatment he deserves someday, but because he produces so much bullshit, and because the bullshit asymmetry principle tells us that debunking bullshit takes orders of magnitude more time than excreting it, that will have to wait. For now, I just want to tackle a few of the misconceptions about youth gender medicine he has been propagating for years, and with renewed vigor since the Cass Review was published.
6) Love this from Chait, “Biden Was Right About Both Antisemitism and the Palestinians Sometimes basic humanity means seeing “both sides.””
In the wake of the most recent spree of antisemitic harassment, President Biden made a statement denouncing the harassment of Jews, while gesturing toward sympathy for the plight of Palestinian Arabs: “I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
Unsurprisingly, this caused an outrage response from the eliminationist left. Somewhat more surprisingly, unless you are familiar with this particular pathology, Biden’s statement also generated outrage on the political right.
“Biden condemns ‘antisemitic protests,’ and ‘those who don’t understand’ Palestinians in echo of Trump ‘both sides’ remark,” blared the New York Post. The Federalist (“Joe Biden Says There Are Very Fine People On Both Sides Of The Oct. 7 Debate”), The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page (“Biden Has a ‘Very Fine People’ Moment”), and other conservative media have repeated the theme.
This is a familiar anti-anti-Trump tactic: finding Trump’s most indefensible moments and then attempting to blow up a minor or imagined Biden infraction to an equivalent size to neutralize the issue. In this case, they are pretending Biden’s expression of sympathy for Palestinians is the equivalent of Donald Trump calling the pro-Confederate demonstrators in Charlottesville “very fine people.”
But there was nothing in Biden’s remark that hinted of sympathy for the antisemitic protests he was denouncing. He was remarking that Palestinian people are suffering and deserve sympathy and attention, and not allowing his radical critics to take ownership of that sentiment.
Since both sides has now become an epithet used by, well, both sides, it is worth making a defense of the general construct. The term both sides became sarcastic shorthand for a common practice in the mainstream media of pretending offenses that were solely committed by the Republican Party were being shared by Democrats. You could find this trope in stories about subjects like, say, the debt ceiling, where fake neutrality would cause reporters to pretend both parties were using hostage tactics.
Yet the general idea of adopting a broad moral framework and balancing competing moral principles remains correct. The error is to misapply it to situations in which all fault is concentrated in a single party. But I do not think that is a useful way to approach all political conflict. And it is an especially poor one for the conflict in the Middle East.
Biden has taken abuse from all directions for attempting to hold multiple values in his head at once. The president has, at various times, expressed the following ideas:
1. Terrorist attacks on civilians are wrong. 2. Israel has a right to self-defense that is bounded by a requirement to minimize civilian casualties. 3. Bigotry against Jews, Muslims, or Arabs is categorically wrong.
7) Wired on the rusting of Tesla’s cybertrucks (saw my first one in the wild this week)
The Cybertruck does not ship with clear coat, that outermost layer of transparent paint that comes as standard on almost every new motor vehicle on the planet. Instead, each Cybertruck owner has the option to purchase a $5,000 urethane-based film to “wrap your Cybertruck in our premium satin clear paint films. Only available through Tesla.”
Who knew untreated stainless steel might not be such a good idea for the exterior of a motor vehicle, especially considering that cars typically get left sitting outside in all weather for 95 percent of their lives? The whole automotive industry, that’s who.
Aside from the 1980s DMC DeLorean and a shiny 1960s Porsche, car companies have long steered clear of stainless steel panels. The material is heavy, relatively expensive, and hard to work with. It’s also stiff, which makes it potentially more lethal to anybody unlucky enough to be struck by a vehicle built with the stuff.
Stainless steel also stains. “Stainless” does not mean “never stains,” just that it stains less than other steels.
Have you been keeping track of the brutal civil war in Sudan? No? Here are the basics:
Central government vs. paramilitary group. Check.
Millions forced to flee their homes. Check.
On the brink of mass famine. Check.
Atrocities by both sides. Check.
Woefully insufficient aid from the US and the rest of the West. Check.
Tens of thousands slaughtered. Check.
Ceasefire desperately needed. Check.
Just the latest in a long history of conflict. Check.
Country was originally under British rule, gained independence shortly after World War II. Check.
Sound familiar? Oh wait. There’s one more thing:
Jews vs Muslims? No.
So no one cares. I imagine most college students could barely find Sudan on a map,¹ let alone figure out which side they ought to support if they cared.² I mean, probably both sides have some legitimate grievances, right? Just like every other conflict in the world except for Israel vs. Palestine, where everything is pristine and clear with no room for doubt about who the warmongers are.
9) I did not know Scott McClurg all that well, but he was good friends with a number of my friends in political science and, in my limited experience, a heckuva guy. He was finally done in by a long fight with brain cancer. As for the brain cancer, that seems pretty clearly the fault of our government and unscrupulous contractors. “After Building the Atomic Bomb, the Government Dumped Deadly Toxic Waste in a Quiet Suburb”
10) Mona Charen is not wrong, “The GOP Is the Party of Putin: The Russians’ takeover of the Republican party is arguably the most successful influence operation in history.”
Most Republican officeholders are not sociopaths, but they take their marching orders from one and have adjusted their consciences accordingly. The talking point J.D. Vance and his ilk favor is that they cannot be concerned about Ukraine’s border when our southern border is also being invaded. Of course it’s absurd to compare immigrants looking for work or safety to tanks, bombs, and missiles, but that’s what passes for Republican reasoning these days. In any case, it was revealed to be hollow when Biden and the Democrats offered an extremely strict border bill to sweeten aid for Ukraine, and the GOP turned it down flat.
Russia’s fingerprints are all over the Republicans’ failed attempt to impeach (in all senses of the word) Joe Biden. Their star witness, Alexander Smirnov—who alleged that Hunter and Joe Biden had been paid $5 million in bribes by Burisma—was indicted in February for making false statements. High-ranking Russians appear to be his sources.
Whether the subject is Ukraine, Biden’s so-called corruption, or NATO, Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history. If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the GOP than anyone other than Trump. GOP propagandists indulge fictions that even many Russians can see through: Ukraine is governed by Nazis; Russia is a religious, Christian nation; Russia is fighting “wokeness.”
Republicans are not so much isolationist as pro-authoritarian. They’ve made Hungary’s Viktor Orbán a pinup and they mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin must be pinching himself.
11) I did not take Paxlovid when I got Covid last year. I’m definitely not taking it next time I get Covid, Jeremy Faust, “Paxlovid does not reduce symptoms, definitive Pfizer trial finds.”
Pfizer finally published its study of Paxlovid’s effects on symptoms for standard-risk and high-risk vaccinated patients with Covid-19.
No difference in symptoms.
The upshot of the trial, known as EPIC-SR and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is that Paxlovid did not reduce the amount of time until patients got symptom relief. For anyone who thinks Paxlovid helps reduce symptoms, we now have high-quality, randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trial data—from the makers of the drugand published in the most prestigious medical journal in the world—saying otherwise. Of study participants randomized to receive Paxlovid, the median number of days until sustained symptom relief was 12 days, compared to 13 days among placebo recipients That difference was not statistically significant (and even if it were, it would hardly align with the anecdotes people tell about taking it and getting immediately better; Inside Medicine readers know better, of course).
12) Well isn’t this some cool political science: “Does Political Diversity Inhibit Blood Donations?”
Does political diversity affect the prevalence of selfless behavior across a society? According to a recurrent finding from the study of social capital, ethnic diversity reduces prosocial behavior. We ask whether the same applies to partisan identity, by turning to a frequently used proxy for social capital: blood donations. The question is especially timely: the United States is currently experiencing its worst blood shortage in over a decade. Using survey results covering over 275,000 individuals in the US from 2010 to 2020, and a preregistered survey of an additional 3,500 respondents, we show that not all measures of social diversity have analogous effects on prosocial behavior. We find mixed evidence for a region’s share of immigrants being linked to lower blood donation by US citizens, and no negative effect for racial diversity. By contrast, political diversity appears to be highly significant. Specifically, individuals are less likely to donate blood when their partisan position is farther from the mean political identity in their state or commuting zone, and when they perceive themselves to be political outliers in their community. Affective polarization is known to be a tax on social interaction with out-partisans; as we show, depending on an area’s partisan makeup, it can also be a tax on prosocial behavior writ large.
13) I’ve been vaguely aware of a long-term feud between a nearby quarry looking to expand and a citizen group trying to stop the expansion. After this article, you can put me on the side of the quarry (in large part, because I use the adjacent Umstead Park all the time and the quarry does not negatively affect my enjoyment of it one bit):
After it passes under Interstate 40, Crabtree Creek forms a boundary between William B. Umstead State Park and Wake Stone Corp.’s Triangle Quarry.
On one side, people hike under a canopy of trees on the Company Mill and Inspiration trails, getting exercise and seeking refuge from the traffic and noise that surround the park.
Across the creek, up a hill and behind a concrete barrier, workers have been blasting and crushing rock for 42 years. The trucks that haul it away to construction sites share the road that people use to enter Umstead from Cary.
An aerial view the Wake Stone Corp. quarry next to William B. Umstead State Park. Raleigh-Durham International Airport has leased 105 acres to Wake Stone so it can expand its existing quarry operation between the park and Interstate 40. Travis Long tlong@newsobserver.com
Whether the quarry and the park have been good neighbors is at the heart of the conflict over whether Wake Stone should be allowed to create a second quarry on property owned by Raleigh-Durham International Airport. The fight over the proposed quarry continues to drag on eight years after it appeared in a draft of the airport master plan.
Sam Bratton, Wake Stone’s president and CEO, thinks the existing Triangle Quarry has been more than compatible with the park. Bratton cites a letter that Jean Spooner, the head of a coalition of groups that aims to protect the park, wrote in 1999.
Wake Stone Corp. was seeking approval for a new quarry in Chatham County and wanted some character references. It asked Spooner, head of The Umstead Coalition, to write about the company and its quarry.
“In the 10 years that I have been a member of The Umstead Coalition, I have never heard a complaint about Wake Stone’s operation next to Umstead,” she wrote. “Our experience with Wake Stone Corporation has been positive.” …
Spooner, a retired extension professor from N.C. State University, speaks for people who love the park and its nearly 5,600 acres of wilderness in the middle of a metro area of more than 2 million people. Many oppose sacrificing 105 acres of forested land next to the park for an open pit mine.
“A heavy industrial site does not generally make a great neighbor to a park,” Spooner said during a walk in the woods near the RDU property. “And this one is no exception.”
Bratton, who heads the company his father, John, started 54 years ago, takes a more pragmatic view on the proposed quarry. Rock needed to build roads, parking lots, houses, restaurants and other buildings in the Triangle has to come from somewhere, he says, and a central location off I-40 near Cary means shorter truck trips to where it’s needed.
Besides, Bratton says, the Triangle Quarry has been a good neighbor to Umstead since the 1980s.
“We’re not going to damage the park, and we’re not hurting anybody,” Bratton said, standing on the edge of the pit across Crabtree Creek from the RDU property. “We’re going to exist over there like we’ve existed over here, and most people don’t even know we’re here.”
This is very true. In addition to never having any issues during my trips to the park, I’ve literally never heard of another park using having a problem because it’s next to a quarry. Sure, we need to protect our environment and outdoor spaces, but this really strikes me as simply being opposed to the quarry expanding because it’s a quarry and people would rather just have that expanded quarry in someone else’s neighborhood.
14) This was fun! “Selected negative teaching evaluations of Jesus Christ”
“Very inconvenient class! Always holds lectures on top of mountains, in middle of the Sea of Galilee—but never close to the main campus.”
“Inconsistent attendance policy. Said we had to be in class by 9:00 a.m. every day. Over half the class showed up late or didn’t attend until the last meeting, but we all got the same participation grade.”
“He’s nice enough, I guess, but he doesn’t vet his TAs: they all provide completely different, conflicting lecture notes. (TIP: Try to get in Luke’s section.)”
“By week one, I was already tired of his anti-rich, pro-Samaritan bullshit. I wanted to take a course in Christianity, not liberalism.”
“Wears sandals too much. No one wants to see your dusty feet.”
“Not what I expected. They say his area of specialty is carpentry, but we never built anything.”
“Kind of absent-minded. My name’s Simon, and he’s called me ‘Peter’ for the entire semester.”
“I wanted to like this class, but on the first day, he submerged us in a river instead of going over the syllabus, and that was kind of a lot.”
We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over.
This prompted so many questions. Does this mean the insect apocalypse is over? Are pollinators saved? Did we unravel the web of maladies known as colony collapse disorder?
What’s it worth to you to minimize the risk of cutting off a finger?
$300? $600? $1,200? Or perhaps it’s worth nothing, if you think you’re already careful enough?
If you’re a woodworker willing to spend enough money, you can buy a table saw that detects fingers and stops the blade like this:
Video
1.00
CreditCredit…Jonathan Katz-Moses
(The hot dog is your finger.)
So, would you pay extra for this feature? What if the government said you had no choice but to pay up? And what if only one company held the patents for the safety mechanism?
Government mandates of new safety technology are classic trade-offs, whether the product is a power tool or a car or a pill. In this case, regulations requiring that table saws be sold with this safety device might mean a few thousand fingers saved per year. But they might also lead to higher costs for consumers…
When the technologies are patented, the trade-offs can become even more clear, like the high prices (and high profits) of drug companies in exchange for the innovation of new drugs. With table saws, it might similarly lead to a period of less competition and more profit for the company that developed the safety mechanism.
Among tools likely to be found in someone’s garage, table saws are the biggest driver of serious woodworking-related injuries: Each year they are responsible for about 30,000 injuries that require emergency department treatment — and nearly 4,300 amputations.
By comparison, the thousands of other products tracked by the Consumer Protection Safety Commission, a federal agency, are responsible for roughly 3,600 amputations per year combined.
17) Conor Friedersdorf on Utah’s approach to DEI, “The State That’s Trying to Rein in DEI Without Becoming Florida”
Utah’s Equal Opportunities Initiatives, or H.B. 261, which was signed into law in January, is more promising. It attempts to end the excessive and at times coercive focus on identity in higher education while also trying to protect academic freedom with carve-outs for research and course teaching.
The law prohibits universities from giving individuals preferential treatment or discriminating against them based on race, color, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, or gender identity. It forbids offices that help students from excluding anyone based on their identity. It bans mandatory campus training sessions that promote differential treatment. It prohibits “discriminatory practices,” such as ascribing “values, morals, or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs to an individual” because of their identity.
Yet it makes real compromises with DEI supporters. Race-based cultural centers, like the Black Cultural Center at the University of Utah, will stay open. And Utah does not plan to fire all DEI staffers, as happened at the University of Florida––the law preserves the funding that DEI offices had while mandating that they refocus and rebrand as centers that attend to the needs of any student having trouble at college.
Hmmm, wait a second. That sounds a lot like what happened right here in NC.
18) Biotechnology for the win. “Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought: The personalized shot gives a standard melanoma treatment a huge boost.”
19) Cool, “Storing Renewable Energy, One Balloon at a Time: To decarbonize the electrical grid, companies are finding creative ways to store energy during periods of low demand.”
Central Sardinia is not generally considered a hotbed of innovation: Arid and rural, some of its road signs riddled with bullet holes made by target-practicing locals, the setting recalls a Clint Eastwood western. Yet in Ottana, on the brownfield site of a former petrochemical plant, a new technology is taking shape that might help the world slow climate change. The key component of this technology is as unlikely as the remote location: carbon dioxide, the chief cause of global warming.
Energy Dome, a start-up based in Milan, runs an energy-storage demonstration plant that helps to address a mismatch in the local electricity market. “In Sardinia during the day, everyone goes to the sea,” Claudio Spadacini, chief executive of Energy Dome, said. “They don’t use electricity, but there’s a lot of supply,” he added, referring to the Italian island’s abundant sunlight.
Energy Dome uses carbon dioxide held in a huge balloon, the “dome” in the company’s name, as a kind of battery. During the day, electricity from the local grid, some produced by nearby fields of solar cells, is used to compress the carbon dioxide into liquid. At night, the liquid carbon dioxide is expanded back into gas, which drives a turbine and produces electricity that is sent back to the grid.
Solar and wind power are fast-growing renewable sources, but they rely on nature’s intermittent schedule to produce electricity. Many researchers and policymakers say that storing such energy until needed, for hours or even days, is key to transitioning economies away from fossil fuels. “Advancing energy-storage technologies is critical to achieving a decarbonized power grid,” Jennifer M. Granholm, the U.S. energy secretary, said in a 2022 statement, when her department announced that it would commit more than $300 million for long-duration energy storage.
Companies are developing and marketing varied and creative ways to store renewable energy: liquefying carbon dioxide, de-rusting iron, heating towers filled with sand to temperatures almost hot enough to melt aluminum. But predicting our energy-storage needs in the future, after a huge energy transformation, is a daunting prospect, and which of these approaches, if any, will prove effective and profitable is unclear.
20) And this one is even cooler because I was part of the research study! “A Blood Test Shows Promise for Early Colon Cancer Detection: Many patients are reluctant to undergo colonoscopies or conduct at-home fecal tests. Doctors see potential in another screening method.”
Early detection of colon cancer can prevent a majority of deaths from this disease, possibly as much as 73 percent of them. But just 50 to 75 percent of middle-aged and older adults who should be screened regularly are being tested.
One reason, doctors say, is that the screening methods put many people off.
Or, as Dr. Folasade P. May, a gastroenterologist at UCLA Health puts it, “either you take this horrible laxative and then a doctor puts an instrument up your behind, or you have to manipulate your own poop.”
But something much simpler is on the horizon: a blood test. Gastroenterologists say such tests could become part of the routine blood work that doctors order when, for example, a person comes in for an annual physical exam…
About 53,000 Americans are expected to die from colorectal cancer this year. It is the second-most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States, and while the death rate in older adults has fallen, it has increased in people under age 55.
Current guidelines recommend screenings starting at age 45. The problem is convincing more people to be screened.
Enter the blood test. It takes advantage of the discovery that colon cancers and large polyps — clumps of cells on the lining of the colon that occasionally turn into cancers — shed fragments of DNA into the blood.
A study published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine found that a blood test searching for such DNA called Shield and made by the company Guardant Health detected 87 percent of cancers that were at an early and curable stage. The false positive rate was 10 percent.
Quick hits is back! Sorry, it’s been a busy end of the semester. Lots of good stuff for you to enjoy here…
1) Jeff Maurer with a really important point, often elided in coverage of the protesters, “The Groups Protesting on College Campuses Don’t Think Israel Should Exist”
But now it’s April, and the “I didn’t know” argument doesn’t work anymore. We have had the “from the river to the sea” debate — we have lived through several high-profile episodes of people co-signing hateful statements and then walking their words back. Remember the guy who was so bonkers that The Atlantic wrote an article basically saying “get a load of this clown”? That was less than a month ago. There have been many clues that you should think before you co-sign a movement’s actions, everyone has had ample time to get acquainted with the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and if you still don’t know that “75 year occupation” means “Israel shouldn’t exist,” then the difference between “filled with hate” and “so simple that you soaked up the hateful ideas that you happened to be standing near” is functionally unimportant.
People on the left often romanticize protest. Civil rights protesters, suffragettes, and other people who stood up for just causes are lionized. Mainstream liberals sometimes don’t know how to react to protest movements that are extreme, brian dead, or both — consider many liberals’ ambivalent response to Occupy Wall Street. It seems to me that the efforts to separate the protests at Columbia from antisemitism — and to make sure that the latter doesn’t taint the former — represent a belief that the protests are basically just, and that the problem is that a few zealots are going too far. I think the dynamic is different: I think that the protesters are openly calling for ethnic cleansing of the state of Israel, and even if you gave every protester an anti-antisemitism pill that magically purged their minds of all bigoted thoughts, they would still be calling for actions that are absolutely horrific.
Like many liberals, I support parts of the Palestinian cause. I’m appalled by Israel’s actions in the West Bank, and I have major misgivings about how they’re conducting the Gaza War. But I hope that everyone on the left understands: These protesters don’t want a Palestinian state next to an Israeli state. They want Israel wiped off the map. Their own words — written down and unchanged despite ample opportunities to do so — say that. A silver lining of the recent surge in left-wing antisemitism is that many liberals are waking up to the fact that wokeness (or whatever we’re calling it) is not liberalism-except-moreso: It’s a wholly alien, hideous movement. Even if you ignore the torrent of antisemitism that makes the “GOODBYE JEWS!” girl from Schindler’s Listlook like the head of the ADL, these groups are nakedly eliminationist. Any liberal who supports them assuming that they’re descended from the peaceful movements of years past is actually supporting something a whole lot darker.
2) Good stuff here on Harvey Weinstein’s overturned conviction. It’s complicated!
Harvey Weinstein long wielded his power to be treated better by the legal system than a typical person accused of violent crimes would be. On Thursday, New York’s highest court said that, nonetheless, he didn’t deserve to be treated worse. They overturned his conviction for assaulting two women, for which he had been sentenced to 23 years in prison, and ordered a new trial. (Weinstein will remain in prison for convictions in California.)
The narrow majority agreed with Weinstein that prosecutors shouldn’t have been allowed to bring into criminal court the cumulative testimonies of multiple women — the very things that helped Me Too grow from a hashtag to a movement — because their cases weren’t being directly charged. (He has been accused of sexual abuse or harassment by nearly 100 women.) The majority opinion and two dissents laid bare a simmering, unresolved conflict of Me Too and its aftermath: Does the gendered, intimate nature of sexual violence, weighted with power imbalances and complex questions of consent, require a systemic overhaul of the legal rules, or is that a slippery slope to the kinds of due-process violations that inevitably come down hardest on people far less privileged than Weinstein?
“With today’s decision, this Court continues to thwart the steady gains survivors of sexual violence have fought for in our criminal justice system,” wrote Judge Madeline Singas in her dissent. The majority responded, “On the contrary, consistent with our judicial role, our analysis is grounded on bedrock principles of evidence and the defendant’s constitutional right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial.”
That majority opinion couldn’t be dismissed as a bunch of clueless white guys protecting the powerful. Its author, Judge Jenny Rivera, worked as a public defender and civil-rights advocate. Singas, meanwhile, was a prosecutor whose official biography describes her as having focused on domestic and sexual abuse. She went so far as to accuse the majority of displaying “fundamental misunderstandings of sexual violence perpetrated by men known to, and with significant power over, the women they victimize.” Rivera responded directly to Singas that adopting her desired standard “would only amplify the risk that biased jurors would justify a vote to convict defendants of color on such uncharged conduct in cases where the evidence supporting the charged conduct is weak — an all too real phenomenon.”
It was a high-stakes revival of the perennial question of whether Me Too had gone too far. “For all those quick to jump to conclusions and unhelpful assessments about the power and reach of the survivor justice movement,” retorted Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center and a co-founder of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, in a statement, “today is a reminder that survivors often still live in the margins, with fine print and loopholes getting in the way of what looks like justice and healing for them.”
Under a 1901 precedent known as the Molineux rule, prosecutors can’t bring evidence of “prior bad acts” only to prove that someone has a propensity to commit a crime. But there are exceptions. In the Weinstein case, the trial-court judge allowed the testimony of three such witnesses, including actress Annabella Sciorra, if they could illuminate Weinstein’s intent and whether he could have understood that the victims he was charged with assaulting didn’t consent. Prosecutors had argued that they would add important context about the entertainment industry and Weinstein’s role in it. The witnesses also sought to counter myths about how a sexual-assault victim would behave — for example, to help the jury explain why someone might go on to have a consensual relationship with a man who she said had previously raped her. The majority said not only was the additional testimony not allowed, it wasn’t needed to convict because “there is no equivocality regarding consent when a person says ‘no’ to a sexual encounter, tries to leave, and attempts to physically resist their attacker before succumbing to the attacker’s brute physical force.”
3) Really liked Leonhardt on values and campus protests:
Arnold Kling, an economist, published a book a decade ago that offered a way to think about the core difference between progressives and conservatives. Progressives, Kling wrote, see the world as a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, and they try to help the oppressed. Conservatives see the world as a struggle between civilization and barbarism — between order and chaos — and they try to protect civilization.
Like many frameworks, Kling’s is a simplification, and it’s easy to find exceptions. But his book has been influential because the framework often sheds light on political arguments.
The debate over pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia and other universities has become an example. If you want to understand why university leaders are finding the situation so hard to resolve, Kling’s dichotomy is useful: The central question for colleges is whether to prioritize the preservation of order or the desire of students to denounce oppression.
In today’s newsletter, I’ll lay out the cases of the dueling sides.
Confronting injustice
For the student protesters, the injustice in Gaza is so horrific that it takes precedence over almost anything else.
The death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7 is more than 30,000, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports. Entire neighborhoods are rubble. Israel has slowed the entry of basic supplies into Gaza, and many families are hungry. (My colleagues Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair profiled two families trying to find their children enough to eat.)
The protesters view this suffering as an atrocity that demands action, much as Jim Crow laws, the Vietnam War and South African apartheid did for earlier students. In a statement yesterday, a pro-Palestinian group at Columbia cited as inspiration the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators who were killed at Kent State University in 1970.
If classes must be canceled and graduation ceremonies can’t happen, all the better, the students say. The disruptions will force the world to confront what the protesters describe as a genocide. “Big picture, genocide is happening, and this is where we stand,” one Columbia graduate student told the publication Hell Gate.
Many protesters specifically call for their universities to divest from companies that do business in Israel or help produce military equipment.
Some students have framed the debate as being about free speech, and free-speech principles do play a role. But I don’t think they are as central as Kling’s frame. Both sides, after all, have tried to restrict speech. Supporters of Israel have doxxed pro-Palestinian students and tried to penalize slogans like “From the river to the sea.” Pro-Palestinian protesters have ripped away Israeli and U.S. flags and tried to prevent pro-Israel students from speaking.
The protesters’ abiding principle is not freedom of speech. It is justice for the oppressed.
Preventing chaos
For the protesters’ critics, the breakdown of order is the central problem — because a community that descends into chaos can’t function.
Protesters have frequently violated colleges’ rules. They have erected tents in public places and overwhelmed those areas. Columbia has switched to hybrid classes because of the turmoil.
Even worse, some protests have involved harassment and violence. The University of Michigan had to cut short an honors ceremony for students. At Vanderbilt, more than 20 protesters stormed the president’s office, injuring a security guard and shattering a window. At Columbia, videos have shown protesters threatening Jewish students with antisemitic vitriol, including a sign talking about Hamas’s “next targets.”
If universities do not enforce their own rules against such behavior, the rules have no meaning, administrators fear. Other protesters, seeing their own causes as existential, could likewise halt normal life. Perhaps they would be climate activists or students outraged by China’s oppression of Uighurs — or even demonstrators with right-wing views unpopular on American campuses. If anti-abortion protesters were to take over a quad for days, would university administrators ignore their own campus rules?
After a day or two crunching data, Rothwell got back to me with the results. He told me that his analyses clearly confirmed Wilcox’s theory: Marriage definitely, definitely matters, a lot. It improves well-being in every dimension, for every level of income. Overall, the average marriage-happiness premium was about 18 percent. That is, among all adults aged 30 to 50, about 41 percent of unmarried adults said they were thriving versus nearly 60 percent of married adults.
But when he compared happiness across income levels, another story emerged. Income, he said, plays an enormous role in predicting happiness as well. Low-income adults in Gallup’s survey were mostly unhappy, whether or not they were married. The highest-income adults were mostly quite happy, whether or not they are married. For example, married couples who earn less than $48,000 as a household are as likely to say they’re happy as single adults who earn $48,000 to $60,000, and a married couple who makes $90,000 to $180,000 as a household is almost exactly as likely to say they’re happy as a single person making $180,000 to $240,000.
Finally, Rothwell ran a test to isolate the correlative strength of several factors, including education, religion, marriage, income, and career satisfaction. Marriage was strongly correlated with his measure of happiness, even after accounting for these other factors. But social well-being (Gallup’s proxy for what Waldinger and Schulz call “social fitness”, which includes rating on the quality of marriages and close relationships) was even stronger. Income was stronger still. And financial well-being—that is, having enough money to do what you want to do and feeling satisfied with your standard of living—was the best predictor of Gallup’s definition of thriving.
One could draw a snap judgment from this analysis and conclude that money, in fact, simply buys happiness. I think that would be the wrong conclusion. Clever sociologists will always find new ways of “calculating” that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount. But the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity. They rise together and fall together. Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness. High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives. In this light, the philosophical question of what contributes most to happiness is just the beginning. The deeper question is why the trinity of happiness is so stratified by income—and whether well-being in America is in danger of becoming a luxury good.
Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.
The conservative justices have, over the years, seen harbingers of tyranny in union organizing, environmental regulations, civil-rights laws, and universal-health-care plans. When confronted with a legal theory that establishes actual tyranny, they were simply intrigued. As long as Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for the Republicans, every institution they control will contort itself in his image in an effort to protect him.
The Supreme Court, however, does not need to accept Trump’s absurdly broad claim of immunity for him to prevail in his broader legal battle. Such a ruling might damage the image of the Court, which has already been battered by a parade of hard-right ideological rulings. But if Trump can prevail in November, delay is as good as immunity. The former president’s best chance at defeating the federal criminal charges against him is to win the election and then order the Justice Department to dump the cases. The Court could superficially rule against Trump’s immunity claim, but stall things enough to give him that more fundamental victory.
If they wanted, the justices could rule expeditiously as well as narrowly, focusing on the central claim in the case and rejecting the argument that former presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president, without getting into which acts might qualify as official or not. Sauer also acknowledged under questioning by Justice Amy Coney Barrett that some of the allegations against Trump do not involve official acts but private ones, and so theoretically the prosecution could move ahead with those charges and not others. But that wouldn’t necessarily delay the trial sufficiently for Trump’s purposes.
“On big cases, it’s entirely appropriate for the Supreme Court to really limit what they are doing to the facts of the case in front of it, rather than needing to take the time to write an epic poem on the limits of presidential immunity,” Waldman said. “If they write a grant opinion, saying no president is above the law, but it comes out too late in the year, they will have effectively immunized Trump from prosecution before the election while pretending not to.”
6) Apparently, the original Alien movie is having a theatrical re-release. Maybe. Absolutely one of my favorite movies ever. Vulture ranks all Alien movies.
7) Drum, “America needs higher taxes”
David Brooks has a remarkable column in the New York Times today dedicated to one thing: our rising national debt. The reason it’s remarkable has nothing to do with the subject matter. I’m not a big deficit hawk, but the long and steady rise in the national debt is at least concerning:
Even after removing the pandemic spike, the trendline is pretty clear: the national debt is now growing $2 trillion per year and shows no particular sign of slowing down.
This is not sustainable forever, so it’s hardly remarkable that Brooks is worried about it. What’s remarkable is that in the entire column he mentions tax increases only once and in passing. Then there’s this:
Ultimately responsibility lies with the voters. In the 1990s, Americans saw how high government debt was raising their interest rates. Voters put tremendous pressure on politicians to get the fiscal house in order. Along came Ross Perot and deficit reduction plans under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Voters today have not yet made that connection. When they do, I suspect the political landscape will shift massively.
Again, no mention that these “deficit reduction plans” both involved higher taxes. But everyone who’s not merely shilling for Republicans knows this is the only way to rein in the deficit. You could completely eliminate Medicaid and the entire domestic budget and half the defense budget…….and you still wouldn’t cut the annual deficit to zero.
Everyone knows this. Federal spending isn’t rising because Congress is out of control. It’s rising because we have to spend more money on old people, something we’ve known forever. There’s nothing anyone can do about this.
So if you’re worried about the mounting national debt—and you should be, at least a little bit—there’s only one way to reduce it: tax hikes. Not huge ones, but not tiny ones either. That’s just the way it is. No one serious can avoid it.
8) This was good, “Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing: Somewhere along the line, the plane maker lost interest in making its own planes. Can it rediscover its engineering soul?”
The two scenes tell us the peculiar story of a plane maker that, over 25 years, slowly but very deliberately extracted itself from the business of making planes. For nearly 40 years the company built the 737 fuselage itself in the same plant that turned out its B-29 and B-52 bombers. In 2005 it sold this facility to a private-investment firm, keeping the axle grease at arm’s length and notionally shifting risk, capital costs, and labor woes off its books onto its “supplier.” Offloading, Boeing called it. Meanwhile the tail, landing gear, flight controls, and other essentials were outsourced to factories around the world owned by others, and shipped to Boeing for final assembly, turning the company that created the Jet Age into something akin to a glorified gluer-together of precast model-airplane kits. Boeing’s latest screwups vividly dramatize a point often missed in laments of America’s manufacturing decline: that when global economic forces carried off some U.S. manufacturers for good, even the ones that stuck around lost interest in actually making stuff.
The past 30 years may well be remembered as a dark age of U.S. manufacturing. Boeing’s decline illustrates everything that went wrong to bring us here. Fortunately, it also offers a lesson in how to get back out.
9) I’m a little limited in my running at the moment (more on that in another post), but once I’m fully back at it I do plan to add in sprints. “Why You Should Add Some Sprints Into Your Workout: Running all out, at least for short distances, can be a great way to level up your workout routine.”
Put simply, sprinting is running at or near your top speed. “It is one of the movements that gives the biggest bang for buck,” said Matt Sanderson, a director at the fitness brand SOFLETE.
Because sprinting engages so many muscles, “it’s going to do a better job of helping maintain your muscle mass and avoid muscle loss as you age,” said Christopher Lundstrom, a lecturer in kinesiology at the University of Minnesota who studies sports and exercise science.
10) Speaking of running, “The New Quarter-Life Crisis: Running a marathon has become a milestone for a growing number of young adults.”
Maybe you started running for fitness, or because it seemed like a good way to make friends. Or perhaps it was a distraction from an uninspiring and underpaid job. Maybe you wanted an outlet for the frustration you felt at being single and watching your friends couple up. But no matter the reason you started, at some point it became more than a hobby. Your runs got longer, and longer, and longer, until you started to wonder: Should you … sign up for a marathon?
This might sound like a classic midlife-crisis move. But these days, much-younger people are feeling the same urge. TikTok and Instagram are filled with videos of 20-somethings filming themselves running and showing off slick gear as they train for what some call their “quarter-life-crisis marathon.” And offline, more young people really have been running marathons in recent years. In 2019, only 15 percent of people who finished the New York City Marathon were in their 20s. By 2023, that share had grown to 19 percent. Similarly, at this year’s Los Angeles Marathon, 28 percent of finishers were in their 20s, up from 21 percent in 2019.
Setting out to run 26.2 miles is intense. But it also promises a profound sense of control that may be especially appealing to those coming into adulthood. For many of today’s 20-somethings, the traditional markers of maturity (marriage, kids, a stable career, homeownership) have become harder to reach. In this context, young people may feel “both logistically disoriented—genuinely not knowing how to pay rent or what to do—but also deeply existentially disoriented,” Satya Doyle Byock, a psychotherapist in Portland, Oregon, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, told me. When other big life milestones seem elusive, a marathon, though extreme, can feel like a surer route to finding meaning: If you stick to your training plan, this is a goal you can reach.
While reporting this story, I spoke with four young marathoners, who had all sorts of reasons for running—many of which were rooted in discontent. They told me about jobs that they hated or that were put on hold during the pandemic. I heard about unfulfilling personal lives, the loneliness of living alone during COVID or of moving to a new city, and the anxiety over political attacks against people like them. They wanted something, anything, to grab on to when they felt unmoored. Marathons were a natural solution. As Kevin Masters, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who began researching marathoners in the 1980s, has found, finishing one can help you find a sense of purpose or a new element of your identity—and he has reason to believe that those factors are motivating Gen Z runners too.
No marathons for this content-with-his-life fellow 🙂
11) So, you know that amazing research on how the reintroduction of wolves transformed the Yellowstone ecosystem for the better? Maybe not so much 😦
In 1995, 14 wolves were delivered by truck and sled to the heart of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, where the animal had long been absent. Others followed.
Since then, a story has grown up, based on early research, that as the wolves increased in number, they hunted the park’s elk herds, significantly reducing them by about half from 17,000.
The wolves’ return and predatory dominance was believed to have had a widespread effect known as a trophic cascade, by decreasing grazing and restoring and expanding forests, grasses and other wildlife. It supposedly even changed the course of rivers as streamside vegetation returned.
Yellowstone’s dramatic transformation through the reintroduction of wolves has become a global parable for how to correct out-of-balance ecosystems.
In recent years, however, new research has walked that story back. Yes, stands of aspen and willows are thriving again — in some places. But decades of damage from elk herds’ grazing and trampling so thoroughly changed the landscape that large areas remain scarred and may not recover for a long time, if ever.
Wolf packs, in other words, are not magic bullets for restoring ecosystems.
“I would say it’s exaggerated, greatly exaggerated,” said Thomas Hobbs, a professor of natural resource ecology at Colorado State University and the lead author of a long-term study that adds new fuel to the debate over whether Yellowstone experienced a trophic cascade.
“You could argue a trophic trickle maybe,” said Daniel Stahler, the park’s lead wolf biologist who has studied the phenomenon. “Not a trophic cascade.”
Not only is the park’s recovery far less robust than first thought, but the story as it has been told is more complex, Dr. Hobbs said.
12) What are ostriches doing swallowing things that will kill them (admittedly, there are no keys in the wild), “Beloved Ostrich Dies at Kansas Zoo After Swallowing Worker’s Keys: Karen, a 5-year-old known for her playful antics, reached beyond her enclosure, grabbed a staff member’s keys and swallowed them, the zoo said. Attempts to save her were unsuccessful.”
A beloved ostrich died last week after reaching beyond the confines of her Kansas zoo enclosure to grab and swallow the keys of a staff member, according to the Topeka Zoo & Conservation Center.
The five-year-old ostrich, Karen, had been a resident of the zoo for around a year and was renowned for her “playful antics,” which included swimming in the enclosure’s pool, playing in the sprinkler and “dancing,” the zoo said Friday on social media.
“Zoo guests and staff alike formed deep connections with her,” said the center, which houses more than 300 animals and is about 65 miles west of Kansas City, Kan.
Karen’s life, however, was cut tragically short after she “reached beyond her exhibit fence,” grabbed the keys and immediately swallowed them, the zoo said, noting that it had consulted with experts across the country in an attempt to save her by both “surgical” and “nonsurgical” means. “Unfortunately,” the zoo said, “these efforts were unsuccessful.”
Founders often fail as managers, Blank noted. “As Tesla struggles in the transition from a visionary pioneer to reliable producer of cars in high volume,” he wrote in 2018, “one wonders” if the generous compensation plan that the Tesla board awarded to Musk that year “would be better spent finding Tesla’s Alfred P. Sloan.”
I called up Blank. He told me that the flaws in Musk that he identified that year remain. “When you’ve been right in the beginning, you think you’re right forever,” he said. “You surround yourself with people who think you’re a genius forever. You run by whim rather than strategy.”
Edwin Land, a co-founder of Polaroid, was a technical genius but a terrible chief executive, Blank said. Steve Jobs bungled his job at Apple and was forced out as chairman, although he redeemed himself by doing better after returning as chief executive, Blank said. Then there’s Durant.
“Musk is very similar to Durant,” agreed Christopher Whalen, an investment banker who is chairman of Whalen Global Advisors and the author of a 2017 book on the history of Ford Motor titled “Ford Men: From Inspiration to Enterprise.” Whalen told me that with Musk, “We’re repeating ourselves in a way.”
A big difference between Durant’s days at G.M. and Musk’s at Tesla is that G.M.’s board was strong and independent of the C.E.O. (as evidenced by the fact that it booted him twice). It’s hard to say the same of Tesla’s.
14) Excellent post from Lee Drutman, “Are We Losing Our Democracy? Or Are We Losing Our Minds? Or Both? Is America Really in Crisis, or Are Our Brains Just Wired to Think So? Yes.”
There are real threats, and real injustices. But if we are going to address and solve these and other problems collectively, we need to have some faith and trust in the government to steer and implement the large-scale solutions necessary.
And yet, it really does feel like we have worked ourselves into a state of counter-productive exaggerated panic and anger, such that we can no longer solve these problems anymore. And the failure to solve these problems contributes to more panic and anger. Which further undermines our collective problem-solving capacity. Which leads for calls to blow up the system entirely. Which…. well you get the idea: a kind of doom loop, if you will.
And this is where I really struggle. As somebody who studies democracy, I see real warning signs. I see an illiberal, authoritarian movement rising on the political right. And it’s important to call it out for what it is. But am I being overly alarmist in a way that contributes to a collective sense of learned helplessness?
I also see how the far-right authoritarian movement, led by Trump, is catalyzed by both some real and significant crises in declining parts of the country. I see how that has mixed with distrust into a rumbling rage that “the elites” have failed them, which makes the idea of “democracy” seem like a farce. But it is also true that many Trump supporters are doing quite well financially. So some of this outrage is… maybe exaggerated? (Please, don’t make me revisit the whole “economic anxiety” debate).
Going back to the late 1970s, most Americans have been satisfied with their lives. The percentages go up and down here and there. But overall, it’s a country of mostly satisfied people. For a decade and a half, half of the country even describes itself as “thriving.”
But the direction of the country? This bounces around much more. Lately it has been pretty low.
Is there a relationship between the two questions? Yes, but it’s complicated. You might expect that when more people are satisfied with their own lives, more people are also satisfied with the direction of the country. And you’d be right. But in the last two decades, the connection has attenuated considerably.
If you are a careful and devoted reader of this substack, you may recall a similar chart in my essay on how economic sentiment had become de-linked from presidential approval over the last two decades. I am now sensing a pattern. In this current era (the last two decades or so), our own fortunes are increasingly de-linked from our feelings towards the government and towards our leaders.
So why this disconnect? Something important has changed. But to understand what’s going on, we need to understand ourselves better.
This essay is an attempt to unravel these complicated interrelated forces. Fair warning: I may pose more questions than answers. But these are hard questions, and I’m starting to think through them.
The short version of my argument is this: The current political-media environment is toxic for our brains. We can’t manage this amount of constant conflict.
15) This truly seemed not great. I hate when American institutions basically prove correct the worst fears that conservatives have about them, “‘Pedagogical Malpractice’: Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class: Top physicians, including former Harvard dean, say required course is riddled with dangerous falsehoods”
16) I’m not much of a drinker, but talk about unsurprising headlines! “Umbrella Dry Bar closing downtown Raleigh location after 4 months”
17) I loved the new “Civil War” movie. And this is a really good take on it.
If the American experiment finally decides to call it quits, how might a national breakup begin?
Perhaps California moves toward secession after the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the state’s strict gun control measures. Or Texas rebels when disputes over abortion laws grow deadly and the state’s National Guard remains loyal to the second Texan republic. Or a skirmish over the closure of a local bridge by federal inspectors escalates into a standoff between a beloved sheriff and a famous general, and the rest of the country takes sides. Or it’s the coordinated bombing of state capitols timed to the 2028 presidential transition, with right-wing militias and left-wing activists blaming one another.
In other words: It’s not you, it’s me hating you.
These scenarios are not of my own creation; they all appear in recent nonfiction books warning of an American schism. The secessionist impulses take shape in David French’s “Divided We Fall,” which cautions that Americans’ political and cultural clustering risks tearing the country apart. (French published it before becoming a Times columnist in 2023.) The statehouse explosions go off in Barbara F. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start,” which notes that when democratic norms erode, opportunistic leaders can more easily aggravate the ethnic and cultural divides that end in violence. The Battle of the Bridge is one of several possible Sumter moments in Stephen Marche’s “The Next Civil War,” which contends that our great divorce would flow from irreconcilable differences over what America stands for.
These authors offer examples of what could happen, not predictions of what will. Their point is that our politics and culture are susceptible to such possibilities. “The crisis has already arrived,” Marche writes. “Only the inciting incidents are pending.”
It is precisely the absence of inciting incidents that makes the writer-director Alex Garland’s much-debated new film, “Civil War” (its box-office success resulting in part from the multitude of newspapercolumnists going to see it), such an intriguing addition to this canon. We never learn exactly who or what started the new American civil war, or what ideologies, if any, are competing for power. It’s a disorienting and risky move, but an effective one. An elaborate back story would distract from the viewer’s engagement with the war itself — the bouts of despair and detachment, of death and denial — as lived and chronicled by the weary journalists at the center of the story.
18a) This is excellent from Jesse Singal, “The Cass Review Won’t Fade Away: How youth gender medicine broke almost every liberal institution it touched.”
Anyone who reads the Cass Review, and who then reads most recent mainstream American media coverage of youth gender medicine, will be gobsmacked.
The review, spearheaded by the respected British pediatrician Hilary Cass (and ably summed up in The Morning Dispatch last week), explains that youth gender medicine “is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint. The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”
Cass and her colleagues arrived at this conclusion after an ambitious yearslong effort to interview clinicians, parents, and patients about their experiences with the National Health Service’s youth gender medicine system. She also commissioned a sizable bundle of independent systematic reviews evaluating both the evidence for puberty blockers and hormones, as well as the quality of recommendations published by influential groups like the World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare. Overall, dozens of studies were collected and evaluated by the team at the University of York, and this culminated in Cass delivering a damning verdict on the present state of youth gender medicine and the professional guidelines surrounding it.
In her report, Cass clarifies that her goal is not to question whether some young people are “really” transgender. She acknowledges that some young people are in tremendous distress about their gender, and she doesn’t deny the fact that some may benefit from blockers and/or hormones. Her argument, which in any other context would not be controversial, is simply that powerful medical treatments should be underpinned by quality evidence—and that that clearly isn’t the case here. Cass also focuses on the need to ensure youth referred to gender clinics receive the proper screening and assessment before medical interventions are undertaken, especially for the growing subset of these youth who are autistic or who have mental-health comorbidities that, some experts believe, can significantly complicate the diagnostic process in these settings.
Cass’ findings led to significant new restrictions on puberty blockers and hormones for youth in the U.K. The changes follow similar decisions based on comparable (albeit less ambitious) reviews in countries like Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Other European nations seem poised to follow suit.
On the other hand, the vast majority of American media coverage has for years touted the safety and efficacy of these treatments. In some cases, writers and reporters denounced the foolishness (if not transphobia) of those who exhibit undue skepticism toward them. These articles are often festooned with quotes from psychologists, psychiatrists, and endocrinologists with extremely impressive credentials—the sorts of people we are told to trust—reinforcing the view that if these treatments have any risks or unknowns, they are small, easily swamped by their salutary effects. A certain message has been delivered with the repetition of a drumbeat: An informed, compassionate person should support access to youth gender medicine.
As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”
Cass focused on Britain, but her description of the intellectual and political climate is just as applicable to the U.S., where brutality on the left has been matched by brutality on the right, with crude legislation that doesn’t acknowledge the well-being of the young people in question. In 24 states Republicans have passed laws banning these therapies, sometimes threatening doctors with prison time if they prescribe the treatment they think is best for their patients.
The battle lines on this issue are an extreme case, but they are not unfamiliar. On issue after issue, zealous minorities bully and intimidate the reasonable majority. Often, those who see nuance decide it’s best to just keep their heads down. The rage-filled minority rules.
President Trump left office wildly unpopular. But in the past few years, some voters’ opinions about him have improved. Support for how Trump handled key issues as president — including the economy, and law and order — has risen by about six percentage points since 2020, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. A plurality of voters, 42 percent, now say the Trump years were “mostly good” for the country. Only a quarter say the same of President Biden’s tenure.
Biden says he finds the nostalgia “amazing,” and at a time when Trump is a defendant in four criminal cases, it may seem surprising. But former presidents often enjoy more positive assessments from voters in retrospect. The difference this year is that, for the first time in decades, a former president is running to reclaim his old office.
Today, I’ll explain why voter nostalgia seems to be helping Trump, and how that might change.
A longstanding pattern
Decades ago, the polling firm Gallup started asking Americans what they thought about past presidents. The results revealed a pattern: Almost everyone Gallup asked about, from John F. Kennedy to Trump, enjoyed higher approval ratings after leaving office than he did while holding it, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows.
Source: Gallup | By The New York Times
One explanation is political. As presidents leave office, partisan attacks recede. Some presidents, like Jimmy Carter, become well known for philanthropy or other good works. “You kind of move, as an ex-president, from being a political figure to someone who is above the fray,” Jeff Jones, a Gallup senior editor, told me.
Another explanation is historical. As years pass, popular culture and collective memory come to shape Americans’ views of presidents — especially for those too young to remember the actual events. History textbooks, for instance, tend to focus more “on the good things they did than the bad things, the historical contributions that they made as president rather than scandals or poor decisions or poor policies,” Jones said.
There are psychological explanations, too. Human memory is fallible. People often experience their current problems more acutely than they recall their past ones or think better of experiences in retrospect, which psychologists call recency bias. That can lead to a perpetual yearning for the supposed good old days.
A political boon
In Trump’s case, the result seems to be that voters are focused more on the inflation, record border crossings and overseas wars of the Biden years than on the administrative chaos, pandemic and insurrection of the Trump years. Voters “know about what they don’t like about Biden, and they have forgotten what they don’t like about Trump,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant, told The Times.
Changes of three points or less are not considered statistically significant. | Based on New York Times/Siena College polls in the fall of 2020 and April 2024
20) This is good, “There’s No Easy Answer to Chinese EVs: Supercheap electric cars or an American industrial renaissance: Pick one.”
Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives?
The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is something known as “the China shock.” American policy makers long considered free trade to be close to an unalloyed good. But, according to a hugely influential 2016 paper, the loosening of trade restrictions with China at the turn of the 21st century was a disaster for the American manufacturing workforce. Consumers got cheap toys and clothes, but more than 2 million workers lost their jobs, and factory towns across the country fell into ruin. Laterresearch found that, in 2016, Donald Trump overperformed in counties that had been hit hardest by the China shock, helping him win key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Upon taking office, the Biden administration committed itself to making sure nothing like this would happen again. It kept in place many of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and even introduced new trade restrictions of its own. Meanwhile, it pushed legislation through Congress that invested trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing. For Biden, the transition to green energy represented a chance to bring good jobs back to the places that had been hurt the most by free trade.
Then China became an EV powerhouse overnight and made everything much more complicated. As recently as 2020, China produced very few electric vehicles and exported hardly any of them. Last year, more than 8 million EVs were sold in China, compared with 1.4 million in the U.S. The Chinese market has been driven mostly by a single brand, BYD, which recently surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. BYD cars are well built, full of high-tech features, and dirt cheap. The least expensive EV available in America retails for about $30,000. BYD’s base model goes for less than $10,000 in China and, without tariffs, would probably sell for about $20,000 in the U.S., according to industry experts.
This leaves the White House in a bind. A flood of ultracheap Chinese EVs would save Americans a ton of money at a time when people—voters—are enraged about high prices generally and car prices in particular. And it would accelerate the transition from gas-powered cars to EVs, drastically lowering emissions in the process. But it would also likely force American carmakers to close factories and lay off workers, destroying a crucial source of middle-class jobs in a prized American industry—one that just so happens to be concentrated in a handful of swing states. The U.S. could experience the China shock all over again. “It’s a Faustian bargain,” David Autor, an economist at MIT and one of the authors of the original China-shock paper, told me. “There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 EVs. But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.”
21) Conor Friedersdorf, “Abolish DEI Statements: Assessing a debate about a controversial hiring practice”
This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.”
More and more colleges started requiring faculty to submit these statements in recent years, until legislatures in red states began to outlaw them. They remain common at private institutions and in blue states. Kennedy lamented that at Harvard and elsewhere, aspiring professors are required to “profess and flaunt” their faith in DEI in a process that “leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism.” He concluded that DEI statements “ought to be abandoned.”
But a “contrasting perspective” on diversity statements that the Crimson published argued that “furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring.” Edward J. Hall, a Harvard philosophy professor, acknowledged flaws in the way DEI statements are currently used, going so far as to declare, “I share my colleague professor Randall L. Kennedy’s anger.” However, he continued, “we should direct that anger at its proper target: not diversity statements themselves, but rather the horribly distorted view that has taken hold about what they should contain.”
The headline of his op-ed, “Don’t Eliminate. Improve,” seemed to endorse a reformist position on DEI statements that I’ve begun to encounter often in my reporting. Lots of liberal-minded academics feel favorably toward diversity and inclusion as values, but they also dislike dogmatism and coercion, qualities that they see in today’s DEI statements. If only there were a way for a hiring process to advance DEI without straying into illiberalism.
But people who see the flaws of the status quo should not be seduced by the illusion that tweaking how DEI statements are solicited or scored is a solution. In fact, interviewing Hall, the ostensible reformer in the Harvard Crimson debate, left me more convinced that abolishing DEI statements is the best way forward.
22) Meanwhile, this happened two weeks ago and has somehow made barely a ripple on my campus so far, “UNC System moves to eliminate diversity goals, jobs at public campuses across the state: A Board of Governors committee approved repealing and replacing the UNC System’s policies on diversity and inclusion at a Wednesday meeting in Winston-Salem. The full board will vote next month.”
These winners of British Wildlife photography awards are fantastic. This is my favorite:
Day Walker. Urban Wildlife, Winner. “This vixen had taken up residence in an electricity substation after being pushed out of her parental territory. The fenced-off area provided her with a quiet place to rest away from the busy city. She would often walk along this wall, and I was able to capture this photo through the gaps in the metal fencing, while making the most of some striking lens flare.” #
The Northern Virginia real estate market of the 1970’s and 80’s helped provide me a comfortable upbringing and a private university tuition. But, as long as I understood it have I hated the commission model of real estate. I really came to hate it– even as a buyer, when my real estate agent in Lubbock, TX worked his butt off for us in 2002 but got 1/4 as much money as my dad would have made selling the same house back in Virginia simply because the markets are so different. And the whole buyer pays 6% or else bit– ridiculous! But, it’s finally changing. Leonhardt with a recent summary:
Free-market economic theory suggests that the American real estate market should not have been able to exist as it has for decades.
Americans have long paid unusually high commissions to real estate agents. The typical commission in the U.S. has been almost 6 percent, compared with 4.5 percent in Germany, 2.5 percent in Australia and 1.3 percent in Britain. As a recent headline in The Wall Street Journal put it, “Almost no one pays a 6 percent real-estate commission — except Americans.”
If housing operated as an efficient economic market should, competition would have solved this problem. Some real estate brokers, recognizing the chance to win business by charging lower commissions, would have done so. Other brokers would have had to reduce their own commissions or lose customers. Eventually, commissions would have settled in a reasonable place, high enough for agents to make a profit but in line with the rest of the world.
That didn’t happen. Instead, an average home sale in the U.S. has cost between $5,000 and $15,000 more than it would have without the inflated commissions. This money has been akin to a tax, collected by real estate agents instead of the government. [emphasis mine]
The situation finally seems to be ending, though. On Friday, the National Association of Realtors, the industry group that has enforced the rules that led to the 6 percent commission, agreed to change its behavior as part of an agreement to settle several lawsuits.
The settlement is important in its own right. Americans now spend about $100 billion a year on commissions. That number will probably decline by between $20 billion and $50 billion, Steve Brobeck, the former head of the Consumer Federation of America, told my colleague Debra Kamin.
There is also a broader significance to the settlement. It’s a case study of a central flaw in free-market economic theory. That theory suggests that capitalist competition can almost always protect consumers from businesses that charge too much.
To be clear, competition is indeed a powerful force that frequently makes both consumers and businesses better off. That’s why capitalist economies have such a better record than communist or socialist economies. Just look at South Korea and North Korea. (Are you familiar with the satellite images that compare the two Koreas at night?) Or consider the recent economic struggles of Venezuela.
Market competition, however, isn’t the panacea that free-market advocates claim. Sometimes, businesses can amass enough economic power to squash competition — as real estate brokers did.
Power meets power
Decades ago, the National Association of Realtors set the standard commission at 6 percent, to be split between an agent representing the seller and an agent representing the buyer. If a home seller tried to negotiate, an agent would often issue a veiled threat: You won’t find a good seller’s agent to work with you, and buyers’ agents won’t show your house to clients.
Joanne Cleaver, for instance, tried to negotiate with agents when selling her house last year in Mint Hill, N.C., a suburb of Charlotte. “They laughed at me,” Cleaver told The Times.
The Realtors’ hardball tactics succeeded because they operate much of the network that’s crucial to the housing market, such as the database of listings. They could keep out agents who would have competed on price.
The solution to this concentration of economic power often requires political power — namely, antitrust enforcement by the government. After years of refusing to change their tactics, the Realtors’ agreed to a settlement now because they were vulnerable to government action.
Hooray! It will be interesting to see just how this plays out and how much better homeowners are doing and how much less well realtors are doing within a few years. There’s a lot of way over-compensated professions out there, but, honestly, in my experience realtors are near the top of the list and it’s sure good to bring some rationality back to that to the benefit of homeowners.
Hey remember the not so good old days when I used to post about Covid all the time? Me, too. Obviously, that doesn’t happen so much these days, but I still find the scientific advances (or lack thereof) pretty interesting. Nice post from Katelyn Jetelina on what progress is being made on future vaccines:
NextGen Category #1: Variant-proof vaccines
One NextGen solution is a universal coronavirus vaccine that would protect against not only SARS-CoV-2 but also other coronaviruses that might cause future animal outbreaks and pandemics. However, this is a long way away.
We have made progress towards a pan-Covid-19 vaccine. This class of vaccines aims to be “variant-proof.” The idea is that these vaccines would induce an immune response that would make it impossible (or at least very difficult) for newer variants to escape antibodies, like Omicron did in 2021. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we would no longer need boosters or that these vaccines could stop transmission. Only time would tell us that.
Around 20 variant-proof vaccines are in the early stages of this process (preclinical), but 5 have reached human trials…
NextGen Category #2: Mucosal Vaccines
The next category is mucosal (i.e., nasal) vaccines. These induce antibodies in a person’s nose and throat—the major site of infection by SARS-CoV-2—so they attack the virus at the starting line. Theoretically, this would better prevent infection and transmission than current vaccines. As previously covered on YLE, this is a hard scientific road for multiple reasons.
Twenty-seven clinical trials of mucosal vaccines have reached human trials, including a few in the U.S. A lot are still in the beginning stages, though.
Mucosal Covid-19 vaccines that have made it to clinical trials. Figure by YLE; Data from Hilda Bastian.
A few have reached later phases, and some have even been approved in other countries. However, they haven’t been authorized by a drug regulatory agency considered “stringent” for the WHO or the U.S. In the U.S., these manufacturers would have to submit their materials to the FDA and, after review, may have to run another clinical trial if they don’t have certain data. It’s not clear if this is happening (or not)…
Don’t forget about T cells! Some have developed vaccines to maximize our T cell responses by targeting other parts of the coronavirus (not the spike). These vaccines wouldn’t have much effect on transmission or infection, but they could be very valuable in preventing hospitalizations if/when we get another coronavirus pandemic.
Pfizer and BioNTech have reported preclinical data, which showed robust immune responses to non-spike targets.
The big challenge with this approach is manufacturers would need an absolutely huge trial (given the outcome is hospitalizations). They could try to justify the vaccine based on the T cell responses, but we don’t know how to interpret those in terms of real-world outcomes. This will take some work.
Bottom line
We need better Covid-19 vaccines. Biomedical innovation, such as the licensure of mRNA vaccines, was a huge scientific win during the emergency, and thankfully, scientists are not stopping there. While these will not likely be available this year, we can cross our fingers and toes that better ones are on the horizon.
I’ve been saying for as long as I can remember, imagine when we’re well into the campaign and Biden’s campaign is able to run ads saying that Trump’s former chief of staff, VP, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of Defense (and others) think he’s a threat to America’s national security. Maybe some of them will even agree to appear in ads. Sure, ads only do so much, but that’s pretty damn damning.
I was thus quite encouraged to read just now that anti-Trump Republican pollster/analyst Sarah Longwell sees this as the way to go:
For Longwell, the key to changing this dynamic is to do to Trump what Democrats did to Trump-like candidates like Lake, Walker, and Masters in the midterms: portray them as far outside the mainstream. “If voters are concerned about January 6th, you have to use that to show what a Trump second term is going to be like, which is that he is going to be a lunatic surrounded by lunatics,” she says. “The other thing that I think is key for these voters is the fact that Donald Trump is not in it for Americans. He’s in it for himself. People cannot tell these court cases apart, but they can understand that Donald Trump is running for himself to stay out of jail and because he needs money.”
In her focus groups, Trump-Trump-Biden voters seemed to get this with one saying that even Trump’s former Cabinet members “that he hand-chose, that worked with him on a daily basis that now want nothing to do with him” and who call him “unhinged” was enough to tip him into the Democratic column.
Kristol says the next order of business for him and Longwell is to roll out a group of “former Trump officials against Trump,” recruiting a group that could theoretically include not just his former vice-president but his former attorney general, two former secretaries of defense, his former secretary of state, two former national security advisers, two former chiefs of staff, two former communications directors, and other aides and advisers.
Importantly, much sometimes ads become a news story themselves (Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, anyone) which really amplifies their impact and there’s every reason to believe that’s possible here. I think the ads will be much more powerful with some of these former high-powered administration officials speaking directly to the threat that Trump represents (rather than news clips, which people can write off as “media bias”), so I do hope that many of them are up to the challenge.
A couple weeks ago I presented our latest research on abortion at the Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting. You can download the paper here. Rather than just posting the abstract, I uploaded the paper to Claude Pro (I subscribed this month and I am loving it) and asked it to write a blog post for me. Here it is…
Title: New Research Reveals How Personal Experiences Shape Abortion Attitudes in Post-Roe America
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, abortion has become a highly salient and divisive political issue. While general public opinion on abortion had been quite stable for decades prior to Dobbs, the new restrictive state laws being passed in many states have put the real-world impact of abortion policy in the spotlight.
Our new research, based on a September 2023 national survey, reveals that personal experiences play an important role in shaping attitudes on abortion, even after controlling for the major political and demographic factors that typically predict views on this issue. Here are some of our key findings:
Women who have had an abortion are the most supportive of abortion access and strongly identify as pro-choice. A full 74% of women who have had an abortion identify as pro-choice, compared to 51% of women overall. Women who know someone who has had an abortion are also distinctively pro-choice.
Young women under 30 are much more likely than older women to identify as pro-choice (67% vs 51% of women overall) and to believe abortion should be legal. Young women seem particularly attuned to how state abortion restrictions could impact them.
In contrast, being a parent predicts less support for abortion access. Mothers are less likely than women without children to identify as pro-choice (46% vs 62%) and both moms and dads score lower on support for legal abortion compared to their counterparts without kids.
Knowing someone who has had an abortion is correlated with greater support for abortion access for both women and men. A full 58% of men who know someone who has had an abortion identify as pro-choice, compared to 44% of men overall.
In summary, while partisanship and religion remain major drivers of abortion attitudes, it’s clear that people’s lived experiences also significantly shape their views, even after controlling for demographics. With more people directly impacted by state abortion restrictions post-Dobbs, these personal experiences may take on even greater political significance going forward. Policymakers should take note that key groups like young women and those who have had or know someone who has had an abortion are especially supportive of protecting abortion access.
Steve here again. And here’s a few helpful charts (Thelast two are regression models, showing the relative impacts of the various factors. Right of the 0 midline is more pro-choice. Each line is a point estimate with error bars– if it does not cross 0, it is statistically significant).
Sorry, been a busy boy. Hope to provide a lot more good content once I get back in the swing. Here’s some quick hits for now…
1) These seem good… “10 Impressive Questions to Ask in a Job Interview“
2) So much, this. I grew up in the suburb of Springfield, VA and Cary, NC just felt like home to me. “What the Suburb Haters Don’t Understand: The homogeneity of the suburbs has an upside: If strip malls and subdivisions remind you of home, you can feel nostalgic almost anywhere.”
Yet the majority of Americans live in this “nowhere.” Being precise about the proportion of the U.S. that is suburbia is difficult—the federal government, in much of its data, doesn’t distinguish “suburban” as a category distinct from “rural” and “urban” (perhaps implying that it, too, considers these places not worth caring about). But in the 2017 American Housing Survey, the government asked people to describe their own neighborhoods, and 52 percent classified them as suburban. These neighborhoods aren’t frozen 1950s stereotypes, either; they are evolving places. For instance, once synonymous with segregation, the suburbs are now more diverse than ever.
The point is: A lot of life happens in these places. Where there is life, there is connection and emotion. Where there is connection and emotion, nostalgia follows. And so, yes, decades of policy decisions and corporate development have led to what Kunstler calls the “depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading” landscapes of the suburbs. But at the same time, many people who have called these places home still have a sentimental connection to them, any spiritual degradation notwithstanding. And a curious side effect of the ubiquity of suburban institutions is that I can feel that small spark of recognition—of, dare I say it, “home”—anywhere I encounter it.
3) A massive problem with Trump that receives way too little attention his how he encourages violence in our politics. Tom Nichols, “Supporting Trump Means Supporting a Culture of Violence: The former president is encouraging threats against his enemies—again.”
On Good Friday, Donald Trump shared a video that prominently featured a truck with a picture of a hog-tied Joe Biden on it. I’ve seen this art on a tailgate in person, and it looks like a kidnapped Biden is a captive in the truck bed.
The former president, running for his old office, knowingly transmitted a picture of the sitting president of the United States as a bound hostage.
Of course, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly began the minimizing and what-abouting: “That picture,” he said in a statement, “was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway. Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”
I cannot recall prominent elected Democrats calling for hurting Trump or his family. The closest Biden got was when he once lost his temper six years ago and said that if he and Trump were in high school, he’d have wanted to beat him up behind the gym, a comment Biden later said he regretted. And there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Biden or his spokespeople ever promoted the idea that the 45th president should be taken hostage. Over the weekend, Trump’s defenders took to social media to keep raising the 2017 picture in which the comedian Kathy Griffin held up an effigy of Trump’s severed head. So let us all stipulate: Her stunt was ghastly. Griffin’s comedy—or parody, or protest art—was in bad taste and potentially a risk to a sitting president. She paid for it: The Secret Service investigated her, and her career at CNN was torched…
Trump’s fan base will shrug off its leader’s condoning of violent fantasies and implied threats of violence as more harmless lib-owning. But what Trump is doing is dangerous, and the time is long past to stop treating support for his candidacy as just one of many ordinary political choices. As the historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted on Friday on X: “This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.”
Other Americans are well within their rights to wonder if this is what Trump supporters actually want to see in 2024.
Perhaps a thought experiment might help: Would today’s Trump supporters think it hilarious, say, to see Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter bound in the same way that Biden was depicted? Perhaps Bill Clinton or the Bushes tied up like hostages? (We can only begin to imagine what kind of ugly end the truck Rembrandts might have portrayed for Barack Obama.)
After seeing Trump post this video, I found myself wanting to ask his voters the questions that always occur after one of his outrages: Is this okay with you? Is this something you’d want your children to see?
4) Tom Edsall on North Carolina’s politics this year. Much to my dismay, he emailed me for my take and didn’t even bother to thank me for my answers (which you know were quote-worthy!) that he did not use. Apparently, NYT’s new gift link policy is that I can share as many as I want, but they expire after 30 days. Going to start sharing a lot more gift links, like this one.
5) Thomas Mills has been writing great stuff on NC lately:
The Republican assault on public education in North Carolina began as a lie. They took power after the GOP wave of 2010 and immediately began saying that our public schools were “broken.” They attacked teachers, claiming they had cushy jobs with too much leave time. Their solution, now clear, was to really break them and the consequences to children be damned.
In reality, North Carolina’s public schools were improving steadily. Teacher pay and per pupil spending were reaching the national average. Test scores improved and so did graduation rates. Sure, some schools suffered, especially in economically disadvantaged areas where tax bases were too low to supplement legislative allocations, but the Leandro court decision required more state money to flow to those school systems. Progress from the 1990s through 2010 was slow but steady.
Republicans, though, had different ideas. They have never been focused on the quality of our public schools. Their priority is removing societal responsibility for educating children. They would “fix” public schools by starving them.
They cut per pupil spending and teacher pay to among the lowest in the nation. They expanded charter schools, allowing them to operate with little oversight and jump-started a massive educational industrial complex of for-profit schools with powerful lobbyists. They implemented a voucher program, initially claiming to give poor kids an opportunity to go to private schools to avoid the failing public ones, then lifting the income cap and allowing the richest families in the state to apply for subsidies.
Republicans’ educational “reform” has been a lie from the beginning because, in reality, they don’t believe in public education at all. Their claim that schools were broken was a lie. Their insistence that “opportunity scholarships” were a way to give poor kids the chance to go to private schools was a lie. Their claim that they are paying teachers more is a lie. They have broken our educational system and in nominating Mark Robinson for governor and Michele Morrow superintendent of public instruction show they don’t mind doing more damage to the morale of teachers or the quality of our schools.
But really, it’s not even about schools. It’s about taxes. In their radical belief in self-reliance and the free market, they don’t believe government should be offering anybody either a hand out or a hand up. They are so twisted in their ideological zeal to keep money in the pockets of the wealthy and corporations, that they will let public school die and support a guy like Donald Trump with no morals and a disdain for the Constitution.
Self-interest and taxes drive the Republican elite. Do you really think they would support Trump if he said he would raise taxes on corporations or the richest Americans? Of course not, but they’ll tolerate an attempt to undermine our democracy, foment political violence, cavort with corrupt and vicious dictators, and exploit the presidency for political gain as long as he won’t tax rich people.
6) Good stuff on the pig kidney. This really could prove revolutionary. “He Got a Pig Kidney Transplant. Now Doctors Need to Keep It Working: Researchers think a combination of genetic edits and an experimental immunosuppressive drug could make the first pig kidney transplant a long-term success.”
Other than rejection of the organ, one of the most common transplant complications is infection. Doctors have to strike a balance when prescribing immunosuppressive drugs: too low a dose can lead to rejection, while too much can make a patient vulnerable to infection. Immunosuppressants are powerful drugs that can cause a range of side effects, including fatigue, nausea, and vomiting.
Despite the deaths of the two pig heart recipients, Riella is optimistic about Slayman’s transplant. For one, he says, Slayman was relatively healthy when he underwent the surgery. He qualified for a human kidney but because of his rare blood type he would likely need to wait six to seven years to get one. The two individuals who received pig heart transplants were so ill that they didn’t qualify for a human organ.
In addition to close monitoring and traditional immunosuppressants, Slayman’s medical team is treating him with an experimental drug called tegoprubart, developed by Eledon Pharmaceuticals of Irvine, California. Given every three weeks via an IV, tegoprubart blocks crosstalk between two key immune cells in the body, T cells and B cells, which helps suppress the immune response against the donor organ. The drug has been used in monkeys that have received gene-edited pig organs…
Riella is also hopeful that the 69 genetic alterations made to the pig that supplied the donor organ will help Slayman’s kidney keep functioning. Pig organs aren’t naturally compatible in the human body. The company that supplied the pig, eGenesis, used Crispr to add certain human genes, remove some pig genes, and inactivate latent viruses in the pig genome that could hypothetically infect a human recipient. The pigs are produced using cloning; scientists make the edits to a single pig cell and use that cell to form an embryo. The embryos are cloned and transferred to the womb of a female pig so that her offspring end up with the edits.
“We hope that this combination will be the secret sauce to getting this kidney to a longer graft survival,” Riella says.
7) One of my very favorite books to read to my kids was Sandra Boynton’s Hippos Go Berserk. I loved it so much that even though my youngest is 13, I can still recite the whole book from memory (which, yes, I do as a party trick on occasion– I”m so much fun). And now there’s a sequel. To give to my grandkids some day, I guess.
8) Fair to say most people are not as disciplined about sports gambling as I am. Good stuff from Ben Krauss, “The Take Bakery: How to reform the sports gambling industry”
If you’re a devout sports fan, you see bets discussed during every pre-game show. If you flip through cable television, you’re bound to catch Kevin Hart or Jaime Foxx extolling the virtues of wagering on professional athletes. Even if you live under a rock, I’m confident you’re aware that Charles Barkley has a “can’t miss parlay.” And that he wants you, yes YOU, to stop reading this article and bet right now.
But if we reduce the sports gambling demand, we will in turn cut off the pernicious supply of gambling content that has ingrained itself so deeply in the zeitgeist.
The reasoning is fairly intuitive: These ads constantly implore consumers to download the app and start betting now, and they usually include special offers to kick-start that compulsive behavior immediately. According to Nielsen, 93% of sports gambling ads in 2022 were aired by mobile sports gambling companies.
But if we ban mobile sporting apps, and limit the demand of compulsive gambling behavior, there is just less of an incentive for companies to advertise. The cost of paying celebrities and buying expensive ad spots won’t be worth the potential return due to the lack of customers.
There are, of course, other ways to tamp down the sports advertising industry. Rep. Paul Tonko introduced legislation banning sports gambling advertisements that is modeled after the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act. And in my last piece, I also suggested that the FCC take action to ban discussion of gambling during sports broadcasts.
But these will all likely face free and commercial speech challenges, and frankly, it’s more effective to treat the source of the issue. By implementing the brick and mortar rule and introducing a tax that deters high-use gambling behavior, we can hopefully drive the sports gambling industry to the annals of oblivion.
But not too far into oblivion because I actually have a really great NBA finals futures bet. And I’d still like the opportunity to place it.
9) And this part of the problem just disgusts me. I hate the people who behave this way so much, “Gambling has made ends of games miserable for college basketball benchwarmers”
Carson Barrett tore his meniscus earlier this year. The injury required surgery, but this is the last run for the Purdue senior. Though he’s never seen a whole lot of playing time in his career, he wanted to at least have a shot at getting on the court this season. So Barrett delayed the repair work, gladly taking the exchange of some pretty painful nights with a throbbing knee in favor of even a few minutes of hooping.
This season he’s played a grand total of 21 minutes and scored six points. Three of them came in the NCAA Tournament. With 37 seconds left in a game long decided, Barrett drained a baseline 3 against Grambling State, putting himself in the box score of Purdue’s first-round victory. As the ball swished through the net, the bench erupted, Barrett’s teammates knowing full well what he’d sacrificed and endured. His bucket would be the last for the Boilermakers as Purdue cruised to a 78-50 win. Back in the locker room, Barrett picked up his phone and scrolled through the congratulatory texts from friends and started to search through his DMs on social media.
He stumbled on this:
You sure are a son of a b—. Hope you enjoy selling cars for the rest of your life.
Followed by:
I hope you f-ing die.
And then the kicker:
Kill yourself for taking that 3 you f-ing worthless loser. Slit your f-ing throat you f-ing f– that was completely uncalled for. I hope you f-ing kill yourself.
The Boilermakers were 27-point favorites against Grambling. Barrett’s bucket meant they won by 28. “I had no idea what the line was,” Barrett said. “I’m just out there, making memories with my friends.”
10) I cannot remember if I shared this one already. Even if I did, it’s excellent. Gift link here, “Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed: The sponsors of the law fundamentally misunderstood the nature of addiction.”
Though our polarized politics tends to frame policy choices as on-off switches, in truth they are more like a dial with many intervening settings. That dial can be productively turned in many parts of the country. Many states are far more punitive toward drug users than Oregon was before Measure 110 passed. They overemphasize incarceration of people who use drugs, they do not provide adequate, publicly funded health treatment and health insurance, and they do not use criminal justice productively to discourage drug use (for instance, by using arrests and probations as leverage to get people into drug courts and treatment). If these states could be persuaded to dial down their criminal-justice approach to approximate what Oregon had before Measure 110, except with adequately funded, evidence-based prevention and treatment, substantial gains in public health and safety would likely follow. The future of successful drug-policy reform is not greater laxity in states that are already quite progressive in their approach to drug use; it is using criminal justice and public health together in a balanced, pragmatic fashion, as Oregon is now poised to do.
11) I’m honestly amazed at Brian Klaas’s ability to just keep on coming up with great essays like this, “Why We Need Fools: Jesters, Power, and Cults of Personality: The history of court jesters and fools reveals lessons about the nature of modern power, from narcissistic hubris to cults of personality—and the necessity of being told when you’re wrong.”
IV: No Jesters in the Courts of Trump or Putin: Cults of Personality and the “Dictator Trap”
The wisdom of jesters lies with rulers who recognize that truth is more valuable than fawning admiration. And yet, we are often ruled by people who can’t take a joke—thin-skinned authoritarians who demand fealty. When they make a catastrophic mistake, it’s reality that’s wrong, never themselves. So, they make up lies— and then demand that their disciples parrot their lies as a loyalty test.1
To Trump, there is no worse fate than being laughed at. On social media, Trump routinely suggested that our enemies were “laughing up their sleeves” at America. And when NBC’s Saturday Night Live ridiculed him, he called for “retribution” against the network. For Trump, being reduced to a punchline is the pinnacle of humiliation. (There is some speculation that Trump decided to run for president in 2016 after Obama mocked him at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner).2
In an even more colorful example from Turkey, President Erdogan pressured the German government to prosecute a comedian who implied that Erdogan has sex with goats. In another case, as I previously highlighted:
A civil servant was arrested and tried for sharing a meme that compared Erdogan to Gollum, the miserable creature from The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. (The defense argued that the memes actually depicted Smeagol, Gollum’s alter-ego and his goodness within, forcing the judge to call for a recess to better understand the character, since he had not read the books or seen the films). Such absurdity is inevitable when rulers try to police comedy.
Thin-skinned egotism from narcissistic autocrats is exactly the opposite of the ethos of the jester, an inversion of a tried-and-tested system that, for thousands of years, allowed leaders to get honest feedback without losing face.
Today, for many (bad) leaders, truth spoken to power is viewed as an unforgivable affront, not an indispensable necessity. After all, anyone who has ever challenged Trump has been purged from his entourage, denounced as a RINO (Republican-in-Name-Only) even for the most minor transgressions. Regrettably, while there are plenty of unserious clowns surrounding them, there are no truth-telling jesters in the courts of Trump or Putin.
Instead, modern autocrats thirst only for unwavering fealty, eliminating those who question the myths that surround the leader. Through endless loyalty tests and public displays of unquestioning devotion, a cult of personality emerges.
No need to speak truth to power, because the powerful determine the truth.
While jesters puncture the myths and combat the lies that surround powerful figures, cults of personality do the opposite: they perpetuate falsehoods so effectively that the dictator begins to believe their own lies. The fake world constructed through displays of slavish devotion becomes the dictator’s reality.
When this happens, you end up with a phenomenon that I call “The Dictator Trap”:
They hear only from sycophants, and get bad advice. They misunderstand their population. They don’t see threats coming until it’s too late…despots rarely get told that their stupid ideas are stupid, or that their ill-conceived wars are likely to be catastrophic. Offering honest criticism is a deadly game and most advisers avoid doing so. Those who dare to gamble eventually lose and are purged. So over time, the advisers who remain are usually yes-men who act like bobbleheads, nodding along when the despot outlines some crackpot scheme.
For vast stretches of history, kings, queens, and other autocrats have understood this informational dilemma between loyalty and truth. For thousands of years, erudite rulers engineered an ingenious solution to become wiser—the jester. And yet, our modern despots, aspiring despots, and boardroom tyrants have forgotten that lesson, which, through their unchecked hubris, has meant the joke is on us, suffering from needless stupidity emanating from overly fragile egos.
V: Long Live the Jester
We need jesters.
Humor, the great disarmer, is the surest way to give “happy unhappy” answers, to ignore the decorum of deferential niceties—to keep the focus on what’s true, rather than what’s comforting. Though we need not dress modern jesters up in harlequin hats with baubles and force them to don special cloaks, good leaders understand the most potent lesson of the fool: that eliciting honest criticism—delivered good-naturedly—is the secret weapon of wisdom.
12) Nate Cohn, “How ‘All in the Family’ Explains Biden’s Strength Among Seniors: Yesterday’s hippies have become today’s seniors — and they’re still voting Democratic.”
To understand why, consider Archie Bunker, the working-class “lovable bigot” from the 1970s hit sitcom “All in the Family,” and his TV family.
The show revolved around Archie’s feuds with his 20-something feminist daughter, Gloria, and his liberal son-in-law, Michael, over race, gender and politics. (The existence of a 30-minute-long YouTube video called “Racist Archie Bunker Compilation” — which has nearly two million views — tells you most of what you need to know about the show and his character.)
It’s not unreasonable if Archie is your image of an older voter. As recently as 15 years ago, every single voter over age 65 was born before the end of World War II and came of age before the cultural revolution of the 1960s that shaped the views of many baby boomers voters for a lifetime.
Archie’s generation was the only one that reacted to the 2008 nomination of Barack Obama by shifting right: A higher share of them voted for John McCain in 2008 than for George W. Bush in 2004.
But in 2024, Archie shouldn’t be your image of a senior. Archie would be 100 years old today; his generation, called the Greatest Generation, has almost entirely died. The generation that came after Archie’s — the conservative Silent Generation, who grew up during the popular Eisenhower presidency in the “Leave It to Beaver” 1950s — has mostly died, too. Just 20 percent of the Silent Generation is alive today.
Instead, you may be better off thinking of Michael and Gloria. They are boomers, and they would be in their 70s today.
As a result, today’s seniors bear little resemblance to those from 10 or 15 years ago. Today, Madonna is a senior. So are Ellen DeGeneres and Katie Couric. By Election Day, Magic Johnson will be 65. Even though they may not feel like older voters to you, these boomers are the new seniors.
13) Love this. Needed to be said, “The Problem With Saying ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’”
The shift to “sex assigned at birth” may be well intentioned, but it is not progress. We are not against politeness or expressions of solidarity, but “sex assigned at birth” can confuse people and creates doubt about a biological fact when there shouldn’t be any. Nor is the phrase called for because our traditional understanding of sex needs correcting — it doesn’t.
This matters because sex matters. Sex is a fundamental biological feature with significant consequences for our species, so there are costs to encouraging misconceptions about it.
Sex matters for health, safety and social policy and interacts in complicated ways with culture. Women are nearly twice as likely as men to experience harmful side effects from drugs, a problem that may be ameliorated by reducing drug doses for females. Males, meanwhile, are more likely to die from Covid-19 and cancer, and commit the vast majority of homicides and sexual assaults. We aren’t suggesting that “assigned sex” will increase the death toll. However, terminology about important matters should be as clear as possible.
More generally, the interaction between sex and human culture is crucial to understanding psychological and physical differences between boys and girls, men and women. We cannot have such understanding unless we know what sex is, which means having the linguistic tools necessary to discuss it. The Associated Press cautions journalists that describing women as “female” may be objectionable because “it can be seen as emphasizing biology,” but sometimes biology is highly relevant. The heated debate about transgender women participating in female sports is an example; whatever view one takes on the matter, biologically driven athletic differences between the sexes are real.
When influential organizations and individuals promote “sex assigned at birth,” they are encouraging a culture in which citizens can be shamed for using words like “sex,” “male” and “female” that are familiar to everyone in society, as well as necessary to discuss the implications of sex. This is not the usual kind of censoriousness, which discourages the public endorsement of certain opinions. It is more subtle, repressing the very vocabulary needed to discuss the opinions in the first place…
The problem is that “sex assigned at birth”— unlike “larger-bodied”— is very misleading. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” suggests that the person’s sex is at best a matter of educated guesswork. “Assigned” can connote arbitrariness — as in “assigned classroom seating” — and so “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer.
Contrary to what we might assume, avoiding “sex” doesn’t serve the cause of inclusivity: not speaking plainly about males and females is patronizing. We sometimes sugarcoat the biological facts for children, but competent adults deserve straight talk. Nor are circumlocutions needed to secure personal protections and rights, including transgender rights. In the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020, which outlawed workplace discrimination against gay and transgender people, Justice Neil Gorsuch used “sex,” not “sex assigned at birth.”
14) These threads on the Comanche Indians were amazing.
Part 2 of a thread on the Comanche, their reign as the horse lords of the Southern Plains, and how they were eventually defeated by the Anglo-Texans. 🧵
15) And, of course, I love this from deBoer, “Treating Every Meaningless Cultural Issue as a Racial Proxy War Helps No One”
Yesterday, the South Carolina Gamecocks women’s basketball team completed a magical undefeated season to win the NCAA tournament, beating the Iowa Hawkeyes and avenging their only loss of last season in doing so. South Carolina coach Dawn Staley solidified her position as the best in the business, while Iowa breakout superstar Caitlin Clark was again denied a championship to cement her record-breaking career. Two worthy adversaries went up against each other on the largest stage, traded blow for blow, and drew record ratings in doing so. What a game, what a season, what a wonderful outcome for women’s basketball and women’s sports.
Except, no. Because we live in culture war hell.
You see, somewhere along the way, Clark became a target of scorn for left-leaning people, in a transitive kind of way, and of praise for right-leaning. Despite all of her accomplishments – this season she became the highest-scoring player in college basketball history, regardless of sex – many liberals have decided that Clark’s awards and acclaim are a result of racism. Basketball is the quintessentially Black sport, after all, and because liberals are most powerful in media and messaging and image and culture, they took to the ramparts to police that boundary, wondering why Black athletes haven’t received the same acclaim in a just-asking-questions kind of way. In particular, Clark has been unfavorably compared to LSU forward Angel Reese, who bested Clark in last year’s title game but who lost to the Hawkeyes in the Elite Eight this year. Reese has, for whatever weird habit of the white liberal mind, become a totem to use as the anti-Clark. Meanwhile, because conservatism essentially only exists now as a concerted crowdsourced attempt to exist as the negation of what liberals like, some MAGA lunatics have represented Clark as a symbol of the volk, though as always with them it’s hard to know how ironic they’re being. It’s not basketball, it’s race war! Everybody start recording your TikToks!
What we’re left with is not a celebration of a remarkable year for women’s basketball, competitively and in terms of attention, but just another grimy episode in the forever war that takes place on Twitter and TikTok and Facebook and on podcasts and talk radio and in the comments section of your local paper’s website.
16) Still no prostate cancer screenings for me. Jeremy Faust, “New research: Razor thin margins at best on prostate cancer screening benefits.”
For reasons that I can’t entirely understand, PSA testing just does not save many lives, if any. No less august a body than the United States Preventive Services Taskforce (USPST) states that men ages 55-69 should consider PSA testing, while weighing the harms and benefits with their doctors. The USPST recommends against PSA testing for men ages 70 and up. Hardly a ringing endorsement. The CDC says no different.
This all surprises a lot of people. I think the messaging in the medical and public health community has often been different from this—a bit too rah-rah in light of the science.
Take a look at new data, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association over the weekend. In the United Kingdom, researchers randomized men to either get an invitation to do prostate cancer screening or not. Then, they followed outcomes for 15 years. If prostate cancer screening made a difference, the mortality curves should have daylight between them. They basically didn’t.
Top: Prostate cancer mortality per 100 men over 15 years. Bottom: All-cause mortality per 100 men over 15 years. There are two lines in each curve. It’s just really hard to see because the differences were so small on the top, and non-existent in the bottom. Image: Martin and colleagues, the CAP Trial. JAMA.
17) Because, of course…”Embattled Harvard honesty professor accused of plagiarism: Academic chapter and two books authored by Francesca Gino appear to copy from sources including student theses, blogs, and news reports”
18) Mark Jacob has been writing great media criticism, “When media ‘objectivity’ is dereliction of duty: Journalists aren’t bystanders – they’re key players in a democracy”
You see, the real problem in American journalism isn’t that some outlets have values; it’s that some outlets spread disinformation. The main reason Fox News is bad for democracy is not because it’s right-wing – it’s because Fox lies to support criminals.
In my four-decade career as a daily newspaper editor, I assigned reporters to cover plenty of stories, and I wasn’t objective. I chose stories I thought would benefit our audience and our community. I was undoubtedly wrong sometimes. But it’s impossible to be unbiased. The very act of assigning a story is a value judgment. Every story is shaped by multitudes of biases, from who gets quoted to how they’re described to what gets edited out. Pretending otherwise is, as McGowan put it, a fallacy.
A few years ago, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote about “viewpoint disclosure.” He said one way for journalists to build trust would be to compose “here’s where I’m coming from” statements to disclose their biases and values. My “coming from” statement might say that I’m pro-democracy, anti-racism, pro-LGBTQ rights, in favor of women’s body autonomy, and supportive of Joe Biden as the candidate standing in the way of a disastrous Trump presidency. But I am not a Democratic partisan. I’m glad that Andrew Cuomo was forced out of office, and I think Robert Menendez ought to get the hell out too. Most of all, I am not objective. I believe in being fair to the facts and the public, not to political operatives.
Of course, “where I’m coming from” statements would blow the minds of news executives who want to pretend their journalists don’t let their opinions affect their work. Frankly, I want journalists who have deeply studied a subject to draw rational conclusions. If someone has been on the climate change beat for years and doesn’t have any strong opinions about it, they won’t be my go-to expert on the subject.
19) I loved tracking changing hotel prices in South Carolina around the 2017 eclipse. Totally loved this, “Eclipse’s Path Is Also Leaving a Trail of High Hotel Prices” I hope some Economists are using this data.
20) If truly consensual, okay, but this seems profoundly not great,
Debby Herbenick is one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior. The director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University and the author of the pointedly titled book “Yes, Your Kid,” she usually shares her data, no matter how explicit, without judgment. So I was surprised by how concerned she seemed when we checked in on Zoom recently: “I haven’t often felt so strongly about getting research out there,” she told me. “But this is lifesaving.”
For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.
As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk Q. and A. at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, “How come boys all want to choke you?” In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, “Why do girls all want to be choked?” They do? Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.
I started to ask more, and the stories piled up. Another sophomore confided that she enjoyed being choked by her boyfriend, though it was important for a partner to be “properly educated” — pressing on the sides of the neck, for example, rather than the trachea. (Note: There is no safe way to strangle someone.) A male freshman said “girls expected” to be choked and, even though he didn’t want to do it, refusing would make him seem like a “simp.” And a senior in high school was angry that her friends called her “vanilla” when she complained that her boyfriend had choked her.
21) I was initially sad to see Duke (my alma mater) lose out on going to the Final Four), but OMG has this been amazing for NC State. Even NYT coverage! “Welcome to Raleigh, the New Epicenter of College Basketball: Students at Duke and U.N.C., both basketball powerhouses, have long labeled North Carolina State their “little brother.” But little brother — and sister — are off to the Final Four.”
Then there is N.C. State.
Students at Duke, which is in Durham, and U.N.C. have long labeled N.C. State their “little brother” — an uncompetitive, weaker sibling in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Sometimes, the trash talk feels like it extends beyond sports. Duke is a premier private university, and U.N.C. is the state’s public flagship, its oldest educational jewel and itself a top school. N.C. State is known for its robust agricultural and engineering curriculums, but it does not have the national allure of the other two.
Yet in the men’s tournament, the No. 1-seeded U.N.C., lost to Alabama in the Sweet 16. And Duke, a No. 4 seed, fell last weekend to none other than N.C. State.
“Now they can’t talk,” Tyler Sherman, a freshman at N.C. State, said of both teams as he decided between a gray and a red Final Four T-shirt at the university’s store on Tuesday.
Still, it has been an arduous journey for the Wolfpack. In the 1950s, the N.C. State men’s team was considered the best in the A.C.C., and for the next three decades, the rivalry between N.C. State and U.N.C. was the biggest in North Carolina, said Tim Peeler, who wrote a book on the team that won N.C. State’s last national title, in 1983.
Fully Myelinated 
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