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.
#3 “they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.” This is kind of what the criminal justice system is supposed to do. It is a weapon against people who attempt to gain from violence and crime.
About Steve Greene
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#3 “they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.” This is kind of what the criminal justice system is supposed to do. It is a weapon against people who attempt to gain from violence and crime.