Quick hits (part II)

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.

8) Drum on Sudan:

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 drug and 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.”

15) The bees are back

Where in the unholy heck did all these bees come from?!

After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high.

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?

16) I loved this.  Such a great example of how complicated even seemingly simple policy really is.   “How Much Would You Pay to Make Sure You Never Sawed Off a Finger?”

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.

There are two options for people of average risk: a colonoscopy every 10 years or a fecal test every one to three years, depending on the type of test.

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.