Quick hits (part II)

1) Talk about stupid, counter-productive laws. Mike Pesca, “The Real Estate Tycoon Who Couldn’t Rent a House: Yusuf Dahl was released from prison as a 23year old, but decades later still is the subject to legal discrimination thanks to long-dead segregationist Strom Thurmond.”

At 18 years old, Yusuf Dahl was sentenced to prison for dealing drugs. He served five and a half years of a ten year sentence. Since his release at age 23, his life has been almost a fairy tale story of redemption, rehabilitation, and forgiveness. It’s exactly what you would want to happen to a kid who made mistakes, stemming from his perception that there were few options for advancement in his inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. He attended college, then an Ivy league graduate school, and went on to lead a center for entrepreneurship at an elite private college.   But there is a rupture in the arc of his story.  Dahl is legally allowed to be discriminated against if he tries to rent a house, as he found this out when he tried to do just that. The Strom ThurmondAmendment legalizes discrimination against felons of drug crimes, and drug crimes alone. As the past president of the apartment association of Southeastern Wisconsin, and as the founder of the Real Estate Lab in Allentown, PA, legalized discrimination is exactly the kind of obstacle Dahl fights against on behalf of other would-be renters who haven’t experienced his level of monetary or professional success.  Dahl is now trying to reform the law and to raise awareness, which is often the lowest hanging fruit, but in this case necessary. I had literally not heard of the Strom Thurmond Amendment in housing discrimination before interviewing Yusuf Dahl on my podcast The Gist.

2) This is nuts. “How NC charter school with GOP backers, ‘classical’ education could skip state approvals”

A charter school with Republican political ties and a focus on a “classical” education could circumvent traditional state approvals and open in a few months if OK’d by state lawmakers.

Trinitas Academy is the only school that meets five detailed conditions lodged in a provision of a 271-page state budget introduced this week allowing an unnamed charter school to expedite its opening.

The five criteria include: a 2024 application, in a county projected to grow at least 25% between 2020 and 2030, in the state’s largest metropolitan area, that the county’s public school district has enrollment under 25,000 students and occupancy in a pre-existing, fully furnished school facility purchased from a local school board.

The tuition-free K-8 charter school, located in the old Mt. Mourne School building in Mooresville, hasn’t started the standard state review process – and may never need to. The property was acquired by a Dallas-based investment firm in 2022 from Iredell-Statesville Schools. The charter school then submitted its proposal during the state’s 2024 application period that ended in April.

Forgoing the state review is raising concerns from some educators.

“It’s outrageous and irresponsible to bypass the review process in order to please an apparent political objective,” Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education Foundation, told The Charlotte Observer. “The point of the review is to make sure the school can survive. This is a serious taxpayer investment and there needs to be oversight.”

The typical review process involves the Charter Schools Review Board conducting interviews, examining budgets, curriculum, staffing and market data. The group’s goal is to ensure responsible use of public funds from state, local and federal sources. This year’s budget proposal would give Trinitas Academy permission to skip a planning year and open in time for the 2024-2025 school year…

The man who helped Trinitas get an exception in the budget is Higgins, according to WFAE. In a March interview, on radio station WSIC’s “Good Morning LKN” Higgins said he helped file this year’s application for Trinitas.

Higgins said in the radio interview the No. 1 question parents are asking is “is it woke?”.

In interviews, Higgins often criticizes public schools, labeling them as bureaucratic and not teaching students the right things. In past writings online, he claimed without evidence the Clinton Foundation is engaged in money-laundering.

“Post-COVID a lot of parents got to see what’s going on in classrooms and kind of realized ‘I need to get my kids out of that environment’ into one that matches their faith, belief system, security or whatever you want to call it,” he said in the radio interview.

That’s where Trinitas’ classical education comes in. “Trinitas” means “three in one” in Latin — a reference to the Holy Trinity.

Its curriculum focuses on “great books” — including Robin Hood, 1984 and Huckleberry Finn — traditional values and the foundations of western civilization, usually starting with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Teaching methods focus on socratic seminars and helping students learn “how to learn” and not “what to learn,” according to Trinitas’ website.

3) Interesting, “Developmental trends in intelligence revisited with novel kinships: Monozygotic twins reared apart v. same-age unrelated siblings reared together”

Highlights

• •

  The first longitudinal study of young reared-apart monozygotic (MZ) twins shows converging IQ resemblance.

• •

  Increased IQ resemblance was observed in an adult reared-apart twin sample, but the effect was less pronounced.

• •

  Young virtual twins (VTs, same-age-unrelated siblings) show reduced IQ resemblance over time

• •

  Greater effects of new genetic factors and non-shared environments, and reduction of shared environments on IQ are shown.

• •

  IQ heritability increases when based on multiple time-points, compared to single measures.

5) Also interesting, “Family environment and self-esteem development in adolescence: A replication and extension”

A study by Krauss et al. (2020) suggested that the family environment (e.g., parental warmth, economic conditions of family) plays an important role for self-esteem development in adolescence. The present research sought to closely replicate and extend the study, using 4-wave longitudinal data from the Iowa Youth and Families Project, including 451 families. To replicate the prior study, we conducted the same set of analyses with similar measures and multi-informant assessments of mothers, fathers, and children from the same families. To extend the previous study, we tested novel aspects (i.e., controlling for prior exposure and testing the effect of the quality of sibling relationships). Overall, the findings provide no evidence for prospective effects between family environment and self-esteem in adolescence.

6) And lastly along these lines, “Most people’s life satisfaction matches their personality traits: True correlations in multitrait, multirater, multisample data.”

Despite numerous meta-analyses, the true extent to which life satisfaction reflects personality traits has remained unclear due to overreliance on a single method to assess both and insufficient attention to construct overlaps. Using data from three samples tested in different languages (Estonian, N = 20,886; Russian, N = 768; English, N = 600), we combined self- and informant-reports to estimate personality domains’ and nuances’ true correlations (r_true) with general life satisfaction (LS) and satisfactions with eight life domains (DSs), while controlling for single-method and occasion-specific biases and random error, and avoiding direct construct overlaps. The associations replicated well across samples. The Big Five domains and nuances allowed predicting LS with accuracies up to r_true ≈ .80–.90 in independent (sub)samples. Emotional stability, extraversion, and conscientiousness correlated r_true ≈ .30–.50 with LS, while its correlations with openness and agreeableness were small. At the nuances level, low LS was most strongly associated with feeling misunderstood, unexcited, indecisive, envious, bored, used, unable, and unrewarded (r_true ≈ .40–.70). Supporting LS’s construct validity, DSs had similar personality correlates among themselves and with LS, and an aggregated DS correlated r_true ≈ .90 with LS. LS’s approximately 10-year stability was r_true = .70 and its longitudinal associations with personality traits mirrored cross-sectional ones. We conclude that without common measurement limitations, most people’s life satisfaction is highly consistent with their personality traits, even across many years. So, satisfaction is usually shaped by these same relatively stable factors that shape personality traits more broadly.

Hooray for me and my extraversion and emotional stability.  I’m pretty ordinary on conscientiousness, though.  Overall, a high level of life satisfaction. And, I don’t think they use the term here, but internal locus of control seems like a big deal.

7) Bold! “It’s Time to Stop Inviting Plus-Ones to Weddings: Extra guests are expensive. What if we did away with them?”

8) Michele Goldberg, “Trump’s Allies Say They’ll Enforce the Comstock Act. Believe Them.”

Until the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, it was hard for feminists to get Americans to take the threat of losing the constitutional right to abortion seriously. Describing Hillary Clinton’s inability, in 2016, to shake pro-choice voters out of their complacency, The New York Times’s Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias wrote, “Internal campaign polling and focus groups showed that the issue did not resonate strongly with key groups of voters, because they did not believe Roe was truly at risk.”

It is similarly difficult to get Americans to appreciate the threat that the 19th-century Comstock Act could be resurrected. Named colloquially for the fanatical postal inspector Anthony Comstock, the 1873 act — which is actually a set of anti-vice laws — bans the mailing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” material, including devices and substances used “for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” Though never repealed, it was, until recently, considered a dead letter, made moot by Supreme Court decisions on free speech, birth control and abortion.

But with Roe overturned, some in Donald Trump’s orbit see a chance to reanimate Comstock, using it to ban medication abortion — and maybe surgical abortion as well — without passing new federal legislation.

The 920-page blueprint for a second Trump administration created by Project 2025, a coalition of conservative organizations, calls for enforcing Comstock’s criminal prohibitions against using the mail — widely understood to include common carriers like UPS and FedEx — to provide or distribute abortion pills. Some MAGA legal minds believe that Comstock could also be wielded to prevent the mail from transporting tools used in surgical abortions. “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, a crusading anti-abortion lawyer who represented Trump before the Supreme Court this year, told Lerer and Dias in February.

Conservatives know this would be enormously unpopular, which is probably why, when they talk about Comstock at all, they often refer to it by its criminal code numbers rather than its common name. (“I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election,” said Mitchell.) Democrats, by contrast, need to be doing everything possible to make “Comstock” a household word. That’s why they should champion a bill introduced by Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota on Thursday to overhaul the Comstock Act. And it’s why President Biden would be wise to act on a petition from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to posthumously pardon one of Comstock’s high-profile victims.

Many were shocked when the Supreme Court overturned Roe two years ago, but as Smith, the former vice president of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, told me, they shouldn’t have been, because the right made no secret of its objectives. There is something similar going on with Comstock. “Believe them when they tell us what they want to do, because they will do it if they’re given half a chance,” she said.

But getting people to believe them is a challenge. A substantial number of voters in swing states don’t even understand the role Trump played in Roe’s demise: According to a New York Times poll released last month, 17 percent of them blame Biden, since the ruling happened during his presidency. In Rolling Stone, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a senior adviser to the progressive Research Collaborative, wrote that in surveys and focus groups, disaffected Democrats and swing voters are appalled when they learn of Project 2025’s agenda, including on abortion. But a mere 21 percent of them think Republicans will actually carry it out it if they take back power. And they wonder, if the danger of Project 2025’s policies is so acute, “why Democrats don’t seem to be speaking out about them or fighting back.”

10) How have I not heard more about this case??  How is somebody going to be executed for the completely debunked “shaken baby syndrome” in 2024?? “He’s Facing Execution For His Daughter’s Death. Now, Science Suggests It Was An Accident.”  And OMG the number of people imprisoned because they did not respond emotionally to a trauma in the way that the police think they should is insane!  I hate everything about this.

Long after he retired from solving murders in rural east Texas, Brian Wharton looked back on one of his biggest cases with unease. A father named Robert Roberson had shown up at an emergency room with his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis. She was unconscious and turning blue. The father speculated that she’d fallen out of bed, but a pediatrician concluded that she had been shaken “very forcefully.” As a detective with the Palestine Police Department, Wharton deduced the father was to blame and testified at the 2003 trial, where Roberson was sentenced to death. But Wharton never could make sense of the man’s demeanor throughout these events. “He’s not getting mad, he’s not getting sad, he’s just not right,” Wharton recalled.

Twenty years later, a defense lawyer showed up at the detective’s door, explaining that Roberson’s affect could be explained by Autism Spectrum Disorder. But that wasn’t all. Many in the medical community had turned against the diagnosis at the heart of his conviction: “Shaken Baby Syndrome.” Wharton quickly came to believe he’d helped send an innocent man to death row. “I took a deep breath and said, ‘Okay, now we begin to make this right,’” he said. “Fortunately, he’s still alive when science comes to his rescue.”

Roberson’s lawyers are now seeking review from the U.S. Supreme Court, which will decide whether to hear his case in the coming weeks. Scientists, doctors, judges and death row exonerees have filed briefs framing the case as an opportunity to stop wrongful convictions based on what some call “junk science.”

Their arguments point to a tension in the U.S. legal system: Convictions are supposed to be final, but science changes. In recent years, prisoners and their lawyers have challenged a number of forensic disciplines: from hypnosis to roadside drug tests to testimony about blood splatter, hair, photographs, burn patterns, bite marks, tire tracks and speech patterns. Since the 1980s, nearly a quarter of overturned convictions have featured “false or misleading forensic evidence,” according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a collaboration of several universities that tracks such cases.

“We believed anyone in a lab coat with letters after their names,” said M. Chris Fabricant, a lawyer for the New York-based Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions across the country, and who wrote the 2022 book “Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System.” But “these methods were developed by law enforcement to solve possible crimes, not in laboratories.” Often a police officer could become qualified as an “expert” with a few days of training, and portray their subjective analysis as impartial science on the witness stand.

11) Things are bad, but I’m betting technology save us here, “Drug-resistant bacteria are killing more and more humans. We need new weapons.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported in late April that the “extensive” overuse of antibiotics during the pandemic may have exacerbated antimicrobial resistance, which was already on the rise. A group of US-based researchers also concluded that hospital-based infections resistant to last-resort antibiotics remain higher today than before Covid-19.

In the face of that threat, scientists are developing innovative techniques for attacking antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These can be as straightforward as finding faster ways to combine existing antibiotics or as pioneering as trying to synthesize antimicrobial molecules that were present in ancient animals like the woolly mammoth. Some investigators are studying ways to replace or supplement antibiotics altogether with microbe-eating viruses or nanosponges that act as vacuum cleaners for toxins.

But beating antibiotic resistance everywhere requires more than technological advances. Experts say a global coordinated strategy, similar to the international efforts needed to address climate change, is necessary. Later this year, the United Nations General Assembly is expected to approve a declaration to mobilize the world against antimicrobial resistance and set targets for progress.

12) I suppose it’s fine to add an Engineering college to UNC (for now, NCSU is the state’s only flagship engineering program), but it seems like it should be a matter of far more discussion than just showing up in the budget.  But, what’s ridiculous is our House speaker talking about it like it’s some different kind of engineering:

But it would also spend $8 million to start the new program at UNC. House Speaker Tim Moore said he doesn’t think it will compete with N.C. State’s engineering school.

“STEM is the fastest growing profession and is where we have been unable to meet the job needs,” Moore said. “So we believe that UNC-Chapel Hill can be a key part of that. It would be a different type of engineering, I don’t see it competing with N.C. State, like in the civil engineering and those sorts of things. The other thing that’s very important is it would leverage additional federal research dollars to the state of North Carolina.”

What does that even mean?

13) George Packer’s latest Atlantic cover story is something else.  A real must-read.  Gift link. “What will become of American civilization? Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city”

Quick hits (part I)

1) Yglesias on health care costs (increase supply, damnit!)

On health care, I feel like the path to progress is even clearer. Back in 2009-2010, Democrats prioritized expanding subsidies for low-income families’ consumption of health care services along with delivery system reforms designed to “bend the cost curve,” and both of those things happened. The Biden administration fought to reduce payment rates to pharmaceutical companies and won (the tradeoff here is that might reduce the pace of pharmaceutical innovation, but there’s a lot of stuff we could do to reduce the regulatory costs of drug approval).

Beyond pharmaceuticals, we should be increasing the supply of medical personnel:

• Instead of an arbitrary cap on the number of residencies, we should set a minimum competency standard and pay for the training of as many qualified American citizens who want to do it.

• Similarly, we should have a clear pathway whereby a foreign-trained doctor can demonstrate competency and get a visa and license.

• We should grant expanded scope of practice to nurse practitioners and physician assistants, and we should be laying the groundwork for medical AI to further increase the range of tasks that can be performed by a nurse.

We should continue with the kind of payment reform work that the ACA implemented to encourage value-based care rather than pure fee-for-service. We should expand Medicaid. We should make Joe Biden’s temporary increase in the generosity of ACA subsidies permanent. I do not think it makes political or substantive sense to push for a “big bang” transformation of the American health care finance system, but there are lots of tweaks to both the supply-side and demand-side of health care that would make sense. Some of this is stuff I would expect Democrats to pursue on a partisan basis, and some of it is wonky centrist stuff I’d expect to see done on a bipartisan basis. But there’s plenty you could do if you put health care closer to the center of politics.

2) This stirs up some strong disagreement in it’s comments and on twitter.  Seemed pretty sensible to me, “Do Liberals Have It All Wrong About How to Beat Trump? Backed by Reid Hoffman, a centrist polling picks a big fight in the Democratic Party.”

The very worst thing Joe Biden could do if he hopes to defeat Donald Trump is forgive student loans for the millions. The second-worst thing is talk up the tax credit for electric vehicles his administration finalized earlier this year, the one that will make it more affordable for millions of people to afford something other than a gas guzzler. The third-worst thing he could do is fail to talk about his administration’s efforts to slow the crush of migrants crossing the southern border.

If you spend any time in the discourse of Democratic Party politics, these findings may seem at minimum like bad political strategy, even morally repugnant. Why avoid talking about all the great things you have done for young people and the environment?  And yet they are what is necessary for Biden to have the best chance of winning in November according to Blueprint, a new Democratic data and polling firm whose findings have upended much of the conventional political wisdom this election year.

Among them: Biden doesn’t need a specific plan to win back parts of the Democratic coalition like young voters and voters of color who have defected, because their concerns are no different than other voters, namely inflation; that instead of talking up his efforts to combat climate change, he should talk about how under his administration the country has seen record energy production; that instead of talking about the vast new spending to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, the president should talk about how he is lowering the national debt; and that even Latino voters favor stricter immigration controls.

“There is a lot of polling out there, but what we felt was missing from all of it was polling that is just victory-minded,” says Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, and the founding partner of the political-consulting firm Slingshot Strategies. “The Democratic Party needs polling that just says, ‘We have to win this election, and so here is where the electorate is, here is what the Democratic Party has done and can credibly run on.’ Let’s see what works and just tell everybody what we find.”

He was sitting at Blueprint’s headquarters in a faded brick building that until recently was occupied by a fashion-photography firm in an ultrahip corner of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Thick fashion magazines still sat on the bookshelves, while nearby nearly a dozen data scientists and political strategists pecked away on laptops. Three days earlier a new slate of polls had been released by The New York Times that showed Trump ahead in several swing states, and another wave of panic was washing over the Democratic ranks.

“One of the reasons why we suspect that the polling numbers are where they are is that voters don’t think Joe Biden and the Democratic Party are sufficiently focused on the things they’re most concerned about,” Roth Smith says. “And so our job is to highlight the things they are most concerned about and explain what the Biden administration has done.”

The EV tax credit and college-debt relief are both losers, according to Blueprint’s data, because they are both coded as preoccupations of the elite; instead, what Biden should be focusing on is his efforts to bring down the cost of pharmaceuticals, take on big corporations, tax the rich, and lower prices in the face of rising inflation. Roth Smith believes Democrats talk too much about Trump’s odious character, his legal liabilities, and the threat he poses to democracy instead of his economic record that includes a massive tax cut for the rich, which Blueprint found to be staggeringly unpopular.

In theory, this thread is a nice counterpoint.  In practice, you are not going to win over the public on student loans.  And safe to say the public is well aware of climate change.

https://x.com/drvolts/status/1804224284748849262

3) Derek Thompson, “America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety: English-speaking teens are spreading their problems abroad.”

The argument that smartphones and social media are contributing to the rise in teen mental distress is strong. A number of observational and experimental studies show that teen anxiety started rising just as smartphones, social media, and front-facing cameras contributed to a wave of negative emotionality that seems to be sweeping the world.

But I have one small reason to question the strongest version of the smartphone thesis. You can find a summary of it on page 5 of this year’s World Happiness Report, a survey of thousands of people across more than 140 countries. “Between 2006 and 2023, happiness among Americans under 30 in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand declined significantly [and] also declined in Western Europe,” the report says. But here’s the catch: In the rest of the world, under-30 happiness mostly increased in this period. “Happiness at every age has risen sharply in Central and Eastern Europe,” the report says. “In the former Soviet Union and East Asia too there have been large increases in happiness at every age.”

This is pretty weird. Smartphones are a global phenomenon. But apparently the rise in youth anxiety is not. In some of the largest and most trusted surveys, it appears to be largely occurring in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries,” says John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report. “And for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”

The story is even more striking when you look at the most objective measures of teen distress: suicide and self-harm. Suicides have clearly increased in the U.S. and the U.K. Emergency-room visits for suicide attempts and self-harm have been skyrocketing for Gen Z girls across the Anglosphere in the past decade, including in Australia and New Zealand. But there is no rise in suicide or self-harm attempts in similar high-income countries with other national languages, such as France, Germany, and Italy. As Vox’s Eric Levitz wrote, the suicide rate among people ages 15 to 19 actually fell significantly across continental Europe from 2012 to 2019.

Happiness is a notoriously difficult thing to measure. So I asked Helliwell for more data. He suggested we look more closely at his home country of Canada, which has two official languages—French and English. In Quebec, more than 80 percent of the population speaks French; in neighboring Ontario, less than 4 percent of the population speaks French. Quebec seems like a perfect place to test the question “Is mental health declining less among young non-English speakers?”

The answer seems to be yes. In Gallup data used for the World Happiness Report, life satisfaction for people under 30 in Quebec fell half as much as it did for people in the rest of Canada, Helliwell told me. In a separate analysis of Canada’s General Social Survey, which asks respondents about their preferred language, researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta found that young people who speak French at home saw a smaller decline in happiness than those who speak English at home…

This is a novel hypothesis—which, almost by definition, doesn’t have nearly enough data behind it to count as an empirical theory. To reiterate, the “anxiety inflation” hypothesis has four parts.

1. Diagnostic inflation: The U.S. psychiatric community offered an expansive definition of sickness, which carried the risk of creating a huge population of “worried well” patients who pathologized their normal feelings.
2. Prevalence inflation: As teens surrounded themselves with anxiety content on the internet, many vulnerable young people essentially internalized the pathologies they saw over and over and over in the media.
3. Negativity inflation: Meanwhile, a surge in negativity across American news media deepened the baseline feeling of world-weariness
4. Globalization of the American psyche: The U.S., the world’s leading cultural-export power, is broadcasting this mental-health ideology, this anxious style of self-regard, to the rest of the English-speaking world. This has happened before. But rather than spread the word through expert mental-health campaigns (as anorexia may have spread in Hong Kong in the 1990s) this “anxiety inflation” disorder is also spreading peer-to-peer and influencer-to-influencer on social media. This is why smartphone use and anxiety seem to correlate so highly in English-speaking countries, but less so in countries and areas that are not as exposed to American media.

4) Ruth Marcus, “Justices course correct on gun control. Don’t count on it to continue.”

Two years ago, the Supreme Court created predictable havoc with its declaration that gun restrictions could only be justified under the Second Amendment if they were rooted in history and tradition. On Friday, the court cleaned up some of that mess, upholding the constitutionality of a federal law that prohibits those subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing guns. Only Justice Clarence Thomas, author of the earlier ruling, dissented.

That’s something to be thankful for, I guess. It was clear from the moment the justices accepted the case — part of the spate of rogue rulings from the out-of-control U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that it is reviewing, and fixing, this term — that Zackey Rahimi would lose.

As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. outlined in his opinion for the court, Rahimi is a drug dealer who embarked on a weeks-long shooting spree — my favorite was firing in the air when his friend’s credit card was declined at a Whataburger — all while subject to a restraining order that barred him from possessing weapons. Rahimi had dragged his girlfriend to his car, fired shots as she fled and threatened to shoot her if she told police. Police found an arsenal in his home.

These are what lawyers call bad facts. Rahimi’s constitutional argument was that the high court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen invalidated the possession law because it lacked a colonial-era analogues. The Fifth Circuit agreed.

Friday’s ruling made clear, as Roberts put it, that Second Amendment law is not “trapped in amber,” requiring a precedent precisely on point. “Since the founding, our Nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” Roberts wrote. “As applied to the facts of this case, [the domestic abuse law] fits comfortably within this tradition.”

There is an infuriating blame-the-victim tone to the majority opinion, lamenting that “some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases.” Really? As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson observed, Bruen unleashed “chaos” in the lower courts as judges engaged in a “mad scramble for historical records,” an enterprise for which they are ill-equipped and for which the court provided woefully inadequate guidance.

5) I purchased a mosquito repellent device on Amazon that didn’t work as everybody said it did.  I sent it back and ordered one from the manufacturer and it works great.  My wife says she’s surely purchased multiple counterfeit products on Amazon. “How to Avoid Scams and Shoddy Wares on Amazon“

6) More potatoes!! “Potatoes Are the Perfect Vegetable—but You’re Eating Them Wrong: The humble potato is a miraculous vegetable, but Americans are eating less of them than ever before and have ditched fresh potatoes for frozen. Is it time to rebrand the spud?”

In 1996 the United States hit peak potato. Americans were eating 64 pounds of the vegetables each year—more than at any point since modern records began in 1970. A record-breaking harvest had flooded the country with so many spuds that the government had to pay farmers to give them away. In the White House, the Clintons were foisting potatoes—fried, marinated, boiled, garlicked—onto princesses and presidents at official dinners.

“It was a crazy time,” says Chris Voigt, whose long career as a potato-pusher started in the potato frenzy of the late 1990s. “Literally you could buy buckets of french fries.” But as Voigt made his way up in the potato industry, all the way to executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, the American potato was undergoing a dramatic shift in fortunes.

The average American is now eating 30 percent fewer potatoes than during the vegetable’s heyday, down to an all-time low of 45 pounds per year. The drop in consumption of fresh potatoes—for boiling, roasting, mashing, and steaming—has been even faster. In 2019, frozen potato consumption overtook fresh potatoes for the first time, opening up a gulf that has continued to widen since the pandemic. Most of those frozen potatoes are eaten as french fries.

This has seen potato fields become battlegrounds for the future of food in America. In December 2023, reports emerged that US dietary guidelines might change to declassify potatoes as a vegetable, mirroring the approach taken in Britain. There was such an uproar that US Department of Agriculture secretary Thomas Vilsack was forced to write a letter reassuring senators that his agency had no such plans.

That reclassification may have failed, but the potato has had a spectacular fall from grace. Once this miraculous nutrient-dense vegetable was the fuel of human civilization. Now the spud in the US has become synonymous with a garbage, industrialized food system that pours profits into a handful of companies at the expense of people’s health.

America’s favorite vegetable is facing a Sophie’s Choice moment. Should we accept that fresh spuds have lost the fight against the tide of fries, hash browns, and waffles, or is there hope for a potato renaissance? Can the humble spud achieve the rehabilitation it deserves? …

Potatoes aren’t just amazing from a nutritional point of view—they are one of the original disruptive food technologies. First domesticated in the Andes and then brought to Europe by Spanish colonizers in the mid-1500s, wherever potatoes were grown they supercharged local societies. Potatoes were well suited to growing in cool, wet, European climates and produced veritable bounties compared with established crops like wheat, barley, and oats.

An acre of field could serve up over 10 metric tons of potatoes, according to the diary of an 18th-century British farmer. The same area of wheat would yield only 650 kilograms, so it’s little wonder that leading thinkers started singing the potato’s praises. “No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being peculiarly suitable to the health of the human constitution,” wrote the philosopher Adam Smith in his influential treatise The Wealth of Nations.

“Potatoes can be grown in really small plots and marginal land,” says Nathan Nunn, an economist at the University of British Columbia who wrote a paper concluding that the introduction of the potato accounted for about a quarter of the population growth in the Old World between 1700 and 1900. Settlements close to areas that were suitable for potato cultivation grew and urbanized more quickly. French soldiers born in villages that could grow potatoes were a half-inch taller in the years after the potato came to the country.

Nowhere in Europe was the promise of the potato more evident than in Ireland. The potato probably reached its shores in the early 17th century. A century later the population had doubled to 2 million, and by 1845 it had soared to 8.5 million people—more than 90 percent of whom were utterly dependent on the potato, writes John Reader in Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. When a fungal disease wiped out nearly all of Ireland’s potato harvest in 1845, over a million people died in what became known as the Great Famine, and a similar number emigrated to North America, Australia, or to Great Britain—where the government continued to export grain, meat, and even potatoes from Ireland despite the raging famine.

7) This is a great rejoinder to those rich people who just want tax cuts and pretend that Trump is actually okay so they can have their tax cuts. “A reply to David Sacks on his support of Trump”

8) Related to #2, Trump’s proposed economic policies are awful and Democrats should talk about that more.

“Biden’s policies are better for the economy,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “They lead to more growth and less inflation.”

According to a Moody’s study, Trump’s plan would trigger a recession by mid-2025 and an economy that grows an average 1.3% annually during his four-year term vs. 2.1% under Biden. (The latter is in line with average growth in the decade before the pandemic.)

9) What has come in just the past 18 months is stunning.  Be patient?  “We’re Still Waiting for the Next Big Leap in AI“

10) Interesting study. Go hard, apparently. “This weightlifting workout in your 60s can preserve strength for years: Older people had stronger leg muscles years after a 12-month weightlifting program than those who did moderate strength training”

11) I’m sorry, no matter how they justify this, the fact that, in the end, South Korea doctors are basically protesting having more doctors just makes them a selfish cartel, “More Doctors Walk Off the Job in South Korea: Physicians across the country staged a one-day strike, the latest escalation in a months-old protest against the government’s plan to train more doctors.”

12) How the hell does Brian Klaas find the time to be a political science professor and keep writing fascinating substack posts like this one, “Why “manifesting” is far more irrational than using a medieval service magician: In the medieval past, people would routinely employ “cunning folk” or “service magicians” to help them. They were much more effective, rational, and ethical than many spiritual practices today.”

13) “Secret Congress” passes major nuclear bill.  This is good! “Congress Just Passed The Biggest Clean-Energy Bill Since Biden’s Climate Law”

The Senate voted nearly unanimously Tuesday evening to pass major legislation designed to reverse the American nuclear industry’s decades-long decline and launch a reactor-building spree to meet surging demand for green electricity at home and to catch up with booming rivals overseas.

The bill slashes the fees the Nuclear Regulatory Commission charges developers, speeds up the process for licensing new reactors and hiring key staff, and directs the agency to work with foreign regulators to open doors for U.S. exports.

The NRC is also tasked with rewriting its mission statement to avoid unnecessarily limiting the “benefits of nuclear energy technology to society,” essentially reinterpreting its raison d’être to include protecting the public against the dangers of not using atomic power in addition to whatever safety threat reactors themselves pose.

“It’s monumental,” said John Starkey, the director of public policy at the American Nuclear Society, a nonprofit of academics and industry professionals that advocates for atomic technology in the public interest.

The NRC, he said, “is a 21st century regulator now.”

“This has been a long time coming,” Starkey said.

In a rare show of bipartisan unity on clean energy, the House of Representatives voted 365 to 36 last month to pass its version of the legislation, called the ADVANCE Act. All but two senators — Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) — supported the bill in Tuesday’s vote or abstained, with a final tally of 88-2. The proposal will now go to the White House, where President Joe Biden is all but certain to sign it into law.

It is widely considered the most significant clean-energy legislation to pass since the president’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

14) This is excellent, “Beyond Academic Sectarianism”  ChatGPT takeaways:

The scarcity of conservatives in academia can be attributed to several factors:

1. Perception of Discrimination: Even if actual discrimination is minimal, the belief that conservatives will face discrimination discourages them from pursuing academic careers. This perception leads to self-selection out of academia at various stages, from undergraduate to faculty positions.

2. Structural and Cultural Bias: Universities tend to favor certain subjects and methodologies that align with left-leaning ideologies. Conservatives often find the dominant academic culture alienating, which acts as a deterrent.

3. Disparate Impact: The academic job market and institutional priorities often do not align with conservatives’ interests, creating barriers to entry and success in academia.

4. Exit Options: Conservative intellectuals have alternative career paths, such as think tanks, which are often more appealing than academia. These options reduce the incentives for conservatives to navigate the challenging academic career path.

5. Ideological Homogeneity: The existing left-leaning dominance in academia perpetuates itself through hiring and promotion practices, leading to further underrepresentation of conservatives.

15) Mark Robinson is simply an awful person. “GOP pick for N.C. governor downplayed Weinstein allegations, assault by Ray Rice: Mark Robinson has spent years repeatedly questioning the veracity of women who accuse prominent men of violence.”

16) OMG all the damn exploitative medical billing in America!! “Even Doctors Like Me Are Falling Into This Medical Bill Trap”  This one is just so wrong. 

Thank goodness for urgent care centers. Last July my daughter was still limping a week after a bike injury, and we needed a quick X-ray to rule out a fracture. As a doctor, I knew we didn’t need an expensive emergency room for something this straightforward. We found an urgent care at the end of a strip mall in Chicago, and 20 minutes later we received the good news that there was only a sprain.

As the three employees closed up shop for the day, I reflected on how urgent-care centers filled a perfect niche between the overkill of an emergency room and the near impossibility of snagging an immediate orthopedic appointment.

But this is health care in America, and nothing ever closes up tidily. Two weeks later a bill arrived: The radiology charge from NorthShore University HealthSystem for the ankle and wrist X-rays was $1,168, a price that seemed way out of range for something that usually costs around $100 for each X-ray. When I examined the bill more closely, I saw that the radiology portion came not from the urgent care center but from a hospital, so we were billed for hospital-based X-rays. When I inquired about the bill, I was told that the center was hospital-affiliated and as such, is allowed to charge hospital prices.

It turns out that I’d stumbled into a lucrative corner of the health care market called hospital outpatient departments, or HOPDs. They do some of the same outpatient care — colonoscopies, X-rays, medication injections — just as doctors’ offices and clinics do. But because they are considered part of a hospital, they get to charge hospital-level prices for these outpatient procedures, even though the patients aren’t as sick as inpatients. Since these facilities don’t necessarily look like hospitals, patients can be easily deceived and end up with hefty financial surprises. I’m a doctor who works in a hospital every day, and I was fooled.

As of 2022, federal law protects patients from surprise bills if they are unknowingly treated by out-of-network doctors. But there is no federal protection for patients who are unknowingly treated in higher-priced hospital affiliates that look like normal doctors’ offices or urgent care clinics. Federal regulations are needed, at the very least, to require facilities to be upfront with their pricing scheme — and more ideally, to eliminate this price differential entirely. Otherwise patients will continue to face unexpected high bills that most can ill afford.

One study of pricing revealed that HOPDs charged an average of $1,383 for a colonoscopy, compared with the $625 average price at a doctor’s office or other non-HOPD settings. A knee M.R.I. averaged $900, compared with $600. Chemotherapy and other medications cost twice as much. Echocardiograms command up to three times as much. Much of these costs comes from tacked-on facility fees, which are rising far faster than other medical costs.

The American Hospital Association justifies these costs by arguing that patients seen in HOPDs are sicker than other outpatients. But that doesn’t typically make the procedures performed at these facilities any more complicated; an outpatient echocardiogram, for instance, is basically the same no matter who it’s for. If a patient’s illness does render a procedure more complicated, there are legitimate ways to account and bill for that.

17) Jay van Bavel, “The four dark laws of online engagement and the science of group psychology”

18) Will Saletan on the GOP response to Trump’s conviction,

Let’s look at the party’s responses to the verdict.

1. Trump did nothing wrong.

The best argument against the Manhattan case is that Trump committed misdemeanors—falsifying business records to hide his hush-money payments—but that those charges shouldn’t have been inflated into felonies by portraying the hush money, in the context of the 2016 election, as a secondary crime. That argument would be similar to what Democrats said about President Bill Clinton’s perjury to cover up a sexual affair in the 1990s: that he behaved immorally and misled a court, but his misconduct shouldn’t have been inflated into articles of impeachment.

But that’s not what Trump and his party are saying about the Manhattan case. They’re denying that he committed any crimes or even that he had sex with Stormy Daniels.

“Nothing ever happened,” Trump asserted at a press conference after the verdict. In a Fox News interview, he repeated: “I did absolutely nothing wrong. I mean, absolutely.” Congressional Republicans agreed. “He’s an innocent man who did nothing wrong,” Sen. Tom Cotton insisted on Meet the Press. “@realDonaldTrump did nothing wrong,” tweeted Sen. Marsha Blackburn. “The man did nothing wrong,” said Rep. Byron Donalds. “The only thing that Donald Trump is guilty of is being in the courtroom of a political sham trial,” said Sen. J.D. Vance.

Anyone familiar with the evidence knows these denials are preposterous. Trump committed adultery with Daniels, paid for her silence to hide the tryst from voters, and—to cover up the coverup—disguised the payments in his business filings. Some of his conduct in the coverup implicated him in crimes. That’s why jurors, after hearing the evidence, convicted him.

Republicans can’t accept that facts decided the case. So they’ve set out to discredit the jury.

19) Let’s talk. “The Science of Having a Great Conversation“