1) I’ve been meaning to do a post about adolescent depression, social media use, and phones. But I haven’t yet. So, do me a favor and just read this excellent Noah Smith post.
Younger Americans adopted the technology more quickly than older ones; 2010-11 seems to have been an especially important moment. And of course the “killer app” for smartphones was social media. When you had to go to a computer to check Facebook or Twitter, you could only experience it intermittently; now, with a smartphone in your pocket and notifications enabled, you were on every app all the time.
Why would that make us unhappy? There’s an obvious reason: social isolation.
Pretty much everyone knows that social isolation makes people less happy, and research strongly backs this up. It’s known to be a suicide risk. The worst punishment in a prison is solitary confinement, which some view as a form of torture. In case you doubt that the relationship between social isolation and unhappiness is causal, you should recall that we recently ran a gigantic natural experiment on much of society in the form of Covid, and the results were clearly negative.
But why would devices that make people more connected lead to social isolation? Isn’t that backwards? Doesn’t having access to all of their friends and acquaintances at all times via a device in their pockets mean that kids are less isolated than before?
Well, no. As the natural experiment of the pandemic demonstrated, physical interaction is important. Text is a highly attenuated medium — it’s slow and cumbersome, and an ocean of nuance and tone and emotion is lost. Even video chat is a highly incomplete substitute for physical interaction. A phone doesn’t allow you to experience the nearby physical presence of another living, breathing body — something that we spent untold eons evolving to be accustomed to. And of course that’s even before mentioning activities like sex that are far better when physical contact is involved.
Of course, smartphones, by themselves, don’t force you to stop hanging out in person. But there are several reasons they reduce it. First, they’re a distraction — the rise of smartphones was also the rise of “phubbing”, i.e. when people go on their phones instead of paying attention to the people around them. Second, phones provide a behavioral “nudge”, like a pantry stocked with junk food — when your phone is right there in your pocket, it’s easier to just text a friend instead of going and hanging out, even if the latter would be less fulfilling. And third, in-person interaction is a network effect. If 20% of people would rather be on their phones, that reduces everyone else’s options for in-person hangouts by 20%.
The psychologist Jean Twenge, the leading proponent of the theory that phones cause unhappiness, has a great run-down of these various mechanisms.
In any case, the data clearly shows that isolation is increasing. Teens had been getting gradually more isolated through the decades — perhaps as a result of larger houses and better entertainment options at home. But face-to-face interaction really plummeted right after — you guessed it! — 2010.
2) David Leonhardt with a good piece on Asian-American voters:
|
Nationally, the rightward drift of Asian voters is connected to a new class divide in American politics. The Democratic Party, especially its liberal wing, has increasingly come to reflect the views of college-educated professionals. This development has had some benefits for Democrats, helping them win more suburban voters and flip Arizona and Georgia in recent elections.
|
|
To a growing number of working-class voters, however, the newly upscale version of the party has become less appealing. The trend has long been evident among white working-class voters, and many liberal analysts have claimed that it mostly reflects racial bigotry. But recent developments have weakened that argument. Class appears to be an important factor as well. Since 2018, more Asian and Latino voters have supported Republicans, and these voters appear to be disproportionately working-class.
|
|
The Pew Research Center has conducted a detailed analysis of the electorate and categorized about 8 percent of voters as belonging to “the progressive left.” This group spans all races, but it is disproportionately white — and upper-income. True, a large number of Democrats, including many Black voters, are more moderate. But the progressive left has an outsize impact partly because of its strong presence in institutions with access to political megaphones, like advocacy groups, universities, media organizations and Hollywood.
|
|
The shift of Asian and Latino voters has coincided with a period when the progressive left has become bolder and shaped the Democrats’ national image. The shift has also coincided with the pandemic and its aftermath.
|
|
Progressives supported extended Covid school closures — which were easier for white-collar parents to manage — and often excoriated people who favored a return to normal activities. As crime surged during the pandemic, progressives often downplayed the importance of the trend even as it alarmed many people of color. “Being Asian, I felt I had a bigger target on my back,” Karen Wang, 48, a Queens resident and lifelong Democrat who voted Republican last year, told The Times.
|
|
Immigration may also play a role. Democratic leaders like Barack Obama once emphasized the importance of border security. Today, many Democrats are uncomfortable talking about almost any immigration restrictions. In Texas, polls show, immigration concerns have driven some Latino voters toward Republicans.
|
|
Then there are the debates over language. In the name of inclusion and respect, some progressives have argued that common terms such as “pregnant women,” “the poor” and “Latinos” are offensive. Many voters find these arguments befuddling and irrelevant to their everyday concerns.
|
|
Beyond individual policy issues, working-class voters tend to have a different worldview than much of the modern Democratic Party. They are often more religious and more patriotic. In a Times poll last year, only 26 percent of Democratic voters with a bachelor’s degree described the U.S. as the greatest country in the world; more than half of voters without a bachelor’s degree gave that answer.
|
|
The Republican Party obviously has its own problems with swing voters, including Asian Americans. Donald Trump has promoted white nationalism, and his descriptions of Covid fed anti-Asian racism. The Republican Party favors abortion bans, while most voters favor significant access to abortion. Many Republican politicians also oppose popular economic policies, like caps on medical costs.
|
|
Given the radicalism of today’s Republican Party, liberals had hoped that Asian and Latino voters would help usher in an era of Democratic dominance. And maybe that will happen one day. But it is not happening yet. Instead, Democrats’ struggles with Latino and Asian voters have helped Republicans solidify their hold on states where Democrats had hoped to start winning by now, like Texas, Florida and North Carolina.
|
|
To a growing number of working-class voters, the Democratic Party looks even more flawed than the alternative.
|
3) This is fantastic and going into my next Public Policy syllabus, “The Programs You’d Have to Cut to Balance the Budget.” Gift link.
Several conservative lawmakers say House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised a House vote on a balanced federal budget. That’s a harder task than it sounds, given the size of the federal deficit.
More recently, Mr. McCarthy has said he doesn’t want to cut spending on defense, Medicare or Social Security — or raise taxes. Those constraints mean cuts to the rest of the budget would have to be brutal…
“It’s incredibly difficult to balance the budget within 10 years,” said Marc Goldwein, a senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group that backs deficit reduction. “It goes from being incredibly difficult to practically impossible if you start taking things off the table.”
The federal deficit is expected to be so large over the next decade that it would take about $16 trillion in spending reductions or new revenues to balance the budget by 2033. That’s about the size of the entire Social Security program. Or the entire Medicare program in addition to every anti-poverty program and refundable tax credit. Those outlandish examples come from a recent analysis from the committee.
Balancing the budget without tax increases, or cuts to the military, Medicare or Social Security, would mean cutting the rest of the budget by a whopping 70 percent. Cuts of that magnitude would mean the firings of most federal workers in agencies like the F.B.I., the Parks Service and the State Department, and huge reductions in food assistance and military retirement.
4) Deserves it’s own post (but do does a lot of stuff and I’ve been really busy with research lately), “The Polls Were Historically Accurate In 2022″
Let’s give a big round of applause to the pollsters. Measuring public opinion is, in many ways, harder than ever — and yet, the polling industry just had one of its most successful election cycles in U.S. history. Despite a loud chorus of naysayers claiming that the polls were either underestimating Democratic support or biased yet again against Republicans, the polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998, with almost no bias toward either party.
5) Gallup with a nice look at the latest public opinion on Covid. Still so polarized:
6) Loved this video from Vox. I had no idea about the exposure to sunlight connection to myopia. “Why so many people need glasses now”
7) Rob Henderson is not wrong, “Dropping the SATs Hurts Poor Kids: Columbia is the first Ivy League university to abandon standardized tests in the name of ‘equity.’ It’s disadvantaged students like me who will suffer.”
Columbia University has just become the first Ivy League school to permanently abandon the SAT/ACT requirement for college admission.
Elite colleges are eliminating standardized tests before they eliminate legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know.
The reasoning, according to Columbia’s announcement, is “to best determine an applicant’s suitability for admission and ability to thrive in our curriculum and our community, and to advance access to our educational opportunities.”
The ability to effortlessly produce buzzwords and gibberish and euphemisms has become a precondition for advancement in our institutions of higher learning, which is how ambitious mediocrities have gained control.
I know it’s supposedly “test optional.” But this contributes to a situation in which testing is downgraded and other application materials take on even more importance.
Here’s a headline in The New York Times:
The writer claims standardized tests penalize poor kids who get good grades. He calls it a “barrier.”
I rarely see discussions about the reverse situation. There are poor kids who get bad grades but find a path upward because of standardized testing.
A 2016 study found that implementing a standardized testing requirement increased the number of poor and non-white kids in gifted programs. In other words, an IQ test administered to all students revealed that previously overlooked students from disadvantaged backgrounds qualified as academically gifted.
Similarly, a British study found that when relying on their own impressions, teachers tended to view a kid from a low-income background as less academically competent even when they had the same test score as a rich kid. The objectivity of scores can serve as a useful corrective to the subjective nature of teacher evaluations…
The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing, which helps their own kids—rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their résumés with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.”
Applicants from the most affluent families excel at these games. A study at Stanford found that family income is more highly correlated with admissions essay content than with SAT scores. Applicants from well-to-do backgrounds are especially adept at crafting their essays in ways that please admissions committees.
8) Tom Edsall with a bunch of academics on the assault on Higher Education in Florida:
Many who have in the past been sharply critical of progressive excess now see DeSantis as promoting excess on the right.
Amna Khalid, a history professor at Carleton College in Minnesota, has written extensively in The Chronicle of Higher Education and other publications on such subjects as “Yes, D.E.I. Can Erode Academic Freedom. Let’s Not Pretend Otherwise” and “The Data Is In — Trigger Warnings Don’t Work.”
However, when I asked Khalid about legislation in Florida (HB 999) that would codify DeSantis’s higher education proposals into law, she emailed back:
HB 999 is an abomination. It’s the most comprehensive attack on academic freedom we’ve seen. From banning concepts and theories that can be taught to limiting faculty and student speech outside the classroom to the erosion of tenure and faculty involvement in hiring decisions, this bill, if passed, will turn Florida colleges and universities into state propaganda factories and intellectual wastelands.
What’s most dangerous about the bill, Khalid continued,
is its vagueness. Calling for general education courses to ban “critical race theory” and the teaching of “identity politics,” without defining what exactly those terms mean, is a most devastatingly effective way of intimidating instructors. Anyone who wants to keep their jobs will no doubt have to self-censor and toe the line.
In addition, Khalid wrote, the measure “empowers university presidents and boards of trustees” (board members are appointed by the governor)
to make hiring, firing and post-tenure review determinations, making it impossible for faculty to critique any policy or challenge any position that runs counter to that of state officials. HB 999 targets the very core of academic freedom, the very thing that has made U.S. universities the envy of the world. If passed this bill will sound the death knell for higher education in Florida.
Khalid is by no means alone among those who have turned their fire on DeSantis.
Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia and a research fellow at the Heterodox Academy, noted in an email that
there is a vast and growing literature showing that existing D.E.I. programming used in many schools and corporations is not just ineffective, it’s actually pernicious. It demoralizes people, reduces trust, increases hostility and conflict and even sometimes reinforces stereotypes or legitimizes prejudicial behaviors.
Al-Gharbi, however, is equally critical of DeSantis:
What is the main complaint of DeSantis et al.? Not that knowledge being produced is unreliable or that students are failing to get good jobs, etc. No. They don’t like that institutions seem to bolster the cultural and political power of their rivals. And they want to instead leverage these institutions in the service of their own agenda. They’re not committed to academic freedom.
Many of the laws being passed, al-Gharbi wrote,
prevent teachers from discussing certain areas of research or force them to toe particular lines or drive them toward self-censorship or weaken tenure protections. These are not moves that enhance academic freedom but undermine it. They aren’t concerned about academic freedom. They’re concerned about power.
9) Radiolab has been one of my favorite podcasts for as long as I’ve been a podcast junkie. Really enjoyed reading about the history of the show and the new hosts.
10) I actually disagree with a lot of this, but this is honestly, by far, the most intellectually honest take of a youth gender transition booster in that it actually takes the skeptics, like me, seriously, rather than just labels skeptics as bigots. “There Are Two Sides to the Debate on Health Care for Trans Kids. Here’s What You’re Missing About One of Them.”
11) I think Josh Barro makes a good case here (and I’m looking at you DJC!) on daylight savings time.
“Every March, it’s the same old thing,” the LA Times declared in a staff editorial this week, but unfortunately they weren’t referring to the annual raft of poorly reasoned editorials calling for the abolition of seasonal daylight saving time. No, they were referring to the annual time shift itself, which like so many writers before them, they purport to find so burdensome that Congress must act:
We set the clocks forward an hour to begin daylight saving time (or increasingly, our smart devices do it automatically) and then spend the next few days slightly discombobulated and wondering why we still practice this odd ritual. By the time the following Sunday rolls around, our disturbed schedules have adjusted and we forget about the week of missed appointments or bad sleep.
There are two possibilities when an entire editorial board claims the annual clock shift causes them to miss appointments for a week. One is that the board consists of the sort of people who frequently put on their shoes before realizing they’re not wearing pants. The other is that the board consists of people who like to complain so much they need to invent problems in order to complain about them.
I assume it has to be the latter.
Haven’t any of these people ever taken a business trip to another time zone? Or stayed out too late on a weeknight? Or had to get up extra early to catch a flight? I assume their lives went on and these events were barely interesting enough to merit a mention in passing to friends, let alone a demand in a major newspaper for a legislative response.
I also don’t get why the authors of these articles always purport not to understand what daylight saving time is for. “Something about farmers? Or kids walking to school?” the LA Times proposes. No, the purpose of daylight saving time is so simple and obvious that it’s encapsulated right there in the title: The policy saves daylight. It obviously doesn’t increase the total amount of daylight, but increases the total amount of daylight for which members of the public are awake, and it balances that objective with also seeking to minimize the extent to which people have to wake up in the dark.
The fact that both of these objectives are important explains why people who want to abolish daylight saving time can rarely agree on what kind of time we should have instead:
-
If we set the clocks permanently forward by an hour, like Sen. Marco Rubio proposes, we’d get very late sunrises in the winter, such as 8:55 AM in Seattle and 8:58 AM in Detroit on December 21. This was the downfall of America’s prior experiment with permanent DST — yes, we tried this before, back in the ‘70s, a fact that many time-reform proponents fail to mention, maybe because they’re not aware. The experiment did not go well: People really didn’t like how dark it was quite late into the morning in the winter, and after just a few months of trying out eternal summer time, Congress voted by an overwhelming margin to repeal the experiment and return us to time that changes with the seasons.
-
If we instead left the clocks permanently on winter time — this is generally the actual preferred policy of the “sleep experts” whose advice permanent summer-time advocates dishonestly wave around to argue The Science Says we should implement their late-sunrise agenda for health reasons — we would end up with some extremely early sunrises in the summer, like 4:15 AM in Chicago and 4:07 AM in Boston on June 21. And that would mean a big loss of useful daylight: The long, sunlit summer evenings we love would all be one hour shorter, replaced with early-morning daylight we’d all sleep through — and all so some editor at the LA Times who frequently forgets his wallet on the bus doesn’t oversleep a week of meetings.
Those outcomes are both bad, which is why we have the policy we already have, which is designed to avoid both of them. I promise you, people thought this through already, and the system we have is the best one available for managing the effects of the earth’s axial tilt at moderate-to-high latitudes.
So stop trying to change the way the clocks work — don’t make me write this column again! — and enjoy your extra hour of evening sunlight this Sunday.
12) DeSantis really is so bad, “Ron DeSantis’s book ban mania targets Jodi Picoult — and she hits back”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants you to know he’d never dream of engaging in mass censorship. He held a recent event challenging criticism of his classroom book restrictions as a “hoax,” releasing a video suggesting only “porn” and “hate” are targeted for removal.
There’s a big problem with DeSantis’s claims: The people deciding which books to remove from classrooms and school libraries didn’t get the memo. In many cases, the notion that banned books meet the highly objectionable criteria he detailed is an enormous stretch.
This week, Florida’s Martin County released a list of dozens of books targeted for removal from school libraries, as officials struggle to interpret a bill DeSantis signed in the name of “transparency” in school materials. The episode suggests his decrees are increasingly encouraging local officials to adopt censoring decisions with disturbingly vague rationales and absurdly sweeping scope.
Numerous titles by well-known authors such as Jodi Picoult, Toni Morrison and James Patterson have been pulled from library shelves. The removal list includes Picoult’s novel “The Storyteller” about the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor who meets an elderly former SS officer. It contains some violent scenes told in flashbacks from World War II and an assisted suicide.
“Banning ‘The Storyteller’ is shocking, as it is about the Holocaust and has never been banned before,” Picoult told us in an email.
“Martin County is the first to ban twenty of my books at once,” Picoult said, slamming such bans as “a shocking breach of freedom of speech and freedom of information.” A coastal county in the southeastern part of the state, Martin County is heavily Republican.
Picoult said she’s puzzled by the ban, because she does not “write adult romance,” as objections filed against her books claimed.
“Most of the books pulled do not even have a single kiss in them,” Picoult told us. “They do, however, include gay characters, and issues like racism, disability, abortion rights, gun control, and other topics that might make a kid think differently from their parents.”
“We have actual proof that marginalized kids who read books about marginalized characters wind up feeling less alone,” Picoult continued. “Books bridge divides between people. Book bans create them.”
13) Zeynep on masks, “Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work”
Now the organization, Cochrane, says that the way it summarized the review was unclear and imprecise, and that the way some people interpreted it was wrong.
“Many commentators have claimed that a recently updated Cochrane review shows that ‘masks don’t work,’ which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Karla Soares-Weiser, the editor in chief of the Cochrane Library, said in a statement.
“The review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses,” Soares-Weiser said, adding, “Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask wearing itself reduces people’s risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses.”
She said that “this wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize,” and that Cochrane would revise the summary.
Soares-Weiser also said, though, that one of the lead authors of the review even more seriously misinterpreted its finding on masks by saying in an interview that it proved “there is just no evidence that they make any difference.” In fact, Soares-Weiser said, “that statement is not an accurate representation of what the review found.”
Cochrane reviews are often referred to as gold standard evidence in medicine because they aggregate results from many randomized trials to reach an overall conclusion — a great method for evaluating drugs, for example, which often are subjected to rigorous but small trials. Combining their results can lead to more confident conclusions…
So what we learn from the Cochrane review is that, especially before the pandemic, distributing masks didn’t lead people to wear them, which is why their effect on transmission couldn’t be confidently evaluated.
Soares-Weiser told me the review should be seen as a call for more data, and said she worried that misinterpretations of it could undermine preparedness for future outbreaks.
So let’s look more broadly at what we know about masks.
Crucially, the question of whether a mask reduces a wearer’s risk of infection is not the same as whether wearing masks slows the spread of respiratory viruses in a community.
14) This is so disturbing and there’s just going to be more and more, “Three Texas women are sued for wrongful death after allegedly helping friend obtain abortion medication”
A Texas man is suing three women under the wrongful death statute, alleging that they assisted his ex-wife in terminating her pregnancy, the first such case brought since the state’s near-total ban on abortion last summer.
Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general and architect of the state’s prohibition on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. The lawsuit is filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives.
Silva alleges that his now ex-wife learned she was pregnant in July 2022, the month after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and conspired with two friends to illegally obtain abortion-inducing medication and terminate the pregnancy.
The friends texted with the woman, sending her information about Aid Access, an international group that provides abortion-inducing medication through the mail, the lawsuit alleges. Text messages filed as part of the complaint seem toshow they instead found a way to acquire the medication in Houston, where the two women lived.
A third woman delivered the medication, the lawsuit alleges, and text messages indicate that the wife self-managed an abortion at home.
The defendants could not immediately be reached for comment. Silva’s wife filed for divorce in May 2022, court records show, two months before the alleged abortion.The divorce was finalized in February. They share two daughters, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit relies heavily on screenshots from a group chat the ex-wife had with two friends seemingly seeking to help her terminate her pregnancy. Her friends expressed concern that Silva would “snake his way into your head.”
“I know either way he will use it against me,” the pregnant woman said, according to text messages attached to the complaint. “If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it as [a way to] try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision.”
“Delete all conversations from today,” one of the women later told her. “You don’t want him looking through it.”
The lawsuit alleges that assisting a self-managed abortion qualifies as murder under state law, which would allow Silva to sue under the wrongful death statute. The women have not been criminally charged. Texas’ abortion laws specifically exempt the pregnant person from prosecution; the ex-wife is not named as a defendant.
15) I was challenged by tough books in high school and I hated them. I even hated The Great Gatsby in high school (I loved it when I read it on my own in grad school). I’m not sure Pamela Paul is right here because your typical HS kid is not on a path to NYT book review editor. Still, interesting:
This began largely with the Common Core, instituted in 2010 during the Obama administration. While glorifying STEM, these nationwide standards, intended to develop a 21st-century work force, also took care to de-emphasize literature. By high school, 70 percent of assigned texts are meant to be nonfiction. Educators can maximize the remaining fiction by emphasizing excerpts, essays and digital material over full-length novels. Immersing children in the full arc of storytelling has largely gone out that window as novels have increasingly been replaced by short stories — or shorter yet, by “texts.”
“The Common Core killed classic literature,” as Diane Ravitch noted in 2018.
So what do kids read instead? To even be considered, a work must first pass through the gantlet of book bans and the excising of those books containing passages that might be deemed antiquated or lie outside the median of student body experiences. Add to that the urge to squelch any content that might be deemed “triggering” or controversial, the current despair over smartphoned attention spans and the desire to “reach students where they are.” Toni Morrison’s short first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” a coming-of-age story, tends to be assigned over her longer, more intricate, more provocative — and to this reader, anyway, richer — novel “Beloved.”
The assumption is that kids aren’t discerning or tough enough to handle complexity or darkness, whether it’s the nastiness of Roald Dahl or the racism and sexism in 19th-century fiction, and that they can’t read within context or grasp the concept of history. But kids adopt the blinkered veil of presentism — the tendency to judge past events according to contemporary standards and attitudes — only when adults show them how.
Citing the need to appeal to fickle tastes with relevant and engaging content, teachers often lowball student competence. Too often, this means commercial middle grade and young adult novels such as “The Lightning Thief” and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” or popular fiction like “The Outsiders,” or on the more ambitious end, accessible works of 20th-century fiction like “To Kill a Mockingbird” — all engaging novels that kids might read on their own — in lieu of knottier works that benefit from instruction and classroom discussion. The palpable desperation to just get students to read a book doesn’t come across as the kind of enticement that makes literature soar.
Those books that remain are read in a manner seemingly intended to leach all pleasure from the process. Even apart from the aims of the Common Core, the presiding goal is no longer instilling a love of literature but rather teaching to the test and ensuring students reach certain mandated benchmarks. In recent years in New York State, for example, skills like “information literacy” appear to be given priority over discussions of literature…
When I was in public high school in the olden ’80s, we read “The Red Badge of Courage” and “The Scarlet Letter,” with multiple forays into Shakespeare. We were assigned Faulkner, Joyce, Conrad and Henry James, authors whose work opened my mind and tested my abilities of comprehension and interpretation.
I also hated the Scarlet Letter (I might appreciate it now) and got less than nothing out of Faulkner in high school.
16) Kat Rosenfeld, “The Illusion of a Frictionless Existence: Eliminating everyday annoyances may be creating the most risk-averse generation in history.”
It is almost certainly this, and not a sudden epidemic of extraordinary wisdom among teenagers, that is fueling the current generation’s extreme aversion to risk, whether it’s the physical hazards of drinking too much or the emotional ones of a broken heart. Today’s teens and young adults have spent their whole lives being overscheduled, micromanaged, and encouraged to report even the most minor disagreement to the nearest authority, rather than attempting to resolve it themselves—and have been taught to see genuine danger in any situation that causes emotional upset. Witness the rise of the word “unsafe” to describe things like a PowerPoint presentation or a New York Times opinion piece that contains arguments someone finds disagreeable; witness how the discourse surrounding sex and dating has become dominated by discussions of consent, until one gets the sense that relationships are not so much an exciting chance at romantic connection as a terrifying midnight sprint through a minefield full of rapists. Of course today’s young people are having less sex; if all you ever heard about dating was how dangerous it was, how rife with the potential for lifelong trauma, would you risk it?
All of this has been well-intentioned. Nobody wants their child to experience trauma—or heartbreak, or failure, or any other kind of hurt. But in seeking to provide kids with a frictionless path through the world, and by teaching them to expect one, we are also sending a powerful message: You can’t handle this. Inadvertently instilled in many of this generation’s kids is a lack of faith in their ability to negotiate discomfort, to recover from emotional wounds, to weather a difficult situation and experience growth as a result; instead, we teach them that bad experiences create permanent trauma and should be avoided at all costs.
The irony is, the result of all this effort to protect Gen Z from feeling anxious has only made their anxiety worse.
For 10 years between 2009 and 2019, I authored a teen advice column. At first, the problems being sent to me were more or less the same ones I struggled with during my own high school years: bullying, crushes, the desperate yearning to be your own person (or at least, to figure out who that person was). But a few years in, something changed, and the letters began to be imbued with a strange fearfulness—of awkward situations, of ordinary social conflicts, of having to hear, or articulate, the word “no.” Amid all this, there was one phrase that popped up, repeatedly, verbatim: “I shouldn’t have to feel uncomfortable.”
At the time, I thought this was remarkable. And I thought: Oh, but you should. You do. You must.
Indeed, the world is an uncomfortable place, filled as it is with 8 billion humans who think differently, talk differently, live differently. People of different religious faiths; people of different political persuasions. People who think it’s morally acceptable to put ketchup on a hot dog! Living in a society means encountering people who test us, or annoy us, or infuriate us—or to whom we ourselves are tiresome, annoying, and infuriating. Two things are true: that a frictionless world would spare us the duty to tolerate all of these people, and that we would be the worse for it. Perhaps it’s for the better, then, that such a thing is unattainable.
17) I don’t eat meat with bones. I love the Bojangles Cajun Filet Biscuit. But, it was really interesting to see that it is making new stores with no bone-in chicken.
Bojangles is ditching the bones, at least in newer markets.
The Charlotte-based chicken chain, which has made its living specializing in bone-in chicken, is planning to expand in new markets with a menu pared down to its breakfast and boneless options, the better to take advantage of shifting consumer demands.
Jose Armario, CEO of the 800-unit chain, said on this week’s episode of the A Deeper Dive podcast that the company has been testing a smaller menu featuring its breakfast, chicken sandwiches and chicken fingers, but not the bone-in chicken for which it’s known.
The company is testing the new menu at some restaurants in Memphis. Results have been strong thus far, and he said the company will likely use that menu in new locations going forward.
“We’re finding the customer is pretty happy, really. The sales have been well over our projections,” Armario said. “We’ve been pleasantly surprised, so far.”
Chicken is increasingly popular among consumers in general. And bone-in chicken had something of a renaissance during the pandemic as buckets of chicken proved popular meal replacements for consumers stuck at home, not wanting to cook.
But in general, much of that market has shifted to boneless options like chicken fingers or chicken sandwiches. That was highlighted by the popularity of Chick-fil-A, now the largest chicken chain in the U.S. and the country’s third-largest restaurant chain, period.
And in general, companies specializing in boneless chicken, such as Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane’s, have easily outperformed their bone-in cousins, according to data from Restaurant Business sister company Technomic. But even those numbers highlight one key fact: Popeyes’ growth in recent years has been driven primarily by the sale of its own boneless option, the chicken sandwich.
18) Jeremy Faust with a nice explainer. This needs to start being widely prescribed, “Metformin found to reduce Long Covid in clinical trial.”
19) Just finished the first season of Poker Face. So, so good. Basically, I never watch episodic television because it doesn’t have the same high quality production values, casting, and writing of serialized dramas. But give it those things– especially Natasha Lyonne, and it can be great.
20) Great Planet Money newsletter on the problem of fake reviews:
But there is no scientific support for any of these hypotheses or approaches. In fact, the science suggests that our ability to detect lying vs. truthful witnesses is mediocre, at best. And that’s when we’re face to face with someone. So how do we stand a chance when we’re reading something online, and we aren’t able to see a person’s mannerisms or expressions?
It could be that without those distractions, we might do better at identifying fakes. There is a theory that it’s easier to determine whether someone is telling the truth when one reads the account of what they say, rather than seeing them say it.
Azimi, Chan and Krasnikov’s study suggests that we’re no better with text than we are in person, although the liar’s tools may be different when he or she is writing, as opposed to talking.
When it came to faking a review, length was important to believability, as was detail. A long, negative review of a hotel, complete with lots of information, tended to convince participants. A lengthy, positive review, on the other hand, was regarded as suspicious, and participants tended to trust writers that kept their glowing reviews short.
Emotion was also important in convincing readers — or the lack of emotion, at least. Azimi says study participants tended not to trust reviews where the writers expressed their feelings in a big way. The more dispassionate that negative write-up, the more likely it was to take the reader in.
Other keys to a convincing review were the fluency of the writing, and the readability of the text. With a positive review, the more the test read like an ad, Azimi says, the less likely the participant was to believe it. Typos and grammatical errors, meanwhile, tended not to sway people either way.
Finally, the study authors wanted to see whether there was a certain type of person that was more susceptible, or more capable of detecting fakes. So they selected participants that conformed to the Big Five personality types: extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. It turns out that people who display openness, and tend to be adventurous and intellectually curious, are better at spotting fake reviews than other personality types. Extroverted people, on the other hand, tend to have a harder time identifying a fake review.
Machine manipulation
The fake reviews written for Azimi’s study were put together by humans, but increasingly, fake reviews are being written by machines. In the past, these bogus endorsements or critiques have been relatively easy to spot, but programs like ChatGPT and other neural networks are now being used to generate realistic reviews that can swamp a business’s website.
Many companies that host reviews, like Amazon, Tripadvisor or Expedia use algorithms to weed out fake reviews. But Azimi points out that the machines are programmed by humans, and given our inability to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to fake reviews, this doesn’t bode well.
The conclusion? When it comes to reviews, it’s wiser to be skeptical. We can’t be sure whether a machine wrote that review, or, if it was a human, whether they’re telling the truth. We can’t trust them. Unfortunately, it seems, we can’t trust ourselves, either.
21) How had I never heard of this book, Galileo’s Middle Finger till a random twitter post,
“Soon enough,” Alice Dreger writes at the beginning of her romp of a book, “I will get to the death threats, the sex charges, the alleged genocides, the epidemics, the alien abductees, the anti-lesbian drug, the unethical ethicists, the fight with Martina Navratilova and, of course, Galileo’s middle finger. But first I have to tell you a little bit about how I got into this mess.”
As is so often the case, what got Dreger into trouble was sex. A historian of science and medicine, she criticized a group of transgender activists who had attacked a sex researcher for his findings on why some people want to change gender. Having hounded the researcher mercilessly, the activists attacked Dreger too. The bad news is that this was hard on Dreger. (More on that momentarily. For now, I’ll just note they called her son a “womb turd.”) The good news is that from this mess emerged not only a sharp, disruptive scholar but this smart, delightful book.
“Galileo’s Middle Finger” is many things: a rant, a manifesto, a treasury of evocative new terms (sissyphobia, autogynephilia, phall-o-meter) and an account of the author’s transformation “from an activist going after establishment scientists into an aide-de-camp to scientists who found themselves the target of activists like me” — and back again.
As its title suggests, the book is also a defiant gesture aimed at those who would deny empiricism. Yet this middle finger (Galileo’s actual middle finger, in fact, which Dreger stumbles across in Italy) is raised in affirmation as well. It points toward the stars that confirmed his cosmology — and toward empiricism’s power to create a fairer, more rational society. For Galileo is famous not just because he saw how the stars move. He’s famous because he insisted we see for ourselves how the world works, share what we see and shape our society accordingly.
22) This is really cool, “Using A.I. to Detect Breast Cancer That Doctors Miss: Hungary has become a major testing ground for A.I. software to spot cancer, as doctors debate whether the technology will replace them in medical jobs.”
Advancements in A.I. are beginning to deliver breakthroughs in breast cancer screening by detecting the signs that doctors miss. So far, the technology is showing an impressive ability to spot cancer at least as well as human radiologists, according to early results and radiologists, in what is one of the most tangible signs to date of how A.I. can improve public health.
Hungary, which has a robust breast cancer screening program, is one of the largest testing grounds for the technology on real patients. At five hospitals and clinics that perform more than 35,000 screenings a year, A.I. systems were rolled out starting in 2021 and now help to check for signs of cancer that a radiologist may have overlooked. Clinics and hospitals in the United States, Britain and the European Union are also beginning to test or provide data to help develop the systems.
A.I. usage is growing as the technology has become the center of a Silicon Valley boom, with the release of chatbots like ChatGPT showing how A.I. has a remarkable ability to communicate in humanlike prose — sometimes with worrying results. Built off a similar form used by chatbots that is modeled on the human brain, the breast cancer screening technology shows other ways that A.I. is seeping into everyday life.
Widespread use of the cancer detection technology still faces many hurdles, doctors and A.I. developers said. Additional clinical trials are needed before the systems can be more widely adopted as an automated second or third reader of breast cancer screens, beyond the limited number of places now using the technology. The tool must also show it can produce accurate results on women of all ages, ethnicities and body types. And the technology must prove it can recognize more complex forms of breast cancer and cut down on false-positives that are not cancerous, radiologists said.
The A.I. tools have also prompted a debate about whether they will replace human radiologists, with makers of the technology facing regulatory scrutiny and resistance from some doctors and health institutions. For now, those fears appear overblown, with many experts saying the technology will be effective and trusted by patients only if it is used in partnership with trained doctors.
My theory… we will absolute still need radiologists, but there will be fewer of them as they will be more productive and more accurate with the assistance of AI technology and that is a great thing.
23) This is wild, “They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam.: Scammers are using artificial intelligence to sound more like family members in distress. People are falling for it and losing thousands of dollars.”
As impersonation scams in the United States rise, Card’s ordeal is indicative of a troubling trend. Technology is making it easier and cheaper for bad actors to mimic voices, convincing people, often the elderly, thattheir loved ones are in distress. In 2022, impostor scams were the second most popular racket in America, with over 36,000 reports of people beingswindled by those pretending to be friends and family, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. Over 5,100 of those incidents happened over the phone, accounting for over $11 million in losses, FTC officials said.
Advancements in artificial intelligence have added a terrifying new layer, allowing bad actors to
replicate a voice with an audio sample of just a few sentences. Powered by AI, aslew of cheap online tools can translate an audio file into a replica of a voice, allowing a swindler to make it “speak” whatever they type.
Experts say federal regulators, law enforcement and the courts are ill-equipped to rein in the burgeoning scam. Most victims have few leads to identify the perpetrator and it’s difficult for the police to trace calls and funds from scammers operating across the world. And there’s little legal precedent for courts to hold the companies that make the tools accountable for their use.
24) I got access to the new Bing/ChatGPT. I haven’t had too much time to play with it yet (and I’m open to ideas). Doesn’t seem all that different to me except that, when it comes to politics, it really is a big deal that it can search the web (gave me some pretty decent stuff on the 2024 election). This was also pretty good:
25) The origins of Daylight Saving in WWI
26) For my fellow hockey fans.
Fully Myelinated 
Recent Comments