1) Noah Smith on American industrial policy:
The really important thing about Biden’s policies, though, is that they don’t even gesture halfheartedly in the direction of “free trade”. The idea of free trade never carried much water with the general public; now, it carries essentially no water with the political class or the intellectual class either. The free-trade consensus is dead as a doornail.
We don’t know exactly what will replace the free-trade consensus yet, but we’re starting to get a pretty good idea of what the Biden administration wants the next paradigm to be. Members of the Biden administration have made a number of important speeches about the new industrial policy, including a speech last October by former NEC Director Brian Deese about America’s “new industrial strategy”, a speech in February by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo about the CHIPS Act and a speech in April by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen about China policy. But I think the most comprehensive statement yet was the recent speech by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the Brookings Institution. If you want to understand why U.S. policy has changed, what the current administration thinks the new objectives are, and what methods they believe will achieve those objectives, I recommend starting with this speech.
Here are a few key excerpts:
When President Biden came into office more than two years ago, the country faced, from our perspective, four fundamental challenges…First, America’s industrial base had been hollowed out…The second challenge we faced was adapting to a new environment defined by geopolitical and security competition…The third challenge we faced was an accelerating climate crisis…Finally, we faced the challenge of inequality and its damage to democracy…
When President Biden came to office, he knew the solution to each of these challenges was to restore an economic mentality that champions building. And that is the core of our economic approach. To build. To build capacity, to build resilience, to build inclusiveness, at home and with partners abroad. The capacity to produce and innovate, and to deliver public goods like strong physical and digital infrastructure and clean energy at scale. The resilience to withstand natural disasters and geopolitical shocks. And the inclusiveness to ensure a strong, vibrant American middle class and greater opportunity for working people around the world.
All of that is part of what we have called a foreign policy for the middle class. (emphasis mine)
I’ve highlighted the phrase “a foreign policy for the middle class” because I think that really captures the essence of what the administration is trying to do. Biden’s people believe that the same set of policies that will build up American strength vis-a-vis China will also work against domestic inequality and help restore the American middle class. That doesn’t mean they see China as the root of America’s economic ills, as Trump did — instead, it means they think they can kill two birds with one stone. Three birds, if you count climate change.
What are the chances that the same policies that would strengthen the U.S. in the international arena would also boost the middle class at home? In fact, I do think there’s a good precedent for this: World War 2. The massive military manufacturing boom unleashed to fight that war, as well as the advent of science and technology policy, ended up boosting the power of labor, accelerating growth, and creating the preconditions for a robust middle class in the postwar years. It was a double win, and it’s one the Biden administration would like to repeat.
So those are the first two main points to understand about the new industrial policy:
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It’s intended to strengthen the U.S.’ hand against China, and
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It’s an attempt to at least partially reverse the rise in inequality that happened in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.
2) Great stuff from Lee Drutman, “The Paradoxical Reason Republicans Win Elections Despite Unpopular Policies”
A majority of the public agrees with Democrats …. on economic issues. On healthcare. On modestly progressive taxation. On abortion. On (not) criminalizing gender transition-related medical care. On (not) restricting drag show performances. On doing something about the warming climate. On (not) banning books. On guns.
And yet. Republicans might still win unified control of Washington in 2024. If they lose, it will only be narrowly.
So why are elections still so close?
Two words: Issue bundling.
In a two-party voting system, voters must prioritize issues. Even though Republicans may hold unpopular stances, it’s the bundle, not the individual issues, that matters.
Huh? The bundle? What, you say?
Stick with me.
(And yes, there are other plausible explanations. Gerrymandering did it! Issues don’t matter! Voters are misinformed! I’ll get to those. They also explain a few things.)
But, here’s my big argument for today: Even if voters were fully informed, even if they voted on the issues, and even if congressional districts were all drawn fairly, Democrats might still lose a head-to-head election against Republicans — despite having the more popular policies.
How is this possible?
Ostrogorski (pictured above) did not invent his eponymous paradox. The political scientists Douglas W. Rae and Hans Daudt conjured it in 1976. They named it for old Moise, “for it was he who devoted his major work to the proposition that all manner of mischief can result when issues are mixed together in a single contest.”
3) On some level, yeah, I am just rooting for laundry with the teams I support, so I love stories like this where it really makes me root for people. I love how 38-year old Brent Burns has Seth Jarvis, 21, over to dinner and to play video games with his kids.
4) Glad to see that Ed Sheeran won his copyright trial. Kind of wild that him playing guitar on the stand was part of the case. Also, this:
A quirk of copyright law governed how the jury could hear the two songs. The case involved only the compositions underlying both tracks — the lyrics, melodies and chords that can be notated on paper — and not their recordings. For older songs like “Let’s Get It On,” copyright is limited to the sheet music, or “deposit copy,” that was originally submitted to the United States Copyright Office. On “Let’s Get It On,” that notation was skeletal.
That meant that the jury never heard Gaye’s original recording, which went to No. 1 in 1973. Instead, the defendants supplied a computer-generated re-creation of what appears on the deposit copy, complete with a robotic voice rendering lyrics like “If you feel like I feel, baby, then come on, let’s get it on.” The studio recording of Mr. Sheeran’s song was heard multiple times.
One of the jurors, Sophia Neis, 23, said after the trial that “the song as we’re allowed to hear it” and the “deposit copy” were key pieces of evidence in the jury’s decision making.
“We ultimately came to what we thought was the right interpretation of the law,” she said.
“It’s obviously cool to have anyone play music in front of you live,” she added, of Mr. Sheeran’s decision to play on the stand. “That was an interesting surprise.”
5) Solid guest post in Yglesias‘ substack, “The criminal justice system doesn’t do enough to make us safe”
In a recent Atlantic article, Reihan Salam and I suggested a different perspective: identifying the “root causes” of our comparatively high rates of violence is less important than adequately applying the tools of policy to the problem of controlling violence. The level of violence should be understood primarily as a function of the extent to which state capacity is exerted to stop it. Violence, that is, is a policy choice.
A corollary of this is that reducing violence — to pre-pandemic levels or to the lower levels of other nations — requires the more vigorous exercise of policy. As I argue, below and in a recent Manhattan Institute report, we have in recent years gone the other direction, deprioritizing the criminal justice system and allowing its problems to fester. What is needed instead is a serious investment, one that offers real promise for making America safe…
The Department of Justice already doles out police hiring grants every year, primarily through the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) office. The office was authorized about $300 million in grants in FY 2023, a dramatic decline in nominal and real terms from the $1.4 billion per year it was first handed in 1995. Supercharging COPS-funded hiring is a proven way to bring crime down.
This isn’t just a guess. Numerous studies have exploited randomness in receipt of COPS grants to investigate how they affect crime. They have consistently found significant crime reduction: a 10% increase in employment reduces violent crime rates by 13% and property crime by 7%, by one estimate.
How much to spend? A very rough estimate is that returning to pre-Great Recession staffing ratios would require about 80,000 new police officers and would run about $10 billion, or $2 billion annually over five years. That’s more than what we currently spend but less than the original outlays adjusted for inflation.
We could maximize benefits by earmarking at least 10 percent of the funding for detectives who, as Matt has noted, are an under-attended way to bring down violence. Congress could also end the requirement
that half of funds go to small jurisdictions. While spreading the wealth is laudable, the reality is that big cities need more police because they have more crime.
Problems with our detention and court systems merit attention, too. It’s hard to run down why deaths are rising in prisons and jails, but they aren’t rising everywhere. A targeted prison remediation program, combining funding with the threat of federal monitorship or receivership if prisons don’t shape up, could improve prison conditions — which in turn can reduce recidivism.
A faster court system, meanwhile, probably entails some fairly technocratic fixes. In their exhaustive study, the National Center for State Courts found that the fastest courts practiced “active case management,” with the judge taking a deliberate interest in expeditious procedure. A 2019 pilot project in Brooklyn followed similar principles and cut time to disposition by 22 percent. It’s not clear that more money would solve what is ultimately a best practices problem. But the federal government could certainly lead the way by promulgating national standards for efficient case management.
6) This was interesting about the death of Bed, Bath, and Beyond and similar stores:
But the bigger picture is more interesting than the economic analysis or the culture-war haymaking. Bed Bath & Beyond was a quintessential “category killer”: a marriage of the big-box superstore (discount) and the specialty store (wide selection and knowledge), which emerged in its present form in the 1980s and 1990s. This particular retail segment has been perhaps hardest hit by the “retail apocalypse”: Borders, Toys ‘R’ Us, Sports Authority, and Circuit City come to mind, among others. Best Buy has weathered rough patches; Office Depot has been slowly shrinking but is holding on. You can probably think of others.
The category killer, in theory, is genius, giving the customer something like a mashup of Walmart and a boutique. That can mean anonymity, a huge sales floor, and low prices combined with a broad, deep, curated product selection and employees who are knowledgeable in a specific area. Those characteristics, however, would represent the best of Walmart and the boutique, a truly ideal arrangement. In execution, this hybrid often ended up being the worst of its two lineages: the same generic warehouse environment, poorly trained and overworked employees, and low-quality merchandise you might find at Walmart, but combined with the high prices of a boutique. Very few category killers (Best Buy and the Container Store are successful exceptions) felt like truly successful discount-oriented specialty stores. They more often felt like departments that had been broken off from a discount department store and reopened on their own with everything unaccountably marked up. The marginally lower prices, more or less similar merchandise, and one-stop-shop convenience of Walmart—and, later, Amazon—never lost their allure…
All of this is to say that category killers are hardest hit by these pressures because of the expectation consumers bring to them that their products are a cut above those being sold in the discount department stores or the “Amazon’s Choice” top search results. If all the products and suppliers end up being basically the same across retail segments—if the space heater or the towel or the bathroom mirror available through each outlet are all a bunch of imported brands you’ve never heard of, and all kind of flimsy anyway—that supply-side pressure advantages retailers who compete mostly or solely on cost. And that was never the way category killers were designed to compete.
And so we might sincerely miss this retail segment when it’s gone, as we might miss a vanished species of lake fish. We can mourn the existence value of Bed Bath & Beyond and similar stores. But in many ways, even that is already gone. And besides, as Katy Perry sings, “I miss you more than I loved you.”
7) Really liked this. Just because a hit in hockey is legal, doesn’t mean it’s clean. And also, what’s legal needs to change:
In some cases, given the speed of the game and the fact it’s played on a super-slippery surface, two players can collide regardless of situational awareness or vulnerable positioning. But those aren’t the plays that are sparking debates like this one quickly has.
So at the end of the day, it has to be asked why the rules exist in the first place. The easy answer for anything regarding contact to the head should be the health and safety of players. But with this much wiggle room within the rules, they can become more like guidelines than restrictions. And that’s why these plays happen and controversial conversations follow. That was the case when Matt Dumba hit Joe Pavelski just weeks ago in Game 1 between the Wild and Stars.
That isn’t to say all hitting needs to come out of the game. There are ways to effectively hit, to make contact that is not to the head in an effort to separate a player from the puck to change possession. But once there’s contact to the head, it’s not clean or legal. The severity of the check, the intent and the context of the situation can influence the level of punishment during the game, with a concerted effort to penalize all hits to the head. Starting with that change in-game, instead of waiting for potential supplemental discipline that doesn’t always come to clean up what’s missed, is a step in the right direction to prioritizing a player’s health and safety.
Borderline hits shouldn’t be acceptable because a player is able to return to play afterward or is glorified as a part of the playoff hockey environment. The victim’s positioning can’t absolve the player who initiated contact entirely, either. Maybe that was acceptable years ago, but the game has evolved and so do disciplinary systems to match it.
In today’s game, a legal hit isn’t always clean. But until the rules change, there won’t be a tangible separation that helps progress anything.
8) One thing that annoys me about team sports is how much individual players are often judged by championships. It’s not like this is tennis– you can be the greatest player ever and not win a championship. Love this from Giannis:
Antetokounmpo, after being asked if he considered the past season a failure:
Do you get a promotion every year at your job? No, right? So every year, your work is a failure? No. Every year, you work towards something, which is a goal: It’s to get a promotion, to be able to take care of your family, provide a house for them, or take care of your parents. It’s not a failure, it’s steps to success. There’s always steps to it. Michael Jordan played for 15 years and won 6 championships. The other 9 years were a failure? That’s what you’re telling me.
There’s no failure in sports. There’s good days, bad days, some days you are able to be successful, some days you’re not, some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sport’s about. You don’t always win, some other people are gonna win. And this year, someone else is gonna win. Simple as that.
So 50 years from 1971-2021 that we didn’t win a championship, it was 50 years of failure? No it was not, there were steps to it, and we were able to win one, hopefully we can win another one.
9) Here’s some biotech making great progress for animal welfare by working towards ending the culling of billions of male chicks:
Even the most clueless consumer likely suspects that all is not well on the big factory farms that raise animals for food, but let me share the details of one practice with which you might be unfamiliar: Every hour, across the world, around 742,000 freshly hatched male chicks are born. A few hours later, they’re tossed into a grinder, which kills them instantly, or gassed with carbon dioxide, which knocks them unconscious before killing them. (Rarer methods include burning, electrocution, suffocation, and drowning).
While the female chicks go on to lay the more than 1.2 trillion eggs humans consume annually, 6.5 billion male chicks each year are hatched, only to be quickly snuffed out. That’s because they don’t lay eggs, so they’re of no use to the egg industry, and because they don’t grow as big and fast as other chicken breeds, they’re of no use to the chicken meat industry. Even though culling costs egg producers an estimated $500 million a year, it makes more economic sense to just kill the males on day one, rather than spend an additional dollar raising them.
Undercover investigations into hatcheries have drawn some public attention to male chick culling, enough that in recent years a number of European countries, including Germany and France, have gone so far as to ban the practice, giving hatcheries and egg producers a few options: raise male chicks for meat (albeit inefficiently), raise “dual-purpose” breeds (ones that lay a relatively moderate number of eggs and grow to a moderate size), import hens from neighboring countries, or shut down operations.
But there’s another option: They can use emerging technology to identify the sex of the chick while still in the egg so they can destroy it before it hatches, before the chick can feel pain.
That last possibility has gained momentum in recent years. Since 2019, five companies have managed to commercialize in-ovo — meaning in egg — sexing technology that enables them to identify the sex of the chick around either day nine or day 12/13 from when the egg incubation starts, depending on the approach. Such advances have already saved tens of millions of male chicks from being born, only to be swiftly culled. It’s estimated that 10 to 20 percent of Europe’s hen flock now comes from cull-free hatcheries.
10) I know many of you will find this interesting, “Does eating close to bedtime make you gain weight? It depends.: Your body’s response to a calorie is different in the morning versus the evening, a recent study reports.”
Eating later at night—or just a few hours before bedtime—contributes to several metabolic changes that increase hunger and may boost the risk of long-term weight gain.
Plenty of past research has found that late-night eating is linked to weight gain or obesity, but most studies are observational, and few explain why eating later might have anything to do with why people put on pounds. A recent study, published in Cell Metabolism, sought to address the questionby controlling the calories participants ate, how much they slept, and how much physical activity they got so researchers could learn how and why eating later might affect weight.
One of the most significant findings from this report is that “a calorie is a calorie, but the response of your body to that calorie is different in the morning versus the evening,” said Frank A.J.L. Scheer, the senior author and a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School.
That finding matches past research showing that the glycemic index of a food—how it affects the body’s blood sugar following a meal—varies depending on the time of day that food is consumed, said Nina Vujovic, a neuroscientist who led this study as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School. The challenge people have with eating at the healthiest times, she added, is that many do not have regular schedules, or their schedule is outside their control.
In the study, Vujovic found that eating within four hours of bedtime affects two hormones related to hunger. On days participants ate closer to sleep, they also burned fewer calories and showed molecular changes in fat tissue suggesting their body converted calories into fat storage more easily.
What surprised Scheer most was that eating closer to bedtime affected all the factors they measured rather than just one or two of them. “In the nutrition field, I think the longest resistance against the idea that timing of food matters is based on this simplistic view of ‘a calorie is a calorie,’” meaning that it shouldn’t matter when someone eats it, Scheer said, “yet it does.”
One of the things I love about my 16-8 approach is that because I never eat after 8p, I’m pretty much never hungry after 8p.
11) Ross Douthat, “Can the Meritocracy Survive Without the SAT?”
The rapid abandonment of the SAT and ACT as requirements for college admissions, to the point where more than 80 percent of four-year colleges didn’t require a standardized test for admission in the coming fall, is a milestone in the history of the modern meritocracy. What remains to be seen is whether it’s a marker on the road to the meritocracy’s demise.
From the beginning meritocratic culture and standardized testing have been inextricably intertwined. The transformation of America’s elite colleges in the middle of the 20th century, from upper-class finishing schools into modern “multiversities” supposedly open to all comers, was driven and justified by the SAT, which was supposed to provide an equal-opportunity means of ascent and legitimate the new elite with numerical evidence of its brainpower.
For a long time meritocracy’s skeptics, left and right, have noted that the new system created an upper class that seems as privileged and insular as the old one. And according to some of the SAT’s critics, it’s precisely this criticism that’s motivating the current shift away from standardized tests — the idea that they’re inherently biased toward kids from well-off families and that a more holistic definition of merit will open more opportunities for the meritorious poor and middle class.
There are reasons to be doubtful of this account. First, it seems pretty clear that many schools are really ditching the SAT in response to the following sequence of events: Asian American SAT scores rose to the point where elite colleges were accused of discriminating against Asian American applicants to maintain the racial balance they desired, this led to lawsuits, and those lawsuits seem poised to yield a Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action. So universities are pre-emptively abandoning a metric that might be used against them in future litigation, not for the sake of widening opportunity but just in the hopes of sustaining the admissions status quo.
Second, while SAT scores are linked to family income, the link is not as tight as critics sometimes suggest, and standardized tests are probably a less class-bound metric than many things that go into more “holistic” assessments. Lots of kids use the SAT or ACT to get a boost out of a bad school or prove themselves despite lacking a polished résumé, and there’s little clear evidence that going test-optional increases racial diversity. Whereas the college essay (assuming it survives ChatGPT), the extracurricular-laden résumé, the right demeanor in the college interview — all of these seem more likely to be indicators of privilege than a raw score on a standardized test. So the children of the upper class could be beneficiaries of the SAT’s decline, while children trying to climb could lose a crucial ladder.
The first point suggests a future where the diminishment of the SAT won’t change all that much about the meritocracy. The second suggests a future where the meritocracy becomes even more privileged and insular — but over time, less associated with talent and intelligence, in a way that steadily undermines its legitimacy and influence.
12) And Yglesias on standardized tests:
Most American colleges have gone test-optional for their admissions policies, and a large and growing number have gone test-prohibited. The official reason for this move, according to its advocates, is the decently strong correlation between student standardized test scores and parental income.
“An overwhelming majority of undergraduate admissions offices now make selection decisions without relying on ACT/SAT results,” said FairTest Executive Director Harry Feder in the organization’s news release. “These schools recognize that standardized test scores do not measure academic ‘merit.’ What they do assess quite accurately is family wealth, but that should not be the criteria for getting into college.”
Feder added, “De-emphasizing standardized exam scores is a model that all of U.S. education – from K-12 through graduate schools — should follow.”
Note that what Feder literally said here is “family wealth,” which is wrong.
Wealth, as longtime Slow Boring readers know, is kind of weird. Donald Trump at various times in his career filed for bankruptcy because he has negative wealth, which did not make his children more disadvantaged than homeless kids whose parents have zero wealth. By the same token, we don’t expect national average SAT scores to crash during years when the stock market takes a downturn. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has plummeted during the past couple of years, but his kids’ academic prospects haven’t.
I’m quibbling here, but since this is, in fact, the centerpiece of Feder’s argument, I think it’s worth calling attention to how sloppy he is with it. Because the whole thing is basically nonsense. As Erik Hoel writes, “I struggle with this reasoning,” since after all, “on the one side there is the litany of activities, academic successes, and school pedigrees that make up the bulk of a good college application, and the massive amounts of wealth and parental involvement that implies from essentially diapers onwards, and, on the other side, there’s a $20 Kaplan SAT prep book and getting your butt in a chair to go through example problems.” …
As I hope you can tell by now, I think the anti-testing people are wrong. That said, I do think the anti-anti-testing people are more worried than they ought to be. I hear from certain quarters that the end of standardized testing will lead to a catastrophic collapse of meritocratic standards or make it impossible for smart kids from modest backgrounds to distinguish themselves.
The people raising those concerns are, I think, taking the situation too literally. The worriers are looking at the current admissions system and then imagining the consequences of kicking out the standardized test leg of the stool. And it’s completely true that if you did that, you’d get a class that’s skewed more toward privilege and less toward intelligence. But I think that misunderstands the situation. Elite schools don’t design an admission system behind a veil of ignorance and then see what happens. They know what kind of class they want and they reverse-engineer admissions criteria to deliver that result. This reverse-engineering process places a thumb on the scale against Asian applicants from major metropolitan areas. But it’s embarrassing (and potentially illegal) to admit that this is happening, and the standardized tests make it a little too clear what’s going on.
Schools are moving to phase out the tests not because they want to admit a different group of people, but because they are anticipating a Supreme Court ruling that will try to make them change who they admit, and they don’t want to do that.
The idea is that without standardized test requirements, it will be harder for anyone to prove that discrimination is happening and schools can keep admitting the same people they are admitting now. Because the tests are a useful tool, doing without them will make admissions work a little bit more labor-intensive. But Harvard has plenty of money and can easily afford to hire more admissions officers to scrutinize applications that lack a convenient summary test score.
13) Speaking of merit. This is long and I didn’t read all of it. But, what I did is really good and I think some of you might really enjoy this. “In Defense of Merit in Science”
14) I quite liked this, “How Much Do Voters Really Care About Biden’s Age?”
Many Americans say they do not want President Biden to run for re-election, and his age is a big reason. In an NBC News poll released last weekend, 70 percent of adults said Mr. Biden, who is 80, should not run again. Asked if age was a factor, 69 percent of them said yes. Other recent surveys detect a similar lack of enthusiasm, with many voters — including around half of Democrats — calling him too old to seek the White House again.
Taken at face value, it’s easy to imagine that his age could undermine the re-election campaign he formally announced on Tuesday. Mr. Biden, already the oldest president in U.S. history, would be 86 at the end of his second term. Republicans have amplified video of his verbal miscues — he also has a stutter — and suggested they reflect cognitive decline. Mr. Biden’s age is a frequent punchline on late-night television.
But a review of the polling and academic research paints a surprisingly mixed picture. With the obvious caveat that a serious age-related gaffe or health crisis could change things, there are good reasons to think that Biden’s age may matter less than some polls suggest.
1. Theory vs. practice
Americans often express concern about aging leaders, but that hasn’t stopped them from voting for older candidates…
That doesn’t mean Americans who say they’re concerned about age are lying. Their voting choices may reflect the available options. “There’s nothing inconsistent about people saying no one in their 80s should be president and then voting for someone in their 80s if that’s the only choice they’re given,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.
2. Party above all
Polls do suggest that voters discern bigger issues for Mr. Biden than past older candidates (although pollsters seem to have asked about past candidates’ ages less often). But in a polarized era, party loyalty is far likelier to determine voters’ choice.
“In the final analysis, we’re going to vote for the ‘D’ or the ‘R,’ ” said Karlyn Bowman, an emeritus fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies public opinion polling. “Partisan loyalty is so strong at this point that that will trump the other concerns.”
Perceptions of Mr. Biden’s fitness also track with partisanship. Republicans — who are unlikely to back any Democratic candidate, no matter how spry — are the most apt to say that Mr. Biden is too old to run. His age also hasn’t stopped the vast majority of Democrats from deeming his presidency a success (though younger Democrats have expressed less eagerness to see Mr. Biden run again).
“People are thinking about the election through the lens of other things,” said Margie Omero, a principal at GBAO, a Democratic polling firm. “Biden’s record, Trump’s record, what they see as the future of the country, legislative accomplishments, the fight for abortion rights.”
15) This sounds right, “Harry Potter Was Always Meant to Be Television: A long story with a locked-in ending is ideal for the smaller screen.”
16) I definitely agree that we should not shame and stigmatize people for being fat. My mom spent most of her adult life significantly overweight and I know how hard it was on her. That said, I find the whole, “actually, the only bad thing about being fat is the social stigma and it’s otherwise just fine for your health” so tiresome.
Sole-Smith produces the newsletter and podcast Burnt Toast, where she explores fatphobia, diet culture, parenting and health. In her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, she argues that efforts to fight childhood obesity have caused kids to absorb an onslaught of body-shaming messages.
“The chronic experience of weight stigma … is similar to the research we see on chronic experiences of racism or other forms of bias,” Sole-Smith says. “This raises your stress level. This has you in a constant state of fight-or-flight, and stress hormones are elevated. That takes a toll on our bodies for sure.”
I also am really thinking that the concept of “privilege” may at this point be doing more harm than good for the left because we get so much stuff like this that just makes normies like me roll their eyes:
On thin privilege
Thin privilege is a concept that is tricky to get our heads around, because if you have it, you don’t really see how much you have it. I mean, it’s a lot like white privilege in that way because you don’t see how much it’s benefiting you. But what we’re talking about with thin privilege is the fact that if you are someone who can wear “straight” sizes [0 to 14], youcan walk into The Gap or Target or whatever and find your size easily on the rack. …
It means when you go to the doctor, your weight is not the first and often only thing that’s talked about. It means you can sit on an airplane and not worry about buckling the seatbelt. You can go to a restaurant without worrying, Will they have booths that are too tight for you to get into while the chairs have arms that are too tight? Physical spaces are built for your body. And whatever your own personal struggles might be … your body is not a target for the world in the way that someone in a bigger body is.
What’s also sort of nuanced and tricky about thin privilege is the fact that you can be fat and still be benefiting from thin privilege relative to someone fatter than you. … I identify as “small fat.” I wear like a 16, 18, 20, and so I can order clothes — mostly only online, not so much in-person stores — but I can get clothes that fit my body pretty easily. I can take weight out of the conversation with a health care provider. I have certainly experienced medical weight stigma, but if I say “I don’t want to get on the scale,” they respect that decision. That’s not available to someone who’s in a bigger body than me.
17) This was a pretty fascinating discussion in the
History world back in March that I kept meaning to post on:
The trouble started with a writer on deadline. James Sweet, who goes by Jim, is a white professor of African history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the former president of the American Historical Association (A.H.A.). Every month, he was tasked with writing a column for Perspectives on History, a magazine put out by the association, which is mostly read by academics. Last summer, while he was on vacation in Ghana, he was struggling to come up with a column idea, and so he started looking around for inspiration.
At his hotel one morning, “a group of African Americans began trickling into the breakfast bar,” he wrote. Sweet noticed that one of them had brought along “a dog-eared copy of The 1619 Project,” a book-length expansion of the Times’ exploration of America’s founding, which looks at the country’s origins through the lens of slavery and racism. Later, Sweet and his family visited Elmina Castle, a slave-trading post on the Gulf of Guinea. “Our guide gave a well-rehearsed tour geared toward African Americans,” despite the fact that “less than one percent of the Africans passing through Elmina arrived in North America.” To Sweet, these examples illustrated the temptation of “presentism”—a concept, often used by scholars in a derogatory manner, referring to studies of the past that are distorted by the ideas of the present. In his essay, he leaned on some other examples, such as “The Woman King,” a popular film from last year, which seemed, to him, to twist violent episodes of African history into a story of Black, feminist triumph. He also brought in Supreme Court decisions written by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who made historical arguments to support decisions on guns and abortion rights. It was a list of strange bedfellows, but his point, or at least the point he wanted to make, was methodological. “We’re being inundated with history at all sorts of turns. No one is immune to that,” Sweet told me recently. “Certain narratives are harnessed in the service of particular political perspectives. For me, that’s a dangerous trend for professional historians to get drawn into.”
The piece was published on the afternoon of August 17th. Sweet, who is also a high-school football coach, was walking off the field after practice when he got the first indication that something was up: an e-mail in his in-box from a famous historian that said “Wow! . . . Just, wow.” By the time that Sweet got home, his piece was blowing up on Twitter. “Oh, hell,” he recalled thinking. “Here we go.”
A number of academics were exasperated that Sweet criticized “The 1619 Project,” which had already come under attack from other white-guy senior historians. Others were confused that he used non-academic examples to illustrate supposed problems in academic history. Some were incredulous that the leader of the country’s premier history organization seemed to dismiss work that was focussed on fundamental issues of power: Jamelle Bouie, a columnist at the Times, tweeted, “Bold take from [checks byline] the president of AHA that race, gender, sexuality, nationalism and capitalism are ‘contemporary social justice issues’ which have been imposed on the study of history.” Many observed that Sweet’s targets for criticism were nearly all Black. One junior faculty member at a private Catholic university wrote about the essay on his blog, saying that he “cried re-reading it, seeing starkly the smug condescension and slap in the face to professional historians of Africa, and to Black Americans.”
And yet supportive e-mails also started flooding in, often from other white, male professors. One academic who works on a prominent African American-studies journal wrote, “The issues you identified are so pervasive, especially in my field, that I have come to question the worth of history and the humanities.” Another professor, a self-described centrist Democrat, echoed Sweet’s concerns about how history is used as a political tool. But, like many of the people who reached out to Sweet with support, he didn’t want to post the sentiment online. “I’m not close enough to retirement to get fired from my job,” he explained.
18) Good stuff from Jean Twenge, “The Myth of the Broke Millennial: After a rough start, the generation is thriving. Why doesn’t it feel that way?”
Pick up a book on Millennials, or wander into a discussion about them online, and this theme pops up again and again: The once-optimistic children of the 1980s and early ’90s are now wheezing under the burden of college debt, too poor to buy houses or start families, sucker punched by a hostile economy that bears no resemblance to the one their parents enjoyed as young adults.
“We’re only now starting to grasp the degree to which we have gotten screwed,” Jill Filipovic wrote in her 2020 book, OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind, “and we’re responding with desperation and sometimes anger.” The famous rebuke that Filipovic takes as the book’s title isn’t mere snark, she writes; it’s “a final, frustrated dismissal from people suffering years of political and economic neglect.” In a Morning Consult poll last year, 45 percent of Millennials, compared with 35 percent of all adults, agreed with the statement “Because of my money situation, I will never have the things I want in life.” Fifty-two percent of Millennials said they were concerned that “the money I have or will save won’t last.”
The surprise was this: Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback.
This is terrific news. And yet it’s not all good news, because the belief that Millennials have been excluded from the implicit promises that America makes to its people—a house for most, middle-class security, a better life than your parents had—remains predominant in society and, to go by surveys and the tenor of social media, among Millennials themselves.
That prompts a question with implications for the cultural and political future of the United States, a country premised, to a large extent, on the idea of material progress: What if the American dream is still alive, but no one believes it to be?
19) Of course, in a lot of quarters of the left (and without a doubt on twitter), just sharing this article might get you labeled a transphobe. But, the reality is “gender-affirming care” for minors is far from the area of settled science it’s advocates would have you believe. “A Teen Gender-Care Debate Is Spreading Across Europe: Doubts have now come to the Netherlands, where the most-contested interventions for children and adolescents were developed.”
As Republicans across the U.S. intensify their efforts to legislate against transgender rights, they are finding aid and comfort in an unlikely place: Western Europe, where governments and medical authorities in at least five countries that once led the way on gender-affirming treatments for children and adolescents are now reversing course, arguing that the science undergirding these treatments is unproven, and their benefits unclear.
The about-face by these countries concerns the so-called Dutch protocol, which has for at least a decade been viewed by many clinicians as the gold-standard approach to care for children and teenagers with gender dysphoria. Kids on the protocol are given medical and mental-health assessments; some go on to take medicines that block their natural puberty and, when they’re older, receive cross-sex hormones and eventually surgery. But in Finland, Sweden, France, Norway, and the U.K., scientists and public-health officials are warning that, for some young people, these interventions may do more harm than good.
European health authorities are not reversing themselves on broader issues of trans rights, particularly for adults. But this turn against the Dutch protocol has inflamed activists and politicians in the United States. Republicans who have worked to ban its recommended treatments claim that the shifts in Europe prove they’re right. Their opponents argue that any doubts at all about the protocol, raised in any country whatsoever, are simply out of step with settled science: They point to broad endorsements by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, among other groups; and they assert that when it comes to the lifesaving nature of gender-affirming care, “doctors agree.”
But doctors do not agree, particularly in Europe, where no treatments have been banned but a genuine debate is unfurling in this field. In Finland, for example, new treatment guidelines put out in 2020 advised against the use of puberty-blocking drugs and other medical interventions as a first line of care for teens with adolescent-onset dysphoria. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare followed suit in 2022, announcing that such treatments should be given only under exceptional circumstances or in a research context. Shortly after that, the National Academy of Medicine in France recommended la plus grande réserve in the use of puberty blockers. Just last month, a national investigatory board in Norway expressed concerns about the treatment. And the U.K.’s only national gender clinic for children, the Tavistock, has been ordered to close its doors after a government-commissioned report found, among other problems, that its Dutch-protocol-based approach to treatment lacked sufficient evidence.
Believe me, I don’t for a second think this makes Republicans right on this subject. Mostly, it makes me jealous that in Europe they seem to have reasonable, nuanced conversations about difficult issues whereas we get tribalism and grandstanding from both the right and the left.
20) I was in Vox a couple weeks ago. That impressed at least one former student. Why these Democrats are defecting to the GOP: Four Democratic lawmakers in West Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina switched parties recently. Should Democrats worry?”
There’s also an incentive for a party that is just short of a supermajority, as was the case in Louisiana and North Carolina, to court members who may be on the political margins. It’s not yet clear whether the GOP made any concessions to any of the lawmakers to persuade them to come over, but it’s certainly possible.
“It’s a lot more fun to be part of the majority and even more fun to be part of the supermajority,” said Steven Greene, a political science professor at North Carolina State University.
The lawmakers will inherently wield more power and have access to favorable committee assignments. But they also don’t have to vote with their new parties all the time: Greene said it would be strange for Cotham to turn her back on her previous positions on abortion and LGBTQ rights, but it’s possible that she might vote with Republicans on the state budget, where the implementation of Medicaid expansion is likely to be contentious.
Mostly, though, as I’ve written before, Tricia Cotham is just awful. Decent people simply do not behave as she has done here.
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