So much I wanted to write about this week. But, alas, had to get the grades in. At least, some pretty good stuff here, I think. And lots more about abortion next week.
1) Loved this in an Emily Oster interview about a book on philosophy and parenting:
But even on smaller issues, I question my kids a lot. In our house, you’re not “entitled to your opinion,” as Americans like to say. You have to defend them. I ask the boys questions, then I question their answers, so they have to think critically about their own ideas. I want to get them in the habit of backing up their opinions with evidence and arguments. But more than that, I want them to know that you shouldn’t have an opinion unless you can back it up — and if the evidence and arguments aren’t on your side, you should change your mind.
You must be super-frustrated with the people who feel in their bones that COVID isn’t real, or that ivermectin cures it, all evidence aside. And you’re doing this huge public service by helping parents find the relevant evidence and think through its significance. I want my kids to have that orientation toward the world. And questioning them — and making them make arguments — is a key part of that. The only downside is that they’ll do it back to you. (But of course, that’s upside too — just exhausting sometimes.)
2) Jeff Maurer on student debt:
One thing I’ve learned is that you can find a research paper to support just about anything. I googled “immigrants commit more crime” and found this paper supporting that thesis from the Center for Immigration Studies, even though it’s pretty well established that the opposite is true. I searched “Bush tax cuts increased revenue” and had to scroll past dozens of studies saying “no they didn’t”, but I eventually found this paper from the Hoover Institute that takes the affirmative position. I did manage to find the outer bounds of this theory — searches for “women find model train enthusiasts sexy” and “crystal meth is a great source of fiber” came up empty — but for most topics under the sun, you can find some crank spouting nonsense due to funding from some presumably-even-larger crank.
Most progressives who want to forgive most or all student loans argue that doing so would benefit the poor and middle class more than the wealthy. And of course they argue that; it would be weird for progressives to support a deeply regressive policy. At least, it would be weird if you don’t think that a sizable chunk of the progressive movement is a borderline cult that lost radio contact with reality some time in the mid-2010s. Though I think I’ve been very clear that I do think that.
To my reading, the evidence is overwhelming that student debt forgiveness with no means testing and no cap on how much is forgiven would mostly benefit the well-off. But some researchers and advocates are parsing data in ways that say otherwise; I consider what they’re doing to be the social science equivalent of standing on your head, squinting, and looking at data reflected in seven mirrors in an attempt to see what you want to see. The effect is an intellectual smoke screen that tries to convince people that something false is true…
The fact that many progressives support a highly regressive policy would be confusing if we didn’t know how we got here. But we do know how we got here: Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016 promising free college for all. He won the support of many young people and did surprisingly well. Bernie either sparked or capitalized on a trend in progressive circles to rally around pithy, absolutist slogans — “Medicare for all”, “abolish ICE”, “defund the police” — of which “cancel student debt” was one. By 2020, both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had made debt cancellation a centerpiece of their presidential campaigns. Also, at some point progressives convinced themselves that this is a race issue, because of course they did.
This puts progressives in the awkward position of advocating a policy that mostly benefits highly educated, upwardly mobile, and, yes, mostly white people. It is also possible that somebody — or even literally everybody — noticed that progressives tend to be highly educated, upwardly mobile, and, yes, mostly white. Must be a coincidence!
Given this context, of course progressives are desperate to muddle the debate. Their staunch resistance to any caps or means testing — which would be inelegant but would help target relief to the poor and middle class — makes it completely obvious that the real end game is to hand a big pile of cash to the type of person who votes for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. That’s a pretty bad look, so it makes sense that their main tactic is to basically throw a smoke bomb on the ground and hope that people get confused. This tactic will probably succeed in giving progressives the psychological cover they need to convince themselves that they’re a champion for the poor while they carry water for the rich, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us need to be fooled.
2) Great stuff from Derek Thompson on Florida, Disney and the parties today:
To review, today’s culture-war death spiral is being accelerated by reactive polarization on both sides. Republicans, freaked out by what they see as cultural disempowerment, are yanking politics right; Democrats, freaked out by what they see as political disempowerment, are pulling institutions left.
I know that by typing the words both sides in the previous paragraph, I have summoned the ancient curse of a thousand tweeted screenshots by media watchers. So let me state something as clearly as possible. As a liberal Millennial, I don’t think liberal Millennials urging companies to take political stands is remotely as bad as Republican activists urging politicians to, say, ban math books on the grounds that cartoons of gay parents amount to sexualized “grooming.” Personally, I find the former defensible and the latter detestable. But as a political observer, I ought to note plainly that both of these things are extraordinary appeals to power, that these appeals to power are effective, and that liberals’ effectiveness moving companies left and conservatives’ effectiveness moving state politics right are two forces turning in a gyre of unyielding grievance. The possibility that the right is polarizing harder and for worse reasons than the left doesn’t change the fact that both sides are polarizing.
***
The political scientist Ronald Inglehart famously wrote that as societies get richer, voters care less about economic (material) issues and more about social and cultural (post-material) issues. With rising material well-being, we climb Maslow’s hierarchy to the top of the pyramid, get woozy with altitude sickness, and start ranting at each other about language. This is how we get Florida setting its economic and tax policy by first looking at which companies are saying the right words.
Who is allowed to say what? In the post-material future coming into focus, this is the only political question that matters. It is certainly the question that matters in the Disney-DeSantis showdown. “I am the most free-market person on the right … I think more freedoms for businesses are good,” the conservative personality Ben Shapiro said recently on his popular podcast, about the Florida fracas. “However,” he said to Disney, “if you decide to just become a woke corporation that does the bidding of your Democratic taskmasters, don’t be surprised if you get clocked by a legislative two-by-four. Eff around and find out.”
What a refreshingly blunt statement: Freedom of speech is good, but my political enemy’s speech is punishable by law. This is right-wing economic policy for a post-material age: Conservative companies are allowed to talk, and leftist employees are invited to listen.
Years ago, Republicans were critical of college-campus Democrats for their embrace of “safe spaces.” But maybe the right wasn’t contemptuous of safe spaces, just envious.Why merely a safe room, or a safe campus? Mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bit bigger, darling. Why not an ideologically safety-proofed corporation? Or state? Why not fire the entire federal bureaucracy, as Ohio’s Senate candidate J. D. Vance proposed, and make the government a safe space for right-wing populism?
You might think I’ve strayed from the crux of the Disney-DeSantis mess. But I think we’re at the heart of it. The specific events of this political crisis are less important than the moral of the story. Who is allowed to say what? Disney effed around and found out for itself: Post-materialism rules everything around us.
3) A thoughtful conservative take on Socio-emotional learning:
While the aims of SEL may be commonsensical and bipartisan in the abstract, the community of educational advocates, funders, researchers, and leaders who shape the practical reality of SEL share notions of “commonsensical” and “bipartisan” that are out of whack with those of most Americans who don’t live in the Acela corridor or on the Pacific Coast.
It can be tough for those outside of education to appreciate just how casually woke the complex of education advocates, funders, scholars, and trainers are. (Interestingly, teachers themselves are generally much more moderate than these influentials.) Ninety-nine percent of the education reformers funded by the Gates Foundation support Democratic causes and candidates. At the nation’s top 20 schools of education, half the faculty study “diversity.” Just the other day, the doyens at the National Council of Teachers of English urged English teachers “to decenter book reading and essay writing” (wait, what?) and instead work to “identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice.”
The result is that advocates and trainers have, almost by default, infused their cultural assumptions and biases into SEL. AEI’s Max Eden has pointed out that, in the past few years, CASEL has actively redefined core concepts to keep pace with woke dogma. CASEL’s notion of “self-awareness” now encompasses “identity” (as defined in terms of “intersectionality”). “Self-management” now incorporates “resistance” and “transformative/justice-oriented” citizenship. In its “Roadmap to ReOpening,” CASEL stipulates that “self-awareness” now entails “examining our implicit biases” and “self-management” requires “practicing anti-racism.” As Eden notes, none of this is “morally or politically neutral.”
Asking teachers to cultivate character is one thing; telling fourth-grade teachers that they all need to embrace “trauma-informed teaching” is another. Serious research on cortisone levels and student anxiety gets scrambled together with research-free calls for affinity spaces. There’s serious research, but it also gets misapplied by foundations, education professors, and teacher trainers to justify all manner of free-floating silliness.
4) Nice explanation of the dog breed and behavior research:
After conducting owner surveys for 18,385 dogs and sequencing the genomes of 2,155 dogs, a group of researchers reported a variety of findings in the journal Science on Thursday, including that for predicting some dog behaviors, breed is essentially useless, and for most, not very good. For instance, one of the clearest findings in the massive, multifaceted study is that breed has no discernible effect on a dog’s reactions to something it finds new or strange.
This behavior is related to what the nonscientist might call aggression and would seem to cast doubt on breed stereotypes of aggressive dogs, like pit bulls. One thing pit bulls did score high on was human sociability, no surprise to anyone who has seen internet videos of lap-loving pit bulls. Labrador retriever ancestry, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any significant correlation with human sociability.
This is not to say that there are no differences among breeds, or that breed can’t predict some things. If you adopt a Border collie, said Elinor Karlsson of the Broad Institute and the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, an expert in dog genomics and an author of the report, the probability that it will be easier to train and interested in toys “is going to be higher than if you adopt a Great Pyrenees.”
But for any given dog you just don’t know — on average, breed accounts for only about 9 percent of the variations in any given dog’s behavior. And no behaviors were restricted to any one breed, even howling, though the study found that behavior was more strongly associated with breeds like Siberian huskies than with other dogs.
And yet, in what might seem paradoxical at first, the researchers also found that behavior patterns are strongly inherited. The behaviors they studied had a 25 percent heritability, a complex measure which indicates the influence of genes, but depends on the group of animals studied. But with enough dogs, heritability is a good measure of what’s inherited. In comparing whole genomes, they found several genes that clearly influence behavior, including one for how friendly dogs are.
What the study means is that dog behaviors are strongly inherited, but that the genes that shape whether your dog is friendly, aggressive or aloof date from long before the 19th century when most modern breeds, like those recognized by the American Kennel Club, were created. Breeding since then has been primarily for physical characteristics.
5) Nature! “An Anaconda’s Play Date With Dolphins Took a Strange Turn: Why were Bolivian river dolphins swimming around with a large predatory snake in their mouths? “There are so many questions,” one researcher said.”
Bolivian river dolphins were spotted toying with a Beni anaconda in August 2021.Credit…Omar M. Entiauspe Neto, Steffen Reichle, Alejandro dos Rios
6) Nature again! “Deadly Venom From Spiders and Snakes May Cure What Ails You: Efforts to tease apart the vast swarm of proteins in venom — a field called venomics — have burgeoned in recent years, leading to important drug discoveries.”
TUCSON, Ariz. — In a small room in a building at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, the invertebrate keeper, Emma Califf, lifts up a rock in a plastic box. “This is one of our desert hairies,” she said, exposing a three-inch-long scorpion, its tail arced over its back. “The largest scorpion in North America.”
This captive hairy, along with a swarm of inch-long bark scorpions in another box, and two dozen rattlesnakes of varying species and sub- species across the hall, are kept here for the coin of the realm: their venom.
Efforts to tease apart the vast swarm of proteins in venom — a field called venomics — have burgeoned in recent years, and the growing catalog of compounds has led to a number of drug discoveries. As the components of these natural toxins continue to be assayed by evolving technologies, the number of promising molecules is also growing.
“A century ago we thought venom had three or four components, and now we know just one type of venom can have thousands,” said Leslie V. Boyer, a professor emeritus of pathology at the University of Arizona. “Things are accelerating because a small number of very good laboratories have been pumping out information that everyone else can now use to make discoveries.”
She added, “There’s a pharmacopoeia out there waiting to be explored.”
It is a striking case of modern-day scientific alchemy: The most highly evolved of natural poisons on the planet are creating a number of effective medicines with the potential for many more.
7) Jesse Wegman on the minoritarian Supreme Court:
This didn’t happen by accident: Republicans have spent the past several years twisting the court into an aggressive right-wing supermajority for precisely this purpose. Remember that one of Donald Trump’s major selling points in the 2016 campaign was his vow that if elected, he would ensure Roe was overturned “automatically.” It hasn’t been automatic, but if the holding in the draft opinion stands, it will mark an astonishing moment in our history: the elimination of an existing constitutional right, one that millions of American women (not to mention the men who impregnated them) have relied on for nearly half a century…
The second takeaway from Monday’s leak: Listen to them. Republicans have been saying for decades that they planned to overturn Roe v. Wade the first chance they got. Now that they finally have the chance, they appear to be running with it.
Keep in mind that five of the six justices in the right-wing majority were appointed by presidents who took office after losing the popular vote. This doesn’t mean they are less legitimate than the other four justices. But it might counsel at least a modicum of moderation and humility when approaching hot-button social and political issues that divide the country, as Justice Alito acknowledges is the case with abortion.
Instead the justices are grabbing everything off the shelves while they can. In the process, they are running roughshod over decades of Supreme Court standards regarding the conditions for overturning longstanding precedent. For example, has the world changed significantly since the original ruling? An overwhelming majority of Americans still support a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in at least some circumstances, so no. What has changed? Nothing except the makeup of the court’s majority itself, the most nakedly partisan crop of justices in memory.
8) Great stuff from Jill Lepore on Alito’s use of history:
About as wholly speculative as the question of who leaked this decision is the history offered to support it. Alito’s opinion rests almost exclusively on a bizarre and impoverished historical analysis. “The Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion, and therefore those who claim that it protects such a right must show that the right is somehow implicit in the constitutional text,” he argues, making this observation repeatedly. Roe, he writes, was “remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text” and suffers from one error above all: “it held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned.”
Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor.
Alito cites a number of eighteenth-century texts; he does not cite anything written by a woman, and not because there’s nothing available. “The laws respecting woman,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” in 1791, “make an absurd unit of a man and his wife, and then, by the easy transition of only considering him as responsible, she is reduced to a mere cypher.” She is but a part of him. She herself does not exist but is instead, as Wollstonecraft wrote, a “non-entity.”
If a right isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, Alito argues, following a mode of reasoning known as the history test, then it can only become a right if it can be shown to be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” As I have argued, the history test disadvantages people who were not enfranchised at the time the Constitution was written, or who have been poorly enfranchised since then. Especially important is the question of who was enfranchised at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, the nation’s second founding, since many arguments defending abortion rights (and many other rights, too) turn on the equal-protection and due-process clauses of that amendment. Here, too, Alito is baffled to discover so little about abortion and women. Referring to the advocates for Jackson Women’s Health Organization and to amicus briefs like one signed by the American Historical Association, Alito writes, “Not only are respondents and their amici unable to show that a constitutional right to abortion was established when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, but they have found no support for the existence of an abortion right that predates the latter part of the 20th century—no state constitutional provision, no statute, no judicial decision, no learned treatise.”
He might have consulted the records of the U.S. Senate from the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment, when Jacob Howard, a Republican senator from Michigan, got into an argument with Reverdy Johnson, a Democrat from Maryland. Howard quoted James Madison, who had written that “those who are to be bound by laws, ought to have a voice in making them.” This got Johnson terribly worried, because the Fourteenth Amendment uses the word “person.” He wanted to know: Did Howard mean to suggest that women could be construed as persons, too?
mr. johnson: Females as well as males?
mr. howard: Mr. Madison does not say anything about females.
mr. howard: I believe Mr. Madison was old enough and wise enough to take it for granted that there was such a thing as the law of nature which has a certain influence even in political affairs, and that by that law women and children are not regarded as the equals of men.
Alito, shocked—shocked—to discover so little in the law books of the eighteen-sixties guaranteeing a right to abortion, has missed the point: hardly anything in the law books of the eighteen-sixties guaranteed women anything. Because, usually, they still weren’t persons. Nor, for that matter, were fetuses.
8) Olga Khazan on intellectual humility and Covid (with a nice shout-out to the Scout Mindset):
Many of us have updated our beliefs about COVID at some point in the past two years, even if we haven’t said so publicly. Perhaps you started out worried that the coronavirus was easily transmitted via surfaces, then you discarded that fear upon further evidence. Maybe you are a major infectious-disease specialist who at first thought that young, healthy people didn’t need boosters, then decided they should get them after all. Maybe you committed the ultimate noble flip-flop: You overcame your skepticism of vaccines and opted to get vaccinated.
Confessing that we’ve changed our opinion is hard, and not only because we don’t like feeling stupid, or looking stupid, or being exiled from certain circles of Twitter. “If I admit I’m wrong, then I have a harder time relying on my own judgment every time I make a decision or have an opinion,” says Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author, most recently, of Think Again. “I’m admitting that my convictions about the world are often incorrect, and that that makes the world a little bit scarier to live in.”
People get especially rigid in frightening and unpredictable situations. The pandemic has made many of us “seize and freeze in order to restore that sense of control,” Grant told me. The restaurants that are still using QR codes rather than paper menus—ostensibly for COVID reasons—are perhaps practicing a little terror management alongside their cost cutting…
One thing that allows people like Smith to talk so openly about changing their mind is a loose attachment to their opinions. “Don’t let your ideas become part of your identity,” said Grant, the organizational psychologist…
According to Grant, the best way to keep an open mind in an unclear situation is to do just this: Think like a scientist. (The other, lesser ways to think are like a “preacher, prosecutor, and politician,” which are what they sound like.) The writer Julia Galef calls this “the scout mindset,” as opposed to the “soldier mindset.” The scout and scientist mindsets are approximately the same thing: “The motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were,” she writes in her eponymous book.
Thinking like a scientist, or a scout, means “recognizing that every single one of your opinions is a hypothesis waiting to be tested. And every decision you make is an experiment where you forgot to have a control group,” Grant said. The best way to hold opinions or make predictions is to determine what you think given the state of the evidence—and then decide what it would take for you to change your mind. Not only are you committing to staying open-minded; you’re committing to the possibility that you might be wrong.
9) Jeff Maurer on abortion:
What about scrapping the filibuster and passing something with 50 votes? That won’t happen soon for Democrats; Manchin and Sinema would have to change their position on the filibuster, and Manchin and Casey would have to change their position on abortion (unless Democrats can pick up Murkowski and Collins, which they probably can’t). Chuck Schumer has announced that the Senate will hold a roll call vote on abortion so that “every American will get to see on which side every senator stands.” Surely, this will be the moment that the progressive left will come to understand: You can’t pass legislation if you don’t have enough votes. It’s not about “standing up” or “fighting” — it’s about votes. This will definitely stop extremely stupid people on Twitter from winging about how they’re never voting for a Democrat again because Democrats can’t get anything done, which, of course, is a major factor keeping Democrats from getting anything done. And I hope the sarcasm in the last few sentences is apparent, because I really don’t know how to lay it on any thicker.
Republicans can’t pass an abortion ban with Biden in the White House, so their focus will be on 2024. If you think that Republicans will keep the filibuster because they’ve spent the past few years singing its praises, then I find your faith in their integrity downright adorable. You’re like Bart Simpson with Krusty the Clown — you just never stop believing! That being said, Republicans didn’t scrap the filibuster when they had a narrow majority in 2016, reportedly because a few in the GOP caucus wanted to keep it. They’ll probably need a majority in the mid-50s to get rid of it, but if they do well in 2024, that will be an option.
About half of the country will probably live in places where abortion is illegal for at least the next few years. This is a somewhat strange outcome in a country where various polling methods continually find solid majorities supporting legal abortion. The wild card in my calculations remains the chaos theory component: Will the politics of abortion change now that abortion opponents can write their beliefs into law? Will large numbers of Republicans suddenly decide that — um, on second thought, an outright ban seems extreme, so maybe just banning abortion in some cases would be better? We’ll see. Americans haven’t voted for politicians who possess the power to make major changes to abortion laws for 50 years. With that being true, there’s only so much that the numbers can tell us about what will happen next.
10) Interesting stuff here! “Evolution Didn’t Wire Us for Eight Hours of Sleep: Chimps sleep nine hours a night. Cotton-top tamarins sleep about 13. What happened to humans?”
Research has shown that people in nonindustrial societies—the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in—average less than seven hours a night, says David Samson, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. That’s a surprising number when you consider our closest animal relatives. Humans sleep less than any ape, monkey, or lemur that scientists have studied. Chimps sleep about nine and a half hours out of every 24. Cotton-top tamarins sleep about 13. Three-striped night monkeys are technically nocturnal, though, really, they’re hardly ever awake—they sleep for 17 hours a day.
Samson calls this discrepancy the human sleep paradox. “How is this possible, that we’re sleeping the least out of any primate?” he says. Sleep is known to be important for our memory, immune function, and other aspects of health. A predictive model of primate sleep based on factors such as body mass, brain size, and diet concluded that humans ought to sleep about nine and a half hours out of every 24, not seven. “Something weird is going on,” Samson says.
Research by Samson and others in primates and nonindustrial human populations has revealed the various ways that human sleep is unusual. We spend fewer hours asleep than our nearest relatives, and more of our night in the phase of sleep known as rapid eye movement, or REM. The reasons for our strange sleep habits are still up for debate but can likely be found in the story of how we became human…
Humans, then, seem to have evolved to need less sleep than our primate relatives. Samson showed in a 2018 analysis that we did this by lopping off non-REM time. REM is the sleep phase most associated with vivid dreaming. That means we may spend a larger proportion of our night dreaming than primates do. We’re also flexible about when we get those hours of shut-eye.
To tie together the story of how human sleep evolved, Samson laid out what he calls his social-sleep hypothesis in the 2021 Annual Review of Anthropology. He thinks the evolution of human sleep is a story about safety—specifically, safety in numbers. Brief, flexibly timed REM-dense sleep likely evolved because of the threat of predation when humans began sleeping on the ground, Samson says. And he thinks that another key to sleeping safely on land was snoozing in a group.
“We should think of early human camps and bands as like a snail’s shell,” he says. Groups of humans may have shared simple shelters. A fire might have kept people warm and bugs away. Some group members could sleep while others kept watch.
“Within the safety of this social shell, you could come back and catch a nap at any time,” Samson imagines. (He and Yetish differ, however, on the prevalence of naps in today’s nonindustrial groups. Samson reports frequent napping among the Hadza and a population in Madagascar. Yetish says that, based on his own experiences in the field, napping is infrequent.)
11) Brownstein on the counter-majoritarian Supreme Court:
The supreme court has set itself on a collision course with the forces of change in an inexorably diversifying America.
The six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have been nominated and confirmed by GOP presidents and senators representing the voters least exposed, and often most hostile, to the demographic and cultural changes remaking 21st-century American life. Now the GOP Court majority is moving at an accelerating pace to impose that coalition’s preferences on issues such as abortion, voting rights, and affirmative action.
On all of these fronts, and others, the Republican justices are siding with what America has been—a mostly white, Christian, and heavily rural nation—over the urbanized, racially and religiously diverse country America is becoming.
“The Court seems to be pulling the United States back into a prior era without regard for changing notions and understandings of equity, equality, and fairness,” Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, told me. “It is about almost trying to maintain a 1940s, 1950s view of what the United States is and what its obligations are to its citizens.”
In this backward-facing crusade, the majority may be risking the kind of political explosion that rocked the Court at two pivotal earlier moments in American history, the 1850s and 1930s. In each of those decades, a Supreme Court that also was nominated and confirmed primarily by a political coalition reflecting an earlier majority similarly positioned itself as a bulwark against the preferences of the emerging America. In the 1850s, the Court tried to block the new Republican Party’s agenda to stop the spread of slavery just as the Abraham Lincoln–era GOP was establishing itself as the dominant political force in the free states; in the 1930s, the Court sought to derail newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s agenda to manage the economy, regulate business, and expand the social safety net just as his New Deal electoral coalition was beginning decades of electoral dominance.
Though the legal battles of the 1850s, the 1930s, and today turn on different policies and personalities across three different centuries, they ultimately raise the same question: How long will rising generations allow what Roosevelt called the “dead hand” of a Court rooted in an earlier time to block their priorities? …
Immigration tells a similar story. The share of Americans born abroad has been steadily rising toward its highest level since the Melting Pot era at the turn of the 20th century. But Trump in 2020 won only two of the 20 states with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents, according to census figures, and Republicans hold only four of their 40 Senate seats. The GOP tilts toward the places least affected by immigration: Trump won 17 of the 20 states with the lowest share of foreign-born residents, and those same states elected 33 of the 50 GOP senators. Combined, those 20 low-immigration states account for only a little more than one-fifth of the nation’s total population.
The same contrast extends to measures of economic change. Republicans dominate the states with the fewest college graduates but struggle in those with the most, as well as in the states where the highest share of the workforce is employed in science, engineering, and computer occupations, all defining industries of the new knowledge economy. The 22 states with the biggest share of such workers have elected just six Republican senators, while fully 31 of the GOP’s Senate caucus represent the 20 states with the smallest share of such employment, according to census figures. Republicans are much stronger in states that rely on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: agriculture, energy extraction, and manufacturing.
Centered in these places least affected by all the transitions remaking 21st-century America, what I’ve called the Republican “coalition of restoration” has developed a much more critical view of social and demographic change than the rest of society. In PRRI polling, for instance, although two-thirds of Republicans say abortion should be illegal in all or most circumstances, 70 percent of all other Americans say it should remain legal in all or most cases. While a 55 percent majority of Republicans say small-business owners should be permitted to deny service to same-sex couples on religious grounds, almost three-fourths of everyone else disagrees. And while about three-fourths of Republicans say discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against Black people, more than two-thirds of everyone else rejects that idea.
Yet on these fronts and others, the GOP-appointed Court majority appears ready to tilt the law sharply toward the coalition of restoration’s preferences. Warbelow, of the Human Rights Campaign, said that by declaring its intention to reconsider earlier rulings on abortion, affirmative action, and perhaps other fronts such as public prayer, the GOP majority is inverting the Court’s usual motivation for revisiting precedent. Historically when the Court has done so, she said, “it has been to rectify past wrongs in a way that creates greater rights for all Americans. But the cases that the Court is now considering … are not about expanding rights; they are about restricting rights [and] perpetuating a very narrow view of who should be able to operate fully within the world.”
12) Adam Serwer, “Alito’s Plan to Repeal the 20th Century”
That is the significance of the draft Supreme Court opinion leaked to Politico, which shows that the right-wing majority on the Court intends to discard Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, landmark precedents guaranteeing the constitutional right to abortion. The justices can change their minds before judgments are issued, but their opinions are drafted after they’ve taken an initial vote on the cases themselves. The draft likely reflects the direction of the final decision, even if the scope of that decision changes.
The draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito, is sweeping and radical. There is no need to dwell too long on its legal logic; there are no magic words that the authors of prior opinions might have used in their own decisions that could have preserved the right to an abortion in the face of a decisive right-wing majority on the Court. The opinion itself reads like a fancy press release from a particularly loyal member of the GOP Senate caucus. Alito’s writing reflects the current tone of right-wing discourse: grandiose and contemptuous, disingenuous and self-contradictory, with the necessary undertone of self-pity as justification. Alito, like the five other conservative justices, was placed on the Court by the conservative legal movement for the purpose of someday handing down this decision. These justices are doing what they were put there to do.
Alito claims to be sweeping away one of the great unjust Supreme Court precedents, such as Dred Scott v. Sanford, which held that Black people had no rights white men were bound to respect, or Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation. But in truth, Alito is employing the logic of Plessy, allowing the states to violate the individual rights of their residents in any way their legislatures deem “reasonable,” as the opinion in Plessy put it. Homer Plessy’s argument was that the segregation law violated his Fourteenth Amendment rights, and that those rights should not be subject to a popularity contest in every state in the union; what Alito describes as a “restrictive regime” of constitutional protection for abortion rights is the kind of safe harbor Plessy himself sought…
The implications of this ruling are therefore tremendous. Notwithstanding the reality that being a woman does not mean being pro-abortion-rights, all over the world the right to decide when and whether to give birth is tied to the political, social, and economic rights of women as individuals. That right is likely to be severely curtailed or to vanish entirely in at least 26 states if this decision takes effect. If the draft becomes the Court’s decision, however, it would have implications for more than just abortion. In the U.S., the rights of many marginalized groups are tied to the legal precedents established in the fight for abortion rights. This opinion, if adopted, provides a path to nullifying those rights one by one.
“The majority can believe that it’s only eviscerating a right to abortion in this draft,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me, “but the means by which it does so would open the door to similar attacks on other unenumerated rights, both directly, by attacking the underpinnings of those doctrines, and indirectly, by setting a precedent for such an attack.”
13) Leonhardt on American K-12 Education:
Today, I’m going to focus on a positive and mostly overlooked trend in American education. For years, you’ve probably been hearing that our schools are in crisis. And K-12 education in the U.S. certainly has problems. But it has also been improving for much of the past few decades, according to several crucial metrics.
Starting in the late 1990s, the math skills of students in elementary and middle schools began to improve. A few years later, reading skills started improving, too….
[Sorry, NYT graphs don’t copy over well, but they’re good]
Racial gaps in reading skills also shrunk during this period.
As Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor of education and economics, says about the recent educational progress, “It may be the most important social policy success of the last half century that nobody seems to be aware of.” …
There appear to be two main causes.
First, many states began to emphasize school accountability starting in the 1990s. Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas and other states more rigorously measured student learning and pushed struggling schools to adopt approaches that were working elsewhere. The accountability movement went national in the 2000s, through laws signed by George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
The timing of the test-score increases is consistent with this story, as researchers at the Brookings Institution have noted. As you can see in the charts above, the biggest gains came shortly after states began holding schools more accountable for student learning. In more recent years, the gains leveled off. This pattern suggests that schools made some important changes in response to accountability policies but then struggled to maintain the pace of improvement.
A second major cause of increased learning seems to have been school funding: It rose during the 1990s and early 2000s. States with especially sharp increases included Michigan, Nebraska, New York and Vermont, according to Kenneth Shores of the University of Delaware and Christopher Candelaria of Vanderbilt.
Typically, the funding increases were larger for low-income schools than for high-income schools. That may help explain why racial gaps in reading and math skills declined.
“Exposure to higher levels of public K-12 spending when you’re in school has a pretty large beneficial effect on the adult outcomes of kids,” Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, has said. “Those effects are much more pronounced for children from low-income families.”
Of course, there are caveats to the recent trends in educational progress. The racial gaps, while smaller, are still large. Reading scores did not rise as much as math scores (perhaps because reading is more heavily influenced by students’ lives outside of school, while math is mostly taught at school). High-school test scores did not rise as much as middle-school or elementary-school scores. And some forms of accountability backfired, leading schools to focus more on test-taking than on actual learning.
14) And Jessica Grose builds off this in her parenting newsletter:
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Last month, Florida rejected dozens of math textbooks because, the state found, they “included references to critical race theory” or had “inclusions of Common Core” or “the unsolicited addition of social emotional learning.” The New York Times reporters Dana Goldstein and Stephanie Saul reviewed 21 of the rejected books and said that while “in most of the books, there was little that touched on race,” they did include aspects of S.E.L., which they described as “a practice with roots in psychological research that tries to help students develop mind-sets that can support academic success.”
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S.E.L. is the latest front in the educational culture wars, and it’s painted as a kind of gateway drug to critical race theory by its opponents. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, told Goldstein and Saul that while S.E.L. seems uncontroversial, “in practice, S.E.L. serves as a delivery mechanism for radical pedagogies such as critical race theory and gender deconstructionism.”
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As a parent, I read this and felt completely exhausted. Partly because I don’t care all that much about whether textbooks explicitly address social and emotional learning. Good teachers, those who care about all of the students in their classes, incorporate these concepts whether they’re spelled out in a textbook. My fourth grader constantly tells me that “practice makes progress,” instead of “practice makes perfect,” because her school is teaching her to keep working at something even if she isn’t great at it right off the bat.
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What I care deeply about is whether my kids are learning the math they are supposed to be learning at their grade level. And I find that very little of the recent political battles over what schools are teaching actually focuses on how American students are doing compared with students in other parts of the world. While most of these culture war conversations are kick-started from the right, there are also unpopular ideas from the left that draw backlash, like recommending against accelerated math in middle school and making standardized college entrance exams optional — despite only 14 percent of Americans believing that standardized tests shouldn’t be a factor in college admissions decisions, according to Pew Research…
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He said that while we still “stink” compared with similarly developed countries, “we have made huge, huge moves forward in improving the math education of our students.” Decades ago, teachers were trying to cram too many topics into every year of instruction, leading to curriculums that were a “mile wide and an inch deep,” Schmidt told me. In the 1990s, “except for the elite 20 percent, the seventh and eighth grade was still doing arithmetic, when the rest of the world, even the more developing countries, were covering the beginnings of algebra and geometry. We estimated our curriculum was two years behind much of the rest of the world.”
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While our curriculum is now more aligned with the rest of the world’s, we haven’t necessarily seen the impact of it. When I asked Schmidt why, he said that it’s probably because of a number of factors, one being that our education system has very little control at the federal level, so it’s tough to know how well any set of standards is being applied more locally. You can see for yourself how well your state is doing on a website, The Nation’s Report Card, which shows how each state ranks on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is given in the fourth, eighth and 12th grades.
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Educational inequality remains a huge problem for the United States, and for a 2015 study, Schmidt and his co-authors looked at PISA test data from more than 300,000 students in 62 countries. There were only 10 countries where the gap between rich and poor students was greater than in the United States. A surprising — to me — takeaway from the study, published on the Michigan State website:
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As the United States continues lagging behind many other countries in math and science, domestic policy often focuses on “good schools” versus “failing schools.” But Schmidt said this approach might be too narrow. The study found that most of the variation in student performance occurs within — and not between — schools.
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If we lived in a sane political environment, we would be talking about this finding. We could discuss how we could emulate countries that are “both relatively high performing and equitable,” according to Schmidt’s study, such as Poland, Finland and Estonia. We would be having conversations about states with higher-than-average test scores for all children and try to figure out what they’re doing right and replicate it. But we don’t. As he put it to me, the culture war right now “has nothing to do with whether these kids learn mathematics, and it’s irrelevant and a waste of time.”
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15) Juliette Kayyem on Biden and Covid:
The implicit policy, in short, is: You do you.
The coronavirus is here to stay, and Americans vary quite a lot in how much they care about that fact. Biden appears to understand this dynamic far better than his public-health team does. Despite his vows to “follow the science,” he was far ahead of federal regulators in pushing for booster shots last fall—to the point that two top FDA vaccine experts resigned. Some scientists wanted to wait for more data about the benefits of boosters; others argued the U.S. government should concentrate on winning over Americans who had not yet been persuaded to get their first shot. But Biden plunged ahead, having apparently concluded that the benefits of offering more protection to Americans who are deeply concerned about their own chance of contracting the virus or passing it along to others outweighed any downside.
That instinct has not entirely prevailed. The FDA’s needlessly long delays in approving vaccines for children younger than 5 suggest that regulators are misjudging many parents’ mood. Meanwhile, many public-health experts continue to fume over what looks to them—accurately—as the Biden administration’s growing emphasis on accommodating individual preferences rather than promoting collective solutions to the coronavirus.
Yet the reliance on society-wide solutions, including mask mandates, social-distancing rules, and school and business closures, began when options were limited, the consequences of coronavirus infection were severe, and treatments were unavailable. The White House’s implicit policy today reflects the rightsizing of the COVID-19 crisis. The arrival of the coronavirus triggered an unprecedented federal effort to contain its spread and mitigate its effects, economic and otherwise. Now the COVID response is starting to look normal—that is, more consistent with federal responses to past calamities—even if life has not returned to the pre-pandemic status quo…
In my field, we define a crisis as a consequential disruption—such as a hurricane, an earthquake, or an oil spill—that comes as a surprise and requires immediate steps to protect the general public. In most disasters, the United States follows a simple template: Local authorities are the first to arrive; the state coordinates how people and resources are used; the federal government supports those efforts as needed. This reflects our constitutional design. The Tenth Amendment gives the powers not expressly delegated to the federal government—powers that include public safety and public health—to the states, which then delegate many of those to localities. The virus upended this pattern as it swept across the nation, creating our first 50-state disaster.
The kinds of crises that require federal assistance, even if in just one state, also tend to reveal longer-term vulnerabilities, such as economic precarity, racial and ethnic prejudice, and unequal access to health care. Some emergency measures may be helpful in addressing these ills. In my own experience, though, the federal government has always scaled down its disaster response before the underlying conditions are cured. There is a difference between a crisis and a persistent policy problem. Some may argue that the abandonment of broad mask mandates is premature, but “not now” is a hard time frame to maintain as the risk of death wanes for anyone who chooses to be vaccinated.
To treat the crisis phase of the pandemic as complete is not the same as declaring that the country’s battle against COVID is over or that many Americans’ unmet needs are irrelevant. It is to say that many of the persistent systemic problems revealed by the coronavirus can be addressed, if our elected representatives choose, without requiring a declared emergency as a pretext for action…
During the pandemic, a saying emerged: You may be done with the virus, but the virus isn’t done with you. This is a cute turn of phrase, but it sounds dated now. Because the coronavirus may never be done with you, whether you are done with it becomes mostly your call. Will you get a booster—or a second booster? When will you wear a mask? Should you attend a party? You know the risks. You do you.
16) Michelle Goldberg, “The Death of Roe Is Going to Tear America Apart”
Very soon, if the Supreme Court really discards Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision partly upholding it, we will have two wildly different abortion regimes in this country. About half the states are expected to mostly prohibit abortion; according to the Guttmacher Institute, in 11 states there won’t even be exemptions for rape and incest. A bill moving through the Louisiana Legislature would allow prosecutors to charge those having abortions with homicide.
Blue states, meanwhile, are casting themselves as abortion sanctuaries. Oregon lawmakers recently passed a bill to create a $15 million fund to help cover abortion costs, including for those traveling to the state for the procedure. Something similar is in the works in California. Abortion clinics in Illinois, bordered by several states where abortion is likely to be made illegal, are preparing for a huge influx of patients.
The right won’t be content to watch liberal states try to undermine abortion bans. As the draft of a forthcoming article in The Columbia Law Review puts it, “overturning Roe and Casey will create a novel world of complicated, interjurisdictional legal conflicts over abortion. Instead of creating stability and certainty, it will lead to profound confusion because advocates on all sides of the abortion controversy will not stop at state borders in their efforts to apply their policies as broadly as possible.”
Already, a Missouri lawmaker has introduced a measure that would let private citizens sue anyone who helps a Missouri resident get an out-of-state abortion. More such proposals will probably follow. Under a Texas law passed last year, people in other states sending abortion pills through the mail to Texas residents could be extradited to face felony charges, though the authorities in liberal states are unlikely to cooperate.
In anticipation of such legislation, Connecticut just passed a law meant to shield doctors and patients. Among other things, it ensures that no one can be extradited to another state for performing or obtaining an abortion that’s legal in Connecticut, and ensures that people sued under a law like the one proposed in Missouri could countersue to recover their costs.
Experts don’t know how these kinds of interstate battles are going to play out because there’s so little precedent for them. If you’re searching for close parallels, said Ziegler, “you’re looking at fugitive slave cases, because there are not many times in history when states are trying to tell other states what to do in this way.” The point is not that abortion bans are comparable to slavery in a moral sense, but that they create potentially irreconcilable legal frameworks.
17) And this is a cool, fun, interactive website about a study on randomness. Worth your time.
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