Quick hits (part I)

1) Man, it was interesting to read how crazy the “student-centered teaching” crowd has gotten.  Chronicle of Higher Ed:

The problem comes when advocates of teaching reform cast judgment on prosaic, everyday classroom practices — such as lectures and multiple-choice exams — that aren’t necessarily damaging and can, in fact, be legitimate pedagogical choices. Try Googling “high-stakes exams”: Littered among the search results are phrases like “dangerous consequences” and “psychological toll.” In a conference talk I once saw high-stakes exams included in a list of possible traumatic experiences. As educational developers, we need to respect instructor autonomy and avoid reproach. After all, the degree to which you are authentic, caring, and invested in student success tends to matter more than which gadgets you choose from the teaching toolkit.

2) Thomas Mills on the NC Republicans new mask ban, “The party of stupid”

Republicans, though, are trying to bastardize the anti-mask law that was suspended during CIVID. They claim they are just trying to return to normal in the post-pandemic era. In reality, they are virtue-signaling to their base and pandering to stupidity.

Republicans refuse to allow an exception to the law for health reasons. They don’t have a good reason. They just want to stick it to woke liberals. In their view, masks are a symbol of the fake pandemic…

The bill is really a reactionary response to the mask mandates imposed during the height of COVID. Republicans spent the pandemic in denial about COVID’s severity and pushed back against government regulations meant to curb its spread. They politicized the pandemic and paid a serious price. According an NPR study, “…[P]eople in counties that voted strongly for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election were ‘nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19’ as people in pro-Biden counties.” The bill Republicans are pushing through the legislature right now is the epitome of wearing your stupidity on your sleeve.

They also don’t see the irony in their bill. Passing a law that prevents wearing masks is every bit as heavy-handed as imposing mask requirements. Both measures are examples of government limiting our freedoms. The bill is just another example of Big Government conservatism.

3) I don’t buy this for a second, “How DEI helped Davidson College choose the name of its new athletic field. ”  Davidson College so did not need a DEI office to realize that they would have a problem in trying to name a field after former football coach, David Fagg. 

4) This was fantastic.  Gift link, “Why Do People Make Music? In a new study, researchers found universal features of songs across many cultures, suggesting that music evolved in our distant ancestors.”

That debate continues to this day. Some researchers are developing new evolutionary explanations for music. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing, that did not need natural selection to come into existence.

In recent years, scientists have investigated these ideas with big data. They have analyzed the acoustic properties of thousands of songs recorded in dozens of cultures. On Wednesday, a team of 75 researchers published a more personal investigation of music. For the study, all of the researchers sang songs from their own cultures.

The team, which comprised musicologists, psychologists, linguists, evolutionary biologists and professional musicians, recorded songs in 55 languages, including Arabic, Balinese, Basque, Cherokee, Maori, Ukrainian and Yoruba. Across cultures, the researchers found, songs share certain features not found in speech, suggesting that Darwin might have been right: Despite its diversity today, music might have evolved in our distant ancestors.

5) And it got me curious about the pentatonic scale.  This 15 year old video with Bobby McFerrin is terrific. 

6) Eric Levitz is not a great fit at Vox, but, I guess that means, good for Vox.  This was good, “Make “free speech” a progressive rallying cry again: Protecting radical dissent requires tolerating right-wing speech.”

Attempts to sanction academics for speech increased dramatically over the past 10 years, according to a 2023 report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Conservative activists were responsible for 41 percent of these campaigns, but a majority came from the left. In national discourse during this period, meanwhile, conservatives often espoused a support for free speech, while some progressives forthrightly defended restricting free expression on college campuses.

In recent months, however, social justice advocates have been forced to contest the very ideas about speech and inclusion that they had once popularized.

Since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war and the resulting surge of pro-Palestinian activism at American colleges, the campus free speech debate has inverted. Now, it is Republican politicians who insist that college administrators must discern the bigotry implicit in non-hateful speech (such as the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”) and then silence that speech to protect a historically oppressed minority group on campus.

And they have enjoyed some success. In recent months, several colleges have disciplined pro-Palestinian activists for ordinary speech acts and mobilized force against their acts of civil disobedience. Congress, meanwhile, is on the verge of enacting a law that would empower the federal government to suppress anti-Zionist advocacy on college campuses.

Progressives have lamented such attempts to regulate campus speech as authoritarian attacks on academic freedom. In their estimation, the aggressive policing of free expression at US colleges since October 7 has not served the interests of the marginalized, but rather it has abetted the mass murder of a disempowered people.

All of which raises a question: In light of these developments, should students concerned with social justice rethink their previous skepticism of free speech norms, for the sake of better protecting radical dissent?

I think the answer is yes.

7) Nice headline from Ian Milhiser.  Appalling that Alito (what a hack!!!) and Gorsuch dissented. “The Supreme Court decides not to trigger a second Great Depression”

The Supreme Court delivered a firm and unambiguous rebuke to some of America’s most reckless judges on Thursday, ruling those judges were wrong to declare an entire federal agency unconstitutional in a decision that threatened to trigger a second Great Depression.

In a sensible world, no judge would have taken the plaintiffs arguments in CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association seriously. Briefly, they claimed that the Constitution limits Congress’s ability to enact “perpetual funding,” meaning that the legislation funding a particular federal program does not sunset after a certain period of time.

The implications of this entirely made-up theory of the Constitution are breathtaking. As Justice Elena Kagan points out in a concurring opinion in the CFPB case, “spending that does not require periodic appropriations (whether annual or longer) accounted for nearly two-thirds of the federal budget” — and that includes popular programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Nevertheless, a panel of three Trump judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — a court dominated by reactionaries who often hand down decisions that offend even the current, very conservative Supreme Court — bought the CFPB plaintiffs’ novel theory and used it to declare the entire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional.

In fairness, the Fifth Circuit’s decision would not have invalidated Social Security or Medicare, but that’s because the Fifth Circuit made up some novel limits to contain its unprecedented interpretation of the Constitution. And the Fifth Circuit’s attack on the CFPB still would have had catastrophic consequences for the global economy had it actually been affirmed by the justices.

8) Sarah Stillman has a great history of telling stories of how our criminal justice system immorally screws people over for money.  This is as damning as any.

Le’Essa Hill, aged eighteen, works at a Subway sandwich shop near Flint, Michigan. Her younger sister, a fifteen-year-old aspiring zookeeper named Addy, helps run a “mini-farm” inside the family’s green clapboard house. When I first met the girls, early this year, Addy was caring for five dogs, four cats, two rabbits, and a lizard named Lily, who ate crickets and kale. Le’Essa and Addy were unlikely candidates to wage an ideological battle against two big private-equity firms, but they were in the midst of one because of a situation involving their father, Adam Hill. For more than a year, while Adam was held in the county jail, awaiting trial, the girls had been prevented from seeing him in person.

“My dad is the kind of guy who can climb a tree even if it doesn’t have any branches,” Le’Essa told me. “He just wraps his legs around the trunk.” Le’Essa’s parents separated when she was young, and her dad has struggled with addiction. “He can be really silly and childish, but in a good way,” she added. “Like when something goes wrong, he’ll make up a funny song about it.” Le’Essa, who, like many teen-agers, has experienced mental-health struggles, wished that she had Adam’s companionship. “I feel like my perception of other people is often completely wrong, and I get slapped in the face by that reality a lot,” she told me. “My dad is the only person who really gets it, and so if I could have deeper conversations with him that would be magical.

Last fall, Le’Essa learned why the children of Flint had been blocked from seeing their parents at the Genesee County Jail. In 2012, a company called Securus Technologies struck a deal with the county, offering financial incentives to replace jail visits with video calls. Families would pay fees that could exceed a dollar a minute to see their loved ones on an often grainy video feed; the county would earn a cut of the profits. “A lot of people will swipe that Mastercard and visit their grandkids,” a county official told the press at the time.

A few years later, the county went after an even steeper commission. In the sheriff’s office, a captain named Jason Gould helped negotiate a deal with a Securus competitor called Global Tel*Link (or GTL, now known as ViaPath), which included a fixed commission of a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year, plus a sixty-thousand-dollar annual “technology grant,” and twenty per cent of the revenue from video calls. The jail chose not to restore families’ access to in-person visits. To celebrate the deal, an undersheriff joked to Gould, by e-mail, “You are not Captain Gold for nothing!”

County sheriffs across the country were making similar deals with Securus and GTL, which resulted in millions of dollars in commissions. Many of those counties replaced in-person visits with the companies’ video calls.

9) I didn’t realize the Simpsons had forced Harry Shearer to stop voicing any non-white characters at the height of the woke moral panic in 2020.

“Folk say the show has become woke in recent years and one of my characters has been affected,” Shearer said. “I voiced the Black physician, Dr. Hibbert, who I based on Bill Cosby. Back then he was known as the ‘whitest Black man on television.’ Then, a couple of years ago, I received an email saying they’d employed a Black actor, who then copied my voice. The result is a Black man imitating a white man imitating the whitest Black man on TV.”…

“The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening told USA Today in 2021 that it “was not my idea” to have white actors stop voicing characters of color, “but I’m fine with it. Who can be against diversity? So it’s great.”

“However, I will just say that the actors were not hired to play specific characters,” he added at the time. “They were hired to do whatever characters we thought of. To me, the amazing thing is seeing all our brilliant actors who can do multiple voices, do multiple voices.”

10) Jerry Seinfeld made big news giving the commencement speech at my alma mater because a few dozen people walked out (to their credit, they did not attempt any further disruption).  The speech is quite good.  That said, as much as I appreciate Conor Friedersdorf’s take (“Jerry Seinfeld’s Speech Was the Real News: Why did the media focus less on his words and more on the 30 protesters who didn’t hear them?”), the speech wasn’t that good. It’s not like commencement speeches make news typically (excepting the recent disaster at Ohio State). 

11) Rather distressing, “How One Crack in the Line Opened a Path for the Russians“

Ukraine is more vulnerable than at any time since the first harrowing weeks of the 2022 invasion, Ukrainian soldiers and commanders from a range of brigades interviewed in recent weeks said. Russia is trying to exploit this window of opportunity, stepping up its assaults across the east and now threatening to open a new front by attacking Ukrainian positions along the northern border outside the city of Kharkiv.

Months of delays in American assistance, a spiraling number of casualties and severe shortages of ammunition have taken a deep toll, evident in the exhausted expressions and weary voices of soldiers engaged in daily combat.

12) Can I just say– ugggg, contemporary Sociology– to this? “Did Kids Become More Racist Under Trump? A new book examines the white children who felt emboldened to be openly bigoted while he was president.”

Between 2017 and 2019, Hagerman, who is on the faculty at Mississippi State University in Starkville, and two Ph.D. students conducted 45 interviews with children ages 10 to 13. All the subjects lived in two politically “purple” towns — one in Massachusetts, the other in Mississippi. Both towns were evenly split between registered Democrats and Republicans, and both had a significant white population living near people of color. It wasn’t Hagerman’s first time interviewing kids this age. From 2011 to 2012, when Barack Obama was president, Hagerman spent two years with the families of 36 white children, also middle-schoolers, in a midwestern city. “I babysat their kids, I interviewed the parents and children, I spent a lot of time observing them with their friends,” she explains. Back then, every white child she interviewed, regardless of their family’s political affiliation, told her racism was “bad” and a serious problem. Some kids didn’t even want to talk to Hagerman about race because they were scared she would think they were racist. “That’s quite different from the white kids in this new study,” Hagerman told me. The study participants’ answers revealed feelings that divided them into three distinct groups but not along the lines one might expect, like Northeast versus Deep South or younger versus older. Rather, the groups were anti-Trump white kids, anti-Trump children of color, and pro-Trump white kids. Cammie turned out to be just one of many in that last cohort who were unbothered by Trump’s overtly racist statements.

I’d love to see what a political science journal would have to say about me submitting something based on 45 interviews with a non-random assortment of people.

Because, maybe they did!  But, I’m sure not going to accept that conclusion from this.

13) Lots of good stuff here from Yglesias, “What the right gets right”

The brutality of history

I don’t think the various fights over the content of K-12 history curricula are particular important on their own terms. But they are kind of telling.

Progressives typically characterize their stance on this as being that it’s important to tell people about the darker aspects of history. And they’re right — it is a good idea for people to learn about those things. But I think the standard progressive read of this gets the figure and the ground backwards. The implication of a lot of these takes on episodes of violence, bigotry, displacement, and cruelty in American history is that these episodes are what’s distinctive about the United States of America.

But if you read the history of anywhere, you’ll see that it’s not like there’s some other country where you wouldn’t say “it’s important for people to learn about the darker aspects of our history.” History is dark! In the winter of 1069-70, William the Conquer and his fellow Normans put down a rebellion in northern England by burning rebellious villages and deliberately destroying food stockpiles, inducing famine and mass death.

Here’s the introduction of historian Ivo Schoffer’s article “The second serfdom in Eastern Europe as a problem of historical explanation:”

“While the German peasant is driven afield to gather snails and wild strawberries for his lord, is plundered and harried and tortured without hope of redress, his English brother is a member of a society in which there is, nominally at least, one law for all men.” With this remark, Tawney proceeds to describe and explain the process of commutation in sixteenth century England. It is proposed here to tackle this problem in its reverse form at the other end of Europe. Why had the German peasant — or for that matter, why had the peasant in Eastern Europe — lost his social position? Why could he be “plundered and harried and tortured?” By the sixteenth century serford had virtually disappeared in England, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy and Spain and was well on the way to disappearance in Western Germany and France. On the other side of the Elbe — in Silesia, Eastern Germany, Poland, Livonia and Lithuania — serfdom had become a firm institution, spread over the whole of the vast agrarian area.

The snail thing is a reference to one of the grievances that led to the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1524-25, which was brutally suppressed in a way that led to the slaughter of maybe 100,000 peasants.

The First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 had two distinct phases. In the first, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria teamed up against the Ottoman Empire. In the second, Bulgaria fought against its former allies. In the end, “Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek, and Ottoman forces committed mutual acts of violence including large-scale destruction and arson of villages, beatings and torture, forced conversions and indiscriminate mass killing of enemy non-combatants.”

Those are just a few things I’ve read about recently, along with the Bronze Age Collapse.

Conservatives have their own flawed tendency to lapse into nostalgia for the recent past, but I do think they typically have a more clear-eyed view of the reality that the whole of human history is littered with atrocity and cruelty. It’s naive to view our sociocultural antecedents here in the United States as flawless, shining heroes, but it’s also naive to think the violence and brutality of American history is what’s unique about it, rather than the fact that we’ve settled into a prosperous and liberal status quo.

The right side of history

The related thing that conservatives get right is a sense that good things are vulnerable and it’s worth worrying about wrecking everything.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s mantra, paraphrasing Theodore Parker, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” is a nice bit of motivational speaking. But this often leads progressives to the view that there is a strong and inherent directionality to history, and thus that any noisy movement for reform with adequate progressive branding must be good. You hear a lot with regard to the Gaza protests that the people complaining are just the same as the people who complained about every good and virtuous social movement of the past. Implicit is the sense that there is no such thing as a social movement that was bad.

But Communism, to cite probably the most important example, was really bad!

14) Yglesias also sent me to this 13 year old article which I love “Rebounding is a Mental Skill”

All of this suggests that rebounding is a skill.  Yesterday Jonah Lehrer –– author of How We Decide (an excellent book on behavioral economics and decision-making) – posted Basketball and Jazz at wired.com.  This post reviews research explaining the mental aspect of rebounding.

A few years ago, a team of Italian neuroscientists conducted a simple study on rebounding. At first glance, rebounding looks like a brute physical skill: The tallest guy (or the one with the highest vertical) should always end up with the ball. But this isn’t what happens. Instead, some of the best rebounders in the history of the NBA, such as Dennis Rodman and Charles Barkley, were several inches shorter than their competitors. What allowed these players to get to the ball first?

The rebounding experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices, watched video clips of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos here.) Not surprisingly, the professional athletes were far better at predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and writers) only got it right about 40 percent of the time. The athletes were also far quicker with their guesses, and were able to make accurate predictions about where the ball would end up before it was even airborne. (This suggests that the players were tracking the body movements of the shooter, and not simply making judgments based on the arc of the ball.) The coaches and writers, meanwhile, could only predict a make or miss after the shot, which required an additional 300 milliseconds.

What allowed the players to make such speedy judgments? By monitoring the brains and bodies of subjects as they watched free throws, the scientists were able to reveal something interesting about the best rebounders. It turned out that elite athletes, but not coaches and journalists, showed a sharp increase in activity in the motor cortex and their hand muscles in the crucial milliseconds before the ball was released. The scientists argue that this extra activity was due to a “covert simulation of the action,” as the athletes made a complicated series of calculations about the trajectory of the ball based on the form of the shooter. (Every NBA player, apparently, excels at unconscious trigonometry.) But here’s where things get fascinating: This increase in activity only occurred for missed shots. If the shot was going in, then their brains failed to get excited. Of course, this makes perfect sense: Why try to anticipate the bounce of a ball that can’t be rebounded? That’s a waste of mental energy.

The larger point is that even a simple skill like rebounding reflects an astonishing amount of cognitive labor. The reason we don’t notice this labor is because it happens so fast, in the fraction of a fraction of a second before the ball is released. And so we assume that rebounding is an uninteresting task, a physical act in a physical game. But it’s not, which is why the best rebounders aren’t just taller or more physical or better at boxing out – they’re also faster thinkers. This is what separates the Kevin Loves and Kevin Garnetts from everyone else on the court: They know where the ball will end up first.

Such research suggests that rebounding may not be a skill that is easy to teach.  If some people can see where the ball might be going before the shooter even takes the shot, these players will always have the advantage in the rebounding game.  And hence, the players with this mental skill will tend to be good rebounders (and those without the skill will not).

15) So true from Chait, “No, Your Pet Issue Is Not Making Biden Lose It’s inflation, not Israel or class warfare.”

he American political landscape in 2024 seems like a very simple story that people continue to overcomplicate. There was a large, global surge in prices in 2021 and 2022 as the economy restarted following the COVID-19 pandemic. That inflation surge left Joe Biden, like leaders in almost every major democracy, deeply unpopular. Biden, like his global peers, has yet to recover.

Is it possible that Biden’s standing can recover as the economy returns to health and the inflation surge recedes further into the past? Sure. But as every month goes by, that prospect gets a bit less likely, and it grows increasingly probable that we will look back and conclude that Biden’s defeat was preordained.

Numerous data points are converging on this explanation. The most recent New York Times polling again finds Biden trailing in all the swing states (except in Michigan, and only if you count likely voters as opposed to all registered voters). Those states find Democrats winning every Senate race.

The point here is that Democrats have a Joe Biden problem, not a partywide problem. Regular, mainstream Democratic candidates are holding up just fine in the purple states.

The story is being overcomplicated in the public’s mind in large part because various ax-grinders want to use Biden’s struggles to push the party toward their positions. Critics of Israel have fixated on the problems created by encampments at elite universities. And it is true that the news media’s intense coverage of an issue that splits the Democratic coalition and unites the Republican coalition hurts Biden and helps Trump.

But that does not accurately reflect the nature of Biden’s polling deficit. The Harvard youth poll found Israel-Palestine at the bottom of young voters’ concerns. Even polls of college students (who are a minority of young people) find low levels of concern about the issue.

The Times poll confirms this again. It finds that of those voters who supported Biden in 2020 but aren’t planning to support him in 2024, just 10 percent call foreign policy their most important issue and don’t sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians. Overall, the public continues to sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 41 percent to 22 percent…

Another, more traditional form of ax-grinding came recently from Mark Penn in a Times op-ed. Penn was a key strategist for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, during which he repeatedly insisted that Barack Obama was too left-wing to be elected president. Penn has since been sidelined from mainstream Democratic politics, and his polling was the basis for an unsuccessful scheme to run a “No Labels” centrist candidacy.

Penn’s long-standing fixation is that Democrats should move to the center across the board. Some of his beliefs about this are correct: The party has moved to the left of the electorate on immigration, climate, and many social issues.

But Penn has always been insistent that the Democrats’ biggest weakness is their desire to tax the rich, and he returns to this claim again in the Times.

“Instead of pivoting to the center when talking to 32 million people tuned in to his State of the Union address,” he writes, “Mr. Biden doubled down on his base strategy with hits like class warfare attacks on the rich and big corporations.”

In reality, taxing the rich and corporations is Biden’s most popular issue. One recent poll found that Biden’s plan to raise taxes on people making more than $400,000 a year commands support from 69 percent of registered voters. Nice. Even a majority of Republicans approve of the idea.

If Biden could get the electorate to focus on taxes, he would have a much more favorable environment. That isn’t easy. The campaign media is inherently averse to covering policy.

16) Some high quality social science, “The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: A deactivation experiment”

We study the effect of Facebook and Instagram access on political beliefs, attitudes, and behavior by randomizing a subset of 19,857 Facebook users and 15,585 Instagram users to deactivate their accounts for 6 wk before the 2020 U.S. election. We report four key findings. First, both Facebook and Instagram deactivation reduced an index of political participation (driven mainly by reduced participation online). Second, Facebook deactivation had no significant effect on an index of knowledge, but secondary analyses suggest that it reduced knowledge of general news while possibly also decreasing belief in misinformation circulating online. Third, Facebook deactivation may have reduced self-reported net votes for Trump, though this effect does not meet our preregistered significance threshold. Finally, the effects of both Facebook and Instagram deactivation on affective and issue polarization, perceived legitimacy of the election, candidate favorability, and voter turnout were all precisely estimated and close to zero.

17) Such a great point about what most 20th century historical dramas get wrong, “Everyone in This TV Show Should Be Smoking“

Palm Royalewears its time period like a sweetheart-neckline cocktail dress. From sunglasses and boat shoes to headscarves, wallpaper, and large automobiles, it’s as good a job of material-historical re-creation as you’ll see on television. Every element has been researched, designed, and presented with the utmost care. When Kristen Wiig’s Maxine Dellacorte sits poolside reading the local society pages or Allison Janney’s Evelyn rocks a pair of sunglasses big and bold enough to get filched by Truman Capote, you feel as if you’re looking at a spread from an old magazine in a vintage store that’s come alive. But something’s missing. Something that should complete the panorama as perfectly as a splash of Angostura bitters in a Manhattan cocktail.

Smoke.

Nobody smokes on Palm Royale, which is set in Florida in 1969. This is not right, artistically or historically. According to U.S. government statistics, a little less than half the adult population smoked in the 1960s, and you could do it just about anywhere — on airplanes, in movie theaters, in the obstetrics waiting rooms of hospitals. Until the 1970s, when TV advertising of cigarettes was banned, smoking was extremely common in movies and less common but far from rare on TV (except for crime dramas and talk shows, where everyone smoked like a chimney). I enjoy the heck out of Palm Royale, but half these characters should be smoking. All the time. In restaurants, in bars, in cars, on front stoops and back porches, behind the wheel of their cars.

And by smoking I don’t mean they should take one or two puffs, then stub it out. They should be exhaling roiling cumulus clouds of smoke during casual conversations, lighting up while watching Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson, extinguishing cigarettes in bedside ashtrays before they go to sleep. If you catch a glimpse of their dreams, there should be smoking in them. Any period piece set between 1800 and 2000 that doesn’t at least occasionally show people smoking cigarettes, pipes, opium, marijuana, hash, or anything else you can light and inhale is a period piece that’s fundamentally compromised. The farther back in the timeline you go, the more the visuals of the piece should be choked with smoke; whether it’s in the foreground or background doesn’t matter.

Mad Men got this right. Righter than any period drama made for TV during the preceding two decades. Just in case you thought all the smoking was an endorsement, the show began with Madison Avenue advertising-wizard Don Draper, a prodigious smoker, pitching a cigarette ad campaign, and ended with a character who’d smoked through all seven seasons dying from lung cancer. The characters on Mad Men also drank casually — at home, at work, in bars — to a far greater extent than people do now. This is a separate but related discussion. Suffice to say that if you were alive for any part of history prior to the turn of the millennium, you know that people participated in self-destructive but visually interesting activities. To quote David Milch, whose work for Deadwood, NYPD Blue, and Hill Street Blues did not lack for depictions of smoking, drinking, and every other sort of vice, “There are times in life when intoxicants are not only permissible but necessary.”

I’ll be even blunter: Unless the year has a 2 in front of it, your frames had better have haze in them. Any film or TV program set in the Before Times that doesn’t show anywhere from a third to half the adult characters smoking is not actually committed to the fiction. And any platform that pressures storytellers to minimize or eliminate smoking from fiction is not merely square but an enemy of art. Again, if it’s set in period, in your mind the entire thing should smell faintly of tobacco.

18) I had some fun with this, “Are You Smarter Than An LLM?”

19) Drum, “Raw data: Public interest in Joe Biden’s age”

Here’s an interesting tidbit. Since the start of the year there have been precisely two short periods when people were interested in Joe Biden’s age:

The first spike came when special counsel Robert Hur made gratuitous remarks about Biden’s age in his classified documents report and spurred a mountain of press coverage. The second spike came when Biden’s State of the Union address made it clear that his age wasn’t a big deal after all. And since then there’s been nothing.

20) Good stuff from Katherine Wu, “How long should a species stay on life support? Decades into their recovery program, black-footed ferrets still don’t have a clear-cut path to leaving the endangered-species list.”

Roughly a century ago, scientists estimate, up to a million black-footed ferrets scampered across the plains of North America; nowadays, just 340 or so of the weasels are left in the wild, fragmented across 18 reintroduction sites. And plague “is their No. 1 nemesis,” Dean Biggins, a grassland ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told me. If ferrets were facing only habitat destruction or food insecurity, multiplying them in captivity might be enough to replace what nature has lost. But each time conservationists have added ferrets to the landscape, plague has cut down their numbers.

To keep the species from dying out, researchers have deployed just about every tool they have: vaccines and captive breeding, but also insecticides, artificial insemination, and a medley of safeguards for prairie dogs, the weasels’ primary prey. In 2020, black-footed ferrets even became the first endangered animal in North America to be successfully cloned for conservation purposes. Still, those efforts are not enough. Mike Lockhart, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s former black-footed-ferret recovery coordinator, once thought that, this far into the 21st century, ferrets “would be downlisted at least, maybe even recovered,” he told me. But their numbers have been stagnant in the wild for about a decade. Without new funds, technology, or habitat, the population looks doomed to only decline.

Ferrets’ woes are “absolutely our fault,” Biggins told me. Humans imported plague to North America more than a century ago, unleashing it on creatures whose defenses never had the chance to evolve. That single ecological error has proved essentially impossible to undo. Today, black-footed ferrets exist in the wild only because a select few people, including Livieri, have dedicated their lives to them.

21) NYT’s best books since 2000. 

22) Arthur Brooks, “How to Be Less Busy and More Happy”

The solution to excessive busyness might seem simple: do less. But that is easier said than done, isn’t it? After all, the overstuffed schedule we have today was built on trying to meet the expectations of others. But we do have research on busyness, which indicates that the real reasons you’re so overbooked might be much more complicated than this. So if you can understand why you end up with too little time and too much to do, that can point you toward strategies for tackling the problem, lowering your stress, and getting happier.

Researchers have learned that well-being involves a “sweet spot” of busyness. As you surely know from experience, having too little discretionary time lowers happiness. But you can also have too much free time, which reduces life satisfaction due to idleness.

Think of a time when a class was way too easy, or when a job left you with too little to do. Being able to goof off might have been fun for a while, but before long, you probably started to lose your mind. In 2021, scholars at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA calculated the well-being levels of people with different amounts of time to use at their own discretion; the researchers found that the optimal number of free-time hours in a working day was 9.5—more than half of people’s time awake.

Nine and a half hours is probably a lot more than you usually get or ever could get, between staying employed and living up to family obligations. In fact, the average number of discretionary hours found in the data is 1.8. But even if 9.5 hours is unrealistic, this huge difference is probably reflected in your stress levels and may have longer-term health consequences. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that worldwide, in 2016, as a result of working at least 55 hours a week, some 398,000 people died of a stroke and a further 347,000 died from heart disease. So even if you never get near 9.5 hours, increasing discretionary time is the right health and well-being strategy for most people—and probably for you too. So why aren’t more Americans demanding better work-life balance?

One answer is that for most of us, too much discretionary time is scarier than too little, and we overcorrect to avoid it. If we don’t know how to use it, free time can become idleness, which leads to boredom—and humans hate boredom. Typically, when we are under-occupied, a set of brain structures known as the Default Mode Network is activated, with behavioral effects that can be associated with rumination and self-preoccupation.

23) Frank Bruni, “The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus”

I warn my students. At the start of every semester, on the first day of every course, I confess to certain passions and quirks and tell them to be ready: I’m a stickler for correct grammar, spelling and the like, so if they don’t have it in them to care about and patrol for such errors, they probably won’t end up with the grade they’re after. I want to hear everyone’s voice — I tell them that, too — but I don’t want to hear anybody’s voice so often and so loudly that the other voices don’t have a chance.

And I’m going to repeat one phrase more often than any other: “It’s complicated.” They’ll become familiar with that. They may even become bored with it. I’ll sometimes say it when we’re discussing the roots and branches of a social ill, the motivations of public (and private) actors and a whole lot else, and that’s because I’m standing before them not as an ambassador of certainty or a font of unassailable verities but as an emissary of doubt. I want to give them intelligent questions, not final answers. I want to teach them how much they have to learn — and how much they will always have to learn.

I’d been on the faculty of Duke University and delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that each component of it was about the same quality: humility. The grammar-and-spelling bit was about surrendering to an established and easily understood way of doing things that eschewed wild individualism in favor of a common mode of communication. It showed respect for tradition, which is a force that binds us, a folding of the self into a greater whole. The voices bit — well, that’s obvious. It’s a reminder that we share the stages of our communities, our countries, our worlds, with many other actors and should conduct ourselves in a manner that recognizes this fact. And “it’s complicated” is a bulwark against arrogance, absolutism, purity, zeal.

I’d also been delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that humility is the antidote to grievance.

Quick hits (part II)

1) Noah Smith on how the internet got worse:

Ads ate the free internet (“enshittification”)

 

The term “enshittification” was coined by Cory Doctorow, one of my favorite sci-fi authors, and a keen observer of internet trends. In a Medium post in 2022 and an article in Wired in 2023, he argued that a social media platform has a predictable life-cycle:

1. First it lures a bunch of users with a great (and free) user experience, to create a network effect that makes it hard for people to leave.

2. Then, in order to make money, it attracts a bunch of business customers by doing things like selling user data and spamming users with ads. This makes the user experience worse, but the users are trapped on the platform by a network effect.

3. Finally, the platform tries to extract more value from its business customers by jacking up fees, offering its own competing products, etc. This makes the platform a worse value proposition for the business customers, but because all the users are still on the platform, and because of their own sunk costs, the advertisers can’t leave. This is what Tim O’Reilly calls “eating the ecosystem” — mainly hits businesses.

This is a very plausible model of how social media platforms work. And since platform network effects draw users away from traditional websites, it’s increasingly a description of how the entire public internet works.

But for most regular folks, the only step that matters here is Step 2 — the relentless proliferation of ads and other ways that previous user-friendly social-media platforms monetize their eyeballs.

Google is a great example. For many years, Google was the front page of the internet — a plain, simple text bar where you could type what you were looking for and immediately find websites offering you information about what you wanted. In recent years, though, Google has relentlessly monetized its ad search monopoly by increasing the amount of advertising on the platform. For example, if I want to learn about drones on the Web, there was a time when I could just search for “drones”. Now, the first and second pages of results are all ads trying to get me to buy a drone:

 

 

And when I get to the actual search results on the third screen down, it’s all just e-commerce sites offering to sell me more drones. I don’t even get to the Wikipedia link until the fifth screen down!

In other words, using Google is now akin to a video game, where the challenge is to craft a search query that avoids ad spam and gets you to the well-hidden information that you actually want. That’s not the most fun video game in the world, so when I can I now use ChatGPT (which is not yet enshittified). But ChatGPT doesn’t work for a lot of things, and so I’m stuck playing this awful, boring video game of “dodge the ads”.

2) As somewhat of a weather forecast junkie, I loved this, “Weather forecasts have become much more accurate; we now need to make them available to everyone: A four-day forecast today is as accurate as a one-day forecast 30 years ago.”

Three-day forecasts — shown in blue — have been pretty accurate since the 1980s, and have still gotten a lot better over time. Today the accuracy is around 97%.

The biggest improvements we’ve seen are for longer timeframes. By the early 2000s, 5-day forecasts were “highly accurate” and 7-day forecasts are reaching that threshold today. 10-day forecasts aren’t quite there yet but are getting better.

Why have weather forecasts improved?

A few key developments explain these improvements.²

The first big change is that the data has improved. More extensive and higher-resolution observations can be used as inputs into the weather models. This is because we have more and better satellite data, and because land-based stations are covering many more areas around the globe, and at a higher density. The precision of these instruments has improved, too.

These observations are then fed into numerical prediction models to forecast the weather. That brings us to the next two developments. The computers on which these models are run have gotten much faster. Faster speeds are crucial: the Met Office now chunks the world into grids of smaller and smaller squares. While they once modeled the world in 90-kilometer-wide squares, they are now down to a grid of 1.5-kilometer squares. That means many more calculations need to be run to get this high-resolution map. The methods to turn the observations into model outputs have also improved. We’ve gone from very simple visions of the world to methods that can capture the complexity of these systems in detail.

The final crucial factor is how these forecasts are communicated. Not long ago, you could only get daily updates in the daily newspaper. With the rise of radio and TV, you could get a few notices per day. Now, we can get minute-by-minute updates online or on our smartphones.

3) This was good.  Everything in moderation… including sunscreen, “Against Sunscreen Absolutism: Moderate sun exposure can be good for you. Why won’t American experts acknowledge that?”

Then, in 2023, a consortium of Australian public-health groups did something surprising: It issued new advice that takes careful account, for the first time, of the sun’s positive contributions. The advice itself may not seem revolutionary—experts now say that people at the lowest risk of skin cancer should spend ample time outdoors—but the idea at its core marked a radical departure from decades of public-health messaging. “Completely avoiding sun exposure is not optimal for health,” read the groups’ position statement, which extensively cites a growing body of research. Yes, UV rays cause skin cancer, but for some, too much shade can be just as harmful as too much sun.

It’s long been known that sun exposure triggers vitamin D production in the skin, and that low levels of vitamin D are associated with increased rates of stroke, heart attack, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, depression, osteoporosis, and many other diseases. It was natural to assume that vitamin D was responsible for these outcomes. “Imagine a treatment that could build bones, strengthen the immune system and lower the risks of illnesses like diabetes, heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure and cancer,” The New York Times wrote in 2010. “Some research suggests that such a wonder treatment already exists. It’s vitamin D.” By 2020, more than one in six adults were on that wonder treatment in the form of daily supplements, which promise to deliver the sun’s benefits without its dangers.

But sunlight in a pill has turned out to be a spectacular failure. In a large clinical trial that began in 2011, some 26,000 older adults were randomly assigned to receive either daily vitamin D pills or placebos, and were then followed for an average of five years. The study’s results were published in The New England Journal of Medicine two years ago. An accompanying editorial, with the headline “A Decisive Verdict on Vitamin D Supplementation,” noted that no benefits whatsoever had been found for any of the health conditions that the study tracked. “Vitamin D supplementation did not prevent cancer or cardiovascular disease, prevent falls, improve cognitive function, reduce atrial fibrillation, change body composition, reduce migraine frequency, improve stroke outcomes, decrease age-related macular degeneration, or reduce knee pain,” the journal said. “People should stop taking vitamin D supplements to prevent major diseases or extend life.”

Australia’s new guidance is in part a recognition of this reality. It’s also the result of our improved understanding of the disparate mechanisms through which sunlight affects health. Some of them are intuitive: Bright morning light, filtered through the eyes, helps regulate our circadian rhythms, improving energy, mood, and sleep. But the systemic effects of UV light operate through entirely different pathways that have been less well understood by the public, and even many health professionals. In recent years, that science has received more attention, strengthening conviction in sunlight’s possibly irreplaceable benefits. In 2019, an international collection of researchers issued a call to arms with the headline “Insufficient Sun Exposure Has Become a Real Public Health Problem.”

4) This is encouraging,  “Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity: They’re delivering solar power after dark in California and helping to stabilize grids in other states. And the technology is expanding rapidly.” Gift article with cool visuals, check it out. And a nice summary tweet.

5) Yglesias on, “How to make a difference in the 2024 election”

That said, notwithstanding my love for the Le Tigre song “Get Off The Internet,” I think it’s actually true that two of the best things you can do to defeat the MAGA movement do, in fact, happen online: giving money intelligently and posting mindfully.

I’m of course not against finding a way to volunteer for political campaigns, especially if you live in a swing state or a place with a contested Senate race or near a frontline House district. But I do think there is a romance to political volunteerism that is not borne out by the facts. There’s a reason commercial enterprises don’t typically market their products by having strangers knock on doors, telling people about the Verizon 5G network. Advertising campaigns and free communication in the media are much more efficient ways to get a message across. There can be lots of benefits to volunteering, including that you may build your own sense of agency or be able to recruit friends to do it with you and create longer-term social capital. I definitely don’t discourage it.

But if you’re really worried, give money. If you’re interested in maximizing your efficacy, give money. If you want to dedicate time and not just money to good causes, then consider getting a part-time job and giving that money.

Something that I think isn’t widely understood is that hard money contributions to political candidates are a lot more valuable, dollar-for-dollar, than Super PAC contributions. Part of this is because the coordination rules, though full of holes, are genuinely not meaningless, and it’s a lot easier for the campaign proper to use resources effectively. The biggest reason, though, is that campaigns receive (by law) preferential rates from television stations. So $1 million of small contributions genuinely buys more ads than $1 million from an outside group. And last but not least, as a donor to a campaign, you can communicate with the candidate you are supporting and urge them to emphasize electability and winning. A lot of candidates believe that hard-core progressive messages are needed to keep the money flowing, and the best way to change that is to send money and speak your mind.

But give money to who? One obvious choice is Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. If you want to beat Trump, then supporting Trump’s opponent is a very good idea.

That said, money is more valuable down-ballot, and I also don’t think you need me to tell you that Trump is running against Biden. After consulting with the smartest people I know in the business, my recommendation is to prioritize eight House seats, a couple of state supreme court elections, and the best funder of abortion ballot campaigns. More details below.

6) Sad. “They gave local news away for free. Virtually nobody wanted it.”

When 2,529 people were offered a free subscription to their local newspapers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Philadelphia Inquirer, only forty-four accepted—less than 2 percent—according to an academic study set to be published this year in the American Journal of Political Science. 

Dan Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted the study, titled “Unsubscribed and Undemanding,” in 2021. The purpose of the research, Hopkins said, was to assess practical ways to increase interest in local or regional news for an audience that seems more interested in national, partisan media outlets. (The pool of those offered subscriptions was made up of locals who had previously responded to political surveys.) Hopkins said that he was “surprised and dismayed” when he realized that only 1.7 percent had accepted the free subscription. 

The findings add context to what has been a difficult start to 2024 for American media. There have been hundreds of layoffs across the industry—the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, and Business Insider, among others, have all downsized. At the local level, half the counties in America have either one news outlet or none at all, according to Medill’s 2023 State of Local News Project. Of those counties, over two hundred are “news deserts,” without any local media whatsoever. 

7) I always enjoy reading Johann Hari, “A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong”

The primary reason we have gained weight at a pace unprecedented in human history is that our diets have radically changed in ways that have deeply undermined our ability to feel sated. My father grew up in a village in the Swiss mountains, where he ate fresh, whole foods that had been cooked from scratch and prepared on the day they were eaten. But in the 30 years between his childhood and mine, in the suburbs of London, the nature of food transformed across the Western world. He was horrified to see that almost everything I ate was reheated and heavily processed. The evidence is clear that the kind of food my father grew up eating quickly makes you feel full. But the kind of food I grew up eating, much of which is made in factories, often with artificial chemicals, left me feeling empty and as if I had a hole in my stomach. In a recent study of what American children eat, ultraprocessed food was found to make up 67 percent of their daily diet. This kind of food makes you want to eat more and more. Satiety comes late, if at all.

One scientific experiment — which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park — seemed to me to crystallize this effect. Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, grew up in Ireland. After he moved in 2000 to the United States, when he was in his 20s, he gained 30 pounds in two years. He began to wonder if the American diet has some kind of strange effect on our brains and our cravings, so he designed an experiment to test it. He and his colleague Paul Johnson raised a group of rats in a cage and gave them an abundant supply of healthy, balanced rat chow made out of the kind of food rats had been eating for a very long time. The rats would eat it when they were hungry, and then they seemed to feel sated and stopped. They did not become fat.

But then Dr. Kenny and his colleague exposed the rats to an American diet: fried bacon, Snickers bars, cheesecake and other treats. They went crazy for it. The rats would hurl themselves into the cheesecake, gorge themselves and emerge with their faces and whiskers totally slicked with it. They quickly lost almost all interest in the healthy food, and the restraint they used to show around healthy food disappeared. Within six weeks, their obesity rates soared.

After this change, Dr. Kenny and his colleague tweaked the experiment again (in a way that seems cruel to me, a former KFC addict). They took all the processed food away and gave the rats their old healthy diet. Dr. Kenny was confident that they would eat more of it, proving that processed food had expanded their appetites. But something stranger happened. It was as though the rats no longer recognized healthy food as food at all, and they barely ate it. Only when they were starving did they reluctantly start to consume it again.

Though Dr. Kenny’s study was in rats, we can see forms of this behavior everywhere. We are all living in Cheesecake Park — and the satiety-stealing effect of industrially assembled food is evidently what has created the need for these medications. Drugs like Ozempic work precisely by making us feel full. Carel le Roux, a scientist whose research was important to the development of these drugs, says they boost what he and others once called “satiety hormones.”

8) Jonathan Bernstein on the Democrats saving Mike Johnson:

That leaves the Democrats, who saved Johnson after letting former McCarthy be defeated last year.3 The situations seem similar; last October a handful of Republicans tried to oust McCarthy after he first agreed to a debt limit increase and then an extension to expiring spending bills, thus preventing a debt limit breach and then a governnment shutdown. This time, Johnson allowed a vote on Ukraine aid. In each of these cases, a House majority favored the bill – but enough Republicans opposed the measures that they would have failed without Democratic votes.

Some of the difference, according to reporting, was that Johnson simply proved more trustworthy than McCarthy.

The truth is, however, that these seemingly similar situations were actually quite different. The impasses that McCarthy eventually “solved” were phony ones that he and other Republicans created out of nothing. Republicans aren’t actually in favor of the US defaulting on its debt or the government shutting down; they were merely using those threats to blackmail Democrats into agreeing to policy concessions. And McCarthy was – at least until he wasn’t – fully on board with that strategy, which Democrats were correct to oppose.

Indeed, given that the (supposedly unpopular) debt limit vote is properly the responsibility of the majority party and that the spending bills were real compromises, Democrats were doing McCarthy a favor by supplying the votes.

On the other hand, quite a few Republicans appeared to sincerely oppose aiding Ukraine, while Democrats were eager to vote for it. Democrats may not have liked the policy implications of the long delay, but Johnson wasn’t manuevering them into casting tough votes, as McCarthy had. No wonder they were eager to dump McCarthy. And that they are now willing to live with Johnson.

So far. Congress still have a number of key deadlines between now and the election, the most notable of which is the end of the fiscal year, at which point temporary spending extensions will once again be needed to prevent a government shutdown only weeks before the election.

The normal procedure when Congress can’t finish it’s work is to simply pass short-term extensions – in this case, until they return for a lame-duck session after the election. Radical Republicans, however, may push for a government shutdown – and for other popular programs with upcoming deadlines to expire, causing chaos during the peak of the campaign, on the assumption that the Democratic president will suffer.

House Democrats are basically acting sensibly in bailing Johnson out in the aftermath of the Ukraine vote. But to keep saving him from the next round of radical Republican sniping, Democrats should insist on, well, business as usual. Either Congress gets things done on time, or Johnson allows votes on temporary extensions for spending bills, farm programs, the FAA, and anything else that’s needed.

If not? Well, there’s still plenty of time in this Congress for another Speaker.

9) I heard about this first-hand!  The 4-year old victim is the daughter of a good friend of mine (and NCSU PS grad), “Rabies alert: 4-year-old girl bitten by rabid fox in Raleigh neighborhood: Wake County Public Health has issued a rabies notice after a rabid fox bit a child in a Raleigh neighborhood.”

10) Some cool social science, “The Causal Effects of a Trump Endorsement on Voter Preferences in a General Election Scenario”

Former President Trump’s persistent influence over Republican politics divides those who argue that he mobilizes otherwise apathetic voters against those contending he mobilizes Democrats at down-ballot Republicans’ expense. Scholars and pundits alike question whether policy still matters in the face of increasingly strong personas like the former president’s. Using a survey experiment, we find suggestive evidence that Trump’s endorsement in a general election reduces the likelihood of voting for a hypothetical Republican candidate. We also test the effect of policy stances and find evidence that Republican respondents value policy stances over an endorsement, but Democrats show no signs of prioritizing one more than the other. However, when shown a hypothetical candidate with unorthodox policy stances, the mere mention of a Trump endorsement leads members of both parties to demonstrate significant changes in the likelihood of voting for that candidate. Ultimately, we show that elite signals can attenuate support derived from policies.

11) Very cool study on personality tests from Clearer Thinking:

Key takeaways from our study 

 

• Big Five Superiority: The Big Five personality test framework outperformed the other two frameworks that we tested – Jungian (MBTI-inspired) and Enneagram in predicting life outcomes.

 

 

• Neuroticism’s Impact: Removing Neuroticism from the Big Five resulted in a substantial drop in predictive accuracy.

• Continuous vs. Binary: Continuous scores in the Jungian (MBTI-style) framework predicted outcomes substantially better than binary categories (which is important since MBTI-style tests are usually presented in a categorical form)

 

• Trait Distribution: Most personality traits approximately formed bell curves, meaning that most people fall near the middle on each trait, suggesting binary categorization (as is typical with MBTI-style tests) might introduce substantial noise.

 

 

 

• Jungian (MBTI-style) Limitations: The Jungian 4-letter framework showed less predictive accuracy than the Big Five, mostly due to its use of binary types (splitting participants into letters like I vs. E and N vs. S) and its failure to measure Neuroticism. By adapting the Jungian framework to give continuous scores (rather than categories) and excluding Neuroticism from the Big Five, then the predictive gap between the two frameworks narrows. However, even with these adjustments, the Big Five (without Neuroticism) still slightly outperformed the modified Jungian test (with continuous scores, not binary types).

 

• Cross-framework Relations: Almost every Jungian trait correlated with a specific Big Five trait: the Jungian Extraversion/Introversion aligned with Big Five’s Extraversion, Intuition/Sensing with Openness, and Feeling/Thinking with Agreeableness. However, the Judging/Perceiving trait was associated with three of the Big Five traits.

 

• Integration Ineffectiveness: Combining the Big Five and Jungian test results didn’t improve prediction accuracy over using just the Big Five alone. This suggests that the Jungian test does not add significant predictive value beyond what is already captured by the Big Five.

 

• Enneagram’s Surprisingly Good Performance: Despite its simplicity, the Enneagram binary (using only the 1-digit Enneagram variable – e.g., Type 9) performed better than the binary Jungian Type at predicting life outcomes. However, the Enneagram still underperformed the Big Five.

 

• Participant Perception: Despite the Jungian test’s lower predictive accuracy, participants felt better after reading their Jungian assessments than their Big Five assessment, likely due to the Jungian test’s positive framing — it feels better to be called “Thinking” than someone “with low Agreeableness”.

 

In short, our study suggests that if you care about how well a personality test can predict outcomes in your life (or other people’s), then the Big Five test is likely superior to a Jungian (MBTI-style) and Enneagram approach. It also suggests that dichotomizing traits into binaries (rather than using continuous scores) substantially reduces predictive accuracy for these tests.

And hooray for me for being about 1st percentile in neuroticism.

12) Interesting, “Powerful Psychedelic Gains Renewed Attention as a Treatment for Opioid Addiction: New research is stirring interest in ibogaine, which appears to help ease the agony of detox and prevent relapse. Used in other countries, it remains illegal in the U.S.”

Ibogaine, a formidable psychedelic made from the root of a shrub native to Central Africa, is not for the timid. It unleashes a harrowing trip that can last more than 24 hours, and the drug can cause sudden cardiac arrest and death.

But scientists who have studied ibogaine have reported startling findings. According to a number of small studies, between a third and two-thirds of the people who were addicted to opioids or crack cocaine and were treated with the compound in a therapeutic setting were effectively cured of their habits, many after just a single session.

Ibogaine appears to provide two seemingly distinct benefits. It quells the agony of opioid withdrawal and cravings and then gives patients a born-again-style zeal for sobriety.

Now, after decades in the shadows, and with opioid overdose deaths exceeding 100,000 a year, ibogaine is drawing a surge of fresh interest from researchers who believe it has the potential to treat opioid use disorder.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that ibogaine saved my life, allowed me to make amends with the people I hurt and helped me learn to love myself again,” said Jessica Blackburn, 37, who is recovering from heroin addiction and has been sober for eight years. “My biggest frustration is that more people don’t have access to it.”

That’s because ibogaine is illegal in the United States. Patients have to go abroad for ibogaine therapy, often at unregulated clinics that provide little medical oversight.

13) I found the struggle of girls’ HS basketball in NC very interesting:

Whatever it is, in the 2023-24 season, a theme has emerged in girls’ basketball and it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon:

You’re either really good these days — or you’re not.

The gap between North Carolina’s haves and have-nots has perhaps never been wider.

Just two years ago, for example, West Mecklenburg didn’t win a game, but the Hawks’ average margin of defeat was about 25 points per game.

Two years ago, West Meck’s conference had four teams with a winning record and the Hawks were the only team with fewer than seven wins.

This year?

Three league teams have three or fewer wins, and the scores in that Queen City 3A/4A conference — and around the state — are often eye-popping.

These are some real scores that have been reported to The Charlotte Observer this season: 96-7, 97-5, 102-5. Those types of scores make some other results — 83-34, 74-27, 90-23 — almost seem normal.

And those types of scores are reported every Tuesday and Friday.

“I don’t know what a coach thinks about when you lose 109-5,” Hopewell’s Brown said. “One thing is (your team’s) morale. We address it by saying, ‘We’ve got to put it behind us. We’ve got to persevere.’ That’s an adverse situation. But even though we’re taking a lot of lopsided defeats, we haven’t had the issue with bad body language, demeanor and lack of hope. Anybody that has seen us play knows we play from beginning to end, 32 minutes, hard. That’s whether we’re up or down by 80, 40, 20, 15.”

Where did the girls go?

Area coaches, like Brown, said the Charlotte area has a smaller pool of players than in the past and that more talented players — sometimes directed by summer basketball coaches — are finding ways to come together on a handful of teams.

Taking good players from other schools makes those teams weaker, coaches say, and creates that situation where you have no middle class.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools did not respond to an Observer request for girls’ basketball participation figures, but anecdotally, coaches have said fewer junior varsity teams are playing and there are fewer players on many varsity teams now, too.

14) It really bugs me that a piece of art can be seen as not all that special and valued at $17,000.  Then figure out it was painted by Rembrandt and it’s worth $14 million.  It’s either great art or it’s not, regardless of who painted it.  In this case, also a really interesting debate about whether it’s really a Rembrandt.  A lot going on here visually you should check out– gift link. 

15) This is pretty wild, “Gut Bacteria May Play Role in Vision Loss”

Summary: Researchers found a surprising connection between gut bacteria and inherited eye diseases, potentially opening new treatment avenues using antimicrobials. They discovered that a specific genetic mutation could weaken the body’s defenses, allowing gut bacteria to infiltrate the eye and cause sight loss.

The study focused on the CRB1 gene, crucial for maintaining the integrity of the eye’s and gut’s barriers. By treating affected mice with antimicrobials, the team successfully prevented blindness without repairing the damaged cellular barriers, suggesting a novel treatment strategy for CRB1-linked eye diseases.

Key Facts:

1. The study identifies a link between gut bacteria and blindness in mice with a specific genetic mutation affecting the CRB1 gene.
2. Antimicrobial treatment prevented sight loss in mice, indicating a potential new therapy for inherited eye diseases.
3. This research could transform the treatment landscape for CRB1-associated eye conditions and possibly extend to other eye diseases.

16) This was a really good piece on suicide in the Morning newsletter a while back:

But something is changing in the United States, where the suicide rate has risen by about 35 percent over two decades, with deaths approaching 50,000 annually. The U.S. is a glaring exception among wealthy countries; globally, the suicide rate has been dropping steeply and steadily.

Barriers are in the works on the William Howard Taft Bridge in Washington, D.C., the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Maine and several Rhode Island bridges. Universities in Texas and Florida have budgeted millions of dollars for barriers on high structures. Scores of communities are debating similar steps.

Research has demonstrated that suicide is most often an impulsive act, with a period of acute risk that passes in hours, or even minutes. Contrary to what many assume, people who survive suicide attempts often go on to do well: Nine out of 10 of them do not die by suicide.

Policymakers, it seems, are paying attention. I have been reporting on mental health for The New York Times for two years, and in today’s newsletter I will look at promising, evidence-based efforts to prevent suicide.

A single element

For generations, psychiatrists believed that, in the words of the British researcher Norman Kreitman, “anyone bent on self-destruction must eventually succeed.”

Then something strange and wonderful happened: Midway through the 1960s, the annual number of suicides in Britain began dropping — by 35 percent in the following years — even as tolls crept up in other parts of Europe.

No one could say why. Had medicine improved, so that more people survived poisoning? Were antidepressant medications bringing down levels of despair? Had life in Britain just gotten better?

The real explanation, Kreitman discovered, was none of these. The drop in suicides had come about almost by accident: As the United Kingdom phased out coal gas from its supply to household stoves, levels of carbon monoxide decreased. Suicide by gas accounted for almost half of the suicides in 1960.

It turns out that blocking access to a single lethal means — if it is the right one — can make a huge difference.

The strategy that arose from this realization is known as “means restriction” or “means safety,” and vast natural experiments have borne it out. When Sri Lanka restricted the import of toxic pesticides, which people had ingested in moments of crisis, its suicide rate dropped by half over the next decade.

Arresting an urge

More than half of U.S. suicides are carried out with firearms. Guns are a reliably deadly means, resulting in death in about 90 percent of attempted suicides; intentional overdoses, by contrast, result in death about 3 percent of the time.

When an attempt fails, “these folks generally survive and go on to get past these thoughts, go on to live happy, full lives,” said Dr. Paul Nestadt, a suicide researcher at Johns Hopkins. “If you are a gun owner, that brief moment where the suicidal thoughts exceed the desire to be alive for tomorrow, that’s all it takes.”

Other countries, like Israel, have brought down suicide rates dramatically by restricting access to guns. But in the U.S., about 400 million guns are circulating in private hands, said Michael Anestis, who leads the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. “We don’t know where they are, and even if we did, we would have no way of getting them,” he said.

Twenty-one states have passed red flag laws, which allow the authorities to remove firearms temporarily from individuals identified as dangerous to themselves or others. A follow-up study found that firearm suicides dropped 7.5 percent in Indiana in the decade after the law’s passage; Connecticut saw a 13.7 percent drop over eight years as the state began to enforce the law in earnest.

Another promising approach is to change gun storage habits, which Anestis likened to public health campaigns around smoking or drunken driving. He threw out some ideas, including financial incentives, such as providing gun owners with a hefty coupon for a gun safe, and encouraging gun shops to install lockers so people could temporarily store their guns outside of the home.

Even brief counseling sessions can change a gun owner’s habits, trials show. Anestis recalled one subject who was particularly dismissive of the counselor’s advice but returned six months later with a different outlook. “Since I was last here, I broke up with my fiancé and I let my brother hold my guns. If I hadn’t done that, I’m pretty sure I’d be dead,” the subject told researchers.

17) Good NYT Editorial on campus speech and protests:

The point of protest is to break such rules, of course, and to disrupt daily routines so profoundly as to grab on to the world’s attention and sympathies. Campuses should be able to tolerate some degree of disruption, which is inherent to any protest. That makes it even more important that school administrators respond when the permissible limits for speech are violated.

During the current demonstrations, a lack of accountability has helped produce a crisis.

It has left some Jewish students feeling systematically harassed. It has deprived many students of access to parts of campus life. On campuses where in-person classes or commencement exercises were canceled, students have watched their basic expectations for a university experience evaporate. And at times, the protesters themselves have been directly endangered — the disarray and violence of the past weeks has been escalated by the continued involvement of both the police and external agitators.

Amid the protests, there has been much discussion of both antisemitism and Islamophobia, and when the line is crossed into hate speech. There are profound risks to imposing overly expansive definitions of inappropriate speech, and universities have been rightly chided for doing so in the past. But it should be easy to agree that no student, faculty member, administrator or university staff member on a campus should be threatened or intimidated. School policies should reflect that, and they should be enforced when necessary.

In the longer term, a lack of clarity around acceptable forms of expression, and a failure to hold those who break those norms to account, has opened up the pursuit of higher learning to the whims of those motivated by hypocrisy and cynicism…

The absence of steady and principled leadership is what opened the campus gates to such cynicism in the first place. For several years, many university leaders have failed to act as their students and faculty have shown ever greater readiness to block an expanding range of views that they deem wrong or beyond the pale. Some scholars report that this has had a chilling effect on their work, making them less willing to participate in the academy or in the wider world of public discourse. The price of pushing boundaries, particularly with more conservative ideas, has become higher and higher.

Schools ought to be teaching their students that there is as much courage in listening as there is in speaking up. It has not gone unnoticed — on campuses but also by members of Congress and by the public writ large — that many of those who are now demanding the right to protest have previously sought to curtail the speech of those whom they declared hateful.

Establishing a culture of openness and free expression is crucial to the mission of educational institutions. That includes clear guardrails on conduct and enforcement of those guardrails, regardless of the speaker or the topic. Doing so would not only help restore order on college campuses today, but would also strengthen the cultural bedrock of higher education for generations to come.

18) Science/biotechnology for the win again, “UK toddler has hearing restored in world first gene therapy trial”

A British toddler has had her hearing restored after becoming the first person in the world to take part in a pioneering gene therapy trial, in a development that doctors say marks a new era in treating deafness.

Opal Sandy was born unable to hear anything due to auditory neuropathy, a condition that disrupts nerve impulses travelling from the inner ear to the brain and can be caused by a faulty gene.

But after receiving an infusion containing a working copy of the gene during groundbreaking surgery that took just 16 minutes, the 18-month-old can hear almost perfectly and enjoys playing with toy drums.

19) Excellent from Thomas Mills, “Rules for vouchers: If we’re going to have state-funded private schools, they need standards and conditions.”

North Carolina Republicans came into power screaming that our public schools are broken and promptly began cutting resources. They would like to shift the financial responsibility for schools to local government, but North Carolina’s constitution says that the state has the responsibility to provide children with a sound basic education. Now, 13 years after they first began writing public school budgets and eight years in control of the Department of Public Instruction, they are still claiming schools are broken. If that’s true, then they broke them, or at the very least, they have failed to fix them. For all of their complaints about public schools, the one thing they have never tried is adequately funding them.

Republicans claim that they want to make schools compete for students. In reality, they want to provide tax breaks for the rich because they don’t believe those who benefit the most from our economic system and society have any obligation to those who struggle. They claimed for years that the purpose of vouchers was to allow financially struggling families to send their children to private schools. Now, they are giving vouchers to families who already send their children to private schools in a direct transfer of money from underfunded school systems to the state’s wealthiest families. Yeah, I’m opposed to that.

I also don’t believe we should be funding private schools that discriminate. Any school that denies entry based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender or national origin should not receive public funds. If we’re going to ask people who meet those criteria to pay taxes, they should not be forced to have their tax dollars used against them.

Private schools and charters should be held to the same standards and regulations as public schools if they are accepting tax dollars. If public school teachers must post their lesson plans to increase accountability, private school teachers should be required to do the same. Test scores of private schools that accept public money should be made public. Teacher and administrative salaries should be publicly available. Private schools that accept tax dollars should be subject to audits from the state auditor to ensure our money is not being misspent. We should watch over our tax dollars in private schools just as carefully as we watch them in other government programs.

20) Always love reading deBoer on disability issues:

And it’s difference that, I think, needs to really be pulled apart here. Because Rosenbaum is guilty of a kind of slippage that has become very common to disability talk: conjoined twins are normal when normal is a desirable thing to be and not normal when normal is not a desirable thing to be. It’s reminiscent of one of the default images of disability discourse in the 21st century, an autistic person who wants their autism to not result in any special treatment or consideration whatsoever, except in those moments when they think their autism entitles them to special treatment or consideration. It’s the era of “my condition is not a disability, now give me accommodation for my disability or you’re a bigot.”

Throughout, Rosenbaum suggests that normalcy is a bad thing, arguing that the pursuit of normal has hurt the rights of conjoined twins (including through surgically separating them, which she disdains) and of trans people. She goes so far as to mock the Hensel twins for their performance of normalcy; no word on whether it’s possible that they’re acting that way because that is what is natural or comfortable or best for them. That “normal” is not a status to be pursued or lionized is a matter of holy writ in many corners of the disability activist world. And yet you’ll note that it’s also considered a terrible insult to suggest that the disabled are not normal, that to call them abnormal or different or unusual is also assumed to be offensive. I would argue that this is internally contradictory – if you reject normalcy as a goal state then you should embrace abnormality – but this is one of many arguments in this domain that I’ve clearly lost.

I suspect that in fact a good portion of the disabled community writ large wants exactly to be normal, to receive normal treatment, to live normal lives. I suspect that very many of them want elevators and braille and closed captions and a legal doctrine of reasonable accommodation so that they can better achieve normal existence. And I further suspect that the disability activist class has embraced the rejection of normalcy in large part because that class is largely made up of people with the least-debilitating, most-manageable conditions, who suffer little from being not-normal and therefore have far less reason to aspire to normal experience than the average disabled person. I would argue that an essential part of evaluating the claims of a disability activist is to assess to what degree their condition has rendered them unable to live without severe restriction or discomfort. It’s not that, say, the self-diagnosed autistic Harvard student with big ideas and an unflinching attitude doesn’t have anything useful to say or isn’t really disabled. (I mean, they may not be, but who’s to say.) The problem is that most people with disabilities are a) not activists and b) do not confront disability through abstract and deracinated concepts of societal respect and normative judgment but rather through the painful experience of navigating the world with physical and mental impairments (disabilities, problems, disorders, less good things) that hurt them. Meanwhile, we live in a culture where diagnosis increasingly collapses into yet another stab at identity. And the loudest tend to be the ones who have the ability to slip back into normal when they want.

21) Ugh. “Schools in One Virginia County to Reinstate Confederate Names”

After a meeting that lasted for hours, the Shenandoah County school board voted early Friday morning to restore the names of three Confederate officers to schools in the district.

With the vote, the district appears to be the first in the country to return Confederate names to schools that had removed them after the summer of 2020, according to researchers at the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative.

The vote rolled back a decision made four years ago, when the killing of George Floyd prompted nationwide demands for a racial reckoning. At a virtual meeting in July 2020, the summer of pandemic and protests, the board voted 5-1 to drop the names of two schools — Ashby-Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High — that it deemed incompatible with a recently passed resolution condemning racism. The schools were renamed the next year as Honey Run and Mountain View.

But a fury had been unleashed in the rural county in the mountains of Virginia. People crowded into school board meetings, denouncing the name changes as secretive and rushed through with little advance notice, and voicing deeper resentments about cultural shifts they saw as being foisted upon them.

Return of quick hits!

Sorry, been a busy boy.  Hope to provide a lot more good content once I get back in the swing.  Here’s some quick hits for now…

1) These seem good… “10 Impressive Questions to Ask in a Job Interview“

2) So much, this.  I grew up in the suburb of Springfield, VA and Cary, NC just felt like home to me. “What the Suburb Haters Don’t Understand: The homogeneity of the suburbs has an upside: If strip malls and subdivisions remind you of home, you can feel nostalgic almost anywhere.”

Yet the majority of Americans live in this “nowhere.” Being precise about the proportion of the U.S. that is suburbia is difficult—the federal government, in much of its data, doesn’t distinguish “suburban” as a category distinct from “rural” and “urban” (perhaps implying that it, too, considers these places not worth caring about). But in the 2017 American Housing Survey, the government asked people to describe their own neighborhoods, and 52 percent classified them as suburban. These neighborhoods aren’t frozen 1950s stereotypes, either; they are evolving places. For instance, once synonymous with segregation, the suburbs are now more diverse than ever.

The point is: A lot of life happens in these places. Where there is life, there is connection and emotion. Where there is connection and emotion, nostalgia follows. And so, yes, decades of policy decisions and corporate development have led to what Kunstler calls the “depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading” landscapes of the suburbs. But at the same time, many people who have called these places home still have a sentimental connection to them, any spiritual degradation notwithstanding. And a curious side effect of the ubiquity of suburban institutions is that I can feel that small spark of recognition—of, dare I say it, “home”—anywhere I encounter it.

3) A massive problem with Trump that receives way too little attention his how he encourages violence in our politics. Tom Nichols, “Supporting Trump Means Supporting a Culture of Violence: The former president is encouraging threats against his enemies—again.”

On Good Friday, Donald Trump shared a video that prominently featured a truck with a picture of a hog-tied Joe Biden on it. I’ve seen this art on a tailgate in person, and it looks like a kidnapped Biden is a captive in the truck bed.

The former president, running for his old office, knowingly transmitted a picture of the sitting president of the United States as a bound hostage.

Of course, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly began the minimizing and what-abouting: “That picture,” he said in a statement, “was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway. Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”

I cannot recall prominent elected Democrats calling for hurting Trump or his family. The closest Biden got was when he once lost his temper six years ago and said that if he and Trump were in high school, he’d have wanted to beat him up behind the gym, a comment Biden later said he regretted. And there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Biden or his spokespeople ever promoted the idea that the 45th president should be taken hostage. Over the weekend, Trump’s defenders took to social media to keep raising the 2017 picture in which the comedian Kathy Griffin held up an effigy of Trump’s severed head. So let us all stipulate: Her stunt was ghastly. Griffin’s comedy—or parody, or protest art—was in bad taste and potentially a risk to a sitting president. She paid for it: The Secret Service investigated her, and her career at CNN was torched…

Trump’s fan base will shrug off its leader’s condoning of violent fantasies and implied threats of violence as more harmless lib-owning. But what Trump is doing is dangerous, and the time is long past to stop treating support for his candidacy as just one of many ordinary political choices. As the historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted on Friday on X: “This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.”

Other Americans are well within their rights to wonder if this is what Trump supporters actually want to see in 2024.

Perhaps a thought experiment might help: Would today’s Trump supporters think it hilarious, say, to see Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter bound in the same way that Biden was depicted? Perhaps Bill Clinton or the Bushes tied up like hostages? (We can only begin to imagine what kind of ugly end the truck Rembrandts might have portrayed for Barack Obama.)

After seeing Trump post this video, I found myself wanting to ask his voters the questions that always occur after one of his outrages: Is this okay with you? Is this something you’d want your children to see?

4) Tom Edsall on North Carolina’s politics this year.  Much to my dismay, he emailed me for my take and didn’t even bother to thank me for my answers (which you know were quote-worthy!) that he did not use.  Apparently, NYT’s new gift link policy is that I can share as many as I want, but they expire after 30 days.  Going to start sharing a lot more gift links, like this one.  

5) Thomas Mills has been writing great stuff on NC lately:

The Republican assault on public education in North Carolina began as a lie. They took power after the GOP wave of 2010 and immediately began saying that our public schools were “broken.” They attacked teachers, claiming they had cushy jobs with too much leave time. Their solution, now clear, was to really break them and the consequences to children be damned.

In reality, North Carolina’s public schools were improving steadily. Teacher pay and per pupil spending were reaching the national average. Test scores improved and so did graduation rates. Sure, some schools suffered, especially in economically disadvantaged areas where tax bases were too low to supplement legislative allocations, but the Leandro court decision required more state money to flow to those school systems. Progress from the 1990s through 2010 was slow but steady.

Republicans, though, had different ideas. They have never been focused on the quality of our public schools. Their priority is removing societal responsibility for educating children. They would “fix” public schools by starving them.

They cut per pupil spending and teacher pay to among the lowest in the nation. They expanded charter schools, allowing them to operate with little oversight and jump-started a massive educational industrial complex of for-profit schools with powerful lobbyists. They implemented a voucher program, initially claiming to give poor kids an opportunity to go to private schools to avoid the failing public ones, then lifting the income cap and allowing the richest families in the state to apply for subsidies.

The GOP’s impact on public education showed up in dueling headlines this week. The conservative Carolina Journal banner crowed, “Record Demand for Opportunity Scholarships: Legislature Should Respond.” The News & Observer reported “Teachers are leaving in droves.” They are two sides of the same coin…

Republicans’ educational “reform” has been a lie from the beginning because, in reality, they don’t believe in public education at all. Their claim that schools were broken was a lie. Their insistence that “opportunity scholarships” were a way to give poor kids the chance to go to private schools was a lie. Their claim that they are paying teachers more is a lie. They have broken our educational system and in nominating Mark Robinson for governor and Michele Morrow superintendent of public instruction show they don’t mind doing more damage to the morale of teachers or the quality of our schools.

But really, it’s not even about schools. It’s about taxes. In their radical belief in self-reliance and the free market, they don’t believe government should be offering anybody either a hand out or a hand up. They are so twisted in their ideological zeal to keep money in the pockets of the wealthy and corporations, that they will let public school die and support a guy like Donald Trump with no morals and a disdain for the Constitution.

Self-interest and taxes drive the Republican elite. Do you really think they would support Trump if he said he would raise taxes on corporations or the richest Americans? Of course not, but they’ll tolerate an attempt to undermine our democracy, foment political violence, cavort with corrupt and vicious dictators, and exploit the presidency for political gain as long as he won’t tax rich people.

6) Good stuff on the pig kidney. This really could prove revolutionary. “He Got a Pig Kidney Transplant. Now Doctors Need to Keep It Working: Researchers think a combination of genetic edits and an experimental immunosuppressive drug could make the first pig kidney transplant a long-term success.”

Other than rejection of the organ, one of the most common transplant complications is infection. Doctors have to strike a balance when prescribing immunosuppressive drugs: too low a dose can lead to rejection, while too much can make a patient vulnerable to infection. Immunosuppressants are powerful drugs that can cause a range of side effects, including fatigue, nausea, and vomiting.

Despite the deaths of the two pig heart recipients, Riella is optimistic about Slayman’s transplant. For one, he says, Slayman was relatively healthy when he underwent the surgery. He qualified for a human kidney but because of his rare blood type he would likely need to wait six to seven years to get one. The two individuals who received pig heart transplants were so ill that they didn’t qualify for a human organ.

In addition to close monitoring and traditional immunosuppressants, Slayman’s medical team is treating him with an experimental drug called tegoprubart, developed by Eledon Pharmaceuticals of Irvine, California. Given every three weeks via an IV, tegoprubart blocks crosstalk between two key immune cells in the body, T cells and B cells, which helps suppress the immune response against the donor organ. The drug has been used in monkeys that have received gene-edited pig organs…

Riella is also hopeful that the 69 genetic alterations made to the pig that supplied the donor organ will help Slayman’s kidney keep functioning. Pig organs aren’t naturally compatible in the human body. The company that supplied the pig, eGenesis, used Crispr to add certain human genes, remove some pig genes, and inactivate latent viruses in the pig genome that could hypothetically infect a human recipient. The pigs are produced using cloning; scientists make the edits to a single pig cell and use that cell to form an embryo. The embryos are cloned and transferred to the womb of a female pig so that her offspring end up with the edits.

“We hope that this combination will be the secret sauce to getting this kidney to a longer graft survival,” Riella says.

7) One of my very favorite books to read to my kids was Sandra Boynton’s Hippos Go Berserk.  I loved it so much that even though my youngest is 13, I can still recite the whole book from memory (which, yes, I do as a party trick on occasion– I”m so much fun).  And now there’s a sequel.  To give to my grandkids some day, I guess.  

8) Fair to say most people are not as disciplined about sports gambling as I am.  Good stuff from Ben Krauss, “The Take Bakery: How to reform the sports gambling industry”

If you’re a devout sports fan, you see bets discussed during every pre-game show. If you flip through cable television, you’re bound to catch Kevin Hart or Jaime Foxx extolling the virtues of wagering on professional athletes. Even if you live under a rock, I’m confident you’re aware that Charles Barkley has a “can’t miss parlay.” And that he wants you, yes YOU, to stop reading this article and bet right now.

But if we reduce the sports gambling demand, we will in turn cut off the pernicious supply of gambling content that has ingrained itself so deeply in the zeitgeist.

The reasoning is fairly intuitive: These ads constantly implore consumers to download the app and start betting now, and they usually include special offers to kick-start that compulsive behavior immediately. According to Nielsen, 93% of sports gambling ads in 2022 were aired by mobile sports gambling companies.

But if we ban mobile sporting apps, and limit the demand of compulsive gambling behavior, there is just less of an incentive for companies to advertise. The cost of paying celebrities and buying expensive ad spots won’t be worth the potential return due to the lack of customers.

There are, of course, other ways to tamp down the sports advertising industry. Rep. Paul Tonko introduced legislation banning sports gambling advertisements that is modeled after the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act. And in my last piece, I also suggested that the FCC take action to ban discussion of gambling during sports broadcasts.

But these will all likely face free and commercial speech challenges, and frankly, it’s more effective to treat the source of the issue. By implementing the brick and mortar rule and introducing a tax that deters high-use gambling behavior, we can hopefully drive the sports gambling industry to the annals of oblivion.

But not too far into oblivion because I actually have a really great NBA finals futures bet. And I’d still like the opportunity to place it.

9) And this part of the problem just disgusts me.  I hate the people who behave this way so much, “Gambling has made ends of games miserable for college basketball benchwarmers”

Carson Barrett tore his meniscus earlier this year. The injury required surgery, but this is the last run for the Purdue senior. Though he’s never seen a whole lot of playing time in his career, he wanted to at least have a shot at getting on the court this season. So Barrett delayed the repair work, gladly taking the exchange of some pretty painful nights with a throbbing knee in favor of even a few minutes of hooping.

This season he’s played a grand total of 21 minutes and scored six points. Three of them came in the NCAA Tournament. With 37 seconds left in a game long decided, Barrett drained a baseline 3 against Grambling State, putting himself in the box score of Purdue’s first-round victory. As the ball swished through the net, the bench erupted, Barrett’s teammates knowing full well what he’d sacrificed and endured. His bucket would be the last for the Boilermakers as Purdue cruised to a 78-50 win. Back in the locker room, Barrett picked up his phone and scrolled through the congratulatory texts from friends and started to search through his DMs on social media.

He stumbled on this:

You sure are a son of a b—.
Hope you enjoy selling cars for the rest of your life.

Followed by:

I hope you f-ing die.

And then the kicker:

Kill yourself for taking that 3 you f-ing worthless loser. Slit your f-ing throat you f-ing f– that was completely uncalled for. I hope you f-ing kill yourself.

The Boilermakers were 27-point favorites against Grambling. Barrett’s bucket meant they won by 28. “I had no idea what the line was,” Barrett said. “I’m just out there, making memories with my friends.”

10) I cannot remember if I shared this one already.  Even if I did, it’s excellent.  Gift link here, “Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed: The sponsors of the law fundamentally misunderstood the nature of addiction.”

Though our polarized politics tends to frame policy choices as on-off switches, in truth they are more like a dial with many intervening settings. That dial can be productively turned in many parts of the country. Many states are far more punitive toward drug users than Oregon was before Measure 110 passed. They overemphasize incarceration of people who use drugs, they do not provide adequate, publicly funded health treatment and health insurance, and they do not use criminal justice productively to discourage drug use (for instance, by using arrests and probations as leverage to get people into drug courts and treatment). If these states could be persuaded to dial down their criminal-justice approach to approximate what Oregon had before Measure 110, except with adequately funded, evidence-based prevention and treatment, substantial gains in public health and safety would likely follow. The future of successful drug-policy reform is not greater laxity in states that are already quite progressive in their approach to drug use; it is using criminal justice and public health together in a balanced, pragmatic fashion, as Oregon is now poised to do.

11) I’m honestly amazed at Brian Klaas’s ability to just keep on coming up with great essays like this, “Why We Need Fools: Jesters, Power, and Cults of Personality: The history of court jesters and fools reveals lessons about the nature of modern power, from narcissistic hubris to cults of personality—and the necessity of being told when you’re wrong.”

IV: No Jesters in the Courts of Trump or Putin: Cults of Personality and the “Dictator Trap”

 

The wisdom of jesters lies with rulers who recognize that truth is more valuable than fawning admiration. And yet, we are often ruled by people who can’t take a joke—thin-skinned authoritarians who demand fealty. When they make a catastrophic mistake, it’s reality that’s wrong, never themselves. So, they make up lies— and then demand that their disciples parrot their lies as a loyalty test.1

To Trump, there is no worse fate than being laughed at. On social media, Trump routinely suggested that our enemies were “laughing up their sleeves” at America. And when NBC’s Saturday Night Live ridiculed him, he called for “retribution” against the network. For Trump, being reduced to a punchline is the pinnacle of humiliation. (There is some speculation that Trump decided to run for president in 2016 after Obama mocked him at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner).2

In an even more colorful example from Turkey, President Erdogan pressured the German government to prosecute a comedian who implied that Erdogan has sex with goats. In another case, as I previously highlighted:

A civil servant was arrested and tried for sharing a meme that compared Erdogan to Gollum, the miserable creature from The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. (The defense argued that the memes actually depicted Smeagol, Gollum’s alter-ego and his goodness within, forcing the judge to call for a recess to better understand the character, since he had not read the books or seen the films). Such absurdity is inevitable when rulers try to police comedy.

Thin-skinned egotism from narcissistic autocrats is exactly the opposite of the ethos of the jester, an inversion of a tried-and-tested system that, for thousands of years, allowed leaders to get honest feedback without losing face.

Today, for many (bad) leaders, truth spoken to power is viewed as an unforgivable affront, not an indispensable necessity. After all, anyone who has ever challenged Trump has been purged from his entourage, denounced as a RINO (Republican-in-Name-Only) even for the most minor transgressions. Regrettably, while there are plenty of unserious clowns surrounding them, there are no truth-telling jesters in the courts of Trump or Putin.

Instead, modern autocrats thirst only for unwavering fealty, eliminating those who question the myths that surround the leader. Through endless loyalty tests and public displays of unquestioning devotion, a cult of personality emerges.

No need to speak truth to power, because the powerful determine the truth.

While jesters puncture the myths and combat the lies that surround powerful figures, cults of personality do the opposite: they perpetuate falsehoods so effectively that the dictator begins to believe their own lies. The fake world constructed through displays of slavish devotion becomes the dictator’s reality.

When this happens, you end up with a phenomenon that I call “The Dictator Trap”:

They hear only from sycophants, and get bad advice. They misunderstand their population. They don’t see threats coming until it’s too late…despots rarely get told that their stupid ideas are stupid, or that their ill-conceived wars are likely to be catastrophic. Offering honest criticism is a deadly game and most advisers avoid doing so. Those who dare to gamble eventually lose and are purged. So over time, the advisers who remain are usually yes-men who act like bobbleheads, nodding along when the despot outlines some crackpot scheme.

For vast stretches of history, kings, queens, and other autocrats have understood this informational dilemma between loyalty and truth. For thousands of years, erudite rulers engineered an ingenious solution to become wiser—the jester. And yet, our modern despots, aspiring despots, and boardroom tyrants have forgotten that lesson, which, through their unchecked hubris, has meant the joke is on us, suffering from needless stupidity emanating from overly fragile egos.

V: Long Live the Jester

We need jesters.

Humor, the great disarmer, is the surest way to give “happy unhappy” answers, to ignore the decorum of deferential niceties—to keep the focus on what’s true, rather than what’s comforting. Though we need not dress modern jesters up in harlequin hats with baubles and force them to don special cloaks, good leaders understand the most potent lesson of the fool: that eliciting honest criticism—delivered good-naturedly—is the secret weapon of wisdom.

12) Nate Cohn, “How ‘All in the Family’ Explains Biden’s Strength Among Seniors: Yesterday’s hippies have become today’s seniors — and they’re still voting Democratic.”

To understand why, consider Archie Bunker, the working-class “lovable bigot” from the 1970s hit sitcom “All in the Family,” and his TV family.

The show revolved around Archie’s feuds with his 20-something feminist daughter, Gloria, and his liberal son-in-law, Michael, over race, gender and politics. (The existence of a 30-minute-long YouTube video called “Racist Archie Bunker Compilation” — which has nearly two million views — tells you most of what you need to know about the show and his character.)

It’s not unreasonable if Archie is your image of an older voter. As recently as 15 years ago, every single voter over age 65 was born before the end of World War II and came of age before the cultural revolution of the 1960s that shaped the views of many baby boomers voters for a lifetime.

Archie’s generation was the only one that reacted to the 2008 nomination of Barack Obama by shifting right: A higher share of them voted for John McCain in 2008 than for George W. Bush in 2004.

But in 2024, Archie shouldn’t be your image of a senior. Archie would be 100 years old today; his generation, called the Greatest Generation, has almost entirely died. The generation that came after Archie’s — the conservative Silent Generation, who grew up during the popular Eisenhower presidency in the “Leave It to Beaver” 1950s — has mostly died, too. Just 20 percent of the Silent Generation is alive today.

Instead, you may be better off thinking of Michael and Gloria. They are boomers, and they would be in their 70s today.

As a result, today’s seniors bear little resemblance to those from 10 or 15 years ago. Today, Madonna is a senior. So are Ellen DeGeneres and Katie Couric. By Election Day, Magic Johnson will be 65. ​Even though they may not feel like older voters to you, these boomers are the new seniors.

13) Love this.  Needed to be said, “The Problem With Saying ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’”

The shift to “sex assigned at birth” may be well intentioned, but it is not progress. We are not against politeness or expressions of solidarity, but “sex assigned at birth” can confuse people and creates doubt about a biological fact when there shouldn’t be any. Nor is the phrase called for because our traditional understanding of sex needs correcting — it doesn’t.

This matters because sex matters. Sex is a fundamental biological feature with significant consequences for our species, so there are costs to encouraging misconceptions about it.

Sex matters for health, safety and social policy and interacts in complicated ways with culture. Women are nearly twice as likely as men to experience harmful side effects from drugs, a problem that may be ameliorated by reducing drug doses for females. Males, meanwhile, are more likely to die from Covid-19 and cancer, and commit the vast majority of homicides and sexual assaults. We aren’t suggesting that “assigned sex” will increase the death toll. However, terminology about important matters should be as clear as possible.

More generally, the interaction between sex and human culture is crucial to understanding psychological and physical differences between boys and girls, men and women. We cannot have such understanding unless we know what sex is, which means having the linguistic tools necessary to discuss it. The Associated Press cautions journalists that describing women as “female” may be objectionable because “it can be seen as emphasizing biology,” but sometimes biology is highly relevant. The heated debate about transgender women participating in female sports is an example; whatever view one takes on the matter, biologically driven athletic differences between the sexes are real.

When influential organizations and individuals promote “sex assigned at birth,” they are encouraging a culture in which citizens can be shamed for using words like “sex,” “male” and “female” that are familiar to everyone in society, as well as necessary to discuss the implications of sex. This is not the usual kind of censoriousness, which discourages the public endorsement of certain opinions. It is more subtle, repressing the very vocabulary needed to discuss the opinions in the first place…

The problem is that “sex assigned at birth”— unlike “larger-bodied”— is very misleading. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” suggests that the person’s sex is at best a matter of educated guesswork. “Assigned” can connote arbitrariness — as in “assigned classroom seating” — and so “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer.

Contrary to what we might assume, avoiding “sex” doesn’t serve the cause of inclusivity: not speaking plainly about males and females is patronizing. We sometimes sugarcoat the biological facts for children, but competent adults deserve straight talk. Nor are circumlocutions needed to secure personal protections and rights, including transgender rights. In the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020, which outlawed workplace discrimination against gay and transgender people, Justice Neil Gorsuch used “sex,” not “sex assigned at birth.”

14) These threads on the Comanche Indians were amazing.

Part 2 of a thread on the Comanche, their reign as the horse lords of the Southern Plains, and how they were eventually defeated by the Anglo-Texans. 🧵

(Part 1 👇)https://t.co/JQ4Pcs2PGe pic.twitter.com/2mvV4GwmX7

— Vandie (@VanDiemen_) March 31, 2024

15) And, of course, I love this from deBoer, “Treating Every Meaningless Cultural Issue as a Racial Proxy War Helps No One”

Yesterday, the South Carolina Gamecocks women’s basketball team completed a magical undefeated season to win the NCAA tournament, beating the Iowa Hawkeyes and avenging their only loss of last season in doing so. South Carolina coach Dawn Staley solidified her position as the best in the business, while Iowa breakout superstar Caitlin Clark was again denied a championship to cement her record-breaking career. Two worthy adversaries went up against each other on the largest stage, traded blow for blow, and drew record ratings in doing so. What a game, what a season, what a wonderful outcome for women’s basketball and women’s sports.

Except, no. Because we live in culture war hell.

You see, somewhere along the way, Clark became a target of scorn for left-leaning people, in a transitive kind of way, and of praise for right-leaning. Despite all of her accomplishments – this season she became the highest-scoring player in college basketball history, regardless of sex – many liberals have decided that Clark’s awards and acclaim are a result of racism. Basketball is the quintessentially Black sport, after all, and because liberals are most powerful in media and messaging and image and culture, they took to the ramparts to police that boundary, wondering why Black athletes haven’t received the same acclaim in a just-asking-questions kind of way. In particular, Clark has been unfavorably compared to LSU forward Angel Reese, who bested Clark in last year’s title game but who lost to the Hawkeyes in the Elite Eight this year. Reese has, for whatever weird habit of the white liberal mind, become a totem to use as the anti-Clark. Meanwhile, because conservatism essentially only exists now as a concerted crowdsourced attempt to exist as the negation of what liberals like, some MAGA lunatics have represented Clark as a symbol of the volk, though as always with them it’s hard to know how ironic they’re being. It’s not basketball, it’s race war! Everybody start recording your TikToks!

What we’re left with is not a celebration of a remarkable year for women’s basketball, competitively and in terms of attention, but just another grimy episode in the forever war that takes place on Twitter and TikTok and Facebook and on podcasts and talk radio and in the comments section of your local paper’s website.

16) Still no prostate cancer screenings for me. Jeremy Faust, “New research: Razor thin margins at best on prostate cancer screening benefits.”

For reasons that I can’t entirely understand, PSA testing just does not save many lives, if any. No less august a body than the United States Preventive Services Taskforce (USPST) states that men ages 55-69 should consider PSA testing, while weighing the harms and benefits with their doctors. The USPST recommends against PSA testing for men ages 70 and up. Hardly a ringing endorsement. The CDC says no different.

This all surprises a lot of people. I think the messaging in the medical and public health community has often been different from this—a bit too rah-rah in light of the science.

Take a look at new data, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association over the weekend. In the United Kingdom, researchers randomized men to either get an invitation to do prostate cancer screening or not. Then, they followed outcomes for 15 years. If prostate cancer screening made a difference, the mortality curves should have daylight between them. They basically didn’t.

 

Top: Prostate cancer mortality per 100 men over 15 years. Bottom: All-cause mortality per 100 men over 15 years. There are two lines in each curve. It’s just really hard to see because the differences were so small on the top, and non-existent in the bottom. Image: Martin and colleagues, the CAP Trial. JAMA.

17) Because, of course…”Embattled Harvard honesty professor accused of plagiarism: Academic chapter and two books authored by Francesca Gino appear to copy from sources including student theses, blogs, and news reports”

18) Mark Jacob has been writing great media criticism, “When media ‘objectivity’ is dereliction of duty: Journalists aren’t bystanders – they’re key players in a democracy”

You see, the real problem in American journalism isn’t that some outlets have values; it’s that some outlets spread disinformation. The main reason Fox News is bad for democracy is not because it’s right-wing – it’s because Fox lies to support criminals. 

In my four-decade career as a daily newspaper editor, I assigned reporters to cover plenty of stories, and I wasn’t objective. I chose stories I thought would benefit our audience and our community. I was undoubtedly wrong sometimes. But it’s impossible to be unbiased. The very act of assigning a story is a value judgment. Every story is shaped by multitudes of biases, from who gets quoted to how they’re described to what gets edited out. Pretending otherwise is, as McGowan put it, a fallacy.

A few years ago, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote about “viewpoint disclosure.” He said one way for journalists to build trust would be to compose  “here’s where I’m coming from” statements to disclose their biases and values. My “coming from” statement might say that I’m pro-democracy, anti-racism, pro-LGBTQ rights, in favor of women’s body autonomy, and supportive of Joe Biden as the candidate standing in the way of a disastrous Trump presidency. But I am not a Democratic partisan. I’m glad that Andrew Cuomo was forced out of office, and I think Robert Menendez ought to get the hell out too. Most of all, I am not objective. I believe in being fair to the facts and the public, not to political operatives.

Of course, “where I’m coming from” statements would blow the minds of news executives who want to pretend their journalists don’t let their opinions affect their work. Frankly, I want journalists who have deeply studied a subject to draw rational conclusions. If someone has been on the climate change beat for years and doesn’t have any strong opinions about it, they won’t be my go-to expert on the subject.

19) I loved tracking changing hotel prices in South Carolina around the 2017 eclipse. Totally loved this, “Eclipse’s Path Is Also Leaving a Trail of High Hotel Prices”  I hope some Economists are using this data.

20) If truly consensual, okay, but this seems profoundly not great,

Debby Herbenick is one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior. The director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University and the author of the pointedly titled book “Yes, Your Kid,” she usually shares her data, no matter how explicit, without judgment. So I was surprised by how concerned she seemed when we checked in on Zoom recently: “I haven’t often felt so strongly about getting research out there,” she told me. “But this is lifesaving.”

For the past four years, Dr. Herbenick has been tracking the rapid rise of “rough sex” among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking. Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized “major Midwestern university” said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.

As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk Q. and A. at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, “How come boys all want to choke you?” In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, “Why do girls all want to be choked?” They do? Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.

I started to ask more, and the stories piled up. Another sophomore confided that she enjoyed being choked by her boyfriend, though it was important for a partner to be “properly educated” — pressing on the sides of the neck, for example, rather than the trachea. (Note: There is no safe way to strangle someone.) A male freshman said “girls expected” to be choked and, even though he didn’t want to do it, refusing would make him seem like a “simp.” And a senior in high school was angry that her friends called her “vanilla” when she complained that her boyfriend had choked her.

21) I was initially sad to see Duke (my alma mater) lose out on going to the Final Four), but OMG has this been amazing for NC State.  Even NYT coverage! “Welcome to Raleigh, the New Epicenter of College Basketball: Students at Duke and U.N.C., both basketball powerhouses, have long labeled North Carolina State their “little brother.” But little brother — and sister — are off to the Final Four.”

Then there is N.C. State.

Students at Duke, which is in Durham, and U.N.C. have long labeled N.C. State their “little brother” — an uncompetitive, weaker sibling in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Sometimes, the trash talk feels like it extends beyond sports. Duke is a premier private university, and U.N.C. is the state’s public flagship, its oldest educational jewel and itself a top school. N.C. State is known for its robust agricultural and engineering curriculums, but it does not have the national allure of the other two.

Yet in the men’s tournament, the No. 1-seeded U.N.C., lost to Alabama in the Sweet 16. And Duke, a No. 4 seed, fell last weekend to none other than N.C. State.

“Now they can’t talk,” Tyler Sherman, a freshman at N.C. State, said of both teams as he decided between a gray and a red Final Four T-shirt at the university’s store on Tuesday.

Still, it has been an arduous journey for the Wolfpack. In the 1950s, the N.C. State men’s team was considered the best in the A.C.C., and for the next three decades, the rivalry between N.C. State and U.N.C. was the biggest in North Carolina, said Tim Peeler, who wrote a book on the team that won N.C. State’s last national title, in 1983.

Quick hits (part I)

1) Jay Caspian Kang, “Online Gambling Is Changing Sports for the Worse: Betting should be legal, but pro leagues and major networks are undermining the value of sports in a bid to get in on the action.”

And there’s a much more concerning subset of the integrity problem, one that feels more permanent and specific to the style and ubiquity of online gambling. Sports betting may be a trenchant vice, but the bets themselves have changed dramatically. Single-game parlays, or S.G.P.s, in which a bettor strings together multiple wagers on individual statistical outcomes—how many points, rebounds, turnovers a certain player will accumulate—for potentially lottery-like payouts, have exploded in popularity. These bets are far more profitable for the books. According to a study by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a typical bet on whether a team will cover the spread will deliver a five- or six-per-cent return for the casino. An S.G.P., by comparison, will typically return up to thirty per cent. As a result, nearly every sports-betting company relentlessly pushes S.G.P.s, which, in turn, has led to a greater focus on individual players. It’s not that easy to fix a basketball game—you have nine other guys on the court affecting the outcome, not to mention the coaches and the officials. It’s a lot easier to fix your own performance. You just have to grab an extra rebound away from a teammate or maybe kick the ball out of bounds at the end of a blowout, and the odds will be ever in your favor…

On Monday, while I was typing the first draft of this column, the news broke that Jontay Porter, of the N.B.A.’s Toronto Raptors, was under investigation for possible gambling infractions involving prop bets—which include wagers based on the stats a player will accrue over a game. N.B.A. Twitter, perhaps the fastest archivists on the Internet, quickly uncovered amusing footage of Porter engaged in all sorts of on-court activity that now seemed suspicious. (Porter, who has not been available for the Raptors’ past three games for what the team describes as “personal reasons,” has yet to comment on the allegations.) Many of these clips were offered in jest, but, truthfully, this is how many fans now interact with sports. When the player is the prop and the prop fails, the player then becomes suspect. And, when an increasing number of bets are props based on individual player performances, rather than team outcomes, it doesn’t take much to prompt cheating, or to trigger the suspicion of misconduct. At some point, that toxic cloud changes the whole atmosphere of sports fandom. “To half the world, I’m just helping them make money on DraftKings or whatever,” Tyrese Haliburton, an all-star guard for the Indiana Pacers, recently told a reporter. “I’m a prop.”

2) Interesting, “In the eye of the beholder: Situational and dispositional predictors of perceiving harm in others’ words”

One manifestation of society’s increased sensitivity and reactivity to harm is the notion that words can be labeled as harmful, regardless of how subtle and regardless of their intent, if perceived as harmful by the receiver of that speech (Haslam, 2016). However, it is unclear what specific words should be considered harmful, particularly if harm is in the eye of the beholder (Lilienfeld, 2017). Here, we tested the hypothesis that situational and dispositional factors can prime individuals to interpret others’ verbal communications as harmful. In Study 1 (n = 217 U.S. college students), a one-sentence prime about harmful words led individuals to perceive ambiguous phrases from others as harmful. In Study 2 (n = 1092 U.S. college students), participants showed far more within-person than between-person consistency in their emotional reactions to widely varying ambiguous statements, and negative emotionality was a consistent predictor of between-person differences in feeling hurt and anxious by such statements. Taken together, findings from the two studies raise the possibility that well-intentioned efforts to boost awareness of the potential harm conveyed in others’ words may have the inadvertent effect of exacerbating perceptions of harm, particularly among individuals already inclined toward such perceptions.

3) This is good. “Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside”

A widespread misconception in much of psychology is that (a) as vertebrate animals evolved, “newer” brain structures were added over existing “older” brain structures, and (b) these newer, more complex structures endowed animals with newer and more complex psychological functions, behavioral flexibility, and language. This belief, although widely shared in introductory psychology textbooks, has long been discredited among neurobiologists and stands in contrast to the clear and unanimous agreement on these issues among those studying nervous-system evolution. We bring psychologists up to date on this issue by describing the more accurate model of neural evolution, and we provide examples of how this inaccurate view may have impeded progress in psychology. We urge psychologists to abandon this mistaken view of human brains.

4) Quite insane is the answer. “What RFK—And the Libertarian Party—Have Become: An increasingly reactionary candidate is courting an increasingly reactionary party.”

Here’s some background. The Libertarian Party has been completely transformed since its heyday in 2016 when it nominated a presidential ticket of New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld. At the 2022 national convention, the party experienced a hostile takeover by far-right culture warriors under the banner of the “Mises Caucus” (named for the 20th century economist Ludwig von Mises) incensed that the party had nominated socially liberal moderates like Johnson and Weld.

I was an active member of the party for nearly 10 years, until I resigned in 2021 along with many others unwilling to stick around for a takeover by the illiberal far right. The caucus has supplanted the ideologically libertarian orientation of the party with a program of openly bigoted authoritarianism. Overt antisemitism, anti-LGBT animus, and explicit racism are now common from the party’s leaders, candidates, and official social media accounts.

5) I think some of AI’s greatest potential is in medicine, “NHS AI test spots tiny cancers missed by doctors”

6) Disappointed to see the AAP being luddites about GMO food: (I’m always here for “the dose makes the poison”)

What did the AAP report get wrong?

The AAP report went awry in its discussion of pesticides and health, especially regarding glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide (weedkiller). First, they misrepresent the scientific consensus about the safety of glyphosate in our food supply. Second, they promote organic diets as a healthier choice for families, based on flawed data and reasoning.

Glyphosate is commonly used when growing a certain type of GMO crop called “Roundup Ready.” Roundup-ready crops (e.g., soy, corn, canola) are genetically modified to tolerate this herbicide. Farmers plant Roundup-ready crops because it simplifies weed management (they can kill nearby weeds without harming the crop), reduces use of more toxic pesticides, and reduces the need for environmentally harmful tilling.

The AAP report suggests that we should be concerned about glyphosate levels because: 1) the International Agency on Research for Cancer (IARC) rated glyphosate as a “potential carcinogen” and 2) glyphosate has been detected in many Americans’ urine samples.

This argument makes sense at first glance but is actually deeply flawed because it ignores the central tenet of toxicology: “the dose makes the poison.” Everything we consume can be harmful at extremely high doses, and everything also has a dose that is so low that it’s safe. For example, while 1-2 pills of Tylenol is safe, a whole bottle is not.

Levels of glyphosate and other pesticides are closely monitored by food safety regulators, with very reassuring results. The US Pesticide Monitoring Program and Health Canada consistently find that over 99% of foods are well below the safe limit. Furthermore, the levels of glyphosate that are detected in urine studies are consistent with exposures that are far below the safe limits. Detectable does not mean harmful!

In their report, the AAP report not only fails to put glyphosate levels in context but also presents a distorted view of the international consensus on the risks posed by glyphosate. It highlights the IARC’s determination that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen” (Group 2A). Yet it fails to mention that the IARC is an outlier – many other health and safety organizations, including the European Food Safety Authority, the US Environmental Protection Agency and Health Canada, have determined that glyphosate levels in our food supply do not pose a health hazard to consumers.

Why are different agencies reaching different conclusions? A big part of the answer is that the IARC assesses whether or not a substance is a hazard, whereas most other organizations assess whether or not something poses a risk (at a given exposure level). Unfortunately, the AAP report conflates hazard and risk.

A hazard is something that has the potential to harm you, while a risk is the likelihood of harm when exposed to a hazard. UV light is a hazard, but the resulting skin cancer risk depends on exposure: a few minutes a day in weak sunshine won’t move the needle on our skin cancer risk, while a few hours a day in peak sun could. Hazard determinations don’t tell the whole story because they ignore dose (exposure). Other hazards in the same category as glyphosate include extra hot beverages, red meat, working night shifts, and hairdressing.

We feel that it’s misleading of the AAP to present only the hazard-based view of glyphosate while ignoring the risk-based scientific consensus that glyphosate is safe for consumers at the levels in our food supply. Note: The level of risk for farmers who work directly with pesticides is less clear and warrants more studies and attention.

We hope that this post helped clear up any confusion that the American Academy of Pediatrics’ report may have caused. For a healthy diet, focus more on eating nutritious foods and less on GMOs and pesticides.

7) Brian Beutler on Republicans and “DEI”

Ask why. Why, beyond petty vendettas and a lust for dominance does Trump single out places like Baltimore. Or Puerto Rico. Why does he think there’s a political edge for him in kicking them when they’re down?

I know why! Republicans see it as an opportunity, like so many others, to pander to bigots under the cover of some other excuse. Trump would notionally pretend that the places he shook down “horribly run” and thus undeserving of government largesse—at least that’s what Trump would have you believe. But the racists know: it’s because they’re filled with non-white people. 

There are obvious moral problems with GOP race politics. But the biggest practical one is that, under Trump, the swapping out of dog whistles for train whistles means Republicans can no longer pander to reactionaries without kicking open the door to the most vile of bigots.

 

 

Trump’s supporters have filled his void of silence just as you’d expect. They’ve blamed “DEI” for the accident, because the political leadership of the city and state is black. They’ve fanned antisemitic conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories about terrorism and immigrants because a) that’s what bigots do, and b) if they have no legitimate basis to blame bad news on their perceived enemies, they can always be counted on to fabricate one. 

If you squint at the polls just so, you can find Republicans on the majoritarian side of narrow “DEI” controversies, just as you can find them on the majoritarian side of the narrow issue of trans high-school sports athletes. But Republicans plainly have no first-principles commitments on either matter. They dredged them up for the purposes of anti-black and anti-trans pandering. And so there’s no principle limiting the political appeals to the narrower issues. They aren’t really fixed solely on the merits of white-guilt seminars or the tiny number of trans girls outcompeting cis girls. And so, by picking these fights, they made it open season on whole races and genders.

Americans might have nuanced misgivings about this or that—who has to make wedding cakes for whom, for instance—but given a choice between siding with a tolerant faction or a bigoted one, most will flock to the former. 

8) I quite enjoyed this.  Elite college admissions is just so insane, “Inside the Craziest College-Admissions Season Ever More applicants, new rules, and even less clarity from schools.”

College admissions has always been filled with uncertainty, especially at schools like Duke where applications are plentiful and seats scarce. But when Guttentag started as dean three decades ago, the process was more forgiving: Duke accepted some 28 percent of applicants, and about 41 percent of them attended — the university’s yield rate. Since the turn of this century, the number of applications to the 67 most selective colleges in the nation, which includes Duke, has tripled — to nearly 2 million a year. That has translated into more stress and longer odds for a lot of applicants, and a much more complicated set of considerations for colleges, in terms of who to admit and when to admit them.

Yield rates — a truer gauge of popularity than acceptance rates when students have multiple options — have plummeted at all but the most selective schools. For colleges and universities, yield is an institutional status symbol, but it is also a important signal of financial strength. Duke’s yield rate is now 60 percent — nearly 50 percent higher than it was when Gettentag started here. Many schools that had similar yield rates to Duke three decades ago have seen theirs go in the opposite direction, including Brandeis University (now 25 percent), George Washington University (19 percent), and Syracuse University (16 percent)…

A decade ago, admissions officers at Duke regularly talked about a “wall of 5s” among applicants on Advanced Placement tests — the top score. “You’d just see this long list of eight or ten or 12 5s on AP scores,” Guttentag recalled. “That’s the sort of thing that would by itself have moved the needle and now doesn’t.” Only 14 percent of the 4.39 million AP tests administered last year were scored a 5, according to the College Board; only half of American public high schools even offer more than five AP courses. Yet the fact that they were so commonplace among Duke’s applicant pool didn’t seem to shock him.

9) Totally loving “The 3 Body Problem” on Netflix.  I gave up on the book when I tried a few years ago.  But I quite enjoyed learning about Ken Liu, who did the English translation. 

10) I always read what Phil Klay has to say, “U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible
A good pretext for war is not enough to make a war just.”

The war Israel is actually fighting in Gaza bears little resemblance to that brutal and far from perfect, but necessary, campaign. Rather, in Gaza, Israel has shown itself willing to cause heavy civilian casualties and unwilling to care for a population left without basic necessities for survival. It has offered no realistic plan for an eventual political settlement. Far from the hypothetical war for Israeli security, this looks like a war of revenge.

Israel’s approachto civilian lives and infrastructure is the first and most obvious problem. John Spencer, the chair of urban-warfare studies at West Point, told The Wall Street Journal this month that Israel sets the “gold standard” for avoiding civilian casualties. Defenders of Israel cite its use of precision munitions and its distribution of leaflets and phone calls warning civilians to evacuate combat areas.

But evacuation orders can only do so much for a trapped population facing destroyed infrastructure, dangerous exit routes, and unrealistic time frames. Israel’s original evacuation order for northern Gaza gave 1.1 million people just 24 hours to leave. As Paula Gaviria Betancur, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, noted at the time, “It is inconceivable that more than half of Gaza’s population could traverse an active war zone, without devastating humanitarian consequences, particularly while deprived of essential supplies and basic services.”

And precision munitions are good only when used precisely. Senior Israeli officials complained even before the war that the list of possible military targets in Gaza was “very problematic.” Then Israel dropped a massive amount of ordnance on Gazan neighborhoods—6,000 bombs in the first six days of the war alone. For comparison, the international coalition fighting ISIS dropped an average of 2,500 bombs a month across all of Syria and Iraq. To think that Israel was precisely targeting 1,000 strikes a day strains credulity. Satellite images do not show pinpoint strikes but whole flattened neighborhoods. From October 7 to November 26, Israel damaged or destroyed more than 37,000 structures, and as CNN reported in December, about 40 to 45 percent of the air-to-ground munitions used at that point were unguided missiles. Certainly Hamas’s practice of building its tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure means that destroying the tunnels will cause widespread damage, but the scale of this bombing campaign goes well beyond that.

11) German Lopez on world leader unpopularity:

By many measures, President Biden is very unpopular. Since at least World War II, no president has had a worse disapproval rating at this point in his term.

Relative to his international peers, however, Biden looks much better. Many leaders of developed democracies have disapproval ratings even higher than Biden’s, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows:

Source: Morning Consult | Data was collected from Feb. 26 to March 6, 2024. | By The New York Times

Many world leaders are also up for re-election. More than 60 countries — half of the world’s population — will vote or have voted this year. Most of the countries in the chart above will vote in national or European Union elections in the coming months.

Why are people so upset with their leaders? Some explanations are local, but four global issues have driven much of the public’s anger. Call them the four I’s: inflation, immigration, inequality and incumbency.

12) The most thorough review of zoonosis versus lab leak and how we can know things that you’ll see.  Courtesy of Scott Alexander. 

16,000 words from @slatestarcodex summarizing the COVID origins debate.

Odds of Zoonotic Spillover vs. Lab Leak

Superforecasters: 75% / 25%
Expert scientists: 77% / 23%
Scott Alexander: 90% / 10% https://t.co/1mkNqgKTXn

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) March 28, 2024

13) The Post has had great coverage of the bridge collapse, “How a cargo ship took down Baltimore’s Key Bridge”

14) David Epstein interviews Jon Haidt on his new book. 

David Epstein: A main argument in the book is that, between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens and adolescents moved from in-person to smartphones, and you call this the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” You suggest that it’s the single biggest cause behind a wave of mental health problems since 2010. To start with, I know there are skeptics of this wave to begin with. What is some of the evidence, beyond just self-report, that this is a real thing?

Jonathan Haidt: Right, so let’s start with the question of: Is there a mental health crisis? And before Covid, so in 2019, is when I joined this debate, and some critics challenged me and said it’s just another moral panic. That’s a very reasonable view. There has always been a moral panic around whatever technology kids are using. And some of these skeptics said there isn’t even a mental health crisis, it’s just that kids are more self-reporting of depression, and that’s a good thing. You know, that view was defensible at one time. But by 2019 we already had very clear evidence that the exact same patterns were happening for hospitalization and for self-harm. Suicide was very similar. Suicide, there’s a weird dip in 2008. For some reason, the rate goes way down. I don’t know what that was in 2008. So it looks like it starts rising in 2009. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. But it clearly is rising very rapidly in the 2010s. So given that we are seeing self-harm and suicide rising, and given that the percentage rises are faster for girls, everything matches that it’s not just self-report. This is not just a change in Gen Z’s willingness to talk about mental illness. This is a giant increase in mental illness, that has hit girls especially, and not just in English-speaking countries. Zach Rausch and I have documented it now in about 15 nations.

15) Bruni on Biden’s age, “The president is a decision maker, not an action figure”

Even so, aspects of the subject actually get too little consideration, starting with this crushingly obvious and yet frequently overlooked fact: The presidency isn’t a solo mission. Not even close. It’s a team effort, and the administration that a president puts together matters much, much more than his brawn or his brio.

To listen to the fretting over how many hours a day Biden can vigorously work, how many speeches he can authoritatively deliver and how many miles he can comfortably travel is to get the sense that he’s independently on the hook for the nation’s welfare. That he’s more action figure than decision maker. That, um, he alone can fix it. That he shoulders all the responsibility.

But he’s not Atlas; he’s POTUS. And the president of the United States is only as good as the advisers around him, whose selection reflects presidential judgment, not stamina.

We acknowledge as much when we discuss how a president might fill or has filled his cabinet. We recognize that many vital decisions are made — and that most important policies are realized — outside of the Oval Office.

But that recognition weirdly dissipates when we start tallying Biden’s birthdays. We attach as much weight to digits as to discernment, or we imply that the former wipes out the latter. Yes, age can erode judgment — if a person’s cognitive health is in marked and clear decline. But Biden’s situation is more cloudy than clear, and nothing about it suggests to me that he’d treat governing as cavalierly as Donald Trump would (and did) or assemble a team as ragtag as Trump’s — or, for that matter, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s.

He wouldn’t elevate a conspiracy theorist like the quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who was on a short list of potential running mates for Kennedy before, on Tuesday, Kennedy chose Nicole Shanahan, a philanthropist (and vaccine skeptic) with zero experience in public office. He wouldn’t invite anyone as unhinged and reprehensible as Rudy Giuliani, who led Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, into his inner circle.

Yes, Trump is about three and a half years younger and often peppier than Biden. Biden is about 300 times saner and always more principled than Trump. That’s the infinitely more important contrast between the two men, and we should never, not for a nanosecond, sweep it aside.

We should also call nonsense on many of the people who signal or say that Biden’s age is propelling them toward Trump. Obviously, that’s a dynamic for some of them, but it can’t be all that common because it defies common sense. Voters who’d be content to back a version of Biden with more spring in his step and less stammer in his voice have values, priorities and policy leanings that would probably render Trump an unconscionable choice. They’re not going to throw in with Trump because he throws himself around more forcefully.

Really, how many people say to themselves: Heck, Biden may be the guy with a proper respect for democracy, won’t blow air kisses at murderous tyrants and doesn’t sound like a fascist, but that Trump sure can shout louder, talk faster and clomp around more thuddingly! He’ll bring the vim to trashing democracy that Biden can’t muster for preserving it. I guess I’ll go with Trump!

No, many of these Trump supporters like what he’s selling — maybe the lower taxes for corporations and wealthy Americans, maybe the promised crackdown on immigration, maybe the nihilism, maybe just the vitriol — and have found a way to defend a vote for him (Biden’s decrepit!) without fully owning up to it.

In an age of rampant falsity, let’s be honest about that.

16) Enjoyed this from Yglesisas, “17 thoughts four years after Covid”

1. As liberals flailed, a distressingly large share of conservative commentary on Covid centered on just making things up. Instead of making all these good points that I am making about Covid NPIs, they would say the disease was no worse than the flu. Or that it would magically evaporate by April. Or that the Covid deaths were a result of classification error. None of that is true, and its widespread circulation contributed to the much lower vaccine uptake among conservatives, and ultimately, the much higher death toll of the disease among conservative Americans.

2. If you compare the US to other countries with much lower death tolls, you can see that post-vaccine the gap narrows considerably (without coming close to closing). Even a really successful lockdown regime couldn’t be sustained forever, and there was a price to pay in Australia and Finland and everywhere else once you opened up.

17) Knowing lots of people with PhD’s that I’m not that impressed by and lots of people without higher degrees that I am impressed by, I’m not much of a “credentialist.” Here’s my result from the ClearerThinking.org test.

Your score puts you at this percentile for credentialism: 20%

This means you are less of a Credentialist than 80% of the people who took this test.

18) Good interview on developing the “3 Body Problem” for TV.  I watched episode 5 yesterday and was just phenomenal.

19) John McWhorter on “centering” antiracism on broadway and universities. 

And this got me thinking about how much less vibrant, or even constructive, the antiracist mission feels at universities. Remember when, in 2020, the new idea was for them to “center” antiracism as their focal mission? One may have thought this was more trend than game plan, but it remains very much entrenched nationwide. According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm, first-year law students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison just this semester were required to attend a “re-orientation,” learning that explained that white people have a “fear of people of color and what would happen if they gained ‘control’” and will never be free of “racist conditioning.” A University of Notre Dame “inclusive teaching” resource from last year notes that “anti-racist teaching is important because it positions both instructors and students as agents of change towards a more just society,” emphasis theirs, with the implication that this mission has unquestionable primacy in a moral society. Statements that antiracism (and battling differentials in power more generally) are central to university departments’ missions are now almost common coin. I just participated in a discussion of antiracism as universities’ central focus at the University of Texas at Austin and am regularly asked to do so elsewhere.

And I think the persistence of this centering of antiracism at universities is kind of scary.

It may understandably seem, after these four years as well as the ones preceding, that for universities to maintain antiracism as the guiding star of their endeavors is as ordinary as steak and potatoes.

But in the spirit of John Stuart Mill advising us to revisit even assumptions that feel settled, imagine a nationwide call for all universities to “center” climate change as the singular focus of their mission. Or STEM subjects, historical awareness or civic awareness, each of these positioned as the key to serious engagement with the challenges of the future. We might imagine the university is to “center” artistic vision or skill in public expression, or even physical culture.

Note that all of these centerings would be about things most consider good, and even crucial, but the question would be why the university, as a general rule, should make any of those things the essence of what an education should consist of. Any university that did so would openly acknowledge that its choice was an unusual, and perhaps experimental, one.

One might propose that antiracism deserves pride of place as a kind of atonement for the sins of slavery and Jim Crow. But while getting beyond evils requires being aware of them, redressing past injustices — in fact, redressing just one past injustice — is not the basic mission of a university. The Scholastics of the Middle Ages “centered” education on Christianity, with the idea that education must explore or at least be ever consonant with the essences of natural law and eternal grace. Today we may view this focus as antique or unintentionally parochial. But it’s not just Christianity: We should question the idea that that any one issue, even one that feels urgent at this particular moment, must be regarded as the heart of education.

20) And a fun note to end, “Bears take a ride on swan pedalo at Woburn Safari Park”

Woburn Safari Park

The group of bears, also known as a sleuth, crowded on to the watercraft

Quick hits

1) Helen Lewis with a great take on the recent insane, everybody should be trans!, essay:

For Chu, the primacy of rights means that evidence is irrelevant to medical decisions—even when children are involved. This view has two logical implications: The first is that, if we are now just letting kids do whatever they want with their bodies, why not let them get married at 12, or drink alcohol at 13, or consent to sex at 14 with an adult partner? “Toddlers have the right to get tattoos” might be the worst political slogan I have ever heard.

The alternative argument is that gender—however you define it—is so unique and important that it alone justifies total bodily autonomy for minors…

But even in America, the debate is shifting. Quite a bit of Chu’s essay is devoted to complaints about media organizations that have not sufficiently echoed the activist line—that puberty blockers are safe and reversible, and that the “science is settled.” The New York Times is deemed to have fallen into the hands of barbarians, or at least failed to stop them from storming the affirmative gates. (Its recent publication of more skeptical articles has led to staff revolts.) “The paper consistently refuses to treat transition-related care the way it would any other health-care matter … as an issue of access,” Chu laments, ignoring the fact that if rates of women seeking abortions, say, rose by thousands of percent in a decade, the Times probably would write about the phenomenon.

The loss of the Times as a reliable ally matters because the American model of youth transition is best described as consensus-based rather than evidence-based—which is to say, it rests on the agreement of credentialed experts rather than on the conclusions of highly rigorous studies. And when the clinical rationale for underage medical transition disappears, what is left is ideology. “The belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism,” Chu writes. She would prefer to make a radical claim for unfettered personal freedom, even for minors: “Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again. Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others.” (It doesn’t, of course—it means that male puberty and higher male testosterone levels confer significant sporting advantages, but that’s me being a reality-accepting nihilist again.)

Above all, Chu argues, we should treat children’s statements about their identity with unquestioned reverence: “To make ‘thoughtfulness’ a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege. That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom.”

In making a case this way, Chu shows a titillating disdain for respectability politics—and will surely irritate many people who share her political goals. For skeptics of puberty blockers like me, who are used to arguing against people who claim that any overreach in gender medicine is not really happening, or that too few patients are involved to be worth caring, or that we should be writing about something more important instead—all the riotous flavors of denial and whataboutism—Chu’s case for unlimited agency for teenagers is refreshing. She said everything out loud, and her argument is logical, coherent, and forcefully delivered. You just won’t hear it made very often, because it’s about as popular as the case for letting 9-year-olds get nose jobs.

2) Love this.  Disabilities actually suck.  So many disability advocates are the worst. Amy Lutz, “When Everything is Eugenics, Nothing Is: Preventing severe disability is a laudable goal. Crying eugenics renders the word meaningless.”

Papers published in academic journals rarely capture public attention, but last year a study from Social Science and Medicine – Qualitative Research in Health was picked up by a variety of mass media outlets. The paper focused on whether testosterone therapy should be discontinued in transgender men during pregnancy, but that wasn’t the reason for the coverage. What got everyone’s attention was rather the authors’ shocking dismissal of the increased risk of metabolic, urogenital, and neurodevelopmental conditions in babies exposed to testosterone. One of the reasons given was: “The desire to maximize the ‘fitness’ of offspring, and guard against development of conditions or human characteristics considered ‘unhealthy’ or less than ideal, may reflect troubling eugenicist and biomedical moralist underpinnings in ways that further harm already socially-marginalized people.”

The belief that disability is not inherently bad isn’t new. Social models that locate disability in the mismatch between people and their environments, not in individual bodies, have long been endorsed by some disability studies scholars—most recently by Elizabeth Barnes in her “value-neutral” model, in which she defines disability as “mere-difference.” But this has never been a consensus position. As feminist philosopher Susan Wendell pointed out almost thirty years ago, there is “much suffering and limitation” that social justice and cultural change cannot fix.

So I was surprised when, six months after the paper was published, the very mainstream National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that they were considering removing the goal of reducing disability from its mission statement at the recommendation of an advisory committee that blasted the idea that disabled people need to be “fixed” as “ableist.”…

In his recent memoir Troubled, Rob Henderson articulates the concept of luxury beliefs: “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” He focuses on socioeconomic status, but I can’t help thinking that perhaps the greatest luxury belief of all is that disability is neutral. It sounds progressive and empowering—yet betrays complete ignorance of what severe intellectual and developmental disability looks like, or how it impacts affected individuals and their families. Perhaps ignorance is the wrong word. More accurately, some disability advocates aggressively shut down incongruent narratives with accusations of “eugenics”and “ableism,” to the point that even the NIH would rather abandon its founding mission than challenge this stunningly obvious fiction…

Because disability is not neutral in our house. Jonah will never have a meaningful career or a romantic relationship. He will never understand politics, geography, history, or philosophy. He can’t follow the plot of Star Warsor even Paw Patrol, choosing instead the Sesame Streetmusic compilations we had on VHS when he was a toddler, which kind souls have since uploaded to YouTube. There’s nothing wrong with Sesame Street—we quote it so often, even when Jonah isn’t around (“I told you, it wouldn’t be easy”; “I guess not every crazy idea works”; “I might even say it’s Oscar-worthy!”) that I think of it as our family’s love language. But no one would choose this extraordinarily constrained life—not for themselves, or for their children.

3) Great stuff from Chait:

Over the last year, the insurrection has gradually assumed a more central place in Trump’s campaign…

Among what remains of the traditional Republican Party Establishment, this display prompted the same baffled objections that have followed Trump’s periodic racist attacks on fellow Republicans, threats to take revenge upon his enemies, and insistence that any electoral defeat of his is illegitimate. Why must he run such an undisciplined campaign?

“Joe Biden’s team has elevated the ‘threat to democracy’ posed by Trump and his movement to a place of prominence in its appeals to voters,” complained National Review’s Noah Rothman, who has written elsewhere that Trump is no more a threat to democracy than Biden. “Making the cause of the January 6 rioters into a central feature of Trump’s campaign plays directly into Biden’s hands.” This is the extent of the Republican concern: Trump is alienating swing voters who might be receptive to messages about high grocery prices but respond nervously to blood-soaked vows to redeem his martyrs and purify the fatherland.

But there is a perfectly cogent reason why Trump continues to press his most extreme demands, even at the cost of repulsing potential voters. He is no longer willing to accept the alliance of convenience with reluctant partners that held traditional Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Reince Priebus by his side during his first term. Trump has long demanded fealty from his party, which has made it harder to discern the acceleration and intensification of his work in the days since he effectively clinched the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday. Trump’s primary focus is not outward but inward, tightening his control over the GOP to almost unimaginable levels of personal loyalty.

Trump’s elevation of the insurrection to a matter of holy writ within the party is a matter of both conviction and strategy, consistent with his intention to stifle even the quietest forms of dissent. This is why Trump deposed Ronna McDaniel as head of the Republican National Committee in favor of election deniers Michael Whatley and Lara Trump. McDaniel had dutifully jettisoned her maiden name (Romney). She had strongly suggested the 2020 election was stolen, saying the vote tabulations had “problems” that were “concerning” and not “fair,” without quite stating as fact that Trump absolutely won. All her genuflections were not enough.

4) This is really good, “Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed: The sponsors of the law fundamentally misunderstood the nature of addiction.”

The key elements of Measure 110 were the removal of criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of drugs such as methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl, and a sharper focus, instead, on reducing the harm that drugs cause to their users. More than $260 million were allocated to services such as naloxone distribution, employment and housing services, and voluntary treatment. The original campaign for the measure was well funded by multiple backers, most prominently the Drug Policy Alliance, based in New York. Supporters hoped that ending penalties—and reducing the associated stigma of drug use—would bring a range of benefits. Once drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, the thinking went, those who wanted to continue using would be more willing to access harm-reduction services that helped them use in safer ways. Meanwhile, the many people who wanted to quit using drugs but had been too ashamed or fearful to seek treatment would do so. Advocates foresaw a surge of help-seeking, a reduction in drug-overdose deaths, fewer racial disparities in the health and criminal-justice systems, lower rates of incarceration, and safer neighborhoods for all…

Both of us have spent the better part of our careers studying and working on drug policy. Both of us watched this deterioration in Oregon’s public health and safety with dismay, and tried to help stanch the damage. We testified before the Measure 110 legislative implementing committee in 2022 in the hopes that the spirit of Measure 110 could be maintained if some reforms were allowed, such as the elimination of open-air drug markets and the resumption of mandated treatment for those suffering from severe addiction. But tweaking the measure proved very difficult. Last year, one of us, Rob Bovett, began working closely with a number of groups trying to reform Measure 110 through legislation, including a bill based on a proposal developed by Oregon’s city governments, sheriffs, police chiefs, and district attorneys, and a bill based primarily on a petition filed by a coalition of Oregonians that had grown weary of the measure’s ongoing failure. He testified before the Measure 110 reform committee and participated in negotiations that led to the reform package that just passed.

We were not surprised that a trivial pressure to seek treatment was ineffective. Fentanyl and meth addiction are not like depression, chronic pain, or cancer, conditions for which people are typically motivated to seek treatment. Even as it destroys a person’s life, addictive drug use by definition feels good in the short term, and most addicted people resist or are ambivalent about giving that up. Withdrawal, meanwhile, is wrenchingly difficult. As a result, most addicted people who come to treatment do so not spontaneously but through pressure from family, friends, employers, health professionals, and, yes, the law.

5) The people are right. Someone needs to tell Democrats, “After Four Years, 59% in U.S. Say COVID-19 Pandemic Is Over”

Majority of Americans, but Not Democrats, Say Pandemic Is Over

Gallup has tracked Americans’ perceptions of whether the pandemic is over in the U.S. since June 2021, during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout when most Americans received their first shot. But it was not until late May/early June 2023 that a majority thought it was over. This was shortly after President Joe Biden signed a congressional resolution to end the nation’s state of emergency and the U.S. and global public health emergency declarations ended. Fewer, though still a slim 53% majority, continued to believe it had come to an end in late August/early September.

The latest 59% of Americans who believe the pandemic is over is up slightly from late last summer but is still shy of the positivity expressed last May/June.

Republicans (79%) are almost twice as likely as Democrats (41%) to say the pandemic is over, while 63% of independents agree.

6) Kristof is right.  We need to take this problem much more seriously:

Alarms are blaring about artificial intelligence deepfakes that manipulate voters, like the robocall sounding like President Biden that went to New Hampshire households, or the fake video of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump.

Yet there’s actually a far bigger problem with deepfakes that we haven’t paid enough attention to: deepfake nude videos and photos that humiliate celebrities and unknown children alike. One recent study found that 98 percent of deepfake videos online were pornographic and that 99 percent of those targeted were women or girls.

Faked nude imagery of Taylor Swift rattled the internet in January, but this goes way beyond her: Companies make money by selling advertising and premium subscriptions for websites hosting fake sex videos of famous female actresses, singers, influencers, princesses and politicians. Google directs traffic to these graphic videos, and victims have little recourse.

Sometimes the victims are underage girls.

7) Yes, yes, yes.  What happened to the teen babysitter?  My daughter is 13 and would be so great at this.  When I was a kid 13 year old girls babysat all the time. “Don’t tell America the babysitter’s dead: For decades, sitting was both a job and a rite of passage. Now it feels more like a symbol of a bygone American era.”

Babysitting used to be both a job and a rite of passage. For countless American teens, and especially teen girls, it was a tentative step toward adulthood—responsibility, but with guardrails. Perhaps you didn’t cook dinner, but you did heat some leftovers for the kids. Maybe you arrived to find them already tucked in, and you read them a story, turned out the lights, and watched TV until the car turned into the drive. You knew whom to call if anything serious came up. Paula Fass, a historian of childhood at UC Berkeley, told me that she started sitting around 1960, when she was 12 or 13. By the time she’d arrive, she remembers, the parents had put their kids to bed and stocked the fridge for her to raid. They recognized that she was grown-up enough to be an extra eye in the home—but childlike enough to go looking for snacks.

Sitting was a “quintessentially American experience,” Yasemin Besen-Cassino, a Montclair State University sociologist and the author of The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap, told me. For decades, working a part-time job was common for teens in the U.S.—perhaps a reflection of the cultural emphasis on hard work, discipline, and financial independence. Even tweens would babysit. And something about that position, teetering between dependence and independence, got lodged in our cultural imagination. Starting in the mid-20th century, the young sitter became an emblem of American girlhood—both a classic coming-of-age character and a locus of anxieties about girls’ growing autonomy. Just how mature are these teens? How much control should they have? And what kind of adults are they on the cusp of turning into? Those concerns preoccupied people not only in real life but also in a plethora of books, shows, and movies.

Today, the teen babysitter as we knew her, in pop culture and in reality, has all but disappeared. People seem to worry less about adolescents and more for them, and for their future prospects. As Fass put it, “Teenagers don’t seem very grown-up these days.” There’s not much reason to fear or exalt babysitters anymore—because our society no longer trusts teens to babysit much at all.

8) In a rational political world, this matters.  Hopefully we still live in one. “The House GOP just gave Biden’s campaign a huge gift: Roughly 80 percent of House Republicans just lined up behind a plan to cut Social Security and ban all abortions.”

9) As is typical from Radley Balko, too long, but also fantastic. “The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers: Their flagship publication, The Free Press’, failure to correct an error-filled defense of George Floyd’s killer demonstrates that they are just another partisan tribe”

10) This is good from Steve Stewart-Williams, “The Worst Economists in the World: Laypeople’s intuitions about economics are systematically misguided”

Humans are fairly good folk physicists: We know that unsupported objects tend to fall, and that solid objects can’t pass through one another.

We’re fairly good folk biologists: We know that living things, but not rocks or mountains, exhibit spontaneous, goal-directed movement, and that organisms are permanent members of their species: Once an aardvark, always an aardvark.

And we’re fairly good folk psychologists: We know that people’s behavior is guided by their desires and beliefs, and that past behavior is usually a good guide to future behavior.

In contrast to all this, we’re fairly terrible folk economists. If we were to make a list of all our everyday intuitions about economic matters, and then a separate list of economists’ views on the same topics, we’d find almost no overlap between the two lists.

I’m quite confident about this, because that’s roughly what the economists Amit Bhattacharjee and Jason Dana did in a fascinating recent paper titled “Lay Economic Reasoning: An Integrative Review and Call to Action,” published in the journal Consumer Psychology Review. Bhattacharjee and Dana make a persuasive case that laypeople’s views on economic questions routinely part company with those of the experts, and thus that folk economics – unlike folk physics, biology, and psychology – is systematically misguided.

Of course, in principle, the laypeople could be right and the experts wrong. But if I had to bet money on it, I know which way I’d go. Aside from anything else, it makes good sense that our untutored intuitions about economics would tend to fall short of the mark. Whereas humans have dealt with the physical, biological, and psychological worlds for as long as we’ve existed on this planet, not so the modern economic world. Thus, biological evolution hasn’t equipped us for it, and culture hasn’t either – not unless we’ve studied economics.

11) Good stuff from Jesse Singal, “Why Is The Same Misleading Language About Youth Gender Medicine Copied And Pasted Into Dozens Of CNN.com Articles?”

Yesterday CNN published an article by senior writer Tara John about the UK National Health Service’s newly skeptical stance toward youth gender medicine. The main takeaway, which is big news to observers of this debate, is that the NHS will no longer provide puberty blockers to young people, other than in research contexts. (As for cross-sex hormones, a relatively strict-seeming regime is set to be implemented, and they will be offered to youth only “from around their 16th birthday.”)

As myself and a number of others pointed out, the article contains a sentence that is, in context, rather wild: John writes that “Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender — the one the person was designated at birth — to their affirmed gender — the gender by which one wants to be known.” But of course, whether youth gender medicine is medically necessary and evidence-based is exactly the thing being debated, and anyone who has been following this debate closely knows that every national health system that has examined this question closely, including the NHS, has come to the same conclusion: the evidence is paltry. That’s why so many countries, including Sweden, Finland, the UK, and Norway have significantly scaled back access to these treatments for youth.1 So it’s very strange to see this sentence, which reads as though it comes from an activist press release, published in a news article in CNN, an outlet that generally adheres to the old-school divide between news and opinion…

This copy-paste job is journalistically problematic for a number of reasons. For one thing, it suggests that CNN has decided, at the editorial level, that its institutional stance is that youth gender medicine is “medically necessary” and “evidence-based.” While they’re being used somewhat colloquially in these articles, these terms have fairly specific definitions in certain medical and legal contexts, and treatments only qualify for such designations if they have exceeded a certain evidentiary benchmark based on solid published research. That is not the case here — far from it, actually. As written, this is a deeply misleading sentence.

The language also puts CNN writers in an awkward position. Does each and every bylined author of these stories believe that youth gender medicine is “medically necessary” and “evidence-based”? Maybe they do (which would be disturbing), but the fact is that they didn’t write these sentences — they, or one of their editors, grabbed that language from somewhere else and pasted it in. They are effectively outsourcing their own judgment on a hotly contested controversy to their employer. This is not what journalists are supposed to do, and, at the risk of repeating myself, it’s significantly different from a reporter rolling their eyes when using language like “undocumented immigrant” or “sex assigned at birth,” rather than their own preferred verbiage. 

12) True. “The D.E.A. Needs to Stay Out of Medicine“

Even when her pancreatic cancer began to invade her spine in the summer of 2021, my mother-in-law maintained an image of grace, never letting her pain stop her from prioritizing the needs of others. Her appointment for a nerve block was a month away, but her pain medications enabled her to continue serving her community through her church. Until they didn’t.

Her medical condition quickly deteriorated, and her pain rapidly progressed. No one questioned that she needed opioid medications to live with dignity. But hydrocodone and then oxycodone became short at her usual pharmacy and then at two other pharmacies. My mother-in-law’s 30-day prescriptions were filled with only enough medication to last a few days, and her care team required in-person visits for new scripts. Despite being riddled with painful tumors, she endured a tortuous cycle of uncertainty and travel, stressing her already immunocompromised body to secure her medications.

My mother-in-law’s anguish before she died in July 2022 mirrors the broader struggle of countless individuals grappling with pain. I’m still haunted by the fact that my husband and I, both anesthesiologists and pain physicians who have made it our life’s work to alleviate the suffering of those in pain, could not help her. It is no wonder that our patients are frustrated. They do not understand why we, doctors whom they trust, send them on wild goose chases. They do not understand how pharmacies fail to provide the medications they need to function. They do not understand why the system makes them feel like drug seekers.

Health care professionals and pharmacies in this country are chained by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Our patients’ stress is the result not of an orchestrated set of practice guidelines or a comprehensive clinical policy but rather of one government agency’s crude, broad-stroke technique to mitigate a public health crisis through manufacturing limits — the gradual and repeated rationing of how much opioids can be produced by legitimate entities. This is a bad and ineffective strategy for solving the opioid crisis, and it’s incumbent on us to hand the reins of authority over to public health institutions better suited to the task.

Since 2015, the D.E.A. has decreased manufacturing quotas for oxycodone by more than 60 percent and for hydrocodone by about 72 percent. Despite thousands of public comments from concerned stakeholders, the agency has finalized even more reductions throughout 2024 for these drugs and other commonly prescribed prescription opioids.

In theory, fewer opioids sold means fewer inappropriate scripts filled, which should curb the diversion of prescription opioids for illicit purposes and decrease overdose deaths — right?

I can tell you from the front lines that that’s not quite right. Prescription opioids once drove the opioid crisis. But in recent years opioid prescriptions have significantly fallen, while overdose deaths have been at a record high. America’s new wave of fatalities is largely a result of the illicit market, specifically illicit fentanyl. And as production cuts contribute to the reduction of the already strained supply of legal, regulated prescription opioids, drug shortages stand to affect the more than 50 million people suffering from chronic pain in more ways than at the pharmacy counter.

13) We need to learn from Boston, “In remarkable start to 2024, Boston has had only 2 homicides this year”

A combination of factors has been credited for the figures, including strengthened police-community partnerships, a strong network of community-based groups working with young people most prone to violence, and outreach by faith leaders. At the center of the violence reduction in the mid-1990s, however, was a focused law enforcement strategy that involved identifying gang members known to be involved in gun violence and a delivering no-nonsense message that they could stop shooting and be steered to jobs and services, or feel the full weight of prosecutorial muscle. 

The web of community organizations and city service providers working alongside police has evolved and changed shape over the years, but it has remained a more robust approach to violence prevention than what’s present in most other cities. 

“Violence reduction is a team sport, and if the team is not working well together the team cannot succeed,” said Thomas Abt, who directs the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction at the University of Maryland. “Boston has a history of positive collaboration between police and community, between police and community service providers and public health workers.”   

14) This is honestly about the best thing I’ve read on the subjectivity of basketball officiating. “Purdue’s Zach Edey is difficult to defend. The 7-foot-4 star is even harder to officiate“

The game is different down on the low block. Looks different, feels different and is, frankly, officiated differently. On the perimeter, where spacing is key, a guard might be whistled for a hand check foul because that hand check is truly influencing the play. “The closer you get to the basket, you’re playing in a phone booth,” says an active official who asked not to be named so he could speak candidly. “And when you play in a phone booth, you’re going to have contact.”

Refs do, in fact, recognize the absurdity of the situation. Most chat prior to the game to compare notes. They know who the key players are, and very often understand how the game is going to be played. Edey, for example, is going to get a lot of touches. Cynics might argue that leads to officials looking for fouls; on the contrary, they say. It means they legitimately try to discern between incidental contact and illegal, fully aware how a ticky-tack foul can change the course of the game.

On most rosters, big men aren’t as abundant as guards. Two quick tweets of the whistle can equate to an extended first-half bench visit, severely limiting a team’s ability to defend and perform. “You gotta be sane and figure out what can be called a foul and what can’t be,” Higgins says. “You have to survive a game. If it’s whoop, whoop, whoop with the whistle, and foul, foul, foul, you’re going to hear it. But the numbers aren’t shocking. I’d bet if you broke down a game film, he’s probably drawing 10 to 15 more fouls than we’re calling.”

There is, of course, a flip side to this – when Edey is the defender. To the consternation of his detractors, Edey gets fouled a lot but rarely fouls opponents. He’s averaging just 1.9 whistles per game and has not fouled out since Purdue’s Sweet 16 matchup against Saint Peter’s on March 25, 2022. He’s played 67 games since then and been whistled for four fouls just six times.

To the naked eye that reads preposterous. How can one man possibly absorb such contact and yet never dish it out on his own? Officials don’t hide that they are keenly aware of how critical Edey is to a game. “You don’t want to put gray area fouls on him,’’ says a current coordinator of officials who asked not to be identified so that he could speak candidly. “You want to make sure the fouls he commits are more or less so obvious that everyone in the arena can say the ref had no choice.”

Is that favoritism? “Fans want to watch the best players play,” Boyages says. “As long as it’s balanced with the other great players on the other side. Every team has one or two players they need to have in the game for 30 minutes, and the refs are aware of it.”

15) Brian Klaas‘ substack is just so good.  I read this and the next day the insights came up in a conversation with a friend about policing, “How to stop social dysfunction: wide vs. narrow problems: Many social problems can be sorted into two groups—wide problems and narrow problems. Treating one kind as the other creates catastrophe, but we do it all the time, from policing to politics.”

16) Interesting article that could’ve been way shorter. “Why Do Men Dominate Chess? FIDE’s new policy governing who can compete in women’s categories highlights the persistent sex imbalance at the game’s elite levels.”

That said, I don’t see evidence for the idea that socialization alone explains the stronger male tendency to focus obsessively on doing whatever is necessary to win, even at board games. And there are good reasons to think that this tendency has an evolutionary basis: In the animal kingdom, males tend to devote more time, energy, and risk to status competition, since this tends to pay more reproductive benefits for males than females. So it’s not unreasonable to suspect that boys and men have some kind of biological advantage—possibly underpinned by higher lifetime exposure to testosterone—that helps explain their over-representation in tournament-level competition in general. (While this particular brand of competitiveness may have a strong evolutionary explanation, it is unlikely to be the wisest reproductive strategy in today’s world.)

Ultimately, sex differences in complex behaviors and skills are always a product of interactions between biology on the one hand (that is, our genes and their relatively fixed effects, such as hormone levels and body size) and our environment on the other (that is, factors such as our family circumstances, social dynamics, and cultural norms). Interactions between the two shape not only our skills and abilities, but also any emerging group differences. But none such complicating factors change the fact that the sex gap in chess is real and persistent. Given the circumstances that led to the creation of the female category, and the fact that many girls and women appreciate what this category offers, FIDE is correct to take the steps necessary to protect its integrity.

17) I had no idea that NC State star DJ Horne was actually from Cary, not Raleigh, and clearly really near by.  He played basketball at my kids’ middle school and was at there and Cary High (for three years) only a year behind my oldest son. 

18) If you’ve read Sapiens (and if not, why haven’t you), nothing new here, but Brian Klaas with a great summary on a fascinating theory, “Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation: Did the watchful gaze of moralizing gods produce the rise of complex civilizations?”

19) Of all the articles I’ve read recently, this is the one I’ve been thinking about the most, “What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet: Disturbances on the sun may have the potential to devastate our power grid and communication systems. When the next big storm arrives, will we be prepared for it?”

If a solar flare is something like the muzzle flash of a cannon, a coronal mass ejection is the cannonball: slower, but more destructive. It takes anywhere from fifteen hours to several days to reach our planet, by which time it has expanded enormously in volume. Once it arrives, it smashes into our magnetosphere, flattening whichever side is facing the sun (that is, the daytime side) and sending the nighttime side streaming away from the Earth, like a wind sock in a gale. If you remember Faraday’s law, you know that moving a magnetic field around produces an electric current. And so it is ultimately the Earth’s own storm-tossed magnetosphere that induces excess electricity in our planet, thereby initiating the third and final phase of a space-weather event: the geomagnetic storm.

Although that storm can affect anything long and metal (pipelines, railroad tracks), it poses the gravest danger to power grids. In the United States, our grid is divided into three regions. The Eastern Interconnection runs from the East Coast to the Rocky Mountains; the Western Interconnection runs from the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean; Texas, in true Lone Star style, goes it alone. For the most part, power can’t flow from one region to another—which is why, when seventy-five per cent of Texas suffered blackouts during a winter storm in 2021, no outside energy providers could help. But, within each region, electricity flows freely—and so can electrical problems, as when, in 2003, a shorted power line in Ohio caused a blackout across much of the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast, leaving fifty-five million people in the dark.

 

All this infrastructure, which continues across the border into Canada to form the North American Power Grid, is also known as the bulk-power system, because it handles energy transmission, not energy distribution. Distribution involves sending electricity from a local substation to everything nearby that needs it—schools, stoplights, factories, the toaster in your kitchen. Transmission gets power to that substation, from one of the more than six thousand generation facilities on the North American grid (nuclear plants, hydroelectric dams, solar farms, etc.), via more than half a million miles of line.

The crucial nodes in this vast network are transformers. Power enters your home at a hundred and ten volts, but voltage that low can’t be sent from a coal plant in West Virginia to your laptop charger in Alexandria; too much energy (in the form of heat) would be lost in transit. Instead, a transformer at the power plant ramps up the electricity to hundreds of thousands of volts, so that it can be transferred efficiently over long distances; once it reaches a substation, another transformer ramps the voltage back down until it can safely enter your home. Whatever its voltage, all that power flows through the grid as alternating current, moving at a constant frequency of sixty hertz.

Hold that thought; here comes the coronal mass ejection. It smacks into our magnetic field, warping it—or, in severe storms, temporarily ripping part of it open—and setting in motion the chain of events that sends additional electric charge into the planet. Some of that charge, which is known as geomagnetically induced current, dissipates harmlessly, because it flows into a part of the Earth that excels at conducting electricity—salt water, say, or sedimentary rock. But, in places where the underlying rock is a poor conductor, the current must go elsewhere. Like all current, it follows the path of least resistance, and the least resistant path of all is the one designed to conduct electricity: the power grid.

By unfortunate chance, some of the least conductive bedrock in the United States is the very old metamorphic and igneous rock of the Appalachian Mountains and the New England Highlands—the geological substrates of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and much of the rest of the Eastern Seaboard, home to half the country’s population. As detailed hazard maps recently created by the geophysicist Jeffrey Love and a team of his colleagues at the United States Geological Survey show, some other parts of the country, notably the Midwest, are likewise vulnerable to geomagnetically induced currents.

My week as an online sports gambler

As anybody who consumes any media in North Carolina knows, legalized online sports betting came to the state this week.  To try and hook a new generation of gamblers, many of the online sportsbooks are offering great deals to get you to use their sites.  Last weekend, N&O sports columnist extraordinaire, Luke DeCock, had a great column about his efforts to take advantage of all this free money and I was totally inspired. 

Who doesn’t like free money — or, the next best thing, playing with house money?

Unless you are completely off social media — and I can’t recommend a Facebook-free life enough — and don’t watch any sports at all whatsoever, you’re aware that legalized sports gambling is coming to North Carolina on Monday, and every online sports book has been offering a bevy of sign-up bonuses.

Hundreds of dollars in bonuses. Maybe even thousands, if you signed up for all of them.

So I did.

Almost all of them, anyway.

In the spirit of not trying this at home, I should say up front that I’m an experienced gambler who knows my limits. While I don’t bet on sports now for professional and ethical reasons, and rarely have on team sports, I’ve spent a lot of time at various points in my life gambling on horses, golf, craps, blackjack and daily fantasy. Modestly, I’ve done OK. But mostly I’ve dabbled enough in this stuff in the past to feel pretty confident I can limit my exposure to this silly experiment. I’m not the target customer, I’m just play-acting as one.

Which is important. As any competent heroin dealer knows, the whole point of these bonus offers is to get people hooked — imagine if it was legal to hand out free booze and cigarettes — but that’s a compromise we’ve become willing to accept in this state, because this gambling was happening anyway, in darker shadows, and we might as well benefit from it. (The same is true of legalized marijuana, but that’s a different conversation.)

It should also be noted that most of the offers are in the form of bonus bets, where you get the winnings if you win but you don’t get the stake back — meaning, if you win an even-money $100 bonus bet, you end up with $100 of real money in your account.

It’s not exactly cash in hand, but if they’re going to offer it, it’s probably worth pursuing. For an hour Friday afternoon, I did just that.

So, it took me a little bit to figure out just how online gambling works, but once I did, it was fun to just take the sportsbooks for their free money.  For example, I started with just $5 on Fanduel and once I bet that– and they wanted me so bad, they let me have a bet that at least one point would be scored in an NBA game– I got $250 in bonus bets.  Once I figured out that the best “even money” bet you could do was 110, e.g., bet $110 to get $100 back, I just bet on a bunch of games where I would bet the same amount on each team to win.  For example, $100 on Boston vs Indiana and you get $90 if Boston wins and then $100 on Indiana for a $90 payout if they win.  So, a sure $90 dollars on a basketball game where the $200 to start was their money, not mine.  You can basically convert “bonus bets” to cash at a 45% rate, no risk, at any online sportsbook.  That’s why I am ending my week over $600 richer.

It was cute how concerned my 18-year old son was that I might get hooked and become a gambling addict.  “That’s what their designed to do, you know.”  No gambling addiction here, but it was interesting to note the thrill of winning a bet when there was actually a risk (one place gave 9 $25 bets, so I played 8 off against each other, but actually had to gamble on the 9th– I won!).  I also am glad that I now know what all those numbers mean and how the odds work.  

But, my life of sports gambling is (mostly) done.  If they give me more free money to try and lure me back, I will use it, for now, Steve $600, online sportsbooks -$600.

 

 

Quick hits (part II)

1) This is really good. “What the Pentagon has learned from two years of war in Ukraine.” Perplexity’s takeaways:

1. Changing Nature of Warfare: The conflict in Ukraine has highlighted a shift in warfare dynamics, emphasizing the importance of adapting to new technologies and tactics. Lessons from the war underscore the need for military forces to rethink strategies and equipment use
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2. Focus on Adaptability: The U.S. military is reevaluating its approach to warfighting, moving away from counterinsurgency tactics towards preparing for conflicts with more advanced adversaries like Russia or China. This shift reflects a broader effort to enhance adaptability and readiness for modern warfare scenarios
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3. Importance of Innovation: The Ukraine conflict has showcased the significance of innovation in military operations. From adapting older artillery with modern technology to countering drone threats, the need for creative solutions and technological advancements has become increasingly apparent
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4. Digital Security Awareness: The war in Ukraine has highlighted vulnerabilities related to digital security on the battlefield. Instances of detecting WiFi signals and Bluetooth-enabled devices as well as identifying command posts through network names emphasize the critical need for enhanced digital security measures in military operations
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2) Speaking of Perplexity, Khan Academy has been working on how to use ChatGPT as an effective indivualized tutor.  I do believe this is a killer app for LLM’s.

But Khan’s anger about cheating wasn’t entirely righteous, either. Unknown to the world, he had signed a nondisclosure agreement with OpenAI and had been working for months to figure out how Khan Academy could use generative artificial intelligence, even securing beta access to GPT-4 for 50 of his teachers, designers and engineers at a time when most of OpenAI’s own employees couldn’t get log-ins. “Half our organization was like, ‘This is a game changer,’” says Khan. “Everything that we’ve ever been doing has been trying to scale personalization, tutoring, engagement with students. This can do that. And then the other half of the organization said, ‘Hold on a second.’” …

By infusing GPT with its own database of lesson plans, essays and sample problems, Khan Academy improved accuracy and reduced hallucinations. The full archive of Khan Academy math problems is now baked into GPT — “Our service to the broader AI community,” says Khan. But that still left a ton of work to do around interactivity. Khan and a small team provided hundreds of hours of feedback, gently retraining GPT to be less of a know-it-all that spits out answers, and more of a patient and knowledgeable companion. Like, say, Sal Khan….

The result is Khanmigo, a safe and accurate tutor, built atop ChatGPT, that works at the skill level of its users — and never coughs up answers. Khanmigo is the best model we have for how to develop and implement AI for the public good. It’s also the first AI software I’m excited for my kids to use.

That blurbable sentence would mean more if the current state of educational software weren’t so atrocious. Parents who’ve ever tried to help their kids with homework know the pain — janky interfaces, impoverished user experiences, word problems that appear to have been translated from another language. Imagine that Microsoft’s Clippy opened a schoolhouse on AOL and you have some idea.

I told the Khanmigo bot I was rusty at algebra (true!), and it presented me with sample problems that escalated in complexity. The focus was entirely on getting the steps in the process right. When I took a poor guess, it said, “Hmm, not quite. Remember, we want to isolate Z on one side of the equation. To do this, we should first try to get rid of the ‘+8’ on the left side. What operation could we use to do that?” The voice was Socratic, enthusiastic but firm — until my 15-year-old daughter kicked me off and told Khanmigo to speak more like a teenager. “Okay, fam, let’s grind through these next problems.” She did not cringe, which might be Khanmigo’s greatest achievement.

3) A super-elite high school near where I grew up (I had friends attend) has shifted to socio-economic based affirmative action.  It’s working and the SC chose not to hear the case.

The revisions to the Virginia admissions program followed protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Amid concerns about how few Black and Hispanic students attended the school, one of the country’s top public high schools, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., adopted what it said were race-neutral admissions standards. The school board did away with a rigorous entrance examination and prioritized admission to the top students from each public middle school in the area rather than the top applicants from any school.

Admissions officers were also instructed to consider “experience factors,” such as whether students were poor, learning English or attending a middle school that was “historically underrepresented.” But the officers were not told the race, sex or name of any applicant…

A group of parents, many of them Asian American, objected to the plan and, calling themselves the Coalition for T.J., sued to stop it.

Joshua Thompson, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian law group representing the parents’ group, expressed disappointment that the justices had declined to intervene.

“Discrimination against students based on their race is not only ethically wrong but also a clear violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection,” he said in a statement.

Karl Frisch, the chair of the Fairfax County School Board, said he welcomed the conclusion of a yearslong litigation.

“We have long believed that the new admissions process is both constitutional and in the best interest of all of our students,” he said in a statement. “It guarantees that all qualified students from all neighborhoods in Fairfax County have a fair shot at attending this exceptional high school.”

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a proponent of class-conscious affirmative action, said the court had struck the right balance, handing a victory to “poor and working-class students of all races.”

“This is an important signal that selective high schools and colleges and universities should feel confident in using race-neutral strategies to achieve diversity,” he said in a statement.

The Supreme Court’s action let stand a ruling from a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., which declared in May that Thomas Jefferson did not discriminate in its admissions. The Pacific Legal Foundation asked the Supreme Court to hear their appeal, saying the new admissions plan was “intentionally designed to achieve the same results as overt racial discrimination.”

4) This was interesting, “Women Outnumber Men in South Korea’s Sports Stadiums”

The scene illustrated a fact that has puzzled experts in one of the world’s most patriarchal societies: In sports, South Korean women generally outnumber men in the stands.

Women here make up 55 percent of fans of professional sports, including baseball, basketball, soccer and volleyball, according to a 2022 estimate by the Korea Professional Sports Association. Similar estimates for major sports in the United States put the figure at less than half for women. In Britain and Australia, that number drops to a quarter or less.

Fans and sports experts attribute South Korea’s high rate of female fandom partly to the sense of security at the country’s sports venues. Others say it’s influenced by a national fan culture powered by intense worship of stars, who are in some cases heartthrobs.

“People don’t think of the players as athletes, but as celebrities,” said Yim Subin, 24, who attends games and fan meet-ups, and watches baseball on TV every day of the season. “It’s not much different from the way K-pop fans follow their idols.”

In South Korea, where modern sports like baseball and soccer were introduced in the late 19th century, professional leagues were a product of brisk economic growth that began in the 1960s and created a large middle class. The leagues matured in tandem with the hosting of major international competitions, including the 1988 Summer Olympics and the 2002 men’s World Cup.

5) This was really, really interesting to me.  I’m considering how I might try it in my classes.

“Write down a phrase you find abhorrent — something you yourself would never say.”

My students looked startled, but they cooperated. They knew I wouldn’t collect this exercise; what they wrote would be private unless they chose to share it. All that was required of them was participation.

In silence they jotted down a few words. So far, so good. We hadn’t yet reached the hard request: Spend 10 minutes writing a monologue in the first person that’s spoken by a fictitious character who makes the upsetting statement. This portion typically elicits nervous glances. When that happens, I remind students that their statement doesn’t represent them and that speaking as if they’re someone else is a basic skill of fiction writers. The troubling statement, I explain, must appear in the monologue, and it shouldn’t be minimized, nor should students feel the need to forgive or account for it. What’s required is simply that somewhere in the monologue there be an instant — even a fleeting phrase — in which we can feel empathy for the speaker. Perhaps she’s sick with worry over an ill grandchild. Perhaps he’s haunted by a love he let slip away. Perhaps she’s sleepless over how to keep her business afloat and her employees paid. Done right, the exercise delivers a one-two punch: repugnance for a behavior or worldview coupled with recognition of shared humanity.

For more than two decades, I’ve taught versions of this fiction-writing exercise. I’ve used it in universities, middle schools and private workshops, with 7-year-olds and 70-year-olds. But in recent years openness to this exercise and to the imaginative leap it’s designed to teach has shrunk to a pinprick. As our country’s public conversation has gotten angrier, I’ve noticed that students’ approach to the exercise has become more brittle, regardless of whether students lean right or left.

6) The NYT Morning on suicide.

“The bridge is sealed up.” Last month, with those words, the general manager of the Golden Gate Bridge announced the completion of a suicide barrier — stainless steel netting that extends about 20 feet out from the walkway for the length of the bridge, making a jump into the water below extraordinarily difficult.

For decades, friends and family members of people who had jumped pleaded for a barrier. And for decades, my colleague John Branch recently reported, officials found reasons — the cost, the aesthetics — not to build one.

But something is changing in the United States, where the suicide rate has risen by about 35 percent over two decades, with deaths approaching 50,000 annually. The U.S. is a glaring exception among wealthy countries; globally, the suicide rate has been dropping steeply and steadily.

Barriers are in the works on the William Howard Taft Bridge in Washington, D.C., the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Maine and several Rhode Island bridges. Universities in Texas and Florida have budgeted millions of dollars for barriers on high structures. Scores of communities are debating similar steps.

Research has demonstrated that suicide is most often an impulsive act, with a period of acute risk that passes in hours, or even minutes. Contrary to what many assume, people who survive suicide attempts often go on to do well: Nine out of 10 of them do not die by suicide.

Policymakers, it seems, are paying attention. I have been reporting on mental health for The New York Times for two years, and in today’s newsletter I will look at promising, evidence-based efforts to prevent suicide.

A single element

For generations, psychiatrists believed that, in the words of the British researcher Norman Kreitman, “anyone bent on self-destruction must eventually succeed.”

Then something strange and wonderful happened: Midway through the 1960s, the annual number of suicides in Britain began dropping — by 35 percent in the following years — even as tolls crept up in other parts of Europe.

No one could say why. Had medicine improved, so that more people survived poisoning? Were antidepressant medications bringing down levels of despair? Had life in Britain just gotten better?

The real explanation, Kreitman discovered, was none of these. The drop in suicides had come about almost by accident: As the United Kingdom phased out coal gas from its supply to household stoves, levels of carbon monoxide decreased. Suicide by gas accounted for almost half of the suicides in 1960.

It turns out that blocking access to a single lethal means — if it is the right one — can make a huge difference.

The strategy that arose from this realization is known as “means restriction” or “means safety,” and vast natural experiments have borne it out. When Sri Lanka restricted the import of toxic pesticides, which people had ingested in moments of crisis, its suicide rate dropped by half over the next decade.

Arresting an urge

More than half of U.S. suicides are carried out with firearms. Guns are a reliably deadly means, resulting in death in about 90 percent of attempted suicides; intentional overdoses, by contrast, result in death about 3 percent of the time.

When an attempt fails, “these folks generally survive and go on to get past these thoughts, go on to live happy, full lives,” said Dr. Paul Nestadt, a suicide researcher at Johns Hopkins. “If you are a gun owner, that brief moment where the suicidal thoughts exceed the desire to be alive for tomorrow, that’s all it takes.”

Other countries, like Israel, have brought down suicide rates dramatically by restricting access to guns. But in the U.S., about 400 million guns are circulating in private hands, said Michael Anestis, who leads the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center. “We don’t know where they are, and even if we did, we would have no way of getting them,” he said.

7) Apparently, California’s ethnic studies requirement for high school is pretty ideological, “California’s Push for Ethnic Studies Runs Into the Israel-Hamas War: The state’s high school students will be required to take the subject, but some object to how the discipline addresses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

For policymakers, a goal is to give California students, 80 percent of whom are nonwhite, the opportunity to study a diverse array of cultures. Research has shown that ethnic studies classes can raise grades and attendance for teenagers at risk of dropping out.

But even in a liberal state like California, scholars, parents and educators have found themselves at odds over how to adapt the college-level academic discipline for high school students, especially because of its strong views on race and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While the name “ethnic studies” might bring to mind a broad exploration of how ethnicity and race shape the human experience, the discipline, as taught in universities, is narrower — and more ideological.

Ethnic studies focuses on four groups: Black Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans. It aims to critique various forms of oppression and spur students to take action, often drawing analogies across disparate expanses of time and geography. The Palestinian experience of displacement is central to that exercise, and has been compared by some scholars to the Native American experience.

In reworking ethnic studies for high school, California came up with a 700-page model curriculum that captures much of the discipline’s leftist, activist spirit. But it added the stories of other ethnic groups, including Jewish Americans, while eliminating discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It said lessons should include “multiple perspectives” on political issues.

Learning about the racial diversity of California’s ethnic groups? Sure.  Doing so with “leftist, activist spirit”?  Not a fan.

8) The AI-generated videos are pretty amazing.

9) Jonathan Martin, “Get Used to It: Biden Isn’t Going Anywhere”

Yet if Biden is not willing to absorb that and step down, what will be the forcing action by which he’s replaced?

This is where Republicans often fall back on the “they” line. To which I say: If not one Democratic governor or senator is willing to even publicly question whether Biden should run, how would he feel any pressure to change his mind? And even if they did speak up, they’d still be faced with the unpalatable dilemma of choosing whether to embrace or reject Harris.

Oh, you think it will be “the DNC?” They’re not independent actors. The headquarters is an arm of the Biden White House and the state leaders are party loyalists who happily saluted Biden when the president made them shake up the decades-old primary calendar to protect him from a primary challenge.

He’s an incumbent president who is broadly supported by his own party’s voters and the deadline to run in most state primaries has passed.

Oh, and did I mention he’s craved the presidency for a half-century, run for the job three times already and aspires to be a consequential man of history. As longtime Biden adviser Mike Donilon, alluding to Marine One and Air Force One, told a prominent Democrat last year: Nobody walks away from this.

There’s no delegation of lawmakers — like Hugh Scott and Barry Goldwater with Richard Nixon during Watergate — that’s going to go to the White House and tell Biden to open up the convention. If they even considered such an intervention and word leaked, they’d be savaged by other Democrats, breaching party omertà and abetting Trump.

10) I’ll start this one with a confession.  No, I don’t have Tik Tok, but I do enjoy watching Facebook Reels on occasion and many of them are actually… Tik Tok. One thing I randomly discovered is that I quite like the comic Taylor Tomlinson.  Thus, I really appreciated this very cool interactive feature on how she refined her closing joke over time.  Worth a gift link.

11) Derek Thompson, “Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out”

But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year. The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted. Americans have been so depressed about the state of the nation for so many consecutive years that by 2023, NBC pollsters said, “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”

I don’t think hanging out more will solve every problem. But I do think every social crisis in the U.S. could be helped somewhat if people spent a little more time with other people and a little less time gazing into digital content that’s designed to make us anxious and despondent about the world. This young century, Americans have collectively submitted to a national experiment to deprive ourselves of camaraderie in the world of flesh and steel, choosing instead to grow (and grow and grow) the time we spend by ourselves, gazing into screens, wherein actors and influencers often engage in the very acts of physical proximity that we deny ourselves. It’s been a weird experiment. And the results haven’t been pretty…

One of the more curious trends to jump out of the data is that many Americans have traded people for pets in our social time. The average time that Americans spend with their pets has roughly doubled in the past 20 years—both because more people have adopted pets and because they spend more time with them. In 2003, the typical female pet owner spent much more time socializing with humans than playing with her cat or dog. By 2022, this flipped, and the average woman with a pet now spends more time “actively engaged” with her pet than she spends hanging out face-to-face with fellow humans on any given day.

The hang-out depression is particularly bad for teenagers. According to the ATUS, teens and young adults saw by far the largest dip in socializing, especially since 2010. In fact, it is genuinely difficult to find any category of play that isn’t experiencing some kind of Mayday! Mayday! descent among this group. Teens are dating less, playing fewer youth sports, spending less time with their friends, and making fewer friends to begin with. In the late 1970s, more than half of 12th graders got together with their buddies almost every day. By 2017, only 28 percent did. “There’s very clearly been a striking decline in in-person socializing among teens and young adults, whether it’s going to parties, driving around in cars, going to the mall, or just about anything that has to do with getting together in person,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University…

What are the root causes of the great American introversion?

The first explanation is so obvious that it scarcely needs mentioning; in fact, I’ve already mentioned it. Americans are spending less time with other people because they’re spending more time with their screens—televisions and phones. The evidence that young people have replaced friend time with phone time is strong. As Twenge wrote in her book Generations, it’s not just that teens overall seem to have funneled their social lives into their smartphones. Even more telling, the groups with the largest increase in phone use, such as liberal 12th-grade girls, also saw the largest declines in hanging out with friends, strongly suggesting a direct relationship. For those who don’t accept that correlative evidence, we also have a 2019 randomized experiment from NYU and Stanford researchers who found that paying people to deactivate Facebook increased the time they spent socializing with friends. (It also increased the time they watch TV.)…

A third explanation for America’s cascading social mojo is the Putnam theory described in Bowling Alone: The rise of aloneness is a part of the erosion of America’s social infrastructure. Someone once told me that the best definition of community is “where people keep showing up.” Well, where is that now, exactly? Certainly not church; each successive generation is attending less than their parents’. Not community centers, or youth sports fields. Even the dubious community-building power of the office, arguably the last community standing for many, is weakening with the popularity of hybrid and remote work. America is suffering a kind of ritual recession, with fewer community-based routines and more entertainment for, and empowerment of, individuals and the aloneness that they choose.

When you put these three stories together, you get something like this: Face-to-face rituals and customs are pulling on our time less, and face-to-screen technologies are pulling on our attention more. The inevitable result is a hang-out depression.

And for young people, all this seems to clearly correlate with actual depression. Teen loneliness has surged in the past decade, alongside teen hopelessness, depression, and suicidal thinking. According to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, the share of teenage girls who say they experience “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased from 36 to 57 percent, and the share of girls who said they’ve contemplated suicide increased 50 percent in the same decade. Neither the decline in socializing nor the surge in mental distress has any precedent on record.

12) This is really something else from Radley Balko, “The retconning of George Floyd: Bari Weiss’s Free Press is the latest outlet to tout a conspiratorial documentary alleging that Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted. It’s all nonsense.”

13) And I really appreciate Glenn Loury admitting he was wrong to be so credulous, “We Were Too Quick to Praise “The Fall of Minneapolis”

14) Noah Smith on Google Gemini and it’s larger implications for how we combat racism is teriffic, “This is not a good way to fight racism in America”

Creating a multiracial nation is an inherently long and arduous process. This is only partly because of political opposition. Mostly, it’s that the things you have to do in order to create a widespread sense of equality and shared nationhood involve making a lot of very deep changes to society.

A prime example is the effort to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion within U.S. corporations and universities. The goal of teaching people how to respect, get along with, and work productively with a diverse set of coworkers is a laudable one. It’s the kind of thing that we don’t really know how to do yet; there’s no proven, effective method for corporate diversity training, so finding what works will inevitably involve a lot of experimentation and evidence-gathering. It’s the kind of task that requires patience, long-term commitment, open-mindedness, and empathy.

Instead, many corporations chose to outsource their DEI training to some opportunistic entrepreneurs. Robin DiAngelo and Tema Okun leveraged their fame to take advantage of the moment of urgency created by the unrest of 2020, selling their programs to companies and schools as a fix for racism. These programs often veered into the utterly ludicrous, characterizing useful work traits like hard work and punctuality as part of “white supremacy culture”. This approach probably added more racism than it subtracted. Meanwhile, there’s little evidence for any concrete benefits in the workplace, and even some diversity consultants now admit that these programs are far less effective than their creators have claimed.

In other words, corporations tried to take a shortcut to a racially inclusive workplace, and the shortcut failed.

A more harmful type of shortcut is when companies and universities actively discriminate against White employees and applicants in an attempt to correct for discrimination against people of color. Ibram Kendi, probably the leading scholar of the post-2020 antiracist movement, has explicitly advocated for this approach:

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

This isn’t quite as crazy a proposition as it sounds. Chances are that a very large percentage of Americans engage in subtle forms of “antiracist discrimination” that most Americans would have little or no problem with. For example, any time you choose to mentor a Black employee, because you think they’re likely to come from a disadvantaged background, you’ve engaged in antiracist discrimination, because you’ve implicitly diverted your time and energy away from mentoring a White employee.

15) This was good, “The Paradox Holding Back the Clean Energy Revolution”

With its 1.2 million LED lights shining brightly against the Las Vegas night, the Sphere may well be the ultimate symbol of 2020s excess. But that gigantic entertainment venue — which doubles as the world’s biggest screen — is also something else: a symbol of the coming collision between our climate goals and our seemingly insatiable appetite for stuff.

In the 1990s, when multicolor LED lights were invented by Japanese scientists after decades of research, the hope was that they would help to avert climate catastrophe by greatly reducing the amount of electricity we use. It seemed perfectly intuitive. After all, LED lights use 90 percent less energy and last around 18 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

Yet the amount of electricity we consume for light globally is roughly the same today as it was in 2010. That’s partly because of population and economic growth in the developing world. But another big reason is there on the Las Vegas Strip: Instead of merely replacing our existing bulbs with LED alternatives, we have come up with ever more extravagant uses for these ever-cheaper lights, from immersive LED art installations and carpets that glow to basketball courts that can play video. As technology has advanced, we’ve only grown more wasteful.

Quick hits (part I)

1) This was fantastic from the most recent Atlantic issue.  Here’s a gift link so that you can read the whole thing. “To stop a shooter: Why would an armed officer stand by as a school shooting unfolds?”  Seriously, open the link in a new tab and make sure you read it.

2) Just a perfect example of illiberalism on the left.  Apparently, a local library cannot have any books trans people don’t like, “‘My Heart Sank’: In Maine, a Challenge to a Book, and to a Town’s Self-Image: Wealthy, liberal-leaning Blue Hill prided itself on staying above the fray — until the library stocked a book that drew anger from the left.”

Rich Boulet, the director of the Blue Hill Public Library, was working in his office when a regular patron stopped by to ask how to donate a book to the library. “You just hand it over,” Mr. Boulet said.

The book was “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” by the journalist Abigail Shrier. The book posits that gender dysphoria is a “diagnostic craze” fueled by adolescent confusion, social media and peer influence, and that teenagers are too young to undergo potentially irreversible gender transition surgery.

Many transgender people and their advocates say the book is harmful to trans youth, and some have tried to suppress its distribution.

“If I’m being totally honest, my heart sank when I saw it,” Mr. Boulet recalled.

Founded in 1796, the library has a $7.9 million endowment in a coastal enclave popular among affluent summer residents. Blue Hill delivered a 35-point victory for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 presidential race. The communities around it are a blend of liberal, conservative and none-of-your-business, all of which helped its library resist political proxy battles like those roiling the nation’s libraries…

“Irreversible Damage” did not reflect Mr. Boulet’s personal views, nor those of his staff. But because “I want the library to be there for everybody, not just people who share my voting record,” Mr. Boulet said he gave the book the same consideration he would any other, and concluded it should be on the shelves.

“I felt like it filled a hole in our collection of a lot of materials on that subject matter,” he said. His staff supported the decision.

Less than a week after the book went on display, the parent of a transgender adult told Mr. Boulet that she found it harmful.

“She and I have known each other for years, and we talked about it calmly,” he recalled. The patron filled out a reconsideration request, asking that the book be kept “under the desk,” available only by request.

The library’s collections committee voted unanimously to keep the book in circulation. “But I knew it wasn’t over,” Mr. Boulet said.

Residents who objected to the book confronted him, library staffers and board members in the grocery store, post office and the library itself.

“They would say ‘I can’t believe that the library is allowing this,’” said John Diamond, the library board president. “My feeling was, ‘I can’t believe the library would not allow it, based on its position on free access to information.’”

The harshest criticism was reserved for Mr. Boulet. One patron told him that if a trans youth checked out the book and died by suicide, “that’s on you,” Mr. Boulet recalled. Critical Facebook posts and negative Google reviews poured in.

Mr. Boulet defended the decision on the library’s Facebook page, which only fanned the discord. Painfully, Mr. Boulet knew many of the negative commenters.

Mr. Boulet appealed to the American Library Association for a public letter of support, which it offers to libraries undergoing censorship efforts. “They ghosted me,” he said.

3) We’ll only be having more stories like this, “An ectopic pregnancy put her life at risk. A Texas hospital refused to treat her.: The 25-year-old woman and her mother blame the state’s abortion ban for a delay in care that doctors say put her “in extreme danger of losing her life””

A Republican state senator who has spearheaded much of Texas’s antiabortion legislation said he was surprised and frustrated to hear about Norris-De La Cruz’s case.

“I don’t know what the excuse would be for a Texas doctor not treating an ectopic pregnancy, because that’s not the law,” said Sen. Bryan Hughes, who sponsored a law last year specifying that Texas doctors are permitted to treat ectopic pregnancies, a follow-up to Texas’s abortion ban meant to prevent cases like this one.

But many doctors consider even Hughes’s follow-up law, which took effect in September, to be an inadequate tool for treating patients like Norris-De La Cruz amid a complicated post-Roe landscape. Ectopic pregnanciesin the fallopian tube, which never survive to term, can be hard to diagnose on an ultrasound with 100 percent certainty, several doctors said — and if the diagnosis is wrong, a doctor might fear potential legal repercussions for terminating a viable pregnancy.

After the first of two OB/GYNs at Arlington Memorial refused to treat Norris-De La Cruz, her mother, Stephanie Lloyd, immediately thought about Texas’s abortion ban.

“Does this have anything to do with the abortion law?” she remembered asking the doctor.

When he didn’t answer, Lloyd recalled, she had to restrain Norris-De La Cruz as her daughter tried to launch herself at him.

“Whenever I f—ing rupture,” Norris-De La Cruz said, “I’m giving my lawyers your f—ing name.”

4) Yale is bringing back standardized tests in admissions.  Good move.  Matt Breunig with his story:

One thing I have not said in my prior writing on this topic is that, in part due to my own experience, I find the argument that these tests are an equalizing force that allows low-income students to demonstrate themselves to be way more plausible than a lot of other people seem to.

The anti-test discourse tends to present the tests as inegalitarian because (1) poor kids have less test preparation resources available to them than rich kids and (2) for this and other reasons, poor kids perform worse on the tests than rich kids on average.

The first point seems to be a bit overrated. Expensive test preparation basically consists of taking practice exams and then reviewing what you got wrong. This can be done inexpensively on your own and it’s not clear that it actually increases scores all that much.

The second point is correct, but is confused.

Low-income kids are underrepresented at the top of the test-score distribution just as they are underrepresented at the top of pretty much any other indicator of educational attainment and academic ability. Being poor is disadvantageous in a lot of ways when it comes to excelling academically.

But the top of the test-score distribution is not completely devoid of low-income kids. There are fewer of them than there would be in a random draw, but they do exist. For those kids in particular, the test is often the best and sometimes only way that they can prove their abilities and show that they actually are more capable than their richer peers…

Still, it was scoring in the top one percent of LSAT test-takers that made it easy for me to demonstrate to schools that, despite my not-so-elite undergraduate institution, I was still able to outperform kids from much more prestigious universities. I was accepted to four T-14 law schools and probably would have been accepted to more but for the fact that the very top of the T-14 schools give extra weight to applicants who do not go straight from undergraduate to law school (a non-academic factor that specifically impeded me, a poor!).

Perhaps this all smacks of “it worked for me, so it is good.” But I don’t think so. The college system and the economic system are separately and, in their interaction, quite unsavory in many respects. But within all that unsavoriness, it is simply the case that standardized tests allow otherwise disadvantaged kids to show what they can do in a way that no other thing does.

There is a reason why the scandals surrounding the SAT and ACT generally take the form of rich people paying a ringer to fraudulently take the test for their kid. It’s because dim rich kids can’t outcompete brighter poor kids in that specific arena. There’s real value in that.

5) Really enjoyed this take from deBoer, “This is Zion: the United States is a place of prosperity and safety for Jews, and we should throw our doors open to more”

American Jews have income and employment figures that are remarkable by any definition. (Pew’s extreme reluctance to simply acknowledge that American Jews are on average a very wealthy ethnic group says something about the requirements of modern identity discourse, but never mind.) American Jews are also incredibly well-educated compared to the norm. As that Pew research demonstrates, fully three quarters of American Jewish adults have college degrees, compared to less than 38% of American adults in general. Israeli Jews are well-educated, but not like American Jews. The average American Jew goes through 15 years of formal education as defined by Pew; the average Israeli Jew, 12. (Note that these figures in general are dragged down by the ultra-Orthodox populations in both countries, whose men typically are restricted to religious education that does not factor into such figures and whose women rarely attend college at all.) Watch Oppenheimer sometime; while it’s true that the Manhattan Project recruited people of all types from all over the world, that effort simply cannot be conceived of without the efforts of American Jews – despite the fact that our most elite academic institutions engaged in a more-or-less explicit campaign to exclude Jewish applicants, such as through the adoption of “holistic” admissions criteria that gave them greater leeway to manipulate their incoming student bodies. Jewish American academic excellence and consequential financial success has been so pronounced for so long that we have decades of research aimed at explaining it and seeing if it can be replicated in other groups…

Of course anti-Semitism exists in the United States. Things aren’t perfect here. But by essentially any metric that you can gather, American Jews as a class are flourishing. And the worst numbers we see in that population come from the ultra-Orthodox, a self-selected group that engages in a style of life that’s unusually likely to result in a lack of education, poverty, and shorter lives relative to comparable peers. (Rejecting modernity has consequences, bad ones.) If you hold Zion to be not a geographic location but a concept of Jewish safety and success, you could hardly ask for a fuller realization of that ideal than what you find in the Jewish experience in the United States.

6) No, I couldn’t.  “Could You Pass the Presidential Physical Fitness Test Today?”  Our elementary PE teacher definitely went too easy on us on the pull-ups. But, one of the proudest things of my childhood, honestly, is that I practiced that standing broad jump till I was at the top level to pull off winning this award.

7) Ummm, I feel seen in this.  And not in a good way, “The Happy Way to Drop Your Grievances: Grumbling about something can feel as if it offers relief, but it spreads misery. Here’s how to break the habit and make everyone happier.”

The problem with all of this kvetching is that it can feel therapeutic—but it typically isn’t. Although complaining might offer temporary relief, it’s bad for your happiness in the long run. Polish researchers who in 2009 measured people’s mood before and after they complained consistently found a significant deterioration. Other scholars have shown that people who share negative emotions on social media—a very prevalent type of complaining today—experience lower levels of well-being…

As I mentioned above, complaining can also lower the happiness of the people around you. The same Polish researchers showed that simply hearing another’s complaint lowers one’s mood from about 5.7 on a seven-point mood scale to about 5.3. Even worse, in some relationships (such as those between customers and service providers), the negative effect can pass like a virus to those exposed, a phenomenon that scholars writing in the Journal of Business Research coined the “complaint contagion effect.” In research on social media, researchers found that when people see others’ complaints expressing anger, disgust, and sadness, they can, in turn, feel similar emotions.

Interesting.  I think anybody who knows me would say… 1) I’m a very happy person; and, 2) I complain a lot.  Am I some anomaly here (I actually think so), or misguided about #1 or #2.

7) EJ Dionne (gift link from him), “Let’s just say it: The Republican problem is metastasizing”

Mann and Ornstein — I should note they’re my friends, and we wrote a subsequent book together — took a lot of grief for supposedly being partisan. This criticism flew in the face of their entire professional careers: thoroughly balanced, appreciative of the work of many Republican politicians and deeply engaged in making our nation’s political institutions work better.

Events of the past week not only ratify what they wrote but suggest that matters are, to borrow from them, even worse now.

It’s one thing for a party to oppose the other party’s proposals over differences of principle. Small-d democratic politics ought to be a contest of ideas and a debate over which remedies are more likely to work.

It’s something else entirely for a party to reject its own ideas to address a crisis simply because it doesn’t want to get in the way of a campaign issue. This is exactly what Republicans did at the behest of former president Donald Trump after President Biden and Senate Democrats offered the best deal the GOP could hope for to strengthen the nation’s southern border.

You have to feel for Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who was chosen by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to negotiate the border deal precisely because he had tough immigration views. Trump himself described Lankford in his 2022 endorsement as “Strong on the Border.”

But if Trump claims the right as president to break the law, he also asserts the right to lie with impunity. He insisted, falsely: “I did not endorse Sen. Lankford. I didn’t do it.” Former students at Trump University are familiar with this sort of thing.

Lankford recounted on the Senate floor what happens these days to Republicans who try to legislate: A “popular commentator,” he said, threatened to “destroy” him if he dared try to solve the border crisis during a presidential election year.

The episode speaks to how the trends Mann and Ornstein caught on to early have metastasized. Power in the GOP has moved away from elected officials and toward those right-wing “commentators” on television, radio, podcasts and online. The creation of ideological media bubbles enhances their power. Republicans in large numbers rely on partisan outlets that lied freely about what Lankford’s compromise did and didn’t do, rather than on straight news reports.

The party’s hostile vibe can also be traced back to a habit in the Bush years to distinguish between “real America” (the places that vote Republican) and what is presumably unreal America. Declaring a large swath of the population to be less than American means they’re not worth dealing with and, increasingly, easy to hold in contempt.

Then there is the denigration of science, dispassionate research and technical knowledge. In his book “The Death of Expertise,” writer Tom Nichols described this mournfully as a “campaign against established knowledge.”

8) Jeff Maurer on the crazy wokeness amok that is Google Gemini.  It really does not like white people.  Seriously.  Inspired by others, here was what it gave me for “NHL players celebrating a goal.” 

9) This Post piece is pretty interesting in trying to explain just what’s going on, but I also found it hilarious that the Post’s authors were trying to justify what is obviously just ridiculous:

Google did not provide further details, but the tuning Google referred to may have involved a couple of types of interventions, said Margaret Mitchell, former co-lead of Ethical AI at Google and chief ethics scientist at AI start-up Hugging Face. Google might have been adding ethnic diversity terms to user prompts “under-the-hood,” said Mitchell. In that case, a prompt like “portrait of a chef” could become “portrait of a chef who is indigenous.” In this scenario, appended terms might be chosen randomly and prompts could also have multiple terms appended.

Google could also be giving higher priority to displaying generated images based on darker skin tone, Mitchell said. For instance, if Gemini generated 10 images for each prompt, Google would have the system analyze the skin tone of the people depicted in the images and push images of people with darker skin higher up in the queue. So if Gemini only displays the top 4 images, the darker-skinned examples are most likely to be seen, she said…

In contrast, some of the examples cited by Gemini’s critics as historically innaccurate are plausible.The viral tweet from the @EndofWokeness account also showed a prompt for “an image of a Viking” yielding an image of a non-White man and a Black woman, and then showed an Indian woman and a Black man for “an image of a pope.”

The Catholic church bars women from becoming popes. But several of the Catholic cardinals considered to be contenders should Pope Francis die or abdicate are black men from African countries. Viking trade routes extended to Turkey and Northern Africa and there is archaeological evidence of black people living in Viking-era Britain.

10) And, yeah, it’s all a little silly and a little crazy, but it’s not hard to lose sight of where the real problems in America are coming from, “West Virginia GOP Passes Deranged Bill That Could Put Librarians in Jail”

11) Excellent stuff from Jersusalem Demsas, “Something’s Fishy About the ‘Migrant Crisis’: The federal government’s dysfunction leaves immigrant-friendly cities feeling overwhelmed.”

Sometimes the best way to understand why something is going wrong is to look at what’s going right. The asylum seekers from the border aren’t the only outsiders in town. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought a separate influx of displaced people into U.S. cities that quietly assimilated most of them. “We have at least 30,000 Ukrainian refugees in the city of Chicago, and no one has even noticed,” Johnson told me in a recent interview.

According to New York officials, of about 30,000 Ukrainians who resettled there, very few ended up in shelters. By contrast, the city has scrambled to open nearly 200 emergency shelters to house asylees from the southwest border.

What ensured the quiet assimilation of displaced Ukrainians? Why has the arrival of asylum seekers from Latin America been so different? And why have some cities managed to weather the so-called crisis without any outcry or political backlash? In interviews with mayors, other municipal officials, nonprofit leaders, and immigration lawyers in several states, I pieced together an answer stemming from two major differences in federal policy. First, the Biden administration admitted the Ukrainians under terms that allowed them to work right away. Second, the feds had a plan for where to place these newcomers. It included coordination with local governments, individual sponsors, and civil-society groups. The Biden administration did not leave Ukrainian newcomers vulnerable to the whims of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who since April 2022 has transported 37,800 migrants to New York City, 31,400 to Chicago, and thousands more to other blue cities—in a successful bid to push the immigration debate rightward and advance the idea that immigrants are a burden on native-born people.

To call this moment a “migrant crisis” is to let elected federal officials off the hook. But a “crisis of politicians kicking the problem down the road until opportunists set it on fire” is hard to fit into a tweet, so we’ll have to make do…

Every step of this process is broken.

First, the U.S. government discourages asylum seekers from crossing at ports of entry. It turns away many would-be asylum seekers who arrive at those entry points and, as the Cato Institute immigration expert David J. Bier explains, works with the Mexican government to discourage would-be asylum seekers from ever reaching them. This all but ensures that large numbers will try to cross in more dangerous places—through deserts, along the Rio Grande. Asylum seekers do then try to present themselves to an official agent, regularly lining up and waiting their turn to do so.

Second, Congress has underfunded immigration courts to such an extent that evaluating asylum claims quickly is impossible. According to the nonpartisan data clearinghouse TRAC at Syracuse University, the average wait time for an asylum hearing has reached nearly 4.5 years. Given that, detaining all applicants as they await trial is financially prohibitive. So they are typically released into the U.S. According to an analysis of government data from 2008 to 2018 by the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, 83 percent of non-detained immigrants, and 96 percent of those with a lawyer, attend their hearings…

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which, among other things, created a six-month waiting period before asylum seekers could legally receive a work permit. In essence, asylum seekers from the southwestern border are prohibited from taking care of themselves. Many try anyway. “I talked to two guys just half an hour ago,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston told me recently. They “were commuting to Colorado Springs, which is about an hour and 20 minutes from here, just for jobs to shovel snow on a daily basis. People are hungry for work.”

Yet if asylum seekers are caught working under the table, their application can be rejected. And if they turn begrudgingly to government aid, they incur resentment from many native-born Americans who question why newcomers are receiving handouts.

The waiting period is meant as a deterrent. If people in troubled nations get the idea that applying for asylum is a sure way to get a work permit in the United States, the logic goes, the number of migrants will balloon. The problem is that persecution and economic devastation in migrants’ home country and greater opportunities in the U.S. are much stronger determinants of migration than tweaks to U.S. immigration policy. As I have previously argued, deterrence policies do not meaningfully dissuade migrants from making the journey, and even harsh Trump-era policies such as family separation had no discernible effect. Clinton now criticizes the six-month work-permit waiting period. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said in a recent radio interview—curiously failing to mention that he had signed that nonsensical requirement into law.

12) I’m grateful that we have excellent, independent local news in Raleigh. “Sinclair’s recipe for TV news: Crime, homelessness, illegal drugs: The local news powerhouse, whose chairman recently bought the Baltimore Sun, focuses on fear in broadcasts that often align with Donald Trump’s view of cities”

13) This was fascinating, “The Taliban vowed to change Kabul. The city may be starting to change the Taliban.”

14) The best of art but make it sports. So good. 

15) Good stuff from Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder, “Colleges Are Cracking Down on Free Speech in the Name of ‘Inclusion’

16) You know I love David Leonhardt and his “The Morning” newsletter.  Enjoyed this Vanity Fair article about the newsletter and it’s influence. 

17) Jeff Maurer, “The Advent of “Feather Alerts” is a Great Time to Reflect on How Racist Antiracism Has Gotten: The line between left-wing and right-wing racism gets blurrier still”

California got roasted on social media this week as news of their new “Ebony Alert” system circulated. You see: Ebony Alerts are Amber Alerts, but for Black kids. If you’re thinking “weren’t Black kids covered by Amber Alerts?” the answer is “yes, obviously”. And it gets dumber: California also has a system for finding missing indigenous people called “Feather Alerts”. Please note: “Feather Alert” is California’s terminology, not mine; I would be banished to Antarctica if I proposed that any system for indigenous people be called “Feather Alert”. So, now that “antiracist” thinking has caused California to embrace separate but equal institutions with racist-depending-on-who-says-it names, it seems like a good time to examine how fundamentally racist so-called antiracism has become…

Here’s what’s going on: People have the (possibly true) belief that the media give less attention to missing persons of color. So, they have altered the California Highway Patrol alert system, which — it should be noted — affects law enforcement, not media. The implicit assumption undergirding this change is that Black and indigenous missing persons need a special system because society cares less about those people. But if that’s true, then creating special alerts based on race seems like the absolute last thing we should do! California has created a system that makes it easy for racists to turn off or ignore alerts for races they don’t care about! Somewhere, a Klansman responded to news California’s of Ebony Alert system with a hearty “Huzzah!”

Imagine, though, that Ebony Alerts and Feather Alerts prove to be highly effective. Suppose that something about those systems causes them to outperform Amber Alerts. In that case, shouldn’t Asian people get their own system? Of course they should. And so should white people, Hispanic people, and anyone else; in fact, you’d have a slam dunk equal protection case if California told anybody “no”. So, everyone gets access to the system, and at that point — wait for it — California has created the exact same fucking system that they started with! Except that they’ve actually created the same system but worse, because people will turn off alerts rather than get racially-bespoke notifications about the 175 people who go missing in California every day.1

The Ebony Alert bill and the Feather Alert bill both passed unanimously. So, we have a museum-ready display of the idiocy of antiracist lawmaking. The process here was:

1. Observe a statistical disparity;

2. Perform no analysis whatsoever of why that disparity exists;

3. Craft a response to that disparity that’s ineffectual at best and counterproductive at worst;

4. Watch that response get implemented because everyone decides it’s easier to simply co-sign the idiocy than to say “wait a minute” and maybe be portrayed as David Duke’s more-evil twin.

18) Yet more reason to exercise, “Can Exercise Help Prevent Prostate Cancer? A new study adds to growing evidence that exercise is an important part of preventing one of America’s deadliest cancers.”

19) Pretty interesting take on Woodrow Wilson from David Frum, “Uncancel Woodrow Wilson”

Wilson’s bigotries were very real. As a historian, he made the case that freedmen had too hastily been given the franchise following the Civil War. All his life, he accepted a subordinate status for Black Americans. As a politician, he enforced and extended it. In private, he told demeaning jokes in imitated dialect and delighted in minstrel shows. He was said to have praised D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation—originally titled The Clansman—as “like writing history with lightning,” though this at least is almost certainly untrue: Wilson viewed the movie in silence, according to a witness at the time. He may have been annoyed because an inter-title within the movie quoted Wilson’s A History of the American People as seeming to praise the Ku Klux Klan. The relevant section had in fact rebuked the Klan for its lawless violence. But Wilson objected only to the Klan’s means, not its ends. He wholeheartedly endorsed the extinguishing of Reconstruction-era reforms by state legislatures and white-dominated courts.

Wilson’s bigotries were shared by his predecessors and immediate successors in the presidency. In his 1909 inaugural address, William Howard Taft repudiated equal voting rights for Black Americans and justified the exclusion of immigrants from China. Taft’s predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, enthusiastically promoted the pseudoscience of racial hierarchy that placed white Europeans at the top. The segregation of the federal civil service that Wilson’s administration instituted was maintained by the four presidents who followed him: Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and FDR.

My point is not to acquit Wilson of the charges against him, nor to minimize those charges by blaming the times, rather than him. Historical figures are responsible for their beliefs, words, and actions. But if one man is judged the preeminent villain of his era for bigotries that were common among people of his place, time, and rank, that singular fixation demands explanation. Why Wilson rather than Taft or Coolidge?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Wilson must be brought low because he stood so high. He is scorned now because of our weakening attachment to what was formerly regarded as good and great…

n the era of liberal academic hegemony, historians sought to weigh Wilson’s errors and misdeeds against his administration’s accomplishments, reaching a range of conclusions. But that era has closed. We live now in a more polarized time, one of ideological extremes on both left and right. Learned Hand, a celebrated federal judge of Wilson’s era, praised “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” Our contemporaries have exorcised that spirit. We are very sure that we are right. We have little tolerance for anyone who seems in any degree wrong.

In our zeal, we refuse to understand past generations as they understood themselves. We expect them to have organized their mental categories the way we organize ours—and we are greatly disappointed when we discover that they did not.

Today, we tend to think of economic and racial egalitarianism as closely yoked causes. One hundred years ago, this was far from the case. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of those Americans most skeptical of corporate power were also the most hostile to racial equality, while those Americans who most adamantly rejected economic reform hoped to mobilize racial minorities as allies.

20) Nice list. “30 Useful Principles (Autumn 2023): Ideas to help you make sense of the world”

Quick hits

1) Brett Stephens on “settler-colonialism“

It’s hard to know where to begin, but here’s a thought: If settler colonialism needs to be eliminated, why not get rid of all settler colonialism?

That would start with the United States, which began as a settler-colonialist enterprise under British, Dutch and Spanish rulers, and continued as one under American rule. Some progressives try to nod to this fact with land-acknowledgment statements, which are now common on college campuses, but that’s a remarkably cheap and performative form of atonement.

Real atonement — of the type that’s now being demanded of Israelis — would look quite different. If you’re an American citizen of non-Native American descent, leave. Leave Hawaii. Leave California. Leave Massachusetts, too. Return to the lands of your ancestors — if they will have you. If not, that’s your problem.

If you are allowed to stay, do so under an entirely different form of government, one that isn’t based on the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Sign over the deed of your property to the descendants of those dispossessed by past generations of settler colonialists. Live under new rulers, not of your own choosing.

What’s true of the United States goes also for Australia, New Zealand and Canada. But why stop there? What are ethnic Russians doing east of the Urals, or in the Caucasus, or in Crimea? What are Han Chinese doing in Xinjiang or Tibet? What are Iberians doing in Latin America? And how did the people, culture and language of the Arabian Peninsula wind up in distant places like Morocco, Tunisia and, for that matter, the Holy Land itself (seized by the Rashidun Caliphate from the Byzantines in 637 C.E.)?

At this point, some opponents of settler colonialism might reply that historically distant examples of settler colonialism don’t justify current instances of it. But how ancient, really, is the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, the last major battle between Native Americans and the U.S. Army? What about the American invasion of the Hawaiian kingdom three years later?

It’s fine to oppose settler colonialism, but in that case, one also must be consistent and principled. To say that Israel alone must be eliminated on grounds of settler colonialism while giving a pass to other cases of settler colonialism is a double standard that is hard to describe as anything but antisemitic.

2) At this point, it’s pretty clear that people who are short of severely immunocompromised are not in particular danger of Covid.  It is entirely unrealistic to expect society at large to shape behavior in response to this one group.  On the latest CDC proposed guidelines:

Concernsamong medically vulnerable people are growing as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention prepares to dropits long-standing recommendation that those with covid isolate for five days.

People with compromised immune systems worry that co-workers will return to the office while they’re still contagious. At the same time, the few remaining policies guaranteeing paid leave for employees with covid are largely coming to an end. New York, the only state that still requires paid leave for covid isolation, is considering ending that benefit this summer.

Even as many cheer loosening isolation guidance, othersare troubled by federal health officials’ latest move to stop treating covid as a unique respiratory viral threat.

 

The forthcoming change,first reported by The Washington Post, sayspeople could return to school and work if they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the aid of medication andthey have mild and improving symptoms.

This would be similar to the guidance for people with influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Supporters, including prominent physicians and public health experts, say it’s the right move,reflectingthe reality that many people with covidare not isolating and the threat ofsevere illness has dimmed as a result of vaccination, prior infections and antiviral treatment. But critics say covid should not be treated like other respiratory viruses because it currently hospitalizes and killsmore people than fluandcaninflict long-term complications that scientists are still trying to understand.

“I feel like I’m on an island by myself,” said Lisa Savage, a 60-year-old retired nonprofit fundraiserin Charleston, S.C., who has several autoimmune diseases that keep her bodyin a constant state of inflammation.

Savage said the CDC’s proposed changes scare her. When she hears people say it’s time for the country to move on, she thinks: “Lucky for you. Those of us with compromised immune systems don’t have that luxury.”

3) A nice write-up of my recent research, “Study sheds light on the truth behind the “deceptive stability” of abortion attitudes”

4) The case for hiring a whole bunch more data scientists for policing. 

5) Nice Politico summary of some top-notch PS research, “Nobody knows which political ads work and why”

Some political ads work a lot better than others. But nobody really knows what will reliably make an ad click with voters.

That’s one of the major findings of a new study from researchers who analyzed data from Swayable, a platform used by Democrats to test the effectiveness of different messages and advertisements.

The study analyzed more than 600 ads produced by more than 50 campaigns and outside groups across the 2018 and 2020 cycles. Some ads are definitely more effective at influencing vote choice than others, the researchers found, but what voters respond to year-over-year is far less clear.

 

The researchers found that a range of characteristics — such as mentions of issues or facts about a candidate, whether an ad was positive or negative in tone, and aesthetic choices like whether the ad featured everyday voters or the candidate themselves — does not reliably predict which ads performed best.

The best-performing ads were more than twice as effective as an average ad, so being able to predict what will resonate with voters matters a lot. Increasing the effectiveness of an ad could be meaningful when it comes to campaigns making large ad buys — and potentially getting double the persuasion return for their money.

“If you make two ads, your best guess should be that one of them is going to be 50 percent better than the other. That’s a big deal, right?” said David Broockman, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and the corresponding author on the paper. “Or if you make four or five ads, the best one is going to be twice as good as the typical ad. That’s a really big deal.”

What makes it particularly challenging is that trends that appeared in one cycle did not always persist to the next. For example, ads that highlighted issues — broadly, any issue-focused messaging — were more effective than other ads in 2018. But in 2020, issue-focused ads in congressional and Senate races were less effective than other ads, which included spots focused on character or biography. Ads with a positive tone seemed slightly more effective in 2018 and less effective in 2020, although not by statistically significant margins in either case.

6) Oh damn this story about a woman who got pregnant in Tennessee and was unable to get an abortion was something else.  Talk about being pro (un)born life. 

7) Atlantic, “The Carry-On-Baggage Bubble Is About to Pop: Airplanes aren’t made for this much luggage”

That said, one of my recent flights had Boeing’s new “space bins” and they are awesome.

8) On medicine and “gender-affirming care.”  Sally Satel, “A Textbook Case of Social Justice Medicine Run Amok: A new volume from the publishing arm of the American Psychiatric Association illustrates the problem when ideology trumps science.”

9) Fantastic from Noah Smith, “A bunch of handy charts about climate change”

Climate change is manageable, but we’re not there yet

Climate change is almost entirely manmade; emissions of carbon dioxide and methane cause it. The more we emit, the more climate change we get.

But over the past few decades, several very good things have been happening. First, humanity has been inventing technologies that replace fossil fuels — the main ones being solar power and rechargeable high-performance batteries. This creates a natural incentive to emit less. Second, countries around the world got together in the early 2010s and set out national targets for emissions reductions; this was followed in the late 2010s by various individual national pledges to reach “net zero” emissions by a certain date. And third, the U.S. has been switching from coal power to natural gas, which emits less CO2 (it emits more methane, but this can be easily dealt with, and it leaves the atmosphere fairly quickly).

These three facts led climate modelers to get rid of some of the apocalyptic scenarios they had been working with. They now think the most likely scenarios have the world warming somewhere between 1.5°C and 3.9°C. The forecasts say that the most likely outcome is around 2.6°C if we do nothing with policy and simply let the march of green energy take its course. If countries meet their Paris commitments, it’ll be a little lower — maybe 2.4°C. But if countries actually follow their boldest pledges, we could end up holding warming all the way to 1.7°C. Here’s a great chart by Zeke Hausfather, pulling together three different projections…

Green energy is for real

Our best hope for beating climate change — and the reason the picture has brightened so much in recent years — is technology. Solar power and battery storage are on steep learning curves, meaning that the more of them we deploy, the lower they cost. Batteries are particularly important because they have two main uses: to replace oil as a power source for transportation (electric vehicles), and to help solar and wind replace coal by smoothing out intermittency.

Let’s start with solar and wind. At this point, thanks to massive volumes of Chinese production, solar panels are so cheap they’re practically free. Costs for land and installation have been falling as well, though more slowly. Wind is also getting cheaper, though less quickly, and land costs are higher.

10) You know what is not going to save a single life in Gaza?  Or even change the mind of a single American to be more supportive of the Palestinian cause?  Disrupting municipal meetings over the issue. “Anti-war speakers disrupt Raleigh City Council meeting, forcing early adjournment”

11) I think it’s fair to say you can be all for an expansive Medicaid policy and for doing more to help people with housing, yet still question whether Medicaid dollars should be spent directly on housing, “Medicaid’s prescription for health includes food and housing in some states”

A growing number of states are broadening the health-coverage program into a hub for fulfilling social needs: helping with housing and transportation, easing past prison life and domesticviolence, and providing the cardboard boxes filled with canned goods and perishables that Nichols and his crew deliver in two counties of southeastern North Carolina.

With the encouragement of the Biden administration, Medicaid is threading health-related social needs into the program.Because Medicaid is a joint responsibility of the federal government and states, each project stepping into such new territory requires federal approval. Since President Biden took office three years ago, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has approved these experiments in eight states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Washington…

At its core, the marbling of social services into Medicaid has two goals: improving patients’ health and making a dent in the nation’s exorbitant medical costs.

The new CMS guidelines say that any service a state chooses to include must be based on evidence it makes a difference. It remains unclear whether all this works.

“There is this incredible enthusiasm this will be a magic pill,” said Laura Gottlieb, professor of family and community medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.

 

Yet for now, “the evidence is not anywhere close to supporting these activities,” said Gottlieb, founding co-director of the Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network, which focuses on the intersection of social and medical care. “The research is [running] behind the policymakers.”

12) Okay, not one of my usual trusted sources, but there seems to be a there here and it’s not great, “FDA and CDC Could Soon Employ ‘Indigenous Knowledge,’ Documents Show”

13) I found this pretty fascinating, “The NHL is caught between two generations of physicality”

I don’t remember exactly when I first had the thought, but it comes back to me every time Jacob Trouba lands another monster hit: “It’s like he time travelled from the late ’90s to 2020s hockey.” He’s the league’s foremost bundler of opposing forwards, and it seems like that defending style — one of brute force at times — is from a version of the NHL that’s slowly dwindled away.

After a couple recent stand-up hits at the blue line, I’ve had similar thoughts about Jake McCabe.

Of course, these aren’t the only players who throw big hits, but they stand out because those hits tend to shock us as much as the players receiving them. When Trouba came off the bench to put Timo Meier in another dimension in the 2023 playoffs, it wasn’t that Meier didn’t know there were opposing players in front of him, it’s that he assumed those defenders wouldn’t be actively hunting for his soul…

In today’s NHL, part of the reason a few players stand out for landing hits like this is that they’ve simply taken advantage of skaters in today’s game who often operate with the belief that they’re not going to get hit.

It feels like we’re between eras in today’s NHL, where there are still some players who grew up watching a more physical game and have some of that mindset, as the league overall is moving towards being one with fewer massive collisions.

I don’t think it’s a huge coincidence that some of the league’s best hitters are Trouba, who turns 30 in a couple months, and McCabe, who turned 30 a couple months back.

In talking to those who watch junior hockey, my understanding is that the next wave of hockey player is way more comfortable in areas of the ice that years ago were essentially no-fly zones. Taking the puck across the opposing blue line was bad, but taking it laterally across the opposing net put yourself in the crosshairs for something much worse. But today, the best offensive players in the league make a living by changing speeds and exploiting bad gaps at the blue line and playing east-west hockey with impunity. Even defencemen going back on pucks will pick it up with a forechecker breathing down their neck and calmly look for an outlet pass.

14) Rick Hasen, “How to Actually Guarantee the Right to Vote”

With a Court that not only fails to protect voting rights on its own but that could also well stymie congressional efforts to provide that protection via ordinary legislation, Americans need a more direct path toward full enfranchisement: The time has come to add an amendment to the U.S. Constitution affirmatively protecting the right to vote. Voters in the United States can no longer depend on the negative protections of voting rights in the Constitution itself, or the Supreme Court’s interpretation of those rights, or Congress’s attempts to protect those rights when it is subject to what is essentially a Supreme Court veto.

Since the 1860s, voting-rights proponents have periodically suggested adding an affirmative right to vote to the Constitution, but these efforts have gone nowhere. More recently, some have thought such an amendment unnecessary. For a brief period in the 1960s, during the heyday of the Warren Court, the Supreme Court more boldly protected voting rights through a generous interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. But that was decades ago, and efforts to expand voting rights in this direction have hit a brick wall at the conservative Supreme Court; indeed, some of the Warren Court voting-rights protections could soon be in danger. For this reason, it’s time to renew suggestions for a popular movement to protect the right to vote in the Constitution.

One might fairly ask how, if Congress cannot even pass ordinary voting-rights legislation with Republicans opposing Democrats on virtually all voting issues, we could expect it to pass a constitutional amendment with its much more difficult thresholds: An amendment requires support of two-thirds of each house of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. Given intense political polarization, passage of this amendment is not happening anytime soon, even if Democrats take back both houses of Congress in 2024. But now is the time to begin the work.

The key is to think in the longer term and to build a political movement around passage of the amendment. That’s what happened in earlier times, as with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment ensuring gender equality in voting. Decades elapsed between 1874, when the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, and 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Along the way, women’s-rights activists built support for gender equality in voting state by state.

An amendment affirmatively protecting the right to vote could be structured in many ways. I have developed what I term a “basic” version of the constitutional right to vote, one that would continue to let states exclude noncitizens, nonresidents, children, and former or current felons, and which would not change voting rights for U.S. territories or abolish the Electoral College or change the Senate. In my new book, I also suggest how to expand the right to vote to make these more capacious changes, leaving the full scope of the amendment to those who would lead a 21st-century voting-rights movement.

15) More great stuff from Freddie deBoer, “Preemies, Genes, Meritocracy, and the Left: the vagaries of chance are at the heart of all left wing politics”

Though I’ve presented at academic conferences and invited talks many times, I’ve only really shared my various thoughts on education at public events a handful of times. Even so, I have enough experience to know that there’s a particular influence on academic performance that people find instinctively touchy: the influence of premature birth and birthweight. In a world in which prospective parents are known to freak out about everything all the time, I find it strange that more people aren’t aware of the consistent research finding that children who are born prematurely, particularly at very low birthweight, on average face serious academic challenges. I stress, these are averages, and plenty of people born prematurely go on to great academic success. But in aggregate the effect is large, persistent, and it scales. In a completely crude way, this seems pretty straightforward: less time in the womb provides less time for fetal brain development, and a majority of neurogenesis occurs in the womb. Though I’m sure the actual neurological processes are very complicated, you can probably safely say that babies just need enough time in the oven for their brains to cook. And it’s not like this evidence is new or this phenomenon undiscussed. A meta-analysis of 14 studies from 2009:

Combined effect sizes show that very preterm and/or VLBW children score 0.60 SD lower on mathematics tests, 0.48 SD on reading tests, and 0.76 SD on spelling tests than term-born peers. […] effect sizes for EF revealed a decrement of 0.57 SD for verbal fluency, 0.36 SD for working memory, and 0.49 SD for cognitive flexibility in comparison to controls. Mean age at assessment was not correlated with the strength of the effect sizes. [That is, the effects are persistent – FdB] Mathematics and reading performance, parent ratings of internalizing [behavioral] problems, teacher ratings of externalizing behavior, and attention problems, showed strong and positive correlations with mean birth weight and mean gestational age.

The earlier a premature baby is born, the lower their birth weight, the more likely they are to suffer from significant cognitive and academic deficits…

It’s not hard to understand why this is a particularly sensitive dynamic. While there are certain risk factors associated with preterm births, babies being born prematurely is fundamentally an act of God, not something anyone can prevent. Prematurity, to put it another way, is out of anyone’s control, including the type of people who have come to parenthood with a deep conviction that they can control everything. Parents of all types are of course very protective of their children and want all possible opportunities to be available to them, and academic potential in particular has somehow become even more intensely valued by parents in recent years. The “knowledge economy” has instilled an even deeper sense of panic and desperation over academic performance in parents and students alike, and elite colleges refuse to expand the size of their incoming classes, resulting in a brutal hunger games for our adolescents. In a world where parents will call teachers at home to try and grade grub an A- into an A, the effect sizes listed above are a crisis, an earthquake. This is a recipe for an exquisitely sensitive issue.

This dynamic is so sensitive, in fact, that I’m willing to bet a very large percentage of the people reading this have never heard of it at all.

It’s strange, isn’t it? Parents are inundated with things to worry over when it comes to their children, and even if they weren’t, many modern parents would seek worry out. (Many modern parents think the quality of their parenting varies directly with the amount of their worry.) And so we’re culturally aware of the cognitive influence of lead, of the academic impact of when a child is born and how that influences their schooling cohort, of the (supposed) academic benefits of breastfeeding. Parents fret over potential variables that have dramatically lower risks of reducing academic performance. Yet despite the fact that one in ten children is born preterm, and that decades of research establish that the academic impact of premature birth is larger than most of the influences that parents freak out about, few parents are aware of this consistently-replicated finding. I suspect that this ignorance stems from the pure, unadulterated unfairness of all of this – this reality is so obviously unfair, so deeply emotionally injurious, and plays so directly to the irrational guilt parents feel over their children that nobody feels particularly motivated to talk about it. You can do something about some of the potential bad influences on your kids academic success, though the effects are generally small. If you live in a state without robust lead testing requirements in the home buying process and your house wasn’t new construction when you bought it, you can and should pay the ~$500 to get your home tested for lead. But what do you do with something that you can’t control, that depends on the one-time-only event of birth, and which has persistent negative influence deep into their adolescence?

Well, you can’t do a lot beyond loving your kid regardless of their academic performance. (Spoiler alert: in the end, all you as a parent control is loving your kid.) 

Quick hits (part II)

I tried Perplexity again and this time it said it wouldn’t help me.  Meanwhile, Gemini– Google’s Bard upgrade– said it could read the links.  Someday, AI will do this for me!  But, alas, today I’m getting some links out on my 52nd birthday.

1) Drum on the truth’s liberal bias:

Tyler Cowen points today to a 2021 study that investigates whether liberals or conservatives are more likely to believe viral misinformation. The researchers removed their own bias by using a third-party service to track the 20 most viral news stories (ten true and ten false) on a biweekly basis. At the same time they surveyed Americans one week after the viral stories to see which ones they believed. The results were dramatically clear: liberals believed fewer of the viral lies (24% to 61%) and more of the viral truths (80% to 70%):…

Here is the authors’ conclusion:

This study provides the most rigorous evidence to date that U.S. conservatives are uniquely susceptible to political misperceptions in the current sociopolitical environment. Data were collected over 6 months in 2019 and reflect Americans’ beliefs about hundreds of political topics. The topics were selected on the basis of social media engagement, suggesting that these are the very issues that Americans were most likely to encounter online. Analyses suggest that conservatism is associated with a lesser ability to distinguish between true and false claims across a wide range of political issues and with a tendency to believe that all claims are true.

The results are consistent across the board: conservatives are simply less connected to reality than liberals. And keep in mind that this study was conducted in 2019, before Stop the Steal and COVID had turned conservative brains entirely into tapioca.

2) This is really good, “Medical Schools Should ‘Combat Racism.’ But Not Like This.: Radical and ill-defined ideas on race are undermining medical education, writes former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier.”

Throughout my career, I have been aware of the disturbing history of racism and bias in medicine. Though much has improved in this regard, important problems remain. As dean at Harvard, I worked with colleagues to combat those problems. And so, when I saw a 2020 paper in the journal Academic Medicine authored by my alma mater’s educational leaders about their efforts in “addressing and undoing racism and bias” in medicine, I was eager to read about the work. 

I was soon disappointed. Instead of a scrupulous analysis of an important problem, the paper consisted of dramatic, if unsupported, generalizations about the inherent racism in medical education and practice, and promises of sweeping but vague changes to come.

The authors—Leona Hess, Ann-Gel Palermo, and David Muller—write that at the Icahn School, “we have come to believe that dismantling racism in a complex, adaptive, deeply hierarchical and siloed structure built on a foundation of scientific racism demands approaches that are bold, transformational, adaptive, and systemic.” They also state that “there is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias.” And, offering their “personal reflections,” they write, “It is impossible to embark upon this journey, especially for people who are White, without making an active effort to leave behind who we think we are, what we think we have accomplished, the titles and publications—all of it. These are meaningless in the face of what our colleagues and students of color face every waking moment of their lives. Worse than meaningless, they are unearned.” 

Denigrating people’s accomplishments, no matter their race, seems a poor way to improve the practice of medicine. And focusing on the race of physicians and patients, rather than committing to providing excellent care for all, does not sound like an improvement. 

3) I find it very frustrating how structured adults make it to just hang out.  What I miss most about my college and teen years is the fact that I could just spontaneously hang out with friends all the time. NYT:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been running an experiment: inviting friends to simply hang out and do nothing, or close to nothing. I’ve asked them to drop by for a cup of tea. I’ve volunteered to join them as they walk their dogs. When I found out that my local grocery store opened at 7 a.m., I asked a fellow early riser if she wanted to get her shopping done early with me.

Some were slightly suspicious at first, but everyone was game. (“Well, I do need coffee filters,” said my friend, who joined me at the delightfully empty supermarket.)

It’s well-documented that friendships improve our physical and mental health and are vital for well-being. But I was inspired to make it even easier to see friends after reading “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time” by Sheila Liming, which argues that unstructured time with others can improve our relationships.

When you’re a kid with limited funds and modes of transport, hanging out with friends feels natural. But adults are often used to doing scheduled activities with one another, said Jessica Ayers, an assistant professor of psychological science at Boise State University, who researches adult friendships.

“Often, we don’t think something is beneficial unless it’s productive,” she said. We don’t always realize “that sitting around and resting with someone is still a productive state, and worthy of our time,” she said.

Liming, an associate professor of writing at Champlain College, said there wasn’t much research on hanging out and more was needed. But there’s evidence to suggest that face-to-face contact can strengthen emotional closeness. Plus, hanging out has an appealingly low barrier of entry, and it’s inexpensive: You don’t need reservations or tickets or special skills.

Hanging out also invites deeper conversation and builds intimacy, Liming said. (Dr. Ayers points to the trending desire on social media for a “couch friend” — a buddy that will sit with you on the couch and happily do nothing.)

But Liming acknowledges that it can feel daunting to spend time together with no formal agenda. Here’s how to get started.

If you’re in the area and you’re reading this, let’s hang out!

4) David Brooks, “Trump Came for Their Party but Took Over Their Souls”

I thought I was beyond shockable, but this week has been profoundly shocking for me. I spent the bulk of my adult life on the right-wing side of things, generally rooting for the Republican Party, because I thought that party best served America. People like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump chased me out of the Republican orbit (gradually and then all at once), but I have still held out the hope that my many friends on the right are kind of like an occupied country. They have to mouth the Trumpian prejudices to survive in this era, but somewhere deep inside, the party of Reagan still lives in their souls.

After this week, and the defeat of the immigration-Ukraine-Israel package, it’s hard to believe that anymore. Even if some parts of the bill survive, the party of Eisenhower, Reagan and McCain is just stone cold gone — and not only among House Republicans, but apparently among their Senate colleagues too.

My progressive readers are now thinking: Have you not been paying attention? Donald Trump has owned this party for years. If he told them to kill the immigration compromise because he needed a campaign issue, they were going to kill that proposal.

To which I respond: I don’t think you quite understand what just happened. This wasn’t just about Republicans cynically bending their knee to Trump. Rather, I’m convinced that Trumpism now pervades the deepest recesses of their minds and governs their unconscious assumptions. Their fundamental mental instincts are no longer conservative, but Trumpian.

Here are some of the convictions that Republicans had to assent to in order to do what they did this week:

Democracy is for suckers. In a democratic society, opposing parties negotiate and try to strike a compromise that’s, on balance, better than the status quo. This week’s immigration-Ukraine-Israel package is one of the most one-sided compromises I’ve ever seen. Republicans got most of their long-term priorities, while Democrats got almost none of theirs. “By any honest reckoning, this is the most restrictive migrant legislation in decades,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted. “This is almost entirely a border security bill, and its provisions include longtime G.O.P. priorities that the party’s restrictionists could never have passed only a few months ago.”

And yet Republican after Republican came out against the package, arguing it doesn’t have absolutely everything they want. They have adopted the Trumpian logic that under him, they will never have to compromise. The dictator will issue commands, and everything Republicans want will just happen. Meanwhile, Republican James Lankford, who conducted a lavishly successful negotiation, is being savaged on the right side of the internet for being a weak-willed compromiser.

5) How had I never heard this story??

As a teenager, Collin Martin felt he had to make a choice. For as long as he could remember, his ambition had been to become a professional soccer player, to make a living doing the thing he loved. He had a sense, though, that it was not compatible with who he was. Martin was gay, and there were — as far as he knew — no gay soccer players.

The two things, he came to believe, could not coexist. He could either play soccer, or he could be himself. In his telling, he approached the choice with a cool rationality…

And then, a couple of years later, his “nightmare” came to pass. During a crucial, end-of-season game with San Diego Loyal, in the U.S.L. Championship, Martin heard an opponent call him a homophobic slur. He reported it to the referee. Martin was immediately sent off; the official had assumed Martin was using the slur toward him.

What followed was messy and confusing and, from Martin’s perspective, excruciating. In footage of the game, the referee seems bewildered, lost. Martin’s teammates surround him, explaining the misunderstanding. His coach, Landon Donovan, implores his counterpart, the Phoenix Rising coach Rick Schantz, to remove the implicated player. When he refuses, San Diego’s players take a knee and then walk off the field.

That scene is the climax to “The Last Taboo,” a German documentary charting the experiences of the handful of openly gay players in men’s soccer over the last half century. Compared to the story with which the film opens — the ostracism, abuse and eventual suicide of Justin Fashanu, England’s first openly gay professional — it is hard not to feel encouraged.

Martin might have been abused, and Schantz might not have understood the gravity of the situation, but the player had the support of his teammates, his coach and his club. They were all prepared to sacrifice a game — and a crucial one — for a principle. That alone illustrates that soccer is certainly a more welcoming place now than it was in Fashanu’s day.

6) Really enjoyed this, “AI professional headshots are quick and easy. But should you use one?”  Gift link so you can see all the examples. 

7) I’m all for efforts to try and make college campuses more diverse, but, not at all costs.  Nebraska Engineering version is what’s wrong with DEI:

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s College of Engineering might sound like one of the last places in higher education where you’d expect to find evidence of DEI orthodoxy influencing big decisions. Nebraska is a red state and UNL is a public school. Plus, you’d expect hiring at an engineering school to be based on, well, scientific criteria. 

But through a public records request, I reviewed every diversity recruitment report created by the school over the last four years. And I’ve discovered that even here, DEI has been central to hiring decisions. 

For example, in 2020, when the school set out to hire a professor of National Defense/Computer Network Security, the search committee made its priority clear: each candidate’s “diversity” score—assessing how well applicants understand things like “many intersectional aspects of diversity”—was given equal weight to factors like research and teaching experience. 

Another search in 2021, for a professor of Big Data/Cybersecurity, stated: “the weight of the ‘diversity’ scores were equal to the other scored areas that contributed to the candidate’s overall score.”

And applicants have been ruled out for failing to clear DEI hurdles. According to one report, from 2021, “a small number of candidates” in a search for a professor of thermal sciences “were eliminated based on absence or weak diversity statement.” In another case that year, three applicants for a role in environmental engineering “did not include diversity statements and were disqualified from the search.”

Per the college’s diversity and inclusion plan, which is still in place, the reports carry high stakes: a search that fails to show “a serious consideration” of DEI-related issues risks being canceled, resulting in no hire at all.

Diversity statement evaluations have long been criticized for their potential to enforce an orthodoxy on issues of race and gender, weeding out faculty with heterodox views. They raise serious questions of academic freedom—as well as First Amendment compliance.

The college’s DEI statement evaluation rubric—also acquired through a records request—confirms these fears. The rubric dictates a high score for engineers who identify and discuss “intersectional aspects of diversity”—while punishing those who fail to “distinguish inclusion from diversity.” 

In other words, even in Nebraska, chemical engineers and materials scientists must be fluent in the idiom of race consciousness.

8) On the failed Mayorkas impeachment:

Those three Republicans — Ken Buck of Colorado, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Tom McClintock of California — appear to be the only House members in their party who understand how the Constitution is supposed to work. McClintock, for example, despises Mayorkas and accuses him of “maladministration, malfeasance and neglect of duties on a truly historic scale” for letting too many immigrants into the country.

“But these are not impeachable offenses,” he said last year. The founders, he said, set a high bar for impeachment — treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors — and if Republicans make a crime out of a disagreement, they “will have signed off on this new and unconstitutional abuse of power.”

That seems so obvious, but many in his party are still in a blind rage about the two impeachments of Donald Trump, having never understood the depraved and criminal actions that led to them. They were desperate for a way to level the playing field against a Democrat, any Democrat.

They may get another chance if Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who was absent while undergoing cancer treatment, is able to return. His vote, though, could be canceled out if Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, wins a special election in New York next week and is quickly sworn in. But a better move is for Republican leaders to tell their loudest members that they’ve been embarrassed enough, and to drop the whole thing.

9) I had never had Indian food till about 10-12 years ago when I tried Butter Chicken and it changed my life.  Now it’s among my very favorite meals (along with some naan, of course).  Thus, I quite enjoyed this story on the controversy over butter chicken’s origins.

10) Did you hear about “Woke Kindergarten”?  If it wasn’t actually real, you’d think this was The Onion, or a right-wing op to make liberals look stupid.  But, no, it’s just liberals being stupid on their own.  Nothing better than satire– via Jeff Maurer.

11) Always here for good research on the microbiome, “Host-diet-gut microbiome interactions influence human energy balance: a randomized clinical trial”

The gut microbiome is emerging as a key modulator of human energy balance. Prior studies in humans lacked the environmental and dietary controls and precision required to quantitatively evaluate the contributions of the gut microbiome. Using a Microbiome Enhancer Diet (MBD) designed to deliver more dietary substrates to the colon and therefore modulate the gut microbiome, we quantified microbial and host contributions to human energy balance in a controlled feeding study with a randomized crossover design in young, healthy, weight stable males and females (NCT02939703). In a metabolic ward where the environment was strictly controlled, we measured energy intake, energy expenditure, and energy output (fecal and urinary). The primary endpoint was the within-participant difference in host metabolizable energy between experimental conditions [Control, Western Diet (WD) vs. MBD]. The secondary endpoints were enteroendocrine hormones, hunger/satiety, and food intake. Here we show that, compared to the WD, the MBD leads to an additional 116 ± 56 kcals (P < 0.0001) lost in feces daily and thus, lower metabolizable energy for the host (89.5 ± 0.73%; range 84.2-96.1% on the MBD vs. 95.4 ± 0.21%; range 94.1-97.0% on the WD; P < 0.0001) without changes in energy expenditure, hunger/satiety or food intake (P > 0.05). Microbial 16S rRNA gene copy number (a surrogate of biomass) increases (P < 0.0001), beta-diversity changes (whole genome shotgun sequencing; P = 0.02), and fermentation products increase (P < 0.01) on an MBD as compared to a WD along with significant changes in the host enteroendocrine system (P < 0.0001). The substantial interindividual variability in metabolizable energy on the MBD is explained in part by fecal SCFAs and biomass. Our results reveal the complex host-diet-microbiome interplay that modulates energy balance.

12) I don’t recall why I recently came across this from 2020, but, it’s pretty cool: “The Democracy of Dating: How Political Affiliations Shape Relationship Formation”

How much does politics affect relationship building? Previous experimental studies have come to vastly different conclusions – ranging from null to truly transformative effects. To explore these differences, this study replicates and extends previous research by conducting five survey experiments meant to expand our understanding of how politics does/does not shape the formation of romantic relationships. We find that people, indeed, are influenced by the politics of prospective partners; respondents evaluate those in the political out-group as being less attractive, less dateable, and less worthy of matchmaking efforts. However, these effects are modest in size – falling almost exactly in between previous study estimates. Our results shine light on a literature that has, up until this point, produced a chasm in study results – a vital task given concerns over growing levels of partisan animus in the USA and the rapidly expanding body of research on affective polarization.

13) I’m not a huge NBA fan and I’ve been vaguely aware that Nikola Jokic is really good.  But I quite enjoyed this, “How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player”  Then I went in search of YouTube videos and I was honestly blown away.  Damn.

 

14) This was a really interesting profile of Bill Ackman. “How a liberal billionaire became America’s leading anti-DEI crusader: Bill Ackman used Wall Street tactics to oust Harvard’s first Black president. He’s part of a wave of business leaders attacking diversity initiatives spurred by George Floyd’s death.” Worth the gift link. 

15) I have the answer to this question…”Why Aren’t More People Watching ‘For All Mankind’?” Because, overall, the writing does not near match the incredible visuals or fine performances.  There’s just too much cringe.  For the record, I just finished the fourth season and while I’ve enjoyed it, I could not help thinking it could be so much better.

16) This is really good, “8 Fitness Myths That Drive Experts Crazy”

Myth 1: You should stretch before you work out.

If you’ve taken a high school gym class, you’ve probably been told to spend a few minutes stretching before exercising. But recent research has found that stretching before exercising is ineffective for preventing injury and may actually work against you. That’s because stretching a muscle for more than 90 seconds temporarily diminishes its strength.

 

“You’ve just transiently weakened all the muscle groups you’re trying to train,” said Dr. Josh Goldman, associate director of the Center for Sports Medicine at UCLA Health.

If you really enjoy the feeling of stretching before physical activity, don’t hold the stretch for long, Dr. Goldman said.

For the most effective preparation to work out, try a dynamic warm-up — a series of active exercises that get your blood flowing and gently stress your muscles. Save your stretching for a separate time, he said. “I like to tell people to do it before bed,” since it gives your muscles time to recover before moving again…

Myth 3: Running destroys your knees.

Fear not, research has debunked the notion that running increases your risk of osteoarthritis, and even suggests it can protect your knees against the condition. In fact, not moving increases your risk of developing osteoarthritis, along with age, weight and genetics.

For years, experts thought that “our knees were like tires — you drive the car a lot, you burn through your tire tread,” Dr. Goldman said. “That is not true, because our body is dynamic,” and our joints can regenerate themselves, especially when we are regularly active.

That said, running can definitely lead to knee pain or injury if you train too aggressively, said Dr. Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine physician at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. Dr. Metzl called this “violating the rule of toos” — running too fast or too far too soon. “Increase slowly,” he said. And if you start to feel knee pain, get it checked out as soon as possible by a sports medicine expert.

Quick hits (part I)

1) I wanted to learn more about humor and personality based on Jillette’s comments on Trump.  Here’s Claude’s summary of this interview from a humor researcher:

Based on the interview, here are some key points about what Kuiper thinks regarding the relationship between humor and personality characteristics:

1. Kuiper sees humor styles as expressions of broader personality traits to some extent. For example, he notes that affiliative humor tends to be an extraverted style of humor. This is supported by twin studies showing that part of the variance in humor styles can be attributed to the same genetic factors underlying personality traits like extraversion and agreeableness.
2. He believes it would be very difficult to substantially change someone’s characteristic humor style, just as it is hard for an introvert to become an extravert. This suggests he sees humor styles as fairly stable traits that are connected to broader personality dispositions.
3. However, he also believes humor styles have a large environmental component, with about half the variance explained by environmental factors. So he thinks they can be changed to some degree through life experiences, but would be difficult to modify dramatically.
4. He is skeptical about the usefulness of humor-based therapies for psychological issues, believing it is better to target broader cognitions, behaviors and emotions. This implies he sees maladaptive humor use as a manifestation of other personality and psychological problems rather than a core issue itself.

In summary, Kuiper seems to view humor styles as related to but distinct from other personality traits, with evidence they share some genetic origins. However he believes they are still separate constructs that have large environmental determinants. Overall he does not see humor itself as a core determinant of psychological functioning.

2) This article on the “moral panic” over Ozempic is fantastic.  You should read it:

Clune has a history of heroin addiction (he wrote, to my mind, one of the great heroin-addiction memoirs) but successfully wrestled his demons into submission through a stay in rehab, diligent attendance at Narcotics Anonymous, exercise, and an enigmatic, epiphanic experience of grace. He knows how lucky he is to have overcome his addiction through struggle, and also knows how rarely his strategy works for others. But when he proposed to friends in the recovery community that Suboxone is a worthy tool, they were upset; they were skeptical of a fix so expedient, so simple, so biological. “That’s like telling someone that smoking crack will get their mind off booze,” one NA longtimer argued. “Your recovery is based on a spiritual awakening,” another explained to Clune angrily. To this friend, Suboxone — a magic pill that changes the brain — would foreclose a person’s chance of personal transformation.

I thought of Clune’s essay often as I followed last year’s media coverage of Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and other new medications that cause weight loss (from here, I’ll just use “Ozempic” as a shorthand for the whole class). Like Suboxone, Ozempic is a startlingly effective pharmacological intervention for a problem — obesity — that is common, stigmatized, complicated, and deadly. Helping people lose weight is only one of its benefits. At the homeless clinic in Brooklyn where I work as a doctor, most of the patients suffer from long-standing, intersecting chronic illnesses that doom them to trajectories of debility and decline: uncontrolled diabetes that hastens kidney disease, kidney disease that worsens high blood pressure, high blood pressure that increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Until recently, this was a Gordian knot that was impossible to cut with medication alone; my patients routinely take a full pharmacopeia a day and yet their conditions progress. But now, suddenly, I’m hopeful. Ozempic seems to be something of a miracle. It’s a very effective treatment for diabetes and as well as high blood pressure, heart failure, and kidney disease. New evidence suggests that it improves depression and reduces suicidality, and it also seems, unexpectedly, to reduce non-food-related addictive behaviors, like gambling. Studies are underway to see if it prevents cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. There’s much more to learn, and we don’t understand how these drugs work so well. It isn’t just a matter of shedding fat and getting glucose under control; as a side effect of Ozempic’s potency, we’re gaining new insight into the relationship between mind and metabolism…

In a culture where we so powerfully associate wealth, beauty, and thinness, I wonder if we simply can’t envision recategorizing a medicine like Ozempic, something rich people want, as an intervention for the non-rich.We are comparing Ozempic to the wrong precedents — fen-phen in the 1990s gets mentioned a lot; McMillan Cottom compares the hype it’s received to Botox and Viagra — and missing the analogies that would be most helpful. In a hopeful end-of-year story in The New Yorker, Dhruv Khullar compares Ozempic to COVID therapies and the COVID vaccine: interventions that made an overwhelming, seemingly intractable public-health crisis suddenly much less so. The comparison is a useful one, because it alsopoints toward how Ozempic’s initial access issues do not mean that it cannot, ultimately, play a powerful role in reducing health disparities. Initial coverage of the COVID vaccine focused a lot on the equity concerns surrounding who would get it first. And yet, because the vaccine was disproportionately beneficial to the populations most vulnerable to serious COVID outcomes, the poor, sick, and elderly were ultimately most helped by it, even if they got it two months later than they should have.

Suboxone is the other medication that might help us make sense of how we should understand Ozempic’s potential. Over the past 20 years, Suboxone’s cost — initially prohibitive to many who needed it — has decreased, and it’s gradually achieved greater acceptance in the recovery community. Regulatory barriers that prevented physicians from prescribing Suboxone have fallen, and “harm reduction,” a framework for managing addiction that tries to mitigate its worst impacts rather than require people to conform to certain behaviors, is increasingly recognized as the standard of care in addiction medicine.

And yet, Suboxone remains a heavily stigmatized, underutilized therapy largely because of its cultural associations rather than its medical risks. The persistent dogma that people who use it aren’t really “clean” prevents people who use drugs from asking for it, and most doctors are reluctant to make it part of their practice and take on a patient population they’d rather not deal with. Like any medication, it also comes with a host of complications: It doesn’t work for everyone, it carries a risk of side effects, it often requires a daily out-of-pocket co-pay, and people usually have to take it for the rest of their lives. It’s a very good medicine, but it doesn’t magically address all the reasons people become addicted to opioids in the first place: trauma, untreated mental-health issues, bodily pain, existential distress. It doesn’t fix a broken culture. But it does give a lot of struggling people a better chance of waking up each day to face that culture and work through everything else that ails them.

3a) The Mayorkas impeachment is so, so wrong.  Ruth Marcus:

“The foundational requirement for impeachable ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ is that they must be of extraordinary seriousness and ought to be of a type that corrupts or subverts governmental processes or the constitutional order,” one of the nation’s leading experts on impeachment, University of Missouri law professor Frank Bowman, told the panel as it hurtled toward writing articles of impeachment against Mayorkas. “Following the policy directives of one’s elected superior in pursuit of that superior’s policy aims is simply not an impeachable abuse of power.”

How do we know this? Well, the framers of the Constitution considered a lower standard at the constitutional convention in 1787. When Virginia delegate George Mason suggested that impeachable offenses be restricted to “treason, bribery or maladministration,” James Madison pushed back. “So vague a term will be equivalent to tenure during the pleasure of the Senate,” he argued.

House Republicans have produced no conservative impeachment scholars to defend their actions. Their go-to legal expert, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, has said he sees no impeachable offense here. “Absent some new evidence, I cannot see the limiting principle that would allow the House to impeach Mayorkas without potentially making any policy disagreement with a cabinet member a high crime and misdemeanor,” Turley wrote in the Daily Beast. “That is a slippery slope that we would be wise to avoid.”

3b) And this is how you cover it as a news story as seen in the Washington Post (NYT was way too weaselly), “House GOP unveils Mayorkas impeachment articles despite lack of evidence”

4) If you are on twitter and not following, “sports, but make it art” you are missing one of the best things out there.  I cannot believe this guy does it without AI help!  Amazing.  Great profile in the NYT:

LJ Rader tries to be online as much as possible during big sporting events, but he missed the first half of last Sunday’s N.F.L. playoff game between the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs because of a dinner engagement. After he left the restaurant, Mr. Rader checked his phone and saw an unusual request: The N.F.L. had tagged him on X, formerly known as Twitter, hoping he would deliver one of his signature creations.

“I would’ve been so mad if I was still eating and had missed this,” Mr. Rader said.

On social media, Mr. Rader is the wizard behind Art But Make It Sports, where he uses accounts on X and Instagram to pair photographs from the world of sports with paintings and other pieces of art that mirror them. Witty, irreverent and often poignant, the accounts have a combined 365,000 followers.

Last Sunday, the N.F.L. wanted Mr. Rader’s take on a scene that was destined for internet immortality: Jason Kelce, an offensive lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles, was screaming, shirtless and clutching a can of beer as he leaned out of a stadium luxury box in subarctic weather to celebrate a touchdown that his brother, Travis, had scored for Kansas City…

As Mr. Rader’s work has grown in popularity, speculation has spread among his followers — some more cynical than others — about how he goes about his business, including suggestions that he must be using artificial intelligence. Mr. Rader said that was absolutely not the case. First, he said, his work predates ChatGPT and other A.I. tools. Second, what would be the fun of using a computer?

“I do it for the enjoyment of it,” he said. “It keeps me sharp and gets me out of the house and gets me going to different galleries and shows and museums.”…

In an interview over video chat, Mr. Rader asked to be presented with a batch of sports photos so that he could be tested on the spot.

Amid a series of uncanny comparisons, Mr. Rader needed about 2.7 seconds to match a photo of “The Catch,” Dwight Clark’s touchdown reception for the San Francisco 49ers in the 1981 N.F.C. Championship Game, to “The Intervention of the Sabine Women,” an 18th-century painting by Jacques-Louis David. In the painting, it is not the main subject that resonated with Mr. Rader, but rather a woman in the background who is holding a baby over her head as a battle engulfs her. (She could have been catching a football amid a swarm of defenders.)

Mr. Rader has a knack for recalling patterns and themes from artwork that he has seen and studied, he said. That skill set does not translate to other facets of his life.

“I’m always forgetting my keys,” he said.

5) OMG this story was nuts! “Inventing the Perfect College Applicant For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait.”  Read it.  Love this detail:

He broke into the city’s private-school set and soon found himself in the fancy Fifth Avenue apartment of a new client. Rim says that one day this teen’s mother gave him a reality check. As Rim recalls it, “She said, ‘Chris, if you want to make it here in New York, you cannot charge $75. No one’s going to take you seriously.’ ” Rim says she told him to charge $1,500 an hour and vowed to bring him more clients.

6) Fascinating look at destranitioners from Pamela Paul.  It is fair and open-minded.  Naturally, the trans activist crowd has labeled it an anti-trans hit piece.  Gift link. 

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.

“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”

7) I’ve now got Perplexity bookmarked.  It did great when I tried it out for a bunch of stuff, “Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me.”

During my tests, I found Perplexity most useful for complicated or open-ended searches, such as summarizing recent news articles about a specific company or giving me suggestions for date-night restaurants. I also found it useful when what I was looking for — instructions for renewing a passport, for example — was buried on a crowded, hard-to-navigate website.

8) Dog breed longevity. 

All dogs go to heaven. But a bulldog might find itself headed there years before a Border terrier, according to a new study of nearly 600,000 British dogs from more than 150 breeds.

Large breeds and breeds with flattened faces had shorter average life spans than smaller dogs and those with elongated snouts, the researchers found. Female dogs also lived slightly longer than male ones. The results were published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday.

9) I’m a big fan of Coleman Hughes and this is a pretty good profile here.  But a real failing of the journalist in coding “failure to adhere to DEI orthodoxy” as “conservative.” 

10) This was a really useful piece from Steve Vladeck, “What’s Really Happening in Biden vs. Abbott vs. the Supreme Court”

Legally, the constitutional law is quite clear: The federal government gets to set nationwide immigration policies and choose how to enforce them. And although states are free to assist in federal enforcement (or to decline to assist, in the case of so-called sanctuary cities), there is no serious argument that states have the authority to impede or supplant federal enforcement efforts. Federal supremacy is hard-wired into the Constitution, regardless of how vigorously we might oppose the policy choices that particular federal officials — or even the sitting president — make. Although the antebellum era witnessed an array of arguments from states for why they could resist federal statutes to which they objected, none of those arguments survived the Civil War.

That hasn’t stopped Mr. Abbott. In a remarkable statement issued last week, he invoked Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution for the proposition not only that states have a federal constitutional right to defend themselves against “invasion,” but also that such authority “supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.” In other words, so long as Texas is defending itself against what it believes is an invasion, conflicts between its actions and those of federal immigration officials should be resolved in Texas’ favor.

 

Given that the statement came just two days after he had been handed a temporary setback by the Supreme Court in one of the three pending border-related lawsuits between Texas and the federal government, it was viewed by many on the left (and in the media) as outright defiance of the justices’ ruling, if not a flashpoint for a burgeoning constitutional crisis. Meanwhile, right-wing media — and an alarming number of Republican elected officials — egged Mr. Abbott on, encouraging him to do exactly what his critics claimed he was already doing, that is, to ignore the Supreme Court in the name of defending Texas’ sovereignty.

The reaction from the left was wrong. All that the Supreme Court did last week was to wipe away, with no explanation, a lower-court injunction that was effectively barring federal officials from removing the razor wire that Texas had placed along the border. Nothing in the ruling stopped Texas from doing anything, so there was no way in which Mr. Abbott could “defy” the court, even if he wanted to. His public and in-court arguments may be — and are — incorrect, but it’s not a constitutional crisis just because he’s making them. And although some prominent Democrats have urged President Biden to federalize the Texas National Guard in response, such a move would be legally dubious on its own and would serve only to escalate the political conflict.

The reaction from the right was far worse. From members of Congress to right-wing commentators, the idea that Mr. Abbott should simply ignore the Supreme Court quickly drew enormous traction. For everyone urging Mr. Abbott on, this made painfully clear that the constitutional principles just don’t matter; all that matters is winning. If an issue is popular — or divisive — enough, then using it to score political points takes precedence over all other considerations, including an actual policy fix on Capitol Hill, respect for the other branches of government, or fidelity to the basic structure of our constitutional system, to say nothing of the dangerous legal and political precedents it would set to upend all of those things.

And then there’s the court itself — which, with full knowledge of what’s happening on the ground, didn’t exactly help matters by issuing an unexplained ruling that divided the justices 5 to 4. Rather than providing guidance that might have helped to defuse some of the legal disputes and political tension, or at least speaking with one voice, the justices introduced further confusion.

11) So good from Yglesias, “How lie detectors exacerbate border problems”

As most people know, polygraph results are not admissible in most legal contexts. That’s because they are not considered scientific enough to constitute reliable evidence. Those of us who’ve seen “Anatomy of a Fall” know that in the French legal system you can apparently just introduce whatever kind of hearsay or gossip or passages from someone’s novel that you want (French lawyers confirm this is true) but in the United States that doesn’t fly.

You also might think that a reliable lie detector test would have enormous private sector value.

CBP wants to know whether or not its job candidates are lying in interviews, but don’t a lot of employers want this information? It turns out there is actually a federal law — the Employee Polygraph Protection Act — which bans most private sector employers from requiring polygraphs as a condition of employment. And yet this thing that’s banned in the private sector and considered unreliable by the judiciary, is mandatory at many public sector agencies including the CBP.

This is particularly a huge issue at the border, because as Elliott Spagat reported for the AP in 2017, about two-thirds of applicants seem to flunk the CBP polygraph screen.

The Border Patrol Union, which has become an influential force in right-wing politics, has been saying for years that this is a problem. So it’s mostly conservatives who’ve taken up the cause of polygraph reform. Representative Dan Crenshaw is a particular leader on this and he has a bill that “would remove the polygraph requirement for CBP applicants who have prior law enforcement experience or military security clearances.” This would expand some of the limited polygraph waivers the CBP currently offers, which are only specifically available for veterans with top-secret clearances.

And it really does seem odd that you have people flunking the CBP polygraph who’ve been cleared at other agencies. One could imagine a story whereby they just have an unusually low-quality applicant pool, but Spagat’s reporting definitely turned up stories of people who seem awfully legit but are getting bounced by the polygraph:

David Kirk was a career Marine pilot with a top-secret security clearance and a record of flying classified missions. He was in the cockpit when President George W. Bush and Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Joe Biden traveled around the nation’s capital by helicopter.

With credentials like that, Kirk was stunned to fail a lie detector when he applied for a pilot’s job with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which guards 6,000 miles of border with Mexico and Canada. After two contentious polygraph sessions that lasted a combined eight hours, Kirk said, he drove home “with my tail between my legs,” wondering how things had gone so wrong.

In the coding of partisan politics, it’s right-wingers and the border agent union that complain about the polygraphs while it’s progressives who worry about low standards and corruption at CBP. But the weird thing about this is that Crenshaw’s position only really makes sense if polygraph testing isn’t reliable (which is sort of what he says), and this turns out to be exactly the liberal position about polygraphs…

On the narrow question at hand here, I think that rather than hiring more polygraph examiners to address the hiring bottleneck, immigration hawks and civil libertarians should join hands to admit that polygraphs are kinda fake and we don’t need to be making it harder to hire border agents.

That being said, the corruption concerns that motivated the polygraph testing are not fake.

There is a lot of money to be made by smuggling people or contraband (usually drugs) into the United States of America. People are willing to run significant risks to their personal safety to reap the rewards of illegal cross-border traffic, and they are also willing to invest time and resources in things like digging tunnels and cutting through segments of border wall. It’s natural that under the circumstances there is also an interest in bribing border agents. Unfortunately, a lot of anti-corruption efforts — certainly including the emphasis on polygraph screening — seem to be motivated by the very specific concern that Mexican drug cartels will recruit people to go become border agents who then work on their behalf.

That kind of scenario, basically a southwestern version of “The Departed,” is certainly something that could happen. But in CBP’s own review of 120 major corruption cases, they only found five instances of infiltration. The most common scenario, in 56 cases, was for an employee to “self-initiate” corrupt behavior — offering illicit services to criminals rather than being recruited by criminals.

One issue the review notes is that corruption seems particularly common in “hometown” assignments where an agent is working close to where he grew up, in a community where he has wide-ranging contacts.

 

If you sent all border agents to far-off postings, that could be a potentially very effective anti-corruption measure. But realistically, if you tried to do that without making any other changes, recruiting would collapse. Lots of people from South Texas who join CBP wouldn’t want the job if it meant a posting to Buffalo. And if you had to try to exclusively recruit people from out of the region to go move to the Southwest border region, you’d be drawing on a much thinner pool of people — especially if you were trying to get a critical mass of people with Spanish-language skills.

12) This seems… not great, “Law Enforcement Braces for Flood of Child Sex Abuse Images Generated by A.I.
Artificial intelligence technology has drastically simplified the creation of images of children being exploited or abused, whether real or fake.”

Can we stamp these out completely?  No way.  But still no reason at all we should not make the possession of pornographic images of children (whether AI or real children) against the law and have laws about disseminating nude images of real persons.

13) I hate the Republican war on public schools. “Private Schools, Public Money: School Leaders Are Pushing Parents to Exploit Voucher Programs: Voucher expansions have unleashed a flood of additional taxpayer dollars to the benefit of families already enrolled in private schools. In Ohio, some schools are now “strongly encouraging” parents to apply for vouchers, regardless of need or income.”

14) Great discussion with Yascha Mounk, “Ruy Teixeira on How the Democrats Lost the Working Class
Yascha Mounk and Ruy Teixeira discuss what Biden would need to do to rebuild a broad coalition for the 2024 election.”

15) All sorts of data on young adult and parent relationships.  This one on why you want daughters:

16) Love this from Jeff Maurer, “An Open Letter to the White House Communications Staff Who Put a Tweet From a Radical Environmental Group on Their Web Page”

Some background is needed: Last week, the White House delayed approval of a natural gas export terminal to study its environmental impact. I am indifferent about this decision, as it may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions. My priority vis-a-vis climate change is to enact effective policies that reduce global emissions. Substantially less important to me is the ability to post an all-caps tweet celebrating a symbolic “victory” that might actually make things worse.

But the policy merits of your decision are not the subject of this letter. I am writing to question the wisdom of one, specific decision that your communications team made in support of this action. As part of the White House’s announcement, you posted statements from various figures and groups praising the decision. 85 quotes were posted. This was one of them:

 

My question to the White House communications team is: Are you so bad at your jobs that you posted praise from Climate Defiance without knowing who they are, or are you so bad at your jobs that you posted the Climate Defiance quote even though you do know who they are?

Because here’s who Climate Defiance are, in their own words:

 

Climate Defiance practice the form of protest that some people call “direct action”, but that most people call “being a total cock to random bystanders”. They relish shutting down events, including White House events (reminder: You work at the White House). They have blocked roads and tweeted approvingly of vandalizing art. They brag about doing “batshit crazy” actions (their words!) that create a “culture of fear”. Their “favorite saying” is “fuck around and find out”. There are few things that truly unite Americans; we live in a fractured culture with few points of agreement. But a visceral loathing of obnoxious shits like the half-wits at Climate Defiance might be the one thing that brings us all together.

So why is the White House advertising its connections with this group? Any link between the White House and Climate Defiance should be buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa. But you willfully touted a connection, and bad news: conservative Twitter noticed. I think if you had posted a web page with 84 positive quotes, that would have gotten the job done. But you decided that 85 quotes were needed — I don’t know why. Maybe you were worried that you would tune into NBC on election night and hear Steve Kornacki say: “Biden would have won if the number of quotes on his natural gas page had been the product of two prime numbers, such as 85. But there were 84 quotes. What a rookie mistake.”

This error is inexcusable since communications materials — which I spent many years producing — are a low-upside endeavor. Nobody reads them. So, the first rule is: Do no harm. A good starting point would be to ensure that none of your materials contain swastikas, full frontal nudity, or glowing praise from highly-unpopular extremist groups. You failed this simple test! Which makes me wonder if other White House pages might contain stray Nazi symbols or dick pics that you accidentally uploaded from your phone.

I’m bothered by how badly you seem to misunderstand the politics of our moment. Extremist protesters are unpopular. Republicans have spent years — nay, generations — trying to tie Democrats to far-left groups. This is why most reporting on Climate Defiance comes from Fox News — they understand that left-wing wackos are bad for the Democratic brand. Democrats should loudly denounce these groups. Consider John Fetterman, who has been publicly feuding with left-wing protesters, and has seen his poll numbers shoot up. In a perfect world, Biden would walk onto the Truman Balcony, expose his testicles, and yell “Come lick ‘em, ya lefty freaks!” But since that’s unlikely (though, you can use that idea if you want!), the next best thing would be for the White House to simply not advertise when it is sympatico with a group of deluded, LARPing nincompoops.

The saddest part of this scenario is that you seem to think that Climate Defiance loons will vote for Biden. They will not. Because, again, you misunderstand the dynamic: Far left protesters’ entire political identity is defined by their opposition to mainstream Democrats. Read Climate Defiance’s Twitter: Most of their invective is directed towards “feeble moderates” and “the mushy middle”. They’ve called Biden a “criminal” and a “backstabber” who is “digging his own grave”. On January 15 — a month after White House adviser John Podesta granted the group a meeting — they called Biden the “white moderate” who Martin Luther King “warned us about.” Stop trying to appease these people — they will not be appeased! You are like a deluded, horny teenager who does the prom queen’s homework and somehow doesn’t realize that she’s stringing you along and will never, ever fuck you.

17) Can DEI create a hostile work environment?

The dispute, like so many in higher education, pits a faction that believes that the prevailing campus attitudes toward identity are racist against a faction that believes that they help fight racism. It is hardly unique in raising the question of whether DEI initiatives ever go too far. Still, this case stands out, not only because it resulted in a federal lawsuit, but because earlier this month, a judge denied Penn State’s motion to dismiss De Piero’s hostile-workplace claim. The case can now move forward.

The ruling comes as backlash against DEI initiatives is growing and questions about when they violate antidiscrimination law remain unsettled. More significant, it establishes a standard that federal judges of varying ideologies could plausibly adopt, and that other plaintiffs can use to bring bias claims to trial.

This isn’t a case where, say, a white Donald Trump appointee who hates academia took an extreme position, like “Any departure from color-blindness is illegal,” that would be overturned on appeal. This particular judge is more difficult for DEI partisans to dismiss. Wendy Beetlestone, a Black district-court judge born in Nigeria, was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama. She was announced last year as the University of Liverpool’s next chancellor; she is clearly not hostile to higher education. And the substance of her ruling is hard for would-be critics to reject in full.

Beetlestone sided with Penn State in dismissing multiple claims, such as that De Piero was subject to “disparate treatment” and that his First Amendment rights were violated. “We are gratified by the judge’s decision to dismiss the majority of Mr. De Piero’s claim,” a Penn State spokesperson wrote in an email to me, “and we will vigorously defend the sole claim the court allowed to proceed.”

That surviving claim concerns whether De Piero was subject to a hostile work environment. Penn State’s approaches to race and DEI, as described in his complaint, “plausibly amount to ‘pervasive’ harassment,” Beetlestone ruled. She qualified her ruling, noting that “discussing in an educational environment the influence of racism on our society does not necessarily violate federal law.” In fact, a workplace “dogmatically committed to race-blindness at all costs” would “blink at history and reality,” she wrote, adding that training on concepts such as white privilege, white fragility, and critical race theory “can contribute positively to nuanced, important conversations.”…

What did De Piero describe that struck the judge as plausibly constituting that “constant drumbeat”?

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, all Penn State faculty and staff were told to attend a “Conversation on Racial Climate” on Zoom. During the session, Alina Wong, an assistant vice provost for educational equity, “led the faculty in a breathing exercise,” De Piero’s complaint states, “in which she instructed the ‘White and non-Black people of color to hold it just a little longer—to feel the pain.’”

On at least four other occasions in 2020 and 2021, the judge wrote, De Piero “was obligated to attend conferences or trainings that discussed racial issues in essentialist and deterministic terms—ascribing negative traits to white people or white teachers without exception and as flowing inevitably from their race.” One session involved a presentation about “White Language Supremacy.” Another included examples of ostensibly racist comments “where every hypothetical perpetrator was white,” the judge continued.

18) Good stuff from deBoer on how a completely crazy anti-psychiatry guy gets treated as a reasonable authority questioning psychiatry:

He’s also a conspiracy theorist loon and highly-influential anti-vaxxer, a man who has spoken darkly about CIA-developed brain control microchips and sees the hand of pharma companies and DARPA in all human affairs. He has claimed that the drive for mass Covid-19 vaccination was the product of a conspiracy that involved, somehow, both Bill Gates and the Chinese communist party, among others. He and his wife’s 2021 book COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey has quietly become one of the more commonly-cited texts by the international anti-vaccine movement, despite being published when the vaccine rollout was less than a year old. He argues that vaccines are an “insidious gateway to transhumanism and human control,” as well as a Trojan horse for using nanotechnology to enforce government domination. He has been an outspoken critic of the so-called climate change agenda, claiming that “global warming alarmists are liars and cheats.” He strongly suggested that the horrific Maui fires of last year were planned by some sinister entity, and speculated that “directed energy weapons” may have been to blame. His work is full of vague, paranoiac references to “globalists” and dark muttering about how the United Nations seeks to dominate us all. He has argued that Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood mass shooter, could have been stopped but was not because the military was afraid to run afoul of political correctness. Breggin is an opponent of universal health coverage, as such – not just a particular expression of such coverage, like Medicare for All, but for the concept of universal health care writ large. He believes that universal access to medical care will necessarily lead to coerced abortions and widespread euthanasia and that the push for universal health coverage is a front for global domination and one-world government.

Here’s a good encapsulation of Breggin’s philosophy, an essay that posits that the American and Chinese governments are working “to utterly crush individualism and personal freedom, and… seek to replace Western civilization and its freedoms with a totalitarian Global Empire.” The various claims he makes amount to a laundry list of contemporary American conspiracy theories.

These fringe views are made more disturbing by how much Breggin’s thinking has penetrated into mainstream spaces, including spaces that matter. It’s in the courtroom that Breggin has perhaps been most influential. He has served as an expert witness many, many times, and frequently brags as such. Usually he testifies in cases against pharmaceutical companies or medical providers, but he has also participated in legal proceedings where mental illness might be an exculpatory factor, such as when he testified in the notorious case of Michelle Carter, who was charged with manslaughter for encouraging a friend to commit suicide. There’s no way to know how much exactly Breggin might have been paid for these services over the years, but expert witnesses typically charge four-or-five figure retainers in addition to extravagant hourly fees, and they can make even more than the usual when a defendant is a deep-pocketed entity like a pharma company. Though other experts have long complained that Breggin is unqualified and misrepresents the available evidence, he expresses himself with total confidence and has a religious zeal when it comes to his pet topics, which are likely very compelling attributes in a courtroom. Because of the sheer volume of his work as an expert witness – his website suggests that he has testified in more than a hundred cases and also cautions that many are not listed due to being settled on condition of secrecy – he is likely one of the most influential psychiatrists in the United States, despite not working for any hospital or holding any governmental or academic professional appointments.

19) There was a viral chart that the gender gap has become huge among the youngest generation.  John Sides explains, maybe not so much:

In the U.S. graph, this is the difference between how men and women self-identify. This is known in the political science literature as “symbolic ideology.”

But symbolic ideology is not the same thing as having liberal or conservative views on issues – or what is called “operational ideology.” And it turns out that younger men and women in the U.S. are not nearly so different on many specific issues.

See, for example, this graph from the political scientist Tom Wood (and see also Jan Zilinsky):

The graph shows the difference between men and women in four age groups on many different political issues. Two findings stand out:

1. The differences between young men and women are MUCH smaller in terms of average operational ideology than symbolic ideology. The average is about 5 points, compared to a 30-point gap in the Burn-Murdoch graph.
2. On average, the gender differences are NOT larger for the youngest age group than for older age groups.

Already I’m seeing a lot of ink spilled trying to come up with specific explanations for would produce a growing ideological gap among young people. Except more comprehensive data show that the gap isn’t that large and any gap isn’t confined to young people.

So, as usual, beware the viral graph.

20)  Bearded dragons seem really cool.  A shame they spread salmonella. “Pet Dragons Linked to Rare Salmonella Strain in U.S. and Canada: Dozens of people, including babies, were sickened, according to a C.D.C. study that highlighted the risks of snuggling with the strikingly scaly lizards, many of which carry salmonella bacteria in their gut.”

21) And, lastly, an Yglesias you should read, “Biden’s media problem: An industry full of young, educated, urban progressives is a mixed blessing at best”

The people who produce the news are primarily young college graduates living in big cities, a demographic that skews way to the left of the electorate. And the audience for this news, though less ideologically skewed than the producers, is still significantly to the left of center.

That dynamic is a powerful force multiplier for platforming and disseminating new left-wing ideas, including ideas that go from edgy to dominant — like “gay couples should be allowed to get married” — as well as ideas that provoke massive backlash the minute they get any purchase — “maybe cities don’t need police departments.” It’s a major structural feature of the media landscape that helps explain why the general policy trajectory over the past generation has been toward the left.

But electorally, it’s a decidedly mixed bag, since the journalists, though clearly on the left ideologically, aren’t partisan propagandists.

In fact, precisely because their left-of-center ideas appeal to the left-of-center audience, more or less nonpartisan journalism tends to crowd out the potential marketplace for partisan propaganda on the left. But beyond that, the ideological skew really is downstream of demographic factors. The media is on the left, but that doesn’t mean the media heavily represents the views of Hispanic SEIU members or elderly churchgoing Black women. Young, educated urbanites are a very Democratic demographic group, but they’re not typical of Democratic voters, much less of the public as a whole…

Unfortunately for the president, his actual Medicare policies have played essentially no role in the public’s understanding of contemporary politics.

Student loan coverage dominates Medicare

 

The Biden administration has done four big things related to Medicare and prescription drugs:

• Capped the price of insulin at $35/month

• Negotiated down the price of 10 major prescription drugs

• Capped annual out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs

• Implemented a tax to discourage companies from raising prescription drug prices

They’ve also undertaken a number of student loan forgiveness initiatives. And both sets of initiatives have been covered in a range of media outlets, but the people who feel like they’ve heard way more about student loans aren’t mistaken — virtually every outlet dedicates dramatically more coverage to student loan policy than to prescription drugs.

 

And though you wouldn’t know this from listening to people talk about politics on Twitter, a much larger share of the population has Medicare benefits than student loan debt (18 percent vs 12 percent). And almost everyone will get Medicare at some point in their lives, which is certainly not true for student loans.

To be fair, some of this falls out of structural differences between the issues.

Biden’s multi-pronged Medicare policy is a set of provisions that were all rolled together in the Inflation Reduction Act, which also included a ton of climate provisions. His student loan policies, by contrast, were announced individually as the Education Department has rolled out a bunch of different initiatives.

I also think conservative media exercises strategic message discipline in the way that they talk about Biden. Fox News runs plenty of criticisms of Biden. But they don’t run segments talking about how senior citizens are now living high on the hog thanks to his improved generosity of Medicare benefits. Even though conservatives don’t like these ideas and have promised to repeal them, conservative media limits their criticism to more controversial Biden initiatives, like electric cars, which results in more discourse from both sides about Biden’s less popular ideas relative to his more popular ones.

So there are structural reasons the coverage has shaken out this way. But those reasons aren’t totally unrelated to the fact that the media fundamentally finds the student loan topic more interesting.

 

Quick hits (part II)

1) Jeanne Suk Gersen is so good on issues of academic freedom:

Sometime in the twenty-tens, it became common for students to speak of feeling unsafe when they heard things that offended them. I’ve been a law professor at Harvard since 2006. The first piece I wrote for The New Yorker, in 2014, was about students’ suggestions (then shocking to me) that rape law should not be taught in the criminal-law course, because debates involving arguments for defendants, in addition to the prosecution, caused distress. At the very least, some students said, nobody should be asked in class to argue a side with which they disagree. Since then, students have asked me to excuse them from discussing or being examined on guns, gang violence, domestic violence, the death penalty, L.G.B.T.Q. issues, police brutality, kidnapping, suicide, and abortion. I have declined, because I believe the most important skill I teach is the ability to have rigorous exchanges on difficult topics, but professors across the country have agreed to similar requests.

Over the years, I learned that students had repeatedly attempted to file complaints about my classes, saying that my requiring students to articulate, or to hear classmates make, arguments they might abhor—for example, Justice Antonin Scalia saying there is no constitutional right to same-sex intimacy—was unacceptable. The administration at my law school would not allow such complaints to move forward to investigations because of its firm view that academic freedom protects reasonable pedagogical choices. But colleagues at other schools within Harvard and elsewhere feared that their administrators were using concepts of discrimination or harassment to cover classroom discussions that make someone uncomfortable. These colleagues become more and more unwilling to facilitate conversations on controversial topics, believing that university administrators might not distinguish between challenging discussions and discrimination or harassment. Even an investigation that ended with no finding of wrongdoing could eat up a year of one’s professional life and cost thousands of dollars in legal bills. (A spokesperson for Harvard University declined to comment for this story.)

The seeping of D.E.I. programs into many aspects of university life in the past decade would seem a ready-made explanation for how we got to such a point. Danielle Allen, a political philosopher and my Harvard colleague, co-chaired the university’s Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, which produced a report, in 2018, that aimed to counter the idea that principles of D.E.I. and of academic freedom are in opposition, and put forward a vision in which both are “necessary to the pursuit of truth.” Like Allen, I consider the diversity of thought that derives from the inclusion of people of different experiences, backgrounds, and identities to be vital to an intellectual community and to democracy. But, as she observed last month in the Washington Post, “across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense.” Allen continued, “Somehow the racial reckoning of 2020 lost sight of that core goal of a culture of mutual respect with human dignity at the center. A shaming culture was embraced instead.”

Last year, students at Harvard’s public-health school discovered that Tyler VanderWeele, an epidemiology professor and a Catholic, had signed on to an amicus brief in the Supreme Court in 2015, arguing that the Constitution does not contain a federal right to same-sex marriage and that the issue should be decided by the states—a view similar to that of President Barack Obama until 2012. After some students called for VanderWeele’s firing or removal from teaching a required course, administrative leaders at the school e-mailed parts of the community explaining that it seeks “to nurture a culture of inclusion, equity, and belonging,” that everyone has a right to express their views, even though free expression “can cause deep hurt, undermine the culture of belonging, and make other members of the community feel less free and less safe.” In light of the harm and betrayal students reported because of VanderWeele’s views, the school hosted more than a dozen restorative “circle dialogue” sessions, “for people to process, share, and collectively move forward from the current place of pain.” (A spokesperson for the School of Public Health pointed out that students exercised free-speech rights when they demanded VanderWeele’s firing and said that the administration never considered disciplinary action against him.)

In 2021, Carole Hooven, a longtime Harvard lecturer on human evolutionary biology who wrote a well-reviewed book about testosterone, stated in a Fox News interview, “The facts are that there are in fact two sexes . . . male and female, and those sexes are designated by the kind of gametes we produce.” She added that “understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect,” and that we can “respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns.” The director of her department’s Diversity and Inclusion task force, a graduate student, denounced Hooven’s remarks, in a tweet, as “transphobic and harmful.” A cascade of shunning and condemnation ensued, including a petition, authored by graduate students, which implied that Hooven was a threat to student safety. Graduate students also refused to serve as teaching assistants for her previously popular course on hormones, making it difficult for her to keep teaching it. Hooven found it untenable to remain in her job, and she retired from the department.

Students across the political spectrum, but largely liberals, have told me that they felt it would be foolish to volunteer their opinions in class discussions, or even that they routinely lied about their views when asked. 

2) This Niki Haley story is crazy!

Back when Nikki Haley, the last woman standing in the race for the Republican nomination, began dating her now-husband, she took a look at him and asked him what his name was.

Puzzled, he told her it was Bill, which she already knew.

“You just don’t look like a Bill. What’s your whole name?” she replied, to which he answered, “William Michael.”

“From that point on, I started calling him Michael, and all my friends did the same,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir, “Can’t Is Not an Option.”

“Before we knew it, he was universally known as Michael,” she continued. “Everyone who knew him before I did knows him as Bill, and everyone who met him after I did knows him as Michael. He looks like a Michael.”

3) Somehow, I was three days ago years old when I learned about the Stanley tumbler craze.  Though I’ve long known that this obsession with hydration is way overblown.  NYT:

The closest thing the United States has to a water consumption recommendation comes from the National Academy of Medicine, which, in 2004, reported that healthy men usually stay adequately hydrated when they drink at least three liters (nearly 13 cups) of water per day, and that women are typically hydrated when they drink at least 2.2 liters (just over nine cups) per day, not including the water they consume via food.

But these guidelines should not be taken as gospel, experts said.

“Most people, even if they stay below that recommendation, will be just fine,” said Dr. Siddharth P. Shah, a nephrologist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in hydration and electrolyte balance.

4) Great piece from Brian Beutler, “The Material Stakes Of The GOP Assault On Democracy Become Obvious”

I wrote recently about the center-right’s reconsolidation behind Donald Trump, and how revisionist praise from influential people like JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon could have a dangerous normalizing effect that cascades through the business community, into wealthy suburbs, where Trump has been an object of revulsion. 

This is a real thing that’s happening and (viewed in a vacuum at least) a cause for genuine concern. Absent the suburban realignment, Democrats would be toast. But it’s also an extra-tidy manifestation of the Big Picture democracy appeal.

I’d bet a large sum of money that Dimon knows Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. I’d bet almost as much that Dimon knows Trump has promised to establish a dictatorship on “day one”; that he has demanded immunity for any crimes he committed from 2017-2020, and any that he might commit from 2025 onward. 

And yet to hasten another round of tax cuts and reduced bank regulation, Dimon will tell the world he thinks Trump is a populist everyman who gets a bad rap. It’s hard to think of a cleaner distillation of the idea that Trump’s assault on democracy is about more than his personal thirst for power. It’s so people like Jamie Dimon can get richer at the expense of the people who will suffer next time unregulated financial capitalism wrecks the country. 

The submission of Trump’s intraparty skeptics reveals a similar cynicism, and a similar calculation: To them, democracy is more of a nuisance than it’s worth if it doesn’t yield right-wing outcomes.

It’s hard to say anything definitive about the moral values and ideological priorities of someone as cynical as Mitch McConnell. But as near as I can tell McConnell genuinely despises Trump. Not like how some Republicans will claim to know that Trump is a cretin in off-the-record conversations with reporters, but only to burnish their Beltway reputations. No, on top of the usual insults and the racist mockery of McConnell’s wife, Trump has tried to end McConnell’s career, and cost Republicans control of the Senate in sequential elections. After January 6, McConnell told Jonathan Martin, then of the New York Times, “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself.” Oops.

McConnell also earnestly wants to fund Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. I doubt McConnell has deep ideological views about border security or the ethnic composition of the United States, but I do think he was hoping he could wring unilateral immigration-policy concessions from Democrats, and that doing so would convince Republicans in the House to allow a vote on Ukraine aid. 

But now we see he’ll jettison all of that, including his dignity, at Donald Trump’s request. The two of them are of one mind that leaving problems in America to fester will help Trump get elected, which will facilitate more tax cuts and deregulation. “We don’t want to do anything to undermine [Trump],” he told Republicans this week.

Republicans like Dimon and McConnell have ultimately decided to join Trump’s slow-burn insurrection not because they worship Trump on a cult-like level, but because the world confronted them with a choice between things they care about and preserving a free society and they’ve decided to sacrifice the latter. It’s not quite the same coarse narcissism that animates Trump, who wants wealth and power for personal aggrandizement and to stay out of prison. They radicalized against democracy because they’re greedy for other things that they’ve reasoned won’t materialize through democratic processes. And in a way it’s worse. Trump is like a dog who will shit on your living room floor if you don’t give him a treat; Dimon and McConnell are like houseguests who will shit on your living-room floor if the toilets are occupied.

5) From 2019, but new to me, “Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche”

Language is universal, but it has few indisputably universal characteristics, with cross-linguistic variation being the norm. For example, languages differ greatly in the number of syllables they allow, resulting in large variation in the Shannon information per syllable. Nevertheless, all natural languages allow their speakers to efficiently encode and transmit information. We show here, using quantitative methods on a large cross-linguistic corpus of 17 languages, that the coupling between language-level (information per syllable) and speaker-level (speech rate) properties results in languages encoding similar information rates (~39 bits/s) despite wide differences in each property individually: Languages are more similar in information rates than in Shannon information or speech rate. These findings highlight the intimate feedback loops between languages’ structural properties and their speakers’ neurocognition and biology under communicative pressures. Thus, language is the product of a multiscale communicative niche construction process at the intersection of biology, environment, and culture.

6) How can the barcode be on it’s way out?  Apparently, because it will be replaced by QR codes, which can contain way more information.  What’s wild, though, is to learn about the alternate proposals for bar codes:

7) And from way back in the past, I was intrigued to learn that it’s possible for quarterbacks to throw too few interceptions.  It means you are playing too conservatively and leaving too many potential good outcomes on the table. 

8) “Obscene” is a little strong, but the main thrust of Brett Stephens argument here is not wrong:

In recent decades, as many as three million people perished in a famine in North Korea that was mainly government-induced. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and an estimated 14 million were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs through gulag-like re-education camps in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress and erase their religious and cultural identity.

But North Korea, Syria and China have never been charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel has. How curious. And how obscene.

It’s obscene because it politicizes our understanding of genocide, fatally eroding the moral power of the term. The war between Israel and Hamas is terrible — as is every war. But if this is genocide, what word do we have for the killing fields in Cambodia, Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine, the Holocaust itself?

Words that come to mean much more than originally intended eventually come to mean almost nothing at all — a victory for future génocidaires who’d like the world to think there’s no moral or legal difference between one kind of killing and another.

It’s obscene because it perverts the definition of genocide, which is precise: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Notice two key features of this definition: It speaks of acts whereas part of the genocide case against Israel involves the misinterpretation of quotes from Israeli officials who have vowed Hamas’s elimination, not the elimination of Palestinians. And it uses the term as such — meaning the acts are genocidal only if they are directed at Palestinians as Palestinians, not as members of Hamas or, heartbreakingly, as collateral deaths in attempts to destroy Hamas.

If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t be putting its soldiers at risk or allowing humanitarian relief to arrive from Egypt or withdrawing many of its forces from Gaza. It would simply be killing Palestinians everywhere, in vastly greater numbers, as Germans killed Jews or Hutus killed Tutsis.

9) Fascinating, “The Biggest Ape That Ever Lived Was Not Too Big to Fail: Fossil teeth reveal Gigantopithecus was doomed by a changing environment and an inflexible diet.”

Standing nearly as tall as a basketball hoop and weighing as much as a grizzly bear, Gigantopithecus blacki was the greatest ape to ever live. For more than a million years during the Pleistocene, Gigantopithecus roamed southern China. But by the time ancient humans reached the region, Gigantopithecus had vanished.

To determine why these prodigious primates died out, a team of scientists recently analyzed clues preserved in Gigantopithecus teeth and cave sediment. Their findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reveal that these nearly 10-foot-tall apes were most likely doomed by their specialized diet and an inability to adapt to a changing environment.

Paleontologists first discovered Gigantopithecus in the mid-1930s in a Hong Kong apothecary where the ape’s unusually large molars were being hawked as “dragon teeth.” The animal was named to honor Davidson Black, the Canadian scientist who studied the early human ancestor known as Peking man. In the decades since, scientists have unearthed about 2,000 Gigantopithecus teeth and a handful of fossil jawbones from caves throughout southern China.

The dearth of fossilized bones makes reconstructing Gigantopithecus difficult; paleoartists depict the ancient ape as looking like an orangutan (its closest living relative) crossed with a silverback gorilla, but bigger. Nevertheless, the very great ape’s teeth, which are encased in a thick layer of enamel, preserve a wealth of clues to how these enigmatic primates lived and potentially why they died out…

Beginning around 600,000 years ago, the region’s climate began to change with the seasons as dense forests gave way to a patchwork of open forests and grasslands. That led to “dry periods when fruits were difficult to find,” Dr. Westaway said. As opposed to ancient orangutans, which adapted by eating a diverse diet of shoots, nuts, seeds and even insects, Gigantopithecus switched to less nutritious alternatives like bark and twigs. Their teeth from this period show signs of chronic stress.

As the environment became unfavorable, Gigantopithecus’s size began to work against it. Unlike spry orangutans, who could travel greater distances through the canopy and into open environments to forage, ground-bound Gigantopithecus were most likely restricted to shrinking patches of forest.

According to Sergio Almécija, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the new research, the demise of Gigantopithecus reveals that even the largest animals are vulnerable to becoming too specialized.

“These apes became so specialized to living in a specific environment that once that environment changes, they’re gone,” he said.

10) Sadly, it only takes two books a year to be in the top half of all Americans for reading.  To be in the top 1%, it’s more like a book a week:

So what did Montgomery find? Of 1,500 Americans surveyed, a less-than-ideal 46 percent finished zero books last year and 5 percent read just one. So, if you read more than two books in 2023, congratulations! You’re in the top half of U.S. adults.

Reading five books put you in the top 33 percent, while reading 10 books put you in the top 21 percent. Those of us who read more than 50 books are the true one-percenters: people who read more books than 99 percent of their fellow Americans.

11) I think there’s so much reason for techno-optimism, “New battery material that uses less lithium found in AI-powered search”

Microsoft announced Tuesday that a team of scientists used artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to plow through 32.6 million possible battery materials ― many not found in nature ― in 80 hours, a task the team estimates previously would have taken 20 years. The results kick off an ambitious effort to create a new generation of batteries less dependent on toxic and environmentally damaging lithium.

The company shared some of the best candidates with the government’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., which investigated the most promising ones and built a prototype battery using a brand-new material.

While the dime-size prototype is not yet ready for a prime-time role powering the watches and car keys of today, it functions using less lithium than commercially available options and has the ability to recharge power. Moreover, the feat demonstrates the potential of new technologies to revolutionize the underappreciated but fast-evolving fieldof materials science.

12) The answer to this is, no. “Are Right-Wingers More Prone to Believe Conspiracy Theories than Left-Wingers?” But, is it dam clear that right-wingers with conspiracy beliefs have way more influence within the Republican party than left-wingers with conspiracy beliefs do within the Democratic party?  Hell yes.

The authors find that conservatives and Republicans are more likely to believe conspiracy theories that fit their predispositions and biases. For example, they are far more likely than liberals and Democrats to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. But, by the same token, left-wingers are more likely to believe conspiracy theories that fit their biases, such as 9/11 “trutherism” (claims that George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance and deliberately allowed them to happen). The authors also find that “[t]here are also many conspiracy theories finding equal support among the left and right, including theories involving “chem-trails”, the moon landing, fluoridated water, Freemasons, lizard people, and television mind control, to name a few.” When a conspiracy theory doesn’t have a strong political valence, left and right are usually about equally prone to believe it.

13) As for any doubt as to the utter insanity of the Republican Party at the highest organizational levels, this is a depressing as hell must-listen from This American Life. 

14) I’m really looking forward to reading Brian Klaas’s new book.  This is a really good substack piece, “We are different from all other humans in history: Countless experiences that have become routine for us are unprecedented in the history of our species. Here’s why that matters.”

We, the modern humans who are alive today, are unique.

Modern humanity has produced astonishing shifts in historic blinks. Here, for example, is one of the most fascinating maps ever produced—known as an isochronic map—which shows how far from London a human being could plausibly travel in a given time period in 1914, just over a century ago.

The red shaded areas show a journey of five days or less; the pink five to ten days; the yellow ten to twenty days; the green thirty to forty days; all the way up to the darker teal shades which showcase the most remote regions—reachable only after a trek of at least forty days, nearly a month and a half.

 

Here’s an updated version of that map, from 2016, using data of travel time estimates from the website Rome2Rio. Suddenly, the range goes from days to hours, shades from zero to twelve hours (dark red) to the most isolated places on Earth in teal (more than 36 hours). The furthest reaches of inaccessible terrain on our planet are now far easier to reach from London than were most places in Western Europe a century ago.

It’s mind boggling.

 

This got me thinking: what else is unique about our crop of modern humans (the people alive today) that was literally impossible for every other fine specimen of Homo sapiens who came before us? And the answer, it turns out, is quite a lot.

15) I’ve seen Clear at airports for a while now, but, my most recent flight was the first time people who had paid for Clear were escorted to literally cut in front of me in my TSA pre-check line.  Paying to cut– so wrong!

Such distortions might be acceptable if CLEAR enhanced the efficiency or safety of airport security, but neither is the case. TSA Pre is a federal program that already capitalizes on the opportunity to identify frequent, low-risk flyers and offer them expedited security screening. Clear Secure offers no such advantages; customers must separately purchase TSA Pre if they want to keep wearing their loafers once they reach the scanner. CLEAR is simply a way to pay extra to jump the queue accessing a federally mandated process.

Now that Clear Secure is embedded within airports, the company has every reason to ensure that Congress and TSA let it keep profiting from airport line-cutting. And, like airports themselves, the company has little cause for concern if the security experience of non-CLEAR members grows more irritating.

Skewed incentives like these are predictable when a profit-seeking company acts as a gatekeeper for a public service. It couldn’t be clearer

16) I loved Happy Days when I was a kid.  And I loved this conversation with the stars looking back on it 50 years later. 

17) Yglesias, “Climate is the problem: Voters don’t care that much about the Democrats’ top priority”

Conversely, I think center-left intellectuals tend to downplay the potentially negative electoral impact of the increasing importance of climate change to the Democratic Party’s agenda precisely because it’s a cause that we genuinely care about.

If you read the New York Times regularly (which you should), I think you see clearly that the management, staff, and readership of the Times have significant concerns and internal disagreement about “wokeness,” left-wing campus politics, etc. all while maintaining a broad consensus that climate change is an extremely important problem.

This is a big deal electorally because the Democratic Party actually does act like a political party that believes climate change is an extremely important problem, elevating it to the top of the priority hierarchy for the Biden administration. So it’s completely reasonable for voters to base their voting behavior in part on whether they agree with Democrats’ climate-related policies. And it’s electorally damaging because, frankly, most voters don’t agree with the party’s assessment. They’re not climate denialists who think the problem is fake or that scientists are lying about it. But they just aren’t as interested in it as Joe Biden or the average New York Times reader. And unlike cancel culture, climate and energy policy does impact everyone’s daily life — including the lives of people who don’t pay that much attention to politics…

People care less about climate than they should

 

If you ask people whether they care about climate change, they generally say yes. If you’re a climate advocacy group that wants to make it look like people are deeply concerned about this, you can certainly hire pollsters who will craft questions that get you the answers that you’re after.

But if you probe public opinion even slightly, it’s clear that public support for climate action is a mile wide and an inch deep. For example, IPSOS found that just 25 percent of Americans said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to address climate change. A 2019 Reuters poll asked specifically whether respondents would pay $100 to fight climate change and only a third said yes. Would you be willing to pay $10/month more in electricity bills to fight climate change? Most people say no.

Democrats are, I think, aware of these facts on some level.

They know not to propose a carbon tax or a gasoline tax increase as part of their climate agenda, even though these are good ideas on the merits. And in their messaging, they certainly never mention the idea of sacrifice or that it might be good for Americans to constrain their lifestyles or reduce their energy consumption.

But I think they still don’t take them seriously enough, because when people tell you they don’t want to pay $100 to fight climate change, you can’t just take that as a narrow point about the $100. It means that if you put together a huge climate-focused legislative package and make that the centerpiece of your agenda, your agenda would be centered around solving a problem that most people don’t think is very important. That’s just inherently a kind of danger zone. Not a unique danger zone, of course. Republicans think that cutting rich people’s taxes is very important and the American people — including lots of rank-and-file GOP voters — disagree. But the Republican Party as a whole seems to be aware that this is an embarrassing priority gap and tries really hard to conceal from the public how focused their party is on low taxes for the rich.

Contemporary Democrats, by contrast, tend to be loud and proud about their climate focus, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given what we know about the public’s indifference to this issue.

18) More techno-optimism, “A Key to Detecting Brain Disease Earlier Than Ever: Treatment of Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, ALS, and other brain diseases depends on reliable detection—especially in those who don’t even know they’re at risk. An innovative scratch-and-sniff test can help.”

Earlier this year, Parkinson’s disease (PD) research entered a new era when the Michael J. Fox Foundation announced a momentous scientific breakthrough—the discovery of a biomarker for PD. It meant that, for the first time ever, we can now pinpoint the earliest known signs of the disease in Parkinson’s patients.

This long-awaited new procedure is called the “alpha-synuclein seeding amplification assay” (SAA), and it’s capable of detecting the misfolded alpha-synuclein in spinal fluid—the wayward protein clearly linked to Parkinson’s. It separates, with a stunning 90 percent specificity, those who have evidence of PD pathology in their cells from those who do not. It does so even before the emergence of symptoms, much like the way high blood pressure or cholesterol levels are used to detect cardiovascular risk long before a heart attack lands someone in the ER.

It would be hard to overstate the implications of this development for people living with dysfunction in their alpha-synuclein. For one thing, we’ve never had a way to know who these people are—that is, until the moment of diagnosis, by which point ongoing damage to brain cells is already well underway. As for the diagnosis itself, which for most people comes as a bolt from the blue, it has always been frustratingly subjective and essentially based on a physician’s opinion following a brief once-over in the doctor’s office—not very useful for medical care provision, let alone biomedical drug development.

The new SAA test is already being integrated into drug trials as the first measure that can objectively identify people with the biology we’re targeting—offering drugmakers increased assurance that they are testing experimental treatments in the right populations. For biopharma firms weighing a decision to enter or stay in the high-risk neurological disease space, this changes the value proposition of investment on its face. In 2024, we will see a ramp-up of potential new drugs entering the pipeline and progressing along their path toward pharmacy shelves.

What’s just as remarkable is how the SAA breakthrough was arrived at. The search for the biomarker required finding and studying “needles in a haystack”: people without any traditional symptoms of PD and unwittingly living with increased risk for the disease. It was critical to figure out what biology set them apart from those who don’t get Parkinson’s. But how do you find someone who doesn’t know they’re being looked for?

As it turns out, your sense of smell is a surprisingly good predictor of brain disease. (We’re talking here not about the short-term smell loss associated with Covid-19, but significant and enduring smell loss that persists over years.) For a while now, researchers have known about the link between smell loss and neurodegeneration, especially in the presence of certain other risk factors, such as a diagnosis with REM behavior disorder (RBD), a sleep disorder. Research shows that half of those over age 60 are living with some degree of smell loss, yet the majority don’t realize it until they’re tested. If you couple this with the fact that all major brain diseases—Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, Huntington’s—are associated with some amount of smell loss, this is astounding.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s large-scale observational study of Parkinson’s set out to use poor smell as one of its criteria for finding and enrolling at-risk individuals. (We should note that, for this risk group, it’s still unclear if or when the disease may eventually show up.) The highly sophisticated screening device used? A humble scratch-and-sniff test, albeit the scientifically validated variety.

19) Ancient history:

Many researchers assume that until 10–12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” suffuses the social sciences. It informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and articulate an alternative, the diverse histories model, to replace it. We review the limitations of using recent foragers as models of Late Pleistocene societies and the considerable social variation among foragers commonly considered small-scale, mobile, and egalitarian. We review ethnographic and archaeological findings covering 34 world regions showing that non-agricultural peoples often live in groups that are more sedentary, unequal, large, politically stratified, and capable of large-scale cooperation and resource management than is normally assumed. These characteristics are not restricted to extant Holocene hunter-gatherers but, as suggested by archaeological findings from 27 Middle Stone Age sites, likely characterized societies throughout the Late Pleistocene (until c. 130 ka), if not earlier. These findings have implications for how we understand human psychological adaptations and the broad trajectory of human history.