The Jeopardy post

So many thoughts on my Jeopardy experience and I realized I need to write them all down before I forget. And, if you are a regular reader here (yeah, I know I’ve stopped posting, sort-of long story), I was on Jeopardy and today is your last day to watch it on Hulu or Peacock before it’s gone forever (for now, season 42, episode 176). So, let’s start with frequently asked questions…

How did I get on Jeopardy?

I’ve been trying since whenever they started the online test. Maybe 15 years ago? The online test is 50 Jeopardy type questions with 15 seconds each to answer. Jeopardy is completely non-transparent about how you do on the test or what kind of score is necessary to move forward in the process. I’m good at trivia and was generally somewhere around 40-45 right (online sources suggest that should be enough), but never moved forward till my annual attempt (you get one online test a year) in early 2024 went well and I received an email that I could take the next test. A zoom proctored Jeopardy test, like the last one, but this time they now it’s you for sure. I did as well as I ever have and knocked that out of the park. Soon after, I received an email to do a zoom audition for Jeopardy. This was originally 3 days after my pacemaker surgery. Would’ve been okay if not for some awful GI symptoms for a couple days after surgery so I was able to reschedule to 9/11/24.

The zoom audition is 9 people and 1 Jeopardy producer– and it is a real Jeopardy producer, when I finally got to Jeopardy I remembered John, the contestant producer, from the zoom. Anyway, at this point, everybody in the zoom has already proven they are good at trivia so they want to make sure you can handle playing Jeopardy and will come across well on TV. They put you in groups of 3 and you play a partial game and answer Jeopardy story type questions about yourself. In my case, they asked my favorite part about being a college professor. Great question for me. I calculated that only about 2/9 make it from each audition to the show, but I thought I had a great chance, based on my performance. When you are done, they tell you that you are in the contestant pool for two years and if you haven’t heard from them in two years, start over. That’s it. That’s all you know.

You may have noticed September 24 is a long time ago. The consensus online is that you will typically make it onto the show in less than 6 months, and certainly under a year, but if it’s been more than a year, you are almost surely out of luck. After a year was up, I could not help being annoyed by other middle-aged white guy college professors on the show that I didn’t think were as good as me :-). So, I don’t know how it happened, but I got the call on February 9, 2026 for a March 16 tape date (and in perfect serendipity, that was Monday of spring break for me and my oldest son, David, who came with me). I asked my fellow contestants when they had auditioned and the furthest back, other than me, was summer 2025 and one was as recent as November 2025, so I will always wonder what took them so long to get to me. Glad they did!

Jeopardy preparation

I was not going to study a ton until I got a call for an audition, but then I decided I needed to study a ton to make the most of my opportunity. I’m a big AI guy so I used Claude and Perplexity to make me customized Jeopardy study online flash cards. There’s a bunch of existing study decks to study with Anki– a spaced repetition learning app– but I wanted to customize my own to fit my needs and weaknesses. I also had fun doing my first-ever vibe-coding to have Claude create my own customizable spaced repetition learning app. In addition to learning a bunch of new facts, I actually quite enjoyed figuring out how to use AI to optimize my study process. I learned a ton of Shakespeare and a ton of geography (all my friends got tired of hearing the Murray River is the longest in Australia) and a whole bunch of random other stuff, in part, based on AI deep research reports on the best ways to study for Jeopardy.

I also started taking each episode of the show seriously as practice opportunity. Yes, I was there clicking my pen. What most don’t realize is that you cannot answer till the moment Ken finishes reading the question and if you buzz in early, you are locked out for 250ms. Far and away the best advice I came across was to read the question on the screen, think of the answer, and then focus on buzzing the moment Ken is done reading. I also put a lot of mental practice into not answering. At home, there’s no cost to just shouting out whatever you think at every question. In the game, shouting out the first thing that comes to mind can lose you $2000. My rule of thumb I’ve been telling people… first two rows of clues and it’s a city in Turkey it’s almost surely Istanbul. Bottom two rows and it’s a city in Turkey it’s almost surely not Istanbul.

If you are really curious about Jeopardy preparation, I could talk about this all day, but, I’ll leave it at this for now.

Jeopardy trip

David and I flew out to LA on Saturday evening. We went sightseeing all day Sunday, with Griffith Observatory being the highlight. Monday was Jeopardy day. Tuesday we went to the La Brea Tar Pits and LA County Museum of Art. We came back Wednesday. We were hosted by some very old friends of mine and had a great time.

Jeopardy day

Jeopardy films a week (i.e., 5 shows) at a time, typically Mondays and Tuesdays. I was scheduled for Monday, March 16. Filming is at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, CA (part of greater Los Angeles). We all had to be there by 8am. Following guidelines, I brought along 3 outfits with mix and match possibilities in case everything went great and I taped multiple shows. The first 90 minutes or so, there was a decent amount of producers talking to us about stuff as well as sitting around and socializing while we took turns getting hair and makeup, having our outfits evaluated for TV readiness (I didn’t realize my camelhair blazer had moth damage on the left shoulder– it got a big red tag), and socializing with fellow contestants. We were also called out one-by-one to discuss which story/anecdote we would share on air. There was a strict no cell phone policy, which was frustrating, of course, but great for encouraging the socializing. There were 13 of us, in total. Tristan, the defending champion (I did not actually meet him till I went against him in game #1 of the day), 11 players brought in from around the country, and 1 “local sub.” Since there’s only slots for 10 new players a day, we were told one of us was going to be there all day and not go till Tuesday morning, based on random draw. That way there’s an extra if something goes wrong. And if something goes really wrong, there’s an LA-area contestant who’s plan all along is to just watch all 5 episodes and get in one of the first games the next day. I was really hoping not to be pushed till the next day as 1) I had two local friends who had taken time off from work to come see me, and, presuming I would not be a multi-game winner, I wanted to be able to sightsee in LA on Tuesday.

Around 9:30, I think, we took to the Alex Trebek stage for practice. It was so cool to just be in that room. Ken Jennings came out and gave us a nice little pep talk. And, yes, he really is that nice. Then we got to two opportunities, randomly assorted, to play parts of practice games. My first time up, I was awful on the buzzer. I got some good advice from Sabrina, the amazingly-kind contestant producer, and some great advice from fellow contestant Chayce, who had an excellent game later that day, which made a huge difference and I had a solid second practice session. A fun moment in the practice was getting that Thyme is a member of the mint family. I have no idea how I know that, but my fellow contestants were impressed.

After practice the lawyers talked to us and then it was time to choose the first two contestants to face the defending champion in game #1 of the day and it was… me! I was relieved I knew right away I wouldn’t have to wait till Tuesday, but, it felt pretty sudden. Just because of the nature of where we were sitting in the green room I had not really talked to defending champion Tristan, or my other opponent, Jessica. I had the middle podium so it was nice to be able to chat with both of them on stage during the 5 minutes or so everything was being finalized. Jessica was the local sub from the previous Tuesday and had spent that whole day in the green room, so, unlike me, she had seen Tristan’s previous victories. Tristan and I talked about him being a new dad and Jessica and I discussed how much we just wanted to get something right and be able to appear in Final Jeopardy. I didn’t learn till we came to the stage that Tristan was a 3-time champion with about $60,000 in winnings. Solid performance, but nothing that seemed particularly intimidating.

[If you haven’t watched the show and plan on watching it and don’t want spoilers, watch before you read the rest]

It was an amazing moment when the recording actually started and I’m just thinking “I’m on Jeopardy! I’m on Jeopardy!” I wasn’t particularly nervous, but super-excited. The game started off rough. There were some surprisingly tough questions in the first few, I missed my first few buzzer attempts, and it was not until clue seven, “what is Screen Actor’s Guild” that I finally got one right. What a relief that was. That first couple minute where I could not get anything did feel pretty harrowing.

I’m so glad I got the “daily double” experience, but, damn, do I wish I had gotten one of the other two that I actually knew with ease. As for mine… Basically, my brain heard “monument” and “South America” having never heard of this monument in Ecuador (I did, know Quito was the capital), I went straight to Christ the Redeemer. Thinking “I know this can’t be it, but I’ve just got a few seconds” I went with the capital of Brazil. That was (mostly) the ballgame. On two $2000 questions, Holocene and Unchained Melody” Tristan just beat me to the buzzer and that was really frustrating, but, I know I got my share of buzzer wins, too. Tristan just knows more trivia than me and I would’ve needed a little luck and a few key buzzer wins to have a chance, but, that didn’t happen.

Another fun moment… Explorer 1 for $1000? David and I saw it the day before at Griffith Observatory. But, I had made no attempt to commit it to memory and was only about 60-70% sure and wasn’t willing to risk it for $1000 (I was damn well determined not to finish in the red). I know David was screaming inside his head, “how is Dad not answering this?/” I didn’t really guess at anything I wasn’t pretty sure of except at the end, I knew it was decimate or decimation and didn’t have time to mentally count letters. Speaking of not ending up in the red, they give you about 6-8 minutes to do the math, so you are sitting offstage for a long time if that happens in real life.

One thing you don’t get to appreciate on TV is that Ken is actually out there talking to all of you, with the audience listening, for about 5 minutes after the show. For two of you, that’s your one time on Jeopardy and they really want to make it great. Ken will ask what your thought process was on tough questions, talk about some of the game stats (I was amazed to learn I had a 59% buzzer percentage, if I recall correctly), etc. So, everybody was telling me tonight, variations of “sorry, Tristan just killed you on the buzzer” and I’m like, “no, Tristan just knows more than me.” (After the show aired, I checked the box score and learned Tristan made 36 buzzer attempts to my 27). We had a hard board– 15 triple stumpers, which is very much on the high side. Obviously, it would have been very cool to get Final Jeopardy right, but it was a tough one. “The work of this man” sent my brain towards artists so I was never going to get Guttenberg.

And, after the show was done, they told us the episode ran long and we would need to re-record shorter versions of our stories, so we all really had to race through them. If you notice, Tristan was talking really fast during his story 😄. Now when I watch the show, I get really bitter when people have these long, leisurely stories and I feel like I had about 5 seconds.

After my episode, I watched episodes 2 and 3 from the audience with David– that was really fun. I especially loved walking into the audience and a whole bunch of people who had just seen the previous game recognizing me. It’s also really cool just how much Ken intereacts with the audience. Game 2 had some long judging breaks and Ken spends that whole time doing Q&A with the audience.

After game 3, I joined my friends, Brian and Jason, who had come out to see me and we were able to walk around the Sony lot (and even see a movie in sound editing) because Jason works in the movies and got lot passes.

Post recording

I didn’t tell anybody how I did. And damn did my sister, Kathleen, and my friend, Michael, do their damdest to get it out of me. I realized my greatest danger of slipping up and letting people know I only played one game was talking about my anecdote in the singular, so I stopped doing that. I sort of slipped to one friend that I didn’t know if champions rewrite their name episode to episode, but he did not seem to notice the slip. I had told my sister Kathleen that the size of my party would reflect how I did. I had a big party because I’m actually quite happy with my 2nd place finish. I’m a good Jeopardy player and I played just fine, but I got beat by an excellent Jeopardy player. The right board and the right opponents and I can definitely win, but, honestly, I’m a pretty average Jeopardy contestant and that’s okay. It was the experience of a lifetime being on the show.

Look, it’s Quick Hits!

Yeah, I’m still here. A lot of stuff going on, but, I’ll explain more in the future. But, today, a lot of articles I’ve just gotta share.

1) Like starting with this one, about how Boston Scientific ignored problems with its pacemaker batteries. Sometimes this proves fatal! Like, see this from the NYT article?

However, from 2022 through 2024, reports from doctors and hospitals of patients being harmed by their Accolade pacemakers climbed steadily, according to an analysis of public F.D.A. safety reports that Dr. Hauser performed last year.

Yep… that’s my exact pacemaker model. Even if there’s problems, they shouldn’t manifest for years, and I’m not truly pacemaker dependent (just for quality of life, not actually being alive), so I’m not personally too worried… but still!

Pacemakers are surgically implanted devices that deliver an electric pulse to keep the heart beating at the right speed. They run on batteries meant to last as long as a decade or more. When batteries fail to deliver the necessary power, devices can switch into an irreversible emergency backup setting known as Safety Mode, which is designed to keep the heart beating until a person can get a new pacemaker. Safety Mode can be dangerous for patients who depend on their pacemakers to constantly keep their hearts beating, because it can sometimes fail to engage.

Last August, Boston Scientific updated its recall to expand the population of affected Accolade pacemakers to more than 1.3 million. To fix the issue, the company announced a workaround: Patients could receive a software update, which would periodically test their devices and alert doctors if the batteries were at risk of triggering Safety Mode and needed to be replaced. On Thursday the company amended the recall again, updating the software further and expanding the affected population to 1.6 million people.

The Accolade announcements arrived on the heels of a 2021 recall of a different line of Boston Scientific pacemakers called Ingenio. Taken together, battery problems in those products are linked with at least seven deaths and more than 800 injuries, according to company filings.

Boston Scientific’s chief medical officer, Dr. Kenneth Stein, acknowledged in an interview that the company, which is the world’s third-leading manufacturer of pacemakers by sales revenue, has struggled to get to the bottom of the issue. “It’s turned out to be a very complicated problem, one that’s required a lot of really diligent investigation,” he said, adding that he stood by the safety of the pacemakers. “I have full faith and confidence in our quality and safety processes.”

Makers of heart devices like pacemakers and defibrillators have a history of selling flawed products that have led to injuries and deaths.

2) Mike Konczal on how Democrats are still living in the tax reality GW Bush created

That is not to say there isn’t a straightforward case for higher taxes on the wealthy funding a broad set of programs and social insurance. You hear from pundits that Americans want Scandinavian social insurance without Scandinavian taxes. I actually don’t buy that’s the right point. The comparison is harder than it looks, and healthcare is the main reason. As both the economists Saez and Zucman in The Triumph of Injustice and Matt Bruenig at People’s Policy Project have shown, adding in employers’ U.S. health spending as a tax dramatically increases the regressivity of taxes and largely closes the international gap. That international difference is fundamentally about the way we fund health care.

But as Democrats shape their policy agenda going forward, there is something worth exploring here: whether social insurance can be expanded through two tracks. The rich pay their fair share in our deeply unequal society. But also we affirm a broader commitment that everybody pays in and everybody benefits. That is what was underpinned Social Security in the first place, and it may be what’s needed to get out of the trap we’re in now.

Yet there remain two central ironies. For all the Democratic reluctance to ask anything of the broad middle class, it was Trump who imposed broad-based taxation on working-class individuals through tariffs. He just did it in the worst possible way, for the worst possible reasons, based on lies, and with the revenue going nowhere useful. More, for all that George W. Bush was thrown into the trash heap of history in 2009, here we are in 2026, unable to increase middle-class taxes above the path he set in 2001. And, after the Iraq War we still live with3, we are now waging another full-on war against Iran, another country he named to the Axis of Evil in his 2002 State of the Union. His strategery of playing the long game won, and we all lost.

3) Tom Nichols, “Trump Had No Plan B for Iran: And it shows.”

Instead, the Iranian government lashed out at several countries in the region, widening the war both to sow chaos and to emphasize the danger of working with the reckless Trump administration. And in a completely predictable move, it has closed the Strait of Hormuz. Or, more accurately, it has exercised its control over the strait, allowing some ships, including its own, safe passage while counting on fear and uncertainty among ship captains and the world’s insurers to choke the flow of oil to the rest of the world and perhaps create an oil shock in the West of a kind unseen since the 1970s.

Some observers have criticized American planners for failing to anticipate such a move. This is unfair: The intelligence community and the U.S. military have analyzed, planned, and exercised for this scenario for decades. The failure came not from the national-security community, but from the civilians, and specifically the commander in chief, who evidently refused to heed warnings from his senior military advisers that the Iranians would do exactly what anyone paying attention suspected they would do.

This arrogance is likely why Trump began the war by haughtily dismissing the need for allies; he is now whining that America’s allies should help open the strait while paradoxically claiming that he doesn’t need their help. Things have gotten so far out of Trump’s control that the president of the United States has even suggested that the People’s Republic of China—the same China that his top aides think is America’s greatest threat—should become involved in the Gulf.

4) Fantastic article on immigration policy from Kelsey Piper and Alexander Kustov. Going into next semester’s syllabus. “Why America is so much better than Europe at immigration: What liberals can actually learn from Denmark”

A labor market can absorb far more people than a welfare state can, and few people resent hardworking coworkers. But most people will predictably regret (and observe that their communities can’t sustain) a large population receiving benefits.

Who shows up matters

The second related factor is selection.

The U.S. immigration system benefits from low geographic distance to culturally more proximate countries and institutional filters that select for employability.

Getting to the United States from the Middle East typically requires a university admission, an employer sponsor, or an established family network. Getting to Europe from the same region more often means an asylum claim or family reunification from earlier guest-worker flows.

The most telling comparison involves the same cultures of origin under different policy regimes. Iranian-Americans hold bachelor’s degrees at a rate of 65% and earn median household incomes around $100,000, many descended from professionals who left after the 1979 revolution and entered through university or employment channels.

Iranians in Europe arrived more often through asylum, with different class and educational profiles. Pakistani-Americans earn median household incomes above $100,000 and hold bachelor’s degrees at rates well above the national average; British Pakistanis have among the lowest employment rates of any ethnic group in the U.K.

Turkish-Americans are solidly middle class; Turks in Germany were recruited as guest workers from rural Anatolia, and their descendants still face some of the widest educational gaps in the OECD. Same regions of origin, different selection and policy regimes, radically different results.

In this respect, the United States also benefits from a structural advantage Europe cannot replicate: English. Immigrants selected through American universities and employers arrive already speaking the lingua franca of global commerce, media, and technology. That head start compounds over time through cultural exposure, professional networks, and children’s schooling.

The third factor is integration infrastructure. We should note upfront that this is where cross-country causal identification gets hardest. Still, the pattern is hard to ignore. What Americans often call “cultural openness” to assimilation is itself largely a product of institutional design.

The Reagan line that anyone can become an American describes an outcome, not an explanation — the outcome of birthright citizenship, anti-discrimination enforcement, and a labor market that lets newcomers prove themselves quickly.

That enforcement matters: A meta-analysis of 97 field experiments found that hiring discrimination against nonwhite applicants is actually worse in France and Sweden than in the United States. Americans are not necessarily less biased because of better character — the U.S. has stronger institutional monitoring.

Researchers exploiting the quasi-random outcomes of Swiss citizenship referendums showed that naturalization causally increased immigrant earnings by roughly $5,000 per year, with the largest effects for the most marginalized groups. Citizenship is not a reward for integration; it is a cause of it.

Sweden is the instructive failure case.

No country in Europe has invested more in integration services, language classes, and social support. Yet Swedish integration outcomes have been among the worst in the OECD. The lesson is that integration effort does not equal integration design.

You cannot integrate people into a labor market that will not hire them, and spending generously on language courses while maintaining employment bans and rigid hiring practices is the policy equivalent of teaching someone to swim and then barring them from the pool.

The three mechanisms suggest three fixes:

1. European countries might benefit from eliminating employment bans for asylum seekers and investing in credential recognition. This is the lowest-hanging fruit: a pure policy choice defended by no constituency other than bureaucratic inertia.
2. Expanding skill-based immigration channels alongside humanitarian obligations could help. Germany’s Skilled Immigration Act is proof this is politically feasible even in a country with deeply contentious immigration politics.
3. Making citizenship accessible, funding language acquisition, and enforcing anti-discrimination law would address the integration gap. But sequence matters: Integration spending or anti-discrimination enforcement without labor market access is wasted money.

The U.S. advantage here is real, but it is institutional, not cultural. Labor market access, selection mechanism, and citizenship determine whether immigration works far more than how many immigrants a nation admits.

The current administration seems intent on testing whether the American advantage can be dismantled; it would be a mistake for liberals to make the same category error. Immigration is good when we do it well; we must do it well, and we must understand that we will get bad results if we do it badly and take seriously our responsibility to avoid doing that.

Europe and the United States may be learning this from opposite directions: one by watching what happens when you deny immigrants access to the labor market, the other by finding out what happens when you start.

5) Philip Bump, “Visualizing the erosion of American democracy”

6) More Alexander Kustov on immigration, “Spread the Word: Legal Immigration Is Difficult: Even conservatives want a less strict system than the one we have now”

We tested this phenomenon more systematically in our paper, recently published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science. In our survey of 1,000 Americans, we asked respondents how long it would take various types of people to legally immigrate. We also asked whether certain family members are even eligible. The average respondent got 25% of the questions right, barely above the 20% you’d expect from random guessing. For example, only about 8% correctly identified that aunts and uncles of U.S. citizens are not eligible to immigrate at all.

The ignorance was remarkably uniform. Young and old, rich and poor, college-educated and not, Democrat and Republican: none of these groups performed meaningfully better than any other. Republicans were, if anything, slightly less likely to know the rules, though the differences were small. The point is not to single anyone out. Almost everyone is in the dark.

This should not be surprising. Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier at the Cato Institute have spent years documenting just how byzantine the system is. Their analysis found that fewer than 1% of people who want to move permanently to the United States can do so legally. They also created the Green Card Game, an online simulation that lets you try to work through the actual rules. Most players discover that there is no “line” to get into, or that the line they’d be placed in lasts longer than a human lifetime. Our research was directly inspired by their work, and we wanted to test whether learning about these realities actually changes people’s minds…

To test this, we randomly assigned respondents to read one of two short paragraphs: one describing how burdensome the system is (costs, wait times, complexity) and another describing how restrictive it is (numerical caps, country quotas, multi-decade backlogs). A control group read a neutral paragraph about migration definitions.

Both treatments worked. Respondents who learned about the system were 13 percentage points more likely to say they preferred increasing legal immigration or making the process easier. That is a large effect for a survey experiment, roughly a 35% increase over the baseline. And the shift was not limited to Democrats. It showed up across the political spectrum, including among Republicans and self-identified conservatives.

Why did it work? We think it is because the information was relevant to what people already care about. Telling people “immigrants are good” is unlikely to move many minds because it runs into existing beliefs and identities. Telling people “the system you think you support is actually far more restrictive than you realize” is a different kind of message. It speaks to voters’ own preferences rather than trying to override them.

7) Oh, heck, let’s just stick with Kustov— he’s been killing it lately. He’s also been writing really good takes on AI and academic research. “Academics Need to Wake Up on AI: Ten theses for folks who haven’t noticed the ground shifting under their feet”

Here are ten theses for my colleagues, most of whom still seem oblivious.

1. AI can already do social science research better than most professors.

This is not hyperbole. Tibor Rutar recently described generating a full research paper using AI prompts alone, producing work he considers publishable in first-quartile journals. Paul Novosad reportedly accomplished similar results in 2-3 hours. Yascha Mounk claims that Claude can produce a publishable-quality political theory paper in under two hours with minimal feedback. Scott Cunningham estimates that manuscript creation now basically costs roughly $100 in editing services plus a Claude subscription.

And this goes well beyond crunching numbers or running pre-existing Stata code. Yes, what I’m claiming here is that LLMs produce excellent literature reviews and generate fruitful recombinations of existing ideas. Let’s be honest: academics haven’t been particularly great at writing either, and AI can make your ideas far more accessible to the people who actually need them. But effective use requires investment: Aziz Sunderji describes building a ~200-line instruction file encoding his research workflow, judgment calls, and behavioral guardrails. This takes a skill.

2. The academic paper is a dead format walking.

Sean Westwood put it bluntly: “AI does lit reviews better. AI will do peer review. Users will skim AI summaries. The real science is the question, the pre-analysis plan, and the analysis. The 30-page paper is just vestigial wrapping paper.” He got roasted on Bluesky for saying this. But he’s absolutely right, and the backlash proves his point: the field can’t even discuss the obvious without circling the wagons. Arthur Spirling is also right that we need conversations about what a paper is, what “review” means, and the correct role of generative AI. Perhaps it’d be a good thing if AI finally pushes us to move on from a system where universities spend taxpayer money to pay commercial publishers to very slowly produce paywalled PDFs2 with outdated results of publicly funded research.

8) Relatedly, “America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs: Does anyone have a plan for what happens next?”

Claude’s summary: A sweeping Atlantic piece uses the Bureau of Labor Statistics — its origins, its limits, and its current underfunding — as a frame for examining whether America is equipped to see the AI labor disruption coming before it arrives. Mainstream economists urge patience, noting the data shows no crisis yet and that legacy tech friction will slow adoption, while outliers like Anton Korinek warn that AI’s self-deploying nature makes it categorically different from prior technological shocks. CEOs have gone conspicuously quiet after briefly sounding alarms, politicians are largely paralyzed or captured by industry money, and the political system’s inability to count — let alone manage — what’s happening to workers may ultimately prove more consequential than AI itself.

9) Don’t try this at home? Good read– gift link, “‘I’d Like to Be Normal’: Can Height Surgery Make Them Happy?
Limb-lengthening can add inches to a person’s stature. But its risks have made it controversial.”

Height, an attribute that is largely set by adolescence, can be a sensitive issue for those who consider themselves short. Researchers have correlated being taller with greater income, high-status jobs and positive perceptions of leadership. And it can be a thorny topic in an era of dating apps that can filter for height preferences.

Adults have long resorted to shoe lifts or high heels. Those seeking more permanent results have pursued growth hormone therapy, which can add height when prescribed for children, but is also much debated. And they have turned to the field of limb-lengthening, where equipment has advanced.

“People have been bothered by height for a long time,” said Dr. Dror Paley, a surgeon and the founder of the Paley Orthopedic & Spine Institute in West Palm Beach, Fla. He began performing limb-lengthening in the 1980s after training under Dr. Gavriil Ilizarov, a physician in the former Soviet Union who invented one method. “This was the beginning of being able to do something about it,” Dr. Paley said.

The technique offered a new, if painfully arduous, pathway for people to correct medical problems in their limbs. But soon, Dr. Paley said, he was approached by people who wanted the procedure for cosmetic reasons.

I’ve always felt funny about this because I’ve got what I consider unearned height. I’m 6’0″ and the next closest anywhere in my family (admittedly a small one) was my dad who topped out at 5’8″ at best. I’m also taller than all three of my sons, which feels wrong (though, Alex is pretty darn close at 5’11”).

10) Fantastic Brian Beutler post, “Trump, Iran, And The Biting Of Reality: There aren’t many hot stoves inside the MAGA cinematic universe. But Trump has found one, and grabbed it with both hands.”

By 2020 the postmodern turn was so complete that Trump could leave America stranded to a pandemic, allowing hundreds of thousands to die needlessly amid depression levels of unemployment, and still gain vote share in the subsequent election. The coronavirus was an act of god. Or China’s fault. As long as his supporters didn’t seek to hold him to any objective standard—as long as they refused to compare American carnage to the outcomes in peer nations—they could hold him harmless, and experience no cognitive dissonance.

Republicans did that by the tens of millions.

The lesson GOP elected officials drew from this experience, and Trump’s subsequent return to power, is that they could create new hyperrealities to soften the blow of every failure, every breach of public opinion. Minneapolis. Tariffs. Corruption.

But some things manifest on more than just screens.

Deportations happen to other people, in other places, filtered through screens and partisan narratives. So do measles outbreaks. But $6 per gallon gas happens to everyone, everywhere, all at once. Wars of choice that disrupt critical global supply chains don’t exist exclusively in the hyperreal.

Trump can’t fix his Iran debacle by changing what’s on people’s screens, and it’s harrowing to imagine what, apart from rapid retreat, would be required to make the cameras point elsewhere.

I don’t know what will happen to his approval ratings in the long run. Nobody knows how long the war will last, and some strategic trajectories are worse than others.

But the TACO formula, which allows his supporters to tell themselves self-soothing stories about Trump’s mastery of events, doesn’t really work here, because Trump can’t snap his fingers and restore the status quo ante.

11) You know what to do. (Damn, weirdly not letting me do a gift link on this). And, it seems that I prefer AI writing. “Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans? Take Our Quiz.”

12) Interesting, “What Your DNA Reveals About the Sex Life of Neanderthals“

One of the biggest discoveries about human evolution in recent decades is that, tens of thousands of years ago, Neanderthals and modern humans interbred. As a result, most people alive today carry a bit of Neanderthal DNA in their genome — and that residual DNA, in turn, is giving scientists a detailed look at the ancient sexual encounters that put it there.

In a study published on Thursday in the journal Science, a team of researchers report that men with a lot of Neanderthal ancestry and women with a lot of modern human ancestry had a strong preference to mate with each other. Maybe modern human women found something especially attractive about men with a lot of Neanderthal DNA, or vice versa. Or maybe the two groups were equally attracted to each other.

However it played out, the preference was intense. “You need a strikingly strong phenomenon to get us there,” said Alexander Platt, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of the new study.

April Nowell, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who was not involved in the research, praised the study for using DNA to uncover details of our ancestors’ intimate lives. “We are learning so much in the labs these days about the behavior of Neanderthals,” she said, “things that just wouldn’t preserve in the archaeological or fossil record.”

13) What’s weird about this to me is that this is such an obvious reform that it is somehow just Arsene Wegner’s idea– really? “Is Wenger’s daylight idea the solution to fix offside?”

Wenger was appointed Fifa’s chief of global football development in November 2019. One of his key remits was to find ways to promote attacking play.

Within weeks he had presented his plan to revolutionise offside: visual separation – or, as it is more commonly known, daylight between players.

The former Arsenal manager says that if “any part of your body is on the same line as the defender, you’re not offside”.

In other words, there needs to be a complete gap between the attacker and the second-to-last opposition player – effectively the last defender, given the goalkeeper’s usual positioning.

14) This is terrific (and again, the NYT is always just chock full of articles like this, so I get so tired of all the haters). If you have a female athlete in your house (or ever will) you should read this (gift link), “Why Are So Many Teen Girls Still Tearing Their A.C.L.s? :For years, ligament tears have been a crisis among young athletes — even though a few simple exercises can prevent them.”

Okay, that’s a pretty good list. More… sometime.

(Return of) Quick Hits

Ahhh, life is busy.

1) Man I love Eric Levitz and wish he was at a better outlet than the husk of Vox. This is terrific, “You don’t need to be a liberal to oppose Trump’s ICE” (removepaywalls version).

Below, I detail six ways that the president’s immigration policies are eroding all Americans’ liberty.

1) ICE is nullifying the Fourth Amendment.

The Fourth Amendment bars government agents from forcing their way into a US resident’s home without a warrant. This protection from unreasonable search and seizure is among Americans’ most basic civil liberties — and ICE has decided to ignore it.

In an internal memo leaked this week, the agency informed its deportation officers that they can forcibly enter the homes of suspected undocumented immigrants without obtaining a warrant from any judge. ICE decreed that its agents could break into anyone’s house, so long as they had an administrative warrant, a type of warrant that ICE itself can issue at will.

This is a blatant subversion of constitutional government — and one that harms undocumented immigrants and US citizens alike. If ICE doesn’t need to establish probable cause before storming into a residence, then it will inevitably march into some American citizens’ homes.

Indeed, last Sunday, in St. Paul, Minnesota, ICE agents broke down the door of a house, put a gun to the head of a US citizen, and dragged him out of his home in just his underwear — all without presenting any judicial warrant…

6) The pursuit of indiscriminate, mass deportation imposes inherent costs to civil liberties

To this point, I’ve been outlining reasons why one should consider Trump’s immigration policies anti-democratic, even if one regards mass deportation as legitimate.

But it’s also true that any attempt to deport millions of non-criminal, undocumented immigrants is bound to impose costs on Americans’ civil liberties.

The case for concentrating immigration enforcement on law-breakers is not just humanitarian. Undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes are already known to the government and typically in its custody. As a result, DHS can remove them from the country without conducting sweeps that ensnare legal US residents.

Yet the Trump administration is committed to deporting as many of America’s 14 million undocumented immigrants as they possibly can. And that has led them to embrace tactics like going door to door in a Chicago apartment building, demanding families prove their legal status in the middle of the night; storming car washes and throwing senior citizens to the ground; and fining legal immigrants for not carrying proof of their status on their person at all times.

To refrain from these tactics, and set narrower enforcement priorities, is not to nullify America’s immigration statutes. The rule of law has never depended on perfect enforcement. Most crimes committed in the United States go unpunished, including nearly half of murders. We should obviously try to change that. But the only way to push the rate of unpunished criminality to anywhere near 0 percent would be to embrace gross violations of civil liberties: The government would need to surveil more or less all citizens more or less all of the time.

Most Americans would regard such enforcement as authoritarian. And so we instead accept that the police will prioritize the prevention and punishment of certain crimes, while acquiescing to a great deal of uncensured lawbreaking. Immigration enforcement entails similar trade-offs.

That doesn’t mean that any enforcement regime broader than Joe Biden’s is fascism. But I would encourage those unmoved by humanitarian objections to mass deportation to consider the inherent, civil libertarian costs of such a policy.

In any event, reasonable people can disagree about exactly how the government should balance the objectives of enforcing borders and honoring civil liberties. What should be beyond dispute, however, is that eroding Americans’ most basic constitutional rights is never legitimate. And it has never been more clear that Trump’s immigration agenda does precisely that.

2) Heck, let’s just stick with Levitz, “A very simple explanation for why politics is broken: Entertainment got too good.” Oh, and this one has a “key takeaways” box, making my job easy:

Key takeaways

• In recent decades, culture war issues have become increasingly salient in American politics, triggering a realignment of the major party coalitions.

• A new study suggests that the rise of cable television fueled these trends: Facing heightened competition, news broadcasters realized that social issues were better at attracting viewers’ attention than economic ones.

• Digital media has made the attention economy even more competitive — and thus, culture war controversies even more prominent.

3) Reading this Atlantic profile of Pam Bondi the appropriate conclusion is that she is a genuinely awful person. Some key summary insights from Claude:

The psychological profile is almost textbook: deeply insecure person with no core identity or intimate relationships, desperate for belonging and approval, finds it only by making herself useful to powerful people, and then can’t say no because exile would mean returning to that loneliness.

The Master Tank story becomes even more disturbing in this light—she wouldn’t give a grieving child his dog back, possibly because she needed the emotional support more than she cared about the kid’s trauma.

And now she’s Attorney General of the United States, with all that power being wielded not in service of any principle or ideology, but essentially to avoid disappointing the one person (Trump) whose approval she’s built her entire identity around.

It’s the banality of evil meets the pathology of loneliness. She’s not a Nazi true believer—she’s someone who will do anything to not be alone again, and that somehow makes it worse. Because there’s literally no limiting principle. She’ll authorize extrajudicial killings, prosecute Trump’s enemies, gut the Justice Department—whatever it takes to stay in the “family.”

4) Okay, so we’ve basically got Gen X adults banning the way we existed as teenagers. Let the teens hang out in the mall (while there are still malls left!). “Can We Just Let Teens Exist in Public?: When malls ban unaccompanied minors and when cities enact curfews, they restrict adolescents’ ability to participate in society.”

5) Good stuff from Chait, “Why Conservatives Defend ICE: Republicans deplore the mayhem in Minnesota—but blame protesters and Democrats for it”

Walz “is courting more ugly incidents,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page scolds. “The President has the legal authority to unleash ICE, and the agents are doing what they are told to do. The way to defeat the Trump policy is at the ballot box, not by obstructing agents in violation of the law.” National Review’s Noah Rothman argues, “What Walz is advising his citizens to do is likely to result in more violence and, potentially, more death.” Zachary Faria writes in the Washington Examiner, “What you have with ICE agents in Minneapolis is people exercising the lawful authority to detain illegal immigrants and, on the other end of that, anyone interfering with federal law enforcement actions.”

The premise underpinning this argument is that ICE is acting legally and in the service of legitimate immigration-enforcement goals. That assumption is difficult to square with on-the-ground reporting. The shooting death of Renee Nicole Good is the most high-profile incident, but the Journal found that the episode “shares characteristics with others the Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire”—tactics that violate law-enforcement protocol.

The New York Times reported on a couple driving home from a basketball game who were attacked with tear gas. The Associated Press found footage of agents brutalizing a man they had pinned to the ground. A group of local police chiefs told reporters that their officers, while off duty, were stopped with guns drawn solely based on their skin color. After a toy-store owner criticized ICE in a television interview, its agents raided the shop and conducted an audit. Multiple attorneys have claimed that their clients are being held incommunicado, in plain violation of the Constitution.

What’s more, the administration’s accounts of ICE’s actions have repeatedly proved untrue. The administration accused Good of steering her car directly into the ICE agent who shot her. But a New York Times video analysis demonstrates both that Good’s car was steered away from the agent, and that the agent fired shots into the car from a safe distance. Just a week after Good’s death, agents in Minneapolis shot a Venezuelan man in the leg. The administration claimed that the man provoked the shooting by assaulting ICE agents with a deadly weapon, but that was also contradicted by video evidence.

These episodes do not appear to be exceptional. A judge reviewing evidence of ICE’s conduct concluded, “The record adequately illustrates that the defendants have made, and will continue to make, a common practice of conduct that chills observers’ and protesters’ First Amendment rights,” and another judge wrote that Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino was “outright lying” under oath about his methods.

6) Great stuff from Bernstein on a year of Trump:

Trump, that is, simply doesn’t respond to the normal incentives embedded in the US government.

The way I’ve put it in the past is that Trump believes that by winning the presidential election Trump believes he won some sort of prize, when in fact he was hired to do a job that has some 330 million bosses. Brendan Nyhan says that “Trump has not been very successful by traditional metrics of the presidency” while at the same time “He’s playing a different game and is trying to consolidate an authoritarian regime.”

I think both of these formulation get at some of how he’s failing badly at the Neustadtian presidency while still getting his way quite a bit. I don’t think either fully captures what’s happening.

I don’t think Trump is trying, exactly, to establish a dictatorship. Someone trying to do that might, to be sure, send thugs to Minneapolis…but he wouldn’t make Greenland a priority. He wouldn’t, I don’t think, expend resources on a bunch of superficial nonsense, whether it’s tearing down part of the White House or interfering with the Kennedy Center or obsessing over Nobel Prizes.

It’s true that some things he does (or at least, what his administration does) look like authoritarian consolidation, and it’s certainly a broad-based attack on the rule of law and democracy. But it’s more a set of whims than anything thought out.3

Or to put it another way: Trump is acting as if the presidency has always been the leader of an autocracy, rather than one piece of a republican government. His whole “deep state” fantasy makes sense if he thinks that presidents are entitled to whatever they want, and some nefarious group somewhere has targeted him as an exception to the rule. Trump wants what he wants (Tariffs, yes! Wind energy, no! A ceremonial arch! Canada!). That those things tie together in some grand overarching scheme? No. It’s just stuff he likes and doesn’t like, and feels that he should get because he won.

Perhaps the key to all of this is that while all presidents are ambitious, Trump is unique in that his ambitious is virtually entirely private.

Madisonian democracy is based on the clash of ambitions (as Federalist 51 explains). But what no one has ever needed to point out is that those ambitions are essentially public – for power, in the first place, but also for public policy, or for advancing the cause of various groups.4 Trump’s ambitions aren’t just private in that he’s out to personally profit from his office, although that is certainly true. Even the things that seem public, such as Greenland, are ultimately personal and private to him; they’re about him in his private capacity as a person, no different than the trophies he wins for cheating at golf at his own private clubs.

Absolute monarchy is terrible in part because one person monopolizes the public sphere and the rest of us cannot participate. Trumpism seems to be about erasing the public sphere entirely. His redecoration (and redesign) of the White House is revealing. It isn’t, as it was with other presidents, about telling a story about themselves and the nation; Trump just wants to colonize his surroundings so that they are his, not ours.5

Which comes back to his promises. It’s not just that Trump ignores (or persecutes) the now-larger half of the nation that doesn’t support him. It’s that he’s really ignoring his supporters, too.6 They’re invited to enjoy the awesomeness that is Donald Trump in his purely personal self-aggrandizement and his pursuit of his personal enemies, but that’s about it.7…

But if you’re seeking to understand what he’s up to and why it’s so corrosive, and why he’s willing to lose and lose and lose again and still keep acting as if he can get whatever he wants? With the result that he manages to both exceed Jimmy Carteresque level of defeat while still achieving things all the time? He’s missing the public ambition that would lead him to respond to the incentives of the system, while also believing he’s entitled to having everything he wants. And yes, that’s incredibly dangerous.

7) Wow, I love the “flock of starlings” metaphor for thinking about other people David Brooks:

But if you see people as flocks of starlings, you’d see just how dehumanizing such sorting systems are. If you wanted to coach, teach or treat a flock of starlings, you wouldn’t be content with factory-style, one-size-fits-all approaches. You wouldn’t want to rank people along a single scale. You’d want personalized education, personalized medicine, personalized management techniques.

The second thing you’d notice, I think, is that change is the human constant. In our culture we have a tendency to essentialize people, to pick a few labels or traits that supposedly capture who they are. But flocks are always in motion. A person who is extroverted at home might be introverted at synagogue. A stock trader who is overly aggressive in a bull market may be overly cautious in a bear market.

Behavior is more about if-then signatures. If I’m confronted with this context I tend to respond with this mental swirl and that action, but if I’m in a different context I’ll respond with a very different swirl. If we saw people as starlings, I think we’d pay more attention to how good each person is at changing and adapting and less on supposedly permanent traits.

Third, I’d think you’d notice that the categories we use to understand people get in the way of actually understanding them. We divide mental activity into categories like perception, reason, emotion, desire, action. This fits well with the modular view of the brain. Vision takes place in the back of the head; reason takes place in the front.

But if you see people as a set of swirls, you are confronted with the fact that all these different mental activities are intensely interconnected as part of a single holistic process. The emotions you feel influence what you see just as much as what you see influences what you feel. The divisions between these mental categories begin to dissolve away. As Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist, wrote in her book “How Emotions Are Made,” “emotions are not, in principle, distinct from cognitions and perceptions.”

8) Why does the NYT not have gift links for Athletic stories?! Regardless, no better story in hockey this year than Carolina Hurricanes’ 27(!!) year old rookie goaltender, Brandon Bussi.

In his first NHL action, Carolina Hurricanes goalie Brandon Bussi has put up an incredible 16-3-1 record over his first 20 starts. He became the fastest goalie in NHL history to 10 wins, doing it in only 11 games.

He’s among the league leaders with a minuscule 2.31 goals-against average and has backstopped Carolina to the top of the Eastern Conference standings. If he carries this level of play into the spring and summer, he could be the long-missing piece to the Hurricanes’ championship puzzle.

I don’t imagine there’s too many 26-year old professional athletes out there who just haven’t gotten the chance to show they are genuinely worthy of the big leagues, but I also doubt Bussi is the only one.

9) Four-man boblsled goes down the run with only the driver. How had I not heard about this?

Nie wiem, jak często się to zdarza, ale na MŚ w St. Moritz aż trzech zawodników wypadło z bobsleja już na starcie :)

Kris Horn zjechał torem sam bez hamulcowego. Na szczęście nic złego się nie stało.
pic.twitter.com/qI61DRIL9q

— BuckarooBanzai (@Buckarobanza) January 12, 2026

10) Jerusalem Demsas on GLP-1’s. I had not seen this image before, which, really explains it all:

On Dr. Ashwin Sharma’s great newsletter, GLP-1 Digest, Sharma pointed readers to a “groundbreaking randomized controlled trial” that included scans of “people’s brains in real-time as they looked at images of high-calorie, high sugar foods (think pizza, cakes, burgers etc) while taking tirzepatide, liraglutide, or a placebo.”

11) I feel like I do pretty well on this stuff, but, damn, I gotta use a hand to get up off the floor. “Are You Aging Well? Try These Simple Tests to Find Out.”

1. Sitting-Rising Test

The goal with this assessment is to go from standing to sitting on the floor, and back up again, using the least amount of support as possible. The test is scored on a 10-point scale — five points for sitting down and five points for standing up — and you lose a point for every hand, knee or other body part you use to help yourself. Subtract a half point if you’re unsteady or lose your balance.

Adults in their 30s and 40s should aim for a perfect 10, said Dr. Claudio Gil Araújo, the dean of research and education at the Exercise Medicine Clinic in Brazil, who developed the test. Anyone over 60 who gets an 8 is “in very good shape,” he said.

The test evaluates strength, power, balance and flexibility. Dr. Araújo has also shown it’s a predictor of mortality. A recent study of his looked at more than 4,000 adults age 46 to 75 and found that, over the course of 12 years, the people who scored 4 or below on the sitting-rising test had death rates nearly four times higher than those who scored a 10. He said that was primarily because people with low scores were at a higher risk for falls.

12) So, I was the discussant for this paper “Reassessing Extremism, Polarization, and Constraint with Continuous Policy Questions” at MPSA back in April. And, damn it is isn’t already published. I don’t remember what my comments were, but I made the acknowledgments. Oddly, I’m pretty sure that’s the first time that’s happened for me from being a discussant.

Some argue that the American public is extreme and polarized along party lines. Paradoxically, others argue that members of the public lack meaningful policy preferences and exhibit low constraint across issues. These conclusions are typically drawn from binary policy questions or scales with ambiguous values, both of which are ill-suited for measuring extremism, polarization, or constraint. In this paper, I reassess these claims by analyzing policy questions that allow respondents to express their preferences on a well-defined continuum. Across a wide range of issues, most Americans appear to have moderate preferences over policy. As expected, Democrats tend to be more liberal than Republicans, but there is significant overlap on every issue, and the average extent of disagreement is modest. Lastly, positions across issues appear more constrained than standard tests suggest.

13) If I were still teaching Gender & Politics, I would spend a lot of time on this. As it is, I’m going to have to find a way to work it into my Public Opinion class, “What women “don’t know”: Across nearly 100 poll questions, women select “I don’t know” more often than men”

Women are more likely to register to vote and to actually vote than men. They are also more likely to boycott and sign petitions and volunteer. Yet, in poll after poll, question after question, month after month, and across ideology, race, and age, more women than men are telling us “I don’t know.”

Since August, of the 98 questions we’ve polled that offered “I don’t know” as a response, women consistently selected it at higher rates.

The gap isn’t massive — the average difference in rate was below 5 percentage points — but that can lead to systematic under- or overrating support for various issues. If, as I suspect is the case, a woman saying “I don’t know” is just more willing to register uncertainty than a man who has the same level of uncertainty, that can lead to meaningfully different interpretations of data.

14) Tell that to the victims of ICE, but, still, “Trump’s Attack on Democracy Is Faltering:One year into the president’s second term, the country’s institutions and civil society are still checking his authoritarian impulses.”

And yet, the prognosis for democracy in the United States is far better today than it was at the start of Trump’s second term, when Elon Musk’s DOGE was stripping the federal government for parts and even normally sober observers began talking seriously about the constitutional crises that would follow if Trump defied the Supreme Court. Since then, American democracy has started to show signs of life: The popularity Trump enjoyed after the election has vanished, protesters have marched in record numbers to oppose his one-man rule, and citizens have shown up to defend their neighbors from immigration enforcement and other federal forces. That bravery has helped encourage opposition politicians to take more and more forceful stands. District judges, meanwhile, continue to throw up roadblocks to the president’s plans.

None of this means that American democracy as we know it will survive—especially given the threat of Trump’s potential interference in the 2026 and 2028 elections—but it has a pulse. As Trump’s term goes on, the administration appears less capable of establishing durable authoritarian rule, and the possibility that the nation will find a way through the chaos with self-government intact no longer seems quite as remote.“In normal liberal democracy terms, the United States is in bad shape,” the international-relations scholar Nicholas Grossman wrote recently. But, he went on, considering that the country is struggling against an attempted authoritarian takeover, “we’re doing pretty well.”…

As Trump began to struggle, the opposition found its voice. His military parade in June was countered by millions of protesters who gathered at “No Kings” demonstrations across the country and returned again in October for what may have been the largest single-day protest in American history. With the National Guard and immigration enforcement moving from city to city, residents—including people not typically among the ranks of demonstrators—have developed and shared tactics of opposition to protect their neighbors. “I’ve never protested in my life,” one man who gathered with others on a Minneapolis street told the freelance reporter Zach D. Roberts.

These are the kind of losses that a would-be dictator still in the early stages of establishing a regime simply can’t afford. Successful contemporary authoritarians, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, tend to ride into office on a wave of popular support and then shore up those high approval ratings while chipping away at governing institutions. By the time a substantial portion of the public wants to stop them, it’s too late. Trump, though, lacks both the self-control required to move slowly and the connection to reality required to understand what is and isn’t popular outside his most committed base. He seems to particularly enjoy the aesthetics of authoritarianism, delighting in the spectacle of armed National Guard members descending on a liberal-leaning city—but those aesthetics are repulsive to many Americans. Likewise, his obsession with tariffs has contributed to economic discontent and dragged down his approval ratings as voters continue to complain about inflation.

15) Ice is evil and needs to be abolished. Radley Balko, “I’ve Covered Police Abuse for 20 Years. What ICE Is Doing Is Different.” (gift link)

In addition to such language, the administration has embraced fear tactics long associated with totalitarian regimes. Until now, law enforcement officers in the United States rarely masked their faces, save for during specialty operations like SWAT raids. For most agencies, this isn’t a written policy; it’s just been accepted that masked policing isn’t consistent with a democratic society. We want law enforcement officers to see themselves as accountable to the community. And we want community members to see officers as approachable, so they’ll cooperate. Masks undermine both. They instill fear in the community and encourage a menacing aura of infallibility among officers.

Instilling fear is a drawback only if your goal is public safety. This administration has made clear that it doesn’t want marginalized communities — immigrants, Somali U.S. citizens, residents of Latino neighborhoods and so on — to feel safe. It wants them living in fear. This is why they mask. It’s why they shatter car windows. It’s why Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, went on cable news to assure federal immigration officers, incorrectly, that they have complete immunity from criminal or civil liability and why, after Ms. Good’s death, Department of Homeland Security social media accounts reiterated Mr. Miller’s claim.

The administration has resurrected tactics that professional policing groups have deemed dangerous or counterproductive. ProPublica recently reported on 40 incidents over the past year in which federal immigration officers used potentially fatal chokeholds that are banned by most police agencies. Federal agents have shot into cars at least 10 times since September. This, too, is prohibited by most big city police agencies, in part because it’s too easy to mistake a driver’s intent…

It’s clear that immigration officials are routinely breaking the law. There’s persuasive evidence that they’ve been explicitly racially profiling people in Minneapolis and elsewhere. (The Supreme Court effectively permitted profiling people by race and other factors in a September ruling.) They’ve been requiring U.S. citizens to produce proof of their citizenship on demand — also a violation of federal law. And we’ve seen U.S. citizens dragged from their cars, homes and workplaces, then arrested or detained.

We’ve seen the unlawful arrest and incarceration of Somali refugees who have legal permission to be here, warrantless raids on private homes and reports that detainees are being denied access to lawyers. And we’ve seen routine excessive force against protesters, from casual use of chemical irritants to physical violence to firing less lethal munitions at them from close range. These are all violations of the law. Not only is there no indication that the administration has investigated any of this, but the videos it posts to social media even seem to celebrate it.

All of which brings us back to Ms. Good. Over the weekend, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, said on Fox News that there will be no federal investigation into her killing. The administration has already said the F.B.I. will not share the evidence it collected with the local police so they can conduct their own investigations, either. This is the very definition of a cover-up. It’s just being done in plain sight.

16) Exercise! “Physical activity types, variety, and mortality: results from two prospective cohort studies”

Results During 2 431 318 person years of follow-up, 38 847 deaths were recorded, with 9901 from cardiovascular disease, 10 719 from cancer, and 3159 from respiratory disease. Total physical activity and most individual physical activities, except for swimming, were associated with lower mortality with non-linear dose-response relations. The pooled multivariable adjusted hazard ratios for all cause mortality in the highest categories of physical activity levels, compared with the lowest, were 0.83 (95% confidence interval 0.80 to 0.85) for walking, 0.89 (0.85 to 0.94) for jogging, 0.87 (0.80 to 0.93) for running, 0.96 (0.93 to 0.99) for bicycling, 1.01 (0.97 to 1.05) for swimming, 0.85 (0.80 to 0.89) for tennis or squash, 0.90 (0.87 to 0.93) for climbing stairs, 0.86 (0.84 to 0.89) for rowing or callisthenics, and 0.87 (0.82 to 0.91) for weight training or resistance exercises. Higher physical activity variety was associated with lower mortality. After adjustment for total physical activity levels, participants in the group with the highest physical activity variety score (group 5), compared with those in the lowest group (group 1), had a 19% lower all cause mortality and 13-41% lower mortality from cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory disease, and other causes (all P for trend <0.001).

Conclusions Habitual engagement in most types of physical activity was associated with lower mortality. The variety of physical activity was inversely associated with mortality, independent of total physical activity levels. Overall, these data support the notion that long term engagement in multiple types of physical activity may help extend the lifespan.

17) Noah Smith does a great job of cataloging ICE’s awfulness (and the awfulness of Republicans defending them) in this post. “Why are federal agents gunning down Americans in the streets? The shooting of Renee Good, like all of the ICE abuses, is symptomatic of a deeper mental illness.”

18) This is kind of wild, “What’s Behind the Staggering Drop in the Murder Rate? No One Knows for Sure.”

19) And on this theme: “The Great Crime Decline Is Happening All Across the Country”

20) Yes, Dobbs is killing women. “Women With High-Risk Pregnancies Have Limited Options Under Abortion Bans
Our reporting has found that abortion bans generally don’t include exceptions that cover health concerns pregnant women with chronic conditions can face — or if they do, doctors aren’t using them.”

21) But, OMG, so are caesareans! This article was so disturbing! Gift link. “A Grave Condition Caused by C-Sections Is on the Rise: Placenta accreta is a life-threatening condition in which the placenta attaches to scar tissue left by a C-section. It used to be extremely rare.”

Placenta accreta used to be very rare, affecting 1 in 4,000 pregnancies in the 1970s. But as cesarean surgeries have become more common in recent decades, so has accreta. While its prevalence has been hard to pin down, one report found a rate as high as 1 in 272 deliveries.

This year, a study found that accreta diagnoses increased significantly between 2016 and 2021. That’s largely because of C-sections as well as other procedures that can result in scar tissue. Doctors have also become better at recognizing the condition, contributing to the uptick.

The placenta is covered in blood vessels that can cling to scar tissue and, in severe cases, grow through the uterine wall into the bladder. About two-thirds of women with placenta accreta hemorrhage during childbirth, sometimes requiring more blood transfusions than small hospitals have on hand. A patient can bleed to death in under 10 minutes.

Researchers believe accreta is a major cause of maternal deaths, though more research is needed to quantify its consequences. A small study at Vanderbilt University found that 5 to 7 percent of patients with especially severe cases died in childbirth.

“It is the single most important consequence of unnecessary cesarean sections,” said Dr. Robert M. Silver, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the University of Utah.

Quick hits

1) Good Atlantic article on how we’re overdoing it with our national protein obsession.

The low rattle of protein mania—the protein matchas and protein Pop-Tarts and protein seasonings to sprinkle on your protein chicken cubes—can be as maddening as it is inescapable. Everybody knows that you are supposed to eat a varied diet with many different types of foods that provide many different nutrients. But only protein is endowed with a special kind of redemptive power. Nobody is pretending that tortilla chips are a cornerstone of a balanced diet, but if they’re protein tortilla chips (7 grams), well, then maybe they’re at least fine. This is fantastic news if your goal is to enjoy tortilla chips, but it does have a tendency to recast all food that has not been protein-ified—either by nature or by the addition of whey-protein isolate—as a minor failure. It is depressing to look at a pile of roasted vegetables, arranged elegantly over couscous, and think: I will try harder tomorrow. I know, because I do it.

Protein is supposed to allow people to realize their untapped potential—to make us stronger and sharper. I suspect, though, that I would be stronger and sharper if I could stop ambiently thinking about my protein intake. That the world is now covered in a protein-infused haze provides constant reminders that I am falling short. Lots of protein evangelists will tell you that this is how cavemen ate, and therefore it is good. I think the best part of being a caveman would be not worrying about protein.

As nutritional trends go, there are worse obsessions than protein. Even if there is still significant debate about how much protein one needs, you are unlikely to send yourself into kidney failure because you protein-maxxed too hard. But the fanatical focus on protein as the true answer, the universal key to transforming the body you have into the one you want—7 grams, 28 grams, 11 grams, a chicken smoothie—feels eerily familiar. We counted calories, grams of fat, carbohydrates, trying to distill the messy science of nutrition into one single quantitative metric. Protein, for all its many virtues, is just another thing to count.

This led me into an AI deep dive with Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. They *all* converged on the same advice for healthy/active people over 50 (yeah, that’s the demographic I care about most). What’s interesting is that this is clear consensus knowledge, and yet you’d never know it. I asked Claude for a summary:

Protein Guidelines for Active Adults 50+

Core principles:

• Protein requires resistance training — without regular strength work, extra protein does very little for muscle
• Aging shifts the threshold, not the total — older muscles need a stronger signal per meal, not necessarily huge daily amounts
• Target ~1.0-1.2 g/kg/day for maintenance — meaningfully above the RDA (0.8 g/kg), well below bodybuilder ranges
• Distribution matters more than totals — aim for ~25-35g protein per meal to effectively stimulate muscle protein synthesis
• Two to three solid protein meals beats one massive meal — spreading intake gives multiple daily “signals” to maintain muscle
• Weekly consistency beats daily precision — small day-to-day variation is fine; chronic under-consumption is the problem
• Total calorie intake matters — protein can’t fully compensate for inadequate overall energy intake

What NOT to worry about:

• Identical intake on training vs. rest days
• Precise workout timing windows
• Achieving three perfect high-protein meals daily
• Pushing beyond ~1.3-1.5 g/kg/day (minimal additional benefit for maintenance)

Priority hierarchy for muscle maintenance:

1. Consistent resistance training (2-3x/week minimum)
2. Adequate total protein (avoid falling below ~1.0 g/kg regularly)
3. Reasonable per-meal distribution (at least two meals with 25-30g)
4. Everything else is marginal optimization

Following these evidence-based guidelines captures the substantial benefits of protein for healthy aging without requiring unsustainable or extreme dietary patterns.

2) This gallery is full of fantastic photos. Seriously, check it out. “Winners of the Bird Photographer of the Year 2025”

© Liron Gertsman / Bird Photographer of the Year

The Frigatebird and the Diamond Ring. Gold Winner, Birds in Flight, and Bird Photographer of the Year 2025. “After well over a year of planning and about a week of in-person scouting on the coast of Sinaloa in Mexico, my dream of capturing a bird in front of a total solar eclipse finally came true on April 8, 2024. Totality was due to last almost 4.5 minutes, and I had enlisted the help of a boat to position myself near some islets off Mazatlán that were frequented by seabirds. As the moon uncovered the sun’s edge at the end of totality, I captured this magnificent frigatebird in front of the spectacular eclipse phase known as the ‘diamond ring’, a moment that lasts just seconds.” Mazatlán, Sinaloa, Mexico.

3) There’s some CSPAN high school video competition and all the local HS students have been coming to me for interviews. This one was pretty good and you get to see my office in all its messy professor glory.

4) Indeed! “Federal Agents Are Violating the Rights of Americans: ICE and the National Guard are acting with impunity.”

5) And here’s what I wrote on FB after attending a pop-up anti-ICE rally yesterday (and, damn does it feel empowering to be among fellow citizens who also passionately care about democracy):

I have been teaching about the Bill of Rights and basic *Constitutional* liberties for 27 years. ICE is daily engaging in *egregious* violations of these rights. Examples that I have been using for decades in my Intro to American Government class (e.g., the police cannot simply go door-to-door looking for crime; detaining people for their skin color/language spoken) as to why we are not a police state are now being *openly* violated by ICE every day. Stand up for democracy. This is not a drill.

6) Great stuff from Lakshya Jain at the Argument, “The loneliness crisis isn’t just male”

This is the traditional story about the male loneliness crisis: Millions of young men are increasingly antisocial, fueled by unique and accelerating feelings of loneliness and isolation, along with toxic podcasters in the manosphere. In the process, they’re finding it harder to make friends, harder to trust others, and harder to interact with the rest of society.

A lot of people meet this with denial. For example, a study from the Young Men Research Initiative analyzed the top Bluesky posts on male loneliness and found that a large chunk of them either denied that the problem existed, blamed men for it, or simply belittled the crisis as overblown.

But there is a loneliness crisis in America, and the evidence in support is increasingly undeniable. What our polling reveals, though, is that it’s a youth loneliness crisis, rather than a male loneliness crisis. Age, not gender, shows far greater correlation with antisocial attitudes and beliefs. Younger voters — both male and female — are increasingly paralyzed by anxiety and fear, and they are finding it harder and harder to socialize.

In fact, when you look at the data, the “antisocial crisis,” as I like to call it, is actually most pronounced among young women, who experience the highest rates of social isolation.

Put another way, it’s true that young men are facing a loneliness crisis. But it’s part of a broader loneliness crisis that young voters are facing in general, and the numbers suggest that young women might actually be hit even harder, even though that story hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention.

7) Great stuff from Brian Beutler, “In Defense of Pretexts”

You might ask: Are these things really worth missing? Aren’t they just symptoms of bad faith? Haven’t you spent the Trump years on a crusade against the scourge of bad faith in right-wing politics.

The answer to all of these questions is yes.

I would of course prefer to live in a world where policymakers and elected officials were scrupulously honest and above board. If that were our condition, we wouldn’t have pretexts, because we wouldn’t start any wars. We might finish them, but we wouldn’t go looking.

Building a world like that should be our north star. But in the world of today—of mixed and rotten motives, where wars of choice happen whether I want them to or not—I’ll take false justifications for bad acts.

If you care about America’s highest aspirations—freedom, equality, self-governance rule of law—the pretexts matter. We can be clear eyed about the people who lay false claim to these ideals, yet still take some solace in their lies, because the lies confirm that the ideals still have power.

Why pretend that a war of plunder is meant to spread democracy or fight communism or defend the homeland, unless you know that the public values certain higher principles, and may revolt if you traduce them? If your true motives are toxic, you have to conceal them, because the people—we the people—are better than you.

This is the tribute vice pays to virtue in the rawest sense, and it is revealing. These are cynical people, many of whom have no place in their hearts for principle or consistency. But if that is their nature, why would they pay tribute to anything? Vice is vice.

They do it because virtue still controls. It’s still the default. Because they haven’t won the masses over to uncut evil.

By dispensing with the pretexts, Trump suggests he thinks he’s overcome that obstacle, worn the public down, made us as malevolent as he is. He still pays some tribute to virtue. He won’t cop to having launched a war. But the theft and subjugation are right there on the surface, without any tributes to virtue.

I think this is what has people so unsettled. Why he has to be stopped preemptively and forced to reverse, or else be run out of office. If he prevails—not just in acting lawlessly, but in doing so nakedly, and without pushback—then it’s over. We become changed.

That’s why I miss the pretexts. It’s also why I take some solace in the fact that his Venezuela “policy” polls poorly. That his menacing of Greenland polls even worse. That the Senate just passed a war-powers resolution meant to foreclose further unauthorized military action. These things matter. They mean we aren’t changed. Yet.

8) I’m reading American Dirt of the great 2020 controversy because Gemini and I were discussing books and it suggested this for literary fiction with real plot momentum. Honestly, it’s pretty good, but, controversy aside, I think a bit overrated. (Among other things, preternaturally mature, thoughtful children that bear no relationship to real children always annoy the hell out of me) But, the attempted cancelation of it at the time was still nuts. Pamela Paul wrote about it in 2023.

From the moment Cummins’s agent sent “American Dirt” out to potential publishers, it looked like a winner. The manuscript led to a bidding war among nine publishing imprints, resulting in a game-changing, seven-figure deal for its author. In the run-up to publication, as the editor of The New York Times Book Review, I asked attendees at Book Expo, then the most significant annual publishing conference, which upcoming book they were most excited about. The answer was as unanimous as I’ve ever heard: “American Dirt.” Publishers, editors, booksellers, librarians were all wildly enthusiastic: “American Dirt” wasn’t only a gripping novel — it brought attention to one of the most vexing and heartbreaking issues of our time, the border crisis. This, its champions believed, was one of those rare books that could both enthrall readers and change minds.

But in December 2019, a month before the novel’s release, Myriam Gurba, a Latina writer whose memoir, “Mean,” had been published a couple of years earlier by a small press, posted a piece that Ms. magazine had commissioned as a review of “American Dirt,” and then killed. In her blog post and accompanying review, Gurba characterized the novel as “fake-assed social justice literature,” “toxic heteroromanticism” and “sludge.” It wasn’t just that Gurba despised the book. She insisted that the author had no right to write it.

A central charge was that Cummins, who identifies as white and Latina but is not an immigrant or of Mexican heritage, wasn’t qualified to write an authentic novel about Latin American characters. Another writer soon asserted in an op-ed that the “clumsy, ill-conceived” rollout of Cummins’s novel was proof that American publishing was “broken.” The hype from the publisher, which marketed the book as “one of the most important books for our times,” was viewed as particularly damning. Echoing a number of writers and activists, the op-ed writer said it was incumbent upon Mexican Americans and their “collaborators” to resist the “ever-grinding wheels of the hit-making machine,” charging it was “unethical” to allow Oprah’s Book Club to wield such power. More than 100 writers put their names to a letter scolding Oprah for her choice.

Never mind that for years, Oprah had championed a diverse range of authors and been a huge booster of the book world. Or that a publisher will use whatever it can, whether wild hyperbole about a book’s merits or a marathon of reliable blurbers, to make a novel work given the unpredictable vicissitudes of public taste.

But an influential swath of the literary world clearly felt galvanized by the charges.

In one of those online firestorms the world has come to recognize and occasionally regret, activists, writers, self-appointed allies and Twitter gunslingers competed to show who was more affronted by the crime of the novel’s success. “American Dirt” was essentially held responsible for every instance in which another Latino writer’s book got passed over, poorly reviewed or remaindered.

As the story gained traction, the target kept moving. According to her critics, it was the author’s fault for not doing better research, for not writing a more literary novel, for writing a “white savior story,” for inaccurately reflecting aspects of Mexican culture, for resorting to negative stereotypes. It was the florist’s fault for repurposing the barbed wire motif on the book’s cover as part of the arrangements at a launch dinner. It was the publisher’s fault for mounting a “perfectly orchestrated mega-budget campaign” on behalf of a white, one-quarter Puerto Rican author rather than for other, more marginalized Latino voices. The blurbs for “American Dirt” were too laudatory. The advance was too big. There were accusations of cultural appropriation, a nebulous and expansive concept whose adherents will parse from homage, appreciation or cultural exchange according to rules known only to them.

What should have been done instead? Should the publisher have pushed back on the blurbers, asking them to tone down their praise? Should Cummins have balked at the advance, saying it was too much money, given some back? Would anyone have gotten this upset had Cummins received $50,000 and a few tepid notes of praise from writer friends?

Many of Cummins’s fans went silent, too scared to mount any kind of public defense. In conversations at the time, a number of novelists — from all backgrounds and ethnicities — told me privately they were afraid the rage would come for them, for earlier novels they’d written in which they’d imagined other people’s lives, other people’s voices. For future novels they wanted to write that dared traverse the newly reinforced DMZ lines of race, ethnicity, gender and genre. (Even now, three years later, many of Cummins’s early champions I contacted were wary of going on the record for fear of poking the bear; many people in the publishing world would speak to me only off the record. Macmillan, the imprint’s house, did not respond to a request for comment.)

9) This story is awful. Yes, we over-criminalize and over-punish in America, but we absolutely have to be harder on people like this. “Man accused of killing teacher Zoe Welsh allegedly terrorized Raleigh family”

10) Thomas Mills, “January 6 was fork in the road”

Also yesterday, The White House put up a website that rewrites history, blaming the Capitol police for the assault on the Capitol. It calls the rioters “peaceful patriotic protesters.” It claims the election was stolen and that Mike Pence betrayed the president. It says Ashli Babbit was murdered. It’s disgraceful and disrespectful to the people who defended the Capitol and our democracy.

A group of January 6 supporters protested at the Capitol. They taunted Capitol police officers with racist tropes. You won’t see the GOP repudiating them.

None of the Republicans who blamed Trump five years ago will stand up to refute the dishonest conspiracy theories being distributed by the President of the United States today. They will slink away at best and echo the lies at worst. They are all complicit in a cover up.

Joseph Stalin famously rewrote Russian history in realtime, removing public figures from photos and even text books. Trump and MAGA are doing the same thing. They are telling us not to believe what we saw and what we know is true. Too many people will fall for it, either out of tribal loyalty, ignorance, or political self-preservation. The press won’t ask many Republicans about it.

As conservative writer Ed Whelan tweeted, “If you were appalled and outraged by the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol while it was happening but now minimize it and harshly criticize folks who continue to regard it as you once did, maybe you’ve managed to gaslight yourself.”

January 6, though, was really a beginning. It exposed Republicans for who they really are. In the years that followed, they dropped any pretense of holding people accountable. The fought investigations and downplayed the attack. They became increasingly anti-democratic and authoritarian in their rhetoric and their actions.

11) I’m not persuaded, but I always find Charles Fain Lehman interesting, “The Case for Prohibiting Vice“

Once you notice the proliferation of vice, it is hard to stop seeing it. Sometimes the drive-through operator is stoned; other times, it’s the barista. A young man you know spends all his money on sports-gambling apps and goes five figures into debt. On Wall Street, news reports tell of young investment bankers popping amphetamines for work and pleasure. For a time, you could buy psychedelic mushrooms at a store 10 blocks from the White House. (You can still get them elsewhere in the nation’s capital.) The men sleeping on the streets are on a cocktail of drugs we had scarcely heard of a decade ago: fentanyl, xylazine, nitazene. Elon Musk used drugs while campaigning for President Trump, as did Hunter Biden during his father’s vice presidency.

The data corroborate these impressions. In 2023, a record 62 million Americans smoked pot; 17 million now use it daily or near daily. One in 12 young adults used a hallucinogen; one in 18 misused prescription stimulants such as Adderall. Another 2.6 million Americans over 12 took meth. Overdoses still claim the lives of 70,000 Americans annually; the majority died using synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Half of American men have a sports-betting account, up from almost zero seven years ago. “iGaming” — gambling via casino apps on your phone — is now legal in seven states. By some estimates, pornography now generates more revenue than Hollywood, and OnlyFans creators collectively make more than players in the National Basketball Association.

This panoply of vice, and the swiftness with which it has come to dominate our culture, has caused many people to recoil with shock. A backlash has ensued. In polls, majorities now favor aggressive regulation of online sports gambling and a ban on betting on college sports altogether. Laws to control minors’ access to pornography are on the books in 25 states and were recently upheld by the Supreme Court. A majority of Americans now say marijuana use is individually and socially harmful; legalization initiatives were rejected in several states in 2024. Congress also recently voted to re-ban accidentally legalized hemp-derived THC products.

This backlash makes sense. Millions of Americans are now dependent on addictive, harmful products, which they can freely purchase at the touch of a button. Surely there is something wrong with this state of affairs. Our natural discomfort, even revulsion, must correspond to some actual problem that deserves social or legal response.

12) I’m mostly enjoying Department Q. But, yes, like so many TV shows today, it should’ve just been a movie.

13) As you know, I really don’t have a lot of interest in Epstein. But, I am intrigued by the mystery of how he built his wealth. Big NYT feature, “Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich” Rather than read the whole damn thing, though, I had Claude read it and then discussed. And here’s my Claude takeaways:

Key Takeaways: The Real Epstein Financial Mystery

How Epstein Actually Made His Money:

• Not a financial genius—a systematic fraudster who tested boundaries early and escalated
• Started with small-scale scams: expense account fraud at Bear Stearns, the $450k Stroll oil deal, likely involvement in Hoffenberg’s $500M Ponzi scheme
• By 1988: ~$15M through market manipulation (Pennwalt scheme) and refusing to return investor money
• The real fortune: systematic misappropriation of “vast sums” (tens of millions at a time) from Leslie Wexner over ~decade starting late 1980s

The Central Unsolved Mystery:

• Wexner gave Epstein power of attorney despite his financial adviser warning “I smell a rat”
• Wexner ignored warnings from: his VP, a board member who hired investigators, and even the person who introduced them
• Professional investigators (Kroll) found “just nothing there” in Epstein’s background
• Wexner eventually acknowledged Epstein “misappropriated vast sums” but took no apparent legal action
• Wexner has refused to answer any questions about the relationship—even after Epstein’s death

Why This Matters More Than Celebrity Gossip:

• The Wexner relationship funded everything—without it, no islands, planes, or large-scale trafficking operation
• Understanding what hold Epstein had on Wexner would explain the actual mechanism of his power
• This is the linchpin question, yet public discourse focuses on flight logs and celebrity associations instead
• Even this extensive NYT investigation couldn’t crack it due to Wexner’s silence

Bottom line: The biggest Epstein mystery isn’t “did he kill himself”—it’s “what was really happening with Wexner?”

14) Interesting. “Five notable gender gaps in 2025″

 High school boys are more likely to want to get married

High school girls in 2023 are 22 percentage-points less likely to want to get married than high school girls in 1993 (Pew Research). It’s still a majority of young women who say they want to get married, but a notable drop, especially compared to their male counterparts, whose interest in marriage is largely steady.

Why are young women today less interested in marriage than their elders? Sure, there is the fact that women’s economic well-being isn’t as closely tied to marrying a man as it used to be. In this viral Instagram Reel by @davi87dp, he dryly makes this point to delighted women in the comments section (‘Men: “Choose better”; Women: “Ok, bet”’).

@davi87dp

Davide De Pierro on Instagram: “AUDIOBOOK LINK IN BIO ⬆️

#rela…

But the realization of this, and other relational dynamics, are where social media comes in, as a source for this gap. There is growing discourse online about the trials and tribulations of dating, and no shortage of social media accounts that teach young men to bait and control women. And young women online see this content, too.

The other gaps are interesting and worth checking out, too.

15) I’ve never read Don Quixote, but I loved learning about it in the context of Trump’s obsession with windmills.

In the novel, Quixote charges at the windmills. Reality hits back. He’s thrown from his horse and badly hurt. Does he rethink his beliefs? No. He says an enchanter must have turned the giants into windmills at the last second to steal his victory.

In 2020, Trump’s own aides told him plainly: you lost the election. “Those are just windmills.” Trump couldn’t accept it. So he sent Rudy Giuliani to Four Seasons Total Landscaping to declare that dark forces had conjured his win into a loss at the last moment.

Once you adopt that logic, no evidence can change your mind—it only proves the conspiracy runs deeper. Facts become proof of the plot. The unfalsifiable worldview locks into place. Five years later, he’s still charging.

False beliefs aren’t harmless when they motivate action. They cause real damage while solving nothing. The monsters were never real. The wreckage is.

Turning progress into an enemy doesn’t stop it. It just makes it more painful. The windmills kept turning in La Mancha. They’ll keep turning here.

Cervantes wrote Don Quixote as satire four centuries ago. We’re still watching a confidently wrong man—whose willful subordination of truth to his ego is mistaken for delusion—charge at windmills because he can’t accept progress.

16) Really a must-read from Noah Smith, “Where does a liberal go from here? Our movement overreached and crashed. But the fundamental ideals are still just as powerful.”

American liberalism’s great historical successes were 1) abolitionism, 2) the New Deal, and 3) the Civil Rights movement. The more modest successes of 1990s liberalism were based on those precedents — a new civil rights movement for gays, an expanded New Deal to fight poverty, and so on. But there came a point when those approaches had succeeded so well that they hit the point of diminishing returns.

The mass incarceration of the 1980s was not actually a “new Jim Crow” — most of the people we locked up had committed serious crimes, and when people stopped committing so many crimes, the rate of incarceration fell. Rising service costs were not amenable to New Deal style solutions. Allowing people with penises to change in women’s locker rooms and giving teenagers puberty blockers upon request turned out not to be something that Americans could bring themselves to regard as a civil rights movement. Telling corporate America that hard work and rationality were part of “white supremacy culture”, or making AI art programs draw Black Nazis, was not the natural extension of the abolition of slavery.

Meanwhile, there were elements of the liberalism I grew up with that had always been deeply problematic, and which were allowed to fester and grow worse in the new century. The anti-development ethos of the 1970s may have once been useful for blocking industrial waste and ugly highways, but it destroyed American state capacity, ruined urban life for the working class by making housing unaffordable, and hollowed out much of the industrial capacity that sustained the working class.

Every social and political movement, if unchecked, tends to take things too far. Ultimately it was the collapse of liberalism’s great rival that allowed it to overgrow its bounds. The self-immolation of Reaganite conservatism in the 2000s — the disastrous Iraq War, the financial crisis and Great Recession, and the moral collapse of conservative Christianity — left liberalism with no real check on its ideological overgrowth. The replacement of the old conservatism with a shambolic rightist cult did little to provide a compelling alternative; instead it just excused progressivism’s worst excesses, by making sure everyone knew that the alternative was even worse.

I’ve spent much of the year since Trump’s election constructing the litany of progressivism’s sins and overreaches. That job is now complete, but the question is: Where does a liberal go from here? Those of us who grew up in the late 20th century liberal dream are now standing on the beach by the hulk of our wrecked ship, staring out to sea and contemplating our next move…

Progressive “anti-racism” may have become the mirror image of the very thing it despised, but does that mean that the idea of a society free from racial division and “supremacist” movements is a bad one? Of course not. With the internet and modern air travel, diversity will only increase as time goes on — even if nativist backlashes temporarily close the borders, they will reopen. The whole world will need to see what a real post-racial society looks like, and even after all we’ve been through, the United States of America is uniquely well-positioned to create it.

Meanwhile, the project of creating economic security and abundance for the vast bulk of humanity is very far from finished. The 20th century taught us that while business is the engine of prosperity, simply throwing up our hands and leaving everything to the market will let far too many people fall through the cracks.

A clean and livable environment. Respect for free expression. Democracy and political inclusion. A tolerant society that lets people pursue their private desires. These are all not just good ideas, but necessary ones if humanity is to have the kind of future most people will want to live in. And whatever sort of creature is bubbling into existence on the political right, it’s unlikely to give people most of these things — no matter how many pragmatists manage to grab its reins.

And if you squint hard enough, you can start to see conditions becoming a bit more favorable to liberalism. Crime is falling again, and fast. Intermarriage is still on the rise. Young people are tempering their use of social media. People in places like Iran are still trying to throw off their chains, while autocratic regimes like Putin’s Russia are making plenty of mistakes. Any new liberal project will probably be forced to endure years of retrenchment and soul-searching, but there are still fundamental forces pushing us toward a more optimistic, empowered, and tolerant society.

So that’s what you do if you’re a French liberal in 1815. You try again. Looking back at history, we see that the project of human freedom and dignity has had plenty of low points, but that so far it has always recovered. Even if you’re old, you pick yourself up and move onward. Even if you’ve made mistakes and supported one or two bad ideas for a while, you get back on track and learn from your errors. Even if you don’t know exactly where liberalism goes from here, you sit down and you think and you read and you talk to smart people until you figure out a new direction. You try again. And if that doesn’t work, you try again, and again, until you die, and someone else sees how much you tried, and learns from your mistakes, and then they try again.

This climb is long. We have taken some dead-end paths, but the summit is still there, beckoning. We are not done.

17) So, I always wondered if my pacemaker might be related to Covid given that we know Covid often has heart implications. But, at the time in 2024, there was no evidence for that. Well now a study just published in October 2025, shows that the incidence of Sick Sinus Syndrome (my diagnosis) has basically doubled since Covid. Obviously, you cannot tell in any particular case, but… wow.

18) Speaking of Covid, “How the Pandemic Lockdowns Changed a Songbird’s Beak: For ecologists, the Covid-19 pandemic has presented a remarkable natural experiment in what can happen to wild animals when humans stay home.”

About two decades ago, the dark-eyed junco, a forest-dwelling sparrow, began to colonize urban Los Angeles. The birds proved to be remarkably successful in the city, making themselves at home on the bustling campus of the University of California, Los Angeles.

They also rapidly diverged from their wildland counterparts, adopting different breeding behaviors and displaying different physical traits, including shorter wings. The urban juncos also developed shorter, stubbier beaks, a shift that may have been driven by a change in diet.

But when U.C.L.A.’s campus shut down during the pandemic, something remarkable happened: The beaks of juncos born on campus reverted to their wildland shape. Several years later, after the pandemic-related restrictions had been lifted, the distinctive urban beak shape returned, researchers reported in a new study on Monday.

20) This is important. We need to improve cancer screening. “Risk-Based Screening Works as Well as Yearly Checks After 40 in Finding Breast Cancers: A study of more than 45,000 women found that screening women according to their level of risk was as effective in detecting tumors as the one-size-fits-most screening currently recommended.”

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, and the current recommendation is for all women of average risk to have a mammogram every year, starting at 40. But what if there were an alternative to the one-size-fits-most approach — one that matched the frequency of screening to the woman’s individual risk for developing cancer?

A large national trial of about 46,000 women, 40 to 74 years old, found that the stratified approach to screening worked as well in detecting tumors as universal yearly screening, and in fact lowered the chance that cancers would not be found until they were at a more advanced stage, although the difference was not statistically significant.

The study randomly assigned 14,212 women to be screened based on their individual risk, while 14,160 women continued with routine annual mammograms. Other participants recruited for the study who did not want to be randomly assigned to one group or another were allowed to choose their screening approach; 89 percent chose risk-based screening.

Each woman in the risk-based screening group underwent a comprehensive evaluation that considered the results of genetic testing, age, personal health history, lifestyle, breast density and factors such as the number of children they had and age at which they first menstruated.

The women were divided into four groups: Those deemed at lowest risk for breast cancer were told to wait until they were 50 to start mammography, while those at highest risk were screened twice a year, regardless of age, once with a mammogram and once with more expensive magnetic resonance imaging.

The results of the study, which was called WISDOM, were published online in The Journal of the American Medical Association and presented on Friday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

“This is the first randomized trial of risk-based screening, and the results are great, actually,” said Dr. Laura J. Esserman, the study’s lead author and the director of the breast care center at the University of California, San Francisco. “We don’t treat breast cancer as if it’s one disease anymore, so it really doesn’t make sense for us to screen as if everyone has the same risk for the same disease.”

21) Basically, some Baptists are such because they actually believe in Jesus’ teaching, whereas for many others it is simply a morally-bankrupt cultural signifier. “Immigration Crackdown Creates Fault Lines Among Baptists: An increasingly loud contingent supports the Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants.”

22) Derek Thompson’s year-end list of ideas is great.

Quick hits

1) The degree to which we let Border Patrol examine people’s phones is absolutely ridiculous, “Phone Searches at the Border Are Up: How to Protect Your Privacy: Customs agents have broad authority to search the electronic devices of travelers entering and leaving the U.S. Here are tips for keeping your data safe.”

Do I Have the Same Rights Everywhere?

Not exactly. Federal courts have created a patchwork of rules for forensic device searches. In 18 states, including California, Massachusetts and Virginia, agents need reasonable suspicion to conduct a forensic search, according to the Center for Democracy and Technology. In 10 states, including Florida and Georgia, agents do not need reasonable suspicion. The remaining states, including New York, New Jersey and Texas, have no clear rule.

The legal landscape at New York City airports is especially complicated because of conflicting federal court decisions. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is weighing a unified rule.

To simplify enforcement, C.B.P. requires agents everywhere to have reasonable suspicion before conducting a forensic search. But that rule includes an exemption for a “national security concern,” which privacy experts said could be broadly interpreted at agents’ discretion.

2) Love reading Quico Toro. This is really good. “Maduro Is Gone—Venezuela’s Dictatorship Is Not”

Venezuelans today are waking up to an unrecognizable country. Like every dictatorship, Maduro’s had invested heavily in the myth of its own invincibility. And yet the regime is very much still in place, albeit in a weird, decapitated state. State TV is still running regime propaganda, Vice President (soon, one surmises, to shed the “vice”) Delcy Rodríguez is still fulminating on behalf of the Venezuelan government, the hardline interior minister Diosdado Cabello is still giving fire-breathing speeches condemning American aggression, Maduro’s notoriously repressive attorney general, Tarek William Saab, is still out mining the night’s events for propaganda points. The entire ghastly apparatus of state repression that Hugo Chávez built and Nicolás Maduro perfected appears, for now, to be fully in control of the country.

Maduro is gone. It’s tempting to think that, without him, the regime will implode. But Maduro’s was never the kind of personalist system that depends on a single leader. It was always more of a team effort, with a constellation of influential figures like Rodríguez and Cabello teaming up with Cuban intelligence to keep dissent at bay. In other words, the kind of regime that could very well survive decapitation. And if it does, Venezuelans will get the worst of it.

For three decades, the most trustworthy principle for interpreting Venezuelan affairs has been a simple heuristic: whatever outcome makes Venezuelans’ lives most miserable is always to be treated as the odds-on-favorite. If, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio apparently told Senator Mike Lee, the United States really isn’t planning any follow-on actions against the rump regime, then for Venezuelans on the ground nothing may change. Things could get even worse: you can easily imagine a wounded and humiliated Chavista successor ratcheting up state repression to rebuild the regime’s now tattered aura of invincibility.

Maduro’s abduction could easily become an all-purpose excuse to crack down on any and every sign of dissent: any expression of dissatisfaction will surely be used as evidence of connivance with the American enemy. Trump’s stunning one-day win could be remembered for heralding an even darker stage in Venezuela’s path towards totalitarianism.

3) So, here’s the thing. I have no interest in reading so-called “challenging” books. I love books that deeply engage with the human condition, but you can (and should!) do that without it being work to read. Tell me a good story! Entertain me! So, what somewhat amused me about this article, “A Bizarre, Challenging Book More People Should Read” is that it extensively referenced 2000’s The Last Samurai which I remember just plain loving. If it was challenging, I would never have finished it.

4) I have enjoyed Ken Burns’ American Revolution, but as this essay points out, it really is too much “The Revolutionary War.” What matters, in the end, is not so much where Burgoyne took his troops, but what happened at Saratoga, but the ideas that changed the world.

But the political history of the Revolution—its origins, innovations, consequences—remains the strangely understated part of the story. In the final episode, just before we hear Dr. Rush’s concluding remarks, we listen to a few platitudinous sentences on the Constitutional Convention that would barely pass muster in a junior high school textbook. The two premier analysts of the Revolution’s political origins and its constitutional consequences—my late mentor, Bernard Bailyn, and his most distinguished student, Gordon S. Wood—do make a few brief appearances here and there. But their remarkable effort to describe the transformative impact of the Revolution on American governance, politics, and culture never seeps through. 

And without examining that impact, no viewer of this series would ever understand what made the Revolution revolutionary. Nor would anyone be able to explain why, at this moment of all moments in our history, with the Constitution teetering on implosion, the best way to think about the legacy of the Revolution involves retracing the course of the war from one campaign to another. That judgment seems all the more compelling because the techniques that Burns deployed so well in his other great productions are sorely missed here. There are no photographs to search minutely, no films to replay. Instead, we get modern painted renderings of events, historical re-enactors firing muskets, and dreamy videos of American landscapes, like the fog-swept mountains of the Carolinas. 

5) Exercise!

6) This is pretty wild. “In China, A.I. Is Finding Deadly Tumors That Doctors Might Miss: A tool for spotting pancreatic cancer in routine CT scans has had promising results, one example of how China is racing to apply A.I. to medicine’s tough problems.”

Tests used to confirm its presence, such as contrast CT scans, involve large amounts of radiation, so many experts advise against widespread screening. But lower-radiation alternatives, such as noncontrast CTs — in which no contrast dye is injected into patients’ bloodstreams — produce less clearly defined pictures, making it hard for radiologists to identify abnormalities.

Artificial intelligence may change that. The tool at Dr. Zhu’s hospital, which was developed by researchers affiliated with the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, was trained to look for pancreatic cancer in noncontrast CTs.

The tool has since analyzed more than 180,000 abdominal or chest CTs, helping doctors detect about two dozen cases of pancreatic cancer, 14 of which were in the early stage, Dr. Zhu said. The tool found 20 cases of ductal adenocarcinoma, the most common and deadliest type of pancreatic cancer. (Mr. Qiu had a neuroendocrine tumor, which is a rarer and less aggressive cancer.)

All of those patients had come to the hospital with complaints like bloating or nausea and had not initially seen a pancreatic specialist, Dr. Zhu said. Several of their CT scans had raised no alarms until they were flagged by the A.I. tool.

“I think you can 100 percent say A.I. saved their lives,” he said.

7) This is just one of those regularly-produced, phenomenal pieces of journalism from the New York Times that makes me think all the haters just don’t get it. Gift link. “90 Minutes to Give Baby Luna a New Heart: After eight years of training, Dr. Maureen McKiernan made her debut as the lead surgeon on an infant heart transplant — an operation on the edge of what’s possible.”

8) Nuts. Lots and lots of nuts. “What a longevity expert eats in a day”

9) The Border/ICE thugs choosing to deny REAL ID whenever they want is Kafkaesque fascism. “DHS Says REAL ID, Which DHS Certifies, Is Too Unreliable To Confirm U.S. Citizenship: It’s the punch line to a bad joke that started 20 years ago when Congress passed the REAL ID Act.”

10) Yglesias on Trump:

Happy New Year! 2026 is finally here!

I have to say that on many levels, the year in politics felt like a nightmarish fever dream. Donald Trump deciding to illegally rename the Kennedy Center after himself is not the worst thing that any president has ever done — it’s not even close — but on a level of sheer batshit insanity, it’s off the charts.

In a halfway functioning political system, I don’t even know what would happen if a president did that — because it just wouldn’t happen! Members of the president’s party would not put up with pure Mad King behavior. It’s not consequential, of course, in the way that cutting tons of people off from Medicaid is consequential. But then he also started a little war with Venezuela and launched some kind of Christmas bombing campaign in Nigeria, while also being so committed to world peace that he’s decided to just take Vladimir Putin’s word for it on Russian war aims. Also, FIFA believes that the president is seven years old, so they made up a fake peace prize to bestow on him, and he proudly accepted it.

Something I worry about a lot is that as Trump wears his ridiculousness and egomania on his sleeve, he invites people to believe that he is shallow and easily manipulated when he’s actually been ruthlessly successful across multiple fields of endeavor.

JD Vance seems a lot more put-together in a lot of ways, but he was also placed on the ticket specifically because Trump was disappointed that Mike Pence wouldn’t violate the constitution to help him steal an election, and Trump apparently feels that Vance is more reliable in this regard.

11) No, rock is not dead, but, other than Wednesday, did not particularly care for any of the bands this article cites to make that argument.

The 21st century has not been kind to rock. Pop, hip-hop, R&B, country and Latin music have all pushed the genre out of the commercial and cultural mainstream. In retrospect, rock’s last grand heyday was in the 1990s, when grunge, nu-metal and pop-punk were all happily — well, more like furiously — blasting away.

But rock was already being stripped for parts. Country was latching onto arena rock’s most crowd-pleasing sounds, hip-hop was borrowing drumbeats and riffs, and pop performers learned to treat electric guitars as fashion statements and attitude signals, if only for the length of a song. While some surviving classic-rock acts still sell out arenas today, most 21st-century rockers are well aware that their chosen idiom is likely to remain a niche choice. One indicator: In recent years, the Grammy Awards haven’t handed out the best rock album trophy during prime time.

But rock has stubbornly stuck around, and in 2025 rock bands still raised a ruckus. They have a vast available vocabulary: psychedelia to punk, rockabilly to shoegaze, yacht rock to emo, prog-rock to industrial. And it’s not as if a band has to choose just one. In an era of streaming that offers every timeline all at once, the most striking rock bands have been demolishing pigeonholes.

12) More great NYT journalism and another gift link. “How Russia’s War Machine Brutalizes and Exploits Its Own Soldiers”

13) The *entire* increase in autism is in the most mild diagnostic categories. That is telling you something.

The autistic community is a large, growing, and heterogeneous population, and there is a need for improved methods to describe their diverse needs. Measures of adaptive functioning collected through public health surveillance may provide valuable information on functioning and support needs at a population level. We aimed to use adaptive behavior and cognitive scores abstracted from health and educational records to describe trends over time in the population prevalence of autism by adaptive level and co-occurrence of intellectual disability (ID). Using data from the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, years 2000 to 2016, we estimated the prevalence of autism per 1000 8-year-old children by four levels of adaptive challenges (moderate to profound, mild, borderline, or none) and by co-occurrence of ID. The prevalence of autism with mild, borderline, or no significant adaptive challenges increased between 2000 and 2016, from 5.1 per 1000 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 4.6–5.5) to 17.6 (95% CI: 17.1–18.1) while the prevalence of autism with moderate to profound challenges decreased slightly, from 1.5 (95% CI: 1.2–1.7) to 1.2 (95% CI: 1.1–1.4). The prevalence increase was greater for autism without co-occurring ID than for autism with co-occurring ID. The increase in autism prevalence between 2000 and 2016 was confined to autism with milder phenotypes. This trend could indicate improved identification of milder forms of autism over time. It is possible that increased access to therapies that improve intellectual and adaptive functioning of children diagnosed with autism also contributed to the trends.

14) A friend of mine who’s job is highly imperiled by AI shared this screed. I just kind of liked it because I like it when the opposing side has such weak and hyperbolic arguments:

Critics have already written thoroughly about the environmental harms, the reinforcement of bias and generation of racist output, the cognitive harms and AI supported suicides, the problems with consent and copyright, the way AI tech companies further the patterns of empire, how it’s a con that enables fraud and disinformation and harassment and surveillance, the exploitation of workers, as an excuse to fire workers and de-skill work, how they don’t actually reason and probability and association are inadequate to the goal of intelligence, how people think it makes them faster when it makes them slower, how it is inherently mediocre and fundamentally conservative, how it is at its core a fascist technology rooted in the ideology of supremacy, defined not by its technical features but by its political ones.

But I am more than a critic: I am a hater. I am not here to make a careful comprehensive argument, because people have already done that. If you’re pushing slop or eating it, you wouldn’t read it anyway. You’d ask a bot for a summary and forget what it told you, then proceed with your day, unchanged by words you did not read and ideas you did not consider.

I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response. Miyazaki said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” Scam Altman said we can surround the solar system with a Dyson Sphere to hold data centers. Miyazaki is right, and Altman is wrong. Miyazaki tells stories that blend the ordinary and the fantastic in ways people find deeply meaningful. Altman tells lies for money.

And I’m glad they’re lies. Because the makers of AI aren’t damned by their failures, they’re damned by their goals. They want to build a genie to grant them wishes, and their wish is that nobody ever has to make art again. They want to create a new kind of mind, so they can force it into mindless servitude. Their dream is to invent new forms of life to enslave.

15) Trump’s executive orders in his first year. And in some bizarre level unlocked accomplishment for me, my contributions are offset by those of (war criminal!) John Yoo:

“It’s the most robust expansion of presidential power since at least FDR, if not ever,” Steven Greene, professor of politics at the University of North Carolina, said. “Trump is absolutely pushing the limits of executive power far beyond what any modern president has done.”

He said presidents were increasingly avoiding the months of haggling it takes to get a law through Congress, even if executive orders lack the permanence of a bill and can be revoked by their successor. “Our standard system on how a bill becomes a law is just so broken,” Greene said.

An alternative view by some constitutional scholars is that Trump is following the founding father Alexander Hamilton’s argument that a strong presidency was created in the constitution to promote “energy in the executive”.

“People forgot for the last four years during a comatose presidency what energy in the executive looks like,” said John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “If Congress isn’t going to be out there passing legislation … and the American people want reform and progress, it falls to the executive branch, because everyone’s going to hold President Trump responsible for how the country does over the next four years.”

16) Oh man is this the best thing on populism I’ve ever read, “Populism fast and slow”

The view that Kahneman was popularizing is known as dual-process theory in psychology. The idea, roughly, is that human beings are capable of two quite different styles of cognition. Daniel Dennett once described the conscious human mind, fabulously, as a “serial virtual machine implemented – inefficiently – on the parallel hardware provided by evolution.” The hardware/software analogy is not perfect, but it gets at an important truth. We have inherited a million-year old primate brain, the product of evolution, that contains a very large number of built-in modules, which allow us to perform complex computations in an effortless, lightning-fast way (e.g. recognizing faces, maintaining balance while walking, predicting the trajectories of moving objects, guesstimating the probability of events, and so on). We call the outputs of these cognitive processes “intuitions,” because we don’t really know how the answers get calculated, we just get presented with the results.

On top of this, we have a more evolutionarily recent system, which allows us to perform cognitively “decoupled” operations, such as mathematical, logical, hypothetical and strategic reasoning. This is basically a software system, in that it requires cultural inputs (such as language, writing systems, arabic numerals, matrices and graphs, etc.) in order to function well. Unfortunately, it differs from the intuitive system in that it is slow, effortful, and requires attention. (This is due to its “inefficient” implementation, on hardware that was never designed to support linear reasoning.) Because the operations of this “analytical system” are effortful, our standard mode of engagement with the world exhibits what Keith Stanovich calls “cognitive miserliness,” which means that we try to get through life as much as we can relying on intuition, and it’s only when that fails – when the limitations of that mode of problem-solving become manifest – that we switch to the more demanding, analytic style of processing. In other words, we spend most of our lives on cognitive autopilot, only thinking hard when we are forced to…

All of this may seem quite far removed from the world of politics, but it isn’t. Just as we have a lot of hardware routines dedicated to interpreting and predicting events in the physical world, we also have an enormous number dedicated to managing social interactions. The latter are also full of bugs. To make matters worse, while the basic rules of physical motion are the same as they were 200,000 years ago, the rules of human society have changed in radical ways. Because of this, many of the intuitive responses that we have to social situations, which were appropriate in small-scale societies, are completely inappropriate in large-scale societies. This means that life in the modern world imposes extremely onerous cognitive burdens on us all.

Take a concrete example. There is a well-known bug in our pattern-detection system that causes us to vastly overestimate the effectiveness of punishment at motivating behavioural change in others. Because we tend to punish unusually bad behaviour and to reward unusually good behaviour, regression to the mean dictates that punishment will more often be followed by better behaviour and reward by worse behaviour. This generates the impression that, not only was the punishment effective, but the reward was counterproductive. Many “common sense” ideas about incentivization (like “spare the rod, spoil the child”) are a direct result of this illusion.

Because of this, people who actually study behavioural change, by keeping records, tracking performance, and analyzing the relation to reward/punishment, wind up developing beliefs that contradict common sense. This is true not just of social scientists, but even animal trainers. They all tend to agree that reward is at least as effective as punishment, and in some cases more so. This generates an important décalage between expert opinion and public culture.

It is not difficult to see how this difference in view creates a state of affairs that can, in turn, be exploited for political gain in a democracy. The expert view on punishment tends to percolate out, influencing the behaviour of educational elites (and others who are inclined to defer to expert opinion). This gives rise to a set of views and practices among those elites, such as permissive parenting, abolition of corporal punishment in schools, a less punitive approach to crime, and opposition to capital punishment, which are basically out of sync with the views of the majority. This in turn leads the broader public to think that certain persistent social problems, such as juvenile delinquency or urban disorder, are a consequence of various institutions (not just the criminal justice system, but schools and parents as well) having become insufficiently punitive. The solution, from their perspective, is an exercise of straightforward common sense – all we need to do is “get tough” with offenders. The resistance of elites to these obvious truths is a sign that there is something wrong with them (e.g. they have been seduced by “fancy theories,” become divorced from reality, etc.).

17) I enjoy Wordle every day, but damn do I love Connections. My longest streak is over 100 and I’m currently at a 91% solve rate. I would love to know my ranking among all Connections users. I’m not great at word games, but my real strengths are an extensive vocabulary and just knowing lots of random stuff. That really pays off. Unsurprisingly, I found this really interesting, “Why You’re Better Than a Computer at Solving Connections: An engineer for New York Times Games has been trying to teach artificial intelligence to understand wordplay more like a human.”

18) Very important stuff here, “Why the Supreme Court Is Giving ICE So Much Power” The Constitution inarguably applies to federal immigration agents—but the Supreme Court has taken away the hope of ever holding them to that standard.”

Many of these tactics are plainly illegal. The Constitution incontestably applies to federal immigration officers: The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and excessive force and requires a warrant to search a private home. The Fifth Amendment guarantees due process and bans self-incrimination. The Sixth Amendment establishes a person’s right to counsel. Why, then, are they getting away with not following the Constitution?

Their impunity traces back to two Supreme Court decisions that put far too much faith in ICE’s commitment to respecting people’s constitutional rights. As a result of these cases, people whose rights are violated by ICE agents have little to no recourse. Contrast that with the rules for police officers. If a police officer kicks down your door and searches your home without a warrant, questions you without a Miranda warning, or illegally arrests you, a provision known as the exclusionary rule may prevent the evidence gathered through those tactics from being admitted in your prosecution. And if you happen to be acquitted, you can sue for damages. None of that is true when it comes to ICE.

The first of these two cases is a 1984 decision, INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, that untethered ICE from the exclusionary rule. In a 5–4 opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor rejected the exclusionary rule for immigration courts, favoring, instead, “a deliberately simple deportation hearing system.” In a typical criminal case, the exclusionary rule is designed to deter police misconduct—the idea being that the police will avoid such conduct if it risks undermining a conviction. But for ICE, the Court decided, such deterrence is not necessary. Unless ICE conduct amounts to an “egregious” violation of the Fourth Amendment, the evidence that agents gather even through illegal means can be used in immigration courts. Key to the Court’s decision was a presumption that Fourth Amendment violations by ICE officers were not “widespread” and that the Immigration and Naturalization Service “has already taken sensible and reasonable steps to deter Fourth Amendment violations by its officers.” Such assumptions may not have been reasonable then; they are certainly not reasonable now.

A second Court decision appears to have eliminated, or at least seriously limited, the possibility of lawsuits for damages after individuals are unlawfully detained, searched, or experience excessive force at the hands of ICE. When the police engage in misconduct, the victimcan sue the responsible officers for damages. Again, not so for ICE. In the 2022 decision Egbert v. Boule, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, denied the rights of plaintiffs to sue Border Patrol agents for excessive use of force in the name of “national security.” There is every reason to believe that the Supreme Court would extend the rationale in Boule to shield ICE from liability as well. The Court would effectively be greenlighting ICE’s abusive tactics and insulating agents from damages when they are, in fact, no different from any state or city police officer who violates a person’s constitutional rights. As in INS v. Lopez-Mendoza,the rationale in Boule relies on the agency’s purported ability to self-regulate; after all, Thomas suggested, Border Patrol “must investigate ‘alleged violations’ and accept grievances.” Can anyone count on such care to come from Border Patrol under this administration? Again, the faith in these institutions to self-regulate seems tragically misplaced.

The remaining options for someone mistreated by ICE are inadequate, to say the least. An individual could file a lawsuit under the Federal Torts Claims Act against federal officers, but that law has its shortcomings: A person must submit a detailed claim to the government and wait for a response before they can go to court. That process can take years and years. An individual could also file a complaint with the DHS Office of Inspector General or the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which would theoretically launch an investigation, but in this administration, the chances of redress for misconduct are slim to none. Nothing drives the point home more than the case of a CBP commander, Gregory Bovino. U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis found that he had lied to the court about whether he had used excessive force against protesters in Chicago. Was he dismissed or disciplined? Neither; he went on to lead another immigration sweep, this time in New Orleans.

19) Excellent work from my friend Kyle, “The United States Has Become a Low-Trust Society — and That Changes Everything: Why America’s Plunging Trust Levels Are Tearing Us Apart”

The United States was not always a low-trust society. In the decades following World War II, trust in government regularly exceeded 70 percent. That confidence peaked in the mid-1960s and then entered a long, uneven decline.

Vietnam and Watergate shattered assumptions of elite competence and honesty. Economic turbulence in the 1970s eroded faith in state capacity. The end of the Cold War removed a unifying external threat. More recent shocks—the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID-19, and contested elections—accelerated a process already underway.

What distinguishes the current moment is that trust no longer recovers. Earlier crises produced partial rebounds. Today, they do not. Trust has become tightly coupled to partisan identity, rising or falling depending on who holds power. That is a fundamentally different phenomenon from generalized confidence in institutions themselves.

From a political science perspective, this matters enormously. When trust becomes partisan, institutions lose their ability to function as neutral arbiters. Politics stops being a contest over outcomes and becomes a struggle over legitimacy and intent…

In high-trust societies, policy debates are primarily about effects: Will this work? Who benefits? What are the tradeoffs?

In low-trust societies, debates shift toward motives: What are they really trying to do? Who is this meant to punish? What comes next?

You can see this dynamic clearly in contemporary debates over taxation, regulation, elections, public health, and national security—you name it.

Proposals are no longer evaluated on their merits alone. They are interpreted as signals of hidden agendas. Even good-faith reforms are processed as threats.

This is not an argument for or against any particular policy. It is an observation about political cognition under conditions of distrust. When institutional legitimacy is weak, compromise looks naïve, restraint looks suspicious, and enforcement looks tyrannical.

Gridlock and gatekeeping become rational behavior.

Democracy, under these conditions, starts to resemble a courtroom with no shared rules of evidence, no shared reality even.

The Administrative Cost of Distrust

Low trust does not just poison political discourse; it degrades state capacity.

Decades of comparative research show that societies with lower institutional trust experience higher compliance costs, weaker public administration, and slower economic growth. The logic is straightforward. When citizens do not trust institutions to act fairly, voluntary cooperation declines. Governments respond with increased monitoring and enforcement. Administrative costs rise. Legitimacy falls further.

In the United States, this shows up in places we rarely connect to trust: declining interest in public service careers, persistent recruitment challenges in the military, resistance to census participation, and skepticism toward regulatory agencies. Each weakens the state’s ability to function effectively—and each, in turn, reinforces public doubts about competence.

This is a feedback loop, not a coincidence.

20) OMG, this was just amazing. Don’t miss this, DJC! “A Trip Around the World of Heat, Mountains, and Poverty” A grand theory of how weather patterns and terrain have shaped kind of everything about human society.

21) The next generation GLP drug looks to be even more potent and there’s a rather expansive gray market of make-your-own from the peptides you can buy from China (while still in phase 3 trials).

22) Turns out there’s all sorts of ridiculous scandals going on wasting taxpayer money in my hometown of Cary, NC. This is why it’s so damn important to have local media. Nobody else covers this stuff. I will always subscribe to the News & Observer. “Mayor said non-ADA compliant trolleys Cary bought were returned. That didn’t happen.”

23) Really, really enjoyed this interview. “Jill Lepore on Why We Should Amend the U.S. Constitution
Yascha Mounk and Jill Lepore also discuss why she nearly quit academia.” This anecdote… just wow.

Lepore: I do not know. Obviously I wrestled with that a lot over the last years, and I think I have failed to live up to my own principles. Far be it for me to suggest what those principles should be for anyone else or how they ought to honor them. You can tell I do not really want to talk about this. I would much rather talk about the work. But just to finish up this point, for me, there were many tough moments. One tough moment was when some students in a class I was teaching said they would not read the Dred Scott opinion, this 1857 Supreme Court decision by Chief Justice Roger Taney, which is considered one of the worst, if not the worst, opinions ever issued by the Supreme Court.

My goal in teaching was surely not to defend it. But the assignment was to engage in a debate in section over the question of whether the U.S. Constitution did or did not sanction slavery, based on a series of readings on that question from the 1850s, which included writings by Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Frederick Douglass, and then the Dred Scott decision.

I remember sitting in my office thinking, I do not feel it is really true that I have to explain that you have to read historical documents even if you do not like them. That seemed like the most elementary piece of work for being a human in the world. I prepared something I might say—bring these students into office hours and say, here is the thing I want to explain—and I was just mad. Who told these people that you could simply say, I do not want to read that because I find it painful? Because if that is how you feel, you cannot read history. History is full of pain. People suffer. Literature is full of pain. Philosophy is full of pain. The human experience is full of pain and suffering and injustice. To gain any capacity to live a good life, you have to confront pain, injustice and suffering, find a way to think about it, reckon with it, remedy it and make amends for it.

If this is what my job is reduced to, saying that you actually have to do the reading, what am I doing? I think that is a good encapsulation. Sure, there were the firings, there was all kinds of nonsense going on. Honestly, these are very young people; I do not blame them. Whatever they brought, they did not get this from me. They got it somewhere. Yet they feel it with such tenacity. For me, that is different from Charles Beard’s problem. That is different from Francis Lieber’s problem. It is not really even about the university at all.

24) Ugh. “A Powerful New Drug Is Creating a ‘Withdrawal Crisis’ in Philadelphia: Medetomidine, a veterinary sedative, mixed into fentanyl has sent thousands to hospitals, not only for overdose but for life-threatening withdrawal. It is spreading to other cities.”

A new drug has been saturating the fentanyl supply in Philadelphia and moving to other cities throughout the East and Midwestern United States: medetomidine, a powerful veterinary sedative that causes almost instantaneous blackouts and, if not used every few hours, brings on life-threatening withdrawal symptoms.

It has created a new type of drug crisis — one that is occasioned not by overdosing on the drug, but by withdrawing from it.

Since the middle of last year, Philadelphia’s hospitals have been strained by patients coming in with what doctors have identified as medetomidine withdrawal. Although the heart rate slows drastically right after use, in withdrawal the opposite occurs: The heart rate and blood pressure become catastrophically high. Patients experience tremors and unstoppable vomiting. Many require intensive care…

From a drug dealer’s grimly economic perspective, medetomidine is a smart choice. It is mostly manufactured in China and can be purchased cheaply online from suppliers of veterinary medicine and research chemicals. It is so addictive that dealers don’t need to mix much into fentanyl.

Right after snorting, injecting or smoking fentanyl with medetomidine, users collapse.

25) Speaking of drugs, Charles Fain Lehman seems to always go a little too hard against marijuana, but raises some good points. “Rescheduling Marijuana Is an Enormous Mistake: Trump’s executive order does little more than offer a tax cut to an industry that profits from addiction.”

Quick Hits

1) All us professors were talking about this a couple weeks ago. So on-point, “Accommodation Nation
America’s colleges have an extra-time-on-tests problem.”

Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology. The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school’s low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.

Accommodations in higher education were supposed to help disabled Americans enjoy the same opportunities as everyone else. No one should be kept from taking a class, for example, because they are physically unable to enter the building where it’s taught. Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.

The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.

“You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” one professor at a selective university, who requested anonymity because he doesn’t have tenure, told me. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.” Even as poor students with disabilities still struggle to get necessary provisions, elite universities have entered an age of accommodation. Instead of leveling the playing field, the system has put the entire idea of fairness at risk.

2) Ruxandra Teslo with a really interesting piece arguing that the key bottleneck in drug development is the lack of human trials and that we really should do something about that.

But where along the drug development pathway do we have the greatest opportunity to steer things differently?

Drug discovery can be thought of as a funnel: broad at the start and progressively narrowing toward approval. Feeding into the funnel at one end stands basic science, which generates countless hypotheses. Only a fraction of these will survive preclinical validation and enter clinical development, where they are tested in humans for safety and efficacy to inform approval. Across all therapeutic areas, only about 8–12% of drugs that enter clinical trials eventually receive FDA approval.

In principle, we can improve productivity at any stage of this funnel: we can raise the quality of inputs through better science, relax regulatory barriers at the end, or accelerate the middle part of clinical development. Yet it’s striking how little public attention focuses on the practicalities of clinical development, despite its importance. This is the stage where theoretical promise is tested against reality: where we discover whether a biological idea can become a safe and effective therapy. It is also the most resource-intensive phase, accounting for roughly 60–70% of drug development costs and timelines.

Because clinical development is so important, it makes little sense to focus attention only on the top and bottom of the drug discovery funnel. Even as basic science and AI advance rapidly, it is unlikely that in the coming decades they will substitute for evidence gathered directly in humans. Clinical trials, with all the financial burden they bring and ethical questions they raise, will remain the critical bottleneck in translating biological insight into real therapies.

Likewise, loosening approval standards is insufficient. In fact, the FDA has already become more permissive in its approval over the past 30 years, increasingly accepting surrogate endpoints in place of demonstrated clinical benefit. But we don’t just want to approve more drugs — we want to identify and deliver drugs that actually work. Even if approval requirements were relaxed, the underlying need would remain: we still have to learn, through testing in humans, which treatments are effective and which are not.

The case for optimizing clinical trials becomes even clearer when we consider the underlying economics of drug discovery. Not only do most drug candidates fail to reach approval, but even among those that do, only about half ever generate meaningful revenue. And within this small subset of commercial successes, only a handful — the so-called blockbuster drugs, such as GLP-1 agonists or the anti-tumor necrosis factors (TNFs) —are truly transformative.

Drug discovery outcomes follow a heavy-tailed distribution: most efforts, even those deemed successful, produce modest results, while a few outliers account for a disproportionate share of both clinical and economic value. Given that success is rare, hard to predict, and potentially enormous, we need to maximize our shots on goal to increase our chances of success. More concretely, that means scaling the number of molecules tested in humans. Expanding the capacity for in-human testing broadens the exploration, increasing the likelihood of uncovering rare, high-impact breakthroughs that drive the most meaningful form of biomedical progress.

3) Republicans are trying to bring back their approach to health care that simply will not work. NPR:

Conservative economists and GOP lawmakers have been making similar arguments since high-deductible health plans started to catch on two decades ago.

Back then, a backlash against the limitations of HMOs, or health maintenance organizations, propelled many employers to move workers into these plans, which were supposed to empower patients and control costs. A change in tax law allowed patients in these plans to put away money in tax-free health savings accounts to cover medical bills.

“The notion was that if a consumer has ‘skin in the game,’ they will be more likely to seek higher-quality, lower-cost care,” said Shawn Gremminger, who leads the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, a nonprofit that works with employers that offer their workers health benefits.

“The unfortunate reality is that largely has not been the case,” Gremminger said.

Today, nearly all health plans comes with a deductible, with the average for a single worker with job-based coverage approaching $1,700, up from around $300 in 2006.

Plans with deductibles that exceed $1,650 can be paired with a tax-free health savings account.

But even as deductibles became widespread over the last 20 years, medical prices in the U.S. skyrocketed. The average price of a knee replacement, for example, increased 74% from 2003 to 2016, more than double the rate of overall inflation.

At the same time, patients have been left with thousands of dollars of medical bills they can’t pay, despite having health insurance.

About 100 million people in the U.S. have some form of health care debt, a 2022 survey showed.

Most, like Monroe, are insured…

There was another problem with her high-deductible plan. Although these plans are supposed to encourage patients to shop around for medical care to find the lowest prices, Monroe found this impractical when she had a complex pregnancy and heart troubles.

Instead, Monroe chose the largest health system in her area.

“I went with that one as far as medical risk,” she said. “If anything were to happen, I could then be transferred within that system.”

Federal rules that require hospitals to post more of their prices can make comparing institutions easier than it used to be.

But unlike a car or a computer, most medical services remain difficult to shop for, in part because they stem from an emergency or are complex and can stretch over numerous years.

Researchers at the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute, for example, estimated that just 7% of total health care spending for Americans with job-based coverage was for services that realistically could be shopped for.

Fumiko Chino, an oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said it makes no sense to expect patients with cancer or another chronic disease to go out and compare prices for complicated medical care such as surgeries, radiation, or chemotherapy after they’ve been diagnosed with a potentially deadly illness.

“You’re not going be able to actually do that effectively,” Chino said, “and certainly not within the time frame that you would need to when facing a cancer diagnosis and the imminent need to start treatment.”

4) A very pessimistic take on AI in higher ed, “Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize
The skills that students will need in an age of automation are precisely those that are eroded by inserting AI into the educational process.”

After three years of doing essentially nothing to address the rise of generative AI, colleges are now scrambling to do too much. Over the summer, Ohio State University, where I teach, announced a new initiative promising to “embed AI education into the core of every undergraduate curriculum, equipping students with the ability to not only use AI tools, but to understand, question and innovate with them—no matter their major.” Similar initiatives are being rolled out at other universities, including the University of Florida and the University of Michigan. Administrators understandably want to “future proof” their graduates at a time when the workforce is rapidly transforming. But such policies represent a dangerously hasty and uninformed response to the technology. Based on the available evidence, the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process.

Before embarking on a wholesale transformation, the field of higher education needs to ask itself two questions: What abilities do students need to thrive in a world of automation? And does the incorporation of AI into education actually provide those abilities? …

To anyone who has closely observed how students interact with AI, the conclusions of studies like the experiment at MIT make perfect sense. When you allow a machine to summarize your reading, to generate the ideas for your essay, and then to write that essay, you’re not learning how to read, think, or write. It’s very difficult to imagine a robust market for university graduates whose thinking, interpreting, and communicating has been offloaded to a machine. What value can such graduates possibly add to any enterprise?

We don’t have good evidence that the introduction of AI early in college helps students acquire the critical- and creative-thinking skills they need to flourish in an ever more automated workplace, and we do have evidence that the use of these tools can erode those skills. This is why initiatives—such as those at Ohio State and Florida—to embed AI in every dimension of the curriculum are misguided. Before repeating the mistakes of past technology-literacy campaigns, we should engage in cautious and reasoned speculation about the best ways to prepare our students for this emerging world.

The most responsible way for colleges to prepare students for the future is to teach AI skills only after building a solid foundation of basic cognitive ability and advanced disciplinary knowledge. The first two to three years of university education should encourage students to develop their minds by wrestling with complex texts, learning how to distill and organize their insights in lucid writing, and absorbing the key ideas and methods of their chosen discipline. These are exactly the skills that will be needed in the new workforce. Only by patiently learning to master a discipline do we gain the confidence and capacity to tackle new fields. Classroom discussions, coupled with long hours of closely studying difficult material, will help students acquire that magic key to the world of AI: asking a good question.

5) Pew and vaccines, “How Do Americans View Childhood Vaccines, Vaccine Research and Policy?
Nearly two-thirds have high confidence in vaccine effectiveness, and about half trust their safety testing and schedule; Republican support for school vaccine requirements continues to slide”

6) Kids should not specialize in athletics at a young age. Science: “Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance”

From athletes like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps to scientists like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, identifying exceptional talent is essential in the science of innovation. But how does talent originate? Did the most talented athletes, scientists, and musicians reach peak performance relatively early or late in their career? Did they forgo mastering multiple sports, academic subjects, and musical instruments to reach world-class performance in only one? In an Analytical Review, Güllich et al. looked at published research in science, music, chess, and sports and found two patterns: Exceptional young performers reached their peak quickly but narrowly mastered only one interest (e.g., one sport). By contrast, exceptional adults reached peak performance gradually with broader, multidisciplinary practice. However, elite programs are designed to nurture younger talent. —Ekeoma Uzogara

7) Way back in my day I read all this stuff as an undergraduate and did my senior thesis on cognitive dissonance. And, now, like so much of academic psychology… “Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?
A foundational 1956 study of the concept, focussed on a U.F.O. doomsday cult, has been all but debunked by new research.”

8) I have read and loved so many Oliver Sacks books and it turns out… he was just making stuff up! Very disturbing profile. “Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost? The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.” Claude summary:

This New Yorker article uses Oliver Sacks’s previously unread journals to reveal that the celebrated neurologist substantially fabricated key details in his famous case studies—patients never made the literary references he attributed to them, the twins in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” couldn’t actually generate prime numbers (an ability that became cited in scientific literature), and transformative recoveries like “Rebecca” joining a theater group never happened. Sacks privately called his work “confabulations” and “fairy tales,” acknowledged making “pure fabrications,” and admitted he gave patients “powers of speech which they do not have” while writing “symbolic versions of myself,” yet he marketed these books as nonfiction case studies that became foundational texts in medical education and inspired the entire narrative medicine movement. The article raises serious questions about whether his celebrated empathy actually served patients or primarily allowed him to project his own experiences onto vulnerable people in institutions, selling millions of books based on stories that were substantially fiction presented as clinical truth.

9) Pretty compelling essay about how it’s been hard out there for white men to break into jobs in academia and media. Widely mocked on Bluesky, of course, but the data it brings largely speaks for itself. Here’s a summary from Mike Pesca.

An essay by Jacob Savage in Compact Magazine has gone viral, arguing, actually demonstrating, that between the years 2014-2024, the world of elite media expunged young white men from its ranks.

Savage, a Princeton graduate who saw his dream of becoming a screenwriter fade into a life of ticket scalping and, eventually, being mocked by Bluesky users, argues that the reckoning/awokening was born on the back of his exact cohort. He further argues that it was older white men who exacerbated the problem out of a sense of self-preservation. This is both plausible and rhetorically clever—even those who don’t buy into the idea that there was an injustice in suppressing the number of white men hired have something to hang onto if the great villains of this period were older white men.

I appreciated the piece mostly for the statistics.

Media:

By 2024, white men accounted for just 11.9% of lower-level TV writers in L.A.

In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25% male and 49% white.

Of the parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, 39% were male and 31% white.

NPR reported that 78% of new hires were people of color.

And what about the pipeline?

Since 2020, only 7.7% of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men.

Between 2018 and 2024, of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at The Washington Post, just two or three were white men.

Since 2018, just 10% of the nearly 220 fellows at The New York Times have been white men.

Academia:

White men fell from 39% of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18% in 2023.

At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7% of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5%.

UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three are white men.

UC Santa Cruz, of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed between 2020 and 2024, only two were white men (3%).

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The main value of this piece wasn’t what was the most debated about it: whether Jacob Savage was discriminated against for just not being good enough. As if the question can be settled if we just get our hands on the Frasier spec script he wrote in 2011 and count how many zingers he put in Niles’ mouth. No, the value is to document a moment that really did happen, that we risk retconning or denying.

10) Kelsey Piper is just killing it at the Argument, “How getting richer made teenagers less free: We value children more than ever. But we’re suffocating them.”

As the nation grew wealthier and more children began to survive to adulthood, we became vastly more protective of them — and permitted them far fewer risks. It’s hard to invest (either emotionally or literally) in children when poverty, disease, and starvation haunt your days. And now that we are less desperately poor, we can afford to ask less of our children — no family need choose between sending their 14-year-old to the factories or surrendering their baby to an orphanage.

Today, legal protections for minors are more expansive than they ever have been. Cultural expectations have shifted enormously. Americans hit their children less than we used to. We spend more time playing with them. We spend, of course, far more money on them. We supervise them more.

“The very successes achieved in improving children’s lives led to an escalation in what came to be seen as the minimal standard for children’s well-being,” wrote Peter Stearns in his history of American child-rearing. “Levels of anxiety experienced by parents did not correlate with what might have been registered as historic progress in children’s quality of life.”

Obviously, “kids rarely die these days” is a massive change for the good, and I’m also not exactly here to defend children dropping out of middle school to tape labels on cigarettes for six cents per thousand (as one child featured in Todd’s article does).

But the same forces that worked to eliminate child labor and exploitation and gave parents more room and incentive to invest in their progeny have also worked to strip children of independence.

This month, The Argument polled voters about modern parenting. I found it striking how far our society has pushed back the age at which children are trusted with even the barest autonomy — or, from another angle, how many years we expect parents to dedicate all their time to closely supervising them. (The full crosstabs are available to paying subscribers at the bottom of this post.)

We asked “At what age do you think it is appropriate for a child to stay home alone for an hour or two?” To my astonishment, 36% of respondents said that it was not appropriate until “between the ages of 14 and 17.”

Are a third of you really refusing to leave your 13-year-olds home alone for a couple hours while you go to the grocery store? Or are those respondents the ones who don’t have children?

I asked my colleague Lakshya Jain to break the data down for me, and parents aren’t much different than nonparents here — 37% of parents and 35% of nonparents said it wasn’t appropriate until the child was aged 14 to 17.

Or take the responses to another question we asked: “When parents allow a 10-year-old child to play alone in a nearby park for three hours, should they be investigated by Child Protective Services for potential neglect?” Again, 36% of respondents said that they should — and since it only takes one person to make a CPS call, many of your neighbors thinking it’s wildly inappropriate for a child to play alone at the park could amount to an effective ban on doing so.

If you don’t have kids, it can be pretty hard to have a good mental picture of what capabilities a 10-year-old has and doesn’t have, so I expect some readers may be adrift in trying to estimate whether this survey result is reasonable or nuts. And 10-year-olds also vary enormously in their maturity and common sense. But I interact with lots of kids, so let me tell you: This is absolutely nuts.

11) I recently started watching Mad Men (on AMC+) and am now excited I get switch over to commercial-free, remastered versions on HBO Max. That occasion led to this fantastic essay on Mad Men and great TV from James Poniewozik. Claude’s summary:

Here are the key takeaways:

1. Budget efficiency: Mad Men proved expensive production values aren’t necessary—its $2-3M/episode budget focused on talent and meticulous period detail rather than lavish locations, yet looked rich and immersive.
2. Episode length discipline: Episodes ran 47-48 minutes to accommodate commercials, contrasting with today’s bloated streaming episodes that often exceed an hour without narrative justification.
3. Episodic structure matters: Unlike streaming’s “10-hour movie” approach, Mad Men had real episodes with distinct plots and arcs while serving larger narratives, demonstrating TV format as strength rather than limitation.
4. Cast actors, not stars: The show cast relative unknowns (Hamm, Moss, Jones) based on talent rather than name recognition, allowing audiences to discover characters without preconceptions and putting burden on writing/performance.
5. Drama needs humor: Mad Men could be both the best drama and funniest show on TV simultaneously—humor signals lively writing and character development, not just comic relief.
6. Defy formulaic thinking: A period drama about an ad agency defied conventional wisdom that dramas need high-stakes settings (hospitals, police), proving ordinary life (work, marriage, aging) can compel audiences when characters genuinely care.

12) It may be harder for men to get certain jobs these days. But not to get into elite colleges. Yascha Mounk: “The Quiet Scandal of Affirmative Action for Men: Colleges systematically disadvantage female applicants.”

For most of American history, higher education was dominated by men. But over the course of the last four decades, male dominance on campus has not just attenuated; largely unnoticed in the broader culture, women have started to outcompete men by a long stretch.

Women began to graduate from high school and college in greater numbers than men in the 1980s, and to obtain a majority of doctoral degrees in the 2000s. Today, girls represent two-thirds of all students who graduate with a GPA in the top 10 percent of their high school class, while boys represent two-thirds of all students who graduate with a GPA in the bottom 10 percent of their class.

The knock-on effect for higher education has been enormous. Undergraduate institutions in the United States currently enroll 8.9 million women, compared to only 6.5 million men. In 2021, men received just 42 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the United States. The last time the gender imbalance among American undergraduates was similarly stark was at the end of the 1960s, when about three in five college students were male.

These changes are extremely visible on all kinds of campuses. Community colleges, historically black institutions, and big public schools are now heavily female. So, increasingly, are the country’s most selective private universities. Women make up the majority of incoming students at every Ivy League school except Dartmouth.

If they were to admit applicants without considering their sex, the best schools in the country would end up with incoming classes that have an even greater predominance of women than they already do. So, largely unnoticed by the public, they have started to embrace a solution to this supposed problem that is simple, effective, and manifestly unjust: affirmative action for men.

13) It’s amazing the degree to which “medical marijuana” has been the key to gaining societal acceptance, but the “medical” part is pretty lacking. NYT, “Review of Medical Cannabis Use Finds Little Evidence of Benefit: Researchers found a chasm between the health reasons for which the public seeks out cannabis and what gold-standard science actually shows about its effectiveness.”

14) Love the idea of the NHL having more color-on-color match-ups. The color jerseys are typically so much more visually interesting than the whites. I found the logistics of this interesting:

Last century, the NHL had one team wear white jerseys and another team wear solid-colored jerseys because games were shown on black-and-white televisions. In the 1970s, road teams switched from white jerseys to color jerseys for a practical purpose, according to Jennings.

“There weren’t the modern arenas with the washing machines and stuff. White jerseys would show a lot of stains and puck marks. Dark jerseys became the road jerseys,” he said.

In the 2003-04 season, the NHL switched up its fashion so road teams could wear white sweaters again while home teams wore colored ones — in part, so home teams could wear their third jerseys in front of their fans who, in theory, would buy more of them…

The NHL plans on having an increased number of “color vs. color” games next season, with a focus on rivalry nights and nationally televised matchups. But white road jerseys aren’t going away. Jennings said after reviewing this year’s schedule that 57% of games were good for “color vs. color” and 43% of games were a “no-go.”

What would make a game a no-go? There are three basic obstacles teams face before making the call on a “color vs. color” game:

The first is color contrast. The Rangers’ blue and the Red Wings’ red are an ideal contrast, but “color vs. color” might not work if the Rangers played the Maple Leafs, for example.

“It needs to be a significant enough color contrast to the visual eye,” Jennings said. He also said that the NHL is very “sensitive to color blindness” among fans, which also demands a distinct contrast in color schemes.

Travel baggage is also a factor. Jennings said the NHL is also sensitive to its teams having to lug around two different “whole uniform systems” on lengthy road trips just to play a “color vs. color” game on one of their stops.

15) High school student video on women’s suffrage. With a special guest talking head.

16) Jonathan Bernstein on Trump as a losing loser.

17) This is just sad. Here’s a gift link, so you can read it. “Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.”

18) Get yourself some peptides? “People Are Already Taking This Unapproved New Weight-Loss Drug
Retatrutide, originally developed by Eli Lilly, has found a loyal fan base—even though clinical trials of the drug still haven’t finished.”

His interest piqued, Terry started contacting suppliers in China, who mass-produce various active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, for pharma companies, regulated and otherwise. Scanning their inventories, he noticed a listing for retatrutide. He ordered 10 vials of the drug in powder form, amounting to some 200 mg. It arrived shortly after via the post, in an unbranded bubble mailer. He prepared it and injected it, following dosing protocols from Lilly’s initial clinical trials. Within two months, he’d gone from 186 to 166 pounds.

Amazed, he wanted to share the miracle with his friends. “Hey, anybody wanna try this?” he asked some buddies during a meetup, producing several vials of retatrutide. He told them about his daughter—and his own weight loss. They were keen to try it. A month later, one of them had dropped 12 pounds. One lost 16. One even shed 28 pounds. Terry was so impressed that he moved into the grey-market pharmaceutical biz himself, ordering APIs from Chinese manufacturers, and selling them—clearly marked as “research chemicals”—through his website, Compound Sciences, based out of Utah.

Another of Terry’s friends—who is also his Compound Sciences business partner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity—claims to have dropped 30 pounds on underground retatrutide. “I was 53 with the dad-bod gut,” he explains. “This is the first time in my life I’ve actually seen my abs. And I’ve changed nothing, other than retatrutide. I don’t exercise more. I don’t do anything other than take the shot once a week.”

Terry holds fast to the line that the peptides he sells are for research purposes only. He also says he tests his imported APIs for purity through third-party labs like Finnrick and Janoshik Analytical, and provides Certificates of Analysis to verify the results. (Raphaël Mazoyer, Finnrick’s COO, cautions that customers should always verify Certificates of Analysis with the companies that issued them and check they include a batch identifier.) Compound Sciences sells 20 mg of retatrutide (branded as GLP3 RT-20) for $79.99. To use the drug themselves, purchasers would have to reconstitute the powder by combining it with bacteriostatic water and injecting with a syringe, processes that are all explained in detail across multiple social media platforms, like TikTok and YouTube. In fact, like with psychedelics and steroids, whole communities have risen up devoted to experimentation with GLP-1-type drugs.

18) I thought this was really good on the Michigan football coach:

Again, the aspect of this that most interests me professionally speaking is how the hell somebody is paid $2.5 million per year to do literally one thing, fails utterly to do that thing, and is still as of this moment employed to do that same job.

The meritocracy!

. . . I’ll just add something I posted on the Michigan football board:

You know that old SNL skit about Buckwheat shooting the president, where they interview one of his neighbors and ask him if he could have ever imagined something like this happening, and the guy says “oh yeah, it was all he ever talked about?”

The KNEW OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that Moore was an out of control sex/porn addict. This guy was following 300 OnlyFan models! In public! Sparty fans were posting about it!

WHERE THE FUCK WAS WARDE MANUEL? The guy who knew that there had now been at least THREE investigations of Moore for sexual misconduct!

On top of that it’s been confirmed by various sources that Moore was acting all weird and depressed for at least the last two weeks. His coaches were talking about how he was going off on them in weird ways — unhinged emotional outbursts.

Again WHERE WAS WARDE MANUEL?

What happened Wednesday was EMINENTLY FORESEEABLE. Good ‘ol Warde is acting like it was the equivalent of a hurricane in Ohio in December, as opposed to a snowstorm in Minnesota.

The $309 Lesson in How the Precautionary Principle Trumps Evidence

OMG do I hate the precautionary principle with a burning hot passion. Yeah, I know I owe you some quick hits, but damn do I need to get this off my chest.

My dog ate some roach bait today. Two stations, maybe three. Each station contained about 10mg of indoxacarb, the active ingredient. So worst case, he ingested 30mg. He’s a 55-pound dog—about 25kg—which works out to roughly 1.2 mg/kg.

When AI Gets It Wrong

The first thing I did was ask three different AI models—Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini—what I should do.

All three gave me the same hysterical response: “Call the vet immediately!” “This could be serious!” Then they listed worst-case scenarios: tremors, seizures, difficulty breathing, potential organ damage.

Not one of them said what they should have said: “Studies on dogs show no adverse effects at doses higher than what your dog ingested. The evidence suggests he’ll be fine, but monitor him for unusual symptoms.”

If they had given me that evidence-based response, I would have looked up the data myself, verified it, and never even called the vet.

The $309 I Didn’t Need to Spend

So, primed by AI panic (and wife and daughter panic), I took the dog to the vet. They recommended the emergency protocol: induce vomiting, give activated charcoal. They also suggested I should call the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center for an additional $90 consultation for “full information and a specific protocol for the poison and dose.”

I paid the vet $309 for the emergency visit. I skipped the poison control upsell when the vet admitted under questioning that it was very unlikely to change his recommendation.

They induced vomiting. They force-fed him activated charcoal. My dog went through an unpleasant, stressful medical procedure. And, so we’re clear, the dog is fine now.

Then I Found the Truth

After paying and going through the whole ordeal, I kept digging into the research. And that’s when I found it: the Merck Veterinary Manual, the authoritative reference that vets actually consult.

From the Merck Veterinary Manual:

• NOAEL (No Observed Adverse Effect Level) for 90-day study in dogs: 3 mg/kg/day
• NOAEL for 1-year study in dogs: 1.1 mg/kg/day

My dog got a max of 1.2 mg/kg ONE TIME.

What this means: If giving a dog 1.1 mg/kg EVERY SINGLE DAY for an ENTIRE YEAR causes no adverse effects whatsoever, then giving 1.2 mg/kg once is extraordinarily unlikely to cause any harm.

In fact, even if my dog had eaten FIVE stations instead of two or three, he’d have been fine. That would be 50mg, or 2 mg/kg—still well below the dose that showed zero adverse effects when given daily for 90 days.

This is basic toxicology: the dose makes the poison. A bottle of grain alcohol will kill you. Nobody panics when you drink a beer. Same substance, radically different doses, radically different outcomes. Yet all three AI models treated my dog eating a trivial dose of indoxacarb like a medical emergency.

The LD50 (lethal dose for 50% of test animals) for indoxacarb in rats is in the range of 179-1,730 mg/kg. Even using the more conservative number, my dog got about 0.7% of a potentially lethal dose. The NOAEL data shows dogs had ZERO adverse effects at doses well above what my dog got, even with chronic daily exposure.

The risk of serious harm wasn’t 1%. It probably wasn’t even 0.1%. The evidence suggests it was essentially zero—like worrying about alcohol poisoning from drinking a single beer.

Armed with this information, I went back to all three AI models. And you know what? Even when confronted with the actual data, they kept fighting me on it. “Better safe than sorry,” they insisted. They kept talking about “1% risk” when there was no evidence the risk was remotely that high.

Here’s the truly maddening part: The Merck Veterinary Manual is one of the most authoritative sources in veterinary medicine. It’s been trusted for over 50 years. It’s in every vet school library. And it was available online the entire time. If just ONE of those AI models had actually searched for and consulted the relevant toxicology data instead of defaulting to panic mode, I would have saved $309 and my dog would have been spared an unnecessary medical procedure.

But no. All three models jumped straight to catastrophizing.

Why the System Can’t Acknowledge Evidence

Here’s what really gets me: The treatment protocol for indoxacarb ingestion is remarkably simple and invariant to dose:

1. Induce vomiting (if within 2-4 hours)
2. Activated charcoal
3. Monitor for symptoms
4. If symptoms develop: supportive care

That’s it. Whether your dog ate half a station or five stations, this is what they do. There’s no antidote. You’re just managing symptoms while the body metabolizes it. The dose doesn’t change the protocol—it only changes the prognosis.

So what would that $90 poison control consultation have given me? Nothing. There’s literally one treatment protocol for this scenario, regardless of dose. The vet had to know that. But the system creates the illusion that more expensive consultations yield better information, when in reality you’re just paying for the same CYA advice.

And no vet, no hotline, no medical professional will ever say: “Honestly? Based on the toxicology data, your dog will almost certainly be fine. Save your $300 and just watch him closely.”

And apparently, no AI model will say that either! They’re trained on a society that cannot think rationally about risk. Their training data is full of liability-driven precautionary advice, defensive medicine, and CYA protocols. They learned to replicate that risk-averse stance even when the actual evidence points the other way.

We’ve built a medical infrastructure—human and veterinary—that’s optimized for minimizing worst-case outcomes, not for rational risk assessment. The system is rational from a liability standpoint. It’s completely irrational from a probabilistic and economic one.

The Bigger Problem

This isn’t really about my dog or my $309. It’s about how the precautionary principle, divorced from actual evidence and risk assessment, creates absurdly expensive and inefficient outcomes.

It’s the same dynamic that drives much of our healthcare spending. The same force behind TSA security theater. The reason we can’t build anything in this country without spending 10x what other developed nations spend.

When the precautionary principle becomes “do the maximum intervention regardless of what the evidence says about actual risk,” we end up with a system that’s simultaneously very expensive and not particularly effective.

The data was right there in the Merck Veterinary Manual. Clear, authoritative, publicly available. Dogs given this dose DAILY for a YEAR showed no adverse effects.

But data doesn’t matter when the system is built around liability, not evidence.

My dog was fine, by the way. Not even slightly sick. Just traumatized from being forced to vomit and fed charcoal for no medical reason.

Worth $309? Not exactly. But you better believe my students will be hearing about this for years to come.

P.S. Since Claude and I had already had a long conversation, I asked him to write the post. It’s 98% Claude– what do you think?

Quick hits

1) So, as for ICE being in my neighborhood, this citizen was picked up and treated with extreme disrespect just at the top of my street.

🚨ICE/Border Patrol agents assaulted and kidnapped a U.S. citizen… then dumped him on the side of the road two miles away.

In the video, you can see agents uncuffing him, tossing his wallet and belongings onto the ground, and driving away. No apology. No explanation. Just… pic.twitter.com/CBE0iag9zZ

— Jesus Freakin Congress (@TheJFreakinC) November 19, 2025

2) I did a bit of a deep dive on the Constitutional Issues around all this yesterday. This essay is the best thing I read on it. Just read it.

Kavanaugh’s concurrence argues that ICE’s stops in Los Angeles County based on race or ethnicity are permissible, in conjunction with any of these four factors:

[T]hat there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English.

He then airily cites Brignoni-Ponce, a ruling that barred border stops motivated by the apparent race of a vehicle’s occupants, for the proposition that “[a]ny number of factors” can furnish reasonable suspicion for “illegal presence” of an individual; when the Court in that case used that phrase to permit officers wide latitude in considering the attributes of a car and the area it was driving in, when deciding whether they had reasonable suspicion for a vehicular stop (vehicular stops being systematically less protected under the Fourth Amendment).

The problem with these four factors is that none of them are particular to the individual being stopped. An individual’s lawful or unlawful presence in the United States is not conditional on whether she is in the Los Angeles area or in another area. Seeking day labor in Los Angeles County isn’t evidence of her being unlawfully present; millions of lawfully present poor people do the same. Not speaking English in Los Angeles County is not evidence of unlawful presence, and nor is apparent origin from Mexico or Central America. What Kavanaugh appears to be trying to do is to say that it’s “common sense”, and therefore Constitutional, for immigration officers to use a probabilistic analysis, based on the average characteristics of a group or of residents in a geographic area, to make Fourth Amendment-valid inferences about an individual. In other words, he’s applying collective, group-based judgments to a right that is fundamentally individual in nature. It’s no different in spirit to the assertion that, because Black Americans in Louisiana are more likely than white people to have been arrested for crimes, Louisiana police are justified under the Fourth Amendment in any stop-and-frisk they conduct of a Black person in Louisiana.

It is perfectly valid, if ICE has evidence of a specific individual‘s unlawful presence in the United States, for ICE to identify and detain that individual, without excessive force. However, it is invalid under the Fourth Amendment for ICE to go on roving patrols in areas known in general to have many unlawfully present people, and then to detain any individual on the basis of the fact that they look Hispanic and are present in that area. In Los Angeles County, which was part of Mexico before California became a state, 90% of its residents are lawfully present, and around half of the population are Hispanic. If we assume, favorably to Kavanaugh here, that all of the unlawfully present people in Los Angeles County are Hispanic, then simple math would tell us that 40% of County residents, or four million people, are both Hispanic and lawfully present. It’s not “common sense” for Kavanaugh to approve a rationale allowing ICE to stop and question any of those four million people, without any further, particularized evidence. To those four million people, many of whom are U. S. citizens, this isn’t “common sense.” It’s a license for gratuitous immigration enforcement intrusion, that will require them to carry proof with them at all times of their lawful presence. As the factual record in this case makes clear, even carrying proper ID won’t necessarily protect them from an ICE arrest. It’s for this reason that Sotomayor’s dissent to this order describes it as establishing a kind of “second-class citizenship.”

3) This is good, too:

I hope a hypothetical will stimulate thinking beyond the immigration context, because I think Fourth Amendment theory cannot be limited to immigration detentions alone.

It has been suggested (but, no surprise, also disputed) that large gatherings of firearms manufacturers, sellers, and firearm enthusiasts – let’s call them “gun shows” – serve as opportunities to circumvent legal regulations governing the buying, selling, or transfer of firearms (let’s call that “illegal conduct”). We can only estimate the percentage of people attending gun shows who are engaged in illegal conduct – let’s guess at 10%. Eighty-two percent of gun owners are white Caucasian men (a lesser percentage of immigrants, about 45%, are Hispanic). May federal law enforcers sweep into gun shows and detain everyone present – or, to reasonably “narrow” the seizures, all white men present – for questioning, based solely on the location and the known possibility that some of those persons are engaged in illegal conduct? That is, does a fair probability of finding criminal violators among a large group equal “reasonable suspicion” to detain and question (briefly, but against their will) everyone in the crowd?…

If Kavanaugh’s view accurately reflects that of his majority colleagues, it foreshadows potential large changes in existing doctrine as well as practices. First, by ignoring the “no roving patrols” holding of Brignoni-Ponce and not applying the usual Terry “particularized suspicion” rule, Kavanaugh seems to advocate a significant change in the reasonable suspicion standard. Second, if reading his solo concurrence as endorsing such a change is fair, Kavanaugh’s vote on the stay application suggests that lower courts should now attempt to predict whether the current court will change the law, rather than go where precedents seem to lead. Both shifts in approach have far broader legal implications than the interim Perdomo order. 

Finally, let’s briefly return to the gun show hypothetical with which I opened this essay. Facts are always capable of being distinguished, but the law professor’s favorite question follows: is there a distinction that makes a legal difference? If agents can be reasonably sure that people violating the law can be found at a certain location, a location that fosters similar law-breaking in the expert view of experienced agents, doesn’t common sense recommend that they detain and question (briefly) everyone there? It is certain that some law violators will be discovered; they may even fit the ethnic and lifestyle stereotype that the agents would predict.

When Perdomo reaches the full court on its full merits – and it may, although this is not inevitable – the justices will have to address, I think, hypothetical applications of the Fourth Amendment well beyond the immigration context.

4) Switching gears, “A chance to depoliticize gender-affirming care: A report commissioned by the Trump administration manages to look at the evidence for youth gender medicine outside of a left-right framing.”

For years, feminists, liberals, and gays and lesbians have voiced their objections to teaching children that if they do not conform to stereotypes, they may have been born in the wrong body. Detransitioners — who medically transitioned and regret it — have been trying to raise awareness among Democrats since at least 2019. Doctors, academics, and therapists have attempted to air their concerns with their colleagues and professional associations. Even some transsexual adults, as they refer to themselves, have been asserting that adolescents should not transition.

No matter which of us raise our voices, we’re rebranded as right-wing. One of the most startling examples is what happened to the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), a nonpartisan group that calls for research on youth gender medicine to be depoliticized. The Southern Poverty Law Center disparaged SEGM’s work by labeling it a “hate group.”

The way youth gender medicine is often practiced without proper guardrails, and the redefining of sex to mean gender identity, are deeply unpopular — even among Democrats. New polls show that culture war issues, LGBT rights, and males in women’s sports are not what voters want Democrats to focus on. But since we don’t know how to pivot, this issue continues to be our party’s Achilles heel; we dig in instead of moving forward.

5) I simply refuse to believe that IQ is only 30% heritable. That said…

I wrote a little bit about the "missing heritability" question and several recent studies that have brought it to a close. A short 🧵 pic.twitter.com/nKT0CJaSXA

— Sasha Gusev (@SashaGusevPosts) November 21, 2025

6) I hate the hatred these people are full of, “‘The System Is Meant to Break You’: What ICE Is Doing to People Here Legally”

Immigration and Border Patrol officers have long held extremely broad discretionary powers to welcome or reject noncitizens arriving in the United States. And this is far from the first wave of xenophobia to hit America. But something different is happening now in the breadth and ferocity of efforts to change the makeup of this country.

The videos circulating on social media are brutal and terrifying — the often violent arrests, people pulled screaming from their cars, out of day care centers, away from their children and their spouses. What should give Americans equal pause is the inhumanity happening beyond the cameras, away from the view of judges and lawyers and the media. Due process is not a constitutional right afforded only to citizens; legal restrictions on unlawful detention apply to all people on U.S. soil.

The stories we were told call into question both the constitutionality and the morality of how the Trump administration is directing immigration policy. That immorality, once unleashed, may ultimately be aimed at others in this country, regardless of immigration status. If a woman returning from vacation with her young children can be suddenly removed from her family and her life, how can we believe that any of us will remain safe?

7) Not exactly current, but Jeff Maurer just unpaywalled this and it’s good, “Repost: The Gender in Sports Debate Gets Even More Confused (Which Didn’t Seem Possible): Transgender talking points come for not-transgender athletes” And because it always bugged me so much with everybody going on about the “transgender” boxer when it was clearly DSD to people who actually understand these issues.

We don’t know much about Khelif’s situation. It’s possible — though absolutely not certain — that she has a difference in sex development, such as 46XY DSD, in which a person has X and Y chromosomes and their body produces and responds to testosterone in the typical male way. This is the condition that two-time Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya is reported to have. The IBA says that Kehlief twice failed an unspecified gender test that apparently was not a test of testosterone levels, and the IBA’s then-president said that the tests showed that Kehlief has X and Y chromosomes. Worth noting, though: The IBA appears to be deeply corrupt, and their former president is a homophobic asshole. If you were hoping to read an uplifting story about a trustworthy organization, then I suggest that you stop reading this article right now and check out this group in Seattle that rescues cats from trees.

The IOC’s only requirement for gender eligibility is that an athlete’s passport declare her to be female. Seriously: That’s it. There are no other tests, and not even — as far as I can tell — any serious effort to verify the passport’s validity; a passport written in crayon on a Snickers wrapper might be good enough. IOC officials have issued statements with logic so perfectly circular that it could be used to calibrate scientific instruments: IOC spokesman Mark Adams justified the eligibility of Kehlief and one other athlete by saying “These athletes have competed many times before for many years.” So: They have been eligible before, therefore they must be eligible now. And because they are eligible now, they must logically always be eligible. I suppose that if Imane Khelif whipped out a 12 inch penis, smacked IOC spokesman Mark Adams across the face with it, and said “I was joking the whole time!”, Adams would respond by saying “She was eligible before, and therefore she is still eligible now.”

The IOC’s claim that sex testing is impossible doesn’t pass the laugh test (a different IOC spokesperson asked “Who makes the call which athletes should be tested?”). The answer to the rhetorical question above — which the spokesperson seems to treat as some sort of “if a tree falls in the forest…” unknowable riddle — is obviously “You make the call, dumbass. You’re the goddamned Olympic Committee.” The IOC could also simply give a genetic test to every athlete, which could be done with a once-per-lifetime cheek swab. This is obviously within the IOC’s capabilities because they also run a rigorous, frequent, and highly-invasive anti-doping regime — the IOC already collects more piss than R Kelly’s bedroom rug. The IOC also tested for Covid frequently in Tokyo and have numerous other requirements that athletes have to follow. Pretending that any sort of test is an unworkable invasion of privacy is “I can’t wear a condom because of a latex allergy”-level bullshit that no grown-up should believe.

Why is the IOC so resistant to doing any real verification of a boxer’s sex? If I may engage in a miniscule amount of speculation, I’d say that it’s because they’ve accepted the argument that any questioning of a person’s gender status is ipso facto bigotry.

8) Loved this from Yglesias. Sometimes, I feel like the ultimate definition of my political tribe is simply people who admit that there are trade-offs in politics. “Affordability means hard choices”

But prioritizing the cost of living means deprioritizing other things, which in turn requires confronting tradeoffs and making clear choices.

A recent example — and one that relates to my personal interests — is that the New York state legislature passed a bill back in June requiring all New York City subway lines to operate with two-person crews (one driver and one conductor) indefinitely. This is how the subway already works, but the requirement is unusual globally and obviously raises the cost of subway operations.

What’s more, while self-driving cars present a difficult (though increasingly solved) problem, self-driving trains are much easier to implement since they run on tracks. Retrofitting an existing train line is expensive, but New York is starting work on a brand new train line — the Interborough Express — and it’s totally crazy to build a brand new train line in 2025 that’s not designed to be automated.

The Transit Costs Project at NYU released a report on this topic, and noted that not only do fewer than 7 percent of train lines globally operate with two-person crews, the Japanese cities that do this are all currently investing in technology to allow one-person or zero-person operation.

On the theory that Democrats are now very interested in affordability, it should be a total no-brainer for Kathy Hochul to veto the bill.

By the same token, given Zohran Mamdani’s interest in reducing bus fares, he ought to be very interested in the question of why New York City buses have higher costs per mile and per hour than the public buses in Boston, D.C., or San Francisco.1

In both cases, though, to focus on affordable transit would mean crossing the demands of narrow union interests. The New York Times did a story on this where they got the president of the Transport Workers Union to say “it doesn’t really matter to us what the data shows” in terms of whether two-person crews have the benefits he’s claiming they have.

That’s fair enough, I guess. But if you’re a politician who wants to prioritize the cost of living, you do have to care about facts and data…

I read a paper last fall about the Buy American Act, which requires the federal government to use American firms for a range of procurement purposes. This sounds like a nice idea, and you can see why elected officials might support it. But the researchers’ conclusion was that it creates jobs at a fiscal cost of $111,500 to $137,700 per job.

That’s not a very good deal.

It also understates the full economic cost of the program — not just the fact that the federal government is overspending on various things, but that the workers doing those jobs are no longer available to do anything else.

This is also a glaring problem with MAGAnomics. Over the weekend, a big raid in Florida targeted immigrants working as tomato-pickers. Some of the people detained were apparently legal residents, and I have serious concerns about ICE hassling American citizens on the basis of racial profiling or supposition.

But even leaving that aside, plenty of farmworkers are here illegally, and who is supposed to do that work if we deport them or scare them off? Some people say they’re here doing the jobs “Americans won’t do.” Others might respond that if you raised wages, some American would do the job. But then the job that person was previously doing will be empty. There just isn’t some enormous pool of unemployed Americans available to go pick tomatoes or work in a sock factory or whatever other job opportunities the Trump administration thinks they’re creating with tariffs and mass deportation.

Their version of skinsuiting is to claim that their anti-immigration crackdown is housing affordability policy. But if you’re trying to make housing cheaper by reducing demand, you’d actually want to focus on the highest-paid, most economically valuable immigrants. Elon Musk does a lot more to raise real estate prices than any seasonal tomato-picker. Besides which, the administration is also raiding construction sites. Trump’s first-term immigration policies appear to have raised housing costs by driving up the price of construction.

And yet, even Democrats who are eager to oppose the administration on immigration are unlikely to argue that what he’s doing is bad because it’s driving up the cost of farm labor. That’s not an argument that sounds good.

The general problem is that your costs are my income and vice versa, so many cost-reducing ideas involve some unpleasant tradeoffs.

Politicians are interested in policies that sound like they can bring costs down purely by sticking it to unsympathetic actors, but this is rarely the actual situation. 

9) Thomas Mills, “So much for constitutional conservatives: CBP violates federalism, civil rights, and state laws as Republicans cheer.”

John writes, “It is clear to me that ICE agents wear a mask solely to hide their identities and operate through threatening tactics. On its face our Mask Law prevents these actions.”

The Republicans who passed that law should be outraged. People from outside of North Carolina are flaunting their disregard for the state’s laws and the GOP’s deeply held conviction that masks should not be worn in public. Republicans were so committed to that belief that they overrode then-Governor Roy Cooper’s veto. Now, they need to either demand that the law be respected and enforced or admit that it was a political stunt to satisfy their base that believed COVID was a hoax.

In addition to the masks, who thought wearing military-style camo gear is a good idea? These guys aren’t in the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of Vietnam. They’re in the Home Depot parking lot. They are supposed to be carrying out police actions, not military ones. Remember, the saying is “Back the Blue.” These guys look like wannabe militia warriors. I want cops protecting us, not soldiers.

I’m having a really hard time understanding why a bunch of cosplaying federal agents from out-of-state are not being held to the same standards as citizens of North Carolina. If a sheriff’s deputy from, say, Orange County put on a mask, grabbed a U.S. citizen off the street with no warrant or probable cause, pushed them into a van, and drove off, the deputy would probably be fired, arrested, and sued. Why are border patrol agents exempt from following state laws and the U.S. Constitution? Where are all those people who used to post all over Facebook about being Constitutional conservatives?

I’m not a lawyer or a Constitutional scholar, but it sure looks like the people invading our communities are violating a lot of laws with no fear of being held accountable. I’m pretty sure that snatching somebody off the street without a warrant or probable cause and putting them into a van is kidnapping. Taking somebody’s wallet and throwing it out the window of the moving van, as the agents did to a U.S. citizen they kidnapped in Cary, is petty theft. If government agents did it, it’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against illegal search and seizure. Also, since they are only grabbing people with complexions a bit darker than mine, it seems they are violating the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

There are ways to enforce immigration laws, but what we’re seeing in North Carolina and other states is just wrong. The goal here is not just to intimidate immigrant communities, it’s to show all Americans that federal agents won’t be held accountable. They are rattling the foundations of our country, trampling the concept of federalism and the rule of law.

10) This story was so upsetting. “That Baby Is Going to Die’ Raylee’s teachers reported her family for abuse. A legal loophole allowed her father to pull her into homeschool anyway.” Claude’s public policy summary focused analysis:

This is textbook intense minority politics with every element you’d want for the classroom:

Small, motivated group: HSLDA represents maybe 2.7 million homeschooled kids (less than 5% of school-age children), but they’re intensely committed. They have the phone number memorized. They’ll flood the capitol with 600 people on two weeks’ notice.

Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs: Homeschooling parents feel any regulation acutely and personally. The costs—dead children—are scattered, invisible, and borne by people (abused kids) who can’t organize or vote.

Organizational infrastructure: HSLDA has built a sophisticated operation—24-hour hotline, Court Report newsletter, massive database of local pods, trained lobbyists, plus an activist network that amplifies their messaging through Facebook groups. They’ve created a turnkey mobilization system.

Strategic framing: They’ve successfully reframed child protection as government overreach, tapping into broader American suspicion of state power. Notice how they invoke “constitutional rights” and “presumption of innocence” for what’s actually just a temporary delay in homeschool enrollment during an investigation.

Low salience for the majority: Most people have no idea this is happening. There’s no organized counter-lobby of dead children. Child welfare advocates are chronically under-resourced and fighting on dozens of fronts.

Credible electoral threat: In West Virginia’s legislature, even Republicans who co-sponsored the bill got scared when the calls started coming. Politicians know these parents vote in primaries and remember betrayals.

The kicker: Raylee’s Law is incredibly modest. It doesn’t stop anyone from homeschooling. It just says “wait until we finish investigating whether you’re beating your kid.” And it still can’t pass. That’s the power of concentrated intensity.

11) I think Richard Hanania is a little too cavalier in tossing aside important Constitutional protections, but, otherwise, this is a very sensible, technology-based agenda for reducing crime.

12) Mark Hertling, “What Americans Should Understand About the Military Disobeying Illegal Orders”

Enlisted members swear to support and defend the Constitution, and to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” And the UCMJ makes crystal clear that the service member’s obligation is to obey “lawful” orders, and that no enlisted member is permitted to carry out an unlawful order. But the enlisted oath is also intentionally anchored in obedience of the chain of command. The accountability lies one level up.

Which brings us to the officer oath—shorter in words, heavier in weight. Officers swear to “support and defend” the Constitution; to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it; and to “well and faithfully discharge the duties” of their office. They also affirm that they “take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” What they do not swear to do is equally important: Officers make no promise to obey the president and the officers above them.Join

That omission is not an oversight. Officers give orders, evaluate legality, and act as the constitutional circuit breakers the Founders intended. They are expected—by law, by professional ethic, and by centuries of tradition—to exercise independent judgment when presented with a questionable directive. Officers are duty-bound to refuse an unlawful order. It is not optional. It is not situational. It is their job.

13) Lakshya Jain with some fasciating polling, “The COVID political backlash disappeared”

14) Yougov, “Majorities of Americans disapprove of ICE and say the agency mistreats citizens and immigrants”

15) OMG, this case. Alphagal! “After a Mysterious Death, a Family’s Quest for Answers Leads to a Tick
A JetBlue pilot’s illness looked like food poisoning, but it was actually an increasingly common tick-borne meat allergy that can be fatal.”

16) Apparently Gen Z bros have decided that the Orthodox church is for real men. I’m actually all for organized religion, but this whole “this church is masculine” is just cringe. The church they profile is just a few miles from my house. “Orthodox Church Pews Are Overflowing With Converts: “In the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, this has never been seen,” a priest said about the surge of young men drawn to the demanding practice of Christianity.”

Orthodoxy “appeals to the masculine soul,” said Josh Elkins, a student at North Carolina State University who was chatting with other young men.

“The Orthodox Church is the only church that really coaches men hard, and says, ‘This is what you need to do,’” said Mr. Elkins, 20, who casually quoted a second-century martyr and rattled off terms like “monarchical episcopate” in conversation. He beamed as he talked about the weekly worship service known as the Divine Liturgy, an hourslong affair at which attendees typically stand the entire time, rather than sitting in the pews or kneeling.

The Divine Liturgy is just one aspect of Orthodox faith and practice that is unfamiliar to many Americans, including other Christians. Orthodox services include chanting, incense and genuflecting deeply before painted icons. Much of the liturgy takes place out of the sight of the congregation. The church also maintains a strict and complicated schedule of fasting.

“It’s so much harder than I thought it was going to be,” said Matthew Herman Hudson, 29, who converted in his early 20s and works in the bookstore in Raleigh. “But it speaks to me in a way that nothing else ever did.”

17) Fascinating. “Cis, White, and Gay: In a new book, Ben Appel describes his journey from closeted Christian cult child, to recovering addict, to social-justice warrior, to self-confessed ‘gender heretic.’”

18) Must-read from Kelsey Piper, “When grades stop meaning anything: The UC San Diego math scandal is a warning”

Now, a lot of people keep misreading this story, and I want to make a few things clear:

1. This is not just about COVID-19 or phones in classrooms or whatever your pet bogeyman is.

Some people took the rapid decline in math competence at UCSD to be just a particularly well-documented example of a phenomenon occurring everywhere: student performance slumping in the aftermath of COVID disruptions and school closures.

This phenomenon is definitely real — standardized test scores are looking ugly — but what’s going on at UCSD is not typical. Other UC schools have seen a two or threefold increase in underprepared students, not a thirtyfold increase.

This is about UCSD’s admissions process and, in particular, the perfect storm created by massive grade inflation and the ban on standardized test scores. These allow admissions to be dominated by students with good grades in advanced classes who did not actually learn the needed material.

2. This is about the UC system.

I’ve seen a massive disconnect in how this story has been discussed in California and outside California. Californians take enormous pride in the UC system, one of the crown jewels of the state. We have hands-down many of the best public universities in the world, and we feel quite strongly that you can drop the qualifier “public” and the claim stays true.

I sincerely believe that UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego will offer you as good an education as Harvard, Yale, or Stanford — and, if you’re a California resident, they will do it for a reasonable price. I’ve seen some non-Californians say “Why is it a big deal if universities have to offer several years of remedial math? Don’t we want universities to do that?”

My answer is emphatically yes, we do want universities to do that. Any student of any age can go learn anything they want at a community college. There’s also the California State University system, with more accessible admissions standards.

But we also want the UCs to remain world-class research universities. There is a trade-off between a math department’s ability to offer more than a thousand students remedial elementary and middle school math and its ability to offer future STEM majors the advanced math classes they need.

“Few, if any students who place into Math 2 have successfully completed an engineering degree,” the report noted. That might be fine if those students don’t want to pursue STEM, but they aren’t particularly prepared for non-STEM coursework either.

California has already committed to a pathway for higher education for everyone — accessible community colleges and top-tier research universities. If we try to make the top-tier universities also serve the function of community colleges, we will destroy both.

3. These students are not lazy or dumb.

OK, I’m sure some of them are — I was pretty darn lazy during college myself. But I think it’s important to emphasize that many students in this boat are, in fact, smart kids. They are kids at the top of their class at large public high schools, kids who sought out honors track classes, worked hard in them, and got As in them.

I feel pretty confident that if we had actually allowed them to fail earlier, thereby providing them with an adequate education during middle and high school, they would, in fact, be prepared to excel in college.

These kids were not doing anything wrong. They were lied to. They were told that they were prepared for classes they were not prepared for. They were told that they were excelling in classes that they were not excelling in. They deserved better.

It’s important to frankly discuss how bad this situation is, but it need not and should not take the form of blaming students or assuming that they must be stupid or unworthy in some way. I think these “blame the student” takes hold sway out of some kind of just-world fallacy.

We don’t want to believe that the system could be so catastrophically bad as to fail even smart and hardworking kids. But yes, it absolutely can.

19) And FdB always worth reading on education issues, “Was the United States Once a Global Leader in Educational Metrics? Have We Fallen From Those Lofty Heights? No and No: the 2020s swoon is happening everywhere and worse in many places, we’ve never done well in international comparisons, and our problems have always been profoundly bottom-heavy”

Whenever we’re asking these big-picture questions about educational outcomes, we also have to ask “Compared to what?” You need a benchmark to compare against. One natural way to do this is against students of the recent past, and we’ll get to that. The other way is to look at other countries, preferably peers in some sense. And the foundation of the declinist narrative is the belief that there was a time when American students dominated international rankings. We were once great, we stopped being great, and that’s why China builds the best electric cars now. But this golden era simply never existed. In 2011, the Brookings Institution released a report explicitly aimed at debunking this “myth of glory days.” The report highlighted results from the First International Mathematics Study (FIMS) conducted in 1964. In that assessment, the United States ranked 11th out of 12 participating countries, beating only Sweden. Far from leading the pack, the U.S. was already trailing nations like Japan and the UK well before the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s or the educational reforms of subsequent decades. As the Brookings report noted, “The United States never led the world… it was never number one and has never been close to number one on international math tests.”

Please note the year of that comparison: in 1964, Americans successfully launched the first Saturn I booster rocket, invented the BASIC computer language, and performed the first angioplasty. We were the world’s dominant economic power and we had a level of military might and diplomatic muscle that would be the envy of almost any country in world history. Poor math performance by average students made no difference to our scientific and technological advantages; the performance of the most academically gifted and inclined are what matter in the world of high-stakes science and technology. Which is fine.

20) I’m fascinating by how well professionals can now kick field goals (and punt, too, honestly), “The NFL’s long-distance kicking revolution: ‘70 will be the new 60’”

There’s a kicking revolution afoot in the NFL, a league that has seen 46 field goals of 60 yards or longer in its 105-year history, more than half coming since 2020. A position once akin to a glorified ball boy is attracting better athletes, and specialized training and technological advances are pushing the limits.

After kicking a 63-yard field goal for the New Orleans Saints in 1970, Tom Dempsey held the NFL record for 43 years. But after Dempsey’s mark was first broken by the Denver Broncos’ Matt Prater 12 years ago, it has since been bested six times, with three of those coming over the past three months. Jacksonville’s Cam Little set an NFL record with a 68-yard field goal on Nov. 2, a little more than two months after he hit from 70 yards in the preseason.

21) More education, “The Big Fail Student achievement has fallen off a cliff. And neither Trump nor the pandemic is to blame.”

A cynic might say this shows that Democrats believe in data only until it elucidates their shortcomings. But an inability to face the facts is bipartisan. And Republicans’ preferred solution to this crisis of public education is its abandonment. Beyond Trump’s slashing of federal education, including programs aimed at improving low-income-student achievement, numerous conservative states have instituted “school choice” programs that redirect public funds to private schools. Vladimir Kogan, an Ohio State professor who studies the politics of education, says many Republicans turned against standardized testing when studies began to cast doubt on the effectiveness of vouchers. “Amongst conservatives, there is skepticism,” he says, “because some of their favorite programs don’t lead to better test scores.”

Kogan recently published a book, No Adult Left Behind, which seeks to locate the source of all this systemic failure. He told me he was inspired by his experience as a parent of two adopted children of color in Columbus, Ohio, during the pandemic. As he watched his city’s school board bicker over reopening plans and other issues, he started working on his book, which delves into the way public education is governed on the local level. In most places, districts are overseen by elected boards that are supposed to represent the best interests of the system’s beneficiaries: the students. But it often does not work that way in practice. In his research, Kogan analyzed the results of more than 50,000 school-board races in 16 states and found, in general, they are characterized by low turnout and dominated by “mostly childless, overwhelmingly white upper-income voters.” This creates what Kogan calls a “democratic deficit,” in which those with the most at stake have less influence. “Adult political considerations and adult political objectives ultimately drive policy,” he says. “It’s not that people don’t care about kids, but those considerations are of secondary importance.”

22) Unless somebody figures something out, this could be disastrous for what would have been my future survey research, “A Researcher Made an AI That Completely Breaks the Online Surveys Scientists Rely On”

23) A good news story about that first item. “Courts, Justice Federal government
Immigration: ‘They basically just kidnapped me’: US citizen taken by Border Patrol in Cary
As Border Patrol agents swept the Triangle area, a construction worker born in the U.S. was among those detained.”

24) Pew, “Americans’ Social Media Use 2025”

ICE comes to my neighborhood

I almost cannot put into words how much I hate what’s going on with the Trump administration sending immigration police into American cities to basically presume that anybody who looks or sound Hispanic is not here legally and has to prove their citizenship. And, I honestly believe that the Supreme Court shadow docket case that allowed this will go down in history with basically the same reputation as Dred Scott. The simple reality I just cannot get over is that ICE could drive down my street, see me raking my leaves, and not bother me because I’m white, but according to the Supreme Court, my literal next door neighbors, doing the exact same thing, by mere fact of the color of their skin, need to prove their citizenship! Nothing could be more un-American (at least in my America, not JD Vance’s). And is it crazy to think ICE could drive down my street? They were harrassing Hispanic workers not half a mile from my house today.

(That top right sighting is basically me).

Or let’s consider that I could walk into my local Home Depot, the one I actually shop at sometimes, and go in totally un-harassed, but again, many of my neighbors and students would be expected to prove they belong here just to buy something.

Thomas Mills isn’t having it either:

When I was a kid, “Let me see your papers!” was always said with a harsh German accent that emphasized the evils of Nazism. Today, its a Republican campaign slogan.

In Charlotte this weekend, masked men toting assault rifles demanded to see the papers of a U.S. citizen sitting in his truck. When the man refused to accommodate them, they smashed his window, dragged him out of the truck, and threw him to the ground. He had just shown his “papers” to another group of border patrol agents minutes before.

I wonder why they kept asking for his papers. What made him so different than somebody like, say, me? Of course, we all know.

I would ask what’s wrong with our country, but I already know that, too. Republicans. A Republican administration is using para-military tactics to terrorize communities and to extract people from the country. The Republican-appointed Supreme Court has essentially authorized racial profiling. And rank-and-file Republicans refuse to criticize them or hold anybody accountable for anything.

The party that once criticized government agents as jack-booted thugs now cheers them on. The party that once claimed to champion states’ rights supports a cosplaying national police force patrolling city streets in camo gear. The party that once advocated for small government is now authoritarian.

This is just so wrong and every decent American should be ashamed of how immigration enforcement is acting in our name. Of course, ICE has the authority to detain people that they have probable cause to believe are in this country without authorization. What they sure don’t have the authority to do is to argue that the mere fact of being Hispanic is probable cause.

Quick hits

1) It is shocking, despicable, and unconscionable what our government has done in our name in sending immigrants to CECOT. This is really hard to read, but a must-read from the NYT of the story of the Venezuelan men who were tortured there. Gift link. “‘You Are All Terrorists’: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison”

They said they were shackled, beaten, shot with rubber bullets and tear gassed until they passed out.

They said they were punished in a dark room called the island, where they were trampled, kicked and forced to kneel for hours.

One man said officers thrust his head into a tank of water to simulate drowning. Another said he was forced to perform oral sex on guards wearing hoods.

They said they were told by officials that they would die in the Salvadoran prison, that the world had forgotten them.

When they could no longer take it, they said, they cut themselves, writing protest messages on sheets in blood.

“‘You are all terrorists,’” Edwin Meléndez, 30, recalled being told by officers who added: “‘Terrorists must be treated like this.’”

From the moment he took office, President Trump has seized on what he calls the threat posed by Venezuela and its autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro, accusing the government and Venezuelan gangs of orchestrating an “invasion” of the United States.

2) This is good, “The War on Sex Differences” The idea that so many people have that sex difference exist below the neck only just makes no sense.

The War on Sex Differences

The evolutionary explanation for sex differences is deeply satisfying in the way that the best scientific theories always are – if, that is, you’re not horrified by the idea of evolved sex differences. As mentioned already, though, some people are genuinely horrified. Many suffer from what we might call dimorphism dysphoria: They’re deeply uncomfortable with the suggestion that men and women differ above the neck, and especially with the possibility that the differences might come from nature rather than nurture.

This discomfort underlies what I call the war on sex differences. This “war” – yes, it’s an overstatement – can be seen in every nook and cranny of modern life, from parents fretting about their daughter’s love of dolls, to bans on gender stereotypes in children’s textbooks and ads on TV, to efforts to achieve a 50:50 sex ratio in every desirable profession where men outnumber women. In fact, as I’m writing these words, even the grammar checker on my word processor is getting in on the act: Whenever I use the phrase “men and women,” it warns me that I should avoid these gendered terms, and consider using “people” instead. Not a helpful suggestion when I’m writing a book about sex differences…

In certain circles, then, sex differences are about as welcome as the plague. Needless to say, not everyone feels this way; if they did, there’d be nothing for those who do feel this way to wage war on. And as mentioned in the last excerpt, some people lean in the opposite direction: Rather than playing down or denying the differences, they hype them up and moralize them. Thus, as we dig deeper into these issues, it would be useful to equip ourselves with some technical terms to help bring order to the chaos.

We’ll start with a pair of terms coined by the psychologists Rachel Hare-Mustin and Jeanne Marecek, who argued that two major biases distort the discussion of sex differences: the alpha bias and the beta bias. The alpha bias is the tendency to exaggerate sex differences; the beta bias is the tendency to minimize them. Both can be found in the culture, but it’s fair to say, I think, that in the modern Western world, the beta bias has the upper hand.

Nowhere is this truer than in my own natural habitat of academia. Many academics are wary of sex differences, and some have an intellectual allergy to them. According to an old joke, everyone knows that men and women are different… except social scientists. Plenty of research reveals the truth in the jest. One study, for example, found that social scientists are more likely than civilians to chalk up sex differences to nurture rather than nature, and that this even extends to differences between hens and roosters. As we’ll see later, even when it comes to humans, the evidence sides with the civilians, making this one area where laypeople have a firmer grasp on reality than many alleged experts – and one area where academia seems to impair people’s understanding of the world rather than improving it.

3) The catch is you will go bankrupt if you have a serious health problem. “The cheap health insurance promoted by Trump officials has this catch”

4) They moved too far left. It’s amazing the degree to which so many people don’t realize that minority Democrats tend to be more moderate than white Democrats. “How Democrats Lost Black and Hispanic Voters”

Democrats have yet to fully grasp that Black and Hispanic voters aren’t liberal. As I wrote for Slow Boring two years ago:

Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents, Black voters are the racial demographic least likely to identify as “liberal.” Only 29% of Black Democrats call their ideology “liberal,” compared to 37% of their Hispanic counterparts and a whopping 55% of white Democrats and Dem-leaners (Pew Research). A plurality (43%) called themselves “moderate,” and one in four (25%) identified as “conservative.” In the aftermath of Rep. Jim Clyburn’s tide-shifting endorsement in the 2020 Democratic primary, a clear majority of Black voters in South Carolina (61%) voted for Joe Biden, elevating him over Far Left favorite Bernie Sanders and putting him on track to the White House.

For decades, many Black and Hispanic Americans voted with Democrats because of long-held traditions. But as the party kept moving further to the left, Black and Hispanic voters became increasingly alienated.

Take Black voters, which the media imagines to be a leftward force in the party: Even among Democrats and Democratic leaners, Black voters are moderate on many issues. Black Democratic voters are significantly more likely to express support for increasing the number of border patrols on the US-Mexico border (63%) than their white (47%) and Hispanic (50%) counterparts. In the 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES) data, white Democrats are more supportive of increasing immigration rates than Black and Hispanic Democrats.

5) David French, “One of the Founders’ Worst Fears Has Been Realized”

Let me tell you about four very different men who share something quite important in common.

On Monday, a man named Jonathan Braun was sentenced to 27 months in prison. The charges against him included sexually assaulting the live-in nanny for his own children and attacking a nurse with an IV pole. He was also accused of assaulting a 3-year-old child.

In October, a man named Christopher Moynihan was arrested and charged with threatening via text to “eliminate” Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, at a speaking engagement in New York City on Oct. 20.

In March, a federal jury convicted a man named Eliyahu Weinstein of defrauding investors of $41 million. As Bloomberg reported, he had falsely promised “to invest their money in Covid-19 masks, scarce baby formula and first-aid kits bound for Ukraine.”

In January, an Indiana sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a man named Matthew Huttle when he reportedly raised a firearm during a traffic stop. Huttle was being arrested for a felony traffic violation when he resisted arrest. A special prosecutor charged with investigating the case said the deputy’s use of force was “legally justified.”

Four different men. Four very different crimes. But their common trait is that each of them had previously received a pardon, commutation or clemency from President Trump. And they’re only a small fraction of a larger number. As our newsroom reported this week, at least eight people to whom Trump granted clemency in his first term have since been charged with a crime.

In addition, “Several others pardoned more recently after being convicted of offenses committed during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have also run into trouble with the law.”

But the pardons just keep coming. On Sunday, Trump granted sweeping pardons to 77 people who helped him attempt to subvert the 2020 election. Last week, Trump pardoned Glen Casada, the Republican former speaker of the Tennessee House, and Casada’s former chief of staff, Cade Cothren. Both men had been convicted of charges including wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

In the same set of pardons, Trump also pardoned Robert Harshbarger Jr., the husband of Diana Harshbarger, a Republican representative from Tennessee. As our newsroom reported, Robert had pleaded guilty to “health care fraud and distributing a misbranded drug, in this case kidney medications, some of which came from China, that were not approved for the purpose by the Food and Drug Administration.”

This is just a partial list of the most notorious and unjustifiable pardons of Trump’s second term so far.

I mentioned one of the most brazen in my column two Sundays ago — the pardon of the crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao.

The pardon came after Zhao’s company, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, “took steps that catapulted the Trump family venture’s new stablecoin product, enhancing its credibility and pushing its market capitalization up from $127 million to over $2.1 billion.”

So what do all of these people have in common? It’s certainly not that they’re deserving of pardons. There isn’t a meaningful claim of actual innocence in the bunch, and in almost every case there’s no meaningful evidence of unusually harsh treatment or unjust sentencing. No, the thing they have in common is they are either allies of Trump and his associates or used connections to Trump or his family (or helped enrich Trump) to get relief from justice…

Acting just like a corrupt king, Trump is transforming the American system of justice into his personal plaything. Friends of the crown break the law with impunity. Enemies of the crown experience the sharp end of the law, whether they deserve it or not.

We can’t say we weren’t warned. If there was one element of the American Constitution that set off the most urgent alarm during the founding era, it was the pardon power — Article II’s grant of absolute, unchecked power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

For example, at the Virginia ratification convention, George Mason, a founding father and delegate to the Constitutional Convention, was recorded as saying that the president “ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself” — a situation that eerily forecasts Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons.

Mason was concerned that the president’s pardon power was so great that it could be fatal to the United States. “It may happen, at some future day,” Mason said, “that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic.”

6) I haven’t seen “After the Hunt” yet, but I’m sure I will enjoy it’s portrayal of Gen Z. “Today’s Top Directors Have Some Issues With Gen Z: “Eddington,” “One Battle After Another” and “After the Hunt” focus on young characters navigating the current political climate. The depictions aren’t always flattering.”

At one point in Ari Aster’s anxiety-inducing, Covid-era western, “Eddington,” a white teenager named Brian stands at a gazebo during a memorial saying, “I’m just another privileged white kid and my job is to sit down and listen — which is what I plan to do after making this speech which I have no right to make.” But even as the teen declares that his role is to “sit down and listen,” his voice grows louder, his tone more aggressive. The irony, like many of the ironies in Aster’s film, is comical until it becomes threatening.

“Eddington” shares a common concern with Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” and Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt”: how a younger generation behaves during the current political moment. These films were bigger in the discourse than at the box office, but with each of them helmed by a well-respected auteur director, they offer a collective view of how the Gen Z story is told on the big screen. The films take different approaches, but all reflect a general wariness toward Gen Z: kids who have grown up in an age of social media, using the rhetoric of protests and revolution. They perform their woke politics, often disconnected from the ideologies they so desperately want to espouse.

7) This is decidedly not good! “The ‘Worst Test in Medicine’ is Driving America’s High C-Section Rate
Round-the-clock fetal monitoring leads to unnecessary C-sections. But it’s used in nearly every birth because of business and legal concerns, The Times found.”

Nearly every woman who gives birth in an American hospital is strapped with a belt of sensors to track the baby’s heartbeat. If the pattern is deemed abnormal — too slow, for example — doctors often call for an emergency C-section.

But this round-the-clock monitoring, the most common obstetric procedure in the country, rarely helps baby or mother. Decades of research have shown that the tool does not reliably predict fetal distress. In fact, experts say, it leads to many unnecessary surgeries as doctors overreact to its ever-changing readouts.

The obstetrics field has long ignored these problems. Now, it’s putting more trust than ever on the flawed technology, often prioritizing business and legal concerns ahead of what’s best for patients, The New York Times found.

This fall, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists updated its guidelines on continuous monitoring, sanctioning it even as some other wealthy countries have cautioned against its routine use. Some large hospitals have opened remote monitoring hubs, where nurses spend their shifts watching screens of pulsing squiggles beamed in from many miles away. Software companies have also jumped at the opportunity, selling unproven artificial intelligence algorithms that claim to pluck useful signals from the heartbeat noise.

All the while, the rate of cesarean sections in the United States remains stubbornly high. One out of every three deliveries happens in an operating room, a figure that far exceeds public health recommendations. The surgery can prolong a woman’s recovery, complicate future births and sometimes risk her life. The top justification for C-sections in healthy pregnancies is fetal distress, a diagnosis made by the monitor.

“We may be the only specialty that continues to do major abdominal surgery without a shred of evidence of benefit,” said Dr. Steven L. Clark, an obstetrician at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas who has extensively studied electronic monitoring. “We just plow blithely on.”

When electronic monitoring replaced simple stethoscope checks in the 1970s, doctors embraced it as a seemingly objective marker of how a birth was progressing. From the start, device companies pitched hospitals on an economic advantage: The tool allowed a single nurse to observe many patients at once.

On rare occasions, the fetal heartbeat can reveal when something has gone wrong. The trouble is, healthy babies have highly variable heart patterns. Since the introduction of continuous monitoring, doctors now have many more opportunities to mistakenly interpret these ambiguous signals as telltale signs of distress.

8) Two smart political scientists who should know better, “The Shocking Truth About Gen Z Voters Is That They’re Pretty Great: Stop panicking: They are the most progressive generation ever, especially on race. If that surprises you, you’ve been listening to the wrong story.”

The fact that Gen Z is low on racial resentment sure as hell does not mean that leaning into identity politics is actually good electoral strategy (as they strongly imply)

So what does this mean for Democratic strategy? All those debates about choosing between “identity politics” and economic populism? They’re based on a false premise when it comes to young voters. Young working-class voters with low racial resentment don’t choose between Medicare for All and Black Lives Matter. They’re ready for both.

9) I’ve been kind of obsessed with videos of NC beach houses being swallowed by the ocean (and there’s been a ton this fall). Images here are amazing. “Battling the Sea on the Outer Banks: Daniel Pullen offers beautifully composed and striking images of the destruction that climate change has brought to his lifelong home.”

10) This matters. “We checked The NYT’s data. Moderates still win.: Democrats win more often when they run candidates who match their districts, not their Bluesky feeds.”

11) Alan Abramowitz, “The 2025 Elections and Future of the Democratic Party: Why Spanberger and Sherrill Provide a More Plausible Model for Success than Mamdani”

Democrats won decisive victories in all three marquee races that were decided last Tuesday. However, the coalitions that the two moderate gubernatorial candidates assembled were quite different from the one that the Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate assembled and are much more likely to provide a path to success for future Democratic candidates who are not running in Democratic strongholds like New York City. Zohran Mamdani won his election fairly easily because the New York City electorate is overwhelmingly Democratic and tilts decidedly to the left ideologically. The coalition he assembled was disproportionately made up of white liberals. That’s a group that makes up a much larger share of the electorate in New York City than in Virginia, New Jersey, or most of the rest of the country.

Some of the differences between Mamdani’s results and those for Spanberger and Sherrill undoubtedly reflected the different types of opposing candidates that they faced. While Spanberger and Sherrill each had only a single significant opponent (the Republican nominee), Mamdani had two—a Republican and a former Democrat. The Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, was extraordinarily weak and ended up receiving only 7% of the vote. Mamdani’s main rival was former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo. However, Cuomo was no electoral powerhouse. His reputation had been badly damaged by allegations of inappropriate sexual advances by several former female staffers that eventually led to his resignation from office. After losing to Mamdani in the Democratic primary, Cuomo ran as an independent in the general election and openly appealed to Republican voters. Cuomo was actually endorsed by President Trump. The fact that a substantial minority of Democrats and a majority of independents were willing to vote for Cuomo was less a reflection of his strength as a candidate than of Mamdani’s weakness among moderate voters—a group that will be much more crucial to Democratic success in swing states and House districts in the 2026 midterm elections.

12) Science! “New Pill From Merck Could Slash Cholesterol Levels, Trials Show
The drug targets the PCSK9 protein, and could give millions of people a more affordable option to reduce their heart disease risk.”

Merck, the company that introduced statins to the world nearly 40 years ago, has a new, intensely powerful pill that can slash levels of dangerous LDL cholesterol to levels almost never seen in adults.

The new pill, enlicitide, blocks a liver protein, PCSK9, that slows the body’s ability to clear cholesterol. With most PCSK9 blocked, LDL levels plummet and rates of heart attacks and strokes in high risk patients fall by up to 20 percent in just the first year.

At least six million adults in the United States are eligible for drugs that block PCSK 9.

Merck’s head of research said the goal is to make the pill affordable. It would be an alternative to expensive biweekly or monthly injections of monoclonal antibodies that do the same thing. But only around one percent of eligible patients take the injections, which include Praluent by Regeneron and Sanofi, and Repatha by Amgen. Many patients don’t want to inject themselves, and insurers put up obstacles to paying, cardiologists say. The drugs’ list prices are more than $500 a month.

On Saturday, at an American Heart Association meeting, Merck is reporting the results of a 24-week study of 2,912 people who had had a heart attack, stroke or other cardiovascular event, or were at risk for one. They were randomly assigned to take enlicitide, or a placebo. Those taking enlicitide reduced their LDL levels by up to 60 percent, the same amount as achieved by the injections.

13) It’s “yes.” “Is health insurance a matter of life and death? Scientists may have an answer.”

The 2025 Annual Review of Public Health study, which focused on mortality, found the evidence had become so much strongersince it last looked at the issue in 2008that it “now unequivocally supports the conclusion that health insurance improves health.” Despite deaths setting a high statistical bar because they are relatively rare and are hard to clearly correlate, according to the study, “we know that the available evidence now clears this bar.”

The study did not explore why insurance appeared to save lives. But the effect appeared to be strongest among adults older than 45 and, to a lesser extent, younger adults.

“This is a big deal,” said Helen Levy, co-author of both reviews and a professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. “We know health insurance saves lives. Full stop.”

14) Enjoyed this from Matt Breunig, “How to neuter the social media mob: If a system builds a “punish my enemies” button, people will mash it.”

Between these two poles exists a variety of options that are more than nothing but not so extreme as to become illiberal: Given that the internet allows for two-way communication, one could simply let the person know how much of an idiot they are. If you previously had a social relationship with them, you could dial that back or eliminate it altogether.

If none of these options scratch your itch, you are, strangely, allowed to get offensive people fired from their jobs or expelled from their schools. Because liberal societies tend to conceive of things like employment as a private, voluntary matter, this response often scans as freedom-respecting, no different than breaking off a social or romantic relationship with someone.

But this understanding of employment is categorically wrong. In a society like ours, losing access to employment also means losing access to income, which, taken to its final end, is a death sentence. Not to mention losing access to employer-sponsored health care and, in some cases, retirement and other benefits. Responding to offense-taking by getting people fired is extremely harsh, makes no systematic sense, and invites backlash from political opponents.

Employment should not be a reward for good behavior. It is merely how we organize production. It exists to facilitate the creation of goods and services. Imposing massive fines on disliked speech — by exploiting the fact that we distribute much of our national income through employment — is illiberal and worse, in many respects, than having government-established speech codes enforced with public fines.

15) I recently had Ben Wittes as a guest at NC State and he spoke extensively of this person he knows well. “‘Strung Up and Tortured’: Hostage Recounts 2 ½ Years of Captivity: Elizabeth Tsurkov, a citizen of Israel and Russia, recounts a harrowing story of cruelty, survival, U.S. diplomatic pressure and, finally, release from the grip of a group backed by Iran.”

Truly awful. And, not victim-blaming, but I cannot imagine being Israeli and willingly setting foot inside Iran.

16) This is a fantastic essay from Ezra. You should read, watch, or listen. “This Is the Way You Beat Trump — and Trumpism”

In American politics, power is not decided by a popular vote. In the Electoral College, in the House of Representatives, and particularly in the Senate, it is apportioned by place. Democrats don’t just need to win more people. They also need to win more places. That will require a more pluralistic approach to politics. It will require the Democratic Party to see internal difference as a strength that requires cultivation rather than a flaw that demands purification.

Think of it this way: If Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayor’s race running as a democratic socialist in New York City and Rob Sand wins the Iowa governor’s race next year running as a moderate who hates political parties, did the Democratic Party move left or right? Neither: It got bigger. It found a way to represent more kinds of people in more kinds of places.

That is the spirit it needs to embrace. Not moderation. Not progressivism. But, in the older political sense of the term, representation.

17) Because, of course, to at least some degree it is a social phenomenon. “Transgender Identity Really Has Fallen Among Young People”

18) Nanotyrannus. “The Case of the Tiny Tyrannosaurus Might Have Been Cracked
Did certain small tyrannosaur fossils belong to “teen rex” or another species? New analysis of a recent fossil appears to have settled the debate.”

For 40 years, dinosaur experts have been locked in a huge debate over diminutive fossils found in the Western United States. Did they belong to a teenage version of Tyrannosaurus rex, or to another species in the tyrannosaur family entirely?

A new study may have settled the dispute. Paleontologists said in the journal Nature on Thursday that a fossil specimen in a North Carolina museum belonged to Nanotyrannus lancensis, part of a distinct group of tyrannosaurs.

“We have this animal that’s been hiding in plain sight, and it raises all kinds of questions that we as paleontologists weren’t asking until now,” said Lindsay Zanno, a paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and an author of the study.

19) Science! “This Genetically Engineered Fungus Could Help Fix Your Mosquito Problem
In experiments, researchers showed that the disease-spreading insects couldn’t resist the sweet smell of a fungus that infected and killed them.”

Watch your back, DEET. There’s a new form of mosquito control in town — one that involves olfactory trickery, genetic engineering and a deadly infectious fungus.

Researchers reported last week in the journal Nature Microbiology that Metarhizium — a fungus already used to control pests — can be genetically engineered to produce so much of a sweet-smelling substance that it is virtually irresistible to mosquitoes. When they laced traps with those fungi, 90 percent to 100 percent of mosquitoes were killed in lab experiments. The scientists say this may provide an affordable, scalable and more ecologically friendly way to quell the bloodsucking insects.

“This work is cool in that it puts together a classic biological control idea with a more modern high-tech approach,” said Noah Rose, a biologist who studies mosquito-borne disease transmission at the University of California San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the study. “They show that this kind of idea might have legs.”

Mosquitoes are by some measures the most deadly animals on Earth. They spread malaria, dengue and other diseases, which collectively infect up to 700 million people and kill one million each year.

20) We need clean air! “What the Air You Breathe May Be Doing to Your Brain: Studies increasingly find links between higher concentrations of certain pollutants and the prevalence of dementia.”

By contrast, the woman, who was 84 when she died of brain cancer, “had barely any Alzheimer’s pathology,” Dr. Lee said. “We had tested her year after year, and she had no cognitive issues at all.”

The man had lived a few blocks from Interstate 676, which slices through downtown Philadelphia. The woman had lived a few miles away in the suburb of Gladwyne, Pa., surrounded by woods and a country club.

The amount of air pollution she was exposed to — specifically, the level of fine particulate matter called PM2.5 — was less than half that of his exposure. Was it a coincidence that he had developed severe Alzheimer’s while she had remained cognitively normal?

With increasing evidence that chronic exposure to PM2.5, a neurotoxin, not only damages lungs and hearts but is also associated with dementia, probably not.

“The quality of the air you live in affects your cognition,” said Dr. Lee, the senior author of a recent article in JAMA Neurology, one of several large studies in the past few months to demonstrate an association between PM2.5 and dementia.

21) I do not miss the captcha.

Google’s launch of reCaptcha v3 in 2018 was a major shift toward decreasing how often people see challenges at all online.

“Instead of interrupting a user, our technology analyzes signals and behavior during an interaction to generate a risk score on which actions can be taken by the website owner,” says Tim Knudsen, a director of product management at Google Cloud, in an email to WIRED. This switch, which accurately sniffed for which users were flesh and which were silicon, made this generation of bot-blocking tech “completely invisible” for most web surfers.

A few years later, in 2022, Cloudflare dropped Turnstile, another reCaptcha alternative. It was an additional major move away from human-completed tests and toward pattern-based usage analysis. Similar to the standard version of reCaptcha, Turnstile can be added to websites for free.

You might not remember the name, but you’ve likely encountered one of these Turnstile challenges before. It’s the random-seeming request to click on a box to prove you’re human.

On the user end, Turnstile appears sometimes as a basic checkbox, but it’s more complicated than that. “Clicking the button doesn’t at all mean you pass,” says Tatoris. “That is a way for us to gather more information from the client, from the device, from the software to figure out what’s going on.” After gathering data, then a decision is made about whether the user is allowed to access the site.

22) Damn do I hate JD Vance’s ethnonationalist vision of America.

There is a battle raging across America (and soon in the halls of the Supreme Court) over what it means to be an American and what our nation should aspire to be.

It’s part of a war between two stories of nationhood that we’ve been waging since the United States was created 249 years ago.

One vision is civic. It says that we Americans may lack a common history, religion or ethnicity, but what we share are the ideals in the Declaration of Independence: Each human has a natural and equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To be American, in this tradition, is to create a society dedicated to making these ideals a reality.

The other vision — an animating force inside the Trump administration — is exclusive and ethnonationalist. Vice President JD Vance laid it out explicitly in a speech this summer: a national identity based not on ideals, but on privileged heritage and bloodlines…

“America is not just an idea,” Mr. Vance said. “We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” He added: “The people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”

If we abandon the Declaration’s ideals in favor of a tribal concept of national membership, we’re done for. America will have traded a quest for human freedom for a sectarian project to allow a minority to dominate everyone else. Here’s the good news: A vast majority of Americans are on the side of the Declaration and reject the ethnonationalist vision.

If we’re to remain a free society, those committed to the American experiment are going to need to start expressing our civic national ideals as effectively and compellingly as the ethnonationalists articulate theirs.

Quick hits (part I)

1) I knew that NC Supreme Court Chief Justice, Paul Newby, was not great. I had no idea how not great. Big Pro Publica profile. Claude takeaways:

Core Development: Paul Newby, North Carolina’s Republican Chief Justice since 2021 (on the court since 2004), has systematically transformed the state’s Supreme Court from a nonpartisan, collegial institution into a highly politicized partisan battleground that consistently advances conservative Republican priorities.

Key Actions and Tactics:

1. Gerrymandering Reversal (2023): Led unprecedented rehearing of gerrymandering case after GOP gained 5-2 majority, bypassing normal deliberative processes. Decision enabled Republicans to gain 6 House seats, contributing to GOP control of Congress.
2. Judicial System Politicization: Worked with Republican legislators to eliminate public financing for judicial campaigns, make elections explicitly partisan, and weaken judicial oversight mechanisms—making them secretive and placing them under Supreme Court control.
3. Administrative Power Consolidation: Used chief justice authority to fire liberal/LGBTQ+ staff, replace them with conservatives from his prayer groups, and demote Democratic/moderate judges. Created climate of fear through investigations of critics.
4. Diminishing Executive Power: Consistently upheld Republican legislative efforts to strip powers from Democratic governors, including recent takeover of state election board.

Political Operation: Newby operates more as political strategist than traditional jurist—lobbying legislators, hand-picking judicial candidates, leveraging family connections (wife is major GOP donor, daughter runs state GOP finance), and cultivating network through religious activities. Campaign funded heavily by dark money ($2M in 2012 race alone).

National Significance: North Carolina is “epicenter” of conservative effort to capture state supreme courts. Model being replicated in Ohio, Arizona, Georgia. Contributes to record-low public trust in judiciary (35% in 2024 Gallup poll).

Bottom Line: Through combination of procedural manipulation, political coordination, administrative authority, and well-funded campaigns, Newby has created durable Republican judicial majority that functions essentially as extension of Republican legislative agenda, fundamentally altering checks and balances in North Carolina government.

2) Great NYT Editorial feature on all the ways Trump is eroding democracy. Gift link.

Countries that slide from democracy toward autocracy tend to follow similar patterns. To measure what is happening in the United States, the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon. The sobering reality is that the United States has regressed, to different degrees, on all 12.

Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy, in the mold of Russia or China. But once countries begin taking steps away from democracy, the march often continues. We offer these 12 markers as a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose.

3) Off-year local elections are stupid (because of absurdly low turnout). We are having them in many NC municipalities (including mine, Cary) next week.

Federal elections are held in even-numbered years. So are state elections. In North Carolina, there are more than 500 cities and towns, and all but a couple-dozen of them hold their elections in odd-numbered years, like 2023. Almost all of them will have very low turnout.

That’s ironic, since local elections are usually more directly consequential to voters than the state and national elections. Local officials are in charge of schools, city services, zoning, and more. But state and national races get more attention and more money. It’s easier to pay attention to one governor’s race than it is to cover dozens of local races in big and small towns in places that are, increasingly, losing reporters and local news outlets. The attention leads to higher turnout. If you’re already gone to the trouble to get a ballot to vote for president, it’s not that much harder to keep going down the ballot to cast a vote for mayor.

This seems like an obvious problem. But! How exactly did we get to this place? Why do almost all of North Carolina’s cities and towns ask people to vote when a president, congressperson, governor, or attorney general isn’t on the ballot? And if it’s leading to abysmal turnout, why isn’t there a larger push to fix it?

4) Ryan Burge, “The Democrats Have a Religion Problem”

I must admit something: I have no idea how the average American thinks about religion and politics. That’s just a blind spot that academics have, I guess. We spend almost every waking moment thinking about these topics, while many other folks don’t think about them at all. It’s a strange reality to wrap my head around. So my goal in doing all this writing is to give the average person a kind of mental scaffolding to better understand the subject I study most. Hopefully, that framework will help them sort and classify new information when it comes.

So, with that preamble, here’s a true, simple, and profound fact.

Eighty percent of the people who voted for Donald Trump identify as some type of Christian. It was 48% for Harris voters in 2024.

Just 17% of Trump voters identified as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” Nearly half of Democrats in 2024 (45%) were non-religious.

If there’s one catch phrase in my little corner of the social science world it’s, “The God Gap.” It’s the simple idea that the Republicans have become the party of religious folks, while the Democrats are much less religiously inclined.

In short, it’s much easier to deliver a coherent religious message as a Republican candidate than as a Democrat. If you’re working for the GOP, something along the lines of “God, Country, and Traditional Family Values” resonates with nearly all your voters. For Democrats, it’s not that simple. A message of faith and values will probably turn off as many voters as it attracts.

But here’s what makes things even tougher for modern Democrats: their “religion problem” is deeply entangled with race. Essentially, the party now has a large cohort of non-religious white voters alongside a diverse coalition of voters of color who remain deeply religious. Comparing the religious affiliations of Democrats in 2008 versus 2024 makes this clear.

5) I wish people cared about this! “The Peril of a White House That Flaunts Its Indifference to the Law
The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has wartime power to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs.”

Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.

A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs.

The administration insists that the killings are lawful, invoking legal terms like “self-defense” and “armed conflict.” But it has offered no legal argument explaining how to bridge the conceptual gap between drug trafficking and associated crimes, as serious as they are, and the kind of armed attack to which those terms can legitimately apply.

The irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency.

It is becoming clearer than ever that the rule of law in the White House has depended chiefly on norms — on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding. This is especially true in an era when party loyalty has defanged the threat of impeachment by Congress, and after the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with official powers.

Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.

6) Really loved this from Yglesias. All your high-minded political beliefs mean nothing if you can’t win elections. “Bigots in the tent: What did you think winning meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”

“Some people don’t want a tent so big that it includes bigots.”

This is a relatively common sentiment on the left, one that I heard echoed in a group chat several weeks ago. My fellow chat-ter was incensed by the notion that bipartisan abundance efforts included people with unsavory views.

This is an appealing notion. Bigotry is bad! I don’t like bigots. I share the widespread sense on the left that the political success of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has inspired a coarsening of our culture that tolerates and even celebrates expressions of bigotry that deserve to be stigmatized…

And yet, when it comes to the work of Democratic politics, this ethic of shunning is counterproductive and unworkable. Nobody should celebrate or encourage bigotry or hang a giant “BIGOTS WELCOME HERE” sign on the outside of their tent. But a political coalition large enough to wield power and accomplish useful things absolutely needs to include bigots.

Put so bluntly, it’s uncomfortable. But any halfway serious effort to reckon with actual facts about American public opinion and demographics will reach the same conclusion…

Just as many white Americans hold and articulate unflattering stereotypes of Black people, so do many Hispanic and Asian Americans. There is no way to put together a winning political coalition based entirely on people who hold all-around progressive views on social and cultural issues, because such people are a relatively small minority of the country. The only reason progressive cultural politics seems even vaguely plausible is that, in a practical sense, a relatively narrow, relatively elite group is counting on the votes of a lot of sexist nannies and homophobic Black churchgoers.

Progressives tend to hand-wave these realities away, but they are stark. One of the big surprises of the past three election cycles is the extent to which, despite Trump’s often-inflammatory rhetoric, he has consistently gained ground with nonwhite voters across cycles.

Some of that relates to issues that are far outside the cultural domain. But some of it stems from the fact that the increasing stringency of progressive taboos against bigotry is working.

The range of views that one is allowed to hold or express while remaining a member in good standing of America’s center-left has gotten smaller. This means that fewer people are in it and Republicans are winning more elections…

The steady erosion of the multiracial working class from the Democratic Party hardly disproves the thesis that right-wing politics in the United States of America — and especially Donald Trump’s version of it — is tied up in problematic ideas about race and ethnicity.

But it does thoroughly debunk the notion that there is some idealized political coalition of perfect intersectional social justice warriors who could be mobilized to beat it. Political behavior, for most people, is a matter of group identity and perceived self-interest.

A Mexican-American construction laborer might vote Democrat because they want more generous health care funding and worry that draconian immigration enforcement will lead to racial profiling that has a negative impact on their life and their family. They are not necessarily standing up for advanced feminist thought or eager to welcome new arrivals from Haiti or even Venezuela.A central part of the long-term project of liberalism should, of course, be to propound liberal ideas and increase the share of the population that endorses them over time.

Trying to change people’s minds is very different from the predominant practice of the past decade, where progressives have frequently sought intracoalitional power by threatening people with cancellation or expulsion. And it’s not enough to hope that espousing left-economic populism will radicalize cultural conservatives on questions of gender, race, and sexuality…

There is always a question in politics of when the electoral costs of a principled stand do and don’t exceed the benefits, but it essentially never makes sense to actively show the door to people over a particular point of disagreement. In a large and diverse country whose political institutions require zero-sum competition between just two political parties, there is simply no way to win elections other than to secure the votes of lots of people who disagree with you about lots of things.

The entire game is to persuade them that because they do agree with you about lots of other things, they should vote for you anyway. That means trying to be chill and welcoming despite points of disagreement. Even with people you may think are bigots.

So, yes, I do want a tent so large it contains a lot of bigots. That’s the only tent that ever wins.

7) This essay from Helen Andrews on “the great feminization” and how women becoming a prominent part of all sorts of political-social institutions is ruining everything is provocative, to say the least. I found this to be among the better and more thoughtful rejoinders.

Anyone who has spent time in groups dominated by each sex knows that the social lives of men and women are very different. Until recently, I worked in predominantly female workplaces in which updates about our complex love lives were practically a standing agenda item in team meetings, and the solution to any issue was invariably “let’s all join hands.” (I loved it.) All-female groups also tend to handle conflict differently to men, for example by canvassing other members to see if there’s general agreement before making a decision on how to act.

But it’s wrong to extrapolate that feminization somehow poses a threat to civilization. Indeed, there are plenty of areas in which more feminization would improve things for men as well. Letting men take paternity leave of longer than two weeks tends to lead to more hands-on childcare, which in turn is associated with better outcomes for children. Indeed, research shows that fathers today want to spend more time with their children than those of previous generations, suggesting that both men and women would benefit from increased focus on areas of life that are traditionally considered women’s domain, such as childrearing.

Today, we are lucky that we don’t have to choose between the old, stagnant patriarchal system in which women were confined to the domestic sphere, and the cruel matriarchal system people like Andrews think we already live in. Instead, we can embrace the positive aspects of masculinity and femininity, whilst finding effective strategies to mitigate the harms of both. This means championing values and policies that lead to a free and fair society for all—even men.

8) Cathy Young is also having none of it:

It’s not that women are bad, says Andrews; but their distinct qualities and values—“empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”—transform these institutions in ruinous ways. Let too many women flock to academia, and we get touchy-feely stuff instead of “open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth.” Too many women in journalism spell the decline of “prickly individualists” willing to brave public disapproval. (Other, that is, than Andrews herself, who is careful to inform the reader that she’s not like other girls: she has “a lot of disagreeable opinions” and is not down with a “conflict-averse and consensus-driven” culture.) Business? Goodbye, “swashbuckling spirit”; hello, “feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy.” Worse, Andrews frets, “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” And culture-wide, the triumph of girl power means the never-ending tyranny of “woke.”..

WHATEVER THE ACTUAL DIFFERENCES between the sexes, trying to “gender” political movements and ideologies is nearly always a fool’s errand. (To take one example: The French Revolution, in which all or virtually all the major players were men, blended an ethos of consciously masculine republicanism, pitted against the perceived effeminacy of the old aristocratic world, with a “feminine” Rousseauist sensibility that celebrated empathy, expressive sentiment, and emotional authenticity.) Yet the widening political gap between young women and young men today, in the United States and a number of other countries, is very real. Many young men are pushed rightward, whether by the real or perceived excesses of progressivism, by male-oriented media, or by their peer-group environment; many women are pushed leftward, both by the reactionary gender politics of the right and by a progressive-leaning female culture. This divergence promotes not only unhealthy gender dynamics, but political subcultures that thrive on toxic gender stereotypes. Female-dominated left-wing spaces can get mired in moral purity tests based on the idea that a woman who strays from progressive dogma is a traitor to her gender while a man guilty of wrongthink is a carrier of “toxic masculinity.” Male-dominated right-wing spaces can push “anti-wokeness” to the point where racist and antisemitic talk becomes a badge of honor and the nastiest misogyny is blatant and rampant.

Andrews has waded into this morass with an ultra-simplistic message for those on the right: Everything they hate in modern American culture can be blamed on women, or at least on women’s social and political empowerment and their large-scale entry into public life. That message seems to be quite popular: Andrews’s talk was reportedly the big hit of NatCon, and the video got 170,000 views in the last seven weeks.

8) An important development in American politics, “How Democrats Became the Party of the Well-to-Do”

Now, it is the Republican Party that represents the middle-class and poor regions of the country that were once the Democratic base. In 2010, Democrats represented 81 of the poorest 25 percent of districts, and Republicans just 30. Last year, Republicans held 65 of those districts, compared with 46 for Democrats.

If Democrats don’t reverse course, they may soon find themselves unable to win presidential elections. Increasingly, the party is made up of urban professionals who graduated from four-year universities and command relatively high salaries. Having more of these supporters has been a boon to the party’s finances, but electorally, the shift has been a disaster.

The electoral power of high-income voters is limited: Not only are they a smaller demographic, but they are also concentrated in a handful of coastal states that do not decide presidential elections. By contrast, the lower-income voters lost by Democrats are dispersed across the battleground states that increasingly determine the Electoral College outcome. Under this system, no candidate can win the presidency today without galvanizing the working class.

9) Loved this from Tomas Pueyo, “Why Warm Countries Are Poorer” Mountains.

Takeaways
The pattern, and its logic, is unmistakable:

Humans evolved in the African highlands, where temperatures are stable throughout the year, and close to that of spring & fall in temperate regions. This is why we feel most comfortable there.

Close to the equator, if we’re not in the mountains, the temperatures are too high for us. We can’t think or work properly because we overheat, and our sweat can’t cool us off because humidity is too high.

We also suffer from many more diseases, more common in hot moist climates, but also because we didn’t evolve there.

This also affects food, as agriculture is much harder in these hot moist climates, given the pests, the speed of rot, and the work required by crops.

This prevented maladapted Westerners from efficiently transferring culture and institutions to these hot, humid, low-lying areas, yet another way these regions suffered.

In order to avoid all that, people close to the equator tend to live higher up, in mountains, where temperatures are cooler and the dew point is lower, allowing people to cool down with sweat when necessary.

The big tradeoff for this comfort though has been much higher transportation costs, so less trade, so less wealth.

This also leads to much more ethnic diversity.

This diversity breeds conflict, which makes everybody poorer.

Ethnic diversity and conflict also mean institutions are much harder to make and keep.

This is how mountains are the most significant underdiscussed topic in economic development, and how they must be considered to better explain why warmer countries are poorer.

10) Oh, man, loved this. Elastomeric respirators and propylene glycol for the win! “Andrew Snyder-Beattie on the low-tech plan to patch humanity’s greatest weakness“

2. The “four pillars” plan offers a robust, defence-in-depth strategy

Andrew’s team has developed a plan focused on physical, scalable, and pathogen-agnostic defences to protect society while medical solutions are developed.

Pillar 1: Personal protective equipment (PPE)

The core idea is to stockpile elastomeric respirators, which are vastly superior to N95s.

• They have a 20-year shelf life, provide a protection factor of 100 (or 10,000 when two people interact), and can be reused for months.
• The cost could be driven down to $5–10 per mask, making it “outrageously cost effective” to protect entire populations for about 50 cents per person per year. A philanthropic effort could realistically stockpile enough for all essential workers.

Pillar 2: Biohardening buildings

To create safe indoor spaces, we can use simple, scalable technologies that are already widely available.

• Propylene glycol vapour (the same chemical used in fog machines and vapes) is extremely safe for humans but deadly to airborne pathogens, disrupting their membranes. The US already produces enough to cover all industrial and much residential floorspace.
• For surfaces, common disinfectants like ethanol and hypochlorous acid (which can be made at home with salt, water, and electricity) are sufficient.
• In extreme scenarios, homes could be turned into improvised clean rooms using positive air pressure generated by common appliances like furnace fans or leaf blowers pushing air through HEPA filters made from materials like household insulation.

Pillar 3: Early detection

The key is to find “stealth” pathogens with long latent periods (like HIV) before they become widespread.

• Pathogen-agnostic metagenomic sequencing offers a solution by continuously sequencing all genetic material from sources like wastewater to identify novel threats without needing to know what to look for.
• Organisations like the Nucleic Acid Observatory, funded by Open Philanthropy, are already piloting this technology across the US.

Pillar 4: Medical countermeasures

• This is the ultimate exit strategy, but it can’t be the first line of defence. Modern vaccines (like mRNA) take too long to develop (e.g., the 100-day mission is too slow for rapidly spreading pathogens) and may not work against engineered threats designed to evade the immune system.
• Long-term, Andrew is optimistic about the “wrench hypothesis”: the idea that it’s fundamentally easier for a defender to design a molecule that “jams the gears” of a pathogen than it is for an attacker to design a pathogen with no vulnerabilities.

11) On LLM’s struggling with questions that are easy for humans, “Was Barack Obama still serving as president in December?” My Gemini answer on Mammoths was telling: (Claude gave different answers depending upon the model)

Yes. You asked if they were alive in December, not this December.

Woolly mammoths were around for hundreds of thousands of years, so they were definitely alive during many, many Decembers. The last known population, on Wrangel Island, died out only about 4,000 years ago.

As to those last three links, if you are not a regular Scott Alexander reader, you should at least check out his monthly links.

12) Huh. What’s different about White South Africans (they are white). “Trump Cuts Refugee Admissions and Prioritizes White South Africans: In a major shift from the Biden administration’s policy, the United States will accept up to 7,500 refugees this fiscal year, down from 125,000.”

13) Oh man have I enjoyed the Karine Jean-Pierre trainwreck this week. I actually had the Deputy Press Secretary on campus this week (a former student of mine), but resisted asking for his take on this. “Karine Jean-Pierre and a Book Tour Most Authors Would Not Dream Of: The Biden White House press secretary seems to be everywhere promoting her memoir, including an “absolute train wreck’’ of an interview with The New Yorker.”

14) Not so much milk chocolate in your chocolate candy now. “What’s Missing From Your Favorite Chocolate Bar? It May Be Chocolate.: As climate change has helped push cocoa prices higher, companies are changing candy recipes in subtle ways.” I enjoyed checking the labels on all the Halloween candy. And I still love Rolo.

Almost no one noticed when, sometime over the last few years, the packaging on Almond Joy, Mr. Goodbar and Rolo was updated to remove the words “milk chocolate.”

The edits were easy to miss: The description on the front of the Mr. Goodbar wrapper changed from “milk chocolate with peanuts” to “chocolate candy with peanuts.” Almond Joy is now marketed as a “coconut and almond chocolate candy bar.” Rolos are now wrapped in “rich chocolate candy” instead of “milk chocolate.”

I realized this earlier this year after eating a disappointing chocolate bar. It wasn’t spoiled, it just didn’t taste like I remembered. As a reporter who covers the climate, I’d read about global warming contributing to drought in West Africa and sending cocoa prices through the roof, and I knew candy companies had raised prices and shrunk portions.

But could it be that they were also tinkering with the makeup of the candy itself?

Yes, it turns out. Experts say high cocoa prices have triggered a wave of “reformulations,” the industry term for recipe changes. As the Halloween season boosts demand, some candy companies are replacing expensive cocoa butter with other fats, a swap that means their products no longer meet the U.S. regulatory definition of milk chocolate and can no longer be called that on packaging.

15) This was great from Jamelle Bouie. Gift link. “The Empty Promises of Trump’s Imperial Presidency”

16) I did not read the new Center-left Democratic report on how to win, but I did read Eric Levitz’s great interview with Simon Bazelon.

17) Health care in America. “A car accident sent her to the hospital — and $64,000 into debt
Her insurance covered the ambulance ride and some ER charges but not the ankle surgery and overnight stay charges from the out-of-network hospital.” Gift link.

18) Also this week at NCSU, I hosted Ben Wittes to talk about democracy. He livestreamed the talk— it was great.

19) This is cool! “Study finds mRNA coronavirus vaccines prolonged life of cancer patients
Health records of more than 1,000 cancer patients receiving immunotherapy for lung and skin cancer showed they gained additional benefit after vaccination.”

20) Meanwhile, because anti-vaxxers are insane. “Vaccine Skepticism Comes for Pet Owners, Too: Anti-vaccine sentiment is spilling over into veterinary medicine, making some owners hesitant to vaccinate their pets, even for fatal diseases like rabies.”

(Return of) Quick Hits

Sorry, been busy… life.

1) Had to start with this fantastic essay (courtesy of DJC) with this just-perfect analogy for elite thinking as Kahneman and Tversky’s system 2 and populism as system 1.

A clue to the solution can be found in a further specification that is often made, with respect to this definition, which is that the “general will” of the people is not for any old thing, but takes the specific form of what is called “common sense.” The crucial feature of common sense, as Frank Luntz helpfully observed, is that it “doesn’t requires any fancy theories; it is self-evidently correct.” (One can think of this as the primary point of demarcation between the people and the elites – the people have “common sense,” whereas elites subscribe to “fancy theories.”) This distinction, in turn, does not arise from the ideological content of a belief system, but rather from the form of cognition employed in its production. More specifically, it is a consequence of the distinction between what Daniel Kahneman referred to as “fast and slow” thinking.

The view that Kahneman was popularizing is known as dual-process theory in psychology. The idea, roughly, is that human beings are capable of two quite different styles of cognition. Daniel Dennett once described the conscious human mind, fabulously, as a “serial virtual machine implemented – inefficiently – on the parallel hardware provided by evolution.” The hardware/software analogy is not perfect, but it gets at an important truth. We have inherited a million-year old primate brain, the product of evolution, that contains a very large number of built-in modules, which allow us to perform complex computations in an effortless, lightning-fast way (e.g. recognizing faces, maintaining balance while walking, predicting the trajectories of moving objects, guesstimating the probability of events, and so on). We call the outputs of these cognitive processes “intuitions,” because we don’t really know how the answers get calculated, we just get presented with the results.

On top of this, we have a more evolutionarily recent system, which allows us to perform cognitively “decoupled” operations, such as mathematical, logical, hypothetical and strategic reasoning. This is basically a software system, in that it requires cultural inputs (such as language, writing systems, arabic numerals, matrices and graphs, etc.) in order to function well. Unfortunately, it differs from the intuitive system in that it is slow, effortful, and requires attention. (This is due to its “inefficient” implementation, on hardware that was never designed to support linear reasoning.) Because the operations of this “analytical system” are effortful, our standard mode of engagement with the world exhibits what Keith Stanovich calls “cognitive miserliness,” which means that we try to get through life as much as we can relying on intuition, and it’s only when that fails – when the limitations of that mode of problem-solving become manifest – that we switch to the more demanding, analytic style of processing. In other words, we spend most of our lives on cognitive autopilot, only thinking hard when we are forced to.

This is not such a problem when the two systems agree with one another. The problem is that they sometimes disagree. In particular, the intuitive systems, being a product of evolution, use a lot of quick-and-dirty tricks (i.e. heuristics) to solve problems, which work most of the time but not always. These systems are also, unfortunately, in most cases incapable of learning. As a result, even though they have bugs in them, we can’t actually debug them. Instead, the analytic system has to step in, suppress the intuitive response, and substitute the correct answer.

2) It’s not enough to just set phonics as reading policy. There’s a lot more that goes into actually improving reading in elementary kids as seen in the “Southern Surge.” Karen Vaites explains:

My primary concern: the Southern Surge is getting oversimplified.

When the WSJ Editorial Board cheered that “California Learns From Mississippi on Phonics” by passing new reading legislation, it reduced the work to one silver bullet: phonics.

Social media has been full of posts proclaiming “it’s phonics” or “it’s accountability” or “it’s 3rd grade retention,” when actually, it’s all of the above, and more.

Here’s why the oversimplification matters: since 2019, every state has either passed legislation or enacted state policies to bring the “science of reading” into schools. Yet most states are playing in the shallow end. Reducing the Southern Surge to magic bullets allows state leaders to point to their efforts as signs of progress – “Look, we passed a bill like Mississippi’s!” – when their outcomes are nowhere close. Progress is measured in student gains, not legislation enacted.

A case in point: many highlight the third grade retention policy in the Southern Surge states, presuming it’s THE success factor. In fact, 17 states and Washington DC have 3rd grade retention mandates. There are only 4 Southern Surge states. Simple math tells us that retention alone does not magically produce reading gains. A broader package of reforms, well-executed for years, produces gains.

Once more for those in the back, here’s that package in a nutshell (first published in my piece for The Argument):

“We must get straight on the plays in the Southern Surge playbook. Because, for the love of God, it’s not just phonics. There are four parts to the playbook:

1. Mandatory screening of students in grades K-3, three times a year, using approved assessment tools, to monitor how early reading skills are developing
2. Focused efforts to improve curriculum quality in schools — for phonics and other aspects of literacy
3. Large-scale efforts to train teachers
4. Retention policies to hold back students who aren’t reading successfully by the end of third grade

Many focus on the retention policies. They are important and do seem to motivate adults to pull out all the stops. But kids cannot learn to read on retention mandates alone. Retention policies work because so much is done between Kindergarten and third grade to ensure all kids develop reading skills.

3) George Will has had enough and he’s not wrong. Gift link. “When ICE came for a U.S. citizen and Army veteran: George Retes is suing the federal government for unconstitutional detention.”

The ICEmen were presumably looking for undocumented immigrants. Retes’s driver’s license, which he says the ICEmen never asked to see, identifies him as “Veteran Army.” His license plate includes “DV”: disabled veteran. While ICE’s warriors were trying and ultimately succeeding in smashing his driver’s-side window (the better to pepper spray him), they apparently did not notice his rear window’s “Iraq Combat Veteran” sticker.

Amid a torrent of shouted and contradictory ICEmen commands, and after he asked for an agent’s badge number, he says, Retes was dragged from his car, his wrists were zip-tied behind his back, and he was seated on the roadside ground for four hours.

He was taken to a Navy base, where he was strip searched, then on to incarceration in Los Angeles, he says, handcuffs having replaced the zip ties. No charges had been made against him, but a mouth swab collected his DNA without his consent. He says his requests for a lawyer, and for a shower to ease the discomforts of tear gas and pepper spray residues, were ignored. After three days, during which he missed his daughter’s third birthday, an agent told him the charges against him had been dropped. “What charges?” he recalls asking. Silence.

When, two months later, Retes published a newspaper op-ed about his experience, ICE suddenly claimed Retes had been resisting its agents. Video from a Los Angeles television station’s helicopter monitoring ICE’s operation seems to refute the agency’s fabrication.

An anonymous spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, dismissed Retes’s account as “garbage.” Not much of an argument, but evidence of the milieu and mentality that produces ICEmen like those Retes met.

In today’s hiring binge, ICE recruiting ads ask: “Which way, American man?” Testosterone is the not-very-sub subtext. Recruits will “defend the homeland,” “recapture our national identity,” stymie an “invasion,” halt “cultural decline” and even save “civilization.”

Something uncivilized is indeed happening. What jobs, if any, are recruits leaving for the glory of donning battle gear and masks (hiding what from whom?) and roaming U.S. communities, throwing their weight around and throwing unarmed people to the ground?

4) Adam Jentleson’s attempts to make the Democratic party more heterodox. I agree.

The person Jentleson thinks Democrats should take a lesson from is Trump. “One of the most poorly understood parts of Trump’s appeal in 2016 was his heterodoxy,” he said. As a candidate, Trump opposed the GOP’s conventional positions on the Iraq War, trade, and foreign intervention. In response, voters called him an independent thinker and made him president. (Now, of course, the party’s position is whatever Trump says it is.) Democrats should follow that instinct, Jentleson said. Some already do. A few good heterodox party candidates already exist, he said, including Rob Sand, the state auditor running for governor of Iowa, who has demonstrated disdain for traditional partisan labels and who recently told a radio host that he doesn’t think transgender women should play in women’s sports…

It’s all “part of a general reckoning where, if you want to build a majority party, you’ve got to let people have a diversity of opinions,” Lis Smith, who works with Majority Democrats but is unaffiliated with Searchlight, told me. “Goddamn it, if we want to save this party, we have to try new things.” Democratic politicians and thinkers appear to be coming to the same conclusion. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who for years crusaded for all Democrats to support gun-control legislation, said in a speech last month that he was rethinking that position. Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and a co-author of Abundance, called for Democrats to open their minds to running anti-abortion candidates in Republican-leaning states.

5) Encouraging, I guess, but, unfortunately, I was not sold. “American Democracy Might Be Stronger Than Donald Trump”

The real question is whether U.S. democracy will survive or not. The genre hardly asks that question, let alone answers it.

To be sure, Trump does all the same things as the authoritarians Levitsky and Ziblatt studied: He has refused to accept electoral defeats; called political opponents criminals and tried to jail them even while backing his own violent supporters; and lashed out at opponents and the media as “enemies of the people” — a chilling phrase that echoes Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

But Trump’s authoritarianism also resembles that of dangerous populists who failed to kill democracy. Careful studies that never seem to get much press find that only about a fifth of dangerous populists actually kill democracy, including in different regions and across different time spans. If you’re serious about weighing the Trump threat, you should be asking what makes the difference between countries where democracy died and countries where it survives.

A significant difficulty in answering this question arises from the structure of the political science discipline itself. When I got my doctorate some 23 years ago, American politics occupied one subfield and comparative politics (the study of all other nations, often via comparison) occupied another — and never the twain should meet. Levitsky and Ziblatt are comparativists. This division has only begun to soften. It’s difficult to apply lessons from elsewhere to Trump’s America because the U.S. political system does differ starkly from others, but this disciplinary divide has made that problem even harder.

I’m also a comparativist, but where Levitsky and Ziblatt focused on Latin America and pre-World War II Europe (plenty of failed democracies in both), I have looked further and wider, from the old Mexican ruling party to the Greek financial crisis, from how economists think to the divisions splitting American liberals. I have found research outside of the literature on dying democracies that asks relevant and important questions. What can we learn, for instance, from the advanced capitalist democracies that survived the brutal 20th century — two world wars, the Great Depression in the 1930s, stagflation in the 1970s, Soviet and Chinese threats? Only two fell to internal authoritarian threats: Italy and Germany between the world wars.

This is a dire moment for U.S. democracy. To make it worse, the assassination of Charlie Kirk threatens to ratchet up not only the recent surge of political violence but to reanimate the poisonous tradition of political assassination that runs through Martin Luther King., Jr., President John F. Kennedy, the many Black leaders murdered during Jim Crow, and the Civil War. Deranged individuals perpetrated the recent attacks, but shared fear that U.S. politics is at an existential moment as the 2026 and 2028 elections approach surely portends more widespread and equally damaging threats of violence.

What if Americans didn’t see the dangers to our democracy as existential? If we had more faith that our democracy would survive Trump 2.0, it might take some venom out of this political atmosphere. It might provide some institutions more confidence to fight unconstitutional Trump demands — to be more like the law firm Perkins Coie, which fought back and not cave like another law firm, Paul, Weiss. It might make ABC and its affiliates more willing to stand up to threats from the administration to police what comedians like Jimmy Kimmel say on the air. The Democratic Party might pay more attention to what they can do for voters instead of harping on the Trump menace — a theme that obviously didn’t work for them in 2024. All Americans might better see beyond this fraught moment to focus more on solving the problems of a democracy that was already in grave need of repair before Trump made the situation far worse.

A careful comparison with countries that fought off autocratic attempts, as well as those that succumbed, suggests that American democracy might be more resilient than you think. At a minimum, it has crucial advantages over democracies that failed. Three main things stand out: None was nearly so rich. None was nearly so long-lived. And none had a legal establishment tracing its genealogy back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

6) Yglesias, “The authoritarian menace has arrived: And so has the backlash — but the resistance needs to be smarter”

There’s no emergency requiring the dispatch of National Guard personnel into cities where they’re not wanted, and there’s no ongoing “invasion” of the country by asylum seekers. What we have is an administration that refuses to tout good news, because it loves the idea of a country immersed in crisis as a pretext to seize even more power. When the president’s top policy aide is tweeting that court rulings upholding basic federalism and America’s long tradition of keeping the military out of domestic law enforcement are “terrorism,” the authoritarian menace has truly arrived.

The question is what to do about it…

And this is what I find so disturbing about the new war on narco-terrorism: it’s not in response to anything. It’s not a bad or counterproductive overreaction to some concrete problem. I don’t want to say that it’s made-up; cocaine smuggling is, in fact, happening in Venezuelan waters. But cocaine was never the epicenter of recent concern about drugs, the overall drug problem has been getting better, and Venezuela is not the biggest source of cocaine trafficking.

I’m not entirely sure what game the administration is even playing with this.

My best guess, though, is that Trump wants to throw his anti-Communist Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American supporters a bone, even while turning his back on new waves of refugees from Latin American socialism. So he’s hit on this nonsensical War on Narco-Terror that nobody’s really asking for.

The import of it, though, is that Stephen Miller is also relentlessly accusing the entire domestic political opposition in the United States of “terrorism.” There is clearly some aspiration to bring the legal concepts honed in Pakistan and Somalia and now being deployed in the Caribbean Sea to the home front…

If we want to prevent Trump from eroding the judicial bulwark against tyranny, Democrats must win the Senate. They can’t outperform expectations in the Senate, or do well relative to the map. We can’t make excuses about how states that Obama won twice, like Iowa and Ohio and Florida, are now unwinnable because of polarization. We can’t tell ourselves that making the ideological moves necessary to win in Texas — where non-Hispanic whites are less than 50 percent of the citizen voting-age population — constitutes a morally unacceptable betrayal of vulnerable minorities.

We have to try to make it work. Right now, the gamblers on Polymarket think Democrats have a 27 percent chance of securing a majority next year. Those are good odds relative to the map, but they’re terrible odds relative to an unpopular incumbent with ironclad control over his party who is overtly trying to tear down the pillars of democracy.

If you’re not thinking about how everything you do makes it easier or harder to win in the states that Democrats need to carry — states that voted for Trump three times in a row — then you’re not really in the game.

7) Loved this article, “The N.F.L. Players Trading Their Helmets for Scrubs: A handful of pro players are choosing careers in nursing after leaving the football field.”

8) This is from April and I finally got around to it. “Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?
With diagnoses at a record high, some experts have begun to question our assumptions about the condition — and how to treat it.” It’s long, but worth it. Gift link. Claude summary.

Scientists who’ve spent decades studying ADHD are increasingly troubled by the gap between their research findings and how the condition is actually treated. Despite intensive efforts, researchers have failed to find any reliable biological test for ADHD—brain scans and genetic studies have come up empty. The landmark MTA study found that while Ritalin dramatically improves classroom behavior, those benefits completely disappear after three years, and medication doesn’t actually improve learning or test scores. Meanwhile, permanent side effects like height suppression remain. Recent research shows ADHD symptoms are far more fluid than previously thought—only 11% of diagnosed children had consistent symptoms year-to-year, and many young adults reported their symptoms vanished when they found engaging work or better-fit environments. Researchers like Edmund Sonuga-Barke now argue we’re over-medicalizing what’s often a mismatch between individuals and their contexts rather than a fixed brain disorder. This matters because diagnoses have exploded from 3% of children in 1990 to 11.4% today (23% of 17-year-old boys), and adult stimulant prescriptions have tripled in a decade. While medication clearly helps some people, the science suggests we’re applying a biological solution far too broadly to what may often be environmental or motivational challenges.

9) Speaking of populist ideas that are dumb when you drill down on them. Ron DeSantis has been out pushing term limits. Chris Cooper explains why they are bad.

10) So good from Brian Beutler:

It is a big country, and so this may, literally speaking, be an accurate description of the sub-universe of well-informed, ideological voters. But for tons and tons of people political ideas form like fashions and fandoms. Who’s a face and who’s a heel? How do we know? What are the pressing problems in society and what aren’t? People alight on the “right” opinions to hold by looking around and adopting views that reinforce their social statuses. The iconoclast at the dinner table may want you to believe he’s an independent thinker, but it’s at least as likely that he just enjoys being a contrarian ass.

How often over the past, say, five years have you found yourself confused to see something small, local, fringe, minor in the scheme of thing become a dominant issue in political discourse?

How do people in Georgia come to care about whether San Franciscans honor Founding Fathers with school names and statues? Why do voters who’ve never met or interacted with a transgender person decide they’ve learned everything they need to know about a politician based on whether they respect (or how they talk about) other peoples’ gender identities? By what process do people who watch Fox News or hang out on Twitter or consume wellness content transform from normies into zealots?

Strident views can arise seemingly out of nowhere the same way trends do. People of influence drop them intentionally into the cultural slipstream then fan and fan and fan them until they’re ubiquitous enough to make us incorporate them, one way or another, into our identities.

This is something Republicans in particular understand about opinion formation, and, thus, persuasion. Democrats by and large do not.

Everyone I’ve asked, from all walks of life, had a visceral reaction to this week’s images of physical wreckage at the White House. Nearly all of them understood intuitively that if Joe Biden or Barack Obama had spent bribe money to bulldoze the East Wing, their presidencies would have ended. They knew enough about politics, in other words, to intuit this difference between how Republicans and Democrats react to shocking developments.

I suspect most elected Democrats had the same visceral reaction you and I did to those images. But they largely suppressed their indignation. They did not treat it as an emergency (i.e. a political opportunity) and reverted instead to their own, socially-constructed, default opinion that Regular People™️ would not care.

It is self evident to them that their feelings about what’s happening in the world, their instincts about what constitutes important news, are unreliable barometers of public sentiment. The fact that they’re upset about something doesn’t imply the voters they need to persuade will care. To the contrary, as out of touch elites, it’s likely that our fixations are of no interest to Joe Sixpack. They can not imagine that Joe Sixpack has few fixed views and is mostly just glancing around for cues about what’s important and what to think about it. They don’t reason that if people in Georgia can be made to care about school names in San Francisco, those same voters can be made to care about the White House reduced to rubble.

And so Democrats did not reach for their phones, or race to TV cameras, or rush legislation to the floor. They followed the advice of the people in the party who do what’s known as “persuasion work,” who tell them to exercise tremendous discipline and avoid the pitfall of driving excess attention to stories and developments that are unlikely to change anyone’s mind.

What kinds of things do they believe are persuasive? Policy issues. Economically significant developments in the world. The great moral issues of our time.

An astute commenter on BlueSky put it this way: Democratic outrage over the White House demolition was “not as strong as the [Republican] pushback against the change in the Cracker Barrel corporate logo.”

This perfectly captures one of the most important sub-ideological differences between the parties: How their respective strategists conceptualize the process of changing people’s minds. The difference between politicians who lift their fingers into the wind, and those who make the weather, knowing it’s the wind that carries voters along.

11) Loved this from Chait, “What Progressives Keep Getting Wrong: Graham Platner is the perfect embodiment of the left’s strategy for returning to power. This is a problem.”

You’d think it would be possible for Democrats to find a normal person who is not a one-man Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (Most normal people, in fact, would qualify.) But the left’s continued embrace of Platner has a certain logic. Progressives have a theory of political change for which he remains, despite his massive and ever-expanding political baggage, the ideal prototype. That is, rather than abandon unpopular positions, Democrats should court voters by nominating more candidates who look like, talk like, and ideally even are working-class people…

You’d think it would be possible for Democrats to find a normal person who is not a one-man Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (Most normal people, in fact, would qualify.) But the left’s continued embrace of Platner has a certain logic. Progressives have a theory of political change for which he remains, despite his massive and ever-expanding political baggage, the ideal prototype. That is, rather than abandon unpopular positions, Democrats should court voters by nominating more candidates who look like, talk like, and ideally even are working-class people.

12) This seemed like such a good and thorough cost/benefit analysis of immigration from the Manhattan Institute. “The Fiscal Impact of Immigration (2025 Update)”

Overall, the average new immigrant reduces the federal budget deficit and expands the economy, but this is not true of all categories of immigrants. Immigrants without college degrees receive more government benefits than they pay in taxes, even when we consider only their preretirement years. By contrast, immigrants who finished college or obtained an advanced degree contribute millions of dollars more in federal taxes than they receive in government benefits, and they save substantial amounts of interest on the debt while growing the economy…

Key Findings

• Education and age drive immigrant fiscal impact. Immigrants with bachelor’s or graduate degrees, particularly those who arrive before age 40, produce large fiscal surpluses over 10- and 30-year windows.
• Low-skilled immigration is costly in both the short and long term. Immigrants with just a high school diploma or no high school education, along with their descendants, tend to receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes.
• Legal status matters. From the perspective of the fiscal impact, employment-based immigrants are the most positive legal category, and parents of U.S. citizens are the most negative. The average legal immigrant will reduce the budget deficit and grow the economy, while the average unlawful immigrant will expand the national debt and grow the economy but to a lesser extent.
• Targeted reforms can yield major fiscal gains. Shifting visas toward high-skilled categories, wage-ranking H-1B visas, and recapturing unused employment-based green cards from previous years can reduce deficits while boosting GDP.
• Comprehensive high-skilled immigration reform can stabilize debt. The Manhattan Institute plan in this report would increase GDP by 4.6% and reduce federal debt by nearly $20 trillion over 30 years without expanding the immigrant share of the population, stabilizing the federal debt as a share of the economy over the long run.

I didn’t read the whole thing, but Claude did, so I followed up on the low-skilled portion. Claude’s take:

The Manhattan Institute’s 2025 immigration report concludes that cutting low-skilled immigration by 300,000 annually while expanding high-skilled immigration would reduce national debt by $20 trillion over 30 years.

The fatal flaw: The report explicitly assumes “neither labor substitution nor complementation” and “constant returns to scale.” Translation: it assumes removing 300,000 low-skilled workers per year causes zero disruption to labor markets, wages, or prices.

This ignores reality. Who picks the fruit? Processes meat? Builds houses? The model assumes these economic activities simply scale down proportionally with no price increases, wage effects, or industry disruptions—a “frictionless substitution” assumption that’s economically indefensible.

The report is sophisticated fiscal accounting masquerading as comprehensive cost-benefit analysis. It counts immigrant tax payments and benefit use while assuming away the primary channel through which immigration restriction affects the economy. That’s not a minor simplifying assumption—it’s assuming away the question

13) Howard Luks on the value of “exercise snacks”– just get moving every hour.

14) Derek Thompson interviews my AI guru, Ethan Mollick. Obviously, a must listen.

Relatedly, Claude now allows you to set some personal preferences. I added, “Please don’t just automatically tell me what I want to hear. Think of yourself as a thoughtful friend who provides useful feedback and will critique me and my ideas when appropriate.” and it has been a gamechanger. So great.

Also, I’ve done some “deep research” with Claude. Lawyers are going to be out of business (not really, but… impressive). I also turn on “extended thinking” for many of my tasks and waiting a little longer allows for some great answers.