Maybe I shouldn’t apologize for this newsletter being late, given that it is free. Part of me wants to be boldly and gloriously indifferent to any such responsibilities—you don’t like the free ice cream? Go buy your own!
But I am a copy monkey by nature, and indeed, that has been the foundation of my career. As the business consultants like to say, this is my Core Value Proposition: there will always be copy. Lots and lots of copy. Don’t like the copy you got? I’ve got more right here …
So one feels there’s a sort of implicit contract: sign up with me, and you’ll get copy on a regular basis. Maybe I don’t promise anything else, but there it is, pretty words all in a row. So failing to generate timely copy seems a violation of my implicit promise to the reader, or myself, or the universe. Someone, anyway.
However, I have a very good excuse: the Very Large Dog had some unexpected health problems, and this left me tired and surly and in no shape to put out a newsletter. He is also a Very Cute Dog, and he needed a great deal of company, and I swear, you’d have done the same thing yourself.
(The Very Large Dog is going on some new medication and will hopefully be fine, except for, you know, being eight years old, which is quite senior for a Very Large Dog.)
Anyway, I’m sorry, and the best I can do is try to make amends. Here, have a meme:
A tip of the hat to the Facebook reader from whom I stole this. I hope you find it as puckishly charming as I do. And if you’re not a huge nerd? … well, you can keep the apology, anyway.
And now, onwards to our somewhat irregularly scheduled program. Topic of the week is vaccines.
First I asked whether, and how, we should use vaccine passports:
… creating a vaccine passport creates an instrument of some coercive power; if such a thing exists, private entities will use it. Which of course is the point; advocates are trying to create a better incentive for vaccination than free doughnuts. All of us should be wary of initiatives that effectively create a condition of participating in public life — especially if coercion becomes a substitute for persuasion.
And yet we should remember that the unvaccinated aren’t the only ones at risk of being shut out of normal life; there are also the people whose immune systems can’t make good use of a vaccine. A recent study of 436 transplant patients nationwide, whose immune systems are suppressed to prevent rejection of their new organs, showed poor antibody response after the first shot of an mRNA vaccine. Between cancer patients, transplant recipients and people receiving treatment for autoimmune diseases, a lot of Americans are on immunosuppressive drugs. Shouldn’t we worry more about them than about the people who choose to stay vulnerable to covid-19?
Then I looked at the half-million excess deaths America experienced in 2020, and asked how many of those deaths were caused by the virus, how many by our reaction to it:
In some cases, we may never know whether to blame the virus, or our reaction to it. Notably, Alzheimer’s deaths increased 10 percent from 2019. Dementia patients are, of course, especially likely to live in nursing homes, among the places hardest hit by covid-19. But when those nursing homes isolated patients in their rooms to keep the virus from spreading, it was particularly catastrophic for those suffering with dementia. For frail individuals who can’t pass their days Facetiming friends or browsing the Internet, isolation was a profound torture that might have sent them into decline even if they never got covid-19.
Moving beyond the medical, we will have to reckon with the sharp spike in homicide across dozens of American cities. How much should we attribute to covid-19, how much to prior trends, how much to the deterioration of police-community relations or some other factor?
Elsewhere at the Washington Post
The Editorial Board urges Democrats to actually consider the plan to save the Post Office put forward by Trump’s Postmaster General:
Now comes Mr. DeJoy with a 10-year plan to fix the Postal Service — and many Democrats, still fuming over last year’s events, are in no mood to listen. Several in the House have already unveiled a bill — sardonically named for the postmaster general — to block his proposals. Others believe that what the Postal Service really needs is for President Biden to appoint new board members who will get rid of Mr. DeJoy.
Whether he stays or goes, though, reality won’t change: The Postal Service has a busted business model and $160 billion in unfunded liabilities and debt.
Michael Chertoff and N. McDonnell Ulsch say AI Companies are enabling genocide in China:
A failure by the United States and its allies to act could allow the Chinese party-state to continue to improve its repressive AI-based technology, persecuting religious and ethnic minorities, and exporting homegrown methods of repression even more aggressively than it does now. Such a scenario can and must be avoided.
And I just now had time to read Josh Rogin’s essay from March on how covid-19 hastened the decline of the US-China relationship. You should take the time right now.
Beijing saw in the pandemic both a challenge and an opportunity, a chance to demonstrate that its authoritarian, state-driven governance model was more efficient and effective than the messy liberal Western democracies. Because China was the first country to get hit by the virus, it was also the first country to deal with the consequences and come out on the other side. But the ways the CCP decided to use that advantage only turned more countries against it.
Finally, an absolutely must-read, not to mention truly, truly bonkers story about a woman who got pregnant while she already was pregnant:
The true number of superfetation cases is not known, but according to a report published in 2008 in the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, fewer than 10 instances of the phenomenon worldwide had been recorded at the time.
Substackery
Holistic admissions privilege the privileged even more than every other criteria:
Whoops! It turns out that, far from being a more “holistic” measure that rewards the well-rounded, college admissions essays correlate more strongly with family income than SATs do. (This is in part a function of the fact that, found to be .25 in the largest sample I am aware of, the correlation between SAT scores and family income is vastly overstated by liberals.) The inevitable result will simply to be to kick the can further; “we need even more holistic criteria than before!” But it might be more useful to have a hard conversation.
Did you know that 15% of all human ancestry comes from the peoples of the Eurasian steppe? Razib Khan has an epic essay on the most important history none of us knows:
But if the steppe looms so large in the story of our species and its development, why does it barely get a footnote? Where are all my fellow steppe-obsessed lay readers? Here, I think studying the steppe peoples brings up a fascinating aspect of historiography: when a people’s brilliance and originality translate into neither architecture nor texts, we are at great risk of underestimating or misunderstanding their contribution entirely.
Keira Bell, the plaintiff in the UK’s landmark Tavistock case about the protocols for treating gender dysphoric kids, tells her story at Persuasion:
By the time I got to the Tavistock, I was adamant that I needed to transition. It was the kind of brash assertion that’s typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation.
Browsing around the web
University faculty are, on average, exceedingly privileged people.
The internet, in capsule form.
Bring on the Cows of Chaos.
How does one go from kibbutznik to libertarian? Slowly, then all at once.
Majority of COVID cases in the US now come from the British variant.
Derek Lowe walks you through the two most important bits of recent vaccine news: The Astra Zeneca vaccine looks like it really may cause blood clots in a very small number of people; the Chinese vaccines apparently don’t work that well at all.
My takeaway remains that either is still considerably better than facing COVID unprotected, but it would be better still if we could ramp up the production of mRNA vaccines that, for now at least, look superior on almost every dimension.Did you understand all that stuff about the Muon anomaly? Yeah, me neither. Now I think I maybe kind of do, thanks to this handy cartoon.
How status-seeking binds and blinds us, and especially elites:
In short, people have a mechanism in their minds. It stops them from saying something that could lower their status, even if it’s true. And it propels them to say something that could increase their status, even if it’s false. Sometimes, local norms can push against this tendency. Certain communities (e.g., scientists) can obtain status among their peers for expressing truths. But if the norm is relaxed, people might default to seeking status over truth if status confers the greater reward.
Experimental autoimmune treatment puts advanced blood cancer into remission. Faster, please.
Learning the wrong lessons from a blocked canal:
Before the freeing of the ship, analysts made dire warnings about how the crisis in the canal proved the inherent instability of the globalized economy… The lesson of Suez is actually quite the opposite. Globalization does not increase fragility, but in fact makes supply chains robust against shocks. Once we understand this, we can see that many arguments for protectionism and investing heavily in American military primacy fall apart.
"the correlation between SAT scores and family income is vastly overstated by liberals"
I think that has the same methodological problem as studies that says income is only weakly correlated with IQ. If you ask, "Does this mean there are just as many people making over $100k with an IQ below 100 as above?" Well...no. Does IQ's relationship with income start to decline above 135? Yes. A highly ranked school is certain to have the smart children of CFOs and accounting firm partners making $750k and the children of professors, journalists, book editors, etc. making less than 100k. See SAT scores aren't correlated with SES! Well...it may be more complicated than that.
This is all lovely content but in all sincerity, please do prioritize hugging your dog.