I’m reading an article about Kamala Harris in the October 21st New Yorker. This paragraph caught my eye: “When Harris talks of the origins of her interest in government, she lingers on a moment from her time in Montreal: a friend from Westmount High, Wanda Kagan, was being physically and sexually abused at home, and […]
A common right-wing grievance is that undocumented (“illegal”) immigrants are taking all the jobs. In particular, that they’re stealing jobs from native-born Americans. What’s the evidence? If it were true that immigrants were stealing jobs from native born Americans, then if you plotted labor force participation by native- and foreign-born over time, they would have […]
Donald Trump and JD Vance are campaigning on xenophobia. There’s no evidence that immigrants are any sort of threat to America, and the data show that immigrants commit crimes at *lower* rates than American citizens. Sadly, though, fear of the other seems to work in America: “Jeffrey Balogh, a resident of Erie, said at that […]
I had an email exchange a couple days ago with Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo about polls (which he’s written a lot about recently) and the election betting market (which he had never mentioned). Yesterday, he used our exchange as a jumping off point to explain why he doesn’t believe the betting market […]
The old model of a single doc running a practice is disappearing in America. Between the overhead and the reduced compensation, this model of health care delivery looks increasingly anachronistic. When I started as an assistant professor at a medical school in 1987, there was a lot of money sloshing around. Patients and their insurance […]
I’ve posted here before about herd immunity. Prior to inoculation/vaccination, herd immunity was the result of enough people dying or surviving that the transmission of the disease (plague, smallpox, etc) was arrested in that population until the next generation of uninfected people grew up, whereupon the substrate for another round of death appeared. But let’s […]
While I was raised Roman Catholic, I had already rejected the RCC teaching on abortion by the time I started high school. That teaching was not grounded in the Bible, nor was it grounded in biological science. Most human conceptuses never make it to term, making God the greatest abortionist of all time. And mammalian […]
Vaccines are an unalloyed triumph of public health. That Donald Trump is attacking vaccines—any vaccines—is obscene. “ . . . on at least 17 occasions this year, Trump has promised to cut funding to schools that mandate vaccines. Campaign spokespeople have previously said that pledge would apply only to schools with COVID mandates. But speeches […]
Last year, mRNA vaccines won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This morning found RNA once again the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. By the time I finished college, RNA was familiar to me as a family of biopolymers that together specified the manufacture of proteins in cells. Ribosomal RNA […]
From Prof. Timothy Snyder’s substack “Thinking about…” Shared with permission: “Think about the politicians Trump idolizes, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The first undid a democracy through fake emergencies, the second through persistent constitutional abuse. It is not hard to see why Trump likes them. “Now consider the Russian and Hungarian […]