I posted an early draft ranking of just 30 names, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I’ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I’d like to at least see all the high school players get started.
No podcast this week as the guest I had lined up had to reschedule. Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, as I’ll be sending another one out this week.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Financial Times has a deep dive into how Putin blundered into Ukraine and has continued isolating himself from would-be advisers who might have helped him out of this mess. The writer posits that Putin may try to hold on until January of 2025, hoping we elect a Republican as President and thus pull our military support of Ukraine.
- Anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes is a must-read for me; her latest piece in the New Yorker covers how our mining of too much phosphorus and subsequent waste of much of it is choking our oceans while leading towards a bottleneck that threatens our food supply. The article also describes the world’s longest conveyor belt, a 61-mile track in the illegally annexed territory of the Western Sahara.
- A former employee came out with claims about malfeasance at a St. Louis medical center that treats transgender youth, telling her story to a newsletter author who doesn’t engage in any sort of fact-checking of stories. The Missouri Independent and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch both investigated and found no corroboration, finding instead that parents had nothing but praise for the center and the treatment their children received. Newsletters are fine for some types of content, but not for actual news.
- The New Republic profiled Dr. David Gorski, who has also blogged as Orac, and his battle against pseudoscience, quackery, and so-called “alternative” medicine online. (There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. If it works, it’s medicine.)
- I enjoyed this Slate story on the 25th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the bizarre, cultlike fandom that album has generated. The title track from that record remains one of my favorite songs to play & sing.
- The cesspool of Twitter had a debunked conspiracy theory trending earlier this week about Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. It’s just one of several that Republican legislators there continue to push as they’ve seen the state turn increasingly blue.
- There is no “lab leak theory.” There are a bunch of conspiracy theories, but no single, testable theory of how COVID-19 was supposedly engineered in and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. And the available evidence points to a zoonotic (natural) origin.
- If you saw anything about Washington, D.C., attempting to update its criminal code this week, with hysterical tweets about reducing penalties for certain crimes like carjacking, there’s a lot more to the story. Most of this would be solved by just making the district a state with the same autonomy as the other fifty have.
- Arkansas’ new education plan, which includes an extremely broad voucher program, is full of sops to banks and charter-school operators, and it’s also likely to gut public education in the state while favoring higher-income families. Sounds great!
- Tennessee jumps on the bandwagon by banning drag shows. There is no evidence any drag show has ever harmed anyone. There is, however, copious evidence that guns have. The choice to ban harmless entertainment should tell you everything about this legislature.
- Board game news: Restoration Games announced that they’re retiring the first two Unmatched sets, Cobble & Fog and Robin Hood vs. Big Foot, later this year, with no plans to reprint them.
- The Gamefound campaign for Huang, a new game from prolific designer Reiner Knizia, is fully funded with five days to go.
DC statehood is long overdue at this point. I’m tired of all the bad-faith arguments at this point. I’ve made this point before but I’m in a part of Virginia that was originally part of DC that Virginia took back during the Civil War and has kept ever since. Yet because of that, I have more rights than your average person in DC despite the fact that my office is in the district and I do a ton of business in it. Instead we have a city of 700,000 people that is subject to the random whims of various members of Congress all while having no voting representation in the House and Senate. Now if Congress wants to exempt DC residents from all federal taxes, let’s go for it. Until then, it’s a load of bs.
Looks like you’re missing a character in FT’s Putin article link.
https://www.ft.com/content/80002564-33e8-48fb-b734-44810afb7a49
Couldn’t the coronavirus have been isolated in a lab from an animal and then escaped? A lab leak wouldn’t need to involve a maliciously bioengineered virus. With the lack of transparency involved I don’t claim to know one way or another, but have been confused by reactions that equate any talk of a lab leak with a right wing conspiracy theory.
I think the leap from “lab leak” to conspiracy theories (nefarious intent by China, cover for mismanaged response) by partisans is what has caused many to want any discussion shut down.
It’s akin to the trans children transition therapy story Keith also links to, in that transphobic reaction to even the appearance of abuse or scandal causes the shut down of reasonable and necessary reporting on the subject. As usual, the extremes have hijacked the discussion, with (in this case) the socons/transphobes using any pretext to impose their draconian policies and the trans/progressive reaction — ranging from frustration to existential panic — seeking to limit discourse or eliminate it entirely. Neither position is completely healthy, but I understand one more than the other.
I was literally criticizing the Free Press last night for publishing Reed’s account without any semblance of corroboration. Of course, once I found out that Bari Weiss was attached to the Free Press, I immediately had reservations about the account and the motives behind publication.
Seeing it pop up in a Jonathan Chait column that lent it too much was also disappointing. He takes a lot of fire for his centrism, much of it unfair, but if Reed turns out to be unreliable it will justifiably bolster his detractors.
Reed’s account follows her sworn affidavit. That doesn’t mean it should be taken as gospel, but her accusations should be taken very seriously I’d think. The Missouri Independent and St. Louis Post-Dispatch stories are the ones showing more holes and misrepresentations the more people look into them.
That’s not true at all about “holes” and “misrepresentations.” You’re falling for the narrative that’s already formed among anti-trans media.
A sworn affidavit is worth about as much as the paper it’s written on. A religious zealot wouldn’t think twice about lying under oath if they thought it served a higher cause.
My overall take on the lab leak vs. spillover as a geneticist and molecular biologist, but not a virologist or epidemiologist. Both are plausible, and both have certainly caused pandemics in the past. From a global health perspective it’s important to do our best to help minimize both. From a spillover perspective, that means identifying the regions where spillover is most likely and to encourage policies that minimize human contact with animals in those regions. For lab leaks, it’s important to carefully scrutinize whether experiments that have the potential to cause pandemics are worth doing (is the knowledge gained worth the risks?–I don’t think that’s the case for much gain of function research) and whether proper safety protocols are in place (work with pathogens that are pandemic risk should absolutely not be performed under only BSL-2 conditions–as a grad student, I knew of several scientists getting ill from their study pathogen under those conditions, though all were treatable pathogens in those cases).
If SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab leak it was most certainly either due to accidental infection while cataloging whole lot of bat coronaviruses or from a virus engineered for studying determinants of infectivity/virulence. For the former hypothesis, the smoking gun would be to find virus isolates or genome sequences closely related to those the original Wuhan strain in the lab. For the latter, one would again need to find the progenitor Wuhan virus before and then after engineering. There would also need to be evidence that a researcher had COVID and then visited the wet market, because that’s where the first clusters of infections traced too. Because we don’t have that, I lean towards animal spillover as being the more parsimonious explanation. But, it seems that gain of function research was being done under BSL-2 conditions. Even if that did not lead to accidental release, that is a totally unacceptable risk to me. So I do hope that this causes NIH and institutional biosafety committees to more carefully scrutinize pathogen research.
“the available evidence points to a zoonotic (natural) origin”
So why do various intelligence agencies come to the conclusion (with varying degrees of certitude) that it is more likely a lab leak than a natural zoological origin?
Was there an effort to shut down anyone that promulgated the lab leak origin in 2020/2021?
Right now, we have a “low confidence” report from the Department of Energy, and a statement from the director of the FBI, the latter appointed by President Trump.
The available evidence is quite clear, even if two non-scientific agencies don’t accept it.
No, there was no “effort to shut down” people who argued for a lab leak; in fact, there’s a fair amount of publicly available research on the topic. Conspiracy theorists have also run wild on social media with claims of a lab leak that they can’t support with evidence. Their claims also tend to be unfalsifiable, which was the point of the link I posted.
Who knows? They haven’t shared their evidence. I’ve noticed many prominent scientists argue in favor of a lab leak, sometimes in well-respected peer-reviewed journals. NIH certainly looked into the possibility of a lab leak very early before coming to the conclusion that zoonotic spillover was more likely. I see no evidence that there was a concerted effort to shut people down.
I do think that within my own (scientific) community that the possibility of a lab leak was given too little credence, likely due to backlash against bad actors on the right promoting it as part of their xenophobic conspiracy theories. I’ve repeatedly said here and elsewhere that a lab leak even being plausible should spur us towards updating our biosafety protocols. I don’t feel that the conspiracy theorists really care much about that–they just want someone to punish.
So the Post-Dispatch not mentioning at all that one of their sources is a cofounder of a trans advocacy group, a group that helped created the gender center in question, isn’t a misrepresentation? I guess it’s more completely misleading. If Reed’s account is faulty, then it should be easy for any journalist to investigate. Unquestionably quoting critics of her story without any sort of skepticism doesn’t help uncover the truth.
Those on the left are just as guilty as following a narrative without doing any research whatsoever. This debate has become so toxic. Trans rights supporters are doing themselves no favor ignoring any and all criticism regarding gender care in this country.
#1: If you seriously believe that children are identifying as attack helicopters and are immediately being given puberty blockers and such based on that, you need to examine your relationship to reality.
#2: The Dispatch article you decry does mention their sources explicitly. The sourcing and the article both appear to be and are quite rigorous. To call this a “misrepresentation,” “misleading,” or “unquestionably quoting critics” is absurd. From the article:
How we reported this story
Jamie Reed does not name patients or parents in her Free Press story or sworn affidavit.
To check her claims, the Post-Dispatch contacted more than 30 people: patients, parents, therapists, doctors, and critics and supporters of Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
They include former employees, people who have testified in the Missouri Capitol and at St. Louis County Council meetings about proposed legislation affecting LGBTQ citizens, and names supplied by those who oppose medical care for transgender minors.
Reed and the Transgender Center’s doctors declined to comment.
From the second paragraph of the Dispatch article, there’s no mention that Kim Hutton co-founder of TransParent and lobbied for the creation of the clinic. Instead they pass her off simply as a concerned parent. That’s misleading.
And the main point of Reed’s accusations were patients being rushed onto puberty blockers and hormone treatments before full clinical assessments were completed. Saying children were given these treatments simply because they said they identified as helicopters is a gross distortion.
After hearing about the Tavistock scandal, and as more EU nations, including nations that were far ahead of the US in gender care, move to a more cautious, conservative approach to children’s gender care, the more believable scenario is the US is not being overly aggressive in treatments?? Sure.
The evidence on children’s gender care is shockingly thin and yet there are many that still push for treatments without the proper safeguards in place. The better approach might be to not completely disregard or rush to denounce anything that hints at that.
#1. Why is it relevant or shocking that a parent with a trans child would lobby for better healthcare options for their child? Parents with children with cancer perform the same advocacy for care/treatments that have *far* higher side effects and regret rates. Why is there no uproar against those parents?
#2. Reed’s reporting is refuted by anyone willing to go on record about it. Not sure why Reed’s claims (which are just gussied up attack helicopter stuff, hence my use) hold so much weight when they appear to be completely made up.
#3. W/r/t other nations, would you believe that other nations also have revanchist movements looking to eliminate trans healthcare? That maybe the same braying forces of capital are doing the same BS there? You mention a British “scandal”…perhaps try to understand why they are frequently referred to as “TERF island”?
#4. The evidence is not “shockingly thin” or even “thin.” You do not need to run an RCT on everything to know what’s correct, and more to the point, you cannot run an RCT on something like “being trans.” Trans people have existed as long as people have, and have faced unspeakable discrimination throughout the ages. We had a moment where we progressed somewhat on that, but now you’re participating in the concerted effort to roll back that progress and worse. Fix your heart
Must be easy to refute everything that doesn’t confirm your priors. Having a good heart means discarding anything and everything that shows we might be pushing treatment on children that have long lasting impacts that we don’t completely understand and whose benefits may not outweigh the risks. Give me a break.
I’d love to see a list of more than 3-5 studies that show the benefits of puberty blockers and hormone treatments for children. I won’t hold my breath. The evidence is just not there which should be disturbing to anyone considering this path for their own children.
“Having a good heart” means considering trans people as people. It means considering why you feel the need to concern troll the existential concerns of others. It means truly contemplating the moral question at hand. I hope you are able to get yourself off of the path you appear to be on.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23281683/trans-kids-transition-medicine-surgery
It must be nice being so morally superior than everyone. There’s nothing in anything I wrote that shows I don’t care as trans people as people. Great talking.
You are to a letter taking the “nice polite liberal” tact echoed by Chait/Yglesias/Singal/etc arguing that we need to limit the very healthcare that allows trans people to exist. How can you say with a straight face that you view them as people when you are arguing against their existence?
Still waiting for those studies that show the benefits of puberty blockers and hormone treatments outweigh the risks.
They’re all over the place. Some of them are referenced in the article I shared and the articles Keith has shared. At this point, it seems like you are purposefully ignoring them so you can continue in your bigotry.
I think all trans people deserve the same dignity and respect as anyone else. I guess it’s easier to call name instead of engaging honestly with someone you disagree with. Questioning medical treatment for children where the risks are not even fully known and potentially life altering does not make one a bigot. If the science here was so easily settled and the studies done have been completed with so much rigor, I’d think it would be rather easy to point to those studies.
I did not once call you a name. Your rhetoric is conveying bigoted positions so I correctly identified it as bigotry. No idea who you are or what your deal is beyond this BS, so I would not presume to judge you as person. Happy to judge your words and actions, though.
If you really think trans people deserve dignity, then maybe you can at least stop advocating for restrictions on essential medical care that a) has been the standard for decades and b) has lower regret rates than almost any medical care and c) has enormous, life changing benefits
FYI, these are the people whose rhetoric you are echoing. Not sure I would be so comfortable with such bedfellows: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/anti-trans-transgender-health-care-ban-legislation-bill-minors-children-lgbtq/
Questioning medical treatment for children where the risks are not even fully known and potentially life altering does not make one a bigot.
No, but there’s a lot wrong with your statement. Risks are often not fully known for medical treatments, especially life-saving ones, which puberty blockers are. We do know many of the adverse effects of puberty blockers, however, enough that doctors and parents can weigh the pros and cons without interference from the state – especially when the state’s approach is based not in science, but in religion and bigotry.
The decision to seek gender-affirming care affects no one but the patient. If that patient is a minor, the parents can make that decision in consultation with medical professionals. It’s none of your business or mine.
I see your point somewhat, but think that ignores the public health concerns. There currently is a lack of studies showing gender care for children outweighs the risks. I don’t know how that doesn’t fall under public health policy when parents are basing life altering decisions on faulty studies. Children’s gender care is currently not based on science. That’s the problem.
There is no “public health concern.” Being trans isn’t contagious, and neither is puberty blocker usage. This is an individual decision.
Your subsequent statements are truly just concern trolling. There’s plenty of research on gender-affirming care if you bother to look – it took me a few seconds to find one meta-analysis covering nine studies that found that the benefits, reducing suicidal ideation, outweighed any risks. Children’s gender care IS based on science. The opposition is not.
You’re just wrong on the quality of studies supporting children’s gender care. Point to any specific study and I can just as easily find a more rigorous analysis critiquing that study. People can name call journalists like Jesse Singal all they want, but at least he’s doing the research. And I really don’t understand the notion that if there are gender clinics pushing overly aggressive treatment on children it isn’t a matter of public health policy. Especially after the Tavistock crisis, there should be a thorough investigation of WU Transgender clinic, not a rush to quiet any criticisms.
Nobody here is name-calling Singal, but he did fall for a single source who appears to have committed a series of HIPAA violations, and he failed to corroborate any of her claims with independent sources (as did Weiss).
“Tavistock” is a popular rallying cry for anti-trans people, but an actual reading of the evidence shows that there is a need for more such clinics, and more providers who specialize in this field, as the demand for such health care has grown. One former patient expressing regret does not invalidate an entire health center or a type of health care.
You’re just repeating a whole bunch of dog-whistles for activists trying to eradicate trans people from public life. Can you present some independent thought on this, rather than just saying “Tavistock” and “public health” and offering false claims that scientists are suppressing contrary views?
If the science is so settled then it should be extremely easy to cite those that support the benefits of gender care for children. I’m not just throwing out words here. I’ve said why I think care that’s being presented as normal and safe and perhaps being pushed too aggressively on children is a matter of public health policy. You can choose to disagree, but the science is far from settled. If it was, I’m sure I’d see a link to many studies supporting that. I’m not trying to be a dick here, but there’s a reason why no one can point to those studies.