Nothing new from me beyond the dish this week. I’ll write up big transactions when they happen, and I should have a board game review up next week, although the game I’m targeting I have yet to play, so we’ll see. EDIT: Hey, we got a trade last night, after I’d scheduled this post, so here’s my writeup of the Jonathan India-Brady Singer trade.
If you’re looking for me on social media, you’re most likely to find me on Bluesky and Threads. I’m winding things down on Twitter, just posting links there, and I locked the account due to the change in the blocking policy. You can also subscribe to my free email newsletter.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: This Esquire first-person longread on what it is like to be homeless in America in 2024 is beautifully told and especially important given what is to come. It should end up on the shortlist for a Pulitzer.
- And in a related story, Harvard magazine looks at the causes of our housing crisis, led by the lack of affordable housing (and of any will to build it) along with draconian zoning laws that pull the ladder up behind existing homeowners.
- Florida State Rep. Rick Roth (R) is a farmer turned politician who long fought attempts to crack down on immigration, but turned into an anti-immigrant hawk in 2023 – hurting his constituents but not him. Funny how that works!
- An Israeli student who shared four photos of the country’s attack on Gaza right after the Hamas attacks of October of 2023 found herself in prison for violating the country’s laws on “incitement” and her prospects for a career all but ruined.
- Trump’s new candidate for Attorney General is Pam Bondi, to whom his foundation donated $25,000 while she was investigating the foundation as Florida AG. She then closed the investigation. Is that a bribe? Do we want an Attorney General who may have taken a bribe, and changed her actions as a result of it?
- A police chief in West Virginia raped a teenager and then paid her $100 to cover it up, according to this investigative piece from the Washington Post.
- At least seven Oklahoma school districts refused to show the state’s school superintendent Ryan Walters’ video promoting his Christian nationalist, pro-Trump agent to students, as he attempted to mandate. Walters spent millions of dollars on “Trump Bibles,” paying twenty times the cost for a regular Bible just to curry favor.
- Our political system is horribly broken – and, more importantly, voters believe it is. Democrats have to change their entire strategy to reflect this.
- Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian offers 20 tips for surviving the coming “post-truth” world and potential autocracy.
- The eXodus: The Guardian will no longer post on X. This month, the site has lost users at the highest clip since Elon Musk took the site over. Truthdig makes the case for abandoning the site. Writer John Paul Brammer did the same. Meanwhile, Bluesky is exploding; my follower count has more than tripled in two weeks, and as a result I’m much more active there than anywhere else. Brian Kirby, a longtime marketing professional with a focus on children’s literature, argues that X is already dead, as a huge number of its accounts are inactive, so publishers should leave it.
- Startup Character.AI is hosting chatbots that groom users who indicate that they’re underage. I’m about as far from a Luddite as you can get, but the public applications of AI so far all suck. And they use too much energy.
- Roxane Gay writes, “Enough.”
- Some mainstream media outlets, including the usually reliable NPR, have already begun sanewashing the anti-vaccine loon RFK Jr, writes Benjamin Mazer in the Atlantic, who also says we should call him what he is – a crank.
- The New Republic’s Melody Schreiber writes that we can expect fewer vaccines and more E. Coli outbreaks under a Trump/RFK Jr administration – and that was before COVID denier Jay Bhattacharya’s name came up as a possible head of the NIH.
- Meanwhile, influenza H5N1, commonly known as bird flu, may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans. Great timing.
- Children who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 are much more likely to develop the life-threatening reaction MIS-C after infection, according to a new study.
- ProPublica reported on two maternal deaths that resulted from Georgia’s draconian abortion ban, using documents obtained from a state committee on maternal mortality. The state then fired the entire committee.
- Oliver Darcy interviewed The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about the Big Tech oligarchs who support and enable Trump.
- North Carolina state Sen. Danny Britt (R) responded to a constituent who raised concerns about the state’s abortion ban by telling her to “move to China” or Russia or Venezuela. As of Wednesday, I haven’t seen any apology or restorative action from Britt or his office.
- GQ interviewed Richard Gadd on what life has been like since Reindeer Baby burst on the scene and swept the Emmys.
- The Seattle Times reports on the effort by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to restore the Elwha River by building logjams to help undo over a century of damage wrought by humans.
- Ken White, aka Popehat, wrote about one of his own cases, defeating what he called “the most purely evil and abusive SLAPP suit” he has ever seen. A 21-year-old Stanford student named King Vanga was charged with gross vehicular manslaughter for a car accident that killed two people. He then sued the family members of the deceased for defamation because they contacted the school with the details of the criminal case. Really.
- Board game news: Fort Circle Games, publishers of Votes for Women and The Shores of Tripoli, has a new Kickstarter up for the SCOTUS-themed game First Monday in October.
- Board game designer Kory Heath, whose games include Zendo, Blockers, and this year’s hit game The Gang, took his own life this week at age 54. Boardgamegeek has a memoriam to Heath and links to other tributes.
- I’ve mentioned the death of board game evangelist Amber Cook a few times now. She left behind a 6-year-old son, and there are several fundraising efforts to try to help provide for his future, including a huge bundle of RPGs available for just $25, over 90% of their aggregate list prices.
This is more than a little self-serving, since my academic lab relies on federal research funding. With that in mind, if you live in a red state and find RFK Jr problematic as HHS Secretary, please contact your Senators. As HHS Secretary, he would have authority to fire NIH Institute Directors and reorganize Institutes. RFK Jr has floated pausing all infectious disease research and drug discovery for 8 years, which would be catastrophic for public health. He wants to redirect half of the NIH budget to study pseudoscience such as alternative medicine. Such reorganization would be massively disruptive to innovation and would also be a huge waste of taxpayer money. I would emphasize historical Republican support for biomedical research, and that it has been a driver of innovation and job creation in red states. And that there has historically been a very high ROI for NIH research, so we risk falling behind other competitors.
In addition to A Salty Scientist’s very cogent points, pausing or redirecting that funding means we won’t be training the next generation of scientists in these critical fields at a time that it is increasingly likely we will need them desperately. Not to mention that the National Institutes of Health have had for some time appropriate places to do (and have done a lot) of research into alternative medical treatments (National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Cancer Institute/Complementary and Alternative Medicine).