Since Al Laffer is in the news for being his 🙄self, I feel obligated to tell you of the time that my Dad gave me the charades clue "Laffer Curve" to act out.
I was 10.
"Everybody knows what this is," he insisted.
Journalists, man.
That same game that he also stuck me to act out "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy" which is an expression from the 1920s penchant for horrific brain surgery to address mental illness if you'd like to inflict this clue on your own family.
And that is how I learned about lobotomies at 10 years of age.
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Going back to the office for the first time in more than a year is like struggling to snap out of amnesia. Where are the cards and code I need to get into building? Don’t forget to bring reading glasses. Etc.
Tripped the alarm :(
Bring batteries and/or leave time to recharge wireless keyboards and mouse
Pandemic transit outages/curtailed hours and a dead cell phone just lead me to a 2 hr transit saga that felt like NYC in the 90s, AMA...
Shout out to both the BART station agent who, b/c no trains were running *at all* and didn’t have the right charger for my phone walked me a few blocks to the muni stop under the freeway (which I eventually abandoned but) and
And, after the wait under the freeway got decidedly much dicier, the bartender I eventually found and asked “this is very old school, but could you call me a cab” did so.
Man, though, pandemic transit when you can’t check timetables is A THING
1/ I learned *so much* from listening to @alibreland and @Fer_Echavarri discuss both the historic forms of extremism that are merging and recombining right now and...GULP...the purchase it is getting among Gen Zers. apple.co/3fIzWrt
2/ The other part of our mini series on extremists and Jan 6 insurrectionists is @smencimer's reporting on the radicalization of Stanford-educated doctor/lawyer Simone Gold: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…
.@msjpauly has a big investigation into the shady science and pitch of air-purifier companies that every parent/teacher/school administrator/building manager/education and environmental reporter/resident of fire-prone states will want to read: motherjones.com/politics/2021/…
A lot of what is being touted as cutting edge and "space-age" airpurifier tech has dubious efficacy—and in some instances may be making the air MORE unhealthy. motherjones.com/politics/2021/…
1/ We ran really good piece by @rowanjacobsen on the lab leak theory a year ago, that also got into how Trump's racism was undermining attempts to accurately assess—and also his administration's failure to heed warnings about such possibilities.
2/ The other reason that people maybe went too far in discounting any *possibility* of a lab leak was that Tom Cotton and others were conflating an accidental leak of coronaviruses being studied out of prevention with a leak of a designed bioweapon. No.
3/ Whether or not there was a leak, whether or not that could ever be/been ascertained even with full transparency, what we HAVE learned is that freighting an investigation with racism and jingoism does not a good investigation make.