1/ So, @nytopinion has published a piece by Chris Rufo, the GOP’s ideological commissar,* on the primacy of liberal education over diversity.

As a measure of @nytimes’ and Rufo’s commitment to free speech, comments were disabled on that piece… 2/ That’s almost all you need to know, really. Both the Times—which is increasingly behaving as part of the penumbra that surrounds and enables the actual actors in right wing extremism—and Rufo are in the speech policing business, not the free expression one…

1/This is a short thread, inspired by @IBJIYONGI, to encourage you to buy my books–& hers, & anyone else's that might interest you. Books are best holiday offerings; literally the gifts that keep on giving.

I'll talk about a few of mine below. Please retweet to help a writer out 2/ First up: Money for Nothing:randomhousebooks.com/books/251546/

Why this one? If you're interested in the history of capitalism, & the roots of the awesome power & dangers associated with financial ideas, this book gets into all that through a ripping story of 1st gr8 stock market crash

Like @hiltzikm, I've long been an admirer of @propublica. Wh. is why their lab-leak "investigation" was so disappointing to me–shockingly below their usual standard.

Michael's got the details of just how bad a train wreck that piece has become: latimes.com/business/story… (paywall) 2/ The short version is that there were numerous red flags in the piece itself, and a minimal post-publication review–the kind an investigative journalism shop generally does before publication as a matter of course–reveals deep underlying flaws of fact and argument...

@jmwallach @soonergrunt @propublica Yes. But it is important to reming folks that since ~Jan. 2020 there has been a steadily expanding body of evidence on zoonosis and essentially nothing new to support a lab leak origin. And any new reporting has to deal w. that disparity, which the @propublica piece did not...1/ @jmwallach @soonergrunt @propublica 2/ On day 2 is what has been bugging me most is that–the absence of a coherent treatment of the single biggest counterargument to the piece...that the zoonosis case has accumulated on so many different fronts, from bat samples to molecular evolutionary trees. Also...

1/ I see @powellnyt is at it again. Major story on what he frames as the "purist" left assaulting free expression.

It's a readable and enraging story: he makes a strong case that unfair criticism derailed a good film.

We can't be sure, of course... 2/ Because Powell is a master at diminishing or dismissing those he sees as the bad guys by truncating quotes–nutpicking by omission, as it were. He routinely violates what used to be a fundamental ethic in journalism (and debate): presenting the opponent's best case before...

One more thing: why am I tweeting out about a book I'm reading?

I'm frustrated by much of my Twitter life: I spend a lot of time raging about various rage-worthy aspects of our time and place...and I sometimes delude myself that such tweeting is action, when it seems... 2/ much more likely that such efforts are howling into the void. (I do believe in amplifying political expression, but I am also damn sure it isn't enough.)

So I want to do something a bit different, in addition to and at least in part replacing my current twitter diet...

Back to my very occasional tweets about @seanmcarroll's #BiggestIdeas new book. Physics, equations included, for lay audiences.

Just finished ch 1, conservation. Two key ideas emerge: conservation laws are built into a universe w. symmetries, like the one we inhabit, and... 2/ the physicist's toolkit, or rather, approach, what Sean calls "spherical cow philosophy," is not (only) a joke, but also, in a way, turns on a basic property of reality.* Crucially, as Sean notes, that property doesn't obtain when stuff gets complicated...

*I know. Let it be.

1/ Idly thinking about demographics and Russia's medium term future here.

Via Wikipedia, there are ~48 million 15-64 y.o. Russian males. Birth rate is 1.5 kids/woman–below replacement–and Russian men have an avg. life expectancy of about 65 years (~12 years less than EU men)... 2/ There were roughly 600,000 active duty members of the Russian military in 2021 (again, Wikipedia), women making up ~41,000 of that total. Something on the order of 10% of that force has been reported killed in Ukraine, though that's a hugely uncertain number...

I have said, and I mean it, that I don't need to join yet one more fight I may or may not have been invited to.

But I will say that I'm coming to see a fundamental unseriousness in the "serious" (as in, not Weiss-hackery) critiques of social justice, speech, etc...1/2

https://twitter.com/JeffreyASachs/status/1560451556226568192

2/3 There are real threats to thought, expression, agency in American intellectual & cultural life. By far the most serious, those w. the most coercive state power behind them, come from the right. If you don't center your focus and analysis on that, you're not serious.

Almost 7 months of experience with an ebike, 5 in wh. it was my only personal transportation, it worked as a car replacement for most daily needs. Given that anecdata, a prediction: if car share becomes as easy as pilot programs suggest, many of us will need many fewer cars.

1/ 2/ I bought a used fancy one–a 2018 Riese and Muller Roadster for $1,750 (less than a new assembled RadPower city bike, for comparison). I bought two good sized panniers for another $150, and had to do about $200 of work on the bike to beef up the brakes. For that...

1/ Elite political media in the US is in crisis; most of those practicing it do not believe this is so.

That blindness is costly. For the country--e.g: all those stories about a gap between personal econ. prospects & perception are confessions of journalistic failure... 2/ Why, pray tell, do you think the public doesn't know about the broader economic phenomena that underpin their (positive) personal perception?

My thought: it's because of the way most political coverage frames the story in horserace terms. Inflation is bad for Biden...

1/ Reading this tweet & exchange w. @kchangnyt–a really good writer on math etc, btw–recalls an old joke on UK & US: 2 cultures separated by a common language.

Background: I criticized Chang, et al. & @nytimes for injecting a political judgment into coverage of the JWST reveal

https://twitter.com/kchangnyt/status/1547051117384704001

2/ I'm not going to prolong this: Chang & I clearly draw opposite conclusions from the same facts. He sees in those facts clear support for the @nytimes & @NYTScience choice to inject a claim into the JWST reveal that Biden did the event to distract from political problems...

I know I'm repeating itself, but the edifice of law that is supposed to ensure the stablity of a large and complex society has just been destroyed by 6 of the people to whom it was primarily entrusted. They've betrayed their oaths and their country.
1/ 2/ This has been building for a while, as the misnamed conservative wing of the court (they're radical) has selected a president and produced an increasingly outcome-oriented body of decisions. but now it's done, completely out in the open...

White men make up less than 30% of the US population. For most of our country's history, those same white men have had an overwhelming edge in gaining all of society's good things: position, fame, prestige, opportunity, etc. That's changed-far from enough-over the last century... 2/ Now that declining fraction of white guys face competition for societies goods from women, minorities, & the immigrants who keep the US pop. growing despite a birth rate that runs below replacement. It's tons harder for a mediocre white guy to go along to get ahead...

So I read this, as I think @nelliebowles is an excellent writer, and I value @TheAtlantic.

My reaction? Not French's. The piece is to me not excellent; it's (unsurprisingly) well written and I agree with plenty in it, but it's poorly argued at key junctures...

1/

https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1534690715774722049

2/ Not going to do a long thread here; I'm behind on my own MS. But it's treatment of Boudin is all over the map: it's his fault that retail crime is a scourge in SF, and yet it was a state-wide measure that turned thefts under $950 into misdemeanors...

I don't bother with @asymmetricinfo these days because I found when I did read her stuff that way too many of her arguments turned on assumptions not in evidence. Stumbled on her hot take re Musk and Twitter, and I find that's still true.

See, e.g., this:

1/ 2/ She makes 4 claims of fact: that twitter users are left leaning; advertisers are scared of them; the junior staff is progressive; and (by implication) is more so than sr. mgmt.

There are, of course, no cites for this in the tweet or her thread. So I checked her column...

I just read @JohnCassidy's fine column on whether Larry Summers is right RE inflation.

But: inflation is not a single phenomenon: bls.gov/news.release/c…
Diff. sectors have behave v. differently. Big jumps in energy prices, cars, & food, much less in medicine & housing. My q... 2/ How does Summers' story hold up when you look at inflation by sector. Energy prices don't fit his story, ISTM. Car price hikes are partly, maybe largely associated with supply-chain issues. Etc.

My bias: A lot of public macro talk is done at a cartoon level of abstraction...

I've now read @pbump's attempt to defuse the critique of elite media (esp. @nytpolitics) coverage of Trump's document thefts vs. its handling of Clinton's emails.

The attempt fails, ISTM and illustrates how even good members of failing institutions get caught in that failure. 1/ 2/ I don't have the time to do a systematic fisking of what @pbump gets wrong IMHO. But a couple of stray thoughts. There's still, STILL, no real introspection of why the press got it wrong with the Clinton story...

So, yeah, @nytpolitics & @deanbaquet. I'm just a quantum of the pajama clad twitter mob. @JamesFallows is not. His latest newsletter indicts your lousy editorial decisions re Trump's records crimes, vs., say, butter emailz. 1/ 2/ You f**ked up. You continue to do so. Observers inside and outside the gilded circle can see it plainly. That you don't, or won't, is a tragedy and a danger...

Here's the thing. Can we assess @maggieNYT & @nytpolitics news judgment and execution. Yes.

The two biggest stories in a generation: the rise of Trump and the GOP turn to open authoritarianism.

She and her colleagues botched the first: see the many failures of 2015-16 coverage.

https://twitter.com/AhNahChedz/status/1491923688538750994

2/ @nytpolitics as a desk has done a somewhat better job on the GOP turn to anti-democratic authoritarianism. Not a great one, and they've been routinely beaten to key developments by other venues. But not completely a fail either. @maggieNYT has not played a role there.

To be clear: I'm not suggesting that there's anything nefarious. I very much doubt it, & have no information or insight to suggest otherwise.

I'm noting the natural history of the organization: this is a lot of change in very important positions...

https://twitter.com/TomLevenson/status/1491880193237008404

2/ There are signals of continuity: the new provost is the fmr chancellor; the new chancellor is the fmr dean of @MIT_SHASS. We have no idea at all who will be candidates or the person chosen for the presidency, and that's, of course, the weightiest factor in future directions.