As I wrote in 2022, about why affirmative action eventually became untenable: “One of my favorite statistics for shocking Washingtonians is to reveal that in 1960, more than five out of every six accounted for in the census were White”.

https://twitter.com/stanfordnyc/status/1927337049683529849

This shouldn’t be shocking but it is; people tend to unconsciously assume that there must have been a lot of non-white people around, because that’s what they’re used to. They understand the numbers used to be lower, but not how much lower.

I've talked about this with lawyers because I've been repeatedly surprised when folks I didn't know very well would openly say to me that they were looking to hire a woman of color for X position. I understood that this was illegal even before SFFA; they very clearly did not.

https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1924503450731082151

How did this happen? Well, because effectively in liberal institutions there were three safe harbors that made this behavior seem safe.

This 1000%. I too used to think male strength was mostly about size until my super-skinny college boyfriend, who actually weighed less than me, effortlessly pinned me in a (playful) wrestling match, then held me down with one arm while he ostentatiously took a bite of his sandwich Even now people will sometimes name check me in the trans sports debate, along the lines of "sure, most men are bigger than most women, but women like Megan McArdle exist" and yes, I do exist, but no I am not as strong even as men a foot shorter than me.

The problem is that these extra payments are used to provide extra benefits, in the form of lower copays and add-ons like dental and vision. Cutting the payments wouldn't necessarily make the retirees less healthy, but it would make them mad as hell.

There is no magic pot of money that can be cut without pissing off voters. If there were, it would have been cut in previous hunts for revenue to spend on tax cuts or new benefits. Oh, and fun fact: in many states, you can't get Medigap insurance if you've been in Medicaid advantage. So you would be cutting the primary reason people choose MA, and those people would then find that they can't really transition back to traditional. The politics of that would be fun.

This is, btw, why the fantasies of getting US costs down to European levels through the power of single payer will never work. Governments are more vulnerable to this sort of pressure than private companies are, not less. "Call your congresscritter and ask them why they want patients to die!" is a super effective ad. (Then how did European countries do it? By holding costs down, not by getting providers to take a pay cut).

I think this is bad, but also think it's a sign of something I thought a lot about after 1/6: it's really important for elites to uphold election norms precisely because normies won't. They'll be happy to indulge in election denial if the political elite goes along.

https://twitter.com/DeanObeidallah/status/1854862864797798715

Democratic norms aren't a bedrock fact of democracy. They're a truce between opposing groups of political elites. Which is why it is in fact extremely important to have elites who are committed to those norms, and will swiftly crush even minor violations.

If you are making fun of how terrible all the food was in the 1950s, some things to keep in mind 🧵:

1) Many of the worst recipes are from cookbooks created to promote various foodstuffs, and probably no one except the poor domestic scientist who created them ever made them. 2) Most jello salad isn't as bad as you think.

3) People were much, much poorer--1950s housewives also preferred steak to spam, but their budget didn't.

4) Chicken and eggs used to be more expensive than beef, not a cheap weeknight staple.

I think the way to square this circle is to think of this not as a matter of people rejecting the moral values you care about, but as emphasizing different values that you both care about.

https://twitter.com/joshchafetz/status/1849632944790315095

Abortion is a good example of this; people tend to think of others as not caring about [the life of the baby/the autonomy of the mother] but in fact most people care about both. They're just choosing which they care about more.

So I wrote a column on my Dad's last year, and the brutal math of caring for the elderly. The column is here. I wrote it because many folks assume that we could save $$$$ by using home care to keep folks out of nursing homes, which is not really true. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…

I don't know all the reasons for the Secret Service failures in Butler. But having written a book about failure (she said, demurely pointing to the link: ) I'm pretty sure that one problem was that ... it had been a long time since anything went wrong.amazon.com/Up-Side-Down-F… Everything the secret service does is a tradeoff: between false positives and false negatives; between safety, and the cost that must be imposed on everyone else to make incremental safety gains; between ensuring nothing bad happens and ensuring that *nothing* happens.

Since the debate, people outside of Washington have been asking me the same question over and over: how did the media miss the Biden story?

So I asked a bunch of savvy political reporters that question, and wrote a column on it I know, conservatives, you think you know the answer: Democratic journalists were covering for a Democratic president. But that's not quite right, as I wrote in my column:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…

Fair critique, but a couple of counterpoints:

1) Pandemic has shifted residential demand outward from urban cores in cities generally thanks to hybrid work. Maybe companies will get most employees back in the office most of the time, but it hasn’t happened yet.

https://twitter.com/aaron_renn/status/1799997435890024888

2) Remote work has also shifted demand towards better weather and cheaper real estate, dimensions along which Chicago’s not super competitive.

I'm about to stop talking about the Trump conviction because no one is going to change their mind, but a final few thoughts: 1) I see a fair number of Trump haters who are dubious about the Bragg prosecution while supporting others. Last time I saw that was Kavanaugh and that didn't go the way the Indigo Blob thought it was going to play out.

Well, my man v. bear column (link in the thread below) has generated a lot of comments--predictably, given that the question was created by an engagement-baiting influencer in the first place. So it's time for another tweetstorm in which I answer the most common objections that were raised to the column, which is here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…

I’m sympathetic to protesters who are bewildered by the abrupt volte face, but as I lay out in todays column, think the reason it’s happening is that our civil rights regime is not designed to handle issues that produced conflicts between protected classes, rather than the clean “oppressor/oppressed “ frame our laws and customs assumed. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/… “Die, Zionist” has a disproportionate impact on Jewish students (as everyone would readily recognize if it was the Unite the Right folks camped in Columbia’s quad. This makes it challenging to adopt a posture of benign neglect towards clear rule violations

For whatever reason this post from 2022 went re-viral just as I was reading about various plans to make data more portable and it reminded me of how nerds simply cannot wrap their mind around the fact that most people simply do not want more granular control over their tech.

https://twitter.com/nathan_culley/status/1521927810809569281

Many years ago, I unwisely embroiled myself in the Linux wars, making the same point over and over: end users do not want a more flexible, customizable system. They want to trade power for simplicity and convenience.

Bunch of people assuming that the reason I am harping on the Biden age issue is that I want him to lose to Donald Trump. This is wrong; I'm voting for Biden, or whoever the non-Trump candidate is.

So why am I talking about it? Three reasons. First, Biden's obvious decline is a Thing That is True. My job is Saying Things That Are True (And Explaining What Follows). "Why are you saying this thing that is true?" is a dumb question to ask a journalist. It is particularly distressing when it comes from other journalists.

Conservatives who are reveling in Claudine Gay schadenfreude might pause to notice that Harvard eventually realized that protecting an insider who had violated institutional norms was destroying the institution, and course-corrected, while the GOP is still saddled with Trump. This makes an excellent lead-in to my column on that very topic: how progressives trying to fend off conservative attacks on academia instead ending up aping their opponent's worst mistakes: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/…

Well, Trump has endorsed Jim Jordan for Speaker, which should make things interesting, and provides a nice hook to discuss my column on why the Democrats made a mistake helping Gaetz oust McCarthy. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… As you might imagine this was very unpopular with my readers, who made various versions of the same arguments I was tackling in the column: that Republicans are bad, that they don't deserve Democratic help, that voters need to understand how bad they are.

Why your theory of how to punish Republicans out of acting bonkers is incorrect, a thread. Here is the mental model of many people on Twitter today: "GOP is acting bonkers! They are demanding bad things! They reneged on their budget deal! They coddle Trump! We must punish them until they stop this outrageous behavior! Thus, help Gaetz vote out McCarthy!"

So @AlyssaRosenberg and I both wrote columns today about work by @kearney_melissa and @BradWilcoxIFS about the importance of family structure to kids.

SPOILER ALERT: It's really important. Specifically, two parent families are important--which in the US, means marriage. @AlyssaRosenberg and I agree on a lot, but she focused on policy and framing--how liberals might build on the victories of the gay marriage movement by talking about access to marriage rather than what feels like finger wagging, and what sorts of policies they might pursue.