Jack

The post Self-doubt as a barrier appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post The Thai coronavirus paradox appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post New York City facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post How Canada was populated, and depopulated appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post The economy of Lebanon is collapsing appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The post Which country has had the best response to the coronavirus? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

• Two recent studies signal major breakthroughs in solar energy that could make solar panels cheaper and more efficient.
• In the first, researchers uncovered a method of converting low-wavelength light that's invisible to the human eye into electricity, suggesting more energy can be harvested from sunlight.
• Another study suggests that silicon solar panels could be replaced with a material called perovskites, which is cheaper and more lightweight.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

New discoveries in solar energy could make it cheaper and more efficient to transform sunlight into electricity, potentially reshaping the renewable energy market.

The breakthroughs were featured in two recent studies, published in Nature Energy and Nature Photonics and first reported by The Independent. While solar is traditionally seen as less energy-efficient than other resources, the new discoveries could change that.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: How waste is dealt with on the world's largest cruise ship

See Also:

• Elon Musk and coronavirus skeptic Alex Berenson reportedly discussed starting their own publication
• OnePlus, the small tech company taking on Apple and Samsung, is about to launch a super-cheap 5G smartphone — here's everything we know about it so far
• Apple is facing a class-action lawsuit that alleges an iTunes gift card scam has swindled $1 billion from customers, with $300 million of that landing in the company's pockets

• Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt is leading a federal initiative to launch a university that would train a new generation of tech workers for the government, per a One Zero report.
• The school, named the US Digital Service Academy, looks to rival Stanford and MIT, two established tech talent pools.
• National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) — an organization created to push the US ahead in the race for artificial intelligence — voted unanimously in a meeting Monday to recommend the university to Congress.
• Schmidt left his role as a technical advisor at Google in February amid his increased involvement in affairs pertaining to military technology.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants to help funnel tech talent into government work.

According to a report from One Zero's Dave Gershgorn, Schmidt is teaming up with former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work to form a federal commission and kick off a university called the US Digital Service Academy that would train new classes of coders for the US. See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: How waste is dealt with on the world's largest cruise ship

See Also:

• Microsoft's president raised concerns about Apple's App Store rules to US lawmakers just before the CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are set to testify before Congress
• In March, Trump announced Google would build a coronavirus testing tool. Some employees working on it describe exhausting conditions, stress, and tears as they work around-the-clock to pull it off.
• Stop trying to make more Silicon Valleys, VC Brad Feld argues in a new book that comes just as techies are relocating to cities across the US

SEE ALSO: Google employees say the company culture that made it famous has almost entirely vanished, as it continues to be less transparent and more 'corporate'

. . . but Covid-19 is interested in Trump.

It seems that Trump has gotten bored with the whole Covid-19 thing:

President Donald Trump’s failure to contain the coronavirus outbreak and his refusal to promote clear public-health guidelines have left many senior Republicans despairing that he will ever play a constructive role in addressing the crisis, with some concluding they must work around Trump and ignore or even contradict his pronouncements.

In recent days, some of the most prominent figures in the GOP outside the White House have broken with Trump over issues like the value of wearing a mask in public and heeding the advice of health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom the president and other hard-right figures within the administration have subjected to caustic personal criticism.

They appear to be spurred by several overlapping forces, including deteriorating conditions in their own states, Trump’s seeming indifference to the problem and the approach of a presidential election in which Trump is badly lagging his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, in the polls.

Once-reticent Republican governors are now issuing orders on mask-wearing and business restrictions that run counter to Trump’s demands. Some of those governors have been holding late-night phone calls among themselves to trade ideas and grievances; they have sought out partners in the administration other than the president, including Vice President Mike Pence, who, despite echoing Trump in public, is seen by governors as far more attentive to the continuing disaster.

“The president got bored with it,” David Carney, an adviser to the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, said of the pandemic. He noted that Abbott directs his requests to Pence, with whom he speaks two to three times a week.

Playing golf in Palm Beach is so much more fun.

Question for those of you who laughed when I said Trump was the worst president in US history. Be honest. Could imagine any other president showing such total disinterest in doing anything at all about one of the greatest crises of the 21st century? Seriously?

PS. In case you don’t know, this is a reference to Trotsky’s famous remark:

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you

Hundreds of academics in the linguistics community signed an open letter earlier this month attacking Steven Pinker, one of their field’s most prominent scholars, for six tweets and a passage from one of his best-selling books. Whatever their intentions, they were never going to succeed in intimidating the famous, tenured Harvard professor. But they did send a message to less powerful scholars that certain opinions, publicly stated, could result in professional sanction.

The chilling effect that creates, especially among linguists without tenure, wouldn’t be cause for alarm if the speech in question were obviously and egregiously improper; if it consisted, for example, of racial slurs or open bigotry. But the hundreds of academics who targeted Pinker were not merely reaffirming sensible, widely agreed upon taboos. They were trying to radically narrow the bounds of acceptable speech and inquiry. A closer look at the letter lays bare the specific ideological orthodoxies and political tests that at least hundreds of linguists now feel comfortable openly imposing on their colleagues.

[Eliot A. Cohen: A tale of two letters]

The first thing to note is the letter’s acknowledgment that the denunciation itself and its call for the Linguistic Society of America to remove Pinker from its list of “distinguished academic fellows and media experts” are not grounded in any claim about Pinker’s scholarly chops. The signatories have no concern about his “academic contributions as a linguist, psychologist and cognitive scientist.”

So what do they have against Pinker? Four passages convey the argument.

The first passage:

We set aside questions of Dr. Pinker’s tendency to move in the proximity of what The Guardian called a revival of “scientific racism”, his public support for David Brooks (who has been argued to be a proponent of “gender essentialism”), his expert testimonial in favor of Jeffrey Epstein (which Dr. Pinker now regrets), or his dubious past stances on rape and feminism.

In the first clause of this indictment, the signatories do not accuse Pinker of “scientific racism” with the attendant obligation to substantiate the charge. They merely claim that Pinker tends to “move” in “the proximity” of what one newspaper “called” a revival of scientific racism. These are the same tenuous, abuse-prone, guilty-by-association tactics that the far right has used to tar academics by linking them to communism or Islamism. The letter links to a Pinker tweet that states, “The Bell Curve: I don’t agree with it on race, but public discussion of the book has been ignorant and dishonest”––in other words, a tweet that repudiates rather than validates the part of the book that critics attacked as racist––and to a 2006 article Pinker published in The New Republic reviewing the work of three researchers from the University of Utah who argued, per Pinker’s description of their Journal of Biosocial Science paper, “that Ashkenazi Jews have a genetic advantage in intelligence, and that the advantage arose from natural selection for success in middleman occupations (moneylending, selling, and estate management) during the first millennium of their existence in northern Europe, from about 800 C.E. to 1600 C.E.” Pinker reviewed evidence for and against their hypothesis at length, reached no solid conclusion of his own, highlighted the potential downsides of such research and the problems with banning it, and did all this in a context he understood as follows:

The idea of innate Jewish intelligence is certainly an improvement over the infamous alternative generalization, a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. And attention to the talents needed in the middleman niche (whether they are biological or cultural) could benefit other middleman minorities, such as Armenians, Lebanese, Ibos, and overseas Chinese and Indians, who have also been targets of vicious persecution because of their economic success. And yet the dangers are real.

This seems rather far afield and easily distinguishable from favoring a revival of scientific racism.

The second clause, about David Brooks, is doubly remarkable: first, because the signatories imply that publicly supporting the centrist New York Times columnist and best-selling author is somehow beyond the pale for linguists in good standing, and second, because they conflate agreement with a newspaper column with public support for the columnist.

Next, the signatories suggest that a linguist who provides expert textual analysis of a criminal statute––which is the service Pinker provided for Epstein, apparently at the behest of Pinker’s Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz––is thereby sullied with the crimes of the defendant. Such an attitude would, of course, interfere with the ability to mount adequate legal defenses and challenge prosecutors.

The last clause, about Pinker’s allegedly dubious stances on rape and feminism, points to the feminist Kate Manne’s critiques of the linguist’s comments on the statistical frequency of deadly hate crimes against women, an empirical question, and on whether rape is exclusively about power or partly about sex, a matter of ongoing scholarly debate.

The letter’s passage conveys these messages to linguists: avoid anything that could be seen as “moving in the proximity” of problematic beliefs, avoid tweeting links to the work of any newspaper columnist who has any problematic belief or risk being tarred with that belief, avoid giving expert analysis of language in the criminal cases if the defendant stands accused of heinous crimes, and don’t depart from feminist orthodoxies. Already, the signatories have implied a severely constrained, highly ideological view of acceptable behavior, even before their primary critique.

The second passage:

We aim to show here Dr. Pinker as a public figure has a pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them. Below, we document six relevant occasions that show how Dr. Pinker’s behavior is systematically and directly at odds with the LSA’s stated aims.

The “six relevant occasions” of ostensibly bad behavior include one passage from Pinker’s best-selling book The Better Angels of Our Nature and a handful of tweets.

In this telling, a scholar can be guilty of “drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence” not as a result of speaking over anyone or suppressing their speech, but merely by publishing claims of his own. What’s more, the signatories imply that scholars can transgress against professional standards if they speak at the wrong time, namely “in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them.”

[Graeme Wood: The cowardice of open letters]

Notice, too, how this passage stereotypes “people suffering from racist and sexist violence” as if they are a monolith that shares the highly particular views of the signatories. One allegedly problematic Pinker tweet stating “Don’t abolish the police,” in fact, expresses a viewpoint that is shared by a majority of every demographic group in America. People of every race and gender subscribe to the views he has expressed––for example, that a mass shooting at UC Santa Barbara was statistically anomalous, that too many Black and white people are killed by police, that both over-policing and under-policing are problems.

The third passage:

On June 3rd 2020, during historic Black Lives Matter protests in response to violent racist killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many many others, Dr. Pinker chose to publicly co-opt the academic work of a Black social scientist to further his deflationary agenda.

The letter included a screenshot of this Pinker tweet from June:

Harvard Social Science Dean Lawrence Bobo did the research I've cited on the decline of overt racism in the US. Here he reflects (w cautious optimism) on race relations in the the context of police killings of black men https://t.co/LAJeFjtCey via @Harvard pic.twitter.com/zXdejdBv3q

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) June 3, 2020

Applying the standards the signatories set forth, a linguist may violate professional standards by citing a Black academic, with the core scholarly practice of citation selectively reframed as co-option.

The signatories go on to claim that Pinker “misrepresents” the work of that scholar. That is at least the sort of claim that ought to affect the reputation and standing of an academic, but the signatories do not substantiate it. In their telling, the social scientist in question “mainly expressed the hope he felt that the protests might spark genuine change, in keeping with his belief in the ultimate goodness of humanity.” Even if that is an accurate characterization, it does not follow that Pinker misrepresented the scholar’s work.

The fourth passage:

On June 14th 2020, Dr. Pinker uses the dogwhistle “urban crime/violence” in two public tweets (neither of his sources used the term) … “Urban”, as a dogwhistle, signals covert and, crucially, deniable support of views that essentialize Black people as lesser-than, and, often, as criminals.

Here are Pinker’s two tweets:

Don’t abolish the police. Patrick Sharkey, researcher on urban violence & its decline, writes: “Cops prevent violence. But they aren’t the only ones who can do it.” https://t.co/L8e4EIIyfb

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) June 14, 2020

Another expert on urban Crime, Ron Brunson, points out: Protests focus on over-policing. But under-policing is also deadly. https://t.co/BvuoYDBPaH

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) June 14, 2020

The notion that Pinker departed from language used by or generally associated with his sources is dishonest. Patrick Sharkey published a 2018 New York Times op-ed titled “Two Lessons of the Urban Crime Decline.” On the cover of Sharkey’s book Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, the urban-studies theorist Richard Florida states, “Sharkey, the leading young scholar of urban crime and concentrated poverty, brilliantly dissects the causes of the great urban crime decline that has brought our great cities back to life, and outlines what it will take to ensure that our cities remain safe, secure, better, and more equitable places for all.”

When The New Yorker quoted Sharkey, it used the phrase urban crime too. Rod Brunson has used the term urban crime in his published writing. Nothing in either of Pinker’s straightforward tweets essentializes Black people or “signals” or implies that Black people are lesser than, and the phrase urban crime is not at all suspect when identifying scholars who specifically study and publish on crime in cities. As Pinker himself later observed, “Dog-whistling is an intriguing exegetical technique in which you can claim that anyone says anything, because you can easily hear the alleged dog-whistles that aren’t in the actual literal contents of what the person says.”

No one engaged in public life could be confident of avoiding speech that might be deemed problematic by the standards used in the Pinker letter. I have not addressed every complaint it raises. A few are in the realm of legitimate criticism. Had I edited his book Better Angels, I’d have advised Pinker against describing Bernie Goetz, who shot four men on the New York City subway in 1984, as “mild-mannered.” But one needn’t side with Pinker or against his detractors on every particular to disapprove of the signatories’ methods: poring over years of individual tweets, asserting uncharitable interpretations of those they highlight, assigning guilt by association, and imposing multiple orthodoxies that are incompatible with academic freedom. (They also made factual errors, as noted by Mother Jones.)

[Yascha Mounk: Americans strongly dislike PC culture]

Why did hundreds of academics sign the letter and endeavor to have Pinker removed from the Linguistic Society of America’s list of “distinguished academic fellows and media experts”? The explanation they offered is hard to accept. “Often, fellows are seen as the first line of academic linguistic authority, and trustworthy sources of linguistic knowledge,” they wrote. “Lay people and members of the press reach out to fellows and media experts for official statements. We feel that fellows therefore have a responsibility that comes with the honor, credibility, and visibility allotted them by their distinguished appointment.” But Pinker’s prestige doesn’t come from the list. And his visibility to members of the press and the public far exceeds that of the list.

Shaun Cammack, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, argued that, despite their stated aims, the signatories were sending a message to less powerful scholars:

This letter wasn’t really about Pinker at all. In fact, it has a very specific function—to dissuade lesser-known academics and students from questioning the ideological consensus. The letter says, in not so few words: “It doesn’t matter if you’re Steven f***ing Pinker. If you don’t agree with our ideological prescriptions, you don’t belong here.”

The letter is really directed towards you—the unknown academic, the young linguist, the graduate student. And in this particular goal of dissuading dissent, it will undoubtedly be successful … You are not Steven Pinker, and Noam Chomksy and others probably aren’t going to come to your defence when you get sanctioned for expressing the wrong opinion. Not because they don’t believe in free speech, but because they won’t even be aware of your case. There will be no articles lambasting and criticising the cancellers. Your cancellation will be a blip on the radar and the academic world will chug along without you.

Charleen Adams, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health who holds a master’s degree in applied linguistics, called the letter’s demands “reactive and authoritarian,” and likened it to a performative ritual by a mob seeking purification. The Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter, an Atlantic contributor, wrote on Twitter, “An organization dedicated to linguistic analysis must punish a leading, brilliant scholar because in the wake of George Floyd's murder, his politics aren't sufficiently leftist? Folks, it’s time to stand this gospel down.”

To me, the motivations behind the letter, however well-intentioned or malign, altruistic or power-seeking, quasi-religious or rational, matter less than what the attack reveals about the academy. The desire to significantly narrow the bounds of acceptable speech is not a fringe proposition; it is a project that hundreds of people in a single academic field are willing to pursue openly. While tenured professors can reject newly expansive views of verboten speech and ideas without fearing the loss of their livelihood, scholars without tenure and younger linguists applying to graduate school or working toward graduate degrees will feel most constrained.

New York magazine interviewed David Shor, the Democratic campaign consultant who was recently cancelled by the left. Some of his comments caught my eye:

The basic political argument since the French Revolution has been the left saying, “Let’s make things more fair,” and the right saying, “If we do that, it will lead to chaos and threaten your family.” . . .

Other research has shown that messaging centered around the potential for cooperation and positive-sum change really appeals to educated people, while messaging that emphasizes zero-sum conflict resonates much more with non-college-educated people. Arguably, this is because college-educated professionals live really blessed lives filled with mutually beneficial exchange, while negative-sum conflicts play a very big part of working-class people’s lives, in ways that richer people are sheltered from. . . .

Black voters trended Republican in 2016. Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican. In Florida, Democratic senator Bill Nelson did 2 or 3 points better than Clinton among white voters but lost because he did considerably worse than her among Black and Hispanic voters. We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too. I think there’s a lot of denial about this fact.

I don’t think there are obvious answers as to why this is happening. But non-college-educated white voters and non-college-educated nonwhite voters have a lot in common with each other culturally. So as the salience of cultural issues with strong education-based splits increases — whether it’s gender politics or authoritarianism or immigration — it would make sense that we’d see some convergence between non-college-educated voters across racial lines. . . .

There’s this sense in left-wing politics that rich people have disproportionate political influence and power. Well, we’ve never had an industrialized society where the richest and most powerful people were as liberal as they are now in the U.S. You know, controlling for education, very rich people still lean Republican. But we’re at a point now where, if you look at Stanford Law School, the ratio of students in the college Democrats to students in the college Republicans is something like 20-to-1. . . .

Why did Heidi Heitkamp vote to deregulate banks in 2018, when the median voter in North Dakota doesn’t want looser regulations on banks? But the thing is, while that median voter doesn’t want to deregulate banks, that voter doesn’t want a senator who is bad for business in North Dakota. And so if the North Dakota business community signals that it doesn’t like Heidi Heitkamp, that’s really bad for Heidi Heitkamp, because business has a lot of cultural power. . . .

So the other positive thing is that age polarization has also gone up. It’s not just that every new generation is more Democratic. Something much weirder has happened. People who were 18 years old in 2012 have swung about 12 points toward Democrats, while people who were 65 years old in that year have since swung like eight points toward Republicans. . . .

The Electoral College bias is now such that realistically we [Dems] have to win by 3.5 to 4 percent in order to win presidential elections.

I suspect he’s right about almost everything.

Andrew Sullivan had the following to say on leaving New York magazine:

And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.

It seems to me that if this conservatism is so foul that many of my peers are embarrassed to be working at the same magazine, then I have no idea what version of conservatism could ever be tolerated. And that’s fine. We have freedom of association in this country, and if the mainstream media want to cut ties with even moderate anti-Trump conservatives, because they won’t bend the knee to critical theory’s version of reality, that’s their prerogative.

The NYT and New York magazine seem determined to commit intellectual suicide. But have no fear; there will always be a place on the internet for good ideas:

If the mainstream media will not host a diversity of opinion, or puts the “moral clarity” of some self-appointed saints before the goal of objectivity in reporting, if it treats writers as mere avatars for their race and gender or gender identity, rather than as unique individuals whose identity is largely irrelevant, then the nonmainstream needs to pick up the slack.

• Apple has won an appeal against an EU order to pay 13 billion euros ($15 billion) in back taxes to Ireland, per a ruling on Wednesday by Europe's second-highest court.
• The EU ordered Apple to cough up the tax in 2016 after ruling that the firm had benefited from illegal state aid from Ireland, a low-tax regime.
• According to the European Commission, Apple has benefited from reduced taxes in Ireland for two decades, allegedly paying as little as 0.005% corporate tax in 2014.
• Apple welcomed Wednesday's decision by the EU General Court, saying it was the largest taxpayer in the world.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple has won an appeal against paying $15 billion in back taxes to Ireland.

On Wednesday the EU General Court annulled a European Commission order that forced Apple to pay 13 billion euros ($15 billion) in back taxes.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: Why thoroughbred horse semen is the world's most expensive liquid

See Also:

• All of Apple's upcoming MacBooks running on its new chip may have just leaked
• You can use text-to-speech in the Kindle app on an iPad using an accessibility feature — here's how to turn it on
• How to reset your Apple ID password in 3 different ways if you've forgotten it or lost your device

The post Our regulatory state is failing us, antibodies edition appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Federal law bans professional gun dealers from selling handguns to 18-to-20-year-olds, but doesn't ban 18-to-20-year-olds from buying handguns from nonprofessional sellers (so-called "private sales"). That's one effect of Congress's decision not to mandate background checks for private sales. As a result, 18-to-20-year-olds are practically able to buy handguns, though they have fewer choices and have to go through more of a hassle.

Virginia law does mandate that all gun sales go through dealers, and thus be subject to a background check, which 18-to-20-year-olds can't pass; as a result, 18-to-20-year-olds in Virginia can no longer buy handguns. That, Judge F. Patrick Yeatts held today (in Elhert v. Settle), is likely unconstitutional: Though governments has have historically been able to restrict gun sales to minors, the age of majority is now 18 in Virginia (though it was largely 21 throughout the U.S. until about 1970), so 18-to-20-year-olds are fully protected by the Virginia Constitution's right to bear arms provision. Because of this, Judge Yeatts temporarily blocked the enforcement of the law against 18-to-20-year-olds (though I expect the state will appeal).

For more on this question generally, see this post by David Kopel and this post of mine.

The California foie gras statute provides,

A product may not be sold in California if it is the result of force feeding a bird for the purpose of enlarging the bird's liver beyond normal size.

Today, in Association des Eleveurs de Canards et D'Oies du Quebec v. Harris (C.D. Cal.), Judge Stephen V. Wilson interpreted this not to include situations where

• The Seller is located outside of California.
• The foie gras being purchased is not present within California at the time of sale.
• The transaction is processed outside of California (via phone, fax, email, website, or
  otherwise).
• Payment is received and processed outside of California, and
• The foie [gras] is given to the purchaser or a third-party delivery service outside of
  California, and "[t]he shipping company [or purchaser] thereafter transports the product to the recipient designated by the purchaser," even if the recipient is in California.

UPDATE 7/15/2020 10:20 am: I originally wrote, foie gras "could be on the menu," but I realize now that this suggests that it could be distributed further by restaurants, and some news accounts so suggest; but, just to be clear, the decision expressly deals with people receiving it in California, and not with people further reselling it: "No relief is offered, for instance, 'to sellers of Hudson Valley's and Palmex's foie gras products who are located within California (e.g., restaurants) [who] have been forced to stop selling them to purchasers in California ….'"

So the key beneficiaries of this particular decision are people who buy this for their own homes (and those who sell remotely to them), or for catered corporate and organizational events where one can plausibly say that the foie gras isn't being further "sold" in California. Query whether restaurants would also be able to distribute the foie gras as a supposedly free "amuse bouche" add-on to an expensive meal, which some restaurants have apparently done.

Around 1989, when I lived in San Francisco, I spent too much time in little rooms with transit advocates (and some transit professionals who could not be named) complaining about Muni Metro, the combined surface-subway light rail system.  It looked like this and still does, except that the T line was added more recently.  Note the r0ute letter names in the lower left.

The segment with 3-5 lines on it, from Embarcadero to West Portal, is the underground segment, which carries the heaviest loads through the densest part of the city.

It had always been wildly unreliable.  The five lines that ran through it (J, K, L, M, and N) always came in sequences of pure arithmetic randomness: N, J, M, K, J, N, N, K, K, M, N, J, L.  (Finally, my “L”!  But of course, after such a long gap, it’s crush-loaded and I can’t get on.)

Four decades after the subway opened, lots of things have been fixed: longer and better trains, better signaling, an extension downtown that helped trains turn back more efficiently.  But none of this touched the true problem:  The core Metro subway carries five lines, all of which deserve to be very frequent.  But they can’t all be frequent enough because they all have to squeeze into one two-track subway.  The other part of the problem is that they all have surface segments at the outer end, where they encounter more sources of delay, causing them to enter the subway at unpredictable times, and in an unpredictable order.

In those small rooms in the 1980s, we all knew that there was only one mathematically coherent solution.  Some us drew the map of this solution on napkins, but we really didn’t need to.  The map was burned into our minds from our relentless, powerless mental fondling of it.  Of course it was politically impossible, so impossible that if you valued your career you would wad up that napkin at once, burn it probably, and certainly not mention it outside your most trusted circle.

At most you might let out the pressure as a joke: “You know, we *could* turn the J, K, and L into feeders, and just run the M and N downtown. And then we’d have room for a line that just stayed in the subway, so it was never affected by surface delays.”  Everyone would titter at hearing this actually said, as though in some alternate universe such a change could be possible.

Now, the impossible is happening.  Without fear or shame, I can finally share the content of that forbidden napkin, because it looks like San Francisco is actually going to do it.

 

The two busiest western lines (M, N) will still go downtown, the others (J, K, L) will terminate when they reach a station but you have to transfer to continue downtown.  M trains will flow through as T.  Finally, a shuttle (S) will provide additional frequency in the subway, immune to surface delays.  As always, asking people to transfer makes possible a simpler, more frequent, and more reliable system.

You may detect, at San Francisco’s tiny scale, a case of the universal “edge vs core” problem.  Like many, many US rail transit systems, Muni Metro had been designed to take care of the edge, people who lived on one of the branch lines, rather than the core, people traveling along the subway in the dense inner city.  The new system finally fixes the core. But the edge folks benefit from a reliable subway too.  What’s more, in the future it may be possible to run the surface segments of J, K, and L more frequently, because their capacity will no longer be capped by the need to fit down the subway with four other lines.

All that in return for having to transfer to go downtown if you’re on the J, K, or L.

Let me not make this sound easy.  These transfer points, West Portal and Duboce Portal, are a little awkward, because they were never designed for this purpose.  You have to walk from one platform to another, crossing at least one street.  There are valid concerns from people with mobility limitations, which will have to be addressed with better street and intersection design.  Plenty of people won’t like it.

But the transit backbone of a major city will finally function.  And for those of us who’ve known San Francisco for decades, that’s a forbidden fantasy come true.

 

 

The post San Francisco: A Forbidden Fantasy Comes True appeared first on Human Transit.

Medical staff from myCovidMD provide free Covid-19 antibody testing in Inglewood, California, on June 19, 2020. The unknowns of immune responses to the coronavirus currently outweigh the knowns. | Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

Emerging cases of Covid-19 reinfection suggest herd immunity is wishful thinking.

“Wait. I can catch Covid twice?” my 50-year-old patient asked in disbelief. It was the beginning of July, and he had just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, for a second time — three months after a previous infection.

While there’s still much we don’t understand about immunity to this new illness, a small but growing number of cases like his suggest the answer is “yes.”

Covid-19 may also be much worse the second time around. During his first infection, my patient experienced a mild cough and sore throat. His second infection, in contrast, was marked by a high fever, shortness of breath, and hypoxia, resulting in multiple trips to the hospital.

Recent reports and conversations with physician colleagues suggest my patient is not alone. Two patients in New Jersey, for instance, appear to have contracted Covid-19 a second time almost two months after fully recovering from their first infection. Daniel Griffin, a physician and researcher at Columbia in New York, recently described a case of presumed reinfection on the This Week in Virology podcast.

It is possible, but unlikely, that my patient had a single infection that lasted three months. Some Covid-19 patients (now dubbed “long haulers”) do appear to suffer persistent infections and symptoms.

My patient, however, cleared his infection — he had two negative PCR tests after his first infection — and felt healthy for nearly six weeks.

I believe it is far more likely that my patient fully recovered from his first infection, then caught Covid-19 a second time after being exposed to a young adult family member with the virus. He was unable to get an antibody test after his first infection, so we do not know whether his immune system mounted an effective antibody response or not.

Regardless, the limited research so far on recovered Covid-19 patients shows that not all patients develop antibodies after infection. Some patients, and particularly those who never develop symptoms, mount an antibody response immediately after infection only to have it wane quickly afterward — an issue of increasing scientific concern.

What’s more, repeat infections in a short time period are a feature of many viruses, including other coronaviruses. So if some Covid-19 patients are getting reinfected after a second exposure, it would not be particularly unusual.

In general, the unknowns of immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 currently outweigh the knowns. We do not know how much immunity to expect once someone is infected with the virus, we do not know how long that immunity may last, and we do not know how many antibodies are needed to mount an effective response. And although there is some hope regarding cellular immunity (including T-cell responses) in the absence of a durable antibody response, the early evidence of reinfections puts the effectiveness of these immune responses in question as well.

Also troubling is that my patient’s case, and others like his, may dim the hope for natural herd immunity. Herd immunity depends on the theory that our immune systems, once exposed to a pathogen, will collectively protect us as a community from reinfection and further spread.

There are several pathways out of this pandemic, including safe, effective, and available therapeutics and vaccines, as well as herd immunity (or some combination thereof).

Experts generally consider natural herd immunity a worst-case scenario back-up plan. It requires mass infection (and, in the case of Covid-19, massive loss of life because of the disease’s fatality rate) before protection takes hold. Herd immunity was promoted by experts in Sweden and (early on in the pandemic) in the UK, with devastating results.

Still, the dream of herd immunity, and the protection that a Covid-19 infection, or a positive antibody test, promises to provide, have taken hold among the public. As the collective reasoning has gone, the silver lining of surviving a Covid-19 infection (without debilitating side effects) is twofold: Survivors will not get infected again, nor will they pose a threat of passing the virus to their communities, workplaces, and loved ones.

While recent studies and reports have already questioned our ability to achieve herd immunity, our national discourse retains an implicit hope that herd immunity is possible. In recent weeks, leading medical experts have implied that the current surge in cases might lead to herd immunity by early 2021, and a July 6 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal was similarly optimistic.

This wishful thinking is harmful. It risks incentivizing bad behavior. The rare but concerning “Covid parties,” where people are gathering to deliberately get infected with the virus, and large gatherings without masks, are considered by some to be the fastest way out of the pandemic, personally and as a community. Rather than trying to wish ourselves out of scientific realities, we must acknowledge the mounting evidence that challenges these ideas.

In my opinion, my patient’s experience serves as a warning sign on several fronts.

First, the trajectory of a moderate initial infection followed by a severe reinfection suggests that this novel coronavirus might share some tendencies of other viruses such as dengue fever, where you can suffer more severe illness each time you contract the disease.

Second, despite scientific hopes for either antibody-mediated or cellular immunity, the severity of my patient’s second bout with Covid-19 suggests that such responses may not be as robust as we hope.

Third, many people may let their guard down after being infected, because they believe they are either immune or incapable of contributing to community spread. As my patient’s case demonstrates, these assumptions risk both their own health and the health of those near them.

Last, if reinfection is possible on such a short timeline, there are implications for the efficacy and durability of vaccines developed to fight the disease.

I am aware that my patient represents a sample size of one, but taken together with other emerging examples, outlier stories like his are a warning sign of a potential pattern. If my patient is not, in fact, an exception, but instead proves the rule, then many people could catch Covid-19 more than once, and with unpredictable severity.

With no certainty of personal immunity nor relief through herd immunity, the hard work of beating this pandemic together continues. Our efforts must go beyond simply waiting for effective treatments and vaccines. They must include continued prevention through the use of medically proven face masks, face shields, hand-washing, and physical distancing, as well as wide-scale testing, tracing, and isolation of new cases.

This is a novel disease: Learning curves are steep, and we must pay attention to the inconvenient truths as they arise. Natural herd immunity is almost certainly beyond our grasp. We cannot place our hopes on it.

D. Clay Ackerly, MD, MSc, is an internal medicine and primary care physician practicing in Washington, DC. He has served both as a faculty member of Harvard Medical School and as Assistant Chief Medical Officer at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He has also held positions in the government and private sector, including the White House, the Food and Drug Administration, and, most recently, as Chief Medical Officer of Privia Health. He can be reached at dclayackerly@gmail.com.

---

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

People lie in social distancing circles at Dolores Park in San Francisco, California, on May 24. | Liu Guanguan/China News Service/Getty Images

What’s the best — and riskiest — way to see friends, take a trip, or get spiffed up? We talked to experts to find out.

As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, many of us are feeling desperate to see friends and family in person, keep kids busy, and get the heck out of town. And it’s extremely tempting to shed our crusty quarantine skins of spring and seize a glorious, social summer.

But should we?

It can be difficult to know since the situation across the US varies so much, as this map of county-level risk based on the number of new daily cases, from Harvard’s Global Health Institute and Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, shows:

Harvard Global Health Institute

Meanwhile, guidance on the safest way to enjoy socializing, playgrounds, and vacations is inconsistent. States, towns, and cities are not uniformly enforcing — or even encouraging — safest practices as they lift (or in some cases, reinstate) coronavirus restrictions.

But one pattern is clear: As some places have relaxed social distancing measures before getting the virus under control, their case numbers have surged. Which suggests that there are probably many things, like packing together in indoor bars, that we shouldn’t be doing — even if they are technically permitted.

“The Covid-19 situation in the US has changed over the past couple of weeks to the extent that no one should be out without a mask, and everyone should be trying to distance as much as feasible, even if retail [and other businesses] are opening up,” Krysia Lindan, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco, wrote in an email to Vox.

Public health experts were particularly worried about the 4th of July holiday because they say Memorial Day weekend festivities helped seed the current outbreaks in places like Arizona and Texas. “I’m very concerned ... that the same types of spikes and surges could be seen not just in the places that are currently experiencing surges but in places that have already experienced surges, and in ones that haven’t yet,” Josh Barocas, an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University and an infectious diseases physician at Boston Medical Center, said in a recent Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing.

Getting out and about is risky in large part because “people can transmit the virus before they start feeling symptoms,” says Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health. By some estimates, about one in five people who get the virus never develop symptoms. And for those who do end up getting sick, many have the highest level of virus in their bodies before they start feeling ill. So, Murray says, “we can’t just rely on how we’re feeling today.” Or, for that matter, how the people around us are feeling.

If you’re in one of the higher-risk orange or red counties in the Harvard map above, sheltering in place is probably the safest move. If you’re in a yellow or green county, you may be ready to venture out, and might be asking: What’s the safest way to have an outdoor get-together with some friends? Is it okay to travel this summer? I lost a tooth filling in April — is it safe to go to the dentist?

I checked in with experts about the best and worst ways to do seven common things this summer, and here’s what they told me. (Risk is ranked only for each category, so a “moderate risk” option for one category might not carry the same level of risk as a “moderate risk” option for a different category.)

Get out of town

The first thing to know is that traveling from a high-risk area to (or through) a low-risk one increases the chances that you will spread the virus to places where more people might be out and about. “I don’t want to encourage anyone to think that gallivanting around during the summer is a good idea,” Lindan says.

Safest: Camp

Be sure to camp — and hike — at least 6 feet from others. Make plans and reservations ahead of time, and bring disinfecting supplies.

To get there, “drive with people in your household and who you know who are either uninfected or have been unexposed and/or safely practicing social distancing for two weeks,” Lindan says. Keep in mind that using public bathrooms, especially those that might not be cleaned super-regularly or those that are very busy, ups the risk for transmitting the virus. “Wash your hands after using the toilet, and always use a mask,” Lindan notes.

Next safest: Get a vacation rental

“Find out how long since the rental was last occupied and what type of cleaning has been done between guests,” Lindan says. If other people were staying there more recently than 72 hours before your arrival, make sure surfaces have been wiped down. (The common booking site VRBO has detailed cleaning guidelines for property owners, and Airbnb has a cleaning commitment hosts can make — or opt for a 72-hour buffer window between guests.) Also, drive there, using the above precautions.

Moderate risk: Hotels

“Find out what precautions the hotel is taking,” Lindan says. Hotels should be using enhanced cleaning protocols; staff should be wearing masks and being tested regularly, and if anyone has tested positive there, staff who were in close contact should follow local health department instructions. And add one more item to your packing list: “Bring your own disinfectant and use it,” Lindan says.

Riskier: Traveling by plane

The level of risk likely depends on several things, Lindan says: how crowded the plane is, how long the flight is, where you are traveling from and to, and how busy the airports are. Before you fly, “ask the airline how far apart the passengers will be seated,” she notes (ideally it would be at least 6 feet), as well as what type of cleaning they are doing between flights (an industry group has released aircraft cleaning guidelines, but it is up to individual carriers to implement them and determine if every step is completed for each new group of passengers or just during longer stops). Also, she says to aim for a window seat with no one next to or behind you. Although that might not be possible on all flights now, as some major airlines have announced that they will once again start booking entirely full flights.

Takeaways

Before you leave your area, look to see how much the virus is spreading there, where you are hoping to go, and any places you will pass through along the way. Murray advises that no one should be traveling to or from the hardest-hit areas of Arizona right now, for example (and probably Texas, Florida, and many other Sunbelt states). Traveling from a low-risk area to (or through) a high-risk one means you will be more likely to pick up the virus, so not only will you be more likely to get sick, but you might also bring it back to your community when you return home.

See older folks, like parents and grandparents, or other high-risk people

Safest: Virtual visit

“Call, email, or communicate through one of the services that allow you to see and hear each other virtually,” Nancy Nielsen, a dean for health policy at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Buffalo and former president of the American Medical Association, wrote in an email. If you are wanting to connect with someone who is in an assisted living facility, inpatient facility, or hospital, many of those places can help you get set up with a virtual chat — in part because it also helps them keep risks lower.

Next safest: Outdoors

Especially if you are visiting someone who lives in an assisted living facility, try to arrange a way to visit outdoors away from others who might be high-risk, such as people 65 and older. But if you must visit near the facility, “You would for sure always want to be wearing a mask and keeping 6 feet of distance as possible,” Murray says.

Moderate risk: In-home visit

This option depends a lot on how well everyone involved has been keeping up best practices of distancing (and how widely the virus is spreading in the area). “This is the question you need to ask yourself,” Lindan says. “If you are not being safe by not wearing a mask and avoiding crowds, do you want to infect and potentially kill your grandmother? If you haven’t been very careful in the previous two weeks, then don’t put your elderly relatives at risk — do a Zoom call.”

Riskier: Traveling to stay

This one depends on the above factors but also on where people are coming from and going to, as well as how likely you (or they) are to have been exposed to the virus, Murray says. For example, if you are an essential worker or health care professional, she advises a 14-day quarantine (staying at home and avoiding contact with others) first. Or if traveling there involves contact with lots of other people, she suggests planning on a 14-day self-isolation period (no contact with others) nearby before going to their home. Lindan agrees: “If you are visiting them for a long period, be sure to have self-isolated for two weeks beforehand or be very careful about your social distancing.”

Riskiest: Indoors at a care facility

“The highest risk would be actually visiting a retirement home where there are a lot of elderly people in an enclosed space,” Murray says.

Takeaways

Be especially cautious if you are seeing older people or others with higher risk for severe Covid-19 complications. And you can do other things to stay connected with these folks that doesn’t involve being in the same room, says Nielsen. “Shop for them, depositing groceries outside their front door.” Or say hi through a closed window.

And definitely skip large groups. “This is not a good time for family gatherings,” says Nielsen. And it’s something we will need to accept for many months to come. “Those may not be very safe until a safe and effective vaccine is available,” Nielsen says. We only have to look to the May surprise birthday party with 25 guests (hosted by a presymptomatic carrier) that ended up spreading Covid-19 to 18 people — including two people in their 80s and one person with cancer — and sent many to the hospital, to see how easily the virus can spread at a gathering, putting older relatives (and others) at risk.

Get routine medical care

Safest: Routine medical visits

“If you need a physical exam or Pap smear, get one,” Lindan says. Make sure that the office or facility you visit is cleaning all surfaces, has providers using N95 masks, and screening patients for Covid-19 (and keeping those who might be positive away from other patients), she notes.

Safer: Dental procedures

“Dentists have been using masks and eye shields for a long time, so going to a dentist is probably fine,” Lindan says. Especially for the patient. (“The risk is more to the dentist or dental hygienist than to you, because of aerosols and droplets that are inevitable during procedures,” Nielsen says.)

Moderate risk: Eye appointments

“It depends on what the ophthalmologist is doing,” Lindan says. If they are taking the best safety precautions, including disinfecting everything (surfaces, instruments, etc.), and wearing gloves and an N95 mask, that makes it safer. (The American Optometric Association has put out guidelines for best practices for the field.) But “given there is a lot of potential eye contact with the instruments, hands, etc., and that Covid-19 can be transmitted to the [mucous membrane of the eye], this might be higher risk,” Lindan says. “Of course, if you have an urgent eye problem, you [will] have to be evaluated.”

Takeaways

“Go now for those medical and dental services you’ve been putting off,” Nielsen says. “Medical and dental offices are acutely aware of risk,” she says. Everyone should be wearing a mask at all times — except for the time you might need to take one off to have your nose or mouth examined. These visits should be safe and can be essential for maintaining other important areas of health. For her part, Nielsen says, “Go for the elective surgery, Pap smears, physicals, eye exams you’ve postponed.” (There is a chance, though, that as Covid-19 case numbers spike in some areas, elective procedures will be put on hold to maintain hospital capacity.)

See friends

Safest: Virtual hangouts

You might have video chat fatigue by now, but it is still the absolute safest answer for socializing with those outside of your household, Nielsen says.

Next safest: Outside gathering

“Getting together in person is more soul-satisfying, of course,” Nielsen says. And you don’t need expansive empty parks for this. You can sit on a friend’s porch or patio so long as you can safely stay at least 6 feet apart. If there is food or drink, people should bring their own. And definitely avoid anything shared or in a buffet style. Also: “No hugs or handshakes!” Nielsen says.

If you’re considering ducking inside a friend’s home to use the bathroom, the riskiness of that depends on how closely those in the home — and you — have been following physical distancing. If you decide all have been adhering well, it should be okay — just wear a mask, wash your hands well, and thoroughly disinfect surfaces before you leave the room.

Should you wear masks when you see friends outdoors? Lindan says that “if you’re outside with a friend who has been cautious and probably not exposed, you probably don’t have to wear a mask” if you keep up physical distancing. But that is something to be mindful of, because staying physically far enough apart from someone you know well is difficult — even if you’re both trying your best. “It’s difficult to maintain these social distances,” Lindan says. “It’s not how we live as humans.”

But distance and fresh air don’t necessarily prevent the spread of the virus. “Spewing respiratory droplets over a longer distance can occur if someone has a vigorous cough,” Lindan says, or if people are talking loudly or singing — even outdoors.

Moderate risk: Inside a home

The level of risk here is strongly tied to how careful you and your friend (and whoever else you and they live with or see regularly) are being. If everyone has been extremely careful, you might be able to “wear a mask until all are safely distanced, then don them again if you’ll pass people closely,” Nielsen says. (Lindan goes so far as to suggest that “if they are not maintaining social distancing or wearing a mask when outside, then maybe they are not your friends.”) But still no hugs, handshakes, or shared foods.

Riskier: Meal at a restaurant

“Sit outside if possible,” Nielsen says. The restaurant should have tables spaced at least 6 feet apart. The staff should be masked, “as should all guests until beginning to eat or drink,” she says.

Riskiest: Crowded bar or event

As far as bars are concerned, Lindan says, “don’t go into them ... unless you can drink outside at a distance from others.” Even if you enter with a mask on, you and others will take masks off to drink. “Plus, getting intoxicated is likely to result in less ability to continue to be safe,” she says. “It is likely that upticks in cases in some places are the result of parties and bars.”

Add to this that “it’s more than the lack of social distancing,” Nielsen says. “It’s that speaking loudly, shouting, cheering, etc., have much more potential for droplet spread” that could spread the virus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases echoed these sentiments at his June 30 Senate hearing: “Bars: really not good,” he said. “Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news. We really have got to stop that.”

Takeaways

The bottom line: “Nothing has changed about precautions to prevent yourself and others from becoming infected,” Lindan says. “Wear a mask at all times that you are out, except when you are eating or drinking, which ideally would occur at least 6 feet away from others in your ‘safe’ group. Clean/disinfect your hands. Being outside for activities, for seeing friends, and for eating is better than inside.”

Keep children busy

Safest: Home — or outdoors with household members

Everyone might be stir-crazy by now and very tired of one another. But keeping children with members of the household is the safest for not just preventing them from getting sick (which does happen) but also to reduce the chances of their spreading the virus to others (data on this is still evolving).

Safer: Playgrounds

A quiet playground, especially one that has just been cleaned, could potentially be okay (especially if transmission in your area is low). Adults and children over 2 should wear masks and maintain physical distancing, and everyone should disinfect hands frequently. “You can try to clean off playground equipment before your child uses it, but it’s probably easier to periodically clean your child’s hands while they are at the playground,” Lindan says.

Moderate risk: Play dates

To keep play dates safest, limit the number of kids and families involved — ideally to just one other family that you trust to be keeping up good distancing practices. Perhaps most important is to “be aware of what the parents are doing,” Lindan says. “Parents pose the most risk. So avoid kibitzing in close proximity with parents whose social distancing practices you are unaware of and who aren’t wearing masks.” Also, ask other parents to wear masks when they are around your children.

Riskier: Camps

Lindan recommends trying to avoid sleepaway camps for now because it is hard to be sure counselors and other staff have all been distancing and wearing masks outside of their time with the children. “Camp experiences that are based outdoors and with smaller groups of children are better compared to an [indoor] computer camp, for example,” she says.

Takeaways

Any activity with children is particularly tricky because, especially with very young children, they are unlikely to be able to follow all of the health recommendations (staying away from other people, not touching common surfaces, wearing a mask correctly, etc.).

A lot remains to be learned about the rate at which children transmit the virus to one another and to adults. And although children do not seem to experience more typical severe Covid-19 infections as frequently as adults do, they can still get very sick and die as a result of the virus.

Get a personal treatment

Safest: DIY

Want a haircut? Manicure? Back massage? “The safest thing to do would be to do it at home or have a roommate or housemate do it for you,” Murray says.

Next safest: Quick haircut

Murray suggests this could be fairly safe “if you’re getting a 15-minute haircut, especially if you’re all wearing masks and you’re 6 feet away from other clients,” she says.

Moderate risk: Manicure or pedicure

These should be done with a plexiglass shield between the client and aesthetician, Murray notes. Also: Everyone should be wearing masks, and clients should be spaced far apart. If you’re deciding between the two nail services, “a pedicure may be somewhat safer than a manicure, since you’re not so close to one another, and you are unlikely to touch your face with your feet,” Lindan says. But it’s not entirely about the extremity you choose. “Think about how long you are going to be there and in close proximity to other clients and staff,” she says.

Eva Marie Uzcategui Trinkl/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Riskier: Lengthier hair treatments

Dyeing, relaxing, and other longer-duration hair treatments up the risk simply because you’re spending longer indoors in a salon. “You might not be in such close contact with [a stylist], but you are going to be in their studio for a long time,” Murray says.

Murray also adds to this category of risk: massages and body waxing, like leg waxes (“if you yell when they pull the wax off, it’s more risky for the person doing the procedure,” she says. “And it can take a long time.”) Nielsen also suggests tattoos are in this level of risk “due to proximity and prolonged encounter time, even when masks are worn by all.”

Riskiest: Eyebrow and face waxing

“I would discourage people from getting their face waxed at all,” Murray says. Really any face-based treatment falls in this category, including other eyebrow services, facials, or a shave.

Regardless of the treatment, says Lindan, “make sure that all instruments have been sterilized between clients (which should be done regardless), that you and the staff are wearing masks properly and washing hands.”

Get around without a car

Safest: Walking or cycling

The fresh air and not being in sustained proximity to others helps to minimize risk — especially if most everyone is wearing masks when passing close to others.

Next safest: Private ride-hail or taxi

“The idea would be that it’s just you and the driver, and you could wipe down surfaces that you would touch and wash your hands afterward — and both be wearing masks,” Murray says. You can also keep the windows open to increase air circulation.

Moderate risk: Quiet bus or metro

“They may be reasonably safe,” Murray says. “If you’re the only person in the subway car, you’re probably fine.” But follow the same good hygiene practices that you probably should use in public transportation anyway: Don’t touch anything you don’t absolutely have to, clean off your hands as soon as you can — and don’t touch your face before you can do so. And when there are a handful of other people, “sit far apart from other passengers,” Lindan adds.

Riskiest: Crowded bus or metro

“If it starts to look like commuting hours used to, where people are squishing in, you definitely don’t want to get in,” Murray says.

Make the summer safer for everyone

Most of these activity evaluations depend on whom you are seeing and where you are. “It’s hard to make gradations of risk,” Lindan says. “It depends on what your friends have been doing, and it depends on the transmission in the community.”

Before we see anyone these days, it should be part of the new routine to let them know if we are feeling well and if we have traveled in the past two weeks anywhere where Covid-19 cases are prevalent, Nielsen says.

It is easy to find out what case levels are like in your area by going to your local health department’s website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 Data Tracker, or checking the rate of positive tests available from Johns Hopkins. “Become informed!” Lindan says. “It’s not difficult.”

German Lopez/Vox

The lesson is that life is very different this summer. And even though some activities are allowed — and even if we see friends and family members engaging in them — that doesn’t mean we should take part. In fact, says Murray, “The types of things people should be doing are the same things they should have been doing since February or March.” These include keeping distance from others, wearing a mask, washing hands frequently with soap and water, and avoiding touching shared surfaces.

This isn’t just to help you avoid getting the virus, which, as Murray notes, “sounds very bad even for mild cases.” It is to help stop the spread of the virus to others and ultimately slow the runaway pandemic.

Or, as Lindan puts it: “You cannot drive 100 miles per hour on the highway. Even if you want to risk killing yourself, it’s not acceptable to kill others. The same is true for Covid-19.”

So for everyone’s sake, try to summer safely.

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance science journalist and the author of Cultured and Octopus! Find her on Twitter at @KHCourage.

---

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Liberal Justice Elena Kagan with conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, on February 5, 2019. | Doug Mills/Pool/Getty Images

The Court’s term included several surprisingly liberal decisions. Don’t expect many of them to last.

Last October, when the Supreme Court began its term, liberals had good reason to be despondent.

The Court’s most recent term, which ended Thursday, was the first full term since Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a staunch conservative, replaced his more moderate predecessor Justice Anthony Kennedy. It was also the first term where Kavanaugh helped select every case that would be heard by the justices.

By all outward signs, the Court’s conservative majority approached its docket like they were children turned loose in a toy store. The Court planned to hear a case that presented an existential threat to the right to an abortion. It seemed likely to shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — which benefits hundreds of thousands of immigrants — potentially doing so permanently, so that no future president could revive it. And the Court appeared ready to expand the Second Amendment, a longtime project of Kavanaugh’s.

In the end, the Court took a far more measured approach to each of these cases. The right to terminate a pregnancy survives, although Chief Justice John Roberts signaled pretty clearly that it is unlikely to survive much longer. DACA also survives, although only due to a paperwork error that the Trump administration may correct. The guns case ended, not with a bang but with a whimper.

This is still an extremely conservative Supreme Court. The just-completed term was a disaster for voting rights. It imposed significant new limits on Congress’ ability to investigate President Trump. The religious right walked away with several big victories. The Court opened up a new front in the war on Obamacare.

But the Court also showed that there is at least some daylight between its interpretations of the law, and the policy preferences of the Republican Party.

A partial explanation for the liberal victories this term is that conservative advocates got ahead of their skis. As Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, wrote in 2015 — the last time the Court had a surprisingly liberal term — “the court’s recent decisions may reflect a change in the cases being considered by the court rather than a shift in the preferences of the justices.”

When the Court moves rightward, conservative advocates are more likely to bring dubious cases — and conservative lawmakers are more likely to enact laws of dubious constitutionality — out of a belief that an ideologically sympathetic Court is likely to rule in their favor. Liberal lawyers, meanwhile, will be more likely to avoid federal court unless they are sure their arguments are airtight. As a result, the Supreme Court will tend to hear weaker claims from conservatives and stronger claims from liberals.

Additionally, at least two members of the Court — Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch — do not always share the same ideological commitments as their fellow Republican justices. Roberts is less active with movement conservatism than his four most conservative colleagues. And Gorsuch’s commitment to a particular method of deciding cases sometimes overrides his conservative preferences.

Because Republicans control only five of the nine seats on the Supreme Court, conservative advocates often need to win the vote of every single conservative justice in order to prevail. So if either Roberts or Gorsuch is unpersuaded by a conservative argument, that’s frequently enough to hand a loss to that argument’s proponents.

Conservatives brought several exceedingly weak cases to the Supreme Court this term

Here’s a good rule of thumb for new law school graduates: It’s a bad idea to make a case that is literally identical to one that you recently lost in the Supreme Court. Yet that’s more or less what anti-abortion advocates did in June Medical Services v. Russo.

In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law requiring abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital — a credential that is very difficult for abortion doctors to obtain and that does little or nothing to improve health outcomes. June Medical asked the Supreme Court to uphold a Louisiana law requiring abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his June Medical opinion, the two laws were “almost word-for-word identical.”

Conservatives undoubtedly hoped that, with Kennedy, who joined the majority in Whole Woman’s Health, no longer on the Court, they could get a different outcome in an interchangeable case. But Roberts was unwilling to endorse such an attempt to treat his Court as a purely political body. “The result in this case is controlled by our decision four years ago invalidating a nearly identical Texas law,” Roberts concluded in an opinion that reluctantly agreed to strike down the Louisiana law.

Much of Roberts’s opinion laid out his objections to the Court’s existing abortion rights cases, so Roberts remains likely to uphold significant restrictions on abortion in the future. He’s just not willing to uphold the exact same law that the Court struck down a few years earlier.

Similar things can be said about Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California, where Roberts joined his four liberal colleagues in holding that the Trump administration didn’t complete the proper paperwork when it decided to terminate the DACA program, which allows nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants to live and work in the United States. The nation’s highest court typically does not exist to excuse high-level government officials who do not want to do their homework.

If the Trump administration wanted to end DACA, it should have just fixed its paperwork error, rather than spending years litigating this case through the federal court system.

And then there’s Trump v. Vance, where the Supreme Court held that the president of the United States does not enjoy total immunity from state criminal investigations. Many of Trump’s legal arguments in this case were so absurd that they bordered on self-parody.

None of this means that conservative lawyers have nothing to gain from bringing audacious arguments to a conservative Court. Twenty years ago, many justices believed that it is unconstitutional for the government to fund religious schools. But in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the Supreme Court held this term that states are required to fund such schools if they provide similar funding to secular private schools.

Similarly, in Trump v. Mazars, the president sought new protections against congressional immunity that were entirely at odds with existing precedents. He won anyway, although the Court didn’t go quite as far as Trump’s lawyers asked it to go.

Nor did conservatives really lose anything meaningful in June Medical, Regents, or Vance. Roberts is still likely to uphold nearly any anti-abortion law that’s brought before him. The paperwork error in Regents can be cured. And Vance largely just maintained a status quo that says the president isn’t completely above the law.

But if conservatives ask for too much, too fast from this Supreme Court, they will eventually find the justices’ limits.

Roberts is very conservative, but he’s divorced himself somewhat from the conservative movement

In the fall of 2007, Chief Justice Roberts had just celebrated the second anniversary of his appointment as the nation’s highest-ranking judge when he delivered the “7th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture” to the conservative Federalist Society. According to the society’s website, that was the last time the chief justice spoke to this organization, which forms the locus of legal conservatism within the United States.

In this sense, Roberts is quite unlike his four Republican colleagues. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh are all frequent speakers at the Federalist Society’s events — both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh took a victory lap at the society’s annual black-tie dinner not long after their confirmation to the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Court’s rightmost justices frequently attend this dinner even when they are not on the speaking program and are just there to enjoy a meal with friends.

It’s hard to minimize the importance of the Federalist Society, which plays an outsize role in selecting President Trump’s judicial nominees, and in maintaining ideological discipline among conservative legal elites.

Research shows that sitting justices are “very prestige hungry” and they “care a lot about their reputations,” according to Maya Sen, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who studies the Supreme Court. The justices, Sen told me, “want to be viewed well by their peers” within the elite echelons of the legal profession, a privileged cohort that includes many “liberal academics.”

The Federalist Society, moreover, was born out of many conservative legal elites’ perception that their ideas were not taken seriously within the legal profession and especially within academia. As then-Solicitor General Ted Olson told the Federalist Society in 2002, “the best measure of our success is the sound of gnashing teeth and lamentations by those who feel threatened” — he then proposed a toast to the society “for sowing such delightful despair among the legal, political and academic establishment.”

At the same event, Federalist Society president Eugene B. Meyer complained that conservatives on law school campuses “have trouble finding faculty advisers” and that “certain ideas are not being heard in law schools.”

The Federalist Society, according to Sen, creates a “safe space” for conservative lawyers — up to and including sitting Supreme Court justices — where they can feel professionally validated without having to seek such validation from the kind of liberal thinkers who often fill the pages of the Harvard Law Review.

The society succeeds not just by doling out plum jobs to loyal conservatives, but also by satiating its members’ very human need to feel loved and respected by their professional colleagues — by surrounding those members with colleagues who love and respect people who advance conservative causes.

Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a politics professor at Pomona College and the author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution, agreed that Roberts’s apparent distance from the Federalist Society distinguishes him from his fellow Republican justices, but she added that she’s not sure if Roberts’s cooler relationship with the powerful conservative organization is a “cause or an effect” of the fact that he sometimes votes to the left of justices like Alito or Kavanaugh.

Hollis-Brusky pointed to Roberts’s vote to uphold most of the Affordable Care Act in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) as the “first time that Roberts deviated from what was clearly the Federalist Society’s preferred outcome.” Roberts’s decision to keep Obamacare alive, she says, may have created a rift between the chief justice and the society.

Once a rift forms, it can be self-reinforcing. Roberts’s vote at NFIB may have alienated him from conservative legal elites, but that makes it less likely that he’ll seek validation from them in the future, which in turn makes it less likely that he’ll vote with his fellow Republicans.

Hollis-Brusky also pointed to another factor that may drive Roberts’s occasional flirtations with the left. Justice Kennedy, she noted, voted more conservatively when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the Court’s “swing” justice — the justice in the Court’s ideological center — than he did when Kennedy took up the “mantle” of the swing vote. It’s possible that Roberts feels the same pressure now that he’s at the Court’s center. And this pressure may be accentuated because of his role as chief justice.

It is, after all, the “Roberts Court,” not the “Alito Court” or the “Kavanaugh Court,” that historians will write about if this age is remembered as an era of unbridled judicial partisanship.

Yet, whatever the reason for Roberts’s relative moderation, there are some outward signs that Roberts’s own Republican colleagues view him as an unsteady ally.

When the term began, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York appeared likely to be a landmark Second Amendment case that would expand the scope of that amendment well beyond its current bounds, but the case fizzled due to a jurisdictional problem and wound up having little to say about gun rights.

Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh have all, at various times, called for the Court to take a more expansive approach to the Second Amendment. And, when the New York State Rifle case reached its anticlimactic conclusion, Kavanaugh even called upon his Court to take up “one of the several Second Amendment cases with petitions for certiorari now pending before the Court.” The Court decided to turn away all these cases.

It only takes four votes for the Court to hear a case, which means that Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh could have joined together to hear any case they wanted. It’s likely they decided not to hear another guns case because they were unsure if Roberts was on their side.

In several other cases, Justice Alito did not hide his rage at decisions where Roberts joined the liberals. He claimed that the June Medical decision “twists the law.” And, in an unusually angry dissent, Alito described a landmark LGBTQ rights decision, which Roberts joined, as “deceptive” and “preposterous.”

None of which means that Roberts isn’t an extremely conservative justice. On voting rights, in particular, he is as doctrinaire a conservative as they come. He joined several decisions this term that will make it difficult — and potentially dangerous — for many voters to cast a ballot during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But Roberts, according to Hollis-Brusky, also appears concerned that his Court should not appear to be the “handmaiden of the Trump administration.”

“It’s not that he’s become a raging liberal, by any means,” said Hollis-Brusky, but at least he can claim that “he’s beholden to no one.”

Gorsuch has competing ideological commitments

Justice Neil Gorsuch, meanwhile, voted with the liberal justices in two major cases: Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that the federal ban on “sex” discrimination in employment encompasses anti-LGBTQ discrimination; and McGirt v. Oklahoma, which establishes that a huge swath of land encompassing half the state of Oklahoma is what federal law anachronistically refers to “Indian country” — Native American reservations where tribal governments retain considerable sovereign authority.

Gorsuch is much more conservative than Roberts. Indeed, on some important issues, he is probably the most conservative justice to sit on the Supreme Court since the Great Depression. But Gorsuch is also one of the Court’s proudest evangelists for “textualism,” the belief that, in his words, a law should be read according to its “ordinary meaning at the time of its enactment.” And his commitment to this method of interpreting federal laws sometimes overcomes his commitment to conservatism.

From a textualist perspective, Bostock was an easy case. As Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told me, “if it were possible (which of course it’s not) to disregard the fraught social and political context of the case, Bostock would be an entirely unremarkable decision, doctrinally speaking.”

The case involves Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination “because of [an employee’s] race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” As Gorsuch wrote in Bostock, a ban on “sex” discrimination necessarily encompasses anti-LGBTQ discrimination simply as a matter of textual interpretation:

Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague.

Similarly, if an employer “fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female” but also “retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth,” that employer is engaged in sex discrimination. “Again,” Gorsuch wrote, “the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision.”

Yet if you attended the oral argument in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. EEOC, a companion case to Bostock that was argued the same day, you could watch Gorsuch’s struggle between his textualist methodology and his conservative political views play out in real time. “Assume for the moment I’m ... with you on the textual evidence,” Gorsuch told the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer arguing in favor of transgender rights. Should courts “take into consideration the massive social upheaval that would be entailed” in a judicial decision prohibiting anti-LGBTQ employment discrimination?

Ultimately, however, Gorsuch’s commitment to textualism overcame his apparent belief that LGBTQ equality could trigger “massive social upheaval.”

A similar dynamic played out in McGirt, where the state of Oklahoma claimed that if half of its lands were held to be tribal reservations, such a decision “would decimate state and local budgets” because “the State generally lacks the authority to tax Indians in Indian country.”

But Gorsuch wrote that such consequences are irrelevant. “Dire warnings are just that,” according to Gorsuch’s majority opinion in McGirt, “and not a license for us to disregard the law.”

The fact that Gorsuch is so committed to a particular methodology that he’s sometimes willing to break with his fellow Republicans is significant, but it would be an enormous mistake for liberals to think of Gorsuch as an ally, or even as a swing vote.

At the time of his nomination to the Supreme Court, Sen told me, empirical studies placed Gorsuch at the 85th percentile of conservatism among his colleagues on the federal bench. And this rough empirical measure misses much of the nuance of his opinions.

When Gorsuch swings right, he frequently swings hard to the right. For example, he is the strongest proponent of the “right to contract” — often a euphemism for employers’ right to exploit their employees — to sit on the Supreme Court since the Franklin Roosevelt administration. In the past, this discredited “right” was used to strike down minimum wage laws and laws protecting workers’ right to unionize, among many other things, on the theory that the right to contract includes the “right” to agree to be paid insignificant wages, or the “right” to sign away your ability to join a union.

So long as the Court’s current panel of nine justices sits, in other words, conservatives have a lot to gain — and liberals have a lot to fear — from the Supreme Court. The lesson of this past term is not that the Court is liberal. It’s that conservatives cannot expect to win every single case they bring, no matter how weak their arguments.

---

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: Conventional theory has it that Planet 9 — our outer solar system's hypothetical 9th planet — is merely a heretofore undetected planet, likely captured by our solar system at some point over its 4.6 billion year history. But Harvard University astronomers now raise the possibility that orbital evidence for Planet 9 could possibly be the result of a missing link in the decades-long puzzle of dark matter. That is, a hypothetical primordial black hole with a horizon size no larger than a grapefruit, and with a mass 5 to 10 times that of Earth. In a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the co-authors argue that observed clustering of extreme trans-Neptunian objects suggest some sort of massive super-earth type body lying on the outer fringes of our solar system. Perhaps as much as 800 astronomical units (Earth-Sun distances) out... If they exist, such primordial black holes would require new physics and go a long way towards solving the mystery of the universe's missing mass, or dark matter. Their argument also constitutes a "new method to search for black holes in the outer solar system based on flares that result from the disruption of intercepted comets," according to a statement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The paper was co-authored by Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard's astronomy department, who points out that "Because black holes are intrinsically dark, the radiation that matter emits on its way to the mouth of the black hole is our only way to illuminate this dark environment." And in an explanatory video, Mike Brown, a planetary astronomy professor at CalTech, suggests another way it could be significant. "All those people who are mad that Pluto is no longer a planet can be thrilled to know that there is a real planet out there still to be found."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

American has never faced an election so consequential as the one coming up in November. In an era where “everything’s political”, what’s at stake is nothing less that the aesthetic vision of our future:

Even as the president makes the case for sculpture in teaching history and inspiring unity, his order advances another front in the culture war by dictatingan aesthetic vision for the park that emphasizes only the literal. “All statues in the National Garden should be lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations,” the executive order reads.

A few months ago, the Trump administration put out a similar rule for federal architecture—nothing modern. Keep it traditional. So here’s our choice in November.

Trump:

Biden:

I think you know where I stand.

Someone comes to you with a letter advocating free speech, asking if you want to sign it. You ask, “Who’s signed it so far?” You are told that the only names they’ve gotten so far are Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Do you sign it?

I don’t know about you, but I’d sign it in a heartbeat. I’d think to myself “I’m a bit surprised to see these three names, but maybe they’ve recently seen the light.”

OK, the lady who wrote Harry Potter isn’t quite as evil as those three individuals, but you get my point. It doesn’t matter who else signs a letter. I’ve signed many letters and I never once knew who else intended to sign it. You are endorsing the content of the letter, not the signatories.

BTW, I’m told the lunatics have pretty much taken over the progressive movement. But who are all these people? I feel like Pauline Kael pondering her elusive Nixon voters—I’ve never once met a single fan of the cancel culture.

The National Review is in a gloating mode, reveling in their opportunity to point out how stupid the left is getting. A recent story was entitled:

The Forehead-Slappingly Stupid Attempt to Cancel Steven Pinker

Then another article with the same theme:

These are dark times. More important, these are stupid times, and Matt Yglesias has contributed more than his share to that. But to treat his signature on a letter endorsing an open culture as a threat is, incredibly enough, more absurd than anything we can remember Yglesias himself having written.

The 21st century certainly does seem dumber than the (late) 20th century. There were a few PC outrages during the Clinton years, but I don’t recall anything as silly as the stuff going on now. It’s still hard for me to believe that people are not joking when they suggest it’s immoral to sign a letter advocating free speech because someone with different political views also signed it. Sci-fi writers imagine waking up in a universe with different laws of physics; I feel like I’ve woken up in a place with different laws of logic. Even communism and fascism merely seemed evil; this cancel culture nonsense seems utterly crazy, incomprehensible.

And yet, the National Review couldn’t be satisfied with winning a few debating points. That had to overreach. (Never forget that conservatives are the “stupid party”.) They had to ruin everything by suggesting that Matt Yglesias frequently writes stupid things. That’s just stupid.

I probably agree with the National Review about twice as often as I agree with Matt Yglesias. But sorry, he’s extremely smart, a lot smarter than most of the people at the National Review. (Look at this recent defense of the greatness of Donald Trump if you want to get a sense of some of the people who write for NR.) Heck, I’d say Ezra Klein is also brilliant, and I’m currently mad at him for his treatment of Yglesias. I lose respect for people who can’t distinguish between “stupid” and “someone who’s politics I don’t like.” When I claim Trump’s stupid it’s because he acts stupid, not because I disagree with his politics, and certainly not because of the score he got on the SAT he paid someone to take for him.

[Yeah, he’s a billionaire, but he’s an affirmative action billionaire.]

And yet even at its worst, the National Review is head and shoulders above most of modern conservatism. The leader of America’s conservatives regularly tweets out statements of . . . let’s use the NR phrasing here . . . forehead slapping stupidity. And most of the conservative movement is afraid to criticize him, afraid they will be “cancelled” if they do. Has NR forgotten what happened to David French when he criticized Trump? (Not to mention the attacks on Yglesias’s colleague.) So it’s a bit rich to write an editorial mocking the mind-numbing stupidity on the left, without at least once nodding to the elephant in the room.

Here’s Anne Applebaum:

It felt like a tidal wave — until January 20 2017, when it suddenly didn’t. Trump was the president. A lot of people felt he had legitimacy and deserved support. Others came to like his rising stock market or the judges he appointed. Trump grew increasingly popular among the Republican voters who read conservative magazines, so the conservative magazines changed their tone. Trump was supported by the Republican donors who funded conservative organisations, so they changed their attitude too. Trump had jobs to give out, and people wanted them.

OK, conservative magazines had to prostitute themselves because their readers demanded it. I’m not naive; I know how the world works. But spare us your holier-than-thou attitude.

The 21st century is dumb and getting dumber every day. And it’s not just here. More and more you can find statements of Trumpian stupidity all over the world, by nationalist leaders (left and right) on almost every continent. Check out Brazil (right) or Mexico (left). Perhaps political systems (and news shows) are becoming more efficient than in the days of technocrats like Zedillo, giving voters (and viewers) what they really want—good and hard.

Tyler Cowen is almost invariably polite, or at least cautious and thoughtful, so you won’t see him call people stupid just because he disagrees with them. But this comes pretty close:

The actual problem is that we have a new bunch of “speech regulators” (not in the legal sense, not usually at least) who are especially humorless and obnoxious and I would say neurotic — in the personality psychology sense of that word.  I say let’s complain about the real problem, namely the moral fiber, emotional temperaments, and factual worldviews of the individuals who have arrogated the new speech censorship functions to themselves.

If that’s what Tyler is willing to say publicly, I can’t even imagine what he thinks privately.

Freddie deBoer says:

You want to argue that free speech is bad, fine. You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine. But just do that. Own that. Can we stop with this charade? Can we stop pretending? Can we just proceed by acknowledging what literally everyone quietly knows, which is that the dominant majority of progressive people simply don’t believe in the value of free speech anymore? Please. Let’s grow up and speak plainly, please. Let’s just grow up.

Maybe they aren’t pretending. Maybe they actually are as dumb as they seem. I know that’s hard to imagine, but can we totally rule out the possibility that it just might be true? Is there any objective evidence showing that they are faking their stupidity?

The internet was supposed to make us smarter. Maybe it’s all a horrible mistake. Maybe it’s making us dumber.

PS. OK, the Kael anecdote is apocryphal. But remember the line in that old John Ford film, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Update: I use the term “prostitute” as a metaphor; actual prostitutes are more honest than politicians—giving value for money.

When Anthony Kennedy retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018, he enjoyed the unique distinction of having been denounced by every major political faction in the country. For conservatives, Kennedy was the activist judge who "invented" a right to gay marriage. For progressives, he was the corporate shill who authored Citizens United. For libertarians, he was guilty of both enabling eminent domain abuse and squashing the rights of local medical marijuana users in favor of a national drug control scheme. At one point or another, it seemed like everybody had cause to hate on Anthony Kennedy.

John Roberts is the new Anthony Kennedy. As the Supreme Court's 2019-2020 term came to its dramatic close this week, the chief justice not only solidified his role as a swing vote in highly charged cases, but also managed to annoy practically everybody along the way.

Will the religious right ever forgive Roberts for siding with the Court's Democratic appointees to strike down an anti-abortion law? In Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), the chief justice dissented when the Court overturned a Texas statute that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. But in this term's June Medical Services v. Russo, Roberts did the opposite, concurring in a decision that voided a nearly identical abortion regulation from Louisiana.

"I joined the dissent in Whole Woman's Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided," Roberts wrote in a lone concurrence. However, "stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike," he continued. "The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana's law cannot stand under our precedents."

Plenty of progressives praised Roberts for that. But their cheers quickly turned to jeers when the chief justice delivered a huge victory just one day later for both school choice and religious liberty advocates in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. "A State need not subsidize private education," Roberts wrote. "But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious." The Court has "long recognized the rights of parents to direct 'the religious upbringing' of their children," he observed. "Many parents exercise that right by sending their children to religious schools, a choice protected by the Constitution."

And then there was Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in which the chief justice led the Court in declaring the single-director structure of the Elizabeth Warren-invented Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to be unconstitutional. "The CFPB Director has no boss, peers, or voters to report to," Roberts wrote. "Yet the Director wields vast rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicatory authority over a significant portion of the U. S. economy. The question before us is whether this arrangement violates the Constitution's separation of powers." Roberts held that it did. Not exactly a happy outcome for supporters of the so-called administrative state.

Libertarians, of course, were criticizing Roberts before it was cool. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), Roberts characterized his vote to uphold Obamacare as an act of conservative judicial restraint, invoking the early 20th century jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who once declared, "if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job." Here's how Roberts put it: "It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices." To say the least, that deferential approach is the antithesis of the libertarian legal movement's vision of the proper role of the courts in our constitutional system.

To be sure, Roberts is not the only swing vote on the Supreme Court these days. Justice Neil Gorsuch actually had a record that was more "liberal" than Justice Kennedy's when the two sat on the Court together in 2017-2018. In this term's Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, Gorsuch led the Court in extending federal anti-discrimination protections to gay and transgender employees. That ruling was widely celebrated as a liberal victory, though Gorsuch did base his reasoning on the textualist principles championed by the late Antonin Scalia, a conservative legal icon.

Still, it was Roberts who was truly at the center of the SCOTUS storm, having cast key votes on some of the most contentious issues in modern American life, from COVID-19 lockdowns to the subpoenaing of President Donald Trump's financial records.

Like it or not, it's the Roberts Court now.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Cut child poverty by a third, break down racial segregation, and stabilize the economy.

Joe Biden has a housing policy agenda that is ambitious, technically sound, and politically feasible, and that would — if implemented — be life-changing for millions of low-income and housing-insecure households.

According to original modeling by Columbia University scholars, it could cut child poverty by a third, narrow racial opportunity gaps, and potentially drive progress on the broader middle-class affordability crisis in the largest coastal cities as well.

The plan hasn’t stirred an intraparty debate or really much attention at all, which could make it politically feasible to enact.

“Biden’s plan is bold, comprehensive, and will go a long way in making sure every American has a home,” Mary Cunningham, the vice president for metropolitan housing and communities policy at the Urban Institute, tells me. “It’s plainly obvious, in the middle of this pandemic, that home is more important than ever.”

The centerpiece is simple. Take America’s biggest rental assistance program — Section 8 housing vouchers — and make it available to every family who qualifies. The current funding structure leaves out around 11 million people, simply because the pot allocated by Congress is too small. Then pair it with regulatory changes to help the housing market work better for more people. It’s the general consensus approach among top Democratic Party politicians and left-of-center policy wonks.

At the time when most presidential candidates were rolling out their housing plans, Biden didn’t have one, dropping his instead right before the South Carolina primary when it was swiftly overshadowed by the dramatic shift in the campaign and then the Covid-19 pandemic. But precisely because the plan has not provoked much infighting and because key provisions would be eligible for budget reconciliation treatment, which would require a majority vote in the Senate instead of a supermajority, it’s the kind of thing that really might happen in 2021 if Biden won.

Universal housing vouchers, explained

Federal housing assistance is something of a patchwork of different programs that includes the Section 8 voucher system, which arose in the mid-1970s when the Nixon and Ford administrations introduced it to incorporate market-oriented reforms into the welfare state. The way it works is that instead of the federal government spending money to build housing that is then rented at a discount to low-income people, the government gives low-income people vouchers that landlords can redeem for money and lets them rent whatever kind of house someone will rent to them. Since the voucher program, when created, became Section 8 of the US Housing Act of 1937, the vouchers have come to be known as Section 8 vouchers.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 5 million people receive help from the program.

It has various flaws, including, most notably, the widespread discrimination against voucher tenants that Stephanie Wykstra has written about for Vox. Another huge flaw is that that, unlike Medicaid or SNAP — which, at least in theory, provide benefits to everyone who meets the eligibility criteria — Section 8 is capped in the amount of money available to it by the whims of Congress. As it stands, about three-quarters of eligible people don’t get the help because there simply isn’t enough money in the pot, which is a huge missed opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Americans.

CBPP data shows that receipt of housing vouchers leads to a decline in children experiencing separation from their parents, a decline in domestic violence, a decline in food insecurity, and, most of all, a steep decline in housing instability.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

The idea of funding the program at the full level to meet family needs has existed for decades. But multiple DC-based housing policy wonks tell me it was Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about housing instability in Milwaukee, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, that helped put it on more people’s radars.

It’s a heartbreaking book, and the epilogue speaks about vouchers in a way that stretches beyond the arcana of federal budge policy: “A universal housing voucher program would carve a middle path between the landlord’s desire to make a living and the tenant’s desire, simply, to live.”

Stephanie Collyer and Chris Wimer of Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy helped me quantify the impact more precisely with a mathematical model. Looking at detailed data from the 2019 Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, they identified currently eligible households that are not receiving assistance. They then modeled the impact of getting assistance on household budgets. One nuance here is that the official poverty measure somewhat perversely fails to count the receipt of rental assistance as a form of income, thus saying that unassisted families are by definition no poorer than assisted families. But the census also publishes a supplemental poverty measure that corrects for this and other flaws.

They find that the properly measured poverty rate falls by 22 percent under this proposal, while child poverty falls by 34 percent. Not bad for a policy that would cost just a fraction of Trump’s tax cuts.

Moving to Opportunity

One nuance is that the underfunding of the program mitigates the landlord discrimination problem somewhat, because under the current system, if one family can’t use a voucher, that frees up money for someone else.

Will Fischer, the senior director for housing policy and research at CBPP, cautions that in the real world, “we can’t flip a switch and get a voucher to everyone who’s eligible overnight.” He says it’s a critical goal, but to achieve it takes not only money for vouchers but also investments. “At the same time we’re expanding the voucher program, we should be building our capacity to help families with vouchers rent in a wide range of neighborhoods, and we should be taking steps to increase the supply of housing, especially in the tightest markets.”

One model is a Seattle program Dylan Matthews profiled for Vox last year that involved a partnership between the city housing authority and the housing authority for the surrounding suburbs in King County. The idea was to give families a bit of extra money as well as hire navigators who would help families understand the value of relocating to “high opportunity” neighborhoods, away from concentrated poverty and blight.

Raj Chetty, an economist with the Opportunity Insights team that helped evaluate the project, called it “the largest effect I’ve ever seen in a social science intervention.”

Seattle’s initiative is a fantastic role model but will be difficult to bring to anything resembling mass scale.

“It isn’t just about increased financial subsidy,” Jenny Schuetz a housing economist with the Brookings Metropolitan Program, tells me. “It also requires high-capacity local government/nonprofit partners,” which simply don’t exist everywhere. But the federal initiative that could at least make it possible would involve expanding the use of what the Department of Housing and Urban Development calls “small-area fair market rents” — basically ensuring that subsidies can be pegged to the cost of renting a house in a nicer neighborhood, not just a pocket of concentrated poverty.

The Biden plan is a little short on these kinds of implementation details, which is the one area where experts see scope for improvement. What he does do is try to tackle the other side of America’s housing affordability problem, which is that even people who aren’t low-income increasingly struggle to find a place to live in metro areas in the Northeast and West Coast where there simply aren’t enough houses to go around.

A carrot for more housing

The basic problem is exclusionary zoning. When land is expensive and demand for housing is high, the natural market response would be to build denser structures — townhouses or mid-rise apartments or even big towers — so as to spread the land cost across more households. The origins of these zoning rules were intimately connected to now-forgotten segregation battles in the first half of the 20th century, when the Supreme Court rules essentially that cities couldn’t formally exclude Black people from certain neighborhoods but they could try to exclude all low-income people and count on economics to do the rest.

Later, redlining policies excluded Black neighborhoods from much New Deal housing assistance, depriving Black families of wealth-building opportunities and creating pockets of poverty and exclusion that persist today.

Handing out money to those in need helps the problem on one side, but breaking down the zoning barriers on the other is important as well. Biden picks up a proposal from Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. James Clyburn to require localities that benefit from Community Development Block Grants or Surface Transportation Block Grants to develop plans to change zoning rules that block development of more housing types.

While expanding vouchers is a straightforward liberal pitch, changing exclusionary zoning involves more complicated politics. Many of the most exclusionary places in America are affluent inner-ring suburbs of big coastal cities — places that these days send Democrats to Congress, but that presumably don’t want to be made to change their zoning rules. The potential good news is that, conceptually at least, liberalizing regulation is something Republicans might support.

Emily Hamilton, an urban policy scholar at the libertarian Mercatus institute, does caution that “the surface transportation part would lose a lot of free market people” because it smacks of federal coercion to some degree, but adds she thinks it’s justified “given that the federal government has done so much to encourage exclusionary zoning through transportation spending and otherwise.”

Her colleague Salim Furth adds the additional caution that “nobody should trust HUD to evaluate zoning changes” because it’s too easy to make a show of reducing exclusion while retaining its substance. He thinks incentive plans should be pegged squarely to outcomes rather than input changes, something that’s compatible with the text of the Booker/Clyburn proposal but would have to be refined at the implementation phase. But even without nailing down all the details, one shouldn’t neglect the transformative potential of Biden’s core idea, especially given the current crisis.

America is on the edge of housing crisis

As Jen Kirby details for Vox, America is on the verge of a housing crisis as emergency eviction moratoriums expire even while the Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage.

Additional extension of emergency measures would help. But fundamentally, the United States can’t really build a housing system around the assumption that landlords will allow tenants to live indefinitely without paying their rent. And from a tenant perspective, while not being evicted is much better than being evicted, a moratorium simply leaves unpaid debts to pile up and creates problems in the future.

When precarious renters need in the short term is actual financial help that would let them make rent. And what the country needs is a more robust housing safety net of the kind that would be created by turning Section 8 into a universal program. Under the status quo, capacity to help people with the rent doesn’t expand along with need. Under universal vouchers it would — household economic pain would be cushioned by automatic expansion of funding, and the economy as a whole would be stabilized by spending ramping up when needed.

To an extent, the entire housing topic has fallen by the wayside amid a very crowded news agenda. But as a tool for stabilizing a pandemic-ravaged economy and l for breaking down entrenched forms of housing segregation, it’s hard to beat an expanded and improved housing voucher program.

---

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Turkey’s highest administrative court issued a ruling Friday that paves the way for the government to convert Istanbul’s iconic Hagia Sophia - a former cathedral-turned-mosque that now serves as a museum - back into a Muslim house of worship. The Council of State threw its weight behind a petition brought by a religious group and annulled a 1934 cabinet decision that changed the 6th century building into a museum. The ruling allows the government to restore the Hagia Sophia's previous status as a mosque.

I suppose there are people who might be surprised to find themselves getting solid economic analysis from a food blogger. I am not one of them. I’ve actually been waiting for this moment since March.

 

Deb Perelman is one of my favorite food bloggers. Her blog, Smitten Kitchen, details her adventures cooking for her growing family in an impossibly tiny kitchen in New York City. She has a great reputation for funny writing, great photos, and reliable and delicious recipes. (I am NOT kidding about the coffee cake.)

 

But last week, she did something a little different. In the business section of today’s New York Times, Perelman has a great piece titled, “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both.” The article is a testament from a working mom with two young children and a husband who has been laid off, who is trying to hold everything together through the pandemic. And she’s just been told that the coming school year–the promise of which has been a beacon of sanity for parents everywhere–will, in her area, have her children attending physical school one week out of every three.

 

Perelman’s article, which you should read immediately, is not the kind of anguished, inchoate cry we have been led to expect by articles that focus on parental burnout, exhaustion, and stress. Certainly, that frustration is in her article as well. But the article is about the economic costs of her school district’s choice, analyzed by someone who is in the middle of experiencing them. She writes:

 

As I said, I’ve been waiting for this moment. I have a history of fascination with economic thinking as expressed in non economic works–and particularly with the economic thinking of people who are in the daily grit of working blue collar jobs and doing household work. I think their diaries and letters and interviews and books of advice tell us at least as much about the economic circumstances under which they were written as do articles by economists–probably more. 

 

This is why I spend a lot of time with books like Round About a Pound a Week, All Our Kin, Working, and How to Run Your Home Without Help. All of these works give us direct access to the lived experience of people managing daunting economic circumstances. They let us SEE people thinking economically, rather than leaving us to surmise from a distance.

 

I think Perelman is right about the unsustainable nature of the burdens–financial, educational, social, and psychological–that working parents are being asked to carry right now. I think she is right that New York City’s plan for schoolchildren to have one week on/two weeks off is an absolute disaster. More important than that, though, I think her voice, and the voices of countless other bloggers, diarists, and letter writers like her, are vital economic data that can help us think more clearly about policy now, and will help us have a better understanding of the tribulations of 2020 when it is a matter of economic history. 

(12 COMMENTS)

The post The Deleted Clause of the Declaration of Independence appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

A new Brookings article by William Frey discusses US demographic trends in recent years. One fact that jumps out is that for the first time ever the white (non-Hispanic) population is declining. Indeed the decline over the past three years has been sharp enough to offset gains prior to 2017, leading to the first decade of negative white growth:

(Note that many Hispanics identify as white, so this is a bit misleading.)

While the white non-Hispanic population declines, the black share of the population is fairly stable, edging up from 12.3% to 12.5%. It’s the other groups that are growing very fast, fed by immigration:

Wasn’t Trump supposed to stop this immigration? Fortunately, just as Trump was too lazy to address Covid-19 or build the wall or repeal Obamacare or build infrastructure or reduce the trade deficit, he was also too lazy to do much about immigration, which continued at roughly the same rate after he was elected. Legal immigration fell slightly, from about 1.18 million in fiscal 2016 to about 1.03 million in fiscal 2019, but the best estimates suggest that illegal immigration rose by a similar amount, leaving overall immigration little changed. What Trump did to is to skew immigration away from high skilled workers and toward low skilled workers.

As he gets more desperate, Trump is increasingly playing to his white nationalist base. But he’s not serving their interests. In the Alabama senate race, he’s opposing the most fervent supporter of his white nationalist policies, the man who supported Trump before anyone else—Jeff Sessions. This is good news. If the Trump movement switches from supporting alt-right ideals to a personality cult built around Trump, then his movement won’t survive after he passes from the scene. On the other hand a Tuberville win would be jumping from the pot into the fire. White nationalism would be weakened, but the politics of personality cults led by a macho leader would be strengthened.

Less fascist, more banana republic.

Happy Fourth of July!