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It’s another example of how we are in this weird and uncanny political moment in which Trump’s politics have broken free of the constraints of public opinion. (It’s reminiscent of a mob bust-out where you rapidly strip a business of its value with no concern for the future because you’re just going to burn it down and collect the insurance pay out.) Presidents often pursue some policies in which they are on the wrong side of public opinion. That’s in the nature of politics. What we’re seeing today is in a different category, a president acting as though there are no limits on his power even as those limits gather round him. While people really do use AI, AI data centers rate in popularity terms down with child molesters. And yes, perhaps that’s an indicator when it comes to Trump. What we’re seeing here and elsewhere is a presidency in YOLO mode, freed even from medium-term strategies and warnings and focused on cashing in, both politically and financially, in the short term.   ~Jo...

Whenever you read the conspiracy theories about fluoridated water, it’s a good idea to remember that much of the world’s water is naturally fluoridated. Indeed, the correlation between natural fluoridation and lower incidence of dental caries is what lead to artificial water fluoridation.   There are plenty of other things to fret about if that’s how you want to spend the years that remain to you. One is dietary arsenic.  “All over the world, people eat rice, and lots of it. From congee and risotto to arroz con frijoles and biryani, it’s an essential ingredient in dishes integral to a variety of cuisines. But while this universal crop plays a foundational role in many diets, eating too much rice comes with a downside: It’s a significant source of the heavy metal arsenic.   “CR  first tested rice  for arsenic in 2012, and released  follow-up testing  in 2014. We recently conducted new tests to see if levels of inorganic arsenic, the more dangerous ...

By now, we all know the Cliff Notes version of American’s founding: Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the colonists defeated the British at Yorktown and Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Adams and Franklin wrote the Constitution, which the 13 colonies/states ratified enthusiastically. As an antidote to those cliché histories, I read a couple of good books on the period, a history and a biography.   The history book was “ Freedom around the globe: A world history of the American Revolution” by Sarah M.S Pearsall. The through-line of this book is that the “American Revolution” was one theater of a global war that also involved British colonies in Canadian North America, the Caribbean, South America Gibraltar and South Asia. And the combatants also included France and Spain. As Pearsall makes clear, Britain lost the American Revolution for reasons familiar to historians of empire—they simply exhausted their resources. By the battle of Yorktown, Cornwallis was fielding a wea...

Had he passed away in 2016, the mourning for him would have been universal. Someone might have named an airport, or a building, for him.   But the last decade  did  happen. And we can’t look past that. We can’t pretend that the “real” Lindsey Graham was the guy before 2016 and everything that’s happened since is just an unfortunate unpleasantness from which polite people should avert their eyes.   The Trump-era Lindsey Graham was the real Lindsey Graham, too. And that matters.   ~Jonathan V. Last

For the last eight years we lived in St. Louis, we had rooftop solar. Ameren paid half the cost, and we got a 30% tax write-off on the rest. The 22 panels only exceeded consumption for a couple months a year. The total savings didn’t pay off the investment. No matter, we did our part to combat global warming in a state where >70% of electricity was generated from coal. Solar options have proliferated since we got involved: “ Plug-in solar , also called balcony or DIY solar, has taken off in Europe, especially in Germany, where perhaps   4 million households  have installed systems that can be   purchased from places like Ikea . Customers buy small panels, typically about the size of half a ping-pong table, then plug them into an electrical outlet. Energy flows from the panels into the home to power up appliances.   Set up   can be measured in minutes. “The units, which come with an inverter, range in capacity, typically between 200 and 1,200 watts, supplying ...

Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits,  fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022 . Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the  proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023 . (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet. The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse.   ~  R...