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  The “baby boom” began in 1946 and ended in 1964. I’m a boomer. In fact, I was born in the mathematical center of the baby boom. I was 14 when Woodstock happened. Boomers have been credited (or blamed) for the tumultuous ‘60s of civil rights and hippie fame. But that’s anachronistic. Here’s Louis Manand in his recent New Yorker article “What happened to the yuppie?” “Most of the baby boomers had nothing to do with the civil-rights movement or the launch of the women’s-liberation movement, and only a few who were born before 1950 had much to do with the antiwar movement. When the first U.S. combat troops were deployed to Vietnam, in 1965, the oldest baby boomers were nineteen, and still in college. The youngest were not yet one, and teething. On the other hand, the yuppies, if we define them as people between twenty-five and thirty-nine in 1984, were indeed baby boomers. The yuppie, not the hippie, is the baby boom’s contribution to American social history. “ . . . [Jerry] Rubin wa...

We’ve been subscribing to the Boston Globe since we moved east. I seldom read the editorials, but have sampled some of the writers. One writer I’ve learned to ignore is Jeff Jacoby. I’m pretty conservative*, but Jeff’s columns were too predictably right-wing and shallow for my taste.  Recently, I broke my fast and read Jeff’s column on JD Vance, Trump’s VPOTUS selection. My boy Jeff was totally on target. We completely agree. “Of course America is the homeland of people who have lived here for generations. Of course there are millions of Americans who feel bound to that homeland by their “shared history.” But much of what makes the United States so extraordinary is that for more than two centuries it has also been the homeland of millions of people — immigrants and the children of immigrants — with no lengthy family or property ties in America. At the heart of Americanness is   not   blood or soil but the embrace of fundamental principles and beliefs. Vance is wrong. Amer...

Yesterday, I posted about geoengineering the ocean as a promising form of carbon capture. But why do we need carbon capture at all? Can’t we just conserve our way out of global warming? No. Here are a couple of reasons why the *only* way to avert climate disaster is to start removing carbon from the atmosphere: 1. The half-life of CO 2  in the atmosphere is ca. 120 years. What that means is that if all sources of CO 2 —man-made, forest fires, vulcanism, etc—ceased worldwide starting tomorrow, it would take 120 years for atmospheric CO 2  to drop by half. So conservation isn’t enough to reverse the march to climate crisis. Suggesting that carbon capture is just a distraction from having Americans drive less is, to put it gently, hopelessly and tragically naïve.  2. The global anthropogenic sources of CO 2  will only expand. Developing world nations want the economies that the industrialized nation built with burning coal, oil and gas, and it is futile (and arrogant) t...

Global heating continues unabated. While decarbonizing our energy sources is certainly important, it is too late to prevent global disaster. Coastal flooding, desertification, wildfires will continue to increase, driving vulnerable populations to migrate and igniting resource wars for fresh water and arable land. It’s already driving migration and violence in the Middle East and Central America. We must find a way to decarbonize the atmosphere on a global scale to prevent an existential threat to humanity. Currently, the most promising path to global carbon capture is geoengineering the worlds oceans.    “There will be tradeoffs involved in carrying out any method of carbon removal on a global scale. Ocean alkalinity enhancement would require major new mining efforts. Ocean iron fertilization could affect the fishing industry and fish stocks in unpredictable ways. We have been unintentionally geoengineering our atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, and as unpalatable as ...

As America ages, dementia is becoming a bigger and bigger healthcare burden. Medicare won’t pay for long-term nursing home care. Dementia will be a growing drag on the US economy at least until the baby boomer die off. Shingles is caused by herpes virus, a neurotrophic virus. For many people who had chicken pox as a child, the virus hid out in their ganglia, emerging decades later as a painful rash. There’s a vaccine for shingles now that is protective for shingles. It turns out that the shingles vaccine is also protective for dementia: “ Last year, a preprint study in Wales suggested that the live shingles vaccine may be associated with a 20% reduction in dementia risk, with the relationship stronger in women than men.   "Although previous studies have suggested immunization against herpes viruses might protect against dementia, particularly in women, this took advantage of a change in vaccine type to overcome the many confounding variables that may have provided alternative expl...

  Ever since I graduated high school, I’ve been associated with one or another research university, either as a student, a postdoc or a faculty. And during nearly all of that time, I was engaged in some form of research. William Rouse wrote a book in 2016 entitled “Universities as Complex Enterprises: How Academia Works, Why it Works These Ways, and Where the University Enterprise is Headed.” He updated and summarized his research in a paper published with two colleagues in late 2018 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. During this time, I was the Associate Dean for Research at the medical school where I worked, so I read both the book and article, and shared them with the university CFO and the President. I doubt it had any effect. To distill it down to a couple essential points: • Research is always and everywhere a cost center for a University. While grant funding can cover some or most project salaries and benefits, as well as supplies and overhead, the net c...

I'm reading a lot these days about Christian nationalism. What I've read so far reminds me of supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Islamist nationalism. Certainly, Jesus never commanded that His followers take over the government in His name. Now we have the Oklahoma state superintendent of schools insisting that biblical indoctrination must be enforced in his state. How feeble is Christianity in Oklahoma that it requires the nanny state to back evangelism. The superintendent cloaks his evangelism in the language of bible as history and culture. LOL! As history, the Bible is terribly inaccurate, and you don’t need any more of an understanding of its contents to understand history in general than you do of any other major religious text. As science, it is risible. As literature, the Bible is nearly unreadable. As moral philosophy, the lessons of the Bible range from inarticulately expressed versions of what can be found in many much better children’s books, to cultish insani...

JD Vance is the only VP nominee in modern history to have *negative* poll numbers when he was nominated. But finding himself in a hole, he continues to dig.  His latest shtick is to question the loyalty and patriotism of childless Americans. That amounts to over 100 million potential voters. "In 2023, an estimated 38 percent of American adults did not have biological children, or roughly 101 million people nationwide, according to a Globe analysis of data from the US Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation. About 46 million of them are women. "In a 2021 Fox News clip, the Ohio Republican and Republican nominee for vice president referred to Harris and other top Democrats as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.” "Despite Vance’s specific calling out of “cat ladies,” a much higher share of childless American adults are men, the survey data show. Nearly 43 percent of adult men — roughly 55 million p...

In 2022, when he won his senate seat, he beat his Dem opponent by 6%; while that sounds impressive, the Republican governor in the same election beat his Dem opponent by a whopping 25%. Gov. DeWine received 2.58 million votes, while Vance got only 2.19, meaning that nearly 400k DeWine voters--or about 15%--voted against Vance. Accordingly, many, many people who wanted a Republican governor in Ohio crossed parties to vote against Vance. Trump selected a VP who significantly underperformed *in his own state.*

Just finished reading “James” by Percival Everett. This novel is a re-imagining of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” through the eyes of Huck’s slave companion Jim. I need to make two disclaimers: (1) I’m not a big consumer of novels and (2) I never read Huckleberry Finn, although I’m familiar with the basic plot line. The character of James is a self-educated slave who hides his education from the white folks by affecting the semi-literate argot that Twain styles as slave speech. He is acutely self-aware. When he learns he is to be sold and separated from his wife and children, he escapes. Soon, he is hunted both as escaped property and a suspect in Huck’s faked murder. There are episodes that are explicit nods to the Twain novel, but also some departures. Throughout, we’ve forced to see the character of James as fully human and not simply a foil to Huck and the other white characters. I found the education of the auto-didact James, gained by reading books in the library of a wealthy ch...

The most economically consequential event of the past decade was the COVID pandemic. It saw countless heroic actions that will be forever unrecognized. Among those who  were  recognized were Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines.  A more controversial figure during that period was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIH Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, who became the public face of the US government pandemic response. Because of his visibility, he’s become a political magnet and whipping boy for opportunistic politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has told Fauci that he should be in prison for crimes against humanity.  On the contrary, Fauci withstood groundless vilification to advocate for the best public health response based on the information available at the time. Here’s Fauci’s reflection: “ If you look at it in two separate buckets, the sc...

 Sorry about the long hiatus. I had log-in problems and just stopped trying until today. I'll resume regular posting here.