Links
4 stars
Israel’s Undeniable War Crimes in Gaza | New York Magazine
26-minute read
It’s clear now that Hamas’s terroristic and sadistic attack on October 7, 2023, was meant to transform the region. Its acts against both Israeli soldiers and innocent civilians, including massacring women, children, and grandparents; burning homes; and taking about 250 hostages, accompanied by the images and videos the group posted online, were unmistakably triumphant, flagrantly criminal, and intentionally terrifying for Israelis and Jews around the world. The daylong offensive across land, sea, and air struck military outposts, a rave, and kibbutzim, killing some 1,200 people and wounding thousands more. For Israelis, it was the worst attack on their country in its history, from an extremist group that has often pledged to destroy them.
[...]
Israel’s critics continue to use the word genocide to describe this all-encompassing destruction, which U.S. officials and Israel’s supporters scoff at as leftist agitprop, an attempt to delegitimize Israel. But the accusation that Israel has committed war crimes — likely hundreds, maybe even thousands of war crimes — has become all but undeniable. Even Israel’s supporters, those who defended or withstood this publicly broadcast nightmare for 19 months, have reached some semblance of a limit. In May, the leaders of the U.K., France, and Canada said the expansion of the Israeli military offensive was “wholly disproportionate.” Germany’s chancellor said he “no longer sees any logic as to how they serve the goal of fighting terror and freeing the hostages.” Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said, “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limit-less, cruel, and criminal killing of civilians,” adding, “It’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”
In its annihilative force and ambition, the Israeli campaign is unique among modern conflicts. In fact, the term war crime is not even adequate for what’s happening in Gaza, in that it suggests that there is a war happening and there are some crimes in it. Gaza is different, the number of war crimes virtually incalculable, the war not really a war but rather the ceaseless pummeling of one side by the other. “If what we are seeing in the Gaza Strip is the future of war,” Pierre Krähenbühl of the Red Cross said in April, “we should all be very concerned, terrified.”
Even the most hardened cynic may ask, What system could possibly have allowed this? Unlike the Holocaust, whose horrors were properly understood by the outside world only after the fact, the evidence of Gaza’s horrors is immediately known and ubiquitous thanks to smartphones, despite the lack of on-the-ground reporting from western journalists barred from the Strip. The postwar legal order established to prevent the atrocities of World War II has failed, and worse, the U.S., which nominally took on the responsibility of preserving that order, is abetting the killing and abandoning any pretense of adhering to the law. “It’s not that huge numbers of potential incidents of war crimes don’t happen in places like Ukraine or Congo,” Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, told me, and he could have added Sudan or China. “What has brought a lot of attention to Gaza is that it’s a very sophisticated military backed by the United States, which is essentially bombing and starving at will. The outrage is about the relentless and very one-sided nature of the conflict.”
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3 stars
How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost | New York Times
29-minute read
What makes the defeat all the more striking is the remarkable string of victories the broader L.G.B.T.Q. movement was winning until a few years ago. Tailoring its message to reach skeptical audiences, careful to ride near the crest of shifting public sentiment, it pursued incremental legal and regulatory wins that, ultimately, sparked deep social change. Beginning in the 2010s, gay people won the right to marry and, along with trans people, serve openly in the military. The movement defeated “bathroom bills” aimed at trans people in states like North Carolina and Texas, persuading even some Republicans that such measures were unnecessary and cruel. Just five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that employees could not be fired for being gay or transgender. But with Skrmetti, the movement bet its future on a far more fraught question: whether children have a constitutional right to treatments that halt and redirect their physical adolescence.
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Along the road to Skrmetti, some believe, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement drove itself toward a cliff — and took the Democratic Party with it, chaining the Biden administration to one of the most divisive issues in American politics at a moment of shifting medical consensus and fierce polarization. “It’s one of the biggest mistakes in the history of trans activism,” said Brianna Wu, a trans woman who serves on the board of Rebellion PAC, a Democratic political-action committee. Strangio and other advocates for trans rights have cast Skrmetti as the case they had to bring. It may also have set their movement back a generation.
[...]
The scientific debate around gender-affirming care had already been upended once that spring, after Hilary Cass, in a final report submitted to British health officials, declared pediatric gender medicine “an area of remarkably weak evidence.” Gender-affirming treatments were not being singled out for lack of rigor, Cass said in interviews, but rather stood out for their weak clinical basis even compared with other areas of pediatric medicine.
Cass’s report sent shock waves across the Atlantic. There was “no evidence” that gender-affirming treatments reduced the risk that trans teenagers would die by suicide, her review found. SOC-8’s adolescent chapter lacked “developmental rigor.” And the much-cited consensus of medical associations was a mirage. Few of the groups endorsing gender-affirming care had actually conducted their own in-depth evidence reviews, her team found; instead, nearly all had relied on older Endocrine Society and WPATH guidelines as the basis for their own recommendations.
There was now a dawning awareness within the administration, another Biden aide told me, that its allies in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement had overstated the medical case for pediatric gender-affirming care.
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3 Teens Almost Got Away With Murder. Then Police Found Their Google Searches. | WIRED
12-minute read
An arson attack in Colorado had detectives stumped. The way they solved the case could put everyone at risk.
[...]
At a department meeting in September, Baker and Sandoval pleaded with colleagues for ideas. Was there anything they hadn’t tried—anything at all? That’s when another detective wondered if the perpetrators had Googled the address before heading there. Perhaps Google had a record of that search?
It was like a door they’d never noticed suddenly flung open. They called Sonnendecker and the senior deputy district attorney, Cathee Hansen. Neither had heard of Google turning over a list of people who had searched for a specific term. In fact, it had been done: in a 2017 fraud investigation in Minnesota, after a series of bombings in Austin in 2018, in a 2019 trafficking case in Wisconsin, and a theft case in North Carolina the following year. Federal investigators also used a reverse keyword search warrant to investigate an associate of R. Kelly who attempted to intimidate a witness in the musician’s racketeering and sexual exploitation trial. But those records had largely been sealed. So, largely unaware of these precedents, Hansen and Sandoval drafted their warrant from scratch, requesting names, birth dates, and physical addresses for all users who’d searched variations of 5312 Truckee Street in the 15 days before the fire.
Google denied the request.
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Endometriosis is an incredibly interesting disease | Owl Posting
13-minute read
Endometriosis is a remarkable disease. It is something that, despite being studied for centuries, has eluded an understanding of its origins, has an uncanny resemblance to cancer, and lacks any effective curative or management methods. Yet, it stands almost entirely alone in terms of how little funding the condition receives relative to the absolute number of lives it irrevocably alters for the worse: 10% of reproductive age women (or 190 million) worldwide, with only $29M earmarked for them.
Understandably, characterizing any disease as ‘interesting’ runs the risk of seeming flippant. Especially given how intensely emotional the impact of it on patient lives can be: chronic pain, infertility, and life-altering disability. This is not my intention! Here, I use ‘interesting’ as a way to convey a sense of unexpectedness. Many aspects of endometriosis are deeply unexpected. And, perhaps more practically and actionably for readers, it is unexpected in ways that are surely fertile ground for more research.
Changing Lanes | The Baffler
15-minute read
I told myself it was a matter of gaining “tournament experience.” The bowling coach in my head was barking encouragement. Get out there and compete. You miss every shot you don’t take. You think you’re a good bowler? How well can you bowl when there’s money on the line? But by now, after a couple decades of trying, I have low expectations. I’m an underachiever under pressure. I’ve bowled poorly in every tournament I’ve ever entered. This one would be the same.
[...]
The number of bowling centers in the United States, which peaked at about twelve thousand in the mid-1960s, has been steadily falling for four decades. The number was down to about 3,800 in 2023, according to the USBC. Political scientist Robert D. Putnam famously cited the decline of league bowling in his 2000 book Bowling Alone as one of many indicators that civic engagement was collapsing across America, noting that league bowling declined by 40 percent between 1980 and 1993. The updated figure is even more dramatic: from a high of about 9.8 million league bowlers at the end of the 1970s, the number of USBC members in leagues for the 2022–23 season was 1.09 million. That’s a decline of 89 percent.
The World's Hardest Bluffing Game | The Atlantic
6-minute read
When you hear the game described, mheibes doesn’t sound difficult. It sounds impossible. Assembled on the court in front of al-Sheikhli were his opponents: 45 men from the city of Najaf, arranged in three neat rows. One of these players held a silver ring. It was al-Sheikhli’s job to determine which one—and in which fist he held the ring—judging only by his facial cues and other tells.
[...]
Even so, when I first learned about mheibes, and started poring over the match videos posted on YouTube and Facebook, I was awestruck by the captains’ skill. A poker player might need to study eight other people at their table. A mheibes captain takes stock of perhaps 45 distinct opponents—or, really, 90 different fists. Mheibes captains do not succeed at this task every time. But I came to understand that top players spot the ring with shocking regularity.
I had to see this for myself.
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2 stars
Intuitive Eating | Orion Magazine
12-minute read
I met Elan Hagens at a Coast Range trailhead about thirty minutes from the Tillamook Cheese Factory. I grew up hiking and backpacking in Oregon, but I’d never gone into the woods with a specifically mushroom-hued lens. On my hour-long drive from Portland, I’d passed fields crystallized with frost, the light-dappled road kinked with turns that sent me flying toward and away from the glittering Wilson River. When Elan leaped out of her car to hug me, her ninety-five-pound giant schnauzer, Maisie—as tall as Elan’s waist-length braids—leaped out too. I had wanted to forage with Elan not just because she was a pro—she’d spent years selling fungi at multiple Portland farmers’ markets, taught mycology and food justice workshops, and lectured at conferences around the country—but because she was candid about the full spectrum of what foraging could make her feel.
Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon | Understanding AI
12-minute read
A new generation of models changed that in mid-2024. StackBlitz developers tested them and said “oh my God, like, okay, we can build a product around this,” Simons said.
This jump in model capabilities coincided with an industry-wide shift in how models were trained.
Before 2024, AI labs devoted most of their computing power to pretraining. I described this process in my 2023 explainer on large language models: a model is trained to predict the next word in Wikipedia articles, news stories, and other documents. But over the course of 2024, AI companies have devoted a growing share of their training budgets to post-training, a catch-all term for the steps that come after this pretraining phase is complete.
Many post-training steps use a technique called reinforcement learning.
When Humans Learned to Live Everywhere | New York Times
3-minute read
About 70,000 years ago in Africa, humans expanded into more extreme environments, a new study finds, setting the stage for our global migration.
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Notes on Managing ADHD | Fernando Borretti
20-minute read
This post is about managing ADHD. It is divided into two sections: “Strategies” describes the high-level control system, “Tactics” is a list of micro-level improvements (really it should be called “stratagems”, since most are essentially about tricking yourself).
Phorm Energy Screamin’ Freedom | New York Review of Books
5-minute read
The line to get into the Army Birthday Festival on Saturday afternoon began a few blocks from the US Capitol, where police had arrested about sixty people the previous day at a veterans’ protest against the planned military parade. Attendees filed past a black flag reading “January 6th was an inside job,” a conspiracy theory that has at times been endorsed by President Donald Trump and his supporters. As we inched toward the security checkpoint a man with a bullhorn and a sign that said “REPENT” warned of the coming Antichrist and prayed for our souls.
Just as I was about to pass through the metal detector, a woman from the antiwar group Code Pink with a keffiyeh wrapped around her waist handed me a flier that read “For 1% of the Pentagon Budget, we pay $9.21 billion in taxes.” It listed how many teachers that sum could fund (94,889) and how much health care it could provide (according to the group’s calculations, it would cover 3.2 million low-income children or 541,736 veterans). When she tried to hand the same flier to the man standing behind me, a military dog handler stationed at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, he stared at her silently, then turned to his companion and muttered, “Doesn’t she know her audience?”
The festival, held on the National Mall in honor of the US Army’s 250th anniversary, had the feel of an arms expo combined with a military recruitment fair. A howitzer stood near the entrance, manned by maroon berets from the army’s airborne force. At the camouflaged tent of the 75th Ranger Regiment—the storied Army Rangers—people lined up to hoist a Carl-Gustaf M4 multi-role weapon system over their shoulder and to try on combat vests and helmets. Kids in Make America Great Again hats clambered inside assault helicopters; a circle formed around two automated Boston Dynamics robot dogs that were trotting in place. Spectators climbed on top of Stryker combat vehicles or took turns holding guns equipped with Smartshooter systems that are designed to “significantly enhance lethality and user survivability.”
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We can't afford to keep cutting taxes for the rich | Noahpinion
6-minute read
If politicians keep getting rewarded for blowout deficits, massive health care spending increases, and tax cuts for the rich, the U.S. government’s solvency is eventually going to be called into question. We don’t know exactly when that will happen, but the amount of fiscal irresponsibility that bond market investors will be willing to tolerate is not infinite.
There are lots of things America’s government can no longer afford. One of those things is tax cuts for the rich.
#82. How Schools Can Improve Kids’ Mental Health and Their Academic Performance | Play Makes Us Human
8-minute read
A concept ignored by the architects of Common Core is school climate. Already before Common Core was adopted (in 2010 or shortly thereafter in most states), many research studies had shown that the schools where students are mentally healthiest and perform best academically are those that focus on creating and maintaining a positive student climate. School climate refers to the attitudes and personal relationships that permeate a school’s culture. A positive school climate is one where all parties—students, teachers, and non-teaching staff—feel physically and emotionally safe, have warm feelings toward one another, respect and care for one another, support one another toward mutually defined goals, and feel good about being members of the school.
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Fifteen years ago (beginning in the fall of 2010), David Sloan Wilson—an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University—conducted, along with colleagues, a remarkable educational experiment. They started a new public high school, in Binghamton, NY, that would enroll only the lowest-performing students in the city (Wilson et al., 2011; Kauffman & Wilson, 2016). Only those students entering 9th or 10th grade who had failed three or more courses during the previous school year were eligible. Of the 117 students who qualified, 56 were randomly assigned to the experimental school, called Regents Academy, and the remainder, comprising the control group, remained at Binghamton’s single public high school. Nearly all of these 117 students were from low-income families, low enough to qualify for the state’s free lunch program.
Wilson, whom I have known for many years and sometimes collaborated with, is famous for his research and theory pertaining to the evolution of human cooperation and the conditions that promote or interfere with cooperation. Regents Academy was, in essence, a test of the hypothesis that a school would function best if designed in a way to maximize the tendency of its members to identify with one another, see themselves as part of a cooperative group, and, as a result, help one another achieve a common goal. In this case the common goal was to achieve success, as a group and as individuals, in meeting the academic requirements of the Binghamton school system.
Intercepted call of Iranian officials downplays damage of U.S. attack | Washington Post
5-minute read
The United States obtained intercepted communication between senior Iranian officials discussing this month’s U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and remarking that the attack was less devastating than they had expected, said four people familiar with the classified intelligence circulating within the U.S. government.
The communication, intended to be private, included Iranian government officials speculating as to why the strikes directed by President Donald Trump were not as destructive and extensive as they had anticipated, these people said. Like some others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
The intercepted signals intelligence is the latest preliminary information offering a more complicated picture than the one conveyed by the president, who has said the operation “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.
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Western democracies are actually pretty good at war | Noahpinion
9-minute read
Rumors of the weakness and decay of the West, and of the inferiority of democracies in the face of autocratic power, seem to have been at least somewhat exaggerated. What’s going on? In fact, the first two decades of the 21st century may have been an aberration; democracies actually do tend to win wars more often than they lose.
1 star
6 Facts About Indigo That Might Surprise You | something is missing
3-minute read
Have you ever wondered about how your jeans turn blue?
Unless you’re a textile artist or designer, chances are you’ve never really thought about this question. The blue which is traditionally used to dye denim is called indigo, and it is one of the oldest dyes in the world.
[...]
The documentary “Shades of Indigo” follows self-taught indigo dyer Ryuta Sasaki, who practices a traditional dyeing technique that involves mixing crushed indigo leaves with wood ash and water to kickstart the fermentation process. Over time, the indigo dye becomes a living entity (similar to a sourdough starter), with its color changing slightly from day to day. Experienced dyers can even sense the “mood” of the dye by its smell and taste. One of the most moving scenes in the documentary shows Sasaki expressing gratitude and saying goodbye to an old indigo vat he had affectionately named “Great-Grandma” after she stopped producing color—a reflection of the deep bond he had formed with it.
A couple tried for 18 years to get pregnant. AI made it happen. | CNN
5-minute read
After trying to conceive for 18 years, one couple is now pregnant with their first child thanks to the power of artificial intelligence.
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It’s called the STAR method, and it uses AI to help identify and recover hidden sperm in men who once thought they had no sperm at all. All the husband had to do was leave a semen sample with the medical team.
[...]
“A patient provided a sample, and highly skilled technicians looked for two days through that sample to try to find sperm. They didn’t find any. We brought it to the AI-based STAR System. In one hour, it found 44 sperm. So right then, we realized, ‘Wow, this is really a game-changer. This is going to make such a big difference for patients,’ ” said Williams, who led the research team.
Massive Rent-Seeking in India's Government Job Examination System | Marginal Revolution
2-minute read
In India, government jobs pay far more than equivalent jobs in the private sector–so much so that the entire labor market and educational system have become grossly distorted by rent seeking to obtain these jobs. Teachers in the public sector, for example, are paid at least five times more than in the private sector. It’s not just the salary. When accounting for lifetime tenure, generous perks, and potentially remunerative possibilities for corruption, a government job’s total value can be up to 10 times that of an equivalent private sector job.
Some European countries have mastered a happiness trick? | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Using Eurobarometer data for 21 Western European countries since 1973 we show the U-shape in life satisfaction by age, present for so long, has now vanished.
A great selection as always.