Book bans and culturally divisive conflicts cost schools more than $3 billion last year.
Schools say they’re spending the money on legal fees, added security, additional staff time and additional costs for community, school board and government relations, according to a report by Diana Lambert at the Times of San Diego. Districts are picking up the financial burden of staff turnover related to conflicts and because staff had to take time away from other duties to deal with conflict.
Half of superintendents surveyed said they’d been personally harassed at least once during the school year, 10% said they’d been threatened with violence and 11% had their proprty vandalized.
“A Pennsylvania superintendent called the emotional stress and anxiety ‘nearly crippling.'”
This article doesn’t say who’s causing all this strife, but I bet it’s the usual MAGA/Qanon/anti-vax/anti-LGBTQ/Dominionist suspects. Trans people and drag queens aren’t bothering anyone.
Awaken Church, an anti-LGBTQ charismatic sect closely aligned with Trump, wants to expand into Coronado, a suburb of San Diego. It’s facing pushback from local leaders (good!).
Church leaders compare Democrats to evil Biblical figures and say the LGBTQ community is the devil. The church partners with a right-wing organization that says it’s building an “army” to “save” America.
The Ingenuity helicopter is permanently grounded on Mars following a crash, after 72 flights. The NASA interplanetary probe was built to be affordable, using off-the shelf components where possible, and was designed for only five flights.
Police have determined who put the body of an 81-year-old former nurse in a home freezer in Allied Gardens, a suburb of San Diego: It was her husband, who died in February, weeks after the body was discovered.
But the cause of death and motive are still unknown.
Julie and I have an agreement that if one of us predeceases the other — which is, of course, likely — the survivor will not put the body of the deceased in a home freezer.
Unless it involves an awesome prank, in which case anything goes.
Ross Douthat: It’s Going to Be Normal to Have Extreme Beliefs. “Going to be”? It already is.
ChatGPT is getting support for Projects. You will be able to group related chats together and add source documents and custom instructions. This looks extremely useful and makes ChatGPT more like NotebookLLM.
I’d love to be able to pin or bookmark chats.
Another new Twitter? Good luck with that. “Users are now flocking to Bluesky. But every social media platform becomes a wasteland in the end.”
In a short article, J Wortham casts a skeptical eye on whether BlueSky will be the new, better Twitter and widens the discussion to examine Silicon Valley and California history. Racism and violence aren’t late additions; they were there from the beginning.
Kennedy’s lawyer has asked the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. A suicide cult is being put in charge of US health policy.
The meaning of McDonald's: Writer Chris Arnade's "favorite franchise can't seem to get out of the news"
The last few months has provided two moments that emphasize how central McDonald’s is to American life, both physically and culturally. First there was the viral, and controversial, Trump campaign stop where he “worked” for an hour, and now the news that Luigi Mangione, the charged and alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was caught in an Altoona franchise because he was spotted by a group of morning regulars and employees.
Those who have followed me for the last decade know that McDonald’s is also central to who I am. My first viral piece, that effectively launched my writing career, was about how McDonald’s has become America’s community centers, especially for communities where so much else has fallen apart, or disappointed people.
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Trump’s McDonald’s photo op, which while it has been adjudicated to death, is a great illustration of what many elites still miss about his appeal.
Trump’s superpower has long been signaling to working stiffs that he’s “just like you” despite being on the surface anything like them. His love of McDonald’s, which I believe is as genuine as any politician can ever have, is one of those signals, and maybe his most effective, because it makes his critics go hyperbolic in a way that signals that they are not “just like you.”
I recently discovered Arnade as a writer and I think he’s fantastic. I prevously read his piece on how McDonald’s has become America’s community center, and loved it, but I didn’t register the byline.
Like me, Arnade is an ambler but he is far more dedicated than I.
The Longevity Revolution: America Needs to Radically Rethink What It Means to Be Old
Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic:
We could use a new category [for adulthood], one reflecting the fact that longevity is inserting one, two, or even three decades between middle age and old age.
As it happens, such a category is available: late adulthood. Associated with such thinkers as the sociologist Phyllis Moen, the psychologist Laura Carstensen, the social entrepreneurs Chip Conley and Marc Freedman, and the activist and writer Ashton Applewhite, the notion of late adulthood captures the reality of a new stage of life, in which many people are neither fully retired nor conventionally employed — a phase when people can seek new pursuits, take “not so hard” jobs, and give back to their communities, their families, and their God.
And no, this is not a pipe dream. Copious evidence shows that most of what people think they know about life after 50 is wrong. Aging per se (as distinct from sickness or frailty) is not a process of uniform decline. It brings gains, too: greater equanimity, more emotional resilience, and what Carstensen and others have called the positivity effect, a heightened appreciation of life’s blessings. Partly for that reason, the later decades of life are, on average, not the saddest but the happiest. Contrary to popular belief, aging does not bring mental stagnation. Older people can learn and create, although their styles of learning and creativity are different than in younger years. Emotional development and maturation continue right through the end of life. And aging can bring wisdom — the ability to rise above self-centered viewpoints, master turbulent emotions, and solve life’s problems — a boon not only to the wise but to everyone around them.
Late adulthood is a time when the prospects for earning diminish but the potential for grandparenting, mentoring, and volunteering peaks. It is — or can be — a time of reorientation and relaunch, a time when zero-sum goals such as social competition and personal ambition yield to positive-sum pursuits such as building community and nurturing relationships.
… Right now, Americans are receiving more than a decade of additional time in the most satisfying and prosocial period of life. This is potentially the greatest gift any generation of humans has ever received. The question is whether we will grasp it.
I found myself nodding along to a lot of this.
… a phase when people can seek new pursuits, take “not so hard” jobs, and give back to their communities, their families, and their God.
Check. I come in to work, I work hard, I try to do great work, and when I’m done I’m done. I am no longer interested in advancing my “career” — I don’t want to be the VP of anything or grind or have a side-hustle go into founder mode or be an entrepreneur.1 I do want to give back more to the community (I’m working on that) and family (more challenging because our families are thousands of miles away). As for God: My idea of God is that all They ask of us is we do right. (Which is asking too much a lot of the time.)
… a heightened appreciation of life’s blessings
Check. I had a very bad cold the past week, but even as I was lying in bed hacking and coughing, I was grateful to have a warm bed to lie in, and Julie to nag me to take better care of myself.
I don’t know about the need for a new category of adulthood, and a label — “late adulthood” — go go with it. Ashton Applewhite,2 whose work on aging I admire enormously, uses the word “olders.” I think that type of language eventually becomes euphemisms, like the phrases “golden years” and “senior citizens” in previous generations, and the euphemisms eventually become as toxic as the original. Maybe instead we should copy the example of our queer3 friends and family, reclaim the bad word, and make it our own: “old.”
On the other hand, I have occasionally described myself as “old” to younger colleagues.4 “You’re not old,” they say. And I find that conversation to be a waste of time. Which is becoming more precious to me on account of my being old.5
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I feel defensive when I describe this attitude in public. So yeah I’m not going to grind 18 hours a day for an employer and I’m not adrenaline-fueled excitement-junkie. But I’m also not addicted to drama. I’m reliable. You can count on me to do the job. ↩︎
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Her book “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism” is essential reading for anyone who is over 50 or plans to be. ↩︎
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Apropos of nothing, I’m reminded of a line fron a recent episode of the Savage Love podcast where a straight person complained that the words “gay” and “queer” used to have other useful meanings and a queer person responded that we should blame the normies for that because they were so afraid of being thought to be homosexuals that they stopped using “gay” and “queer” to mean anything else. ↩︎
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Nowadays that’s all of them lol ↩︎
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Or in “late adulthood.” Or an “older.” Or whatever. ↩︎
LA Times Billionaire Owner Hilariously Thinks He Can Solve Media Bias With 'AI'
Academics have spent generations warning about what happens when you let journalism and media consolidate in the hands of rich people and corporations. As this season’s election coverage demonstrated, the end result is usually a lazy simulacrum of journalism that looks like real reporting, but tends to reflect ownership interests and (usually) lacks the courage to challenge wealth and power.
The coverage tends to be feckless and shallow. It tends to hew toward false ideological symmetry (what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere"). It tends to give short shrift to issues like labor and consumer rights, and extra attention and credence to corporatist beliefs. It very often demonstrates sexist, classist, and racist bias. It’s generally not subtle.
When white male billionaires jump into the news business they are conditioned to see none of this. Most of the time, as we’ve seen with outlets like Politico (run by German billionaire CEO Mathias Döpfner) they’ll generally whine about “bias," but believe most of the bias in journalism is coming from “the left” end of the ideological spectrum (too much “divisive” coverage about class and race issues).
How Easy Rawlins Built a Real Estate Empire, One Crime Novel at a Time. “Walter Mosley talks about how his fictional hero frees himself from wage labor through America’s favorite side hustle: landlording.” — I loved these books. I got out of the habit of reading them. Time to resume!
Predicting the Present: Cory Doctorow reflects on his 2019 story, “Radicalized,” about men on a message board who see their loved ones murdered by medical insurance companies, and who “egg each other on to spectacular acts of mass violence against health insurance company employees, hospital billing offices, and other targets of their rage.”
“Radicalized,” of course, foreshadowed real-life events, specifically the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Cory says he’s surprised there hasn’t been more violence directed against health insurance companies, given their flagrant abuses and given that the U.S. is awash in guns.
Cory:
Murder is never the answer. Murder is not a healthy response to corruption. But it is healthy for people to fear that if they kill people for greed, they will be unsafe."
Think about hospital exec Ralph de la Torre, who cheerfully testified to Congress that he’d killed patients in pursuit of profit. De la Torre clearly doesn’t fear any kind of consequences for his actions. He owns hospitals that are filled with tens of thousands of bats (he stiffed the exterminators), where none of the elevators work (he stiffed the repair techs), where there’s no medicine or blood (he stiffed the suppliers) and where the doctors and nurses can’t make rent (he stiffed them too). De La Torre doesn’t just own hospitals – he also owns a pair of superyachts:
It is a miracle that so many people have lost their mothers, sons, wives and husbands so Ralph de la Torre could buy himself another superyacht, and that those people live in a country where you can buy an assault rifle, and that Ralph de la Torre isn’t forced to live in a bunker and travel in a tank.
It’s a rather beautiful sort of miracle, to be honest. I like to think that it comes from a widespread belief by the people of this country I have since become a citizen of, that we should solve our problems politically, rather than with bullets.
But the assassination of Brian Thompson is a wake-up call, a warning that if we don’t solve this problem politically, we may not have a choice about whether it’s solved with violence. As a character in “Radicalized” says, “They say violence never solves anything, but to quote The Onion: that’s only true so long as you ignore all of human history.”
A quick note for my San Diego friends
Agenda item 29 on Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting prohibits the sherriff’s department from participating in deporting undocumented people.
Amy Reichart has rallied her troops to send comments to the supervisors asking them to vote no.
Please send a short message to the supervisors asking them to vote yes on agenda item #29.
Here is a sample:
I urge the supervisors to vote YES on this item (agenda item #29) to protect our communities. The county should not be using its resources to engage in immigration enforcement, which is a federal function. County resources should be used to support, not separate, families.
And here is the link to submit your comment.