Gongol.com Archives: June 2026
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June 3, 2026
It's not a cure, per se, but the announcement that a drug can double survival times for people with advanced pancreatic cancer is phenomenal news. It's the cancer that probably terrifies the most, because it usually goes undetected until it is far advanced. The more time we can buy for people with pancreatic cancer, the greater the chances survivors will live long enough to benefit from the next advancement. ■ The phrase "survive and advance" is usually tied to sports, but it's the right term here, as well. Strategically, we want to attack most serious illnesses (including cancer) in the same way: Prevention wherever possible, detection as early as practical, cures wherever we can find them, and therapies to slow the spread of disease for as long as possible. ■ Cures obviously remain the trophies we seek the most. But we ought to get really excited -- standing-ovation excited -- over discoveries that stretch out the time over which people with dreadful diagnoses can have a chance to benefit from the discovery of new cures. ■ It really is an amazing time to be alive, with terrifically effective vaccines coming into being and new therapies being proven all the time. We can't let up on any frontier, though; detection still seems to lag in many more ways than it should, but we might be getting some early inklings of what could be possible with the help of data as tools like AFib detection on the Apple Watch and biometric detection via jewelry achieve mass-market acceptance. ■ Baumol's cost disease paints a semi-gloomy picture of health-care costs that rise forever (in both absolute and relative terms), and that has long been a model backed by the hard data of real experience. If there is to be any hope of diminishing that, it will come from sustained research and progress on all fronts in the fight against the big serious diseases.
If someone offered you a television or movie script telling the real-life story of the superintendent-turned-fugitive, you'd dismiss it for outlandishness
He only played a psychologist on TV, but such was his ability to inhabit an appealing character that it's how he's remembered in statuary
FAA to investigate SpaceX Starship mishap
Dropping an uncontrolled booster segment to Earth wasn't a great move. Maybe not as dramatic as the giant Blue Origin explosion, but both call for some extremely careful investigation.
Commercially-available location data puts US troops at risk
Smartphones and data brokers as national security risk
June 4, 2026
In the midst of widespread technological change that sometimes results in mild to serious social upheaval, it's easy to get the wrong impression that everything is changing quickly. In fact, the world is a blend of the slow and fast, and calibrating our responses to reality can take a lot of effort. ■ 37 years ago, the Chinese Communist Party used the armed forces at its disposal to violently repress pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. ■ Probably the most enduring image of that multi-day incident is the Tank Man, who simply stood, groceries in hand, directly in the path of a tank as an act of fearless, spontaneous protest. ■ The "Frontline" documentary of the incident should be required viewing for all Americans. For one thing, it is a compelling depiction of the First Amendment spirit we too easily take for granted. ■ No less important, though, it is a tale about building the future we want. That begins with conceiving of a world where individual librties are universally protected and the consent of the governed is secured voluntarily. But it also includes having a serious, persistent, and extremely long-term plan for how to advance those values worldwide. ■ That doesn't mean advancing them at gunpoint (quite the opposite; if they aren't chosen freely and endogenously, they're unlikely to stick). But it does mean looking at a character like the Tank Man and asking how his quest for dignified citizenship can best be supported from abroad, and how it can be secured in ways that make our own liberties safer in the world, too. If 37 years and counting is too long a wait (and it surely is), then what should we have been doing all along and what's holding us back from acting without any further delay?
June 6, 2026
It seems plainly evident that the Kremlin had no idea it was entering into a four-year war when it started its full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022. It's a war that could stop at any moment upon the Kremlin's command to its own forces to stand down and withdraw. But as with so many other cases of human misjudgment, deeply pathological forces of psychology stand in the way of the admission of failure that remains so long overdue. ■ People have an astonishing capacity to ignore or even deny the obvious when it requires them to admit unpleasant realities. (Recall that it took decades for hand-washing to catch on with doctors because it was simply too unpleasant to countenance the idea that their unclean hands might have been causing avoidable death.) ■ An unpleasant reality forced upon us by Russia's war on Ukraine is that we have been launched directly into a complex world of warfare where the ideas of battlefields and front lines have been rendered far less important. If Ukraine -- not on anyone's radar as a leader in warfighting technology five years ago -- can launch thousand-kilometer drone attacks deep into Russia, then "defense" needs to be rethought. ■ 1,000 kilometers is a long, long way: It's like someone launching a drone from Washington, DC, and having it land in Chicago. Only, what landed in St. Petersburg wasn't just a fleet of flying machines. If war can be projected over distances that great at relatively low cost by a country that has built a domestic drone industry essentially from scratch, then it's time not to ignore the obvious but instead to get serious about realizing that a whole new era of warfare is likely afoot.
June 7, 2026
The harsh reality of school closures
A somber story in Nebraska's Flatwater Free Press tells of the closure of the last country school in Scotts Bluff County. It's not a high-profile place, though some may recognize it from the Oregon Trail and other historical themes of westward expansion -- the legendary Chimney Rock stands just outside the county's borders. ■ The school is closing due to a number of familiar refrains: The student population has been declining, the cost to keep a school open continues to rise, and a variety of public pressures (from local taxpayers to the state legislature) offer resistance to finding more funding. As with so many other places, the community considers the school a fixture of its identity, and closing the school is a harsh blow to that sense of place. ■ Nothing really can be done, however. Baumol's cost disease remains basically undefeated, and tiny schools are not going to escape emotionally-charged closures without huge changes. ■ One possible change would come in the form of a massive overhaul to their funding models, which seems unlikely, considering that every tax expenditure needs a constituency and the core of the problem is the lack of a population big enough to form such a constituency. ■ The other possibility is a sea change in the cost of delivering instruction. There are few plausible scenarios here, either, but one possibility looks like a shift to outsourced instruction, delivered mainly by personalized online connections, but supervised by one or more roving tutors who could pitch in to help when and where needed. ■ If routine classroom instruction can be largely outsourced, tiny schools just might be able to afford to keep the lights on by having teachers supervise larger numbers of students while someone else delivers the classroom material. By consolidating classes (and grade levels) together, the schools might be able to reach the necessary critical mass of students to teachers in order to afford an in-person experience, perhaps with rotating assignments for additional teachers to supervise unavoidably hands-on activities like science lab sessions or gym classes. ■ It may not meet anyone's standards for an ideal experience, but not much else is likely to work. As long as educators are expected to have four-year college degrees, their salary expectations will be moved along (to at least some degree) by the pay received by people with comparable levels of schooling. The only way to level out this "cost disease" is to find new sources of efficiency (i.e., by getting more classroom instruction per hour of teacher time by having students get most of their instruction online) or to gladly accept an ever-rising -cost to keep schools open.
June 9, 2026
There's no post-literacy, only illiteracy
Scores on objective, standardized tests can be useful barometers of educational trends. At their best, they can offer warning signs about troubling shortcomings or serve as evidence of successful changes to policies and procedures. But sometimes the most important information comes from elsewhere than testing alone. ■ The National Assessment of Educational Progress contains a mixed bag of score-based data, including some good signs about 9-year-olds and some disappointing ones about 13-year-olds (whose reading scores are no better than those of their counterparts in 1971, despite the decades of research and experimentation since). ■ Here's the fact that should resonate like a fire alarm in a concrete hallway: Only 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun "almost every day". That number has collapsed since 2012, when it was twice as high. Those who "never" read for fun has surged: While it hovered generally around 10% from 1984 to 2004, it's been triple that figure since 2020. ■ There is no way to be sufficiently alarmed about those figures: A society that doesn't read for fun isn't post-literate, it's illiterate. And to those who would say we shouldn't worry because they're just kids: To the contrary! ■ If there's one thing that has always been true about 13-year-olds, it is that they are invariably searching for answers about how to define themselves: What they think, what interests them, who they want to become. And those lessons aren't found in the 50th TikTok short of a binge session. They aren't always found in books, but they are vastly more likely to be found somewhere in the written word -- novels, poems, magazine articles, news clippings, letters, diaries, encyclopedias, and all other forms of written words. ■ Reading isn't just for stereotypically bookish kids: It's also for the ones who find new hobbies and want to explore, the ones who realize their own weaknesses who want to brush up, and the ones who need safe ways to explore tough questions about self-identity. ■ Scores matter, and our social failure to get any better at improving those scores for 55 years is troubling. But the collapse in plain, simple "reading for fun" ought to be cause for enormous alarm.
June 11, 2026
How to ruin your non-profit in five easy steps
■ 1. Don't insult your people by sharing best practices. Best practices are for suckers. Truly talented people are naturally good at everything, including things they've never seen before. It's rude to tell them ways to save time and frustration. ■ 2. Avoid doing anything you've seen anyone try elsewhere. All good ideas are your own original thoughts. If it wasn't yours first, don't bother attempting it. Ignore what peers and admirable leaders have tried. ■ 3. Under-communicate. Begrudge the process of explaining your ideas, do it as infrequently and irregularly as possible, and treat all messages as having the same level of importance. Never differentiate! There's no such thing as a "most important" thing: Your message channels should be one big Facebook-style feed of equal value. ■ 4. Avoid identifying talent. Make people fight their way to the top: Status-seeking and unchecked ambition should be rewarded. ■ 5. Have no transcendent goals. If you must have goals, keep them small and self-serving. Goals should be reserved for tedious metrics that you can use to hound volunteers. Anything bigger is just a hassle.
June 12, 2026
As a name is set to be removed from a significant landmark in the District of Columbia, it is worth noting that not every President has earned a memorial or been acknowledged with a Presidential library. ■ Aside from some of the forgettable Chief Executives of the middle and late 1800s, more significant Presidents have also been left out. James Madison, for instance, has a namesake building housing the Library of Congress, but it only opened in 1980 (and isn't exactly a "Presidential library" of the same hagiographic status as the brand-new Obama Presidential Center). ■ That probably wouldn't bother Madison, though. He would almost certainly be content with recognition via a functional library building, considering his foundational influence on the Library of Congress. ■ Madison was a zealous advocate for knowledge, even pressing Congress to form a national university "on a scale and for objects worthy of the American nation". Though no comprehensive university of the type was ever built, it's interesting to consider what that might look like today. As important as bricks-and-mortar residential college life can be, a truly national university today would have to contain a very large online learning component. ■ And despite the rarity of higher education in the late 1700s, there is no better advertisement for the value of very broad access to educational opportunity than the progress of the country since Madison's time. We live vastly richer in a material sense in large part because so many people in so many ways over so many years decided to get a little bit smarter than they were berfore. Compounding effects matter in human knowledge, too. America doesn't need more places to stand in the way. ■ A worthwhile monumental program for our 250th anniversary as a country could easily include some incarnation of a national university. We don't need vanity renaming projects or more opportunities to sit still: We need people who are eager to keep moving towards greater and greater goals.
June 13, 2026
Tip O'Neill, who was first elected to Congress when Harry Truman was President and served ten years as Speaker of the House (from 1977 to 1987), was more gifted at quips and witticisms than most Speakers (including his modern successors). He was a memorable figure of the 1980s because he was both a frequent policy opponent and a personal friend to Ronald Reagan. ■ Their interaction often played out in front of the national media, and despite their many points of contention in domestic politics, they shared some important goals surrounding America's place in the world. It left a model for behavior that gets ignored quite a lot today: Knowing that they didn't agree, they bargained instead. ■ O'Neill wrote a fair amount in his retirement, including a short book on his general view of politics -- not of policies, but of the act of serving in office. One of his lasting recommendations was, "[A]sk your staff periodically, 'Am I the same person you went to work for?'" ■ That's good advice not only for public office-holders, but for private-sector leaders as well. Nothing could be more important than remaining grounded and aware of one's own shortcomings. Lots of people drift from their original principles (even when only in charge of small projects or minor offices). The risk of this happening grows exponentially with power, as does the harm that comes from it. ■ Calvin Coolidge anticipated O'Neill's advice in somewhat more high-minded language: "It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man. When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions." But both men had it right: Anyone with great power (not just Presidents) needs great humility, too. Nobody is indispensable, and everyone is at risk of coming untethered without the help of truth-tellers. Real greatness is conditioned on having the modesty to be willingly pushed back into line.
June 14, 2026
One of the idealized promises of the Internet Age was the flattening of time and distance. With an Internet connection, everyone could be connected everywhere without delay. It was never entirely true, at least not to the full extent, but we may be on the verge of a substantial reversal of direction. ■ There is no reasonable doubt that domestic politics around the world are being shaped in meaningful ways by foreign interference: See, for instance, the riots taking place in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Simultaneously, international collaboration both in the shadows and in the spotlight has had big effects on politics, as well. ■ Meanwhile, this takes place against a backdrop of a general amplification of extremes without interference from abroad, charged heavily by the effects of both social media and algorithmic media siloization. ■ With the G7 meeting looming, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has openly declared, "What one can't do at this point in a rapidly shifting world order is to rely on one set of institutions, one grouping, one country to provide the answers". Carney is in many ways a textbook institutionalist, but he seems unapologetic about calling out what he sees as a major geopolitical realignment that moves the United States from hegemon to participant. ■ The risk is grave that Carney might be right. The time of peak global cooperation, mutuality, and barrier-lowering, largely under US leadership, may be over -- or, at the very least, put on hold for a substantial time to come. And that's a travesty, because such a reversal in policy will hurt the United States more than most other countries, and it's largely a self-inflicted injury. ■ Other periods of barrier-building and general retreat from international engagement have been costly, as anyone with even a modest exposure to history would know. But it takes trust and patience to lower the barriers, and while those barriers are in place, people like Carney will rationally position themselves around building substitute arrangements for the good of their own countries if it looks like no one will really stand up for the old institutions.
June 17, 2026
An environmentally prohibitive learning environment
Teachers and parents in the Catalonia region of Spain have been establishing a sensor network inside classrooms to monitor the indoor temperatures experienced by students and faculty. And the results are problematic: Kids are going to school in temperatures as high as the mid-30s (Celsius), which converts to the 90s (Fahrenheit). It's happening in multiple classrooms, not just in isolated individual outliers. ■ Those are indoor temperatures -- and there's no number of fans that can possibly be installed to make those rooms tolerable. It's a plain and inescapable fact that at certain temperatures, particularly indoors, people become less able to get their jobs done -- including the jobs of teaching and learning. ■ The effects of heat on productivity are making news in India, too, where the temperatures are cutting into factory productivity by as much as 10%. ■ There are scolds and puritans out there who would say that humans have created the high temperatures by burning fossil fuels and causing anthropogenic climate change, and thus humans should be punished. But not only is that wildly unfair to the schoolchildren (who made none of the choices that led to the climate change), it's self-defeating: Things aren't going to get better if misery is the only outcome that counts. ■ This means that we will have to act in a way that mirrors the classic admonition that "You have to spend money to make money". In this case, in the process of trying to rectify past wrongs that resulted from burning too many fossil fuels, we will have to accept some accommodations along the way (like spending on air conditioning systems and the electricity needed to run them) on our way to mitigating or reversing the impact of past environmental wrongs. Things aren't going to get better if we leave students to roast in classrooms where it's too hot to learn. We can't expect progress if we subject the next generation to environmentally prohibitive learning environments.
A museum piece that can be played
The Commodore computer has been revived under the "Commodore 64 Ultimate" name, with some classic retro specs inside the case
How to spot an election cheater
A clever use of statistics helps to illuminate credible accusations of corrupted elections, showing that places where ballot-box stuffing takes place show simultaneously high levels of both voter "participation" (because the cheaters are trying to run up the numbers) and votes "for" the winner (because nobody wants to stuff the ballot box for the opponents they're trying to cheat).
June 18, 2026
Private equity doesn't have to buy everything
A good case can be made for ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans) as a means to let the owners of private businesses sell those companies without turning to "private equity" buyers with an obsessively short-term focus.
There's no high tech without basic sanitation
A long-distance flight to Cancun reported a loss of water supply to the lavatories and requested a diversion with more than two hours left in the flight. The pilots had the very reasonable concern that nothing would be sanitary without working sinks. And they're right: Safe running water is a basic necessity, especially at 30,000 feet, even if the folks on the ground don't seem troubled by the absence. ■ Modern air travel is full of paradoxes like this one: The technical sophistication involved in putting the airplane in the sky and keeping it there is enormous. The precision involved in components like the engines is mind-blowing. But the failure of just one boring system to deliver water can turn the entire aircraft into something as backwards as an unimproved campsite on the side of a mountain. ■ It was a problem experienced by the Artemis II crew, as well: Their incredibly expensive space toilet stopped working until troubleshooting could be done. And since we haven't yet found a way to escape our own biology, that was a pretty big problem for the astronauts. ■ We are surrounded by illusions of technical perfection all the time, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that "turn it off and back on again" remains one of the main ways we fix our computers when they go awry. Sophistication and advanced functions are easy to recognize, but truly bulletproof reliability remains hard to find.
June 20, 2026
One of the nearly ubiquitous experiences of modern consumer living is the follow-up customer survey. "You may receive a survey in the coming days" is recited almost reflexively, as often is its tagalong buddy, "Anything less than a 9 or 10 is considered a failure". ■ In theory, these surveys are a clever attempt to collect valuable market data that otherwise might be too hard to uncover before it's too late. But a truly astonishing number of these surveys fail to ask the right questions, corrupting the data, hiding the information they're supposed to reveal, and generally wasting well-meaning customers' time. ■ That's because most of the surveys ask about a narrow range of judgment points, and far more often than not represent the experience as belonging entirely to the front-line, customer-facing employees. Most reasonable people realize that there are second-order and third-order causes that lead to their experiences, but the surveys rarely probe that far. ■ An airline survey, for instance, might ask about whether a cabin crew was friendly and whether the lavatories were clean. These things matter, of course. But rarely do those surveys go on to ask equally important questions like, "Was everything about the online experience satisfactory?", "Did we account for enough overhead bin space?", or "Did you spend too much time waiting for a connection because our crews were mis-scheduled?". ■ There are countless times when things go wrong beyond the control of frontline customer-service employees, but the surveys are often structured so that they get punished in the scoring for factors well outside their control. Well-meaning consumers then start to pull their punches (not wanting to punish people for problems beyond their control), and solvable issues go undetected. ■ A good guideline in life comes in two parts: "If you see a problem, solve it. When attempting to solve a problem, be sure to solve the right problem." Surveys all too often look like good attempts to do the first part right while failing miserably at the second.
June 21, 2026
With a distressing biological upset continuing in the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, some wild claims are being made that the problem is one of sneaky vandals turning a beloved national fixture the wrong color. ■ In reality, the root cause of the problem is almost certainly one of nutrients, wherever they're coming from. And those nutrients have fairly well-established solutions which experts are capable of assessing and addressing. ■ In an especially ironic turn, the problems at the Reflecting Pool are happening just as 10,000 of these water experts are converging on Washington for the American Water Works Association's Annual Convention and Exposition. Some are even presenting on algae issues. ■ Expertise is a two-way street: Experts have to make themselves available for the good of the public, and the public has to be willing (sometimes through agents like government officials) to seek out that expert advice. If nobody in the Federal government manages to take the short drive to the Washington convention center to see if any of the 10,000 conference attendees could be recruited to make a quick field trip and offer some advice, then there's little hope for getting the problem resolved. Wild conspiracy claims rarely have it right.
June 23, 2026
Most good things worth keeping aren't created in an instant. They take time. This applies whether we're talking about physical things (like painting the Sistine Chapel or carving the Lincoln Memorial) or abstract ones (like inventing calculus or codifying the principle of checks and balances). ■ These observations are self-evident. And yet, it is hard to build these things into ordinary life, no matter how necessary the process may be. The durable things that really matter in life, like character and integrity, can't be flipped on like a switch. They run on a wholly different timeline than much of the rest of life. ■ A significant hazard of our particular era is the way we've invited phenomenally powerful ultra-short-term feedback mechanisms into our lives, designed and engineered to pull our attention to what's popular right now. Social media and smartphones, full of "likes" and daily trends and torrential notifications, are the creations of people with a lot of money riding on the outcome of whether they can get lots of people to react like circus animals to constant stimulation. ■ But the odds are close to zero that anyone is going to be driven towards the durable things that are worth having by the engagement of the moment. Virtually nobody's going to build good character traits while trying to trend on TikTok. ■ If people are overstimulated into caring about what other people think of them right now, there's not going to be much attention left over for caring about what we're making of ourselves in the long run. ■ It's doubtful there are easy answers, particularly because great character traits don't have much of a marketing budget. But the longer it takes us to put some real thought into the matter, the greater the danger that we will look back from the future on this era and lament that nobody took sufficient action before hollowing out the mechanisms that could have saved us.
June 25, 2026
One of the hard lessons of adulthood is that we are raised through childhood and adolescence to believe, without much questioning, that certain traditions and institutions matter a lot. Some of this is inevitable, because even young institutions may look old to someone who hasn't been around very long. Some of it is by design, because adults are often invested in the power of those institutions as tools for raising the young. ■ The shock comes in adulthood, when the realization dawns that things like these matter because people decide that they should matter and take steps to preserve and promote them. The good news is that it's always possible to establish new traditions and institutions where they are needed, as long as enough people are willing to participate and sustain them. ■ The bad news is that institutional decay can set in quickly if nobody undertakes the efforts required to stop it. That starts wtih persuading people to care enough to act, oftentimes at some expense of time, energy, money, or other resources. ■ Whether the institution in question is a church, a museum, or a radio station (not to mention thousands of other categories), there is no such thing as inevitable survivability. This goes double for abstract principles like the peaceful transfer of power or the freedom of navigation. Perpetuity is a matter of choice.
June 26, 2026
Every social organization tends to have three types of members: Builders, renters, and extractors. Builders, as the name implies, are the ones who can be trusted to improve upon what they find, leaving things stronger and more durable than before. ■ Renters show up for the time they're around and are mainly inert. They fill the space, but they don't transform what's around them. Just as nobody washes a rental car, no renter does much to enhance the social organization. Extractors, on the other hand, are active about withdrawing from the accumulated value of the organization. Extractors see what's in front of them as a pile of treasure to be used for their own gain. ■ Different times call for more or fewer builders and renters. Homesteaders had to be builders, whether they liked it or not. Renting tends to be a luxury of success; as things get better, more people can contribute less from day to day. Social renting, like its counterpart in housing, creates a convenient distance for the renter, who generally finds it easier to move away than the builder. ■ Progress has made it much easier for America and American institutions to tolerate lots of social renters. But a lot of people have gone from renting to outright extraction. It's not a sustainable path. Some extract literally, by doing things like taking oversized pay for underwhelming service to important institutions. Others do it indirectly or even figuratively, by actively pursuing a policy of "Whatever is best for me" anywhere they go. ■ Letting this go on for much longer without some kind of course correction would be a grave mistake. Lots of knowledge is embedded within our institutions, from government agencies to social clubs, and letting them decay is a way of erasing that embedded knowledge, which was often won through hard and costly experience. Ben Franklin wrote, "Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other." Ending that foolishness requires a step further upstream, convincing those who would be renters or extractors to become builders instead.
June 27, 2026
Health wins come in many different forms, and periodically it's helpful to get some good news on one front or another to help remind us that good things are possible. Sometimes, medicine figures out ways to make lots of people a little bit healthier, like with the invention of blood pressure medication. Sometimes it makes a small number of people substantially better off, as with the recent breakthrough in treatment for pancreatic cancer. ■ Other times, medicine succeeds in overcoming a chronic problem for a particular population. That's the case with a new method of functionally curing sickle cell disease, using gene therapy. It's a genetic condition mostly found among African-Americans, so the benefits of this research are concentrated within that community. ■ Some research -- medical, social, scientific, educational, or otherwise -- needs to be concentrated on particular communities. Some gullible or uncritical people will complain that this looks like favoritism toward the targeted group. ■ In reality, it's analogous to some public-works efforts: Sometimes, you resurface a heavily-traveled road driven by everyone. Doing so benefits the many in modest ways. Sometimes, you repair a segment of road in front of one cul-de-sac that collapsed because of a water main broke. Doing that benefits fewer people, but the need is disproportionate and unevenly distributed. ■ Allocating resources among the many options takes thoughtful human consideration and a knowledge that scarcity requires that judgment calls be made. Keyword witchhunts are a poor substitute for careful consideration. A victory over a cruel affliction like sickle cell is a win for everyone, even if the immediate benefits are concentrated.
June 28, 2026
The conditions that prevail in Venezuela are making a terrible situation worse.
Can small hospitals be kept open?
Keeping small hospitals open in rural areas is a big challenge. One of the best ways would be to encourage highly skilled immigrants to work there.
Extreme heat is on the way for the Upper Midwest of the United States, as it already is affecting life in Europe. Like it or not, it's imperative that we figure out how to make life more habitable in the midst of hot spells.
Wikipedia keeps up the good fight
The site has become more important than ever, but it's being run with a skeleton crew. They're only able to keep up by blocking bad actors with a fair amount of frequency.
One of Iowa's two biggest electric utilities makes data centers and other major users pay their own way for infrastructure buildouts and commit to 10-year power purchase agreements
There is no shortage of sources looking to sell people on supplements, apps, and furnishings marketed to improve sleep. It's a colossal industry. Yet it seems as if Americans have little to no appreciation of the central psychological value of sleep. (We remain mystified by its physiological purpose, but we can intuitively grasp more about the psychological merits.) ■ Sleep is the one time during every 24-hour cycle when a person can escape the conscious concerns of waking life and go unbothered by others. Sleep is nature's "do not disturb" setting. ■ This has obvious effects on stress. Everyone has stress responses, driven by cortisol and other chemicals we cannot avoid. And having a basic escape function in the form of sleep, whatever else it does for us biologically, at the very least offers the theoretical opportunity to go for a few hours every day without new stressful inputs being applied. ■ The proof that we fail to take this seriously can be plainly seen in two places: One is with the omnipresence of smartphones, tagging along with us into bedrooms (often by necessity) but all too frequently following people literally into the bed itself. ■ By nature, the phone is a stimulant, and while it's every adult's right to make the ill-advised choice to let phones interfere with the psychological cordon of sleep, it is a tragedy that many adults let those phones into juvenile bedrooms at night. If anyone deserves the sanctuary of sleep, it is the child who needs escape from social pressures, adult-sized worries, or bullying. If a conduit of alarm is always present, how can the brain ever fully de-escalate from a state of anxiety? ■ The other case is that of homelessness. As a society, we can hardly expect rational behavior and good decisions out of people who aren't able to safely let down their guard for a few hours every night. This is, at least in theory, the rationale behind the "housing first" approach to homeless assistance. ■ While we're eager to work our way through a thousand pressing social, economic, and political concerns in our waking hours, someone needs to speak up for straightening out some of the errors we're making that don't fit neatly on the editorial page. Just because a problem doesn't seem immediate doesn't mean it's unimportant.
June 29, 2026
Two stories are never, ever leaving the news
The University of Nebraska is a partner in a large health system called Nebraska Medicine, and they're in the messy process of separating from one partner institution and adding another. But behind the story, there are two issues that are never, ever leaving the news: Funding for higher education and funding for health care. ■ Anyone who wants to understand why both stories are going to come back perpetually, "Groundhog Day"-style, needs to read William Baumol's book "The Cost Disease". Right behind death and taxes comes the certainty that higher education and health care budgets will remain large, growing, and contentious from now until the end of foreseeable time. ■ To condense the argument to its essence, demand for both health care and education seems poised to grow indefinitely. Meanwhile, the supply of each is tightly constrained by the need for lots of human-centered, person-to-person interactions, from diagnostic counseling to reading stories written by second-graders. Unless a substantial number of patients want to sign up for do-it-yourself blood draws or emptying their own hospital bedpans, these constraints are inevitable. ■ On the surface, it's a little grim to say, "These problems are both intractable and virtually certain to get worse with every passing week", but it's much worse to approach them as if they are solvable in the sense of "If we just apply enough brainpower and effort, we can find a permanent answer". ■ The problem is that both health care and education are hugely influenced by public policy and public funding, which invariably draws them into an arena of discussion where patience, strategic thinking, long-term viewpoints are especially hard to sustain. This means every resulting policy discussion is more or less bound to involve wishful thinking, impossible promises, and frothy arguments among highly interested parties. And that's exceptionally unlikely to change in anyone's lifetime today, even when all parties involved are of good character and mutual goodwill.
With the layoff of its long-time morning show host, "WMT Radio in Cedar Rapids has lost the last of its local on-air staff after more than 100 years on the air." Incompetent, uninterested ownership has devastated the condition of hundreds of radio stations across the United States. It's not just absentee ownership in the abstract sense, it has become absentee-managed and absentee-programmed, as well. The FCC still requires, at least nominally, that broadcasting serve the "public interest, convenience, or necessity". It is long past time for some enforcement of that principle. Terminate the licenses of the reckless rentiers who have extracted every last drop of value from once-proud institutions that were protected from competition by explicit government regulation. Make them surrender those licenses (for cause) and turn them over to operators whose first interest is, in fact, the local public.