A hard question for any new drug is what its long-term side effects might be. That question is especially sharp for drugs requiring long-term use, and for vaccines, which cause a long-term change i…

Last night had just about everything I enjoy about winter races. Just enough air to sail. Just enough cool that everyone wears foulies. Just enough crew to do it. The mark was a beam reach. We rais…

Rob Schenck provides a Christian perspective on the rise of MAGA, referencing past religious movements led by flamboyant hucksters. I suspect his dour conclusion is accurate: It will be at least a …

Rose Horowitch writes a bleak article on how students entering college are woefully unprepared for the basic math. Which has always been the case, in some sense. The interesting and disheartening f…

We had a fun race last night. Despite the dark. There was some overcast, and not even a waxing moon to reflect light back from the other side. The water was rolling ink. Everything else was shades …

The EU is rolling back some of the regulations that have put barriers to how the large tech companies do business there. While that is a welcomed step, the EU needs to do more to increase business …

Gallup reports that two in five American women under 45 now would leave the US permanently, given the opportunity. Twice as many answer that way as men. Most won’t. Only a tiny fraction of Am…

Max Boot writes on Dick Cheney’s legacy: Cheney rightly came to decry Trump’s abuses of power, but many of Trump’s actions grew out of a contempt for congressional, media, and judicial oversi…

Erik Loomis uses the recent presidential election in Ireland to reflect on a bit of amazing recent history: One of the most remarkable political stories in my life is the transformation of Ireland …

In explaining MAGA, Beth Macy tells a familiar story about the decline of civic life, especially in smaller towns: Some of my old friends were finding community not in religion but in QAnon, sharin…

Like most everyone who competes in a team sport, I celebrate the races we win, regret the ones we should have won, and try to do my part to shift the tally more to the first. I hope my fellow crewm…

Dutch intelligence will be more selective in sharing information with the US. Whose administration it reasonably does not trust. MAGA likely turned bitter toward Dutch intelligence when it early wa…

I’m glad a friend recommended this book, because it is quite a bit better than I would have expected from what I have read in the past by Matt Ridley. Several of the middle chapters have inte…

Alex Hutchinson writes a good article on why supplements, rather than just wasting money, likely also do some real harm to those who too much credit them. It boils down to the fact that people slack off on the important hard things, when they add something easy: A 2011 study in Taiwan illustrates this. Researchers gave a group of volunteers an inert supplement, telling half of them that it was a multivitamin and the other half that it was a placebo.

I don't worry about long-term demographic trends. Fertility rates are falling? Well, in 2100, the US might have 350 million people instead of 365 million, and the world 9.5 billion people instead of 10 billion. Plenty still. Culture and technology will have changed so much when we reach the next century that what those of us now think about that won't much matter.

I wish more (some?) of the many people writing on the 1st amendment today would pay attention to Elon Musk using the FTC to go after Media Matters. That is actual government action. To benefit one …

Trump has made billions from his office, less than a year into his second term. He began by running a pump-and-dump with his $TRUMP meme coin. If you understand the graph right, it shows how he fle…

My last company had one engineering foot in Belgium, with customers in the UK and France. I spent quite a bit of time working in Geel. We had a good CFO, and I trusted he had built all the legal fr…

Trump is beatifying conservative propagandist Charlie Kirk. He will award Kirk the highest civilian honor. MAGA Republicans are moving to install a statue to Kirk in the Capitol. Most significantly…

Corpus Christi’s ever-expanding inner harbor desalination project, pushed for years to solve the city’s water woes, was knifed in a late night city council vote. While much of the repor…

It’s easy to point to some of our Constitution’s failings, especially in the light of recent history. Regarding the presidency, it vests too much power in one individual. It should prov…

There are many, especially on the right, who classify politics chiefly by economic ideology. Those voices now are decrying Trump’s step to socialism, when he takes a stake in Intel or single-…

One of my fellow sailors captured video of the finish, last Wednesday night’s race. These start in the Corpus Christi marina, with first gun at 1800. As usual, it was a beat to a wellhead des…

There are two pieces of nonsense about undocumented immigrants that now are frequent memes in my internet scroll. The first is that Democrats encouraged their entry, to boost the census population …

What stands out about, E. J. Antoni, Trump’s nominee to head the BLS, is not so much the softness of his resume as his willingness to abuse data for the sake of ideology. National Review make…