jpedmd2025-11-23T11:50:42-05:00November 23rd, 2025|

Maxwell Kennedy writes evocatively about his father Bobby Kennedy’s legacy in the Boston Globe.  I was 14 and remember being absolutely devastated when RFK was assassinated.  Reading this essay reminds me of how incredibly far the quality of our leadership has plummeted.

jpedmd2025-11-10T17:27:13-05:00November 10th, 2025|

From Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:

“Today, former U.S. district judge Mark L. Wolf, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by President Ronald Reagan, explained that he resigned on Friday because he wanted the freedom to do “everything in my power to combat today’s existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.” Wolf called out Trump’s use of the Department of Justice to hurt his political opponents, his firing of inspectors general, the administration’s pay-to-play policies in which wealthy donors get government favors, the corruption of cryptocurrency, unconstitutional executive orders, and the threats against judges as Trump attacks the rule of law.”

Kudos to Judge Wolf.  His Atlantic essay Why I am Resigning is here.

• Katelyn Jetelina writes (with Hayden Rooke-Ley) in her Your Local Epidemiologist blog on the wildly disproportionate cost/delivery ratio of health care in the United States; read  “5 ways our health care system has become utterly insane” to get a summary of that sad story.  One tidbit – wages may have kept pace with inflation over the last 15 years, but they have decidedly NOT kept pace with health insurance costs.  And then there’s this:

“One in three Americans has medical debt, and more than half worry they’ll fall into debt any time they use the health care system. That fear changes behavior: people delay appointments, skip medications, or avoid care altogether…Medical debt is now the most common form of debt in collections ahead of credit cards, utilities, or personal loans. Nearly 60% of those in medical debt have insurance.”

• Brian Lee PhD, one of the authors of the 2024 JAMA sibling study suggesting that there is no causal relationship between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and neurodevelopment disorders talks about this study in this free interview in JAMA.

He mentions a more recent 2025 Japanese study that came to the same conclusions:

“A nationwide Japanese study with about 200 000 persons looked at this exact same question and also did a sibling analysis. The use of acetaminophen in this population was roughly 40%. And they found the exact same thing that our Swedish study did, where there’s an apparent statistical association initially, but it completely disappears when you do the sibling control analysis. And so, the evidence is pointing a certain way that is going to be challenging for other studies to try and overcome.”

• Frank Bruni outdoes his usual excellence in this week’s NYT newsletter “The Unchecked, Unbalanced Reign of King Donald.” His For the Love of Sentences is especially good as well. Some examples:

Frank’s own, nominated by me:

“But the Republicans who control the House and the Senate have instead surrendered all control to Trump, whose vanquishing of Democrats and potential wrath speak more loudly to them than ethics, a word I feel silly typing. They’re dutiful handmaidens and gushing cheerleaders who have given him whatever he wants, including a roster of senior administration officials who are, incredibly, yet more dutiful and gushing than they are. Where two or three gather in Trump’s name, there he is to bask in their obsequiousness, as if he were extending his legs for a pedicure and each of them were calling dibs on a different toe.”

and from others:

In The Pickup, John Paul Brammer took issue with a proposal to build the tallest skyscraper in the United States in a very flat state: “It’s difficult to communicate just how dramatically its completion would transform the Oklahoma City skyline, but picture, if you would, a pancake with a yardstick plunged into it.”

In her newsletter, Mary Geddry experienced Trump’s ramblings to journalists in the Oval Office last Monday as “less a press conference than a slurred soliloquy of decay, staged under the chandeliers of American decline.”