• An excellent essay by David French on why there is a legitimate case for disqualification based on the 14th amendment appears in the NYT here. An excerpt:

• Krugman on the current state of things, writing in the NYT:

“You may have heard about the good economic news. Labor force participation — the share of adults in today’s work force — is actually slightly higher than the Congressional Budget Office predicted before the pandemic. Measures of underlying inflation have fallen more or less back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target even though unemployment is near a 50-year low. Adjusted for inflation, most workers’ wages have gone up.

For some reason I’ve heard less about the crime news, but it’s also remarkably good. F.B.I. data shows that violent crime has subsided: It’s already back to 2019 levels and appears to be falling further. Homicides probably aren’t quite back to 2019 levels, but they’re plummeting.

None of this undoes the Covid death toll or the serious learning loss suffered by millions of students. But overall both our economy and our society are in far better shape at this point than most people would have predicted in the early days of the pandemic — or than most Americans are willing to admit.

For if America’s resilience in the face of the pandemic shock has been remarkable, so has the pessimism of the public.”

• From Bill Gates’ end-of-year Gates Notes newsletter:

“My favorite innovation story, though, starts with one of my favorite statistics: Since 2000, the world has cut in half the number of children who die before the age of five.

How did we do it? One key reason was innovation. Scientists came up with new ways to make vaccines that were faster and cheaper but just as safe. They developed new delivery mechanisms that worked in the world’s most remote places, which made it possible to reach more kids. And they created new vaccines that protect children from deadly diseases like rotavirus.”

• Look upon it and despair at our inability to offer a direct solution like banning assault weapons – or even magazine sizes.  Instead, we offer “prayer” platitudes or claim it’s “a mental health problem” (which of course we also don’t deal with adequately).

Thank you, Washington Post, for offering this still-sanitized lesson in the reality of the destroyed human lives caused by mass shootings using assault weapons. See:  A rare look at the devastation caused by AR-15 shootings

• I’m with Brian Klaas on this one – he talks about how we have so normalized DJT’s unhinged ravings (and fear amplifying them) that little media attention is given to how much of a threat he is to democracy, the rule of law, and social order.  Read his essay The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.   An excerpt:

“Bombarded by a constant stream of deranged authoritarian extremism from a man who might soon return to the presidency, we’ve lost all sense of scale and perspective. But neither the American press nor the public can afford to be lulled. The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.”

• I just can’t help recommending Matt Levine’s November 20 Bloomberg Opinion piece on who controls OpenAI (and, also excellent, on the not-quite-right “negative emissions” profile of plans to cut trees to burn wood to fuel carbon capture).  Great stuff, Matt (and he quotes from a Ted Chiang essay, another plus!).

• David Wallace-Wells does a pretty good takedown of some of the theses presented in Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s“The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind” – especially the ones in the clickbait-titled, New York Magazine excerpted “Covid Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.” Wallace-Wells often disagrees, and has data to back up his arguments.

• Timothy Lee tries to reduce your AI-induced anxiety in his substack post Why I’m not afraid of superintelligent AI taking over the world.  Basically, he posits that preexisting knowledge, not tokens/training data volume, is a limiting factor, both because of its finite, non fungible nature.  It’s definitely worth reading, though I found it only mildly reassuring. Someone will eventually allow AI to test hypotheses in the real world ad lib, and then it will likely generate its own new knowledge based on empirical results.

• Brittany Trang, writing in Stat, has a very good piece reflecting on the future of Emergency Medicine Residency programs.

• I think Nicholas Kristof’s commentary on the Israeli-Hamas conflict in the NY Times is worth reading: We Are Overpaying the Price for a Sin We Didn’t Commit.  An excerpt:

“Israel faces an agonizing challenge: A neighboring territory is ruled by well-armed terrorists who have committed unimaginable atrocities, aim to commit more and now shelter in tunnels beneath a population of more than two million people. It’s a nightmare. But the sober question must be: What policies will reduce the risk, not inflame it, while honoring the intrinsic value of Palestinian life as well as Israeli life?”