Kevin Drum 🕸

What causes cavities? Lots of things, it turns out, but mainly sugar, just like you learned in grade school. However, sugar doesn't directly produce cavities. As with all things in biochemistry, the actual mechanism of cavity production is pretty complex. But let's simplify. The main culprit in the conversion of sugar into cavities is a ...continue reading "Did the FDA kill a promising new way of preventing cavities?"

It's too bad Southern California is so hazy. This is a lovely picture of a sailboat cruising serenely off Dana Point, but it's a bit ruined by the orangeish smear at the horizon. Oh well.

Today brings a limited but interesting decision from the Supreme Court. It involves Yonas Fikre, a US citizen from Sudan, who was placed on the no-fly list 15 years ago. Here's the summary: Mr. Fikre alleged that he traveled from his home in Portland, Oregon to Sudan in 2009 to pursue business opportunities there. At ...continue reading "No-fly victim wins (limited) victory in the Supreme Court"

The Guttmacher Institute released numbers today for abortion in 2023. They're from a new monthly survey that isn't as precise as Guttmacher's usual annual abortion count, but probably still pretty close. The figures are startling: This is a 10% increase from 2020. A big part of the reason is the rise in medication abortions: If ...continue reading "The abortion rate spiked upward in 2023"

The FBI released crime figures for Q4 of 2023 today, and violent crime is down everywhere: Nationally, every type of crime was down except for auto theft:

Here's the latest uninsured rate among Americans under age 65: The uninsured rate was up slightly in Q3 of last year, but still down considerably from 2021, when President Biden's subsidy expansion went into effect.

What is a "personal record" under the Presidential Records Act? The definition in the act is relatively short and simple, so here's the entire, unabridged text: (3) The term "personal records" means all documentary materials, or any reasonably segregable portion thereof, of a purely private or nonpublic character which do not relate to or have ...continue reading "Donald Trump cannot decree that official records are actually personal"

A few months ago I took a look at remote learning during the COVID pandemic and concluded that it hadn't made much difference. States that kept schools open did about as well as states that closed schools. The results internationally were similar. But that was based on partial data and a specific measure of school ...continue reading "Remote learning during COVID was harmful but limited"

Do snakes yawn? This one does. It's a cape cobra at the Los Angeles Zoo, and it was slithering along in its normal snakey way when it stopped, yawned, and then continued on its travels. But snakes don't yawn because they're tired. They yawn after meals to realign their jaws.

As you know, there are two basic types of Medicare: traditional fee-for-service (FFS) plans, where doctors get paid for services rendered; and Medicare Advantage plans (MA), where doctors are paid a set annual amount for each patient. In theory, MA plans should be cheaper. In reality, they game the system in two ways. First, they ...continue reading "Medicare Advantage will cost an extra $83 billion this year"

The latest AI chips from Nvidia will get the rock star treatment when they're unveiled next week: Chief Executive Jensen Huang is expected to unveil his company’s latest chips on Monday in a sports arena at an event one analyst dubbed the “AI Woodstock.” The new chips are expected to be called B100s and be ...continue reading "New Nvidia chip will cost $50,000"

Donald Trump says he won't be able to post the $454 million bond required by his loss a few weeks ago in a New York business fraud case: In a filing to a New York appeals court, Trump said that the judgment, ordered by a state judge last month, was so large that suretors wouldn’t ...continue reading "Trump can’t post bond in his $454 million fraud case"

Last year a Trump judge in Louisiana issued a deranged ruling that said the Biden administration "seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth'"—and therefore prohibited all communication with social media from a slew of federal agencies. On appeal, even the 5th Circuit couldn't stomach most of it, but they ...continue reading "Supreme Court ready to toss out loony Louisiana “coercion” case"

I've long argued that eventually AI will get better than human beings at everything, which in turn means we'll all be out of jobs.¹ During the Industrial Revolution this didn't happen because while machines took over a lot of jobs, they also created a lot of new jobs for humans (like designing and maintaining machines). ...continue reading "Here’s an interesting argument that AI won’t take all our jobs"

What's the right way of covering the endless stream of ugly and apocalyptic language that Donald Trump uses to inspire his MAGA followers? Here's an example from yesterday: many news outlets reported that Trump had threatened a "bloodbath" if he's not elected. But if you listen to his remarks, he's talking about a bloodbath in ...continue reading "We should be honest about Donald Trump’s “bloodbath”"

Here's yet another reason not to panic over TikTok: For the first time in TikTok’s history, its user growth is stagnating, according to people familiar with the matter.... U.S. average monthly users ages 18 to 24 declined by nearly 9% from 2022 to 2023, according to the mobile analytics firm Data.ai. Some users in their ...continue reading "TikTok is losing popularity among teens"

There's a reason that I've been willing to defend Joe Biden almost immediately against the various mopery and dopery he's been accused of over the years. It's because he's been in the public eye for half a century and we all have a pretty good idea of who he is. When Tara Reade accused him ...continue reading "Joe Biden is a decent human being"

Bob Somerby quoted Sen. Katie Britt today saying that human trafficking across the Mexican border has grown from $500 million in 2018 to $13 billion today—meaning 2021. Is this really true? Nope. It's a widely cited statistic, but as near as I can tell every single repetition can be sourced back to a New York ...continue reading "Human trafficking has barely changed at all since 2018"

The first test of delivering food aid to Gaza via the sea is a success: We did it! Teams of @WCKitchen and @openarms_fund working hard to offload all 200 tons…12 trucks! This was a test! To learn…we could bring thousands of tons a week..with what we learn we will get better…working with the local communities ...continue reading "Food aid to Gaza is starting to pick up"

In polls, about half of Americans think Joe Biden's age would affect his ability to do the job. As usual, though, it's instructive to see how this breaks down: It's not "Americans" who think Biden is too old. It's Trump supporters.