I am now the voice of my parents

https://web.archive.org/web/20160216014205/https://jewishjournal.com/travel/article/i_am_now_the_voice_of_my_parents_20080502

I remember how, during the Passover seders, after we finished our meal, my father and I would try to set up the 16-millimeter projector, threading the film of a 1953 episode of "This Is Your Life" to watch my very young-looking mother become the first Holocaust survivor to appear on national television. As it played, my mother, Hanna Bloch Kohner, would stay in the kitchen doing dishes. I guess she didn't want to watch it. But for me, it was part of our annual ritual: When Ralph Edwards said, "....upon arriving at Auschwitz, they handed you soap, and you went to the showers. Your shower had water, others were not as fortunate, like your mother, father and your husband, Carl. They all lost their lives in Auschwitz."

In a strange way, I think I just took the idea of this for granted.

I don't know when I learned about it, but by the time I was a teen I knew that my mother had had an abortion in Auschwitz in order to survive. Her first husband, Carl Benjamin, was killed upon arrival, but, miraculously, my Uncle Friedl was a doctor in the camps and arranged for her procedure, which saved my mother's life. However, she was told that she would never be able to carry a child again. That didn't stop her from trying, however: After eight miscarriages and months of bed rest, I was born on July 4, 1955.

Louis DeJoy's Surprising Second Act

https://time.com/6263424/louis-dejoy-trump-election-postal-reform/

There have been other victories and vindications. Last winter, he worked with the White House to deliver half a million COVID-19 test kits to Americans nationwide. Tim Manning, then the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 supply coordinator, says his team arranged a call with DeJoy’s underlings in December 2021 to float the idea. DeJoy heard about it and invited himself. “Louis jumped on and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll make this happen,’” Manning tells me. A month later, the test kits went out; roughly 60% of the orders were fulfilled within 24 hours, 90% within 48 hours. Meanwhile, there’s no longer an ethical cloud hanging over DeJoy’s head. Both the Federal Election Commission and the FBI closed investigations into him related to campaign contributions, and the USPS Inspector General said he met “all applicable ethics requirements related to disclosure, recusal, and divestment” pertaining to his holdings with Postal Service contractors upon taking the job. And the midterms went exceedingly well—99% of all 2022 election mail was delivered within three days.

Yet it hasn’t all been a redemption tour for perhaps the most famous Postmaster General since Benjamin Franklin. DeJoy remains a favorite target of the left. Over the last three years, progressive organizations have sent out “Fire Louis DeJoy” fundraising emails like clockwork. In the last few months, Democrats like Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and groups like the Democratic Governors Association have bought Facebook ads to raise money off calling for DeJoy’s ouster. Some of DeJoy’s allies, on both the right and left, cynically suspect that some Democrats secretly relish having DeJoy in his role as a foil, especially with Trump out of office. Neither Baldwin nor the DGA responded to a request for comment.

I was wrong about Israel. I apologized. Then President Carter gave me a lesson in grace

https://forward.com/opinion/539385/president-jimmy-carter-apology-israel/

Perhaps Carter’s most important achievement was the Camp David Peace Accord between Israel and Egypt. This peace treaty has endured for 44 years, and spared thousands of lives on the Israeli-Egyptian border. It also saved hundreds of billions of dollars in military costs that the two countries would have needlessly spent.

President Carter warned everyone in 2006 that we all had the choice of Peace Not Apartheid. Some have made deliberate choices on the matter of Israeli occupation; some have walked in a stupor, blaming the other for their shortcomings. Others still blame the messenger for the message.

In his response to my apology, Carter wrote a simple and touching message:

“You have no reason to apologize, but I accept your wonderful letter as you obviously intend it. I sympathize and understand the feelings of my many friends, who reacted as you did. Best wishes, Jimmy Carter.”

I was shaken and inspired by his humility. Carter owed me nothing, yet gave me a sense there is a capacity within us all for unconditional love.

Asteroid lost 1 million kilograms after collision with DART spacecraft

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00601-4

One factor is that the spacecraft hit a spot around 25 metres from the asteroid’s centre, maximizing the force of its impact. Another is that large amounts of the asteroid’s rubble flew outwards from the impact. The recoil from this force pushed the asteroid further off its previous trajectory. Researchers estimate that this spray of rubble meant Dimorphos’ added momentum was almost four times that imparted by DART4.

Although NASA has demonstrated this technique on only one asteroid, the results could be broadly applicable to future hazards, researchers say. “It means that we can quickly design a mission to deflect an asteroid if there is a threat, and we know that this has a very high chance of being effective,” says Franck Marchis, from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California who is also chief scientific officer at the telescope manufacturer Unistellar in Marseille.

“If you had asked me 30 years ago, ‘Can we be confident we won’t be wiped out by a giant killer asteroid a week from next Tuesday?’ I would have had to say no,” adds Tom Statler, DART’s programme scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. Now that astronomers have surveyed the skies to identify nearly all the dangerous asteroids — and now that DART has been shown to work —“we will know what to do about it when something new is found”, he says.

The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/magazine/china-spying-intellectual-property.html

Although China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.

Two Different Versions of ‘Cancel Culture’

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/opinion/lab-leak-dilbert-cancel-culture.html

But there’s a problem — the more that America polarizes, the more it contains not one but two Overton windows, the “red” window and the “blue” window. Speech that is squarely mainstream in Red America is completely out of bounds in Blue America, and vice versa.

We could list any number of topics where shifting standards and changing norms breed intolerance at the extremes and confusion in the middle. Millions of Americans thus tread lightly, fearful that even the tentative expression of a dissenting thought could lead to a vicious backlash.

The Playing Field

https://grahamduncan.blog/the-playing-field/

One great portfolio manager I know told the story of being driven somewhere by an analyst on a rainy night when a truck swerved and almost ran them off the road. “Why is stuff like this always happening to me?” the analyst instinctually responded. But to the portfolio manager, that response reflected a terrible mindset, whether on the road or in the market: a sense that the world is acting on you as opposed to your acting on the world. It is a mindset that is hard to change. But from what I’ve seen, great investors don’t have it. Instead, they’ve come to understand which factors in the market they can control and which factors they cannot.

One way to relocate your locus of control is to frame investing (and even life more generally) as a game. This allows you to experience luck as luck, to separate the hand you drew from the playing of that hand. As David Milch, the creator of the HBO show Deadwood, put it, he realized late in life that “it’s the way you learn to play the cards you’ve been dealt, rather than the hand itself, that determines the worth of your participation in the game.”

‘Something Was Badly Wrong’: When Washington Realized Russia Was Actually Invading Ukraine

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-oral-history-00083757

GEN. MARK MILLEY: People don’t think about war — even today. When I say to people, “There have been 35,000 or 40,000 innocent Ukrainians killed in this war, a third of their economy has been destroyed, an estimated 7 million internally-displaced persons, and another 7 million refugees out of a pre-war population of 45 million — you’re looking at 30 to 40 percent of that country displaced out of houses.” People sit there and go: “Oh?”

Tip O’Neill — I’m from Boston, he was a Boston guy — and he said all politics are local. If it’s not happening to you, or in and around you, there’s a sense of remoteness. It doesn’t strike through the same way it does if it happens to you and your family. But for some of us, who have a lot of combat experience, who have seen a lot of war, it’s very real. For many people — good people, smart people — it’s very difficult to get your head around this stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s human nature. Just the other day, there were 1,100 Russians killed in a single day — more than that, closer to 1,200 — down around Bakhmut. That’s Iwo Jima, that’s Shiloh. 

One Year Inside a Radical New Approach to America’s Overdose Crisis

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/opinion/drug-crisis-addiction-harm-reduction.html

The streets are a terrifying and deeply uncomfortable place to live. Ms. Corso found that poor personal hygiene was often strategic — a woman who smelled disgusting was far less likely to be raped — and that sleep deprivation and sleep psychosis were at least as common as serious mental illness. She and Mr. Webb knew people who used heroin to sleep or meth to stay awake when they were too afraid to close their eyes.

She also found that a snack, a cigarette, a drink of water and a nap could solve 90 percent of a client’s immediate distress and that providing those things was the fastest way to build rapport. She liked to joke that her experience as a cocktail waitress was at least as useful as any coursework or prior counseling jobs she had done. “It’s not like people are summoned to our office for sit-down therapy,” she said. “It’s more like I walk the intake room striking up conversations and trying to upsell people on services. I am basically a cocktail waitress who serves mental health.”

It was tricky work, she said. Most of the people she sees have survived severe traumas — rape, molestation, physical abuse — that they had never discussed with another human or even grappled with themselves. For many of them, conversations in her office or around OnPoint are their first meaningful human interactions after something horrific.

They Were Married. They Shared a Trench. They Died in It Together.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/20/world/asia/ukraine-russia-war-death.html

Taras and Olha Melster signed up to help the war effort. Like many other urban professionals in Ukraine, they never expected to be sent to the front line. 

The Impact of Russian Missile Strikes on Ukraine’s Power Grid

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-impact-of-russian-missile-strikes-on-ukraines-power-grid

Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, its attacks had periodically damaged energy infrastructure near the front lines. “That we were used to,” Dmytro Sakharuk, the executive director of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said. “But then they changed strategy.” Starting last fall, the Russian military began targeting coal-fuelled power plants, substations, and transformers across the whole of Ukraine. Russian officials wagered that by depriving Ukrainians of electricity—and, as a result, heat and water—during wintertime, they would sap the country’s resolve. “They wanted to initiate a long-term blackout and to freeze our big cities,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the C.E.O. of Ukrenergo, told me. “The idea was to force us to negotiate not through emerging victorious on the battlefield but by terrorizing the population.”

Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko jailed for highlighting Mariupol killings

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64647267

Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko has been jailed for six years for posting on social media about a deadly attack by Russian warplanes on a theatre in Ukraine.

The court in Barnaul in Siberia found her guilty of spreading "fake news", under laws introduced aimed at stifling dissent about the invasion of Ukraine.

She was also barred from activities as a journalist for five years.

Hundreds of civilians died when the Mariupol theatre was bombed last March.

Ponomarenko was detained last April, weeks after the bombing, for posting that Russian warplanes had carried out the attack even though the Russian defence ministry had denied it.

She is one of a growing number of Russian dissidents jailed for criticising the war in Ukraine.

Why Christians Have a Hard Time Believing it’s Actually Wrong to Sexually Abuse a Child, as Long as Another Christian Does It.

https://twitter.com/LauraRbnsn/status/1624780476605923331

🧵Why Christians Have a Hard Time Believing it’s Actually Wrong to Sexually Abuse a Child, as Long as Another Christian Does It.

Okay, this is a hyperbolic title. I will be told this is a straw man. Fair! I do try to avoid extreme statements about religion because I do think

— Laura Robinson (@LauraRbnsn) February 12, 2023

The Death of the Smart Shopper

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/02/online-amazon-shopping-informed-consumer-quality-control/673017/

Last week, the journalist John Herrman published a theory on why, exactly, Amazon seems so uninterested in the faltering quality of its shopping experience: The company would rather leave the complicated, labor-intensive business of selling things to people to someone else. To do that, it has opened its doors to roughly 2 million third-party sellers, whether they are foreign manufacturers looking for more direct access to customers or the disciples of “grindset” influencers who want to use SEO hacks to fund the purchase of rental properties. In the process, Amazon has cultivated a decentralized, disorienting mess with little in the way of discernible quality control or organization. According to Herrman, that’s mainly because Amazon’s primary goal is selling the infrastructure of online shopping to other businesses—things like checkout, payment processing, and order fulfillment, which even large retailers can struggle to handle efficiently. Why be Amazon when you can instead make everyone else be Amazon and take a cut?

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell

This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?

Pluralistic: Tiktok's ens***tification

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this ens***tification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

Revealed: secret cross-party summit held to confront failings of Brexit

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/11/revealed-secret-cross-party-summit-held-to-confront-failings-of-brexit

The highly unusual cross-party nature of the gathering of Brexit opponents – and the seniority of those who agreed to attend – reflects a growing acceptance among politicians in the two main parties, as well as business leaders and civil servants, that Brexit in its current form is damaging the UK economy and reducing its strategic influence in the world.

Concern is growing at the top of the Labour party that it poses a real threat to the success of any future Labour government unless problems such as increased trade friction can be addressed.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has predicted that, over the 15 years from 2016, Brexit will reduce the UK’s GDP per capita by 4%. 

What the New York Times Got Wrong About ‘Rural Rage’

https://dailyyonder.com/what-the-new-york-times-got-wrong-rural-rage/2023/02/02/

Krugman uses a tweet from J.D. Vance to prove that rural politicians can spit vitriol at urban people but urban politicians could never reply in kind. If that’s the case, how do you explain the deluge of degrading tweets from Democrats about Appalachia when it was hit by deadly floods in July of 2022? Is it ever excusable for someone to say, after seeing the devastation of such a disaster, that “these people got what they voted for”? 

The problem with using J.D. Vance as an example of what’s wrong with rural America is that he shows exactly why the rural stereotypes Krugman shrugs off as a non-issue are so dangerous. 

Just because Vance dissed New York City does not mean that all rural people hate cities, nor should it give a pass for urban politicians to disparage rural America. Perhaps – perhaps! – politicians (and the public) shouldn’t disparage either place. 

It’s Not Just What Manchester City Won. It’s What Others Lost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/sports/soccer/manchester-city-premier-league-rules.html

Manchester City deserved to win all of those games, of course. On each occasion, it was much the better team. Its opponents accepted their fates with good grace. They did not quibble with the result. “We know how far ahead of us they are,” Gray said, even as his teammates were coming to terms with their humiliation in the sanctuary of the changing room.

That City was better is not in question. What is at stake, instead, is whether it was in a position to reach all of those finals, to win all of those trophies, while operating under the same rules and restrictions as everyone else. If it was not, then there is no punishment, no matter how harsh, that restores what has been lost.

The Founding Fathers Favored a Liberal Immigration System

https://www.cato.org/blog/founding-fathers-favored-liberal-immigration-system

Alexander Hamilton argued that the “advantage of encouraging foreigners was obvious and admitted,” asserting that “persons in Europe of moderate fortunes will be fond of coming here where they will be on a level with the first Citizens.”

Father of the Constitution James Madison “was not averse to some restrictions on this subject, but could never agree to the proposed amendment” in part “because it will discourage the most desirable class of people from emigrating to the U.S.” In other words, not only were the Founders opposed to restricting the free movement of people into the United States, but they opposed restrictions on citizenship that they felt would discourage immigrants from using that freedom. Madison spoke of “great numbers” who would wish to come to the United States.