It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Briefly: Three things to read elsewhere.

First, you owe yourself the mouth-hanging-open weird hate-pleasure of watching Vogue gush about Ukraine’s first lady:

On one day she wore an ecru silk blouse with a black velvet bow tied around the neck and a black mid-calf skirt, her ash-blond hair swept up in a loose bun. The next day, it was wide-leg jeans, chunky white sneakers with yellow and blue detailing, a nod to the Ukrainian flag and a fundraising project by the brand The Coat, her hair loose on her shoulders, and a rust-colored button-down shirt. I couldn’t help but think the shirt had the same rusty hue as the burned-out Russian tanks that I saw lining roads in Irpin and Bucha, suburbs of Kyiv where Ukraine pushed back the Russians.

I…wish I could show you my current facial expression?

Second, spend five minutes admiring the ability of the journalist Zak Cheney-Rice to avoid noticing the implications of his own statements. He’s writing about policing, and linking the question of defunding the police to the problem of the post-Dobbs enforcement of abortion laws. There are a half-dozen actual howlers in here — literally, claims that made me produce loud verbal noises that scared the cats — but, again, watch the way journalists use adjectives to force information to work as evidence for something they wish to claim:

The DA’s office of Texas’s Tarrant County, home to more than 2 million people, tweeted ominously in response to the Court’s decision: “We followed Roe v. Wade when it was the law and we will follow Texas state law now.”

It’s very ominous when prosecutors say they’ll follow the law. Elsewhere in the same piece he notes with relief that Blue Zone prosecutors are promising not to help with the enforcement of new abortion laws. This, he explains, is very good. We need prosecutors who refuse to follow the law and choose which laws to actually use, see, so we can avoid having repressive government. And so on, in an essay that’s like watching pellets spin around in a blender, flying in circles and slamming into other pellets. “Dobbs is a reminder that what constitutes a crime is frequently arbitrary,” says the writer who wants prosecutors to pick and choose their own laws.

And finally, this long article about apparent research fraud by an influential scientist studying Alzheimer’s disease is incredibly disturbing on multiple levels — but especially relevant now for its depiction of boundary policing and channelization in science, both by social pressure and by the role of funding from organizations like the NIH. Money quote:

“You can cheat to get a paper. You can cheat to get a degree. You can cheat to get a grant. You can’t cheat to cure a disease,” he says. “Biology doesn’t care.”

We keep relearning this. Worth the read.