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The Lie About the Supreme Court Everyone Pretends to Believe

From The Lie About the Supreme Court Everyone Pretends to Believe:

The day Thurgood Marshall retired, he issued a furious dissent to a decision that strengthened the death penalty. “Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decisionmaking,” Marshall wrote, dissenting from the majority opinion in Payne v. Tennessee. “Neither the law nor the facts … underwent any change in the last four years, only the personnel of this court did.” The same is true of every precedent overturned by the Roberts Court.

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How Humans Lost Their Tails

From How Humans Lost Their Tails:

Even if geneticists are beginning to explain how our tail disappeared, the question of why still baffles scientists.

The first apes were bigger than monkeys, and their increased size would have made it easier for them to fall off branches, and more likely for those falls to be fatal. It’s hard to explain why apes without tails to help them balance wouldn’t have suffered a significant evolutionary disadvantage.

And losing a tail could have brought other dangers, too. Mr. Xia and his colleagues found that the TBXT mutation doesn’t just shorten tails but also sometimes causes spinal cord defects. And yet, somehow, losing a tail proved a major evolutionary advantage.

“It’s very confusing why they lost their tail,” said Gabrielle Russo, an evolutionary morphologist at Stony Brook University in New York who was not involved in the study. “That’s the next outstanding question: What on earth would the advantage be?”

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Progressive Pressure Over the Budget Reconciliation Bill Is Creating Establishment Pushback

From Progressive Pressure Over the Budget Reconciliation Bill Is Creating Establishment Pushback:

It seems that a prerequisite for a TV anchor job or a Beltway reporting gig at a corporate media outlet is an ironclad commitment to standing in the shadow of a Mount Everest–sized pile of corporate campaign cash, and insisting with a straight face that politics is just a battle of ideas between earnest statesmen presenting different visions for the country’s future.

Jacobin follows the money. You should too.

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The Great New England Vampire Panic

From The Great New England Vampire Panic:

Though scholars today still struggle to explain the vampire panics, a key detail unites them: The public hysteria almost invariably occurred in the midst of savage tuberculosis outbreaks….

“People find themselves in dire situations, where there’s no recourse through regular channels,” [Rhode Island folklorist Michael Bell] explains. “The folk system offers an alternative, a choice.” Sometimes, superstitions represent the only hope, he says.

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The Cancel Culture Panic and Middle-Aged Sadness

From The Cancel Culture Panic and Middle-Aged Sadness:

Many people I know over 40 — maybe 35 — resent new social mores that demand outsized sensitivity to causing harm. It has been jarring to go from an intellectual culture that prizes transgression to one that polices it. The shame of turning into the sort of old person repelled by the sensibilities of the young is a cause of real psychic pain….For the individual, this may be a source of anguish [but] that doesn’t make it a political emergency.

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The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles

Beginning in the late sixties, Helmut Kentler placed neglected children in foster homes run by pedophiles. The experiment was authorized and financially supported by the Berlin Senate. In a report submitted to the Senate in 1988, Kentler described the program as a “complete success.”

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Exploring Some of the Reasons Not To Get Vaccinated

As part of my job at the school, I do some writing for the school’s blog. I just posted a relatively long article titled, Exploring Some of the Reasons Not To Get Vaccinated:

Unfortunately, millions of Americans still refuse to get the vaccine. With the FDA approving the Pfizer vaccine for every American over the age of 12  (making every member of the LiHigh School community eligible), we want to clear up some of the misinformation around the vaccine.