Brothers Judd Blog – If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

MAKING A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST IS SO MUCH EASIER:

August 29, 2026

You Can Have My Walkman, Just Don’t Take My Mix Tape: These objects contain meaning. (Kera Bolonik, 8/28/26, NY Times)

The popularity of home taping exploded in 1979, with the introduction of the Sony Walkman. At last, you could listen to what you wanted when you were on the move.

The music industry wasn’t pleased with this development, blaming it for a pronounced drop in the sales of vinyl records. The British Phonographic Institute, a trade association in London, mounted a campaign with a reproachful slogan: “Home taping is killing music. And it’s illegal.” In the United States, music executives pressed lawmakers to place a fee on blank cassettes and home recording equipment. George David Weiss, the president of the Songwriters Guild, likened home taping to theft.

None of it stopped youthful Gen X-ers from turning themselves into amateur curators of sound. While this new pastime gave them the chance to to hear their favorite songs in the order of their choosing, it served other purposes, too. “I am what I play,” David Bowie sang on the 1979 song “D.J.,” and the living-room D.J.s of the early 1980s used the medium of the mix tape to claim their identities, introduce themselves to others, flex their musical knowledge, telegraph messages and even flirt.

Forty years after I started making and exchanging mix tapes, I can still remember which friend introduced me to which artist. Mix tapes had a way of casting an indelible imprint on our musical taste, fashion sense — even our worldview.

Health

IT’S QUACKERY:

August 28, 2026

An Insider’s Look at What Happened When Chiropractic Was Evaluated Scientifically, and Why No One Remembers (J. Michael Menke, August 27, 2026, Skeptic)

During the 1980s and 1990s chiropractic researchers launched clinical trials, comparative-effectiveness studies, and collaborations with universities and medical centers.

Then, the larger, better-designed studies made the clinical picture go soft. Patients improved—sometimes substantially—but the improvement proved stubbornly hard to pin on manipulation. Natural history, spontaneous recovery, reassurance, exercise, attention, expectancy, and plain contextual healing kept blurring the causal thresholds.2 Manipulation generally performed about as well as any other conservative care including placebo, and when superior, it closely tracked the false positive rate expected under null hypothesis significance testing.3, 4 In fact, to this day you will see chiropractic research conclusions proudly assert that manipulation is no less effective than other treatments for low back pain, including controls—a damnation by faint self-praise.

The problem was not only scientific but psychological, cultural, and institutional, which is why supporters and critics could read the same trials as Rorschach blots and come away convinced of opposite conclusions. When one body of evidence underwrites both conclusions, the fault is rarely bias; more often the evidence was never built to answer the question asked of it.5 The remedy is unglamorous: decide in advance which single measure could settle the question, weigh several rival hypotheses at once,6 and recognize when further information can no longer move the decision.7 In short: name in advance the result that would change your mind. Chiropractic, though, thrived in the ambiguity. When outcomes were positive, manipulation worked; when they were negative, prejudice or incompetence was clearly afoot.

So the center of gravity in chiropractic research quietly retreated from the awkward clinical effectiveness question, towards safer, fundable territory: biomechanics, sensorimotor physiology, adverse-event surveillance, health-services research, and broad biopsychosocial models.

Does spinal manipulation itself produce large, reliable, clinically transformative effects beyond natural history and contextual healing?

I eventually tried to answer that question—at scale, assembling a meta-analysis of spinal manipulation for low back pain: a hundred and twenty randomized trials, some nineteen thousand patients, modeled against the natural history of recovery. The results did not rescue the story I had spent my youth defending. Once natural history and contextual healing were given their due, the slight effect we detected turned out to be natural history carrying manipulation for acute pain and a faint placebo carrying it for chronic pain.8, 9 Years later, a contemporary from those reform days, chiropractor, influencer, and fellow researcher Greg Plaugher, remarked to me that “evidence-based chiropractic” was an old and abandoned paradigm.10

Culture

WHO’D HAVE DREAMT YOU COULD RUIN ICELAND:

August 28, 2026

The Most Optimistic People in the World, in $1,000 Yurts; At a festival on a disc golf course, on a peninsula in Iceland, waiting for the sky to descend into darkness. (Callie Holtermann, Aug. 27, 2026, NY Times)

The Snaefellsnes Peninsula sticks out from Iceland’s western coast in the shape of a carrot that was peeled during a bumpy bus ride. When I arrived in mid-August, there were 16 hours of sunlight each day. A handsome glacier loomed in the distance, keeping watch over lava fields and clutches of lichen. Arctic terns made lazy circles in the sky. It looked like a cross between Yosemite and Mars.

The festival had attracted around 4,200 people who seemed to share an openness to New Age thinking and a degree of financial flexibility. Tickets cost $888 for entry-level participants and $1,444 for V.I.P.s whom festival organizers referred to as “celestial voyagers.” Lodging was extra. I slept in a spacious beige canvas yurt that cost $1,000 for the week.

There were start-up founders and astrologers and eye surgeons and bartenders and literal astronauts. There were Silicon Valley-types in performance synthetics and Icelanders wearing shorts. During a set called “high vibrational fun time abundance of comedy,” the comedian Brent Pella joked that most people in the audience had crystals but no health insurance. In response, a man stood up and waved his hunk of quartz back and forth as if it were a lighter at a Coldplay concert.

Books

OF MICE AND MEN:

August 28, 2026

Why Asimov’s Foundation series still resonates in the AI era (Chow Chung-yan, 26 Aug 2026, SCMP)

Elon Musk called it a fundamental catalyst for SpaceX. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman credited it with shaping his career. Newt Gingrich made it required reading for his congressional staff, and even Japanese cult leader Shoko Asahara was reportedly inspired by it. […]

When Asimov began writing Foundation 85 years ago, he was capturing the cutting-edge intellectual currents of his era: mathematical determinism, the quantification of social sciences and the rise of central planning in governance.

Economists such as John Maynard Keynes argued that macro-level human behaviour could be managed through top-down intervention, while Jan Tinbergen and Ragnar Frisch were building the first econometric models. Seldon’s psychohistory was essentially macroeconomics and public administration pushed to their absolute logical extreme – individual chaos smoothed out by the predictable behaviour of billions.

Both sides of this coin are incredibly destructive: there are the intellectuals who believe that their social engineering would, uniquely, work and those who think their failed lives must have been engineered from without.

Health

…AND CHEAPER…:

August 27, 2026

Canadian supercomputers are transforming drug discovery: Can they deliver medicines faster? (Dr. Tim Sandle, August 26, 2026, Digital Journal)

The traditional process of drug discovery is lengthy and complex. Scientists must identify disease-causing biological targets, design molecules capable of interacting with those targets, test thousands of candidates, and then determine whether any are safe and effective enough to progress into clinical development. It is an expensive undertaking that is frequently described as taking around a decade and billions of dollars to bring a successful medicine to market.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being positioned as a solution to this challenge. Across academia and industry, researchers are combining AI algorithms with powerful computational infrastructure to identify promising drug candidates more rapidly.

Books

COUNTING:

August 27, 2026

Did the Zodiac Kill the Black Dahlia? This Crime Writer Thinks So. (Alexander Nazaryan, Aug. 26, 2026, NY Times)

[W]hen two of Connelly’s most trusted collaborators, the retired Los Angeles Police Department detectives Rick Jackson (partly the basis for Bosch) and Mitzi Roberts (the inspiration for Ballard), came to him early last year with the claim that an amateur sleuth in West Virginia had solved the most notorious murder in L.A. history, there was only one thing Connelly could do: work the case as if he were still a young reporter ravenous for the big scoop.

That investigation resulted in “Killer in the Code,” a podcast whose second season returns on Wednesday with the first two episodes of six. The 10-episode first season, which debuted last December, roiled the true crime community by arguing that a World War II veteran named Marvin Margolis was responsible for two of the most famous unsolved crimes in California history: the 1947 Los Angeles murder of Elizabeth Short, immortalized as the Black Dahlia, and the five killings committed by the Zodiac throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s.

“I have no doubts,” Connelly said in the run-up to the second season, which focuses on advancing the case against Margolis as if he were still alive. The evidence pointing to Margolis as the killer, Connelly added, was “completely convincing.”

Margolis has been floated before as a suspect in the Short killing, but never with such confidence. And he has never been previously connected with the Zodiac killings. The podcast has infuriated many in the true crime community. Connelly is viewed by some as a carpetbagger and completely out of his depth, duped by bad cryptography and shoddy evidence, the kind of thing Bosch or Ballard would see right through.

“Mike was a fine reporter, but those reporting days are in the rearview mirror,” said Larry Harnisch, a leading Black Dahlia expert who has led the opposition to “Killer in the Code.” Back when Connelly was a reporter for The Times, Harnisch was a copy editor at the paper. He hasn’t taken kindly to what he sees as the novelist’s intrusion on his domain. “I’m not going to sit silently and let them do it, because it’s a scam,” Harnisch said.

Despite the criticism, Connelly retains a conviction that he has the right guy, dismissing Harnisch and other detractors as a “small incestuous group” peddling “disproved” theories.

“I knew that, going into this, I would put my reputation on the line,” Connelly said.

“They’re invested in a different theory,” he added, “so to accept our theory, they have to accept that they’re wrong, or they’ve wasted a lot of time.”

The gray goatee, the bulky frame, the raspy voice. Michael Connelly, now 70, may be one of America’s most successful writers, but the vibe he gives off is of a cop on the cusp of retirement yet with something still left to prove.

Connelly admits that when he first got involved in the podcast, he did not think it would become something of a second job. (His latest novel, “Ironwood,” was published in May; a new Bosch novel, “The Hollow,” is coming in October.) He would narrate the story of Margolis, and the Black Dahlia-Zodiac link, then go back to writing books. Instead, the story has swallowed him whole.

It all began when he learned that a self-taught investigator in West Virginia claimed to have finally solved one of the Zodiac’s cryptograms. “As homicide investigators like to say, it goes where it goes,” Connelly said.

He can’t just drop it, like a bad first draft. This Friday, he and the rest of the podcast team will present their findings at the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center, which houses the forensics divisions of the L.A.P.D. and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

What keeps him going is an enduring fascination with Short, the patron saint of every lost soul to wander down Sunset Boulevard. “She was missing something,” Connelly said. “That’s the secret of L.A. Everybody here came from somewhere else because they’ve been missing something. Myself included.”

Educated about serial killers by novels, as we all are, both the gap between murders and the wildly differing manners of killing seem awfully odd.

Books

NOT THE ONION:

August 26, 2026

The Elvis Impersonator, the Karate Instructor, a Fridge Full of Severed Heads, and the Plot 2 Kill the President: Remember that crazy story about the dude in Mississippi who mailed ricin to Obama and then tried to frame some other dude in Mississippi for the crime? Well, as Wells Tower discovered when he traveled to Tupelo and started poking around, the story is a thousand times crazier than you thought (Wells Tower, September 29, 2013, GQ)

Spend a week or two in Tupelo, Mississippi, and you begin to wonder if the air down here perhaps contains an element that causes dreams to ignite and burn hotter and stranger than elsewhere in the world. What are the dreams that catch fire in this town? They are dreams of rock ‘n’ roll; of valor, metamorphosis, and ruination; sex and betrayal; of the government and shadowy forces; of the grand dream, American. The ether here is surely spiked with something. How else do we explain the dream of the poor hillbilly born in a shotgun shack in east Tupelo, who invented rock ‘n’ roll and changed the world and died on the toilet at the age of 42? How else to understand a man like Kevin Curtis, one of northeastern Mississippi’s preeminent Elvis impersonators, whose life was nearly ruined by the sight of a severed head on a refrigerator shelf? How else to make sense of the story you are about to hear, the tale of Mr. Curtis and Everett Dutschke, two men who might have shared a lovely friendship but instead had a weird feud that ended in the attempted poisoning of the president of the United States?

Theirs is a story of human dismemberment and righteous causes, of martial arts and murder intrigues, sexual perversity, political conviction, and resentments dearly held. What lies behind Mr. Curtis and Mr. Dutschke’s spectacular collision? A lot of odd and complicated things. But in the simplest sense, perhaps it’s that these gentlemen simply had too many dreams in common, and in their particular America, there are only so many dreams to go around.

Founding Republican Liberty

LIBERTY RESTRICTS FREEDOM:

August 26, 2026

Liberty for Whom? David M. Kennedy on Patrick Henry: The Revolution’s master orator saw freedom in states’ sovereignty, not federal control. (David M. Kennedy, August 25, 2026, Freedom Frequency)

But what about that word “liberty”? My callow and rambunctious adolescent brain understood it to mean personal freedom, the kind of autonomy that latter-day libertarians assert as an unalienable individual right.

I’ve come to believe that my youthful understanding was not entirely wrong, but it was seriously incomplete, arguably even mistaken in its fundamentals. Properly understood, Henry’s concept of liberty indeed embraced at least a qualified sense of individual prerogatives, of the sort that Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But for him the essential, foundational concept of liberty was a collective attribute, the sacred right of organic communities—or, more precisely, majorities in such communities—to govern themselves without outside interference, and sometimes even to subordinate individual welfare to the will of the larger community.

Books Law/Crime

RUSE OF WAR:

August 26, 2026

Was the Trojan Horse a War Crime?: The modern heart of the filmed Odyssey is a transgression and its consequences. But how did the ancients see the epic ruse? (Barry Strauss, August 25, 2026, Freedom Frequency)

What would we say if the Trojan Horse took place today? Does it violate international humanitarian law, which is also known as the Law of Armed Conflict? The law permits “ruses of war” if they don’t otherwise violate international law and if they don’t constitute “perfidy.” The law defines a ruse of war as anything aimed at misleading the enemy if it doesn’t trick him into thinking that he is protected under the law of war. The latter is perfidy. For example, attacking the enemy after either pretending to surrender or faking a wound is considered perfidy. But feigned retreat, such as the Greeks engaged in at Troy, is not perfidious, and is permitted by international humanitarian law.

The Trojan Horse was an ambush by means of camouflage, and both ambushes and camouflage are permitted ruses. Still, the horse was a religious symbol and an unofficial emblem of Troy, a country known for horse breeding and horse trading. The law of armed conflict prohibits the use of a religious symbol in an ambush, but only if it invokes legal protection. Pretending to be a chaplain or hiding soldiers in a religious shrine would violate the law, but offering a false gift to a nation’s god probably would not. International law would probably judge the horse to be a legitimate ruse of war.

It might not give Sinon’s behavior a pass. On the one hand, lies and deception are no violation of the law of war. On the other hand, Sinon claimed to be hors de combat (not to be confused with horse de combat) and a refugee when, in fact, he remained an enemy soldier. The Roman poet Virgil condemned Sinon’s behavior as perjury. Lawyers will disagree, but Sinon might well be judged today to have violated the law of armed conflict.

Anglospherics

GOING TO EXTREMES:

August 25, 2026

My quest to the most northerly point of the British Isles: A journey around the ‘island above all others’: Having grown obsessed with a tiny rocky outcrop off the coast of Shetland, travel writer Amelia Neath sets out on a journey to reach Britain’s most extreme northerly point (Amelia Neath, 25 August 2026, Independent)

I spend perhaps an unhealthy amount of time staring at the Maps app on my phone, zooming into remote roads, tiny islands, or the middle of vast plains peppered with isolated buildings. One place I always come back to – via satellite image, that is – is the Shetland Islands, or more specifically, Out Stack, a small skerry in the North Atlantic Ocean marking the northerly point of the British Isles. There’s just something so satisfying about an endpoint, an extreme boundary, that keeps piquing my curiosity during my late-night virtual explorations.

So when I found myself this summer standing on the cliffs of Shetland’s Hermaness National Nature Reserve, looking directly out at the uninhabited rocky islet that poses as the final full stop of Britain, I finally understood why Romantic poets found our country’s nature so powerfully awe-inspiring. Other walkers we chatted to along the cliffs also shared these feelings; we were all harbouring a triumphant secret that day about what it’s like to be the most northerly people in the country.

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