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)
Hydrogen-powered business jet edges closer to certification (David Szondy, March 26, 2026, New Atlas)
Because of its redundant fuel cell configuration, the six 400-kW cells powering the turbofan motors are claimed to have a system resilience that rivals that of conventional engines. In addition, the zero-emissions powertrain makes the BYA-I immune to carbon taxes and “flight shaming” regulations.
The Green Fields of the Mind (A. Bartlett Giamatti,)
The aisles are jammed, the place is on its feet, the wrappers, the programs, the Coke cups and peanut shells, the doctrines of an afternoon; the anxieties, the things that have to be done tomorrow, the regrets about yesterday, the accumulation of a summer: all forgotten, while hope, the anchor, bites and takes hold where a moment before it seemed we would be swept out with the tide. Rice is up. Rice whom Aaron had said was the only one he’d seen with the ability to break his records. Rice the best clutch hitter on the club, with the best slugging percentage in the league. Rice, so quick and strong he once checked his swing halfway through and snapped the bat in two. Rice the Hammer of God sent to scourge the Yankees, the sound was overwhelming, fathers pounded their sons on the back, cars pulled off the road, households froze, New England exulted in its blessedness, and roared its thanks for all good things, for Rice and for a summer stretching halfway through October. Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.
That is why it breaks my heart, that game–not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.
The long shadow of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ is evident in anti‑immigration efforts today ( Brian C. Keegan & Emily Klancher Merchant, March 26, 2026, The Conversation)
Ehrlich’s predictions were conspicuously wrong – and experts said so at the time. But his logic resonated through the 1970s and ’80s across the political spectrum. Its shadow is evident in today’s anti-immigration campaigns and White House arguments for mass deportation.
We have followed its long afterlife, as a computational social scientist studying contemporary extremism and as a historian whose book “Building the Population Bomb” analyzed Ehrlich’s impact. […]
The intellectual genealogy behind “The Population Bomb” ran deeper than Ehrlich’s own career. The “bomb” analogy was borrowed from a 1954 pamphlet by Hugh Moore, a businessman whose population anxieties descended from Guy Irving Burch, the anti-immigrant eugenicist who founded the Population Reference Bureau in 1929.
Burch, worried about “alien or negro stock” replacing Europeans, introduced the phrase “population explosion” to American public discourse in the 1930s as part of a campaign for immigration restriction. Moore updated Burch’s framework for the Cold War, warning that population growth in Africa, Asia and Latin America would produce communist expansion and nuclear war.
Ehrlich’s use of ecological carrying capacity – the idea that any environment has a finite number of resources to support a population before collapsing – justified coercive population control initiatives as foreign and domestic environmental policies in the minds of many Americans.
Too many of you: not enough of me.
One Man’s Quest for the End of the World Started on a Ranch in Texas: A Texas businessman believes he was divinely chosen to help usher in the Second Coming of Christ—by finding unblemished red heifers and getting them to Israel. (Andrew Logan, March 2026, Texas Monthly)
It was nearly Christmas, and Jerome Urbanosky was expecting unusual company. The easygoing 72-year-old rancher stood outside his redbrick home, watching as a dozen or so vehicles crunched along the gravel road that winds through the grassy plain of his 1,500-acre ranch northwest of Houston. The delegation that piled out into his driveway included high-ranking rabbis who’d flown straight from Israel, a U.S. documentary crew toting multiple cameras, and a Texas businessman named Byron Stinson.Urbanosky was taken aback by the size of the crew—but that wasn’t the thing that startled him the most. Four men dressed in black tactical gear and carrying military rifles approached and told him they needed to sweep the property to make sure no “foreign agents” were present. “They were armed to the teeth,” Urbanosky remembered. He wasn’t inclined to stand in their way. His wife, Jane, who was in the kitchen preparing the weekly Sunday meal, stared saucer-eyed as the armed men entered her home.
Once the security team cleared the property, Urbanosky led the rabbis to a red barn, where two calves awaited. Urbanosky Ranch is home to a herd of more than 450 Santa Gertrudis cattle, a hardy breed that’s known to produce good beef and whose origins trace back to the King Ranch, in South Texas. But as Urbanosky knew, this delegation wasn’t here for a steak.
Santa Gertrudis cattle also have striking coats of deep rusty red, which is what had initially attracted Stinson’s attention. A seventy-year-old Glen Rose business owner who’s described himself as a “Jesus zealot,” Stinson had visited Urbanosky at his ranch once before and explained that he was in search of an unblemished, completely red heifer—a scratch or a single white hair, and it wouldn’t do. Such a heifer hadn’t been identified in two thousand years, but it was key to unlocking an ancient Jewish ritual described in the book of Numbers, a necessary precursor to constructing the Third Temple in Jerusalem and, ultimately, bringing about the Second Coming of Christ. It’s a fringe but nonetheless influential belief, and Stinson’s Israeli associate, Yitshak Mamo, had convinced Urbanosky that he, too, was essential to this journey.
Urbanosky, a Catholic who attends weekly Mass, had never heard of the Jewish ceremony. He was wary at first, but Stinson was tireless, and Mamo told Urbanosky that, just maybe, God had indeed chosen him to deliver the sacred heifer. “It has shaken my psyche,” he said. “I don’t have this superiority complex. I know that my wife doesn’t think I’m anything special.”
Where You Live in the U.S. Affects How Long You Live (Amy Olson, 12/10/21, Dartmouth)
The team’s initial thought was that the differences in mortality rates across the country might be explained by deaths of despair—suicide, alcohol poisoning and drug overdoses such as from opioids. However, this was not the case. Deaths of despair only accounted for one-sixth of all midlife deaths.They then looked at whether geographic differences in mortality rates could be explained by differences in education, such as if a person had a college degree, and whether states with more college graduates had better mortality than states with fewer college graduates. Education was not the root of the problem, as health inequality was still present after education at the state-level was accounted for, the researchers found.
The researchers also investigated how state-level income impacted the increased divergence in mortality rates. “Our findings show that over the past three decades, mortality rates have improved in states with initially high incomes in 1990 while the rates in low-income states have lagged behind,” says co-author Ellen Meara, an adjunct professor at The Dartmouth Institute and a professor of health economics and policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “In 2019, high-income states experienced the biggest drop in mortality rates relative to 1968 or 1990, whereas, the low-income states barely budged at all.”
It wasn’t income that drove the great geographic divergence in mortality, the researchers say. Instead, it appears to be the long-term benefits of public health and social policies that were enacted by higher-income states in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly relating to children and adolescents, as they started paying off at midlife in the 2000s and 2010s.
“Investments in public health—higher taxes on cigarettes, expansion of the earned income tax credit for families, and expansion of Medicaid to pregnant mothers in high-income states—are the most likely candidates for why some states gained and others didn’t,” says Skinner.
Meara says, “our results demonstrate how regional investments in health capital over the lifecycle, including policies aimed at adopting good health behaviors, can provide long-term benefits for residents, significantly increasing life expectancy.”
Why Fallacies Don’t Exist: (except in textbooks) (Maarten Boudry, Feb 12, 2026)
As the saying goes: correlation does not imply causation. If you think otherwise, logic textbooks will tell you that you’re guilty of the fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc. You can formalize it like this:
If B follows A, then A is the cause of B.
Clearly, this is false. Any event B is preceded by countless other events. If I suddenly get a headache, which of the myriad preceding events should I blame? That I had cornflakes for breakfast? That I wore blue socks? That my neighbor wore blue socks?
It’s easy to mock this fallacy—websites like Spurious Correlations offer graphs showing correlations between margarine consumption and divorce rates, or between the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool and the number of Nicholas Cage films released per year.
The problem is that not even the most superstitious person really believes that just because A happened before B, A must have caused B. Sure, in strict deductive terms, post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy—but real-life examples are almost nonexistent. That’s the first prong of the Fallacy Fork.
So what do real-life post hoc arguments actually look like? More like this: “If B follows shortly after A, and there’s some plausible causal mechanism linking A and B, then A is probably the cause of B.” Many such arguments are entirely plausible—or at least not obviously wrong. Context is everything.
Imagine you eat some mushrooms you picked in the forest. Half an hour later, you feel nauseated, so you put two and two together: “Ugh. That must have been the mushrooms.” Are you committing a fallacy? Yes, says your logic textbook. No, says common sense—at least if your inference is meant to be probabilistic.
Here, the inference is actually reasonable, assuming a few tacit things:
Some mushrooms are toxic.
It’s easy for a layperson to mistake a poisonous mushroom for a harmless one.
Nausea is a common symptom of food poisoning.
You don’t normally feel nauseated.
If you want, you can even spell this out in probabilistic terms. Consider the last premise—the base rate. If you usually have a healthy stomach, the mushroom is the most likely culprit. If, on the other hand, you frequently suffer from gastrointestinal problems, the post hoc inference becomes much weaker.
Almost all of our everyday knowledge about cause and effect comes from this kind of intuitive post hoc reasoning. My phone starts acting up after I drop it; someone unfriends me after I post an offensive joke; the fire alarm goes off right after I light a cigarette. As Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, once put it: “Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’” The problem with astrology, homeopathy, and other forms of quack medicine lies in their background causal assumptions, not in the post hoc inferences themselves.
Take Me Out to the (Simulated, Hallucinatory) Ballgame (Adam Dalva, March 25, 2026, NY Times)
The abbreviation of Henry’s full name, JHWh, is a conscious echo of YHWH, the Hebrew name for God, and the book teems with religious symbolism: Ball stadiums, Coover writes, are the “real American holy places.” But because Henry has created a clockwork universe, a procedural generator whose rules are fixed, theological intervention is impossible. The dice control everything from off-season sports to a complex system of politics — all of which is highly entertaining to read.
But the dice can also cause tragedy. In one indelible scene, a freak sequence of rolls brings out the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart, which details the unlikeliest (and unluckiest) scenarios. Henry can’t accept what he sees, and what he’s done to his favorite player. But to cheat the rules of the game would be to render the whole thing meaningless. His hands tremble. Disaster has struck.
Why America is so much better than Europe at immigration (Kelsey Piper and Alexander Kustov, Mar 18, 2026, The Argument)
Americans are divided over immigration — in a recent YouGov/Economist poll, 55% said legal immigration should be increased or kept the same, and 46% said immigration makes the U.S. better off (only 24% say it makes the country worse off).That’s a lot more support for immigration than you see across the Atlantic. In a YouGov poll of Germany, 32% of respondents said that legal immigration over the last 10 years was about right or too low, and only 24% said legal immigration has been mostly good for Germany. In the same survey of France, 33% said legal immigration was about right or too low, and 22% said it has been mostly good for France. Across every Western European country surveyed, there was about 50% support for ending all new migration and requiring many existing migrants to leave.
So in America, immigration is hotly contested; in Western Europe, it’s generally way underwater. But we’re not just talking about a difference in public opinion. By almost any metric you choose to name, immigration is working far better in the United States than non-EU immigration is working in Europe.
In the United States, immigrants are actually more likely to be employed than non-immigrants (but only just). In Germany, on the other hand, OECD data reveals that only 58% of non-EU immigrant prime-aged adults work, compared to 78% of non-immigrant Germans. In France it’s 52% (of non-EU immigrants) vs 66% (of French people).
Notably, in Spain, where immigration isn’t deep underwater politically (47% said legal immigration was about right or too low, and 42% said it has been mostly good for Spain) immigrant labor force participation is higher than native labor force participation.
In the United States, immigrants commit much less crime than natives; in Europe, non-EU immigrants generally commit much more crime than natives.
Sovereignty of the Afghan State under the Taliban: The Taliban’s rule violates international norms, but that doesn’t give Pakistan the right to violate Afghanistan’s sovereignty. (Atal Ahmadzai | March 23, 2026, FPIF)
Sovereignty is a fundamental characteristic of the modern state and the basis of contemporary international order, upheld by international law, treaties, and judicial decisions. Key elements of state sovereignty include territorial supremacy, independence, non-intervention, equal rights, and internal jurisdiction. The UN Charter supports these principles by emphasizing “sovereign equality” among member states, prohibiting the threat or use of force against states, and protecting domestic jurisdiction.
Although defined as a state’s supreme authority over its territory and people, sovereignty is not static or absolute but rather subject to change and limitations. Initially, an absolute right of monarchs in the seventeenth century, it evolved into state sovereignty in the eighteenth century, and now reflects modern popular sovereignty. In the aftermath of twentieth-century atrocities committed by states, the concept of sovereignty increasingly highlights the authority of the people through constitutional rights and elected representation. Consequently, modern international law incorporates human rights considerations, among others, that limit state sovereignty. This limitation is particularly relevant to the Taliban regime.
No regime that is not liberal has a legitimate claim to sovereignty.
Is the Radical-Right Threat Existential or Overstated? (Catherine Fieschi, Visiting Scholar, 3/19/26, Carnegie Europe
We know the radical right when we see it. Across countries, idioms, and organizational forms, it returns to a familiar cluster of commitments: an organic and essentialized view of the nation, a deep suspicion of pluralism, a taste for hierarchy dressed up as common sense or natural order, and a determination to redraw the boundaries of belonging so that some citizens are always less secure, less legitimate, and less equal than others.
What links a polished electoral machine, a digital grievance ecosystem, and a violent extremist fringe? The fact that they do not share a handbook, but definitely share a political direction. The radical right does not simply propose a tougher immigration policy, a more punitive criminal code, or a more culturally conservative school curriculum. It is not merely offering a policy correction within democratic life. It is advancing a different moral order. Roger Griffin’s definition of palingenetic ultranationalism, first proposed in his 1991 book The Nature of Fascism, captures something essential: The dream of national rebirth is never only rhetorical. It is a project of reconstruction in which the political community is purified, enemies are named, and equal citizenship becomes conditional. Viktor Orbán’s embrace of the so-called illiberal state was not just a constitutional preference; it was an assertion that equality and pluralism should give way to a morally and ethnically homogeneous political community. And when Donald Trump speaks of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the nation, he isn’t simply escalating campaign rhetoric; he is recasting membership itself in quasi-organic terms, as though the polity were a body to be cleansed rather than a civic compact to be shared.