Group of kids playing video games on smart phone after school
I don’t know any teacher who doesn’t think they are making classroom education nearly impossible. It is a crisis:
Social media, the U.S. surgeon general wrote in an advisory this year, might be linked to the growing mental health crisis among teens. And even if this link turns out to be weaker than some recent research suggests, smartphones are undoubtedly a classroom distraction.
Understandably, individual schools and school districts — in Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere — are trying to crack down on smartphones. Students are required to store the devices in backpacks or lockers during classes, or to place them in magnetic locking pouches. In 2024, these efforts should go even further: Impose an outright ban on bringing cellphones to school, which parents should welcome and support.
In educational settings, smartphones have an almost entirely negative impact: Educators and students alike note they can fuel cyberbullying and stifle meaningful in-person interaction. A 14-country study cited by UNESCO found that the mere presence of a mobile phone nearby was enough to distract students from learning. It can take up to 20 minutes for students to refocus.
Education Department data suggest that a majority of schools prohibit nonacademic cellphone use during school hours, but the enforcement of those policies is often lax — teachers can’t confront every student or confiscate every device; some report students request bathroom breaks to check their notifications in the stalls. Phones are still in hand between classes, at lunch and recess, and often during instructional time despite putative bans — 97 percent of teens report using their phones during the school day, mostly for nonacademic purposes.
Forty-three percent of 8-to-12-year-olds own a smartphone, as do 88 percent of teens 13 to 18, according to the 2021 Common Sense Census. But most didn’t buy one themselves. The most ardent opponents of all-day device bans tend to be parents. Some are “enraged,” as one mother in Charlottesville told the Daily Progress, at the idea of cellphone limitations, insisting on the need to remain in contact with their children: to arrange pickups and dropoffs, keep track of their whereabouts or otherwise be in touch.
These are not totally trivial concerns. Indeed, parents and students these days have to worry about staying connected in the event of a school shooting. (As one nervous eighth-grader told a Post reporter: “I’m afraid that if something happens, I won’t be able to contact anyone. … Worst-case scenario: You can at least say goodbye.”) For the most part, though, it’s safer for students to focus on their surroundings during a crisis, not devices. The better solution to this tragic dilemma is prevent shootings in the first place with common-sense gun control policies.
For less dire — and far more common — emergencies, students would be better served by learning how to deal with a forgotten assignment or extracurricular themselves. And if there’s a true need to communicate with home, there’s always the option of using the school office’s landline, as students have done for decades.
[…]
[T]here is still a lack of robust data to suggest that digital technology inherently adds value to education, said UNESCO in its 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report. Much of the research that does exist was funded by private companies trying to create a market for their own digital learning products.
The same UNESCO report calls for a ban on smartphones at school no matter what age the user, and recommends it worldwide. This would reinforce a “human-centered” vision of education, the report says. Countries that have already adopted such policies have seen positive results; reductions in bullying in Spain and improved academic performance in Norway and Belgium. The United States would do well to follow their lead.
In the face of today’s evidence, one could plausibly argue that children shouldn’t have access to smartphones at all. But at least keeping the devices out of schools? It’s an idea whose time has come.
Unfortunately, one of the main arguments for allowing kids to have cell phones in class is that parents are paranoid that some nut is going to shoot up the school and they want their kids to be able to call them.
That’s how sick we are. But there should be another way. There has to be another way.
Some of us have learned to refrain from issuing hot takes on developing stories. Yes, sometimes it’s infuriating when the press holds back from stating the obvious. I still recall the hour or more of “we don’t know what happened yet” reporting when the Challenger exploded (1986) shortly after launch, even as TV ran and re-ran footage of the explosion and we watched the detached bosters, still firing, fly wildy across the sky. Other times, as in last week’s Canada/U.S. border crash, there is a race to sensationalize in the absence of facts.
Update from local news on the driver of the car who Ted Cruz and other Republicans in Congress claimed was a terrorist and blamed Biden for it. Police Chief: “It doesn’t help anybody, especially the family, when all these rumors are being posted.” pic.twitter.com/zkhHIX80yO
Will Bunch opens his Sunday column with an Orwell quote:
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” — George Orwell, 1984
The lie that the bridge crash was a terrorist attack from Canada spread before the flames from the burning Bentley subsided. First the truth:
Here’s what really happened on Wednesday: A 53-year-old couple from Erie County, N.Y. — Monica and Kurt Villani — were driving to a casino in Canada in a Bentley luxury car because of a canceled rock concert when something went terribly wrong. Approaching the Rainbow Bridge border post, the car was traveling 80 to 100 mph — perhaps due to a medical emergency, or a stuck accelerator — and struck a curb, sending the Bentley into the air before a fiery crash and explosion that killed both occupants.
The FBI and police naturally had to rule out terrorism before turning to that more mundane explanation. But before the facts became known, outlets like Fox ran with fear-mongering speculation.
“What I’ve been told is that this was an attempted terrorist attack,” said Alexis McAdams, a correspondent for Fox News, the right-slanted network that despite a series of scandals and mishaps is still the most-watched cable news channel. Reporting just two and a half hours after the crash, McAdams added that her law enforcement sources believed that the motorists — in reality, remember, two middle-aged KISS fans — “have packed that car full of explosives.”
A-a-a-nd the demagogues were off:
“We need to lock down the borders immediately,” GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida posed on X/Twitter Wednesday. “Full deportation efforts need to begin. The U.S. does not need to be the world’s hospitality suite any longer.” Added another Florida Republican, Rep. Byron Donalds, in a now deleted tweet: “Open borders, soft-on-crime policies and bending a knee to the woke P.C. mob is an inevitable threat to our nation and its people. Today’s apparent terrorist attack must be a wake-up call to all Americans.”
The website Meidas Touch published a list of more than 30 Republican officials or right-wing luminaries who tweeted similar sentiments and occasionally embellished their posts with new made-up details, like the discovery of an Iranian passport at the crash site. Some of these posts are still up, days after it became clear that the Niagara Falls crash was just a horrific tragedy and not the far-right’s fever dream of Islamic jihad to justify a repressive response. Others, including Fox News, have ripped yet another page from George Orwell’s 1984 — tossing their initial reporting down a memory hole.
Except what my post below suggests is that, like discredited scientific studies, discredited “news” will persist in cyberspace and be cited as true facts obscured by a government coverup for years to come. It works for them.
This kind of propaganda is designed to further destabilize the country and to prepare it for a strong man, even if it’s not Donald Trump.
For millions of U.S. web surfers and couch potatoes, the mental connection of Biden, the border and fiery chaos had already been implanted, and it will remain even as some of the erroneous tweets are deleted. And that sense that things are out of control in America is already being used to sell them on a rule-breaking strongman in the White House. That will be used in a Trump 47 presidency to actually carry out Luna’s howling at the moon, to deport so many migrants that America will need a gulag archipelago of camps to hold them.
The Niagara Falls panic didn’t happen in a vacuum, after all. It happened in the same week that Argentina elected a right-wing extremist president in Javier Milei, that the anti-immigration party of radical Geert Wilders won the most seats in the Netherlands parliament, that a fake rumor about the immigration status of a stabbing attacker sparked a destructive riot in Dublin — and that polls show Trump edging into the lead over Biden ahead of 2024′s election.
We can see where the right wants to take the country. But let’s not get out over our skis about those Trump-Biden polls. Like polling about the economy, they are likely skewed by Republican respondents’ same tribal detachment from reality about the economy:
A pair of economists who examined decades of polling data concluded, “While both Republicans and Democrats view the economy more favorably when their party controls the White House, the magnitude of this partisan bias is roughly two and a half times larger for Republicans than for Democrats.”
Factor that two and a half times into reading any polling about the 2024 election. It’s a feature, not a bug. Truth and pants, you know?
Forget that we cannot trust self-driving cars and that those flying ones we were promised remain elusive. Two random items this morning reinforce concerns about AI.
Science is an imperfect process, the Hill opinion notes. “Since 1980, more than 40,000 scientific publications have been retracted. They either contained errors, were based on outdated knowledge or were outright frauds.” The problem is that those zombie studies do not disappear simply because they’ve been retrcated. They continue to be cited “unwittingly“:
Just by citing a zombie publication, new research becomes infected: A single unreliable citation can threaten the reliability of the research that cites it, and that infection can cascade, spreading across hundreds of papers. A 2019 paper on childhood cancer, for example, cites 51 different retracted papers, making its research likely impossible to salvage.
AI relying on undigitized medical knowledge from 1853 may seem unlikely. But relying on 40,000 retracted studies still floating around?
I dredged this up from the summer based on a comment in the Blue Sky thread:
Cigna is using an algorithm to review — and often reject — hundreds of thousands of patient health insurance claims, a new lawsuit claims, with doctors rubber-stamping those denials without individually reviewing each case.
{…}
The litigation highlights the growing use of algorithms and artificial intelligence to handle tasks that were once routinely handled by human workers. At issue in health care is whether a computer program can provide the kind of “thorough, fair, and objective” decision that a human medical professional would bring in evaluating a patient’s claim.
“Relying on the PXDX system, Cigna’s doctors instantly reject claims on medical grounds without ever opening patient files, leaving thousands of patients effectively without coverage and with unexpected bills,” the suit alleges.
Right now, no fewer than half of health care organizations are planning to use some kind of generative AI pilot program this year, according to a recent report by consulting firm Accenture. Some could involve patients directly. AI could make it easier for patients to understand a providers’ note, or listen to visits and summarize them.
But what about… you know, actual doctoring? So far, in limited research, chatbots have proven decent at asking simple health questions. Researchers from Cleveland Clinic and Stanford recently asked ChatGPT 25 questions on heart disease prevention. Its responses were appropriate for 21 of 25, including on how to lose weight and reduce cholesterol.
But it stumbled on more nuanced questions, including in one instance “firmly recommending” cardio and weightlifting, which could be dangerous for some patients.
Steven Lin, a physician and executive director of the Stanford Healthcare AI Applied Research Team, said that the models are fairly solid at getting things like medical school test questions right. However, in the real world, questions from patients are often messy and incomplete, Lin said, unlike the structured questions on exams.
Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend, that most venerable of American holidays which enables families to gather once a year to count their blessings, stuff their faces, and endeavor mightily to not bring politics into the conversation, I thought I might mosey on over to the movie pantry and hand-select my top 10 food films. Dig in!
Big Night– I have frequently foisted this film on friends and relatives, because after all, it’s important to “…take a bite out of the ass of life!” (as one of the characters demonstrates with voracious aplomb). Two brothers, enterprising businessman Secondo (Stanley Tucci, who also co-wrote and co-directed) and his older sibling Primo (Tony Shalhoub), a gifted chef, open an Italian restaurant but quickly run into financial trouble.
Possible salvation arrives via a dubious proposal from a more successful competitor (played by a hammy Ian Holm). The fate of their business hinges on Primo’s ability to conjure up the ultimate feast. And what a meal he prepares-especially the timpano (you’d better have pasta and ragu handy-or your appestat will be writing checks your duodenum will not be able to cash, if you know what I’m saying).
The wonderful cast includes Isabella Rossellini, Minnie Driver, Liev Schreiber, Allison Janney, Campbell Scott (who co-directed with Tucci), and look for Latin pop superstar Marc Anthony as the prep cook.
Comfort and Joy– A quirky trifle from Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth (Gregory’sGirl, Local Hero). An amiable Glasgow radio DJ (Bill Paterson) is dumped by his girlfriend on Christmas Eve, throwing him into existential crisis and causing him to take urgent inventory of his personal and professional life. Soon after lamenting to his GM that he yearns to produce something more “important” than his chirpy morning show, serendipity lands him a hot scoop-a brewing “war” between two rival ice-cream dairies.
The film is chockablock with Forsyth’s patented low-key anarchy, wry one-liners and subtle visual gags. As a former morning DJ, I can attest the scenes depicting “Dickie Bird” running his show are authentic (a rarity on the screen). One warning: it might take several days for you to purge that ice cream van’s loopy theme music out of your head.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover– A gamey, visceral and perverse fable about food, as it relates to love, sex, violence, revenge, and Thatcherism from writer-director Peter Greenaway (who I like to call “the thinking person’s Ken Russell”).
Michael Gambon (who passed away earlier this year) chews up the scenery as a vile and vituperative British underworld kingpin who holds nightly court at a gourmet eatery. When his bored trophy wife (Helen Mirren) becomes attracted to one of the regular diners, an unassuming bookish fellow (Alan Howard), the wheels are set in motion for a twisty tale, culminating in one of the most memorable scenes of “just desserts” ever served up on film (not for the squeamish).
The opulent set design and cinematographer Sacha Vierny’s extraordinary use of color lend the film a rich Jacobean texture. Richard Bohringer is “the cook”, and look for the late pub rocker Ian Dury as one of Gambon’s associates. It’s unique…if not for all tastes.
Diner– This slice-of-life dramedy marked writer-director Barry Levinson’s debut in 1982, and remains his best. A group of 20-something pals converge for Christmas week in 1959 Baltimore. One is recently married, another is about to get hitched, and the rest playing the field and deciding what to do with their lives as they slog fitfully toward adulthood.
The most entertaining scenes are at the group’s favorite diner, where the comfort food of choice is French fries with gravy. Levinson has a knack for writing sharp dialog, and it’s the little details that make the difference; like a cranky appliance store customer who will settle for nothing less than a B&W Emerson (he refuses to upgrade to color TV because he saw Bonanza in color at a friend’s house, and thought “…the Ponderosa looked fake”).
This film was more influential than it gets credit for; Tarantino owes a debt, as do the creators of Seinfeld. It’s hard to believe that Kevin Bacon, Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Daniel Stern, Timothy Daly, Steve Guttenberg and Paul Reiser were all relative unknowns at the time!
Eat Drink Man Woman– Or as I call it: “I Never Stir-Fried for My Father”. This was director Ang Lee’s follow-up to his surprise hit The Wedding Banquet (another good food flick). It’s a well-acted dramedy about traditional Chinese values clashing with the mores of modern society. An aging master chef (losing his sense of taste) fastidiously prepares an elaborate weekly meal which he requires his three adult, single daughters to attend. As the narrative unfolds, Lee subtly reveals something we’ve suspected all along: when it comes to family dysfunction, we are a world without borders.
My Dinner with Andre– This one is a tough sell for the uninitiated. “An entire film that nearly all takes place at one restaurant table, with two self-absorbed New York intellectuals pontificating for the entire running time of the film-this is entertaining?!” Yes, it is. Director Louis Malle took a chance that pays off in spades. Although essentially a work of fiction, the two stars, theater director Andre Gregory and actor-playwright Wallace Shawn are playing themselves (they co-wrote the screenplay). A rumination on art, life, love, the universe and everything, the film is not so much about dinner, as a love letter to the lost art of erudite dinner conversation.
Pulp Fiction– Although the universal popularity of this Quentin Tarantino opus is owed chiefly to its hyper-stylized mayhem and the iambic pentameter of its salty dialogue, I think it is underappreciated as a foodie film. The hell you say? Think about it.
The opening and closing scenes take place in a diner, with characters having lively discussions over heaping plates of food. In Mia and Vincent’s scene at the theme restaurant, the camera zooms to fetishistic close-ups of the “Douglas Sirk steak, and a vanilla coke.” Mia offers Jules a sip of her 5 Dollar Milkshake.
Vincent and Jules ponder why the French refer to Big Macs as “Royales with cheese” and why the Dutch insist on drowning their French fries in mayonnaise. Jules voraciously hijacks the doomed Brett’s “Big Kahuna” burger, then precedes to wash it down with a sip of his “tasty beverage”. Pouty Fabienne pines wistfully for blueberry pancakes.
Even super-efficient Mr. Wolfe takes a couple seconds out of his precisely mapped schedule to reflect on the pleasures of a hot, fresh-brewed cup of coffee. And “Don’t you just love it when you come back from the bathroom and find your food waiting for you?”
Tampopo– Self billed as “The first Japanese noodle western”, this 1987 entry from writer-director Juzo Itami is all that and more. Nobuko Niyamoto is superb as the title character, a widow who has inherited her late husband’s noodle house. Despite her dedication and effort to please customers, Tampopo struggles to keep the business afloat, until a deux ex machina arrives-a truck driver named Goro (Tsutomo Yamazaki).
After one taste, Goro pinpoints the problem-bland noodles. No worries-like the magnanimous stranger who blows into an old western town (think Shane), Goro takes Tampopo on as a personal project, mentoring her on the Zen of creating the perfect noodle bowl. A delight from start to finish, offering keen insight on the relationship between food, sex and love.
The Trip– Pared down into feature film length from the BBC series of the same name, Michael Winterbottom’s film is essentially a highlight reel of that show-which is not to denigrate; as it is the most genuinely hilarious comedy I’ve seen in many a moon. The levity is due in no small part to Winterbottom’s two stars-Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, basically playing themselves in this mashup of Sideways and My Dinner with Andre.
Coogan is asked by a British newspaper to take a “restaurant tour” of England’s bucolic Lake District, and review the eateries. He initially plans to take his girlfriend along, but since their relationship is going through a rocky period, he asks his pal, fellow actor Brydon, to accompany him.
This simple setup is an excuse to sit back and enjoy Coogan and Brydon’s brilliant comic riffing (much of it improvised) on everything from relationships to the “proper” way to do Michael Caine impressions. There’s some unexpected poignancy-but for the most part, it’s pure comedy gold. It was followed by three equally entertaining sequels, The Trip to Italy(2014), The Trip to Spain (2017), and The Trip to Greece (2020).
Tom Jones– The film that made the late Albert Finney an international star, Tony Richardson’s 1963 romantic comedy-drama is based on the Henry Fielding novel about the eponymous character’s amorous exploits in 18th-Century England.
Tom (Finney) is raised as the bastard son of a prosperous squire. He is a bit on the rakish side, but wholly lovable and possesses a good heart. It’s the “lovable” part that gets him in trouble time and again, and fate and circumstance put young Tom on the road, where various duplicitous parties await to prey upon his naivety.
John Osborne adapted the Oscar-winning script; the film also won for Best Picture, Director, and Music Score (Finney was nominated for Best Actor).
The film earns its spot on this list for a brief but iconic (and very tactile) eating scene involving Finney and the wonderful Joyce Redman (see below).
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is experiencing some political repercussions for dumping gasoline on his fractured party’s descent into dysfunction when he ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for the sin of keeping the government open. While the congressman is still popular in his Panhandle home district, his standing in Florida overall is in a state of disrepair.
The Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolCom Lab released the results of statewide polling it conducted between Oct. 27 and Nov. 11 last week. It found that 57 percent of Florida voters are unhappy with Gaetz’s job as a congressman. That means that just 21 percent of voters surveyed approved of the congressman’s performance in Washington. About eight percent were “neutral” and 14 percent indicated they didn’t know how they felt, per the poll results.
When broken down by party, his approval rating is only a little less bleak. Among Democrats surveyed, almost 83 percent said they disapprove of the professional antagonist. But among Republicans, 36.3 percent disapprove of the congressman, with just 36.6 percent approving of his “work.” That’s less than the percentage of Republicans who responded to the same survey saying they approved of the decision to remove McCarthy as speaker — 42 percent. The Florida Atlantic University poll surveyed just under 1,000 Florida voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2%.
While Gaetz’s popularity in his home district is holding steady, his statewide disapproval follows news that the Republican may be interested in running for governor in 2026 when Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is term-limited out of the governor’s mansion. NBC News reported in September that the congressman was “100 percent in” on a potential 2026 bid. Gaetz has denied that reporting, offering only that his sole “political focus right now is Trump 2024.
I won’t be surprised if he becomes Governor at some point, to tell you the truth. Florida has an incredibly record of electing creeps like Gaetz.
If you don’t watch Fox, as you shouldn’t, you miss the incisive reporting and analysis they provide.
Hurt: No, they do want to take away the gas stoves and, in fact, they are taking away the gas stoves… because they hate us. They hate joyfulness. They hate pies. pic.twitter.com/iaCigmRh2W
Yes, the radical left commies, Marxist thugs like you and I hate pies. We really do. Especially apple pie which is, as you know, American. Because we hate America and don’t want it to be great again.
(Nobody wants to “take away” anyone’s gas stoves. The idea is that in the future new gas stoves will not come online and instead modern technology will be delivering a superior form of gas stove that isn’t going to kill the planet. Because we hate everyone.)
In case you are wondering what this is about, Kamala Harris and her husband Doug posted a picture of themselves on Thanksgiving with a pie in their kitchen, (at the Naval Observatory where they live? I don’t know.) This has turned into a viral sensation among the right wingers because it shows that they have a gas stove which makes them monstrous hypocrites who hate everyone and want t=people to suffer without any pies.
This is what we’re dealing with. Snotty, stupid. nasty little mean girls spouting nonsense. Tens of millions of people think this is awesome.
BTW: Just as a reminder, you are not allowed to call right wingers “deplorable” because it’s rude and disrespectful of them and their culture.
Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) said Friday he won’t resign from Congress but acknowledged he will likely be expelled as he lobbed salacious accusations at colleagues and called the chair of the Ethics Committee a “p***y”.
Santos said he knows he is “going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” adding: “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.”
In an X space hosted by journalist Monica Matthews, Santos said he is “not going to resign” because “[if] I resign, I admit everything that’s on that report.”
Santos said he will defend himself “to the end of time,” criticizing the Ethics Committee probe as biased and goading Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) to “stop being a p***y” and force a vote on his expulsion resolution.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) joined the space and urged Santos to make a “direct apology” to voters and resign because “we’re going to vote to expel you George.”
The Ethics Committee’s 56-page report said the panel’s bipartisan investigation found a “complex web of unlawful activity involving Representative Santos’ campaign, personal, and business finances.”
[…]
Santos threw out wild allegations against unnamed colleagues in an effort to cast his alleged extraordinary wrongdoing as the norm.
Santos said Congress is “felons galore” and filled with “people with all sorts of shiesty backgrounds.”
He called his colleagues “a bunch of hypocrites,” accusing them of extramarital affairs, getting drunk with lobbyists and then missing votes due to hangovers, and handing out voting cards like “candy” to allow others to vote on their behalf.
Despite his ongoing legal troubles and likely expulsion, Santos said he is not ruling out another run for office and said he plans to stay involved in politics in some capacity.
“I definitely will not be going away … elected office is not off the table,” he said, though he added that he won’t run any time soon and he likely will never run for office again in New York.
Lol. Why not run for president? Apparently, you can do whatever you want if you’re a candidate and the law can’t stop you.
Until recently, Democrats’ biggest concern about the 2024 youth vote was that millennial and Gen-Z voters were so disappointed with our octogenarian president that they might not turn out in great enough numbers to reelect Joe Biden. Young voters were, after all, the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the Democratic base in the last election. But now public-opinion surveys are beginning to unveil a far more terrifying possibility: Donald Trump could carry the youth vote next year. And even if that threat is exaggerated or reversible, it’s increasingly clear that “the kids” may be swing voters, not unenthusiastic Democratic base voters who can be frightened into turning out by the prospect of Trump’s return.
NBC News reports it’s a polling trend that cannot be ignored or dismissed:
The latest national NBC News poll finds President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among young voters ages 18 to 34 — with Trump getting support from 46% of these young voters and Biden getting 42%. …
According to Pew’s validated voters analysis (which is a lot more precise than exit polls), Biden won under-30 voters by a 59 percent to 35 percent margin in 2020. Biden actually won the next age cohort, voters 30 to 49 years old, by a 55 percent to 43 percent margin. In 2016, Pew reports, Hillary Clinton won under-30 voters by a 58 percent to 28 percent margin, and voters 30 to 44 by 51 percent to 40 percent.
So one baby-boomer Democrat and one silent-generation Democrat kicked Trump’s butt among younger voters, despite the fact that both of them had their butts kicked among younger primary voters by Bernie Sanders. It’s these sort of numbers that led to a lot of optimistic talk about younger-generation voters finally building the durable Democratic majority that had eluded the party for so many years.
Then what’s gone wrong?
For one thing, it’s important to note that yesterday’s younger voters aren’t today’s, as Nate Silver reminds us:
Fully a third of voters in the age 18-29 bracket in the 2020 election (everyone aged 26 or older) will have aged out of it by 2024, as will two-thirds of the age 18-to-29 voters from the 2016 election and all of them from 2012. So if you’re inclined to think something like “gee, did all those young voters who backed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2012 really turn on Biden now?”, stop doing that. Those voters are now in the 30-to-41 age bracket instead.
But even within relatively recent groups of young voters, there are plenty of micro- and macro-level explanations available for changing allegiances. Young voters share the national unhappiness with the performance of the economy; many are particularly afflicted by high basic-living costs and higher interest rates that make buying a home or even a car unusually difficult. Some of them are angry at Biden for his inability (mostly thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court) to cancel student-loan debts. And most notoriously, young voters are least likely to share Biden’s strong identification with Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas (a new NBC poll shows 70 percent of 18-to-34-year-old voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war).
More generally, intergenerational trust issues are inevitably reflected in perceptions of the president who is turning 81 this week, as youth-vote expert John Della Volpe recently explained:
Today many young people see wars, problems and mistakes originating from the older generations in top positions of power and trickling down to harm those most vulnerable and least equipped to protect themselves. This is the fabric that connects so many young people today, regardless of ideology. This new generation of empowered voters is therefore asking across a host of issues: If not now, then when is the time for a new approach?
All of these factors help explain why younger voters have soured on Uncle Joe and might be open to independent or minor-party candidates (e.g., Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, or a possible No Labels candidate). But they don’t cast as much light on why these same voters might ultimately cast a ballot for Donald Trump.
Trump is less than four years younger than Biden and is about as un-hip an oldster as one can imagine. He’s responsible for the destruction of federal abortion rights, a deeply unpopular development among youth voters (post-election surveys in 2022 showed abortion was the No. 1 issue among under-30 voters; 72 percent of them favored keeping abortion legal in all or most cases). His reputation for racism, sexism, and xenophobia ought to make him anathema to voters for whom the slogan “Make America Great Again” doesn’t have much personal resonance. And indeed, young voters have some serious issues with the 45th president, even beyond the subject of abortion. In the recent New York Times–Siena battleground state poll that showed Trump and Biden about even among under-30 voters, fully 64 percent of these same voters opposed “making it harder for migrants at the southern border to seek asylum in the United States,” a signature Trump position if ever there was one.
But at the same time, under-30 voters in the Times-Siena survey said they trusted Trump more on the Israel-Hamas conflict than Biden by a robust 49 percent to 39 percent margin. The 45th president, needless to say, has never shown any sympathy for the Palestinian plight. And despite the ups and downs in his personal relationship to Bibi Netanyahu, he was as close an ally to Israel’s Likud Party as you could imagine (among other things, Trump reversed a long-standing U.S. position treating Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank as a violation of international law and also moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a gesture of great contempt toward Palestinian statehood). His major policy response to the present war has been to propose a revival of the Muslim travel ban the courts prevented him from implementing during his first term.
But perceptions often differ sharply from reality. Sixty-two percent of 18-to-29-year-old and 61 percent of 40-to-44-year-old voters said they trusted Trump more than Biden on the economy in the Times-Siena survey. It’s unclear whether these voters have the sort of hazy positive memories of the economy under Trump that older cohorts seem to be experiencing or if they instead simply find the status quo intolerable.
In any event, the estrangement of young voters provides the most urgent evidence of all that Team Biden and its party need to remind voters aggressively about Trump’s full-spectrum unfitness for another term in the White House. Aside from his deeply reactionary position on abortion and other cultural issues, and his savage attitude toward immigrants, Trump’s economic-policy history shows him prioritizing tax cuts for higher earners and exhibiting hostility to student-loan-debt relief (which he has called “very unfair to the millions and millions of people who paid their debt through hard work and diligence”). Smoking out the 45th president on what “Trumponomics” might mean for young and nonwhite Americans should become at least as central to the Biden reelection strategy as improving the reputation of “Bidenomics.” And without question, Democrats who may be divided on the Israel-Hamas war should stop fighting each other long enough to make it clear that Republicans (including Trump) would lead cheers for the permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank while agitating for war with Iran.
There’s no world in which Donald Trump should be the preferred presidential candidate of young voters. But it will require some serious work by Team Biden not only to turn these voters against the embodiment of their worst nightmares but to get them involved in the effort to keep him away from the power he would abuse.
To me, the single most persuasive way to convince these folks that Trump is not only not the answer but is the greatest threat to everything they hold dear is to show him in his own words. Everything they care about from the Palestinians to climate change to abortion to gun violence to racism and immigration and LGBTQ rights are at monumental risk if he is elected in 2024.
Many of them are too young to know much about him. Consider that some college freshmen were just 14 or 15 when he was in office. Some of the older ones weren’t paying attention. (Even a lot of full adults don’t seem to recall what he was like.)
They need to be reminded of “drink bleach” and “shithole countries” and “grab ’em by the pussy” and “shoot the protesters” and “windmills cause cancer” and “there has to be a punishment for the woman [if she has an abortion], on and on and on. That’s not even to mention the fact that he tried to steal the election and staged a coup. This all happened! If they knew, I believe that most of them would not want to vote for him.
Of course, the lure of the protest vote is always there and that, in my view, is the bigger problem. I have found throughout my life that trying to convince a young person that nobody gives a shit about their protest vote, certainly not the right wing asshole they help elect with it, and it never seems to penetrate. I just don’t know how to convince them that it does no good and that there is no moral superiority in enabling the worst of all choices.
It’s not just the younger people. The whole country needs to be reminded of what happened to us when this monster was in charge. It was a nightmare. And it will be a thousand times worse if he wins again. I can’t believe I live in a country where that’s even possible. It’s not as if most of us are not old enough to remember it.
Thank you Philip Bump for this perfectly illustrated explanation of the question of life expectancy which I have tried to explain to people to no avail. For some reason this concept seems to be hard for some people to accept:
One day recently, three old friends met to play pickleball. Alan, 85, had taken up the sport first. Over time, he compelled his old college acquaintances Bob, 80, and Don, 75, to join him, in keeping with the rapidly growing sport’s slow downward trend in the median age of its participants.
On this day, though, Bob was preoccupied.
“Does it ever bother you guys,” he asked, as they were warming up, “that each of us is above the average life expectancy in the U.S.?” Bob, you see, was well-versed in government data, in part thanks to his willingness to indulge in the natural human inclination to want to understand and explore numbers.
And Bob was right. The most recent estimates compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for the year 2021, put American life expectancy at just over 76 years of age. That varies by race, with Asian Americans being estimated to live more than 83 years and Black Americans just under 71 years.
“I think about this a lot!” interjected Don. “Especially since men have even shorter life expectancies, regardless of age.” Don was not known as being particularly attentive to such intricacies, surprising his companions. But he’d spent an enormous amount of time over the prior 12 months considering the subject, as he believed that it was important for his plans.
And, again, this was correct. White men, like Don, had a life expectancy of just over 73 years in 2021. Among Black men, like Alan, the expectancy was under 67 years.
“You’re lucky,” replied Bob, who’d grown increasingly agitated. “You live in Florida, where life expectancies were slightly higher than the national figure in 2020. I live in Delaware, where life expectancies are even lower.” (If you are curious why Don and Bob were playing pickleball with Alan despite living in different states, it is because each of them had ready access to private aircraft for different reasons.)
“Well, that’s true,” Alan replied, joining the conversation at a useful pivot point. “But that’s because expectancy correlates to income, which correlates to race.”
“But regardless, you guys are completely missing the point,” he continued, now getting warmed up. (He was used to having to get Bob and Don to have to understand the bigger picture.) “What you’re talking about is life expectancy at birth, which isn’t what is important for us.”
Bob and Don looked at each other in confusion. Alan sighed.
“Think of it this way,” Alan continued. “Imagine there’s a houseplant that consistently lives for precisely 10 years. But there’s one exception: for the first year after it sprouts, 1 in 5 plants will suddenly die for inexplicable reasons.”
“So this plant lives an average of a bit over 8 years,” he said. “let’s just call that the life expectancy for the sake of the example. Once you’re past that first year, though? All of the plants will live to 10 years.”
“So a three-year-old plant has a life expectancy of 10 years?” Bob asked.
“No,” Alan replied. It has a life expectancy of seven years — seven more years.” Bob and Don looked at each other and nodded.
“That’s how the government publishes life expectancy data,” Alan said. “Americans born in 2021 were expected to live 76.1 years. But Americans who were 75 were expected to live 11.5 more years — to 86.5. And since people keep living past their life expectancies, the expectancy keeps going up over time.”
“What do you mean?” Don asked.
“Well, think of it this way,” Alan said. “A lot of people who were 75 in 2021 will live past 11 more years, past the age of 86. We need to recalculate life expectancies for those people — and it obviously has to be higher than 86!”
Alan grabbed his phone and pulled up the CDC data. No one objected; data is more interesting than pickleball.
“As ages increase, so do life expectancies,” Alan said, showing them a graph he found in a newsletter he subscribes to. “And, over time, the racial disparities in life expectancy mostly fade. Expectancies converge.”
The graph, well-designed and clear, made this obvious. For example, Black Americans have died younger than other groups for decades. Once Black Americans live to old age, though, their life expectancies match other groups.
“In fact,” Alan said, zooming in on the graph, “by the age of 85, Black Americans have higher life expectancies than Whites, even just among men. But its subtle.”
For Bob, though, something else about the graph leaped out at him.
“Wait,” he said, pointing at the chart. “This suggests that, according to 2021 estimates, I’d be expected to live nearly another eight years after I turned 80.”
“That’s right,” Alan replied. “And that’s with those 2021 estimates, reflecting the height of the pandemic. It’s expected that the new estimates will show life expectancies moving back up after multiple years of declines.”
“Oh, that’s a relief,” Bob said. “I’d been thinking about making a long-term, four-year commitment next year but was wondering whether that made sense, given that I’d be 86 when it ends. I guess I should have more confidence in my ability to fulfill that commitment than I assumed.”
Alan nodded. Bob looked relieved. Don, though, seemed irritated for some reason. And so ends our allegory.
“You don’t get a lot of chances to correct history’s mistakes. You get a few. And when you get them, you damn sure better take advantage of them,” said environmental historian Dan Flores. He wasn’t talking about consigning the MAGA movement to the ash heap of history. He was talking about efforts to restore bison herds on the Great Plains:
In 1805, when the Lewis and Clark expedition reached the border of what is now North Dakota and Montana, they found herds of American buffalo so numerous, “the whole face of the country was covered” by them, Meriwether Lewis wrote. Less than a century later, in 1889, the nation’s most majestic animal (whose scientific name is Bison bison) had been reduced from practically uncountable numbers to an easily countable 541, and the species teetered on the edge of extinction.
Today their numbers stand at about 350,000, most raised as livestock.
Only 20,000 of them are protected in federal and state preserves in what are called conservation herds. Meanwhile, some ranchers and nonprofit environmental organizations are trying to provide buffalo with something closer to the habitats they once knew: more room to roam and native grasses to eat. Under those conditions, the bison can reclaim their former role as the “keystone” species of the prairies, improving conditions for all other species to thrive.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, herself a Native American, has a $25 million initiative to “combine bison restoration with grassland restoration, making large swaths of the prairies healthier and helping them store more carbon to combat climate change.”
The Pentagon loses far more each year in its couch cushions.
For Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa from North Dakota, the buffalo is “a symbol of our existence and the symbol of our difficulties,” but it can become a symbol of so much more. “When you look at a buffalo, you don’t just see a big shaggy beast standing there,” he said. “You see life. You see existence. You see hope. You see prayer. And you see the future for your young, the future for those not yet born. And if we give the buffalo a chance, like I think we should, it will strengthen us not only as human beings but as Americans.”
This new chapter in our nation’s complicated and sometimes tortured history is poised to move beyond the restoration of a shaggy but majestic animal. If given a chance, the buffalo can lead us toward a long delayed reconciliation with the first people who inhabited the bounteous land we all now call home — and into a future every American can be proud of.
Just don’t be the type of American idiot who puts a juvenile bison into a van or a juvenile fascist into the White House.
