“Beginning about 25 years ago, shortly after ending my rural primary care practice as a Board Certified Internist, I began to recognize that from the 1960s through the end of the 20th century, there were a series of illnesses that I initially referred to as ‘fad’ diseases. Given that each of these diseases were in vogue for at least a decade (a bit too long to be a fad), and in an attempt to be more ‘woke,’ I now refer to these conditions as ‘meme’ diseases.” (05/21/26)
“A Turkish court on Thursday issued a ruling that effectively removed the head of the country’s main opposition party by annulling a 2023 congress that elected him. The move deals a serious blow to the beleaguered Republican People’s Party, or CHP, as it struggles under waves of legal cases targeting its members and elected officials. An appeals court in Turkey’s capital Ankara declared the CHP congress that picked Ozgur Ozel as chairman to be null, ordering that he should be replaced by his predecessor Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Last year, a lower court ruled against claims of irregularities and misconduct surrounding Ozel’s election but Thursday’s decision overturned the original verdict.” (05/21/26)
“[T]he American frontier A.I. companies aren’t betting everything on A.G.I. even if it looks like they are. The value of dominating A.I. and getting your models embedded everywhere is enormous even if they are just a ‘normal’ revolutionary technology. The winner doesn’t necessarily take all, but it can take a lot. They aren’t betting everything on A.G.I.—but America might be, in the sense that, if we focus exclusively on giving these companies what they want, their wins might not translate readily into American “wins” in the economic and geopolitical contest with China.” (05/21/26)
“The president, along with his Republican cheerleaders, counts his first-term abrogation of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as a signature achievement. This week, yet again, he falsely claimed that had he not done so, Iran would have a nuclear weapon. In fact, his action in 2018 taking the United States out of the multinational deal subsequently led to Iran’s rebuilding of its nuclear program, the emboldening of the Iranian hard-liners now in power and the Middle East morass in which the United States is now mired. That quagmire has left Trump seeming desperate for a deal — almost certainly a worse deal than the one Obama struck.” (05/21/26)
“An outfit in the United Kingdom called Ofcom, the main enforcer of the U.K.’s Online Safety Act, is requiring social platforms to implement onerous procedures to censor ‘hate,’ including stripping users of anonymity — or face mammoth fines, bans in the U.K., and other draconian penalties. Nobody would object to compelling the removal of content that is clearly criminal. But is that what most so-called ‘hate’ content really is? Of course not. Much of what irks censors and the merely censorious is merely vituperative, and no small part of what gets their goat is nothing other than sharp disagreement with those authorities who decide what ‘hate’ is — that is, the censors themselves.” (05/21/26)
“We’ve seen before that students who frequently attend religious services as well as students who are studying religion are unusually tolerant of controversial speakers, meaning they are willing to let them speak on campus. (We measure left- and right-wing tolerance by whether students say they would allow those controversial speakers on those sides.) This raises a few questions. Are religious people more tolerant? More specifically, which religions’ members tend to be more tolerant?” (05/21/26)
