This post is free, but I hope you’ll consider becoming a paying subscriber. Remember that anyone who is a paid subscriber as of today, September 4, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern gets two months added to the end of their subscription (details here). Subscribing also allows you to unlock two posts from earlier this week — one on a plagiarism-y issue at CNN and one on Nature’s. . . troubling editorial about Jason Arday.

Subscribe now

The University of Austin is a private college conceived of at the frenzied peak of the Wokeness Wars. At a time when, the thinking went, higher education was being seriously damaged by dogmatically left-wing ideologues, UATX was to be “a new university ostensibly based on principles of free expression and academic freedom,” as a Politico Magazine article put it in January — one that “framed itself as a bulwark against the cancel culture that many contend has become common in the American academy.”

It has not been a smooth ride. As the article explained, UATX had a bit of a cancel-culture meltdown of its own last year. This was sparked in part by a closed-door address given by Joe Lonsdale, the billionaire co-founder of Palantir as well as the co-founder and chairman of the board at UATX, in which he announced that “all staff and faculty of UATX must subscribe to the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, [anti-]identity politics, and anti-Islamism,” as Michael Lind later summarized the proceedings in a letter announcing his un-resignation (yes, things got messy!).

Just read the article if you want to understand what happened in Austin. As I’m far from the first to point out, this episode did call into question UATX’s commitment to free speech versus its commitment to a conservative ideology that selectively deploys the concept of free speech as a bludgeon against “wokeness.” (There had been prior tensions as well, including in 2021, when Steven Pinker and other founding UATX trustees stepped down.)

Anyway, I got a tip earlier this week that a couple recent fundraising emails sent by the university’s current president, Carlos Carvalho, were AI-generated. The tipster said that Pangram, the AI detector, rated those emails as 100% AI-assisted. I used Substack’s handy Pangram feature to test them myself, and yup, same thing for both:

Of course this isn’t dispositive; there’s some debate over the accuracy and fairness of these AI detectors, especially, in a case like this, given the overlap between AI-speak and PR-speak. I reached out to UATX and heard back from Carvalho himself:

Jesse,

Those are fundraising emails by an outside firm we work with closely to handle donor outreach. I review each one and sign off on them. They are helping us keep in touch with our allies and supporters (I personally read the responses). We take no government funding and every undergraduate attends tuition-free, which means every dollar we don’t spend on admin goes into teaching and student experience, so we use these AI tools deliberately and will continue to do so.

Carlos

Make of that what you will. The text of both emails is pasted below. For this first one I’ve taken the liberty of changing the font color of the parts I find funniest, given this context, to red (bolding in the originals):

Dear [recipient],

Right now, college freshmen across the country are unpacking dorm rooms, scrolling through campus maps on their phones, and figuring out which dining hall has the best options.

Our freshmen are doing something different.

This month, our newest class begins orientation by putting their phones away for days. Instead of staring at screens, they will hike the Barton Creek Greenbelt, swim at Barton Springs, and discuss the Iliad in daily seminars. They will learn to debate with rigor and generosity. They will be challenged physically, intellectually, and personally before their first day of class even begins.

This is not a summer camp. It is a deliberate introduction to what we expect of them: show up fully, engage seriously, and rise to the occasion.

And every year, they do.

Our students do not come here looking for the easy path. They come because they want to be pushed. They want to read difficult texts, wrestle with hard questions, and be surrounded by people who refuse to let them coast.

We designed UATX to meet that ambition. Every admitted undergraduate student attends tuition-free, not because of a test score, but because we believe that if we are going to ask this much of our students, cost should never be the barrier.

That is only possible because we refuse government funding and rely entirely on people like you.

Our independence is what allows us to build a university around truth and intellectual seriousness rather than political mandates or institutional conformity. But independence has a cost, and that cost is borne by the people who believe this work matters.

As a new class of students begins their journey at UATX this month, will you consider making your first gift to help us keep building?

https://donate.uaustin.org/august-appeal

Every dollar you give is a vote of confidence in these students and in the idea that American higher education can still demand excellence.

Thank you for being part of what we are building.

Carlos Carvalho
President, University of Austin

And the second one, which was shorter and a bit less on the nose, so no snarky reddening from me:

Dear [recipient],

As another academic year begins, I’ve been thinking about a simple question:

When today’s students graduate from college, what is one thing you believe every educated person should know, understand, or be able to do?

Higher education is supposed to prepare young people for life. But what that means has become increasingly unclear.

At UATX, we believe a university should do more than prepare students for a career. It should teach them how to think clearly, engage honestly with difficult ideas, and pursue truth wherever it leads.

So I’d like to know what you think.

There’s no right or wrong answer. I’m simply interested in your perspective.

I read these responses personally, and I always appreciate hearing from members of the UATX community.

Thank you for being part of what we’re building.

Carlos Carvalho
President, University of Austin

In the spirit of Carvalho’s efficiency-maximizing, I uploaded my draft of this post and my last published one into Claude and asked it to produce “a funny, very Jesse sign-off, in my inimitable style, that no one will ever realize was AI.”

By “sign-off” I meant “a paragraph or two,” but apparently, Claude interpreted my prompt as meaning “about half a goddamn book chapter”:

Right now, newsletter writers across the country are refreshing their subscriber counts, scrolling through their mentions, and figuring out which take will annoy the fewest people. I am doing something different. This week, I put my phone away for several minutes and asked a large language model to finish my own blog post.

This is not laziness. It is a deliberate introduction to what I expect of myself: show up partially, engage sporadically, and rise to whatever occasion involves the least typing. And every week, I do.

Every subscriber reads this newsletter tuition-free, not because of a test score, but because I refuse government funding (nobody has offered) and rely entirely on people like you. Independence has a cost, and that cost is borne by the paying subscribers who believe this work matters, or who forgot to cancel.

Anyway, I ran this section through Pangram and it came back 100% AI, which I think says more about Pangram than it does about me, a real human being who has never once “wrestled with hard questions” and would only do so under duress. I review each of these posts and sign off on them. I personally read the responses. Make of that what you will.

Thank you for being part of what we are building.

Jesse
President,
This Newsletter

B−.

Questions? Comments? Intel about super cool parties at UATX? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. Image via UATX.

Seemingly everyone, myself very much included, was gobsmacked by an editorial Nature published earlier this week about the death of Jason Arday (which, sigh, see here and here and now, I guess, here, in this post you’re reading).

For some reason, the editors at Nature, a still very highly regarded science news outlet and peer-reviewed journal — the two operate separately under the same roof — decided to collect basically all the Arday-related slop they could milk from Bluesky (can you milk slop? For the sake of this disgusting image, let’s go with yes), gussied it up until it vaguely resembled something like an editorial in Nature, and hit Publish, presumably while screaming “YOLO!!!!!!!!!”

“The death of Jason Arday must prompt deep reflection,” goes the headline. Subhed: “Universities and media organizations need to scrutinize their roles in the events that led to this tragedy.” If you stop reading there, you can imagine a sane editorial underneath. I’d like to think I made a version of it in the column I wrote after Arday had resigned but before he was found dead: that the story reflected quite poorly on the institutions that promoted and then covered for him as it became increasingly obvious his academic career — not to mention his inspiring biography — was built on lies.

I trained most of my fire on the academic institutions, foremost among them the University of Cambridge, but of course you can include the media as well on the list of Mandatory Reflectors, because there was a lot of softball coverage of Arday, some of it extremely cringe-inducing and almost none of it making even a token effort to investigate claims that were, in retrospect, unbelievable. It’s not for nothing that when The New York Times did finally take a closer look last month, it reported, among other revelations, that “Dr. Arday’s claims about not speaking were false, a former classmate and a speech professional who worked with him told The New York Times. His supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature, experts in developmental and speech delays say. That should have set off alarm bells for the Cambridge hiring committee, which included a child psychiatrist who had done research on autism, experts said.” None of this would have been difficult to uncover if anyone had bothered to check!

But that’s not the sort of reflection Nature has in mind. Instead, the authors, riding some sort of vertiginous slophigh, have come away convinced that Arday was effectively bullied to death by academia and the media. “Arday died after relentless media coverage,” explains the editorial, written by science journalists who must know how frequently correlation and sequencing are misconstrued as causation.

“In February 2023,” the editorial notes, “when the University of Cambridge appointed Arday, it issued a statement that included a description of him as the youngest Black professor in its history, news that became a global media event.” Three paragraphs later it approvingly passes on the claim that because so much of the coverage centered on his race, with some stories questioning whether he was hired because of it, that coverage was racist! You’d expect professional journalists to have more object permanence than this.

In case I’m not being clear: Yes, given the condescending and cynical way the university publicized Arday’s hiring, seeking to draw as much attention as possible to his race, and given Arday’s repeated claims to have been quite cognitively disabled — for example, he wrote that he didn’t know what was going on at work 90% of the time — of course it’s fair game to suggest his race was a factor. Cambridge itself came within a few inches of openly admitting as much! Or can you name other examples of established chairs at top universities going to scholars who admit that they know what’s going on just 10% of the time? This horrible, embarrassing train of events has led to this exchange, over and over and over:

Cambridge: Look at this BLACK professor we hired. He is the youngest BLACK professor in our history. Another thing you should notice is the color of his skin. Aren’t we good people? Doesn’t this demonstrate our commitment to diversity?

Arday, for years: I’m cognitively disabled, and this has brought all sorts of challenges. My college application was filled out for me by my girlfriend and I got a 9% on my first exam there. Even years later I had massive difficulties performing basic academic tasks — in grad school I was reading at about the same level as my then-3-year-old daughter. At least some of these problems still plague me, as I can’t understand what’s said to me at work 90% of the time. (Yes, he said all of this — see above and here.)

Journalists: It appears Arday was not really qualified for his position and that his race may have been a factor in his hiring. He also seems to have lied about a lot of stuff, sometimes in truly audacious fashion.

Nature and a million other slacktivists piling onto journalists who covered this controversy and in some cases circulating enemies lists of them: How dare you make this about Jason Arday’s race or intellectual ability?

You can understand the level of almost unprecedented bullshit going on here, right? Even by the standards of online hysteria? You can understand how unfathomably bad-faith this is, and why, because it isn’t just random online crazies, but also journalists, professors, famous activists, and now one of the pinnacles of mainstream scientific respectability stoking this grotesque controversy, I keep getting sucked into writing about it?

So what, exactly, did journalists do wrong? That remains unclear. At one point Nature notes that

The Editors’ Code of Practice from the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) in London, a body representing some of the United Kingdom’s largest media organizations, states that journalists must “not engage in intimidation, harassment or persistent pursuit”, and must stop questioning or pursuing individuals if asked to desist. In a statement, IPSO says it is reviewing “a high volume of complaints and concerns about recent coverage about Dr Arday” and that it “will take the appropriate steps in accordance with our procedures” if it finds breaches of the editors’ code.

Even setting aside my American allergy to press rules that seem awfully subjective and easily abused — and remember that Arday called the police on people who asked him questions about his work and also threatened to sue them, all of which goes unmentioned by Nature!(!!) — this paragraph is a smoke machine. No evidence is presented of actual fire. Nature instead ticks off the rules journalists might have broken, and then notes that there sure have been a lot of complaints. Which, you know — shocking that weeks into this bizarre, wrongheaded, endless campaign to pretend Arday was hounded to death by the media, some people have gone so far as to. . . fill out an online form complaining about the media.

I don’t want to spend any more time thinking about or fisking this terrible, deeply dishonest column. It’s demoralizing that it was published. If you want more details on why I (and so many others) think that, start here and just scroll through the replies.

Instead I want to make a different point: a point connecting this controversy to Chunky.

Enter Chunky

If you’re not a paying subscriber, that’s all you get! You should upgrade to the paid level, especially now: Anyone who is a paying subscriber tomorrow, Friday, September 4, gets two months tacked on to their subscription. Details here.

Subscribe now

Read more

Back in 2024 I published an article headlined “Why Is The Same Misleading Language About Youth Gender Medicine Copied And Pasted Into Dozens Of CNN.com Articles?” The sentence in question was “Gender-affirming care is medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender — the one the person was designated at birth — to their affirmed gender — the gender by which one wants to be known.”

As I wrote:

But of course, whether youth gender medicine is medically necessary and evidence-based is exactly the thing being debated, and anyone who has been following this debate closely knows that every national health system that has examined this question closely, including the NHS, has come to the same conclusion: the evidence is paltry. That’s why so many countries, including Sweden, Finland, the UK, and Norway, have significantly scaled back access to these treatments for youth. So it’s very strange to see this sentence, which reads as though it comes from an activist press release, published in a news article in CNN, an outlet that generally adheres to the old-school divide between news and opinion. [footnote omitted]

That article included a list of 35 instances in which that sentence, or very close variants of it, had appeared in CNN.com articles between May 2022 and March 2024. I reached out to CNN but the network gave me no substantive comment — someone there told me on background that it’s standard for outlets to provide reporters with guidance about the appropriate language to use, but this didn’t seem like a credible explanation. Sure, outlets have style guides when it comes to “illegal alien” versus “undocumented immigrant,” or “biological sex” versus “sex assigned at birth,” but come on — this was clearly different:

You do not generally see the same complex sentence pasted over and over and over into news stories written by different authors and published in different sections. I asked CNN if it could provide me any other examples of CNN.com publishing the same sentence in multiple stories by different authors, and posed the same question in an email to Virginia Moseley, the CNN executive editor who, according to the website, “oversee[s] international and domestic news operations across platforms.” I didn’t hear back about this.

One thing I didn’t do when I published that first piece, but which I should have done, was confidently lock down the very first instance of this sentence appearing on CNN. Last week I finally did, and. . . this looks really bad for CNN. Whether or not you want to call it “plagiarism” will probably depend on how charitable you’re feeling, but either way it reflects genuinely sloppy editorial practices. It’s also a cringeworthy example of how mainstream media outlets have let themselves be steamrolled by activists on this issue.

You, Free Subscriber or Esteemed Visitor From Elsewhere (EVFE), are about to hit the paywall. But now’s a really good time to upgrade that membership, not only because what follows is some spectacular rock-solid arguably pretty decent media criticism, but also because, as I mentioned a couple days ago, anyone who is a paying subscriber this coming Friday, September 4th will get two free months added to their subscription. You’ll basically be making money!*

*though not in any literal or otherwise meaningful sense.

Subscribe now

Read more

Hello! I hope each and every one of you has had the best summer in human history.

As for me? Still, all these years — decades? Centuries? — later, I have a bunch of book stuff left to do. The good news is that it’ll be wrapped up soon; the bad news is that I badly wanted to be in the clear by now but alas, I am not. (As I have been mired in book muck, I’ve put some live events on the calendar for my glorious draft’s-in near-future. Details here for folks in New York, D.C., and Philadelphia.)

That being said, I’m itchy to return to Singal-Minded; the lights have been out too long here, and there are gross cobwebs everywhere. So here’s how I’m going to split the difference: Tuesday morning I’m going to turn paid billing back on. Shortly after that, premium subscribers will have their first new piece in a while. It’s about a Major Media Outlet that did something ridiculously sloppy and then allowed the slop to spread for years like some sort of. . . big slop-spill (I’m shaking off the rust). You’ll see what I mean when you read it. Free subscribers will get a paywalled preview.

The Grand Relaunch with the extra bells and whistles is going to be delayed a bit. The next couple months, I’ll actually be on a slightly slower cadence — probably four or five posts a month. BUT to make it up to premium subscribers, I’m going to give you all a couple free months.

This coming Friday at 5 p.m. ET I’ll simply tack those two months on to the accounts of everyone who is, at that very moment, a paying subscriber (free-one-week-preview folks don’t count), effectively bringing down their monthly price a bit. So if you are currently a free subscriber and become a paid one at 4:59 p.m. Friday, you’ll get three months for the price of one, effectively. (I mean, maybe don’t cut it that close, but you get what I’m saying.) If you’re already a monthly or annual paid subscriber, you don’t have to do anything — your subscription end date will time travel two months into the future. I do wish there were a less clunky way to do this, as it would be nice to give longer-time subscribers more of an extension, but Substack makes it tricky to pull off fancier moves than that.

Okay! I think you’ll like Tuesday’s piece, and then I’ve got some other hopefully good stuff cookin’ up in the ol’ noggin as well (I have a really good idea for a column on contrived folksiness). In the meantime, I’m also pasting below my last column in The Dispatch for premium all subscribers since the paywall is still off (duh), which I forgot to do when it came out a couple weeks ago. Sorry! Remember that that’s yet another benefit of paid subscriptions — I usually repost anything of mine that runs in The Dispatch the next day.

See you Tuesday — it feels good to (almost) be back.

Questions? Comments? Songs about how much you missed me? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com.

The Cascade of Dysfunction That Helped Doom Jason Arday

In a better world, the late scholar wouldn’t have been elevated to—and fallen from—such dizzying heights.

There’s an exceptionally annoying thing writers do in the internet age: We type something like “I really didn’t want to talk about this,” and then we talk about it anyway, at length.

I’m going to do that here, but I can explain.

You’re probably familiar with the Jason Arday case by now. In 2023, when he was 37, Arday was appointed the youngest black professor in the storied history of the University of Cambridge, quickly becoming a minor celebrity in the process. As I summarized in the New York Times last week, drafting off the impressive investigatory work of a group of dogged scholars and journalists, it soon became apparent that Cambridge may have made a mistake in hiring him.

To make a long story short, Cambridge knew since at least 2023 that Arday appeared to have plagiarized some of his work and to have fabricated some of his interviews but refused to engage in anything like a full investigation. This led to some disgruntlement within Cambridge; someone there leaked his or her concerns to Nathan Cofnas, an American academic with controversial views on race and IQ, and he published a Substack post in July that went viral, spelling the beginning of the end of Arday’s career.

As Cofnas wrote, in addition to the other allegations, Arday appeared to have plagiarized significant portions of the Ph.D. thesis he completed at Liverpool John Moores University. Cofnas also shined a spotlight on a number of questionable claims from Arday’s inspiring life story, including that he had run 30 marathons in 35 days, 600 miles in six days, that he had been nonverbal until age 11, and that he had been unable to read or write until 18. Those claims, alongside the Cambridge appointment, helped Arday gain far more media attention than the average academic, including segments and interviews on top outlets like the BBC.

None of the four institutions involved in the academic facet of this scandal—Cambridge, LJMU, and the two journals notified of apparently plagiarized material—responded in a sufficient manner. Rather, all four seemed to prefer to cover for Arday—in July Cambridge sent me and other inquiring journalists a statement describing the accusations as a “vile campaign” to undermine him. But Arday had no meaningful track record in academia; he hadn’t produced anything of note and openly stated that due to his autism, when he was at work, “90% of the time I don’t know what is going on but I am having to pretend I know what is going on.” Despite that, he had been appointed to an “established chair at Cambridge,” as the New York Times later explained, which is “a permanently funded position that comes with prestige and research support [and] is among the academic world’s most sought-after jobs.” The scrutiny mounted shortly before the release date of his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, a major title published by Simon & Schuster on August 11 for which Arday claimed to have received a 1.4 million advance, according to the Guardian, though he didn’t specify whether he meant dollars or pounds.

Eventually Cambridge folded, announcing an investigation last week. Arday announced his resignation just hours later. Then, this past Friday, he was found dead in London’s Battersea neighborhood after an apparent suicide.

What I mean about not actually wanting to write about this: If I somehow controlled the internet, I would have enforced some sort of 72-hour cooldown period. Everyone go for a walk, hug your loved ones, reflect on life’s preciousness. No insta-takes in response to a man’s tragic death; no using a corpse that hasn’t yet been laid to rest to promote your own politics. But we live in 2026, so that wasn’t what happened. Instead, there was an instant explosion of outrage directed at racists, the media, and racist media. This explosion is so misguided, so driven by misunderstandings about what actually happened, and so censorious that it warrants a robust response.

I’m not nutpicking here. The MacArthur-winning American race scholar and activist Ibram X. Kendi described what happened to Arday as a “lynching.” The co-host of PBS NewsHour, Geoff Bennett, derided a fair and important New York Times postmortem of the scandal as “ghoulish.” In the U.K., Labour MP Dawn Butler published a letter to the head of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, an independent regulatory body, arguing that “Jason would still be alive today if not for the relentless and pernicious coverage by the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator, to name a few,” and calling for (unspecified) “decisive action” in response to his death. The British journalist and broadcaster Will Self took things even further, posting a lengthy open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for a crackdown that sounds far more Moscow than London. Self argued that the Crown Prosecution Service “should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding computers” before claiming that “This is not an attack upon a free press—it is a necessarily immediate defence of one.” An open letter arguing that “Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed” was signed by a number of British academics and politicians, including Green Party leader Zack Polanski.

As far as fighting over a corpse was concerned, I admittedly became part of the problem: In the hours immediately after Arday’s death, I was back on X, arguing like everyone else. I couldn’t help it; I found the outrage following this tragedy particularly deranging because of the almost perfect, 180-degree extent to which it misses the point.

I mean that in two senses. First, the call for more scrutiny of media, or even outright censorship of it, is astonishing in light of the facts of this case. It was because of the U.K.’s lack of press protections that this story took so long to come out, which, in the end, increased the damage done to Arday. Times Higher Education had a story in the works last year, but Arday sicced an infamous British law firm, Carter-Ruck, on the outlet, killing it. That would not have happened in the United States, because our defamation laws are much more media-friendly (as strange as that might sound during the Trump era).

Arday abused not only the civil system but the criminal one, too. In 2023, mere months after Arday’s hiring, the first academic to notice oddities in his work emailed him to ask about those oddities. Arday responded by reporting him to the police. Last year he also reported a member of the Times Higher Education team, Jack Grove, to the police on similar grounds. Here in the United States, cops would likely respond to such a complaint with the American version of “bugger off”—in the U.K., while both criminal complaints were eventually dropped, they were apparently taken seriously by police at first. A cop even told Grove that while he wouldn’t be investigated further, he shouldn’t email Arday again. That’s direct law enforcement interference with the press in what is supposed to be one of the freest countries in the world.

These are all signs that in British society, it’s very easy to weaponize the law against good-faith media or academic inquiries. To come out the other side of this horrible story wanting to give more power to those who would crack down on journalistic inquiry beggars belief. To be sure, none of this is to deny that there are elements of British tabloid culture that are a bit bloodthirsty, but as my examples have hopefully made clear, anger at the media has gone well beyond those outlets. (And while it’s ill-advised to pin suicide on any one cause, anyway—a point to which I’ll return shortly—does anyone actually think the excesses of the right-wing tabloids are more likely contributors to Arday’s death than his entire life and career falling apart in a short period?)

The complaints of racism—that “Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys,” as the academic Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz put it—constitute an even more extreme example of point-missing. Look: In much the same way some of the media coverage was excessive, of course, amid the broader online circus, there has been racist commentary. There always is when a person of color is the subject of public scrutiny and shaming, especially in a situation like this where the story really does involve a dispute about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But to claim that Arday was unfairly singled out on account of his race is to ignore the very important other half of the ledger: He was elevated to an untenable position because of his race! You don’t need to take my word on that. Just read the very end of the Times of London’s contemporaneous article about his hiring, if you can stomach it:

Professor Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, said hiring Arday was proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities.

She told The Times: “Not only is Jason Arday a world-class scholar, he also brings a wealth of experience that can help us to take forward our efforts to widen participation at all levels.

“Hopefully it is becoming increasingly clear that with concerted effort and a genuine commitment to change, those barriers that still exist either to working or studying at top universities can be overcome.

“To any students or prospective colleagues who are wondering if Cambridge is a place where they can belong, the answer is, emphatically, yes.”

Even more dyspepsia-inducing is a BBC segment from that same period that, to me at least, gets harder to watch every day. In it, Cremin approaches Arday and takes his hand as though he is some sort of messianic figure. A bit later, during a strange sit-down centered on her complimenting him, she explains, “The Board of Electors on your interview, they were absolutely unanimous. We are so lucky to have you.” Then she looks him dead in the eyes and lies to his face: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

In the article that the NewsHour co-anchor would later describe as “ghoulish,” the New York Times revealed damning details about that hiring process: “A review of internal Cambridge documents and interviews with former colleagues and associates shows that, in addition to passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed publicly about Dr. Arday’s scholarship and privately disregarded complaints about his work,” the Times reported. A bit later: “Dr. Arday’s claims about not speaking were false, a former classmate and a speech professional who worked with him [said]. His supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature, experts in developmental and speech delays say. That should have set off alarm bells for the Cambridge hiring committee, which included a child psychiatrist who had done research on autism, experts said.”

There’s a word for what Cremin and her colleagues did here: racism. It is racist to respond to someone’s skin color by pretending they are something they are not. It’s not racism in the way lynchings or slavery are racism. But it’s racism nonetheless. And anyone with a passing familiarity with this story knows that Arday was appointed to his post precisely because of how Cambridge thought the color of his skin would reflect back on the university itself—precisely because of what the current crop of censors might call systemic problems within that university.

To be clear, Jason Arday is not dead “because of” Cambridge University’s social-justice-coded racism. Suicide is multicausal and we should strongly resist the urge to blame it on any one factor, whether Cambridge or “the media.” But it’s clear that Jason Arday never should have been within miles of such a prestigious academic appointment. His fall was inevitable from the first day he arrived at Cambridge. As my friend Sarah Ditum put it, “I do not regret writing about Arday, but I am sorry for him and for all of us that he was ever put in a position where he was somebody I would have cause to write about.” That’s exactly right.

In a saner, fairer world, Jason Arday would have lived out a happy and healthy life somewhere else, gainfully employed, loved by friends and family. Maybe his chronic tendency toward fabulism would have elicited rolled eyes at the local pub, but it never should have caused more harm than that.

Instead, thanks to a cascade of institutional dysfunction that will go down in history as uniquely bizarre and condescending—even by the considerable standards of higher ed misadministration—Jason Arday found himself in an environment where no one would say no to him, where no one would ask follow-up questions (at least out loud), and where people covered for him rather than holding him accountable. As a result, he did significant harm—to the scholars he plagiarized, the peers he wrongly beat out for a prestigious position, and (everyone keeps forgetting this) to the parents of nonverbal kids with autism, who are frequently victimized by false and suspicious claims of miracle cures like Arday’s.

None of this means he deserved to die—of course he didn’t deserve to die. But it does mean that, if we want to prevent such scandals from recurring in the future, it is imperative to learn from this rather than to use Arday’s death as an excuse to rewrite history.

Correction, August 19, 2026: This article has been updated to correct the advance Arday claimed to have received for his book.

Hello! My hiatus is going well — thanks for asking. Below is a story I wrote for The Dispatch. Hope you enjoy, and please stick around for a brief after-thought below the story itself. I’m going to try to make a habit of adding something a little extra whenever I publish one of my Dispatch pieces here, like I did last time.

I can’t really explain the very complicated, extremely American conflict engulfing California’s Tahoe-Truckee Unified School District without explaining the road I took to get there in March.

Let’s say you do what I did: Berkeley to Truckee. You start in the San Francisco Bay, at elevation zero-ish. You take Route 24 out of Berkeley. That’ll bring you, via a number of valleys, through the hills of the Coast Ranges—a mere appetizer, by the standards of this drive, but striking in their own right and dazzlingly lush if your timing is right regarding season and recent rainfall. Eventually you hit the main highway, I-80, connecting the Bay to the Tahoe region, which will take you the rest of your way, including through the Central Valley towns of Dixon and Davis. Here it’s farmland and farmland and farmland, much of it dedicated to growing tomatoes. This middle part of the drive isn’t all that pretty, but it doesn’t last long either.

It’s once you’re past Sacramento that the true majesty starts. Sacramento sits basically at sea level, and it usually doesn’t get any snow. But it is situated just west of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range—one of the snowiest places in the country—and that’s where I-80 brings you next. The last 90 minutes of the drive take you into those foothills, and then up, up, up—the mixed flora of Sacramento giving way to a landscape of coniferous forests that gets more dramatic with every passing mile. And all of a sudden you’re in the sky; all of a sudden you are straining, as you drive, against the temptation to gawk at the vistas that present themselves whenever there’s a gap in the trees or whenever the highway takes you around a particularly spectacular bend. It is patently ridiculous that you were just rolling through level farmland, that you saw your last palm tree, like, 45 minutes ago. Now it’s mountains and valleys and cliffs and pine trees and rocks extending out forever.

And, for about half of the year: snow. So much snow.

Then, the Donner Pass. We’ll get back to the Donner Pass, trust me, because in many respects it is the main character of the story. But once you’re over the Pass, I-80 dips you swiftly back down more than 1,000 feet into Truckee, the biggest town in the North Lake Tahoe region: approximately 17,500 year-round residents, the population swelling significantly during prime tourist season in the winter (skiing and snowboarding) and summer (hiking, rock climbing, and lake-enjoying). The cute downtown, which looks like something out of a western, consists mostly of a strip of diners, coffee shops, and art galleries lining Donner Pass Road.

And not far from that strip is the headquarters of the region’s school district, Tahoe-Truckee Unified (TTUSD). Which brings us to the present conflict.

—

TTUSD has two traditional high schools, North Tahoe and Truckee. Their students mostly head east, rather than west, to play high school sports—since the early 1980s they have been part of the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association, or NIAA. That’s because of the Donner Pass.

You have probably heard of the Donner Party, the group of emigrants who became trapped during the final stretch of their planned journey from Illinois and Missouri to the fertile promised land of the Sacramento Valley in the winter of 1846-1847. Some of the survivors, pinned down by relentless snowstorms in dirty, ramshackle camps not far from present-day Truckee, eventually ate their deceased pets and human companions.

As they so horrifically found out, there’s nothing you can do about a sudden juggernaut of a storm dumping 4 feet of snow atop you and your family. And while the idea of a 4 feet of snow is hard for those of us from more forgiving American climates to fully understand, it isn’t particularly unusual, in the higher-altitude regions of the Sierras, from December to March. And storms that are rather—to dip into contemporary Californian parlance—gnarly can, from time to time, hit as early as November and as late as April.

Today, of course, you traverse the emigrants’ path through the Sierras in hours rather than months, from the safety and comfort of a climate-controlled car. But while I-80 is a wide, modern, well-maintained highway, three or four or seven times a year, its higher-elevation Sierras stretch gets walloped by a big storm. During these storms the state’s transportation authority will bar passage to cars lacking four-wheel or all-wheel drive, unless they have chains on their tires, or to even close parts of the highway entirely. Despite the warnings, the flashing signs on the side of the highway, and the checkpoints where Caltrans employees ensure that the cars passing through are appropriately equipped, people always make this drive who shouldn’t. More often than not, the big snowfalls generate scenes like this, from a storm in February that dumped more than 100 inches (yes, more than 8 feet) of snow on the Pass in five days:

That, more than any other reason, is why the Tahoe-Truckee Unified School District has long competed in a Nevada-based athletic conference: To avoid sending student-athletes over the Pass in the winter, instead placing the district’s athletic center of gravity in a region with much, much gentler weather.

But soon, TTUSD student-athletes might be forced to go west, over the Pass, even during prime blizzard season.

—

TTUSD’s troubles originated thousands of miles to the east, in Washington, D.C., and they center on a long, complicated game of White House ping-pong over how sex should be defined in federal law. President Barack Obama and then President Joe Biden argued that the preexisting “on the basis of sex” language of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 includes gender identity in that category—thereby (they argued) ensuring trans Americans’ access to certain spaces in certain contexts. Both Trump administrations have begged to differ, insisting on the traditional definition of “sex.” As I wrote in The Economist last year, this all has “led to what Doriane Coleman of Duke University School of Law described as a severe ‘whiplash’ effect, with the government’s understanding of sex swinging wildly back and forth depending on the current administration’s policy preferences and, in some cases, the latest court rulings.” (The more recent battle in this war was concluded last week, when a Supreme Court ruling upheld state laws segregating school sports by biological sex.)

It’s no surprise, then, that when Trump was inaugurated the second time he quickly signed an executive order threatening to “rescind all funds from [federally funded] educational programs” that used gender identity, rather than biological sex, to determine who is allowed to play on girls’ and women’s sports teams. This executive order applied significant pressure on many school districts and athletic conferences to conform to the White House’s preferred approach to high school sports.

One of those conferences was the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association, which at the time had a policy allowing students to play sports on the teams corresponding to their gender identity, with permission from their school. That conference’s leadership voted on April 1, 2025, to amend this policy, requiring athletes to compete according to their birth sex. The conference’s executive director said he did “not think it would behoove us as a body to willfully violate” the order.

Under normal circumstances, the Tahoe-Truckee district would have likely been forced, regardless of its own feelings on the matter, to shrug and go along with the NIAA’s new policy, at least until the next swing of our giant national sex-and-gender-identity pendulum. But because TTUSD lies across the border, it is subject to California state law, which mandates that “A pupil shall be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs and activities, including athletic teams and competitions, and use facilities consistent with his or her gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the pupil’s records.” In the wake of the NIAA change, TTUSD realized it could find itself in violation of this law by competing in a conference that had adopted a strict biological-sex standard.

The district’s reaction was swift: Just a month after the NIAA vote in April 2025, TTUSD took preemptive action, announcing that it planned to transition to the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) the following academic year, specifically the so-called Sac-Joaquin section (that’s a reference to Sacramento and the Northern San Joaquin Valley). From there, things got confusing: That announcement was followed, in rather swift succession, by that same body announcing a one-year delay to the switch, and by the TTUSD Board of Trustees voting to remain in the NIAA. Then, in late June of last year, the California Department of Education (CDE) received a complaint alleging that the district’s decision to remain in the NIAA violated California state law.

The complaint, no copy of which has been made public, came from an unnamed former TTUSD student. In April, my researcher requested a copy from the California Department of Education, which we received on July 8. “By refusing to leave the NIAA, TTUSD is undermining the rights of transgender students and violating the very legal and ethical obligations that safeguard students in our state,” the writer, whose name was redacted, stated. “As someone who grew up in this district and participated in its sports programs, I find this action deeply personal and profoundly distressing.”

The writer also stated that, by refusing to leave the NIAA, TTUSD would be “undermining the rights of transgender students and violating the very legal and ethical obligations that safeguard students in our state.” The CDE ruled that the complaint had merit and that TTUSD would, in fact, have to switch conferences. Glossing over some further bureaucratic wrangling, TTUSD now plans to switch conferences starting during the 2028-2029 season.

While this unfolded, the Trump Department of Justice sued the CDE and CIF, claiming that allowing transgender girls to compete on girls’ teams is a violation of Title IX. For those keeping track at home, we have the Trump administration suing California for allowing trans girls to play in the female category while California pressures TTUSD to leave a Nevada-based athletic conference because it doesn’t allow trans girls to play in the female category. It’s like something out of a hacky political satire.

It’s worth noting that as far as anyone knows, no current TTUSD student has complained or claimed they are being discriminated against; according to parents I’ve spoken with, as well as communications from the district, none of the district’s 800 or so student-athletes appear to be openly trans, anyway.

In any case, a group of very vocal TTUSD parent-activists have sprung up to oppose the conference switch, launching Facebook groups like Tahoe-Truckee Save Our Sports (which has almost 2,000 followers) and making themselves heard at school-board meetings and other events. One of this group’s unofficial leaders is Todd Winter, an attorney who moved to Truckee in 2015 with his wife, Hien vo Winter, a fellow attorney. Both of their kids play sports, and Winter himself coaches high school girls’ basketball in the district.

The first time I saw Winter in person was at a school board meeting in Truckee I attended in March. He was scheduled to speak after three TTUSD employees—two athletic directors and an assistant principal—gave a presentation to the board downplaying the logistical difficulties of switching conferences. Among other points, they noted that it actually wasn’t unusual for TTUSD teams to travel over the Pass to games and matches, including for soccer, football, and cross country.

Winter stood up and issued a civil but pointed rejoinder. He said he had “so much respect” for the TTUSD staffers who had just presented, “but so much of what they said was very misleading, and the Board needs to really consider this.” Yes, he explained, TTUSD sometimes went “over the hill” for sports competitions. But those trips were mostly for fall sports, a season that generally only extends to the end of November. “You’re proposing that buses and vans full of kids go back and forth over the hill for winter sports,” he said—during the very teeth of the Sierras’ monster-storm season.

I met Winter the next day at a Truckee coffee shop. During our discussion, he brought up a tragedy that had occurred a couple of weeks prior, during the aforementioned 100-inch February storm: An avalanche had killed nine skiers during a guided trip. “This year it’s only happened once, but those kinds of events happen all the time,” he told me. “Not necessarily nine people killed—that was obviously tragic—but road closures, three days in a row of no school … that’s not unusual in a season. It happens multiple times.” From where Winter sits, the school district is covering its own ass legally rather than taking into account the danger its students might face.

What alternatives? Winter has diligently catalogued all the ways in which, as he sees it, the district is falling short of resolving this conflict in the safest and sanest possible manner. Among other documents, he put together a 20-page memo laying out both what they see as the district’s errors and its best path forward, including retaining independent outside counsel and pursuing all available legal and administrative remedies (many of which, unsurprisingly, get a bit in the weeds).

Perhaps Winter’s most compelling argument is that there’s little sense in making a hasty switch given the current climate of legal chaos and uncertainty. If anything, given the active federal lawsuit against the CDE, switching might prove the more legally fraught option. “Those developments, combined with the full record of the federal litigation in which the CDE and CIF are named parties, establish that the CDE’s corrective action order is not a compliance remedy,” the memo argues. “It is an instruction to step into active federal litigation crossfire.”

—

Truckee sits in Nevada County, California. It’s a fitting name given that in many ways, this area has closer ties to Nevada than to the rest of California. Reno is the closest significant population center; it’s about 35 minutes northeast from Truckee to Reno on I-80 in good driving conditions. Prices in the mountains are often unreasonable (ask me about my $20 taco truck torta), so yearlong residents head to Reno for cheaper goods, for big box stores, and to take advantage of Reno-Tahoe International Airport’s direct links to cities like New York and Los Angeles. And since housing is far more plentiful and affordable across the border in Nevada, the many service workers who keep the Truckee-area tourist industries humming often commute from Reno or nearby Carson City.

I’d done the I-80 drive from Truckee northeast into Nevada some years prior and remembered that it was breathtaking, but I decided to do it again to better understand the normal route TTUSD student-athletes took to get to their games and why it was supposedly so much safer. Not wanting to push The Dispatch’s gas-money-reimbursement generosity by picking, say, Elko (about 320 miles each way), I decided to drive the 38 or so miles from Truckee High School to one of TTUSD’s closer Nevada-side opponents: Sparks High School—Sparks being a large Reno suburb that early in the 20^th century decided to name itself after the state’s then-governor, John Sparks.

During the course of this short trip, you find yourself in a rockier and rockier landscape, the vegetation getting thinner and scragglier. Once you’re a significant northeast distance from the Pass, the landscape transitions into something unlike anything you’ll find to the west—much craggier and noticeably more arid.

That’s because of something called orographic lift. This is the phenomenon by which air that is forced upward becomes colder, raising its relative humidity and potentially causing precipitation. By dint of the particular angle at which warm, moist Pacific air is blown inland and then hits the Sierras, the Donner Pass, despite being just a 15-minute drive from Truckee in good weather, gets almost twice as much snow per year, 400 inches or so, as the (itself famously snowy) town does. Truckee is east of the pass and a bit lower, so by the time storms arrive there, they’ve already been sapped of a bit of their moisture and energy by orographic lift. And as you continue on I-80 northeast from Truckee toward the Reno area, you travel deeper and deeper into the “rain shadow” caused by this phenomenon—an area naturally shielded from precipitation (or much of it, at least) as a result of these natural forces. That’s why, generally speaking, the eastern side of the Sierras is so much drier than the western side.

The rain shadow brings with it a remarkable transformation. The 40 minutes or so from Truckee to Sparks bring you from one of the snowiest parts of the contiguous U.S.—a place where six inches of snow can fall in four hours—to a city that gets less than that most years.

Sparks, like Reno, lies in what is known as a cold semi-arid climate zone. It’s not a desert, but it’s pretty dry—much drier than what you get if you turn around and head back into the Sierras, as I did after I got to the high school.

—

I met another local parent-activist, A.J. Cheline, at North Tahoe High School, about 20 minutes south of Truckee in Tahoe City, a small town that sits on the lake. The high school is part of a sprawling campus that includes tennis courts, a football field ringed by a running track, and the local middle school, all tucked into quiet pines a bit uphill from the lake, which peeks through here and there.

Cheline and his wife have two kids, one of whom plays tennis and the other of whom plays soccer. He recalled the shock of hearing the announcement for the first time. “It was just like, Wow, what is this?” he said. It felt like there’d been no deliberation, no real process. And if the switch does go through, he worries that it could simply wipe out both of his kids’ ability to play high school sports at all.

This might sound like an exaggeration, but the argument is straightforward. As Cheline noted, soccer and tennis are fall sports in Nevada that are all wrapped up by mid-November, which is well before Tahoe usually sees major snow. In CIF Sac-Joaquin, on the other hand, boys’ and girls’ soccer is usually played in the winter, the playoffs occurring in February, while boys’ tennis is usually played in a spring season that starts in late January.

None of this is a problem for student-athletes and their families in places like Sacramento. There, as in most of low-elevation California, winters are famously mild and pose no obstacle to outdoor sports. Up in the mountains things are very different. In places like Truckee and Tahoe City, any outdoor surface that isn’t diligently plowed or shoveled usually gets buried by snow—feet of it, usually—from January until early April or so. That was part of why Cheline invited me to meet him at the high school, to simply show me how unplayable everything was. Even after some freak March rains had wiped out a good chunk of February’s pileup, a quick loop of the grounds made it clear how difficult it would be for anyone to be playing soccer this time of year. (To be fair, one of the seven CIF Sac-Joaquin divisions, Division 7, does have boys’ soccer in the fall. But Cheline explained that there are concerns that this division wouldn’t be competitive enough for TTUSD, since it’s for the very smallest schools, and it would still leave the girls’ team in a difficult position, since their season would start in late February.)

“If they schedule games in winter or early spring, it’s just not viable,” said Cheline. “Kids who are serious about soccer are going to look for other options. So then the question becomes—can they even fill the team? I doubt it.”

Part of the problem is the lack of local indoor athletics space: The district has raised the possibility of building some sort of indoor facility via funds that could theoretically be provided by the state legislature or a bond measure, but this appears to be purely hypothetical at this point. And indoor space or no, every game between a TTUSD school and schools on the other side of the Donner Pass would involve busloads or vanloads of kids doing a round trip over it. This, critics of the conference switch insist, would not only bring with it the safety concerns inherent to the route, but also potentially expensive logistical problems: What happens if a TTUSD team travels to Sacramento, or a vice versa, and then gets stranded at their away-game location due to the pass being, well, unpassable? In the worst cases, this could lead to frantic attempts to find overnight lodging for what was supposed to be a quick day trip, disrupted family plans, and thousands of dollars in extra travel costs.

Like the other parent-activists I spoke with, Cheline felt that the school board was simply not standing up for families like his own. “Right now, it feels like the board is just marching forward, satisfied with a delay,” said Cheline. “And that’s not what the community is satisfied with—at all. What we’re asking for is simple: Challenge it in court and have a judge look at all the factors involved. Because there are a lot of trade-offs.”

—

The theme of trade-offs came up repeatedly in my conversations with parents. I kept hearing different versions of the same simple argument: The possibility of discrimination against a hypothetical student-athlete who, as far as anyone could tell, didn’t yet exist, was being addressed in as heavyhanded a manner as possible, by replacing a system that had been working for a long time with one that seemed ill-suited to the region’s geographic idiosyncrasies and the realities of Tahoe winters.

Winter, who described himself as a political moderate who is pro-LGBT in general, acknowledged that he did personally oppose “males at birth playing against females,” noting—correctly—that this is a “pretty common position around the country.” But he and the other advocates I spoke with seemed to prefer discussing what they see as the tangible safety and logistics concerns to participating in the raucous national debate over self-ID in sports. That’s part of what makes this controversy so interesting: the very, very concrete ways it could affect so many kids and families who wouldn’t otherwise have much of a stake in this issue.

The district, for its part, wouldn’t answer any of the questions I sent it, including requests to respond to Winter’s specific claims and an update on the indoor-facility planning. Via a spokeswoman, it instead replied with a canned statement that read, in part, “To help with your research, you can access our detailed presentations, family communications—including our letter outlining timeline details—and official correspondence on our athletics page. Additionally, video archives of past Board meetings are available for full context.” The spokeswoman also pointed me to a video of a recent board meeting where the district’s superintendent provided an update.
But in my view, the district’s communications and presentations have not substantively addressed the legal and logistical downsides raised by opponents of the switch.

TTUSD is clearly caught in a difficult situation. But this controversy is the natural result of the country’s deep divide. And of course we are not just any country: Our combination of federalism, increasing polarization, and the ever-growing power claimed by the executive branch all make these debates more toxic, complex, and confusing than they might be elsewhere.

There’s really no way to know how this will all resolve—it’ll be determined by court cases, elections, and local activism in Truckee and the surrounding communities. In the meantime, the student-athletes of TTUSD, as well as their families, are caught in a complex and very-2026 dispute—through no fault of their own.

Brendan Keen contributed research.

My after-thoughts are more about reporting itself than the details of this story. I love reporting. It was great to drive to Tahoe and attend that school board meeting and drive to Sparks and (this didn’t make it into the story) check out the actual sites where the Donner Party members hunkered down and, in many cases, perished.

I made that trip and did that reporting whilst juggling other responsibilities, including this newsletter, my podcast, and my book. In a perfect world I’d have been able to spend several more days in and around Truckee, attend more meetings, meet more parents, knock on some doors of school-board members, and all that other journalist-y stuff. That’s what’s so sad about the implosion of journalism: There’s hardly anyone left who has the resources to give a story like this the time and attention and care it deserves.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m very happy with how this turned out, and even if I’d had more time to spend in Tahoe, it’s unlikely I would have gotten much from anyone who is in favor of the conference switch, given the circumstances. But working on this story did remind me how uniquely satisfying reporting is — satisfying and resource-intensive. At its best, on-the-ground reporting provides perspectives and information that really can’t be replicated in any other form, and I hope we’re able to save it from the merciless economic forces that have decimated it.

After this post goes up, I’m going to put Singal-Minded to sleep for roughly a month and a half. If you’re a paying subscriber, you don’t have to do anything — you won’t get charged while the newsletter is dormant. (I am finishing up one piece for The Dispatch that you will receive, as always, a day after it goes up.)

I’m partly doing this because I’m entering (another) period of book crunch and need to devote as much of my brain as possible to that during a chunk of this summer. I’m quite excited for this book but I really, really need to finish it so I can move on.

That’s not my only motivation, though. A pause like this also provides an opportunity to reboot Singal-Minded, and to improve its quality.

I’ve been writing this newsletter since 2019. I’m proud of Singal-Minded, not to mention eternally grateful that it has built up the audience it has. But, in large part because my attention is perpetually divided between this and other projects, it’s not as strong a newsletter as it could be.

I plan to reboot Singal-Minded with a slightly different focus, with a more consistent publication schedule, and with other features that will, I think, help it to stand out in an ever-more-competitive Substack landscape. I’ve already taken a first step on this front: I’ve hired an assistant editor who I will formally introduce when I return. He and I have been brainstorming how to make Singal-Minded 2.0 as strong as possible, and he’s going to be doing a lot of tinkering between now and then. At some point before the relaunch, I’m also going to solicit input from my subscribers about what they want to see (or don’t want to see) in this newsletter going forward. So please keep an eye out for that email.

In the meantime, I’m curious to hear any off-the-cuff thoughts you might have about this here publication. Paid and free subscribers alike are welcome to shoot me a note at singalminded@gmail.com.

That’s it! Again, if you’re paying for Singal-Minded you don’t have to do anything — your billing will pick back up when I relaunch the newsletter. New paid subscriptions will be closed in the meantime.

Thank you so much for reading. There’s a lot of good stuff to come.

Questions? Comments? Offers to preorder 15,000 copies of my book? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com.

New York Times health and wellness reporter Simar Bajaj has a new article about “The Return of Blaming and Shaming in Public Health,” as the headline puts it. It’s pegged to our esteemed Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., and discusses the relationship between stigma and public-health concerns like obesity and smoking.

I don’t think there’s any good reason to be skeptical of Bajaj’s general thesis that stigma, in the sense of shaming or ridiculing or othering, is ineffective as a public health strategy. And there were things I liked about this article, which is a bit more nuanced than the headline suggests.

But I also think Bajaj makes a common mistake you see all the time in science writing, and it’s one that drives me a bit nuts. In arguing against approaches steeped in stigma, Bajaj writes the following:

Researchers found that antismoking messages focused on industry deception — like how Big Tobacco targets teens or manipulates the public — were some of the most effective at reducing cigarette consumption.

As soon as I read this sentence, I knew what would happen when I clicked on the link: I would be brought to a study that did not, in fact, meaningfully support the claim that we have such rich data about which antismoking messages work better than others.

How could I be so confident? Two reasons: First, we, as a species, don’t really know how to change people’s beliefs and behavior. Second, our hypotheses on this front are notoriously difficult to test scientifically.

Smoking itself is a fine example. The best way to know which anti-smoking messages work would be to take a huge group of otherwise similar people, divvy them up into groups that are otherwise as similar as possible, and randomly assign the different groups to be exposed to different messages about smoking. If, after the experiment ends, differences have emerged in the rates of smoking/quitting/other important behavioral variables between the groups, you might be able to infer that those differences were caused by the messaging.

But this is quite difficult to do in practice. It is difficult to find the resources to run a study this large and rigorous. And even if differences are observed, that’s not the end of the story: There could be all sorts of other explanations. The best-laid plans of researchers often go awry.

Of course the vast majority of studies aren’t nearly this ambitious. While we do have some randomized controlled trials of anti-smoking interventions, they are small and sometimes difficult to interpret. In this one, for example, 357 smokers in San Diego who had cigarettes delivered to their home by the researchers (not a bad study to participate in!) were randomly assigned to regular packs, blank packs, or to packs containing nasty imagery designed to deter smoking. The researchers found that “graphic warning labels decreased positive perceptions of cigarettes associated with branded cigarette packs but without clearly increasing health concerns. They also increased quitting cognitions but did not affect either cigarette cessation or consumption levels.”

One the one hand, a useful study, both because of the key result but also because it reveals something important and frequently ignored: People often profess beliefs that don’t translate into their actual behaviors. On the other hand — and this is not a knock on the researchers — even this fairly basic result is difficult to interpret! For example, “demand effects” (or characteristics) are a well-known phenomenon in experimental psychology — people often seem to catch on to the fact that they are being studied and to provide responses oriented (perhaps unconsciously) toward satisfying researchers. Let’s say I measure your beliefs about smoking, start sending you packs containing graphic warnings, and then measure your beliefs about smoking again. You report that you feel less positively about cigarettes. Was that because the imagery actually affected your perception of cigarettes, or because the experiment basically contains a giant blinding neon sign stating WE ARE TRYING TO MAKE YOU FEEL WORSE ABOUT CIGARETTES?

Also: There are huge cultural, political, and health-behavior differences between different parts of this great nation of ours. Would the results of a San Diego study, whatever they are, generalize to Peoria? Hell, would they generalize to San Francisco? It’s very difficult to know.

All of which brings me back to my skepticism of that New York Times sentence. If it’s difficult to establish reliably effective ways to change beliefs or behavior, and if in even the best cases (like an RCT) it’s difficult to interpret attempts to measure such interventions, it seems unlikely that anyone has actually established something as specific as “antismoking messages focused on industry deception. . . [are] some of the most effective at reducing cigarette consumption.”

Read more

May flew by! Here are some of your best comments, with some responses by me.

Jonathan Reale, on “On The New York Times’ White-Guy Discrimination Case (And Bubbles)”:

The rest of that quoted section from the Klein article also could benefit from some “turnabout” perspective. Imagine taking the attitude that because someone made a federal complaint, employees at the paper were justified in trying to ascertain and share the identity of the turncoat, with who knows what consequences to follow, if the racial category of the complainant had been something other than it is. I can imagine specific words/phrases that would likely get used to describe the group of employees and their activity as they vigorously sought to identify the traitor in their midst.

Yeah, I think there’s widespread skepticism that you’re “supposed to” use the federal civil rights law if you feel discriminated against as a white person. I have no doubt that this sort of discrimination has been vanishingly rare in American history as compared to other types but, as I pointed out in that article, it puts institutions in a legally tenuous position when they are basically advertising their desire to engage in it.

Snailprincess, on “It’s Immoral Not To Call The Cops On Genuinely Menacing People You Encounter In Public”:

I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that, in progressive circles, particularly online, it is in vogue to say “the system” is so broken it must be replaced. If that is your belief, then attempting to work within the system is pointless and morally wrong. But I’m going to say something controversial, the system is. . . mostly pretty good. Our system of courts, police, trials, courts, etc. is honestly pretty good, especially on paper. We absolutely fall short in execution plenty. Things can and should be improved. But no, we don’t need to rethink the entire concept of police. Almost all of the energy I see online is directed at “the system is broken, burn it down,” that there’s very little left for proposing actual reasonable improvements. I think that filters into politics as well. Very early on in the protests, there were some reasonably good proposals out of the “Black Lives Matters” protest, things like increased accountability and training for police, etc. Those got drowned out almost immediately by the “defund” rhetoric. Make America Incrementally Better Again.

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of some of the internecine fighting that goes on between (to oversimplify) the center-left and the far left. If you’re socialized to believe contemporary America is a world-historical hellhole that is mostly evil, then yeah, you’re going to want to burn it down. If — and this is closer to my perspective — you think America has some serious, frustrating problems, but in certain respects offers people a better life than almost anything that has come before it (here things get somewhat complicated with comparisons to Denmark and Germany, etc.), you’re going to be a bit more risk averse, especially when it comes to doing root-and-branch rather than piecemeal reforms of the justice system, “overthrowing capitalism” (whatever that means), and so on.

I’m probably a bit more bearish on our criminal justice system than Snailprincess, mostly because I think the idea of a two-tiered justice system is. . . basically true? That is, if you have money, you just have so many more opportunities to come out of scrapes with the system (civil or criminal) relatively unscathed than you do if you are lacking in resources. That is obviously unfair, though I don’t know how to fix it. I do think we’ve made tremendous progress toward the decarceration of nonviolent offenders and that we should acknowledge as such. Doesn’t mean you need to leap all the way to “never lock up any violent person for any reason unless you absolutely have to.” As I mentioned in the piece, sometimes it’s the only moral option to maximize everyone’s safety.

Justin DaMetz, also on “It’s Immoral Not To Call The Cops On Genuinely Menacing People You Encounter In Public”:

I recently had to call the police late at night here in suburban Tulsa because a homeless man had decided the space between my two cars in my driveway was the best place to sleep for the night. He was intermittently yelling and crying, and the noise woke my five-year-old. Being someone who is more progressive than not, part of me felt bad calling the police on someone who was clearly having a hard time in life already, and was just looking for a place to rest for the night. The last thing I wanted was to have some police officer having a bad night give him a tough time. But I was glad I did: One of the responding officers told me, along with being deeply inebriated, he also had a grazing gunshot wound that looked like it had been untreated. Calling the cops got him the medical care that might have saved his life from infection, and got him a better place to sleep for the night than my cold driveway. And the officers from TPD were all kind, calm, and compassionate the entire time they were at my house.

In some cases, contact with The System is better than the alternative!

J Chicago, on “How WPATH Thumbed The Scale Of Youth Gender Medicine Research”:

There is also a wider and serious nocebo effect. All these young people are being told they need these “life-saving” interventions in order to thrive, which was directly criticized after a UK study in response to the claims:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-suicides-and-gender-dysphoria-at-the-tavistock-and-portman-nhs-foundation-trust/review-of-suicides-and-gender-dysphoria-at-the-tavistock-and-portman-nhs-foundation-trust-independent-report

“The way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing, and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide.”

This is also discussed by Clayton:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02472-8

“However, an excessive focus on an exaggerated suicide risk narrative by clinicians and the media may create a damaging nocebo effect (e.g., a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ effect), whereby suicidality in these vulnerable youths may be further exacerbated (Biggs, 2022; Carmichael, 2017). This type of risk has been discussed in other similar situations involving youth (Abrutyn et al., 2020; Canetto et al., 2021; Shain & AAP COMMITTEE ON ADOLESCENCE, 2016).”

That is, patients who get these drugs might think they were saved from this risk.

And patients who don’t get them might be made even more anxious—a big problem right now in U.S. states where these interventions are not available for minors, and where the **MDs** treating them still believe that this means “lifesaving care” is being denied. The doctors pushing the “lifesaving” narrative are, in my opinion, doing harm to these kids by suggesting suicide is a natural response to having gender dysphoria and that gd can only be alleviated with these medications. It appears to me to be encouraging despair and fear, based on falsehoods.

Read more

Last week I published an article originally titled “How WPATH And The Endocrine Society Thumbed The Scale Of Youth Gender Medicine Research.” I say originally because I’ve since nixed “The Endocrine Society” from the headline. I’ve also unlocked that article, which was paywalled when I published it. What follows will make a lot more sense if you read that one first.

In the article I claimed that both WPATH and the Endocrine Society (ES) authored letters endorsing an observational design for the “Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth” study (those are links to PDFs of both letters), and that both letters exaggerated and oversimplified the state of quality evidence for youth gender medicine in 2014 (which, unfortunately, is not all that different from the state of quality evidence for youth gender medicine in 2026).

I made an error here: “The Endocrine Society letter was authored by the endocrinologist Wylie Hembree, who died in 2022 and who at the time was the Chair of the Society’s Task Force on Clinical Practice Guidelines for Transgender Care. He was also lead author of the 2009 guidelines. Writing on Endocrine Society letterhead. . . ”

I’m embarrassed I managed to screw this up given that I linked to the letter right in that paragraph, and it clearly isn’t on ES letterhead!

I’m honestly not sure what happened, but I apologize. I’ve corrected this in the text of the last article and, after this goes up, will include a link directing people here to explain what happened. (The WPATH letter clearly is on WPATH letterhead — believe me when I say I’ve now triple-checked.)

A couple people alerted me to this error. One was Dr. Michael Laidlaw, a California endocrinologist and youth gender medicine skeptic who has served as an expert witness for states seeking to ban youth gender medicine. He is also a co-author on the HHS umbrella review published last year, and the story of his attempts to get these documents is worth briefly telling.

In 2018 or so, Laidlaw developed concerns about the ethics of this research project. This led him to seek out information about it from the National Institutes of Health. He teamed up with the conservative legal activist Jane Robbins, a fellow skeptic, and she filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Olson-Kennedy team’s NIH application packet that year. When it arrived they found it was missing two appendices they were interested in: the consent form that would be used to enroll children and youth in the study and — more importantly for our purposes — the two “letters of support” from WPATH and the Endocrine Society. Multiple follow-up FOIAs did not yield these documents. Eventually Robbins’ sister, Patricia Daugherty, filed a lawsuit against the NIH to obtain the documents, with the conservative legal group Judicial Watch serving as her counsel. “We reluctantly agreed to a dismissal since they at least produced the consent forms,” explained Laidlaw, but the other documents were still missing.

Laidlaw said he made a separate effort to get the letters via a California Public Records Act request to UCSF, a public university whose youth gender clinic is one of the four sites of the study (UCSF is also the home base of Olson-Kenendy’s co-investigator, the endocrinologist Stephen Rosenthal). That effort stalled out as well, and these dead ends were “what led me to call and email the Endo Society directly to try to obtain the letter that I thought they endorsed,” explained Laidlaw, who had been a member of that group since 2006.

I don’t remember how I first found out about the existence of these letters — it may well have been through Laidlaw. But for those of us who are curious about this project, they have long been an object of fascination. There really wasn’t any ambiguity about the letters’ provenance in the language of the grant application: Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues reference “the Endocrine Society and WPATH letters of support regarding our cohort design” and “Letters of support regarding our cohort design from both the Endocrine Society and WPATH.” Anyone reading the application would interpret this as the ES and WPATH lending their institutional imprimatur to Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues’ preferred study design.

That’s why Laidlaw, curious for the same reasons I was, reached out directly to the Endocrine Society in 2020. In October of that year, an ES staffer named Rodneikka Scott told Laidlaw the group had had no luck tracking down any such letter. “We double-checked with our colleagues in our Government and Public Affairs and others in an attempt to find the letter referenced in your email,” she told Laidlaw in an email that he shared with me. “As it turns out, there is no record of an advocacy-related letter of this same title.”

A few days later Laidlaw responded, gently insisting that the letter likely did exist given the clear references made to it in Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues’ grant application. “It seems to me to be a big problem if researchers claim they have a letter from the Endocrine Society that does not exist,” he also noted.

Scott then responded again, closing out the conversation:

Many thanks for your follow-up. Intrigued, I continued to dig a bit more into your request earlier today. The Endocrine Society does not write letters in support of specific grants. With that being said, we were able to find the attached two documents. The author of the grant may have attached one of these letters. We don’t know, though. I hope this is helpful as it is all that we have. [emphasis mine]

Neither of the two letters attached had anything to do with this research project, so those weren’t the ones in question. I have no idea why I got lucky where Laidlaw and Robbins struck out — why, late last year, in a long-overdue response to my follow-up FOIA request, the NIH sent me the two letters.

After I heard from Laidlaw, I emailed the ES earlier this week, quoting some of the group’s correspondence with him and pointing out that this shouldn’t be a complicated thing to establish: Either Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues’ claim that their letter of support had been authored by the ES was true, or it was false. In either case, I argued, the ES should clarify things.

I haven’t heard back. Just like I didn’t hear back when, prior to my publication of last week’s article, I reached out to the Endocrine Society to ask if the group wanted to comment or provide context about what was going on.

What we’re left with is a confusing situation. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues repeatedly referenced a letter from the Endocrine Society in their NIH application. Such a letter would, of course, carry more weight than a letter from an individual endocrinologist — albeit an influential one — who merely had a role in the Society’s development of its gender dysphoria guidelines. The letter itself, however, looks much more like the latter: like the late Dr. Wylie Hembree was writing on his own behalf, noting his affiliation with the ES but not claiming to represent the opinion of that group on this particular matter.

I can imagine a critic accusing me of nitpicking, but shouldn’t researchers seeking millions in federal funding provide accurate information about which professional organizations have or haven’t written them letters of support? Shouldn’t the Endocrine Society, having been aware of this confusing situation since at least 2020 (via its correspondence with Michael Laidlaw), provide a public explanation? More broadly, should it have taken years worth of FOIA requests and a lawsuit just to obtain important documents that are part of a controversial, high-profile, and taxpayer-funded research project?

The most common theme in my reporting on youth gender medicine is a lack of transparency and accountability. It’s extremely rare for the researchers and activists whose work has come under scrutiny in recent years to be willing to answer even basic follow-up questions about their claims, their methodologies, or their theories. In some cases I can understand why — there have been lawsuits and harassment campaigns and all sorts of over-the-top ugliness. This is a very heated dispute. But when it comes to the top-tier researchers and research journals and professional organizations, I remain confused as to why they can’t answer simple questions about what they have done and why they have done it. These individuals and institutions often present themselves as the voices of scientific (and, frequently, moral) authority — they issue authoritative-sounding statements, they write op-eds, they get paid handsome sums to prepare expert declarations, and they consistently seek to influence ongoing public debates. It seems like they’re trying to have it both ways: They want attention and influence and prestige, but they don’t want to deal with the accountability that should come with those rewards.

I don’t want to let myself off the hook here for what was a very silly error. This shouldn’t have required two separate newsletters to explain, and I made the situation even more confusing than it needed to be. I should have noticed this apparent discrepancy and noted it in my first article. But fundamentally, the root cause of this confusion is a federal grant application that appears to contain false information. Someone directly involved should simply explain what’s going on here, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Questions? Comments? More information about this? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com.

Update, 5/29/2026: It turns out that there’s some real uncertainty over the role of the Endocrine Society here. See here for a more information on that.

In 2014, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, was taking the lead on an ambitious research proposal known as “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth.” Olson-Kennedy and three other established youth gender-medicine practitioners — her co-investigators Stephen Rosenthal of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, Norman Spack of Boston Children’s Hospital, and Robert Garofalo of Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago — were seeking millions in funding from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a yearslong effort to study the outcomes of youth who came through their four clinics. They planned to publish separate studies on the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

Suffice it to say that this sort of effort requires a mountain of paperwork, and I obtained some of that paperwork via a Freedom of Information Act request. The packet reveals that during the application process, the team hit a potential snag when the NIH reviewers evaluating the proposal expressed qualms about its being an observational rather than an experimental study.

This distinction is quite important for understanding what happened next and why it matters.

An observational study simply tracks a group of patients over time as they receive treatment. The problem is, if the patients’ conditions improve it’s difficult to know whether the medication itself is responsible. People who are sick often get better over time, without intervention. Or it could be that, while the subjects were receiving the treatment, they were also receiving other forms of care or advice from their doctors. There can also be strange and not fully understood mind-body mechanisms at work, including the placebo effect — sometimes people appear to get better simply because they think they’re getting treated. Observational studies might, in some cases, also be susceptible to the Hawthorne effect, in which patients who know they are being observed modify their responses to certain queries as a result. These problems can be addressed by attempting to statistically control for unobserved factors that might be contributing to patient outcomes, but there are real limits to what observational studies can reveal, and they can’t generally provide strong causal evidence about the efficacy of medical treatments.

An experimental study, on the other hand, often involves randomly assigning study participants to either receive the treatment being evaluated or something else. Sometimes the “something else” is a placebo — that is, half of the headache sufferers get a headache pill, while half get a sugar pill — and sometimes it is some other treatment that the new treatment is being compared to.

In the strongest, most idealized version of this type of study, every effort is made to treat the patients identically with the exception of the treatment in question, and patients, doctors, and almost everyone else directly involved are “blinded” as to who is in which group until the experiment itself is complete and it is time to analyze the results. In theory, this prevents patients in one group or another from being treated differently by doctors and others who interact with them. Researchers go to significant lengths to complete what are known as “double-blind randomized controlled trials,” the gold standard for medical research. In some cases, they even perform “sham” surgeries for the sake of RCTs.

In a letter responding to the NIH’s critique, Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues acknowledged that “by our estimation [it] was the most significant issue raised by the initial review,” but then argued against the idea of withholding puberty blockers from any of their study participants:

However, the current standards of care from the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) were developed from a panel of scientific experts and a consensus-building process based largely upon clinical experience and existing minimal research, and each supports the positive impact of intervention and the negative impact of no intervention. In the context of these guidelines, we strongly believe that a non-intervention control group, or certainly any control group as part of a traditional randomized trial, would be both impractical and unethical (see the Endocrine Society and WPATH letters of support regarding our cohort design in Appendix A). [Italics mine.]

It’s true that you can’t blind a study participant (or their family members) as to whether or not they have really received puberty blockers — not for long, at least. But methodologists have come up with ways to run solid, nonblinded (or “open -label”) experimental studies, so the choice isn’t just between a blind experimental study and an observational one.

Olson-Kennedy’s more important argument here is that, because the available evidence and guidelines “support[ed] the positive impact of intervention and the negative impact of no intervention,” it would be unethical to deny study participants access to puberty blockers.

It’s true that by the time Olson-Kennedy and her team were seeking funding, the Endocrine Society (2009) and WPATH (2012) had both published guidelines supporting the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria in at least some instances. But those guidelines — written by teams dominated by early practitioners of youth gender medicine — were not carefully written, as an independent Cass Review assessment later found (see online supplemental table 3). They did not include many of the guardrails that seek to attenuate the role of human bias in guideline development, and they recommended puberty blockers for gender dysphoric youth in the absence of quality evidence supporting this approach. Jennifer Block’s reporting in The British Medical Journal has more information about all of this.

The first group of clinicians to prescribe puberty blockers as a treatment for gender dysphoria certainly thought this treatment worked, despite that lack of evidence, and sought to codify that view into the relevant professional guidelines. Olson-Kennedy’s co-investigator Norman Spack, for example, was one of the earliest American youth gender clinicians to embrace puberty blockers, and he also co-authored the Endocrine Society guidelines. Given the prominence of the Endocrine Society, those guidelines went a long way toward legitimizing a medical protocol that, in 2009, could only be described as experimental. “There was an attitudinal shift to be able to say that the Endocrine Society supports this,” Spack told Endocrine News in 2013 (I came across that quote via the sociologist and youth gender medicine critic Michael Biggs).

There are good, well-understood reasons not to automatically trust physicians who believe a new treatment works but who lack data. That’s why the “evidence pyramid” underpinning the practice of evidence-based medicine puts “background information/expert opinion” at the bottom.

Doctors, like everyone else, are susceptible to bias. And absent a carefully controlled experimental setting, they don’t generally collect rigorous data on their patients, nor attempt to follow up with those whom they are no longer in contact with. All of which can give physicians a skewed understanding of the effectiveness of the care they are providing.

So while Olson-Kennedy’s argument to the NIH is larded with signifiers of authority — phrases like “panel of scientific experts” and the names of leading professional organizations — if you actually examine the timeline and the names involved, it really just boils down to “The small group of early practitioners of youth gender medicine believed puberty blockers worked as a treatment for youth gender dysphoria and enshrined their belief in the early guidelines.”

Yes, a couple of early, influential articles were published by the Dutch clinicians who pioneered the puberty-blocking protocol in 2011 and 2014, but they were methodologically weak observational studies of a carefully screened group of Dutch youth, and they did not tell a conclusive story: In many cases, the youth entered the study with solid mental health and they still had solid mental health when they were last observed. Even setting aside other, potentially backbreaking issues with this Dutch research that wouldn’t be recognized until years later, the studies didn’t come close to providing the quality of evidence required to justify the stance that non-intervention would be unethical.

That’s especially true given that, as Olson-Kennedy and her team explained in their application, they were seeking, in some cases, to begin puberty blockers at an earlier age than the usual Dutch threshold of 12 years old. As they wrote, “no data have been collected in the U.S. on the physiologic and mental health impact, safety, or tolerability of pubertal-blocking medical interventions… for transgender youth, particularly in children younger than age 12, leaving a gap in the evidence for this practice,” emphasis theirs.

Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues, then, simultaneously argued that there existed “no data” on the “mental health impact, safety, or tolerability” of blockers, particularly in this cohort — again, these are all their exact words — but also that it would be unethical to withhold this medication from any patients. These two claims are very much in tension.

As the team understood, 2014 was a crucial time to develop genuine evidence about youth gender medicine. And there were options available for an experimental study, at least hypothetically. For example, the Dutch clinicians had, before blockers came on the scene, provided counseling and other mental-health support to gender dysphoric teenagers until they reached age 16, at which point they could begin hormones if they were deemed to be good candidates for medical intervention (the counseling did not include attempts to convince the youth they weren’t trans, or anything like that). Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues could have at least attempted to run an experiment comparing that approach (or a version of it) to the newer protocol involving earlier medical intervention via puberty blockers. This sort of comparative study would not have been perfect, but it could have provided more useful data than an observational study.

Instead, they argued that an experimental study that withheld puberty blockers would be unethical, and to buttress their argument they pointed the NIH to “letters of support” from the same two groups that had published the early guidelines. The letters, which were not included in the original packet the NIH sent me but which a follow-up FOIA request yielded many (many, many) months later, are telling. They show that by 2014, despite a lack of quality evidence to support puberty blockers as a treatment for youth gender dysphoria, both organizations had decided not just that puberty blockers worked, but that they worked so well that it would be unethical to deny them to study participants. Given how much uncertainty remains about these treatments more than a decade later, this is a striking example of how individuals and institutions have, in their embrace of youth gender medicine, contravened normal standards of medical evidence.

The Endocrine Society letter was authored by the endocrinologist Wylie Hembree, who died in 2022 and who at the time was the Chair of the Society’s Task Force on Clinical Practice Guidelines for Transgender Care. He was also lead author of the 2009 guidelines. Writing on Endocrine Society letterhead, In his letter, he argued to the NIH that “Non-intervention in adolescents with Gender Dysphoria has been demonstrated to result in harmful physical and psychological outcomes, especially at the onset and during pubertal development,” and that “Including a randomized non-treatment arm would be unethical based upon existing data documenting adverse effects of failure to treat.” But whether non-treated adolescents with GD sometimes suffer bad outcomes is a different question from whether puberty blockers (followed by cross-sex hormones) effectively treat GD in the long run and are worth the potential downsides, and it was those latter questions (among others) that Olson-Kennedy and her team were seeking to answer. (Correction, 5/26/2026: The letter wasn’t written on Endocrine Society letterhead, but Hembree did list himself as “Chair, Endocrine Society Task Force on Clinical Practice Guideline Transgender Care,” and Olson-Kennedy referred to the letter as having come from the Endocrine Society. I’m reaching out to the Endocrine Society again to attempt to clarify this.)

The WPATH letter was written by Jamison Green, then the president of WPATH and the chair of its Ethics Committee (as well as a big name in trans activism more generally), and by Jamie Feldman, chair of the organization’s medicine and research committee. Both had been involved in the development of the 2012 WPATH guidelines. The letter read, in part, “There is no question that pubertal blockers block puberty,” the implication being that an experimental study would be unnecessary. The authors also argued that “We have generations of transgender people who have been denied puberty blocking treatment, and we know the trajectory of these people’s lives.” Citing the high suicide risk of transgender youth, they argued, “The prospect of entering a program for treatment with a chance that treatment will be withheld could endanger the mental and physical health of the subjects.” This is question-begging, given that Olson-Kennedy and her team were specifically investigating whether puberty blockers would ameliorate suicidality among study participants. (I reached out to both the Endocrine Society and WPATH for comment. I received a call from a public relations firm representing WPATH and, after a quick off-the-record chat about this story, didn’t hear anything further. I didn’t hear back from the Endocrine Society.)

There are, of course, situations in medical research where withholding treatment would be unethical. But that’s only the case when there’s a great deal of certainty about the treatment in question (the relevant technical term here is equipoise, or a situation of genuine uncertainty about which approach is best). There was no such certainty when it came to the use of puberty blockers: There were always obvious potential side effects worth grappling with concerning infertility, sexual dysfunction, bone health, and cognitive development, as critics of youth gender medicine have noted. Olson-Kennedy and her team, as we saw earlier, were well aware of these and other uncertainties, and even the aforementioned WPATH guidelines point out that “the long-term effects [of blockers used for gender dysphoria] can only be determined when the earliest treated patients reach the appropriate age.” It’s simply a misunderstanding of basic bioethical principles to claim, under conditions of such profound uncertainty, that it would be unethical not to treat.

These letters demonstrate that the Endocrine Society and WPATH both endorsed the idea that puberty blockers were already an established, effective treatment for gender dysphoric youth — that many of the very questions Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues were seeking to answer had already been answered. (Which, of course, would raise the question of why they needed federal research dollars in the first place.) They were not convincing responses to the issues raised by the NIH. Nonetheless, the NIH allowed the study to proceed with an observational design — no comparison group.

In August 2015, Olson-Kennedy and her co-investigators received an initial $5.7 million to begin their project. More than a decade and about $10 million later, they haven’t come close to answering the key questions they set out to answer. Their most important publication, a 2023 New England Journal of Medicine study on hormones, is rife with cherry-picking, outcome-switching, and other signs of shoddy and/or politicized science. And even if you accept the team’s highly suspect methodological choices, their results do not offer compelling evidence to support the administration of hormones to adolescents with gender dysphoria — not least because there is no comparison group, and the authors did not control for therapy and/or medications like antidepressants.

As for the blockers study, in 2024 Olson-Kennedy told Azeen Ghorayshi of The New York Times that “Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements… most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began,” as paraphrased by Ghorayshi. Olson-Kennedy admitted that she and her team had withheld this data out of fear that it would be weaponized by conservatives seeking to ban youth gender medicine. The final version of that study still hasn’t been published, but a preprint of it (that is, a pre-peer-review version) published online last year appeared poised to repeat many of the mistakes of the 2023 NEJM study.

The failure of gatekeepers here can’t be overstated. WPATH and the Endocrine Society have attempted to present themselves as rigorous-minded groups that follow the science, but in this instance they acted much more like activist organizations (not for the last time, especially in WPATH’s case). Of course, it didn’t help matters that the project’s lead, Olson-Kennedy, had already publicly described these treatments as lifesaving years before she began studying them: As she told ABC News in 2011, “We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’ ”

At the risk of repeating myself, I can’t emphasize enough how foolish it is to blindly “trust the experts” unless the experts in question have earned that trust. There are myriad ways the difficult process of scientific inquiry can go off the rails, and “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth” is a prime example.

Questions? Comments? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. Image via the Endocrine Society.

I feel bad for the anonymous 23-year-old woman interviewed by the New York Post earlier this week. She explained that on April 2, she and her friend were attacked and followed on the subway by a menacing man who wouldn’t leave them alone: “the crazed suspect stalked them closely and allegedly yanked her by the back of her head in an attempt to slam her to the ground and booted her friend in the back.” Thankfully, during their escape they came across some NYPD officers and the suspect was immediately arrested.

The woman and her friend eventually declined to press charges, she told the paper. “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail,” she said. That’s the quote that’s gone viral since then: I don’t want to put another black man in jail. It’s gone viral because a month later the black man in question, Rhamell Burke, pushed retired schoolteacher Ross Falzone down a flight of stairs in Chelsea, killing him.

Reporting from The New York Times and the Post paints an astonishing story. Burke had, under the name Rhamell Burke-Missouri, been a Broadway dancer before descending into profound mental illness during Covid. The timeline of last Thursday almost defies belief: On the same day, he was released from a psychiatric unit, killed Falzone, and showed up for a scheduled court appearance on another assault charge. (Though he had been identified by then, no one realized he was wanted for a new crime during the court appearance, according to the Post.)

It’s a cropped version of that quote from the anonymous Post source that’s circulating. In full, it reads, “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail, but, you know, at some point, if you are a criminal, you’re a criminal, and he was scary, he was a scary guy.” The shorter version of the quote is being slightly misrepresented online, as though it proves that if she and her friend had only intervened then and there, the later killing never would have happened. But as the last line of the story notes, “Burke was hit with an assault charge for the April attack and granted supervised release at arraignment.” I’m guessing, based on her quote, that the anonymous victim feels that if she had cooperated more, his punishment would have been more severe, averting the killing of Falzone. That’s far from certain, and I don’t entirely blame her for her decision. Even if her quote indicates one particular motivation, there are all sorts of reasons to not want to cooperate fully with a prosecution.

I do think, however, that we should pause and think through which of these two options — help the police or decline to do so — is more morally fraught in a situation involving a clearly dangerous man (it’s almost always a man) threatening people in public. If you do help the police, you of course have no control over where the perp will end up, what sentence he will receive, and so on. There’s real moral uncertainty because you’re not saying “I choose to help the police and in doing so I hereby declare that the proper punishment is 90 days of inpatient treatment at a gleaming, freshly constructed facility whose rec room has nice river views.” That isn’t how it works. Neither option is close to perfect.

The incident involving this Post lady reminded me of the wave of online outrage sparked by Emma Vigeland, co-host of The Majority Report, in 2023, over comments she made on her show about the killing of Jordan Neely by Daniel Penny — another instance in which the failure to keep a dangerous, deranged man off the streets led to an unnecessary death (his, in this case):

I was hit at one point sitting on the subway by a man who was having a mental health episode. He sat next to me, and he was elbowing and kind of flailing around. He hit me in the face and in my body. It was jarring, right? The idea that I would want him to be hurt in any way — I just didn’t want to be near him in that moment because I understood something was going on here. Every one of us who has taken public transit has had this kind of situation, something similar happen — seeing someone struggling. That doesn’t mean that our fear in that instance — and I was a little scared, because I was hit —but my fear is not the primary object of what we should be focusing on right now. It’s the fact that this person is in pain. And so, like the politics of dehumanization, privileges, the bourgeois kind of concern of people’s immediate discomfort in this narrow, narrow instance, as opposed to larger humanity and life, it’s really frickin’ twisted.

Now, I’m not an impartial arbiter here because I dislike Vigeland, and no online pile on delivers the “correct” amount of scorn, but of course it’s ridiculous to treat “not wanting to get assaulted in public” as a “bourgeois kind of concern of people’s immediate discomfort.”

Vigeland’s comments here reflect a worldview that is staunchly opposed to police involvement: You should hardly ever call the police on anyone because the police are very likely to make things worse. This norm has been taken to dizzying extremes during moments of peak concern about police abuse. At one point during the summer of 2020, for example, the head of a small Twin Cities literary agency tweeted that she had called the police in response to a gas station near her getting looted. This sparked a minor uproar online that led to three of her staffers publicly resigning, because (apparently) it’s racist to call the police on looters.

But let’s stick to situations involving genuinely menacing people on the subway. Not people who seem a little off, not people slumped against a wall within a station, but people who wander around, in public, threatening others or actually hurting them, as in the case of Vigeland and the Post lady. These types are fairly rare, at least in the relatively safe parts of New York City where I spend the most time, but in my experience they have become less so since the coronavirus. (The difference between “safe-” and “unsafe”-feeling neighborhoods is also blurred a bit by the extent of our subway and bus coverage.)

My argument is that if you are assaulted or seriously menaced by someone like this and you don’t get the police involved, you’re doing something wrong — in fact, you may be wronging not only this person’s future victims but the person himself.

Read more

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing The New York Times on behalf of a veteran journalist who claims he was denied a promotion due to being a white male. Both the lawsuit itself and the response to it are revealing.

New York Magazine’s “LOL Get a Load of This Loser” Approach Is Tired and Unhelpful

A useful entry point is New York magazine’s short write-up, in Intelligencer, by features writer and media columnist Charlotte Klein. The web headline that pops up on Google reads “The White Man Crying Discrimination at the New York Times” (the live headline on the story itself is milder).

Klein’s story does not devote any real space to helping readers understand whether and to what extent the suit has merit. Rather, the assumption seems to be that everyone reading the article is on the same page: This is ridiculous.

This makes a certain level of superficial sense given our political moment. Donald Trump really likes to weaponize the courts against his perceived enemies. He has used seemingly every conceivable legal lever, in seemingly every conceivable manner, to attempt to make life difficult for institutions and individuals he feels have wronged him. He has done this both in his personal capacity, launching plainly baseless multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuits against outlets like The Wall Street Journal (dismissed for now) and the Times itself. Perhaps more menacingly, he has sought criminal prosecutions against political enemies like New York attorney general Letitia James (repeatedly) and former FBI director James Comey (for posting a photo of seashells* spelling out “86 47” in seashells on a beach to Instagram, which contra Trump’s DoJ, is clearly not a violent threat unless you think “86 the scrambled eggs,” when overheard at a diner, is a waitress’s call to murder scrambled eggs). While these cases tend to falter one way or another because they are (to use the technical legal term) ridiculous, of course that doesn’t matter to the individuals and institutions targeted, who are facing a vindictive, erratic world leader with effectively unlimited resources at his disposal. (Correction: This paragraph originally said Comey himself spelled the offending numbers out in seashells. This is false: He says he and his wife found them already arranged like that. His is being charged for posting a now-deleted photo of the arrangement to Instagram. Thanks to the commenter who alerted me to this error.)

Trump and his deputies are also particularly outspoken about their desire to use the cudgels of federal authority to wage culture wars, most notably against the universities that they view as having been taken over by DEI lunacy. The same general trajectory applies to the EEOC, which, as Klein notes, is “now controlled by a Trump appointee who has vowed to help wage the president’s war against DEI culture[.]”

If I were coming to this controversy fresh, I’d probably assume this EEOC lawsuit was politically motivated and had no merit, simply because the Trump administration is basically a giant factory that produces meritless, politically motivated legal actions. And even despite what I’m about to say, I can’t even deny the possibility of a political motive here! You don’t think Donald Trump or anyone seeking to ingratiate themselves to him would lick their chops at a chance to sue the Times? The EEOC has significant discretion to choose which of the many complaints it receives to investigate and potentially elevate to full-blown lawsuits, and wherever there’s discretion, there’s the potential for politicization and other forms of bias.

The thing is, I’m not coming to this controversy fresh, and neither is Klein. She knows, as do I, as does anyone who worked in a progressive institution during the peak of the circa-2020 racial reckoning, that during this period there was a large amount of open, legally precarious talk endorsing employment discrimination against white people — particularly white men. Everyone in our world knows that this occurred, and in some cases, is still occurring. I cannot bold this enough! If you are from our circles, you should pause and consider the merits of a case like this — not immediately slot it in alongside Trump’s (and Kash Patel’s) many abuses of the legal system. (This article by Jacob Savage generated a lot of discussion when it was published late last year and is a good starting point for anyone skeptical that what I’m describing actually occurred.)

Now, legally precarious is not a synonym for illegal. We’ll dive a bit more into the complaint in a moment. It’s here, it’s just 17 pages long, and you can and should read it. (Klein doesn’t link to it, and as Robby Soave points out, this is an unfortunate tendency among outlets writing about litigation). But I want to linger for a moment on Klein’s coverage. Because if you read her piece, you will not find yourself edified one iota as to the underlying merits of the disgruntled employee’s claims. Rather, you will be immediately buffeted by politically loaded signifiers, giving this whole story the stench of yet another instance of Trump and his toadies unfairly attacking the media. That is, Nothing to see here other than more MAGA grotesquerie.

Naturally, there are quotes from Times insiders supporting this view:

The paper itself was the first to break the news of the suit but did not name the employee who made the complaint. Reporters at the paper have been scrambling to figure out the employee’s identity, driven in part by bafflement that one of their own colleagues would sell out the paper to the administration, which has used tools of the federal government to attack the press. “You’re giving the Trump administration a weapon while they’re trying to persecute journalists,” said one reporter.

“This has been kind of a shitshow behind the scenes — people trying to figure out who the aggrieved person is,” said another Times staffer.

. . .

People at the paper say the claim is absurd. “I’m sorry, there are plenty of white guys at the top of the New York Times. Not really something that’s holding you back,” said the reporter. To name one prominent example, Joe Kahn, the paper’s executive editor, is a white male, as are many members of the masthead.

That last graf tells you all you need to know about Klein’s approach to this story. First, “People are saying/People say” is a classically suspect journalistic construction, not to mention a pretty funny one to use in this context. “People” say a lot of things! Especially nonrandom samples of them.

The quote which follows is, as Soave notes, a total non sequitur. This case centers on one staffer/applicant’s claim that he was discriminated against. At no point in the suit do the EEOC attorneys claim that the Times doesn’t have white men in positions of senior leadership. This blatantly fails the turnabout test: Klein would never cover a lawsuit claiming anti-black discrimination at a company by quoting a skeptic pointing to the existence of black higher-ups at the company in question. Because Klein does not take this complaint seriously, entirely different standards of evidence and reasoning apply.

I don’t doubt that there are employees at the Times furious that this employee filed this complaint. They are the ones most likely to speak to Klein about it. But I do doubt that that’s the whole story. For years, there’s been an ongoing conflict within the Times — sometimes rather heated — between staffers who take a more swashbuckling approach to matters of social justice and staffers whose views on the proper roles of newspapers and journalism are a bit more traditional, and it would be surprising if we didn’t see the same cleavage here.

I’m positive that, especially among staffers who think that social justice activism within the Times became unreasonable and interfered with the paper’s mission (a sizable group that was able to assert itself a bit after the reckoning had crested, as this earlier coverage by Klein makes clear), the reaction to this lawsuit is significantly more complex than anger at Yet Another Aggrieved White Man. I would bet significant money that there’s a cohort of them rolling their eyes not at the complaint, but at the sloppiness of the Times’ approach to DEI — that they view this more as an inevitable instance of the chickens coming home to roost than as an employee acting in a reactionary or unreasonable manner.

The Bubble

Back in 2021 I wrote about epistemic bubbles, about how in certain communities members are socialized to believe that certain arguments are compelling. Outside those communities? Less so. So one of the downsides of being inside an epistemic bubble is that you come to believe things that — whether or not they are true — are unconvincing to outsiders. (See also my more recent column in The Dispatch.)

In communities centered on social justice, the inspiring, unifying sense of being “on the right side of history” can sometimes overshadow more terrestrial concerns. And if you disagree with the community’s preferred approach to some issue on the grounds of those more terrestrial concerns, that calls into question whether you are, in fact, on the right side of history in the first place, which in turn calls into question the legitimacy of your group membership. This can, in the most extreme cases, bring reputational or even professional consequences.

Within progressive institutions, the racial reckoning was quite intense. I would argue that — as is often the case during periods that feel revolutionary — the decisions institutions made about how best to meet the moment were not particularly well thought out. At the time, it was actually quite difficult to openly disagree with whatever the activist-minded members of your organization were saying, simply because it was so unpleasant to find oneself on the wrong side of that revolutionary fervor.

The reckoning brought with it accelerated demand for certain preexisting diversity policies. One such demand centered on diversity trainings, which, as I argued in the Times in 2023, might do more harm than good and be legally problematic, especially in their more intense, psychologically demanding circa-2020 incarnations (indeed, these trainings did spark some legal complaints). But it was very hard to say so as interest in these interventions was peaking! Revolutionary fervor and all that.

Another long-standing demand, newly reenergized during the reckoning, was to diversify workplaces — the subject of the EEOC complaint. The question of which sorts of interventions to diversify a workplace are legal is complicated. It centers largely on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which contains a straightforward proscription on hiring, failing to hire, promoting, or failing to promote someone on the basis of their “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Over the years the courts have carved out some exceptions, but they’re quite narrow. So if a complainant can prove that race was a factor in their suffering a negative employment outcome, in theory they could have a strong Title VII case. Race doesn’t even need to be the only factor.

Of course, countless institutions have tried to become more diverse while staying within the boundaries of this law, and it’s the courts that make the final kosher/haram determination. This has never been a simple matter but it has become more of a moving target at the moment because of a couple of Supreme Court cases: First, there’s 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which effectively ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions and which may come to have significant ramifications in employment settings as well. More straightforwardly, 2025’s Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services (that one decided 9–0) rejected a “background circumstances” rule that made it harder for members of majority groups to bring successful Title VII challenges. That rule assumed that discrimination against majority groups in employment settings was “unusual” and imposed a higher burden on members of these groups seeking to argue that they had been discriminated against. Absent the obstacle posed by that rule, it became significantly easier to claim anti-white discrimination in employment settings.

All that being said, a newspaper like the Times does have options at its disposal to increase workplace diversity that are probably legal if certain precautions are taken. A newspaper is allowed to beef up its recruitment at historically black colleges and universities, to invest heavily in developing pipelines that extend all the way down to (say) majority-minority high schools, and so on. Efforts to expand the pie of potentially qualified applicants have been generally blessed by the courts as legal under civil rights law, though there are always potential landmines: If you send a rep to an HBCU career fair as part of your diversity efforts, for example, but that rep refuses to let a white student write down their email address to be notified about job openings, that could be legally risky, because it could be seen as a proscribed form of discrimination on the basis of race.

Much more legally problematic are policies like rigid quotas, which clearly entail discrimination in decision-making for a given position. (A super-simplified example: A company has two manager-level positions and has decided one of them should be black. If there’s an opening for one position at a time when the other is held by a white employee, then, definitionally, anyone applying for the open position who isn’t black will be discriminated against on the basis of their race.) And of course you, the employer, face grave legal risk if you enact or express preferences — in either direction — about the racial identity of the successful applicant for an advertised position. Should a complaint arise, that could be seen as explicit evidence of discriminatory intent.

In many cases, the question of whether a given intervention is on safe legal ground has to do with a fiendishly complex array of legal, regulatory, and political factors. The NFL, for example, instituted the so-called “Rooney Rule,” in which NFL teams are required to interview candidates for certain high-level coaching and management positions who are external to the organization and who are female and/or members of minority groups. This creeps right to the line of at least a certain sort of quota, albeit a quota involving a given applicant pool, not final employment decisions. In theory, this is legal under Title VII — probably? But you don’t know for sure until you test it in the courts, and testing it in the courts usually requires a plaintiff with “standing” (that is, someone who has grounds to sue). No one has challenged the Rooney Rule on the basis that it discriminates against white applicants, which doesn’t, on its own, really tell us much about its legality. It would be difficult for a rejected white applicant (the only sort of person with standing to bring such a case) to prove they had been discriminated against, and it would be career suicide to do so given that the NFL is a tiny and hypercompetitive labor market. (That said, Florida’s conservative attorney general recently threatened to sue the league over the rule.) All of which is to say that the absence of lawsuits does not mean a given diversity policy is on legally sturdy ground.

There are clearly a ton of complexities here, especially given the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to waging the aforementioned battles and, longer-term, a conservative-dominated Supreme Court that has expressed a severe allergy to race-based decision-making in academic and employment settings. The present case doesn’t really involve these complexities, though.

Read more

It was a hectic month! I’m about to fly across the country again! There’s a lot going on and several deadlines collided last week, so you won’t see responses from me this time around. I apologize for that. You guys had a lot of good and though…

Read more

I’m late to this, but when the host of Jeopardy! name-checks you, how can you not write about it?

It was a negative name-check, to be clear. In March, Jennings wrote on Bluesky, “Jesse Singal: ‘I don’t understand why all these experts with degrees keep disagreeing with me. So demoralizing. What could the explanation be??’ ”

I need to engage in an annoying bit of pre-explaining (presplaining), because I deleted the tweet that precipitated all of this. I’ll relegate a fuller explanation to a footnote, but the short version is I did not mean to imply I favored the Ken Paxton policy in question. Rather, my post was a response to Jack Turban’s claim that there is a clear scientific consensus on the subject of youth gender transition — a claim he was not making for the first time.1

Jennings, of course, got famous as a wildly successful contestant on, and then as the host of, a game show where almost every question has a single correct answer. (Well, it’s Jeopardy!, so technically every answer has a single correct question.)

Unfortunately, a sizable subset of the progressive world, in my experience, believes that extremely complex scientific disputes are more or less like Jeopardy! What’s the answer to a question? If there’s any ambiguity you consult a panel of judges — The Experts. Whatever The Experts say is the truth of the matter, and you can win an argument by citing the existence of an expert, or experts, who agree with whatever claim you’re promoting.

Does youth gender medicine work? Yes. What’s the detransition rate? Extremely low — like, wildly so. Are teenagers’ views of their gender identity influenced by social and cultural factors? Of course not. How do we know all of this? Because “the leading experts” agree. And you can, of course, find experts who will make these claims. In Jennings’ view, if you disagree with the experts, that is prima facie evidence something is wrong with your position, because experts are generally not to be questioned.

This conflation of “expert view” and “correct view” is common in progressive circles. The experts are basically the oracles: You go to them for the truth of the matter, as spoken directly by the science gods. There was a certain brilliance to the trans activist talking point that “the experts all agree” that youth gender medicine works, because respect for and deference to mainstream experts is burned into the modern progressive soul. Overwhelmingly, we’re the ones who both populate the nation’s sensemaking institutions and consume their output: We’re far more likely, compared to conservatives, to become university professors and journalists and public-health officials and to read scientific papers and pop-science treatments of controversial disputes. It’s one of the key ways we differentiate ourselves, whether the subject at hand is evolution, anthropogenic climate change, or youth gender medicine. We trust the experts; they do not.

To be sure, “trust the experts” works in some situations. We trust engineers to build bridges since the vast majority of the time, bridges don’t collapse. The development of the smallpox vaccine really did allow us to completely eliminate smallpox from the wild. I trust a trained engineer over some random guy to build a bridge, and I would not trust anyone who claimed the smallpox vaccine didn’t do what the experts claim it does. More generally, certain scientific debates do basically have two sides, with one being right and the other wrong. The small numbers of people who continue to believe in young-earth creationism or to not believe that humans cause climate change are wrong about the facts of the matter.

But these sorts of right-and-wrong science disputes generally center on very well-understood natural processes, very well-researched diseases and vaccines, and so on. Most matters of genuine, ongoing public scientific controversy are significantly more complex than that. Sometimes the science itself is unclear, sometimes the attendant questions of values and trade-offs are fiendishly difficult, and sometimes both. (There is no “right” or “wrong” answer to how long schools should have remained closed after the peak of the pandemic, for example.)

The contemporary progressive view of science, as reflected by Jennings, sweeps a huge amount of genuine complexity and controversy under the rug. Its adherents vastly overestimate the number of genuinely settled scientific controversies as well as the ability of scientific findings alone to resolve complex policy disputes in the first place. In doing so, they give “experts” far too much credit, and they give the average educated person far too little credit for their ability to challenge experts. On the whole, this understanding of science is profoundly elitist and disconnected from the messy realities of how research is practiced, and who is treated as an “expert” in the first place.

It’s Not Only Okay to Question Experts — It’s Necessary for a Healthy Public Science

Let’s take Jack Turban as an example, since it was his name that sparked this whole thing. Turban is impeccably credentialed: He’s a psychiatrist and professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, he has degrees from Harvard and Yale, he did his residency at Stanford, and he is regularly cited in major media outlets as an expert on youth gender medicine. As his bio page notes, he has won awards like the Excellence in Public Health Award from the U.S. Preventative Health Service, and he was named a Pride 30 Innovator by NBC.

In Jennings’ view, this is the platonic ideal of the trustworthy expert. Who would disagree with someone like that?

I think this is silly, elitist (I’m going to keep using that word because that’s really what this comes down to, more than anything), and wrongheaded. I think the average educated person can be trained to understand enough about the underlying concepts to either judge for themselves whether Jack Turban is trustworthy, or to be able to do a reasonable job interpreting public criticisms of Turban. (In some fields, that wouldn’t be the case. I don’t think the average educated person can understand complex disputes about quantum mechanics. That’s not what this is, though.)

Of course, it would be nice if this were unnecessary. It would be nice if, during a given dispute between multiple parties, we could apply some sort of mathematical formula that adds up everyone’s degrees, weighs for prestigiousness, and tells us who to trust. If that were the case, surely Jack Turban would win by sheer dint of the number of illustrious institutions he is affiliated with. But this would be very unwise.

To see why, let’s start with an extreme example: Just Some Blogger. If there’s anyone you shouldn’t trust on matters of science, in the Jennings/Bluesky world, it’s Just Some Blogger, right? Just Some Blogger is their bête noire, and for often solid reasons: When it comes to issues of genuine scientific misunderstanding, like the debunked link between vaccines and autism, who has done more damage than Just Some Blogger? Worse still are Just Some Blogger’s descendants, Just Some YouTuber and (ew) Just Some Substacker.

Except: You can’t always trust the impeccably credentialed expert over Just Some Blogger!

In 2021, as Turban was becoming an increasingly well-known name among those familiar with the youth gender medicine controversy, someone named JL Cederblom published a post to Medium titled “The Lukewarm Perjury of Jack Turban,” which is a deep dive into a single sworn statement Turban published as an expert witness in one of the legal cases surrounding a youth gender medicine ban. JL Cederblom is classic JSB — the name is a pseudonym, and we, the reader, have no idea what his or her credentials are. Why would you possibly trust “JL Cederblom,” Just Some Blogger of unknown provenance, over Jack Turban, MD, he of Yale and Harvard and Stanford?

Because, if you read their post, you will see that JL Cederblom is clearly in the right here: They are correct that Turban routinely bungles and/or misrepresents fairly basic facts in this particular document. I’m not saying I agree with every single claim in this long, bloggy takedown, but on the whole, you really can read Turban’s claims, Cederblom’s responses, the source material (usually studies from the literature), and recognize that Turban’s sworn declaration puts a thumb — maybe several thumbs — on the scale.

Or you can do what I did a while ago: Listen to Turban’s interview on Science Vs where he touted the strong evidence base for these studies, track down the studies he and the show referenced, and read what they actually say. If you do, you’ll find that Turban is, again, presenting an exceptionally rosy view of the literature.

Or — and I’m giving you multiple options here, to demonstrate that none of this requires a PhD in statistics — you can look up other sworn statements Turban has made on this subject and see how they hold up. For example, much of this debate comes down to the question of study quality, to the differences between strong studies and weak ones. This is an area known as evidence-based medicine, or EBM.

Leor Sapir, a Manhattan Institute critic of youth gender medicine who led the and the lead author on the Health and Human Services report about it, published a piece in 2023 arguing that Turban appears unfamiliar with basic EBM terms, including an absolutely vital one: systematic reviews. I can imagine Jennings saying: “What! Outrageous!” Sapir has a PhD, sure, but in political science. He isn’t a medical doctor like Jack Turban is and he definitely lacks Turban’s esteemed pedigree and history of expertise on this subject. Who the hell is he to claim that the good doctor lacks such basic knowledge? (Correction: Sapir emailed me to say he isn’t considered the lead author of the project. It’s a subtle but meaningful-enough-to-correct difference.)

But again, we have a choice here: We can do what Jennings implied as the correct course of action in his post about me — defer to whomever seems like the “expert” — or we can try to actually evaluate the disagreement and see who is correct. I have read the deposition in question, and Turban, answering questions posted by a legal adversary, under oath, really doesn’t seem to understand what a systematic review is.

On the one hand, it’s shocking, given Turban’s lofty perch as a Leading Expert who makes hundreds of dollars an hour producing sworn declarations and sitting for sworn depositions on this subject, that he doesn’t really know what a systematic review is (or didn’t, at least, at the time of the deposition in question). On the other hand, to be honest, I wasn’t that surprised, because it’s been clear to me that Turban shoots from the hip in a sloppy way since at least 2019. In November of that year, Turban and his frequent co-author Alex Keroughlian published a Psychology Today article that claimed “As recently as 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM] referred to being transgender as a ‘gender identity disorder.’ ” This is a completely false claim, albeit (for very in-the-weeds reasons) a frequently made one. The day after his piece went up, I pointed out to him on Twitter that there was no textual support for how he was describing this debate (I think my quote here is from his now-deleted tweet):

It only took Turban and Keroughlian and/or Psychology Today a year, but they eventually corrected the false claim from their piece:

It’s fairly wild that a public-intellectual psychiatrist, who should be more acquainted with the DSM than anyone else, would make such an obviously wrong argument about it. But before Turban and Keroughlian relented and made this correction, you could have played the same elitist game Jennings wants you to play: Why should you trust some sleazy, just-asking-questions journalist over two clinician-researchers as stuffed to the gills with Credibility and Expertise as Turban and Keroughlian? Maybe because sometimes people are treated as experts despite not exhibiting the competence of experts? Because sometimes people are elevated to the status of “expert” because they make politically expedient claims that fit certain cultural grooves, not for reasons of pure merit?2 Because we don’t have a formal state priesthood?

Again: Jack Turban is not a quantum physicist wowing his audience with astonishing strings of mathematical notation. He is a doctor making pretty straightforward, pretty specific claims about what various documents and studies do or don’t say. Some of these documents and studies require some training to be able to understand, but for the most part this debate is not, contra what Ken Jennings would have you believe, so far out of reach of the average educated reader that we have no choice but to mindlessly defer to experts.

Maybe on its own we could just call the DSM blunder a random slip-up on Turban’s part, the sort of brain fart we all experience from time to time. But you combine that with his under-oath misunderstanding about systematic reviews, and the issues highlighted by JL Cederblom, and so much other stuff that I don’t even have the time to get into here. . . I think Ken Jennings is way off base in instructing me — and, more importantly, his huge, fawning audience — to automatically view it as suspect if an “expert” like Jack Turban disagrees with me.

These Guys Don’t Actually Trust Experts Anyway

In a sense I’m giving Jennings and his Bluesky audience too much credit, because they don’t actually trust experts in the sense of automatically deferring to them on the basis of their credentials. Rather, Jennings and his audience first decide what the “correct” view is on a given subject, then they search out the experts who support that view, then they pretend those are the only “experts” in the room.

Jennings has only fleetingly chimed in on youth gender medicine, but he clearly views any skepticism of it as beyond the pale. In fact, after California governor Gavin Newsom said in an interview he was torn on youth gender medicine — not that he was against it, but that he was torn — Jennings agreed with a trans activist who said she would never support Newsom because of that stance. “Any candidate cynically ‘triangulating’ on trans kids is a non-starter,” wrote Jennings, “and now is the time to say so. There’s still so much time to advance candidates that DON’T suck.”

Jennings has decided, then, that any skepticism about youth gender medicine constitutes immoral “triangulating” on what he clearly views as a civil rights of such exigence that it rises to single-issue-voting status for him: allowing minors access to puberty blockers, hormones, and double mastectomies.

Jenning did not adopt these beliefs because he reviewed the scientific evidence and found it so compelling. Rather, he adopted this belief for the same reason most of us adopt our beliefs — matters of tribal affiliation, peer pressure, and so on — and then he reverse-engineered his way into his belief that “the science is settled” or whatever. Of course, there are now many experts who feel differently, who have decided that the science is very unsettled, because the systematic reviews that have been conducted tell such a clear story to that effect. In my experience, youth gender medicine advocates reach into a bottomless sack of excuses and smears to explain away these experts — anyone who disagrees is a bigot, made howlingly obvious scientific errors, and on and on. In the worst cases, massively credentialed, super-respected “experts” have simply lied — there’s no other word to describe what they did — to denigrate their perceived opponents. Jack Turban himself, for example, put his name on this. That’s who Ken Jennings wants me to defer to, like some sort of robot — a guy who will sign his name to lies without a trace of discernible shame.

So in one sense this entire exercise is bad faith — Jennings only trusts the experts only to the extent the experts reflect his own beliefs back at him. But since he’s such a famous and well-respected guy, I wish he wouldn’t promote such silly, superficial, and elitist ideas about the relationship between the average citizen and scientific “experts.”

Questions? Comments? Online petitions to get me on Jeopardy! so I can hash this out face-to-face with Jennings during what would be the most unwatchable TV segment ever broadcast? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. Image: BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA - MAY 02: Ken Jennings attends UCLA Jonsson Cancer Center Foundation's 28th Annual Taste For A Cure at Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel on May 02, 2025 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Robin L Marshall/Getty Images)

As soon as the novel Upward Bound came out a few weeks ago, two things happened: It became a runaway hit — now a New York Times bestseller — and a bunch of critics loudly wondered whether it was really written by its ostensible author, Woody Brown.

In case you haven’t heard about this controversy yet, Woody Brown is a 28-year-old man with severe autism. He suffers from echolalia, or the involuntary recitation of words or phrases, and his utterances are often drawn from the children’s programming he has a fixation with. He employs a “media cart” with multiple screens playing this sort of content to keep him calm.

Well, it’s not that he employs the media cart. That’s the thing: It’s his mother, Mary Brown, who is his caretaker. Brown communicates with her by pointing at a letter board using a technique called the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM).

This will all sound familiar if you’ve heard of facilitated communication, or FC. FC is a broader set of practices that purportedly allow severely disabled people to communicate via the use of keyboards or letter boards, usually with the help of a caretaker who holds their arm steady. This practice was propelled along by an undeniably seductive idea: that a bunch of people who had been written off as incapable of communication due to their disabilities in fact had rich inner lives that could be unlocked by the proper caretaker wielding the proper technique. There was a surge of media attention, a surge in demand for FC training, and a sudden uptick in the number of severely disabled nonverbal people who were now communicating — sometimes in remarkably sophisticated ways — thanks to FC.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t real. Debunked isn’t a strong enough word for FC — disgraced might be a better fit. The technique appears, in many cases, to be driven by a Ouija board type of effect in which it is actually the facilitator who produces the words attributed to the nonverbal person in question. At the peak of FC, some of the words that were produced were very consequential. There were false sexual allegations. There was an unbelievable scandal involving a “consensual” relationship between a professor and disability activist named Anna Stubblefield and a nonverbal young man. Rigorous trials have shown, rather conclusively, that FC does not work as advertised.

Woody and Mary’s method, RPM, is basically just FC. It has not been rigorously evaluated. When I reached out to Soma Mukhopadhyay, the technique’s founder — and the woman Mary Brown credits with unlocking Woody’s apparently enormous potential — she sent me a few papers that didn’t come close to demonstrating what needs demonstrating: that RPM generates text that originated with the disabled person, not their facilitator. (I mentioned this in a premium episode of Blocked and Reported we produced on this controversy.)

RPM has taken Mary and Woody on a remarkable ride. His communicative potential unlocked — and with Mom at his side facilitating his communication — he allegedly got an undergraduate degree at UCLA, he allegedly followed it up with an MFA in creative writing at Columbia, and he allegedly wrote Upward Bound.

I say “allegedly” because no one knows if he actually accomplished any of these things. That’s what’s so remarkable about this story — how long it’s been going on with so little pushback from anyone who could have, well, pushed back. The Woody Brown controversy didn’t emerge ex nihilo. Rather, there’s a lot of history and context here, and that history and context should cause any reasonable observer to default to the explanation that it’s Mary, not Woody, doing the communicating here. (It doesn’t help matters that you can watch videos of Woody “spelling” that rather clearly demonstrate he is not, in fact, spelling the words Mary is attributing to him, as Jill Bearup and others have demonstrated.)

Daniel Engber, who wrote the definitive Stubblefield story for The New York Times Magazine all the way back in 2015, has done more investigation into Upward Bound than any other journalist. In his Atlantic article, he mentioned “the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work”:

Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters [during his MFA program]. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”

One more:

Mona Simpson taught Brown in two classes at UCLA and supervised his senior project, an early draft of Upward Bound. “He has a natural instinct for the shape of a story,” Simpson told me. “I truly have no doubts about Woody’s authorship.” But over the course of our conversation, she acknowledged the vagaries of collaboration — the possibility of some interpretation at play: “It could be that they’ve worked together so long that she can intuit some of what he’s intending. I don’t know.”

These responses are glib given what’s at stake here, but I can also understand how this puts individual instructors in a tough decision. Asking tough questions about Woody and Mary Brown is clearly the right thing to do, but it feels like the wrong thing to do. Wouldn’t it be much easier to assume that their communication system works, that someone, somewhere, had done the required rigorous testing? It’s a form of very human buck-passing, especially because it isn’t individual instructors or professors, after all, who make decisions about disability accommodations — it’s administrators.

I reached out to UCLA and Columbia University about this. Now, these institutions have certain obligations under federal law regarding Woody’s privacy. I wouldn’t expect them to renege on these obligations. Instead, while disclosing that I was writing about the Woody Brown controversy for this newsletter, I simply asked what their more general policy was toward facilitated communication. I sent both schools’ media offices versions of this email:

Read more

Boston magazine just published an article about Steven Pinker headlined “Can Steven Pinker Save Harvard?” Subheadline: “But the celebrity professor’s own record raises a question: Is he the right guy for the job?”

First of all, I don’t get that “but.” It’s not referencing anything! It’s like the original headline was going to be something like “Steven Pinker Wants to Save Harvard,” and then someone changed the headline without changing the subheadline.

Setting aside my overreaction to a minor copy-editing error, this conceit is also a bit much — it’s very magazine-y. No one, including Steven Pinker, thinks Steven Pinker is (single-handedly) going to “save Harvard.” The article is really about a few different things, most of them summed up in the very first paragraph: “His critics call him a cover for racists,” writes author Robert Huber. “He’s been accused of providing intellectual ammunition to the alt-right, and of dismissing inconvenient evidence when it doesn’t fit his theories.”

Huber doesn’t dive deeply into the idea that Pinker has “dismiss[ed] inconvenient evidence” — he mostly just quotes a couple of academics who have made that claim. So I’m more interested in the (re-re-re-re-)litigation of the idea of Pinker providing cover for or legitimizing bad actors. There’s a very long, involved controversy here that mostly has to do with virulent anger, on the part of a small but loud group of academics, about Pinker’s status as one of the leading public-intellectual debunkers of “blank slatism,” or the idea that all humans are basically the same, and that any differences that emerge are the result of external factors.

I find it surprising, in 2026, that adherents of the more sweeping anti-Pinker view have done so poor a job of addressing counterarguments to their position (I’m going to table the narrower and more standard academic debate over whether he has gotten this or that wrong in his books; obviously, it’s legitimate to closely read and critically respond to the work of as influential a figure as Pinker). Their myopia on this matter can, I think, be explained by their own form of blank slatism. They believe that people are more or less blank slates, with regard to political opinions, until they decide which scientific beliefs to adopt. Similarly, political ideologies are only adopted because they are seen as having scientific legitimacy.

So, the argument goes: Without figures like Pinker, who are at best useful idiots and at worst quiet but intentional enablers, the alt-right would have far less intellectual fuel and wouldn’t have gained the power it has gained. Or if they aren’t arguing this, I don’t understand how they could possibly have remained so mad at Pinker for so many years.

But there’s another way of looking at things: Humans have certain hardwired or nearly hardwired tendencies. We’re very good at carving the world into us versus them, for example. Is there a society anywhere that doesn’t do this? There are a million strains of us-versus-them-ism. There are relatively “soft” versions like civic nationalism, in which differences that in other contexts might matter a great deal are overlooked (or partially overlooked) in favor of a big collective identity. That’s America, at its best, though there are obviously also downsides when it comes to xenophobia in times of war, and so on. But civil nationalism is cupcakes and cotton candy compared to the harsher, more evil forms of us-versus-them-ism — racism, Nazism, and so on.

Read more

Below the paywall you’ll find my latest column in The Dispatch. This is one of the (many! uncountable!) benefits of being a premium subscriber to Singal-Minded — you get these columns about a day after they appear (also behind a paywall — sorry everything in the world is paywalled) on The Dispatch.

This column is a response to a conspiracy theory that bothers me. The conspiracy theory holds that the backlash to trans rights is the result of “out-of-state billionaires” (Graham Platner’s view) or center-left/“reactionary centrist” types, myself included, in outlets like The Atlantic or The New York Times (all of Bluesky’s view).

The basic idea is that voters have been bamboozled into thinking a “fake” issue is a “real” issue. There isn’t actually anything to talk about when it comes to the briefly, wildly successful progressive campaign to change how society views sex and gender identity, and to institute many of those changes into law and regulation (and despite the backlash, many of those codified changes remain).

I’d like to briefly mention the response to the article from Alejandra Caraballo, the trans activist and clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. She has come up before in this newsletter and is generally not worth engaging with. It is to our collective benefit that she has sequestered herself on Bluesky, where she can do her thing all day far from society.

But I can’t resist responding to two bits from the lengthy skeetstorm she posted in response to my article (you won’t be able to read it unless you’re signed in — which, maybe for the best…).

First:

Singal frames trans advocacy as demanding “someone’s sex is what they say it is” with “no questions asked.” This is the caricature that the right spent those hundreds of millions constructing. He’s repeating the propaganda in a moderate voice to appeal to liberal’s prejudice. [next skeet]: Actual legal frameworks for gender recognition vary enormously and involve documentation, clinical engagement, and administrative processes. Singal collapses all of that into the most inflammatory possible framing and attributes it to a monolithic movement. It’s a strawman.

Specifically, I wrote that the trans backlash appears to be the result not of some broad, deep-seated animus toward trans people and a desire to see them removed from their homes or jobs (for example), but because the “specific arguments trans advocates and progressive politicians have chosen to embrace simply don’t appear to have worked at all,” emphasis in the original.

And that, I argue, is

largely because they center on a maximalist version of self-ID, or the notion that someone’s sex is what they say it is. Blue states have passed laws extending this logic to areas like locker rooms and prisons, and these are wildly unpopular positions for obvious reasons: Most people don’t think biological males should be able to enter female spaces with no questions asked.

It is undeniably — undeniably — the case that mainstream trans activism has pushed for no-questions-asked self-ID! I don’t understand how anyone could have the audacity to claim otherwise! It’s too bad the word gaslighting has been ruined by overuse because damn, is this close: An activist coalition pushes X, someone responds by noting that X is very unpopular and leads to some bad outcome, and one of the activists in question sputters “What? We weren’t pushing for X! What are you talking about! That’s the most inflammatory possible framing!”

Obviously, Caraballo is correct in saying that the “actual legal frameworks” vary, but that’s not due to a lack of effort on the part of activists, who have pushed for just about the simplest legal framework possible: Because this person says so. California itself is a great example: It used to have a system that provided prisons with the discretion to make individual decisions about where trans women should be housed. Then the ACLU and other activist groups pushed for a law that basically turns this into a matter of self-ID, with explicit “regardless of anatomy. . . based on the individual’s preference” language that makes it difficult to keep males out of women’s prisons.

This from Caraballo annoyed me a lot more:

Singal claims marriage equality imposed “nothing other than hurt feelings” on opponents. This is revisionism and ignores religious exemption litigation like Masterpiece Cakeshop. Opponents made the exact same tangible-harm arguments. Singal sanitizes that history to make the comparison work.

Here’s the passage Caraballo is quoting from: “With a very tiny number of exceptions, gay marriage did not, in fact, impose anything other than hurt feelings and offense on its opponents.”

Part of the reason to stay away from Bluesky is that it is filled to the brim with the most brazen, shameless liars. I can’t imagine a better example than this: I write a sentence in which I make a point, note the existence of exceptions to that point, and link to the most famous exception. Caraballo responds by claiming I didn’t address the exception, quoting from the sentence where I addressed the exception! What do you even do with a “public intellectual” who acts in this manner? Again: Thank God for Bluesky and its sequestration function.

Subscribe now

Anyway, the column itself is below for premium subscribers. Hope you enjoy it.

Trans Issues Are No Conspiracy

The public pays attention to trans issues because trans activists wanted them to.

There’s been an undeniable backlash against the trans rights movement. In February, the liberal outlet The Argument reported on the results of a survey it had commissioned of 3,000 registered voters. The problem wasn’t just that the mainstream trans advocacy position was underwater on genuinely fraught issues like sports and youth gender medicine, but that even a seemingly settled issue—bathrooms—also now polled poorly for trans people.

Read more

If the “controversy” over Joe Rogan endorsing Bernie Sanders hadn’t actually happened, it would sound like something a right-wing internet troll had fabricated. It was that idiotic.

This was back in 2020, when, as you recall, professional progressives were hard at work at their nationwide Make As Many Americans As Possible Hate Us initiative — an undeniable success. On a then-recent episode of his podcast, Rogan had expressed enthusiasm about Sanders. “I think I’ll probably vote for Bernie,” he said, as quoted by CNN. “Him as a human being, when I was hanging out with him, I believe in him, I like him, I like him a lot.”

Rogan, then and now one of the most successful podcasters in the country, not only has a huge audience, but a huge audience of the very group Democrats have struggled with in recent cycles: young men. Naturally, then, the Sanders campaign tweeted out the clip of Rogan endorsing their man.

This, as hard as it might be to believe, sparked a “controversy.” Rogan, you see, had opinions that did not line up 100% with progressive orthodoxy, including the most important, vital-to-defend sort of orthodoxy: orthodoxy that had just been established. CNN dutifully reported, for example, that Rogan had

questioned — using offensive language — whether a transgender MMA fighter should be able to compete against other women. [This is a reference to Fallon Fox, a male-to-female MMA fighter.]

“If you want to be a woman in the bedroom and, you know, you want to play house and all of that other sh-t and you feel like you have, your body is really a woman’s body trapped inside a man’s frame and so you got a operation, that’s all good in the hood,” Rogan said. “But you can’t fight chicks.”

The Human Rights Campaign put out a statement denouncing Sanders for accepting the endorsement, noting that “In 2019, 25 transgender and gender non-confirming [sic] people were killed because of the type of transphobia that Rogan stokes.” One relevant fact about HRC here is that the organization vigilantly searches out stories of trans people who have been murdered, retcons these individual tragedies as having been caused by transphobia even when there’s no evidence that was the case, and then uses these misrepresented killings as a fundraising device. (I wish I were making this up.) “Given Rogan’s comments, it is disappointing that the Sanders campaign has accepted and promoted the endorsement,” tutted moral exemplar Alphonso David, who was president of HRC until whoops. “The Sanders campaign must reconsider this endorsement and the decision to publicize the views of someone who has consistently attacked and dehumanized marginalized people.”

If you take what HRC and a bunch of shrieking online weirdos — some of them, then as now, in positions of institutional progressive power — were saying at face value, it would mean that candidates like Sanders are allowed to accept endorsements only from figures whose views are already quite far to the left. This would, of course, make it very difficult to win any sort of national election.

On his podcast, Bill Simmons sometimes dips into his “Conspiracy Bill” persona, which grants him license to float wildly silly conspiracy theories about, like, the NBA draft lottery. Allow me here to briefly 1) don my Conspiracy Jesse hat, which is actually a velvet fedora; 2) note that if you’re living a comfortably upper-middle-class life working at a D.C. organization like HRC, some tiny part of you must know that your professional life actually benefits from Democratic losses; 3) ask you not to get offended because this is a simple corollary to the obvious fact that, for example, anti-abortion groups were undeniably hurt by Dobbs; and 4) take off the fedora and emphasize that I don’t really think this.

Anyway: We’re seeing a different version of this same controversy now, and it concerns a figure who is not seen as too far to the right but as too far to the left: Hasan Piker. The background here is slightly complicated but it comes down to the fact that, as per Politico, the centrist group Third Way is putting pressure on Democrats to not associate with Piker after Politico revealed that Piker “will stump in Michigan with Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed next month.” Other big lefty Democrats, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have previously done events with Piker, but now the pressure appears to be ramping up:

“Piker is close to — but not over — the Nick Fuentes line, where going on his show itself is indefensible,” Third Way co-founder Matt Bennett, who’s been sounding the alarm about Democrats’ affiliation with Piker, told POLITICO. Bennett added that Democrats “take on all of his baggage if they don’t overtly reject” him, which he said is “dangerous because it empowers the right and gives them an incredibly powerful tool to hit Democrats with that’s very bad.”

This strikes me as extremely naive. The idea that if you appear on a stream with someone, or do an event with them, you “take on all [their] baggage” is the sort of thing you could only come to believe if you are an overpaid political analyst. I just don’t think it accurately captures the relationship between influencers and their audiences. A lot of people tune in to folks like Piker and his ilk not because they agree with everything they say, but because of the parasocial feeling of hanging out with someone whose general vibe or worldview they like. This is difficult for those of us who are over a certain age or who don’t consume a lot of streaming (or both) to understand, but I strongly believe it’s true. This is just an extension of the commonly voiced but rarely internalized-among-political-elites finding that the “average American” doesn’t have the same sorts of meticulously labeled ideological commitments as college-educated, politically activated types. Again, it’s more vibes: We’re the weird ones for giving ourselves specific political labels and for holding bundles of beliefs that don’t actually “go” together for any coherent reason.

Read more

There are some significant changes coming to Singal-Minded. I’m excited to go into more detail soon, but one bit of very low-hanging fruit I have thus far failed to pluck is the excellent comments you guys post under each and every one of my articles. That changes now: Going forward, I’m going to publish a monthly roundup. In some cases I’ll simply highlight comments that deserve to be highlighted, and in others I’ll also respond. Feel free to use the comments sections of these posts to continue the conversation further, of course.

Thank you to [NEW MYSTERY ASSISTANT EDITOR WHO I WILL MORE FORMALLY INTRODUCE IN THE NEAR FUTURE, OR NMAEWIWMFIITNF], for doing the bulk of the work of compiling these.

Randall Randall, on “The Horseshoe Always Wins: Gettin’ Mad At Headlines Edition,” has thoughts on a not-great tweet from CNN I mentioned in that piece.

The CNN tweet was remarkable in that it seemed to assign responsibility for the “drastic change” to the arrest, rather than to the throwing of bombs. It doesn’t even say they threw bombs, just that they were arrested for it! This is the kind of wording many have come to see as an attempt by a media outlet to imply that someone did X, when the article then buries near the end that they were only accused of doing X. It’s language that signals something misleading is being conveyed, and it’s up to the reader to figure out how and what the writer’s bias was.

Ann, also on “The Horseshoe Always Wins: Gettin’ Mad At Headlines Edition”:

Genuinely confused by this statement: “I’m not calling for outdated ideals of perfect objectivity or whatever —” Perfection is not possible, agreed, but is it not still considered a worthy goal?’

All I was getting at here was that I don’t expect journalists to be robots viewing situations from 50,000 feet. It’s silly to demand we never let any moral judgment seep into our writings, but it’s even sillier to demand we inject large amounts of moral judgment — especially when the heinousness of an act or an attempted act speaks for itself.

Andrew Wurzer, on “AI Is Too Consequential For Half-Baked Lefty Critiques”:

AI is a great force multiplier. It’s a terrible replacement — so far, anyway. Can it replace entry-level employees? Some of them, at least. Enough of their tasks that they may not be worth hiring in nearly such large numbers.

The difference between an entry-level person and an LLM is that the entry-level person can reliably learn to get much better and more independent in a few years. The LLM? Jury’s still out. I have my doubts, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility. But if we stop developing higher-level talent, and AI is not able to keep up, in ten years we’re going to have problems as experienced people retire and cannot be replaced because we didn’t train anyone to do it.

The problem with all of this is that it’s very hard to keep up with the progression of LLMs. In my experience, LLMs can get better over time — and/or, perhaps just as importantly, their human users can get better at knowing how to usefully prompt them, when not to trust them, and so on. And the improvement does seem to be pretty insane over time. It’s just hard to say exactly which walls in which domains they’ll hit. In my daily use of Claude and ChatGPT, I’m consistently blown away both by how good it is and the basic nature of its errors! Just today I asked it a question about a specific date range I circled in red on a screenshot of a calendar. It confidently generated a long, likely compute-intensive answer based on totally different dates, and then I had to correct it! I just think so much money is on the line that those sorts of basic errors are likely to become less frequent in time.

I’d like to think that firms and organizations won’t be so myopic that they’ll fail to understand which tasks can’t be outsourced to AI and leave themselves in the situation Andrew describes. It’s going to depend on the humans responsible for making these decisions and their ability to accurately assess what can and can’t be outsourced. The general name of the game still seems to be expert human supervision for anything mission-critical that’s more complicated than entry-level.

TK-421, on “A Response To Critics Of My AI Article And An Apology To Librarians”:

There’s an old Edsger Dijkstra quote: “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” I wouldn’t put it quite that strongly — I think it’s a fascinating philosophical question in the right context — but in terms of evaluating whether a computer can perform a particular task or have a particular impact on society, whether it’s “really thinking” or not is much more of an academic question.

I’m agreeing with TK-421 agreeing with me, but this is well-put. It’s interesting to think about the Chinese room thought experiment, then versus now. The basic tension always centered on the fact that the guy inside the system clearly didn’t know Chinese — he was just blindly following instructions. Even though the common response to this is that the entire system the guy is immersed in “knows” or “understands” Chinese, it strains our intuitions a bit because the whole thing seems so clunky. But when the thing doing the translating/conversing/writing/reading is lightning fast and its inner workings are obscured to us, the so-called functionalist arguments just feel different.

Read more

A huge number of public debates are fundamentally pointless and, at least arguably, scammy.

What I mean is this: People express extremely strong opinions about certain subjects without ever explaining exactly what they mean. They’ll say they are ardently pro-X or anti-Y. But if you ask them to explain exactly what they mean by X or Y, you’ll often be met with hostility, the request itself treated as prima facie bad faith.

This sort of half-baked conversation benefits a lot of demagogues. These sorts of people are good at coming up with creative and often vitriolic ways of expressing their ardent support for X or their opposition to Y and, just as importantly, their disdain for people who feel differently. But if they were forced to carefully and transparently define their terms, they’d have a lot less control over the ensuing conversation and might find that they are not intellectually or rhetorically equipped to engage meaningfully in it.

Take the (related) debates over Black Lives Matter and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs. When these terms first went viral, good-versus-bad dichotomies emerged. To say you were in favor of BLM or DEI was to say you endorsed progressive views on race, policing, and the like. Likewise the opposite: To oppose BLM or DEI was to express support for conservative views on race, policing, and the like. It was all rather performative.

Eventually, the debates got more complex — it became clear that these terms could be seen as “floating signifiers” that meant different things to different people. Clarification became important. Did endorsing BLM mean that when police shoot someone, they should be subjected to a rigorous and independent investigation? Or did BLM mean, as the website BlackLivesMatter.com at one point endorsed, “disrupt[ing] the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable”?

I’ve found the DEI debate even sillier and even more in need of clarification. Do you “support DEI”? Shouldn’t it depend? If supporting DEI means ensuring everyone follows civil rights law, supported by trainings centered on the nature of those laws, that’s one thing. If supporting DEI means intense workplace encounter sessions in which employees are forced to cop to being (perhaps unconsciously) racist, perhaps exacerbating rather than ameliorating intergroup tensions in the process, that’s another thing. To this day, though, you see a lot of pundits, academics, and others pretend that being for or against DEI is an inherently good/bad position, as though this means much of anything in the absence of a lot more information. It’s a floating signifier and also a political football.

***

Earlier this month, the researcher David Manheim wrote on X, “People keep repeating ‘stochastic parrot’ — often without any mental process behind it to specify what the argument is.” So he decided to do something about it: He wrote “a paper dissecting various possible arguments, and explaining which are valid. Here’s a blog-post version.” He published that version to the rationalist website LessWrong. It’s titled “Hunting Undead Stochastic Parrots: Finding and Killing the Arguments.”

For those unfamiliar with the stochastic parrot argument, it comes from a very influential 2021 conference paper published by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell (going by “Shmargaret Shmitchell” here) titled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?”

I promise this isn’t another Singal-Minded piece about AI. It’s a piece about how to think and write clearly. But, briefly, Bender and her colleagues wrote that “Contrary to how it may seem when we observe its output, [a language model] is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot.”

Subscribe now

Even though the paper is about a lot of other stuff as well, because stochastic parrot is both in the title and is an ingeniously memorable phrase, it has turned into its own sort of viral floating signifier. You’ll commonly see arguments of the form that AI can’t really think or reason or understand, because it’s just a stochastic parrot. In my experience — and to borrow slightly from my last post on this subject — these arguments are often very vague, depending entirely on how the arguer him or herself would define terms like think or reason or understand. It’s also gotten harder and harder to treat these models as mere parrots as they’ve become increasingly powerful, unless we’re talking about some sort of mutant super-parrot (again, to be fair, the article was written in 2021).

Manheim’s post starts:

I argue the “stochastic parrot” critique of LLMs is philosophically undead — refuted under some interpretations, still valid under others, and persistently confused because nobody defined it clearly. This is an attempt to fix that.

He then lays out seven different versions of the “stochastic parrots” claim, all of which have different meanings.

He continues:

The most practically significant observation from this taxonomy is that there’s a conflationary alliance, a term Andrew Critch coined, among groups skeptical of LLMs, built on the ambiguity of “stochastic parrots.”

People with materially different philosophical and empirical commitments can all say “LLMs are just stochastic parrots” and mean completely different things. The Markovian version appeals to critics who wish to claim LLMs are simple. The Social Normative version appeals to critics who think society needs accountability from the LLMs. The Teleological version appeals to those dismissive of increased agency, and to safety researchers worried about goal-directed systems. Clearly, the groups have overlapping rhetoric but widely divergent implications — they’d give different advice about what to do, what evidence would change their minds, and what would constitute a solution.

The stochastic parrot argument was always a cluster of distinct claims, some of which were valid about earlier systems and have since been refuted, some of which remain live but depend on specific philosophical commitments, and some of which are unfalsifiable. Once these are separated, most of the ammunition for the argument disappears — what remains are legitimate concerns about accountability and social norms (Social Normative SPs) and a contingent empirical debate about generalization robustness (Unreasoning and Optimization-Artifact SPs), rather than a fundamental barrier to LLM understanding.

It doesn’t matter if you, personally, don’t get all of this. Parts of this paper were a bit above my own head, technically speaking. The point is that this is an extremely useful and intellectually helpful way of approaching this conversation. It advances it in a way merely having the ten-thousandth yes/no argument about “stochastic parrots” doesn’t.

The next person who wants to come along and participate in this debate can look at Manheim’s list and do all sorts of. . . stuff. They can refute the claim that anyone’s even arguing for this or that version. They can argue that versions Manheim is claiming are dead or ill are actually alive. And so on. This post, and the paper it will soon turn into, is fundamentally productive. Whereas a lot of pundits and a distressing number of actual “intellectuals” use slipperiness as a substitute for actual reasoning and argumentation, Manheim is actually intellectual and has reputational skin in the game, making arguments that are rather specific.

This might sound basic, but I’ve been depressed by how much of intellectual life — again, including intellectual life as carried out by actual intellectuals — operates at a much lower, fuzzier, more demagogic level than this. People like Manheim should be lauded for engaging in productive intellectual work, even if it turns out to be wrong, and the scamsters whose reputations rest on slipperiness should be called out as such.

As public (pseudo)intellectual life gets increasingly fractured and balkanized and shot through with demagogues and scam artists, I’m becoming increasingly interested in finding signals of trustworthiness. In general, if someone makes a strong claim — especially a morally weighted one — and then refuses to define their terms or answer follow-up questions, I think this is an extremely useful heuristic: This probably isn’t someone worth taking seriously. Of course this, like any other heuristic, isn’t 100% accurate, but if you’re out here attempting to build your reputation and/or intellectual project by making public claims, what excuse do you have to not meaningfully elaborate on and defend them?

Questions? Comments? Follow-up questions and requests for clarification? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com. Image: 07 March 2026, Berlin: A pair of parrots play at their nesting place in an alder tree on the Landwehr Canal. The collared parakeets (Psittacula krameri) have been at home in a park in Kreuzberg for two years and are very popular with walkers. They are extremely robust and can therefore spend the winter in freedom in cities. Photo: Jens Kalaene/dpa (Photo by Jens Kalaene/picture alliance via Getty Images)