Author Archives: jgordon

“singing mice had approximately three times the number of neurons sending signals from the motor cortex to two specific downstream regions of the brain”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/science/a-mutation-gave-humans-the-gift-of-speech-these-mice-have-it-too.html

Language features emerge in small brains without novel anatomy but through expansion of existing pathways.

I strongly suspect something like this enabled humans to read.

“given the structure of legal and political institutions in America, the Supreme Court must function as a kind of crypto-Super Legislature”

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https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/05/the-law-question

Novel take

“All of which is a very convoluted way of saying John Roberts is either a liar or a fool. Knowing what I know about the institutions that educated him, which happens to be a lot, I’m going to go with the latter conclusion, which may be rather charitable of me”

“The widow of Renee Good has asked a court to order the federal government to hand over the vehicle her spouse was driving when she was fatally shot by an immigration agent in January.”

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https://www.startribune.com/renee-goods-widow-asks-feds-to-hand-over-vehicle-late-wife-was-driving-during-fatal-ice-shooting/601804458

Feds not doing any investigation but holding on to the property anyway to block state investigations.

COVID becomes a cold: “patterns indicate that new strains are relatively more capable of overcoming our immune responses, but the infection outcomes are more mild”

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https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/27/is-covid-still-a-thing-expert-analysis-who-needs-vaccine-booster-shot/

Immunity + virus evolution + non-exposed vulnerable are dead. Annual booster uncertain value.

Open question: do all coronaviruses cause a degree of vascular brain injury? How does that accumulate over a lifespan?

“Never Trumpers, the Always Trumpers, and then this really key group in the middle that’s pretty dispositive in terms of which way they swing and it’s dispositive in terms of determining election outcomes”

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https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-vibes-with-jared-bernstein

“What I think of them, at least in the context of our conversation, are people who believed Trump when he said, “I’m going to lower prices on day one.”

It’s powerfully tempting to consider this group simply dumb. They are not academics for sure. I suspect, however, that if we disregard their explanations their distress is sending a critical message.

Lessons from the wins and losses of the Tennessee Valley Authority: “Malaria affected close to 30 percent of the population”

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https://scalawagmagazine.org/2026/04/dirty-energy-and-the-lost-promise-of-the-tva/

TVA was public-private. We may be doing a lot more like that. So need to know this history.

“In the 1970s, TVA’s coal-fired facilities were responsible for about 14 percent of all toxic sulfur-dioxide emissions nationwide”

“The land the Clovis people entered around 13,000 years ago was full of enormous ambulatory meat lockers with little-to-no experience of human predation.”

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https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/anzick-1-the-clovis-people-and-life

I loved this informed recreation of life of early Americans.

A few hundred exploded across the continent. “The sheer speed of their expansion is remarkable, and in my opinion, perhaps the clearest example of demographic success we can see anywhere in prehistory.”