I just finished the podcast Classy, which is a short and light take on the friction between the classes. It is not about policy solutions or analyzing how we got here - just strictly about the discomfort and awkwardness that occurs when different social classes coexist.

The host (and many of the guests) grew up poor but are now UMC, and that's the dominant lens that frames the podcast.

Some recurrent themes:
- the ambivalence you feel when you grew up thinking Walmart Product X was perfectly fine, and then you discovered that Cashmere Artisanal Y is actually divine, and you are kind of embarrassed and uncomfortable by the distance that has sprung up between where you started and where you landed.
- how many of the guests were first exposed to wealth when they accompanied their mothers to rich estates where their mothers were housekeepers.
- the anger that the have-nots feel towards the haves.

On that last point, the host is actually more chiding and finger-wagging towards the anger than I am. I'm not sure if it's because he doesn't want to alienate his NPR audience, or if it's because he himself is uncomfortable with the implication that he's now on the receiving side of the anger, or if it's because the everyday Joe with cashmere socks is not responsible for the policy decisions that impoverish half the country, so maybe I should cool it.

Finally, the host is Jonathan Menjivar. Menjivar manages not to do the irritating This American Life intonation too much, although it is still an NPR podcast. I found him likable.

My favorite episodes were Am I a Classhole?, with the author of ¡Hola Papi! (who we've discussed here before), and the last episode, Queen for a Day, about the insane eponymous TV show which is apparently known as the worst show ever.

I was issued an ID recently, and I happened to look on the back.

Hair: GRY

It's a slow news day, and no one topic seems interesting enough to justify a post.

1. There's the Jewish tunnels, but that's already being discussed in a thread.

2. New Year's Resolutions, which isn't very interesting, which is why it's now two weeks old in my queue of potential topics, and the ancillary Dry January if anyone likes to discuss such things.

3. Apparently a possible reason that MS clusters in Northern Europe is tied to a specific wave of herders and possibly some protection against livestock diseases.

The researchers identified a pivotal migration event about 5,000 years ago at the start of the Bronze Age when livestock herders called the Yamnaya people moved into Western Europe from an area that includes modern Ukraine and southern Russia.

They carried genetic traits that at the time were beneficial, protective against infections that could arise from their sheep and cattle. As sanitary conditions improved over the millennia, these same variants increased MS risk. This helps explain, the researchers said, why Northern Europeans have the world's highest MS prevalence, double that of Southern Europeans.

It's interesting! It's just that our science discussions are often a little clumsy or brief.

4. My back still hurts when I wake up in the morning. I'm having trouble figuring out a pain-free solution. Our bed is firm with a squishy topper, and it's hard to invest money in a new mattress situation without having reason to believe that's going to solve anything.

CharleyCarp writes: Are folks following the Nazis at Substack debate? Being on Casey Newton's discord has been a great vantage point for the thing. Here's where he's been. The headline Substack says it will remove Nazi publications from the platform overstates what Substack has agreed to do. Molly White has moved off Substack, but this apparently required some programming on her part. That Mineshaft Alum has moved his newsletter as well. Old Place.

What are our obligations as readers?

Heebie's take: Oh goddamnit, I hate dealing with content moderation so much. I don't necessarily want to punish those authors who don't leave over this, especially if they're not aware and don't have the means to easily migrate to new places. I hope Substack gets its act together.

Mossy Character writes: Virus:

From 2000 to 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) documented a ten-fold surge in reported cases worldwide increasing from 500 000 to 5.2 million. The year 2019 marked an unprecedented peak, with reported instances spreading across 129 countries. After a slight decline of cases between the year 2020-2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lower reporting rate, in 2023, an upsurge in dengue cases have been observed globally, characterized by a significant increase in the number, scale, and simultaneous occurrence of multiple outbreaks, spreading into regions previously unaffected by dengue.

The city of Dourados in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul on Wednesday began the country's first mass vaccination against dengue, the city's government said.

Heebie's take: All that and my back hurts! I think I'm sleeping weird. I don't think it's dengue (yet).

Awhile back I read this interview by AHP, about how the number of out-of-state attendees has risen at flagship universities. But it's very light on numbers.

This article (from 2015) has a lot of interesting charts and graphs (but it's super long, so I just looked at the charts and graphs):

Obviously some of that is just regionality of small states, and possibly a lot of the out-of-state students at a school like Vermont have some sort of reciprocity agreement. But that doesn't account for the whole phenomenon.

The general idea is that some schools - AHP focuses on Alabama - are putting the vast majority of their recruitment efforts into out-of-state students because they bring in so much more money.

From the culture study link:

So #1, state flagships have poured tons of money into developing pipelines from affluent out-of-state high schools. They want feeder schools so that it's normal for kids from say Long Island to apply to OSU, Wisconsin, Bama, Vermont, etc. Sometimes recruiters will make 2-3 visits a year to a private high school in another state to build the relationship. Another move is joining Common App (and requiring no supplemental essays) to make it easy to apply... In turn, many Black, Brown, and low-income students who could have benefited from the resources of the state flagship (including the big alumni networks) get routed to regional state campuses, which can be great but are historically under-resourced.

Here's my contrarian take: there are currently too many highly qualified students for too few slots at the best schools. Maybe this is just what growing pains look like when flagship schools become national schools, and regional schools become flagship schools (so to speak).

Obviously I think that regional schools should be better funded, and that there are too many barriers for bright, ambitious kids from poor families in poor communities! But that is always true, regardless of how many out-of-staters attend flagship universities. I can't get past the sheer numbers part of it - there are just way more highly qualified high school seniors applying to college than there were 50 years ago, and wherever those students land are therefore going to be populated with a strong student body.