Happy Halloween!

Natasha Miller says she was getting ready to do her job preserving donated organs for transplantation when the nurses wheeled the donor into the operating room.

She quickly realized something wasn't right. Though the donor had been declared dead, he seemed to her very much alive.

"He was moving around -- kind of thrashing. Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed," Miller told NPR in an interview. "And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was crying visibly."

It's spooOOOooky season! (All kidding aside, the story is horrifying.)

Two links on college admissions:

1.This seems like a win for transparency:

Texas students can now see which state public universities would accept them before they apply. Students can enter their class rank, grade point average, and standardized test scores to get a list of universities to which they'd be admitted.

Maybe this already happens elsewhere? There's also still a traditional admissions process if your scores don't get you in automatically.

2. Older, but: California bans legacy admits at all colleges, private and public. And apparently Virginia, Colorado, Maryland and Illinois already did so, but I hadn't heard about them.

I still think about the Early Decision loophole that de facto gives wealthy students access to better acceptance rates, but I suppose that's more about preserving the plutocracy than the quid pro quo of legacy admits.

...

On a totally different note, I started listening to the audio book of The Unaccountability Machine, and it's way more engaging and enjoyable than I expected. I assumed it would make me smarter, but I thought it would be a lot harder to get there.

Gen Z men are retrograde:

Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute.

and

Young men have different concerns [than young women]. They are less educated than their female peers. In major cities, including New York and Washington, they earn less.

At the same time, they place a higher value on traditional family life. Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points, according to a survey last year by Pew.

Sad!

Anyway, if you look at the gender gap in US presidential elections, the biggest one in the past 50 years was 1996. I would not have guessed that!

My hope - which is surely a safe bet? - is that there's a huge gap in turnout between the young women and young men. (Historical data.)