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.)

Moby writes: Canada seems to be unduly pressed by outside forces. In addition to the usual problem of being located north of us and having a head of state with dactylitis, India is killing its expatriate dissidents in Canada even though Canada is the country with the oil (gift link).

And, because I can remember 20 year old headlines from The Onion more easily than I can remember what I wanted to buy at Lowe's, I'm including a tangentially related bonus story from happier times.

Heebie's take:

The previously undisclosed details about India's alleged involvement in the 2023 death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar and other attacks stem from an ongoing investigation that Canadian authorities said has uncovered extensive evidence linking a larger outbreak of violence in Canada to the administration of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"We know they are involved in the Nijjar killing, in other murders and in ongoing violence -- actual violence -- in Canada," said a senior Canadian official. The official said that since Nijjar's death, the pace of threats has escalated to such an extent that authorities have warned a dozen individuals of Indian descent that there was credible information they could be targeted.

and from the second link:

"We are all pleased that these two nations were able to resolve their differences," said U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, hiding his mouth behind a manila file folder.

NickS writes: I found this story about a Tukwila pastor using her church as a sanctuary moving and an interesting exploration of the challenges that come with that.

Bolerjack isn't a trained social worker and doesn't have a background in immigration or homelessness services. But she's stubborn, likes to work fast and her past pushes her to say "yes."

She couldn't wait to act while government agencies created a plan, Bolerjack said. "But that's really uncomfortable for a lot of people."

It's especially uncomfortable for Tukwila's leaders.

"Pastor Jan continues to say 'yes' beyond her resources," Tukwila Mayor Tom McLeod said in August.

He wants Bolerjack to set firm limits on the number of people living on church property to a level their fire marshal deems appropriate, with that analysis now underway.

To appease Tukwila's leaders and receive their financial support, Bolerjack doesn't accept everyone anymore. She's already turned away hundreds of new arrivals. Her property has about 135 residents and migrants are scattered across the region now. But her church still plays a significant role, and it needs the city's help. Donations are falling and she recently put $8,000 in air conditioning repairs on a credit card.

Still, a low-simmering tension remains between Bolerjack and city leaders.

"Because I'm not saying I'm going to do what they're asking me to do, " Bolerjack said.

Her congregation is small -- she counts 12 who show up and about 40 on the books. But she's not worried about Riverton closing because through its social services -- cars line up at 5 a.m. for their food bank that opens at 10 -- she's been able to maintain relevance.

In seminary school -- after trying careers in physical education and nursing -- Bolerjack was taught ways to get more people in the pews on Sundays.

"That is not my interest," Bolerjack said. "My interest is being the heart and voice of God in the world."

Her church bosses describe her as "strong-willed" and "focused" and say they support the risks she's taken.

Heebie's take: First off, that woman is amazing. But there's also a really unnerving "things fall apart" centrifugal force to the story. The center can't hold.

Mossy Character sends in: 'The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out' - Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman.

Wow, basically Blue Zones are bullshit:

In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That's for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn't confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn't speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.

and

According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 "living" pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.

Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there's the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It's closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.

I guess you can go back to eating Western slop. Enjoy!