I thought this was interesting:

A significant association for later maternal age was found whereby women who had their last child beyond the age of 33 years had twice the odds of survival to the top 5th percentile of survival of their birth cohorts compared to women who had their last child by age 29.

This isn't a new result, but shores up a bunch of other research that points the same way.

I don't think they're making any claims about causality, though. The last sentence (about a different research project) at this link:

The researcher plans to also examine whether extended maternal age is a marker for healthy aging and longevity in all family members.

makes me think that is intended to tease that apart. My read is: if all members of the family have the longevity marker, then the longevity marker paves the way for extended fertility. If not, then it's the fertility that leads to longevity.

This is long and interesting on all the collected research on advanced maternal age.

There's a small bit on how racism intersects assisted reproductive technology, which gave me an unrelated thought: Are we about to see a big purge of government websites again? I'm remembering how everything got scrubbed in 2017.

Resolution time? Look, we all usually think resolutions are maybe a little hokey. But if you're turning away from politics a wee bit, what are you turning towards? Are you also taking up the tuba*?

*Not me. And was it the cello? And was it Chill? Who is learning what again?

I don't exactly have a resolution, but if I were going to have a direction of personal growth, I would enjoy it if these things became easier:
1. Decluttering the dumb old house
2. Figuring out how to handle work under time pressure? My local politics blog has ended up being a wild amount of work for three days, twice a month, and I wish I had some strategies to keep that from being such a roller coaster.

Look, I see predictions and resolutions as an irresistibly easy post. (Here's last year's predictions thread. My most woeful misfire: "Biden wins with a larger margin than in 2020. Trump's mental instability becomes obvious to uninformed, independent voters." In hindsight, that first debate was one of the pivotal moments of the year. It certainly felt like it in real time.)

It's easier to make predictions in an election year because there's some known scaffolding to mold your guesses around. It's harder this year. Like what even are the major categories for predictions?

So is this ban actually going to come to pass?!

From a Fresh Air transcript:

I want to talk a little bit about some of the scenarios if the January 19 ban stays in effect. People are just wondering, what does that mean? Does TikTok just go away then?

ROZENSHTEIN: I think more likely what's going to happen is that if TikTok thinks that the ban is really going to go into effect, it will move its infrastructure outside of the United States to physical servers that are not in the United States. Now, that's actually a very tricky thing to do. TikTok is quite large, and so, you know, moving to a different cloud service provider is not a trivial thing, but they can probably make something work. And so on January 19, it actually might be a seamless transition in the sense that if you already have TikTok on your phone, you may still be able to access it. But it might be quite a bit slower because now you're no longer accessing it in the United States, and also, your app will not upgrade over time. So as TikTok rolls out new features, as it finds bug fixes, your app is just going to stay.

And so, you know, I think that for the first day, week, month or two, it may be that TikTok users don't actually experience much, if at all of the disruption. But the farther we get into the ban, the worse the TikTok experience is going to be. And I think the big worry for TikTok is that at some point, that experience will degrade sufficiently, that TikTok users will decide, hey, maybe I should look at one of the competitors like Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.

Seems plausible.

I'm still not exactly clear on who wants this ban to go forward. Defense hawks? And I'm also not clear how many other companies would be included if we held other companies to this same standard.