Confirming all your priors:

The present study reports on the personality attributes of nursery school children who two decades later were reliably stratified along a liberal/conservative dimension. An unprecedented analytical opportunity existed to evaluate how the political views of these young adults related to assessments of them when in nursery school, prior to their having become political beings. Preschool children who 20 years later were relatively liberal were characterized as: developing close relationships, self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, relatively under-controlled, and resilient. Preschool children subsequently relatively conservative at age 23 were described as: feeling easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and relatively over-controlled and vulnerable. IQ during nursery school did not relate to subsequent liberalism/conservatism but did relate in subsequent decades. Personality correlates of liberalism/conservatism for the subjects as young adults were also reported: conservatives were described in terms congruent with previous formulations in the literature; liberals displayed personality commonalities but also manifested gender differences. Some implications of the results are briefly discussed.

Water is wet and all, but easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and relatively over-controlled is priceless.

How's everyone holding up? This is maybe a little bit reductionist or stuff we already know, but it resonated:

Your overwhelm is the goal 🧵

1/ The flood of 200+ executive orders in Trump's first days exemplifies Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" - using chaos and crisis to push through radical changes while people are too disoriented to effectively resist. This isn't just politics as usual - it's a strategic exploitation of cognitive limits.

2/ Media theorist McLuhan predicted this: When humans face information overload, they become passive and disengaged. The rapid-fire executive orders create a cognitive bottleneck, making it nearly impossible for citizens and media to thoroughly analyze any single policy.

3/ Agenda-setting theory explains the strategy: When multiple major policies compete for attention simultaneously, it fragments public discourse. Traditional media can't keep up with the pace, leading to superficial coverage. The result? Weakened democratic oversight and reduced public engagement."

(She also has a few recommendations.) But really, this is supposed to make everyone's autonomic nervous system spazz out.

Below the cut, one of the videos I use as a go-to pick-me-up. (I apologize that it's not subtitled.)

Discuss RFK here, but also I have a side question:

Obviously plenty of Trump policies in the first administration caused a lot of harm and suffering. That's a separate metric from how reversible the policy was - how easily government could return to business as usual under Biden.

From T1, which policies or events ended up being hardest to reverse? Supreme Court is obviously the mother of all hard-to-reverse outcomes, but what else? Which of the destructive crap ended up being easiest to reverse?

NickS writes: This story about Krugman leaving the NYT is interesting, but not particularly revelatory.

I appreciate that he's clear about his specific frustrations with the job, and that he doesn't present it as an ideological conflict. I'm sure they had political differences but it feels oddly unusual for an old, powerful white guy to frame his story as a workplace dispute and not, "they tried to silence me."

The offer to reinstate the newsletter did nothing to placate Krugman, who had another serious complaint. "I've always been very, very lightly edited on the column," he said. "And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence." And, increasingly, attempts "to dictate the subject."

"I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread," Krugman continued, "and often spent the afternoon in a rage. Patrick often--not always--rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work--certainly more emotional energy--into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft. It's true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless."

Healy denied he had done anything to muffle Krugman's voice. "He never called or emailed me saying I was changing his meaning or censoring his views, and he never lodged an objection to me that I overrode," Healy wrote in his email to CJR.

Heebie's take: I love Krugman at Substack - I read him so much more now. It's great. But I'm sorry his audience shrunk.

(Also the entire article is third person, except for this minor jab:

Almost everyone outgrows the Times eventually. I did when I was twenty-nine--mostly because of intrusive editing of my sentences by the metro desk.

So precocious!)

Ile writes: The Mineshaft if maybe It's seriously time to start a Resistance garden since farm workers are being scooped up. And has anyone done that only in containers? Are we maximizing vitamin c? My latest nightmare fuel is learning that scurvy opens up all scars including long healed ones from childhood. This is probably blathering panic but I have run out of "stop freaking out" spoons.

Heebie's take: I'm not at that point. I think there's quite a lot of deterioration of society that has to happen before we get to Resistance Gardens for nutrition.

Trump's gimmick is to terrorize everyone he hates, while convincing low-information white dudes that he's achieved Great Again. If the food supply chain gets disturbed, low-information white dudes would feel peeved.

But I did read the thing about scurvy opening up your scars - I think it was because your body is hunting for sources of collagen maybe? - and that is really a disturbing image.