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Chiefs' Harrison Butker hopes Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce 'get married and start a family'
Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker opened up about meeting Taylor Swift for the first time and what he hopes for her and Travis Kelce for the future.
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US and Japan call for ban of nuclear weapons in outer space
The U.S. and Japan are jointly sponsoring a United Nations Security Council resolution urging nations not to deploy or develop nuclear weapons in space.
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New York governor orders probe of marijuana licensing program 'disaster' amid black market surge
Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has ordered a probe of the state's recreational marijuana licensing program due to issues that have hindered its success.
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Whatever Happened to Teen Babysitters?
Babysitting used to be both a job and a rite of passage. For countless American teens, and especially teen girls, it was a tentative step toward adulthood—responsibility, but with guardrails. Perhaps you didn’t cook dinner, but you did heat some leftovers for the kids. Maybe you arrived to find them already tucked in, and you read them a story, turned out the lights, and watched TV until the car turned into the drive. You knew who to call if anything serious came up. Paula Fass, a historian of childhood at UC Berkeley, told me that she started sitting around 1960, when she was 12 or 13. By the time she’d arrive, she remembers, the parents had put their kids to bed and stocked the fridge for her to raid. They recognized that she was grown-up enough to be an extra eye in the home—but childlike enough to go looking for snacks.Sitting was a “quintessentially American experience,” Yasemin Besen-Cassino, a Montclair State University sociologist and the author of The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap, told me. For decades, working a part-time job was common for teens in the U.S.—perhaps a reflection of the cultural emphasis on hard work, discipline, and financial independence. Even tweens would babysit. And something about that position, teetering between dependence and independence, got lodged in our cultural imagination. Starting in the mid-20th century, the young sitter became an emblem of American girlhood—both a classic coming-of-age character and a locus of anxieties about girls’ growing autonomy. Just how mature are these teens? How much control should they have? And what kind of adults are they on the cusp of turning into? Those concerns preoccupied people not only in real life but also in a plethora of books, shows, and movies.Today, the teen babysitter as we knew her, in pop culture and in reality, has all but disappeared. People seem to worry less about adolescents and more for them, and for their future prospects. As Fass put it, “Teenagers don’t seem very grown-up these days.” There’s not much reason to fear or exalt babysitters anymore—because our society no longer trusts teens to babysit much at all.[Read: Teen brains are perfectly capable]The 1920s were boom times for leisure. New technologies made chores easier, freeing up couples’ time, and growing wages gave people more disposable income. Meanwhile, restaurants and movie theaters proliferated, and car ownership exploded. Parents were going out at night—and more mothers were working during the day too. At the same time, traditional child-care providers were becoming less available, Miriam Forman-Brunell, a historian at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, wrote in her book Babysitter: An American History; grandparents, for instance, were enjoying social lives of their own. Working-class families, Fass told me, would still have been likely to enlist older siblings to watch the young ones. But middle-class parents could also afford to pay a few bucks to the kid down the block, who—as companies were marketing products, more and more, to youths—now had a reason to want pocket money. The teen babysitter was born.From the beginning, the role was viewed with suspicion. Granting a young person unmonitored control over your children and your house may naturally have been a little worrisome—but beyond that, the sitter took on brewing cultural anxieties. Given that she was working outside her own home—and earning her own pay—she represented teen girls’ growing autonomy, according to Forman-Brunell. She was also associated with women’s liberation. After all, parents needed her partly because moms were starting not only to work but also to enjoy free time on the town. (Before the ’20s, Fass told me, “that kind of leisure had not been common to married women.”)Those domestic worries came through in pop-culture depictions of the sitter. In the midst of the 1960s sexual revolution, she was often portrayed as a temptress, seducing fathers when mom was away; in the ’70s, she started showing up in horror movies, trapped with a killer in the house and kids to protect—perhaps a way, Forman-Brunell suggests, to see her punished for her self-sufficiency or for the irresponsible behavior audiences seemed to imagine. None of that was likely helping sitters’ reputation, but parents still needed them. That’s when The Baby-Sitters Club, the ’80s book series about a group of tweens running a sitting business—and solving mysteries in their spare time—came to the PR rescue. The novels exemplified what Forman-Brunell calls the “supersitter” trend, portraying fun but well-behaved, competent girls: role models for kids, and also a comfort for nervous parents. Teens’ trustworthiness was a tug-of-war.But that cultural battle has quieted. There’s little point in it now, perhaps, because actual teens may not be babysitting so much anymore. The field is hard to track precisely, because it’s so informal by definition, but sources told me that many parents today are looking for professionalized child care, or at least older and more experienced caregivers. Teens, meanwhile, are given few opportunities for responsibility—especially with the kind of training wheels that babysitting used to entail.[Read: Why adolescence feels so intense]The archetypal sitter lived just a few doors down. She was the daughter of your friends; she was the girl you’d been watching grow up for years. But Americans today tend to be less well acquainted with neighbors than they used to be, and they trust other people less in general. If you’re not familiar with the high-schooler on your block, you might not feel comfortable placing your children in her questionably capable hands. Even more than that: You might never connect in the first place.Even if parents do know potential young sitters nearby, they may still hesitate to rely on them. In the past few decades, as “intensive parenting” has become a child-rearing ideal across classes, grown-ups have broadly begun to see kids as fragile and in need of constant oversight. Tweens or younger teens might not seem like comforting sources of protection—they might seem like children in need of watching themselves. As Fass pointed out, it didn’t used to be unusual for 12-year-olds to babysit. Now more than two-thirds of American parents think kids should be 12 or older before they’re even left home alone. Several states have guidelines issuing a similar age limit; in Illinois, kids legally can’t be left unattended until age 14.The intensive-parenting approach isn’t just about physical safety; it’s also about ensuring kids’ future financial security, using every spare moment to “enrich” them with skills. Besen-Cassino found in her reporting that this was very much part of parents’ calculus when it came to their children’s care. Many families don’t want their kids wasting time sitting in front of the TV or even just playing, she told me; they want them learning, say, math or piano or another language. And if kids are spending time in scheduled activities led by adults, they don’t need a sitter. The same trend means teens themselves are also likely to be preoccupied—too busy with SAT prep or Model UN to be babysitting. Indeed, teen-labor participation has been dropping for decades, driven in part by adolescents turning instead to academic pursuits and internships. (High-schooler employment rates rose slightly after 2020—perhaps partly because employers, strapped while emerging from pandemic lockdown, were more willing to accommodate teens’ hectic schedules—but remain lower than they were in the latter half of the 20th century.) Part-time employment used to be a milestone in many kids’ transition to adulthood. But today, the period between childhood and adulthood seems to be longer than ever—psychologists call it “extended adolescence.” Americans are getting married, having kids, and buying houses at older ages, and spending longer on education and career exploration beforehand. So teens don’t just seem unfit for babysitting; babysitting might also seem unfit for teens. It’s not the kind of thing you think to put on a résumé.Of course, not every teen has the privilege of doing an unpaid internship rather than making money; not every family can afford to fill their kids’ time with tutoring or extracurriculars. But intensive parenting isn’t limited to the superrich; it was initially described as a middle-class phenomenon, and more recently it’s spread, at least as an aspiration, across classes. So while less wealthy families are particularly likely to rely on unpaid child care from relatives or friends, many other parents are scrambling to give their kids a leg up with activities—or, if they’re really rich, leaning also on au pairs or boarding schools. It’s unclear who exactly the clientele for the humble babysitter really is anymore.The result is that babysitting today feels more like a symbol of a bygone American era than a normal part of how teens come of age. The glut of babysitting pop-culture content has thinned significantly; even the TV reboot of The Baby-Sitters Club, which was such a massive hit as a book series, was canceled in 2022 after two seasons. The creator, Rachel Shukert, told Vulture that she believes that was partly because Netflix marketed it to girls rather than to grown-ups: “A show like this has tremendous nostalgic potential,” she said. “But if you’re 35 and you loved the books … Netflix is not going to show The Baby-Sitters Club to you.” It doesn’t sound like it hit teens particularly hard, perhaps because the experience of babysitting isn’t relatable to them.Or maybe it just didn’t hit a cultural nerve because our fears are evolving. The Baby-Sitters Club was a blueprint for girls becoming women in a time when people were anxious about them maturing the right way. But most of the main characters are 12 or 13 when the series begins; Mallory, initially one of the club’s charges, starts babysitting herself at 11. It might no longer seem like a coming-of-age narrative because people may be less likely to see 11-to-13-year-olds as coming of age at all—just as kids.[Read: Why don’t we teach people how to parent?]Teen babysitters still exist, but they’re facing a different field than they once might have—more structured and formal. A 2020 study found that sitters tended to prepare carefully for their role, taking safety courses and planning a slate of activities in advance—and parents were comforted by those displays of seriousness. When Besen-Cassino spoke with sitters for her research, she learned that they had used their free time not just to get CPR training or lifeguard certifications or driving lessons but also to take classes so they could offer to help kids learn math or music or sports. They advertised themselves, she told me, as “not just a babysitter but someone who can change the life of that child.”Especially given that babysitting has long been undervalued and underpaid, it seems unfair that teen girls should have to make all that extra effort just to get their foot in the door. And yet, caregiving is serious work; the fact that parents are taking it seriously is warranted. For so long, it’s been treated as something girls and women do naturally, not as labor that requires skills and deserves fair compensation. If we acknowledge that babysitting is more than just a starter job, maybe it makes sense for adults to take it on.But young people do need some opportunities for growth. Rebecca Raby, a professor of child and youth studies at Brock University, in Canada, told me that first jobs can be extremely formative, even empowering experiences. She’s found that many young babysitters have a sense of pride in their craft and their earning ability. In the liminal space of early teenhood—a time of feeling awkward, misunderstood, and largely powerless—having a job can grant you dignity. And to be a role model for a younger kid might be nothing short of profound. Ideally, society could acknowledge the gravity of caregiving but also support the teens who want to do it—and some people are working toward just that. Margaret House, a coordinator for Oregon State University’s community-partnership program, runs a babysitting-training program through the youth-leadership organization 4-H. She teaches teens about child development but also how to impress wary parents: the dos and don’ts of being in someone else’s home, different parenting styles, how to talk about yourself in interviews. They discuss how this work can lead to a real career—working in a day-care center, teaching preschool, researching early childhood—and how they might include babysitting on a résumé. Still, she doesn’t forget that this work is about creating trust in communities. Sure, it takes a village to raise a child, she told me, but “there is no village.” So grown-ups have to build it themselves.House does sometimes have trouble connecting her sitters to parents. Recently, she tried to do a meet and greet at the local library, and she remembers that only a couple of adults showed up. But she doesn’t doubt that there’s an audience out there. She reminds the teens to tell parents about any extra talents they have, yes, but she boosts them up regardless: “Parents might want someone who’s older and going to be able to teach them multiple languages or whatever.” But just by being present and attentive, they’re offering a valuable service. “So don’t shortchange yourself,” she tells them.Families still need help caring for their kids. Teens still need money, and chances to practice responsibility. And neighbors could stand to trust one another more—to start building their village. That won’t look just like it did in 1950, but that’s for the best. Perhaps we’ll find a way to finally treat adolescents as just what they are: not children and not adults, not scary and not superhuman. Just young people who, with a bit of support, can be capable of a great deal.
theatlantic.com
Caitlin Clark Is Just the Beginning
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Caitlin Clark’s remarkable season is how many people have been watching it.All but two of the University of Iowa women’s basketball games have sold out or set an attendance record, according to the university’s athletic department. Iowa sold out its season-ticket allotment in August—three months before the first game—and teams hosting Clark have found her to be a one-woman boon to the local economy. An Associated Press analysis found that Iowa road games have seen a 150 percent increase in average attendance. Tickets to the February game in which Clark set the all-time college women’s scoring record were, at about $400 on the secondary market, the most expensive in the history of women’s college basketball—until the game, two weeks later, in which she passed the men’s all-time scoring leader, when the average resale ticket went for $546. Clark has made Iowa games competitive in TV viewership with NBA games and the highest-profile men’s college matchups. Heading into the NCAA tournament, she is easily the most famous player in college basketball, if not all of college sports.And yet Clark’s singular level of stardom obscures an even bigger shift taking place in college sports: After decades of treatment as second-class citizens, women are surpassing men in popularity, interest, and financial potential. The second-most-famous player in American college basketball is also a woman. So, arguably, are the third-, fourth-, and fifth-. Aside from dedicated hoops fans, most Americans probably don’t know much about Zach Edey, Purdue’s hulking center and the presumptive men’s national player of the year for the second year in a row. Many more people have heard of Angel Reese and JuJu Watkins. Eventually, the men’s game will get another zeitgeist-dominating star, but it could be a while, given that the most famous men’s prospects don’t spend much time, if any, in college. Zion Williamson came through the ranks for one year in 2019. Victor Wembanyana didn’t play in college at all, nor did three other top-five picks in last year’s NBA draft.[Adam Harris: San Antonio, the Spurs, and me]Clark’s greatness as a player is a big part of her mainstream breakthrough, but it’s not the whole story. Clark sits at the intersection of several major shifts in the economics of college sports, and she arrived at the perfect moment to accelerate and take advantage of those changes. The new ability of college athletes to monetize themselves and build individual brands has led to a women’s hooper, not a football or men’s-basketball player, becoming the biggest draw. Clark is the first star of this magnitude to emerge from women’s college sports, but she will not be the last. More than any scoring record, her legacy will be proving that there’s no ceiling on how popular women’s sports can be.Clark is astonishing to watch. She makes shots from every zip code and slings deft passes that call into question how many eyeballs she has. The only college-basketball fan who can look away from her is the Ohio State student who ran into her while rushing the court after one of Iowa’s rare losses. Clark seems comfortable with her stardom. She signs endless autographs, takes pictures with kids, and talks often with the press. “Watch her postgame, trying to leave the gym,” the longtime Iowa sports writer Patrick Vint told me. “It’s like the Beatles.”But all of that talent and charisma would probably not have been enough to make Clark such a cultural sensation even five years ago. Women’s sports have historically gotten short shrift from campus administrators and the NCAA, who too often have treated women’s sports as little more than a box to be checked for Title IX–compliance purposes.Only recently have sports’ power brokers come to see women’s athletics less as an obligation than as a potential growth property. Some of that stems from an obvious and overdue realization: Fans enjoy watching women’s sports. Softball competes with and sometimes beats college baseball for viewers. Ratings are up for gymnastics and volleyball. But just as crucial was the NCAA’s 2021 decision, made under legal and political pressure, to allow athletes to be paid for the use of their name, image, and likeness. That reform didn’t just permit booster payments from the local car dealership. It created a financial incentive for college athletes to build their individual brands on social media and leverage those followings into lucrative endorsement deals. The biggest college stars today are well-known personalities—athlete-influencers, essentially—who carry individual marketing value. And, perhaps surprisingly, given the dominance of football compared with other college sports, these stars are disproportionately women. The Olympic gold-medal gymnast Suni Lee, who competed until November 2022 at Auburn, has about 3.1 million total followers on Instagram and TikTok. She sometimes shared a gym with LSU’s Olivia Dunne, who has 13 million. Compare that with LSU quarterback Jayden Daniels, the most recent winner of the Heisman Trophy, who has just shy of 200,000 Instagram followers.At the highest levels of stardom, collegiate women have outpaced men at building online followings. (Two notable exceptions are the University of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders and the University of Southern California guard Bronny James. Not coincidentally, their fathers are two of the most famous American athletes of all time.) Basketball has the most stars: Clark, UConn’s Paige Bueckers, LSU’s Reese and Hailey Van Lith, USC’s Watkins, and Stanford’s Cameron Brink are among the big-ticket social-media presences. This freshly monetized star power is combining with the broader recognition of how fun the games are to generate an overall boom for the sport itself. The right to broadcast the NCAA women’s-basketball tournament is valued at $65 million a year in a new agreement with ESPN, more than triple its worth under the previous agreement, signed in 2010.[Read: How men muscled women out of surfing]Clark is at the tip of the spear, having proved to be a sought-after partner for blue-chip companies, including Gatorade, Nike, State Farm, and Goldman Sachs. Some commentators have speculated that she may be at the top of her earning capacity right now, rather than in the WNBA, where she will make roughly $77,000 in salary as a rookie next year. The WNBA doesn’t have as big a fan base as the college game. Attendance is rising, but no WNBA team sold out more than 12 of 20 games in the 2023 season. Even Brittney Griner’s return last May—a marquee event celebrating a marquee player—didn’t fill the house. In professional markets with lots of entertainment competition, the roar of the crowd will not be the same as it was on campus.But we’ve also never seen a player enter the WNBA with as much hype as Clark. As the recent No. 1 WNBA draftee Aliyah Boston explained in an interview with the sports reporter Khristina Williams, “These brands still want to follow you. Your fan base does not change.” Clark, as the consensus best player in the draft, will join Boston on the Indiana Fever, which once again owns the first pick. Clark already has a deal in place with the Indiana company that sponsors the team’s arena.Clark’s economic power is even more striking considering the broader sports-business dynamics right now: With the notable exception of the NFL, getting fans excited about anything in sports these days is a big lift. Attention spans are short. Young people are interested in other things. Leagues are scrambling to make games shorter in order to keep spectators engaged, and many teams across sports are struggling to get butts in seats. One person in the college-sports industry right now has a demonstrated ability to cut through those headwinds, to make every game she plays feel like the most important game that’s ever been played. She happens to be a woman. And whoever succeeds her as the face of college basketball will probably be a woman too.
theatlantic.com
Israel sending delegation to DC after White House blasts lack of ‘coherent strategy’
Israel is sending a delegation to Washington to discussr plans for an invasion of Rafah after the White House said Israel lacks a "coherent" strategy.
foxnews.com
5 NBA Draft prospects to watch heading into 2024 NCAA Tournament
With March Madness upon here, some of the top NBA prospects in the country will be centerstage looking to impress everyone before the 2024 NBA Draft.
foxnews.com
The Worst Argument for Youth Transition
The point of a public intellectual is to make wild arguments with maximum conviction. And in this respect, Andrea Long Chu—transgender woman, Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic, irrepressible provocateur—always exceeds my expectations.In a recent cover story for New York magazine, Chu makes the case for child gender transition using the most unpopular rationale possible: in essence, that minors should be allowed to have mastectomies and other gender surgeries if they want them, simply because they want them. “We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex,” Chu writes. “It does not matter where this desire comes from.”Counterpoint: It does.The most broadly appealing version of the argument for medical transition is that a small number of people have a psychological condition (gender dysphoria) that makes them unhappy (because their sexed bodies feel alien to them) and doctors have treatments (hormones and surgery) that can help.In making the case for youth transition, activists have tended to emphasize the first part of that story—the distress of gender-nonconforming children—to justify treatments that would otherwise sound extreme. Even Marci Bowers, the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, has noted that blocking puberty early means patients might never develop adult fertility or sexual function. The price of a genetically male child never growing an Adam’s apple or having his voice break—the outcomes that will help that child pass more easily as a woman one day—can be giving up orgasms and the ability to have biological children.Put simply, this is not something that most parents would agree to—unless the alternative was worse. And so medical-transition advocates have highlighted the possibility of suicide by gender-nonconforming minors: Would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter? (Thankfully, adolescent suicides for any reason are rare, although rates have risen in the past decade.)Treating gender dysphoria as a clinical diagnosis with a medical solution, Chu argues, has “hung trans rights on the thin peg of gender identity”—the idea of a male or female essence (or something in between) that resides inside all of us. She notes that this argument was copied from the marriage-equality fight, where activists stressed that being gay was an innate and unchangeable state, not a trend, a pathology, or something into which a person could be groomed or seduced. Adopting a similar “born this way” argument for medical transition, Chu writes, “won us modest gains at the level of social acceptance.”[From the July/August 2018 issue: When children say they’re trans]She doesn’t think this is enough. Instead, she makes an argument for full-throttle libertarianism, albeit without ever using the word. She doesn’t want grudging accommodations and delicately balanced rights. She wants people like her—born male and living as women—to have unfettered access to female sports and services, based purely on their self-identification. And she wants Americans of any age to have the right to “change sex,” a phrase she seems to define specifically in terms of medical body modification.The stark facts of child transition are that when the puberty-blocker model was developed, a few hundred minors sought treatment every year—England’s main clinic had only 210 referrals in 2011—and those treated were mostly natal males who had suffered gender dysphoria since early childhood and exhibited no other mental-health issues. What kicked off the current debate was a steep rise in the number of children seeking care, and the changing demographics of those children. In recent years most of the patients have been genetically female, and many of them presented with other issues, such as autism, eating disorders, anxiety, or past trauma.Undoubtedly, such children need parental support, counseling, and appropriate medical treatment. The “affirmative” model departed from this assertion, though, characterizing extensive psychological assessments as transphobic gatekeeping. Removing barriers to medical transition was a “life-saving” approach, supporters claimed.However, the evidence that adolescent medical transition prevents suicide turns out to be thin. As early as 2018, the Gender Identity Development Service—Britain’s leading child gender clinic, staffed by doctors involved with transition-related care—criticized a television drama called Butterfly that showed a gender-nonconforming 11-year-old attempting suicide. “It is not helpful to suggest that suicidality is an inevitable part of this condition,” the clinic declared in a statement. “It would be very unusual for younger children referred to the service to make suicidal attempts.” Last month, a Finnish study concluded that suicide was rare among minors seeking help at gender clinics, and when deaths occurred, they reflected overall mental-health challenges rather than being specifically linked to gender dysphoria.This emerging evidence doesn’t bother Chu, because she regards evidence as a real downer. She criticizes the writer Jesse Singal’s 2018 Atlantic cover story on child transition—which included interviews with doctors and patients who had a variety of perspectives on the issue—and claims that it ushered in an unwelcome phase of the transgender debate. “The story provided a template for the coverage that would follow it,” she writes. “First, it took what was threatening to become a social issue, hence a question of rights, and turned it back into a medical issue, hence a question of evidence; it then quietly suggested that since the evidence was debatable, so were the rights.”[Daniela Valdes and Kinnon MacKinnon: Take detransitioners seriously]For Chu, the primacy of rights means that evidence is irrelevant to medical decisions—even when children are involved. This view has two logical implications: The first is that, if we are now just letting kids do whatever they want with their bodies, why not let them get married at 12, or drink alcohol at 13, or consent to sex at 14 with an adult partner? “Toddlers have the right to get tattoos” might be the worst political slogan I have ever heard.The alternative argument is that gender—however you define it—is so unique and important that it alone justifies total bodily autonomy for minors.Whenever I read Chu’s work, I get the sense that she’s mocking the strand of feminism for which I have argued all my adult life. The project of feminism, from Mary Wollstonecraft onwards, has been to decouple the material reality of being born female from notions of passivity and femininity. But in her book, Females, Chu writes enthusiastically about “sissy porn,” in which “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is.” (Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the more standard definition of XX chromosomes and the body type evolved to produce large gametes.) Shorn of identifying information, the author of that quotation could be assumed to be an old-school misogynist rather than a darling of the progressive left.But such trollishness is Chu’s preferred style when writing about gender. (Her literary criticism is more straightforward.) She has written that she transitioned to experience “benevolent chauvinism” and to wear hot pants, and argued that “my new vagina won’t make me happy, and it shouldn’t have to.” The modern trans movement has largely tidied away the suggestion that sexuality—and particularly, the sexual fetish known as autogynephilia, where men become aroused by the thought of themselves as women—has anything to do with transition. Yet Chu has steamrolled through that taboo too, wondering aloud whether sissy porn made her trans. Sometimes I think only her ideological opponents actually read her work. Certainly, liberals tend to get uncomfortable when you quote from it, because they know perfectly well that this is not the trans-rights narrative approved by GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign. You have to argue against her with one hand tied behind your back, politely overlooking her actual, published statements, including her claim that the anus is “a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed.”Anyway, it turns out that I wasn’t wrong to think Chu is mocking me—because she is, specifically, by name. Her New York article includes me on a list of supposed gender-critical “militants,” alongside Singal, Matthew Yglesias, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Meghan Daum, and Bari Weiss. “Many of these writers live in self-imposed exile on Substack, the newsletter platform, where they present themselves as brave survivors of cancellation by the woke elites,” she writes. Never mind that to most of America, my European center-left views make me a woke elite. My offense is to be “preoccupied with the ‘science denial’ of radical activists, who have put wokeness before rational standards of care.” Yes, I do think doctors should have a good evidence base before giving out drugs used for chemical castration. Guilty as charged!Chu identifies my fellow militants as an insidious force against the affirmative gender-care model. The queer theorist Judith Butler believes that only fascists—and trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, whom Butler sees as fascists in disguise—have questions about the new orthodoxy on gender. But Chu is willing to grant us membership in a third category. We are TARLs, or trans-agnostic reactionary liberals. (To my ears, this doesn’t sound as catchy as TERF, but then, I haven’t yet had the newer term screamed at me through a megaphone by a six-foot figure in a balaclava.) “The TARL’s primary concern, to hear him tell it, lies in protecting free speech and civil society from the illiberal forces of the woke left,” she writes. “On trans people themselves, the TARL claims to take no position other than to voice his general empathy for anyone suffering from psychological distress or civil-rights violations.” Again, guilty as charged.The ostensible hook for Chu’s argument is a new book by Butler, and the essay begins with a review of it. My impression, however, is that Chu finds Butler’s prose dull (relatable) and their persona dour; she clearly prefers her own rhetorical fireworks and provocative poses to Butler’s pioneering work in the field of impenetrable subclauses.Chu’s real motivation, surely, is a sense that her side is losing. In Europe, where the “Dutch protocol” of puberty blockers was developed in the 1990s, several countries are turning toward talk therapy as a first-line treatment instead. Just after Chu’s essay was published, England’s National Health Service announced that it would no longer routinely prescribe puberty blockers for dysphoria, saying that the evidence for their safety and effectiveness simply was not good enough. France, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and even the Netherlands have also pulled back—hardly a roster of countries that you’d describe as being to the right of the United States. Crucially, these decisions have been led by doctors, not politicians, unlike in the U.S., where the debate is extremely polarized and the most high-profile opponents of youth transition are Republican governors.[Helen Lewis: The only way out of the child-gender culture war]But even in America, the debate is shifting. Quite a bit of Chu’s essay is devoted to complaints about media organizations that have not sufficiently echoed the activist line—that puberty blockers are safe and reversible, and that the “science is settled.” The New York Times is deemed to have fallen into the hands of barbarians, or at least failed to stop them from storming the affirmative gates. (Its recent publication of more skeptical articles has led to staff revolts.) “The paper consistently refuses to treat transition-related care the way it would any other health-care matter … as an issue of access,” Chu laments, ignoring the fact that if rates of women seeking abortions, say, rose by thousands of percent in a decade, the Times probably would write about the phenomenon.The loss of the Times as a reliable ally matters because the American model of youth transition is best described as consensus-based rather than evidence-based—which is to say, it rests on the agreement of credentialed experts rather than on the conclusions of highly rigorous studies. And when the clinical rationale for underage medical transition disappears, what is left is ideology. “The belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism,” Chu writes. She would prefer to make a radical claim for unfettered personal freedom, even for minors: “Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again. Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others.” (It doesn’t, of course—it means that male puberty and higher male testosterone levels confer significant sporting advantages, but that’s me being a reality-accepting nihilist again.)Above all, Chu argues, we should treat children’s statements about their identity with unquestioned reverence: “To make ‘thoughtfulness’ a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege. That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom.”In making a case this way, Chu shows a titillating disdain for respectability politics—and will surely irritate many people who share her political goals. For skeptics of puberty blockers like me, who are used to arguing against people who claim that any overreach in gender medicine is not really happening, or that too few patients are involved to be worth caring, or that we should be writing about something more important instead—all the riotous flavors of denial and whataboutism—Chu’s case for unlimited agency for teenagers is refreshing. She said everything out loud, and her argument is logical, coherent, and forcefully delivered. You just won’t hear it made very often, because it’s about as popular as the case for letting 9-year-olds get nose jobs.
theatlantic.com
Congress is the NIL referee we never wanted -- column
Collegiate athletes and coaches went to Capitol Hill to talk NIL but David M. Rich writes that Congress isn't the body college athletics needs to deal with NIL.
foxnews.com
Trump's immense GOP clout on the line in contentious Republican primary in crucial Senate battleground
Former President Trump's GOP clout is on the line in Tuesday's Republican Senate primary in Ohio, in the race to face off in November against vulnerable Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown.
foxnews.com
California defendant on trial for murder allegedly stabs his attorney with pen, charges toward prosecutor
Two attorneys were injured in a California courtroom after a man on trial for murder allegedly used a pen to stab his own defense lawyer before attacking the prosecutor.
foxnews.com
Kim Kardashian's New Skims Ad Sparks Backlash
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newsweek.com
What has MLB scouts talking this spring: a rising AL power, the biggest threat to pitchers, breakout phenoms
I made this simple request to more than 30 executives and scouts: What have you seen this spring that has made you go “wow” positively and “wow” negatively?
nypost.com
What to Know About Nowruz, a 3,000-Year-Old Festival Celebrated by Millions Worldwide
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time.com
Support grows for US trail system proposal allowing coast-to-coast travel without roadways
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foxnews.com
Man convicted after DNA from gum links him to 1980 murder
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cbsnews.com
Steve Tensi, former Broncos and Chargers quarterback, dead at 81
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foxnews.com
'The View' Co-Host Calls Out Lara Trump Interview
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newsweek.com
Blinken Warns China Against Armed Attack on Philippines
The secretary of state struck a balance seemingly meant to deter China while avoiding a dangerous escalation with Beijing.
1 h
nytimes.com
Forget impeachment. Watch this Biden investigation.
In today’s edition … White House says Israel lacks a ‘coherent and sustainable strategy’ in Gaza … There is a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security.
1 h
washingtonpost.com
Mike Johnson’s ‘political stance is actually costing lives’ in Ukraine
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1 h
washingtonpost.com
Kate Middleton Theorists Warned of Reckoning Day
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1 h
newsweek.com
Kia SUVs Are Surprisingly Capable in Extreme Winter Weather
Kia, popular in the Southern United States, is gaining a foothold on customers throughout North America thanks to evolved drive technology.
1 h
newsweek.com
Freezing Weather Warning for 10 States as Cold Front Hits Deep South
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1 h
newsweek.com
COVID vaccines found to cut risk of heart failure, blood clots after virus infection
COVID-19 vaccines were found to cut risk of heart failure by up to 55% and blood clots by up to 78% following COVID infection, according to a new study.
1 h
abcnews.go.com
Taiwan Slams Russia's Putin for Backing China's Territorial Claim
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1 h
newsweek.com
Russian Neighbor Deals Blow to Putin With Western Pivot
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1 h
newsweek.com
Donald Trump Snubs Rudy Giuliani
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1 h
newsweek.com
California has to worry about measles again. But there's hope
Marin County and other areas with too-low vaccination rates have shown that vaccine skepticism can be reversed.
1 h
latimes.com
Murder defendant slips restraints in court, stabs his lawyer with pen. All good, attorney says
As a Contra Costa County jury watched, an Oakland man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend attacks his lawyer with a pen and tries to attack a prosecutor.
1 h
latimes.com
Hedges aren’t just for old British estates
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1 h
washingtonpost.com
California's Central Valley is voting, again, to replace Kevin McCarthy in Congress
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1 h
latimes.com
A little girl's family wants to know who slaughtered her pet goat. Shasta District Fair officials won't say
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1 h
latimes.com
Ani DiFranco on Broadway? She’s still wrapping her head around it.
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1 h
washingtonpost.com
How to get an inside look at gorgeous private gardens in and around L.A.
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latimes.com
Letters to the Editor: You can love Israel and want Netanyahu gone at the same time
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latimes.com
March Madness regional breakdowns: Teams and players to watch
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1 h
latimes.com
The end of Skid Row’s cheap hotels? L.A. leaders want to replace last-resort homeless housing
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1 h
latimes.com
Shocked by Oakland's decline, one resident seeks to revive one block at a time
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1 h
latimes.com
Tips from a wedding photographer for do's and don'ts, from booking to your big day
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foxnews.com
The Village Voice gets the rollicking, rebellious oral history it deserves
An exchange with Tricia Romano, author of 'The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture,' with one of her former colleagues.
1 h
latimes.com
Instead of writing about Princess Diana, Chris Bohjalian opted for her Vegas impersonator
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1 h
latimes.com
Amazon claims its packages are recyclable. Much of the plastic ends up in landfills
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1 h
latimes.com
UC stirs furious debate over what high school math skills are needed to succeed in college
The University of California is weighing what kind of data science classes, if any, could count as math for admission, sparking debate over equity and access for those who aren't set on the algebra/calculus path.
1 h
latimes.com
Letters to the Editor: How to be a community elder after losing your spouse
Seniors have lived experiences that can educate younger people. Those looking for company after the death of a spouse can put those experiences to use.
1 h
latimes.com
Why new 'Top Chef' host Kristen Kish didn't call Padma Lakshmi for advice
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1 h
latimes.com
College financial aid extension in the works for California students hurt by FAFSA mess
State officials hope to help students whose college dreams are endangered by glitches and delays affecting the federal financial aid application, or FAFSA.
1 h
latimes.com