It's a small part of this discussion. But betting market advocates who say they're better than polls weirdly ignore that most betting market numbers are just downstream reactions to polls.

Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial Scientists caution that more research is needed, but nearly all of the patients who responded to the personalized vaccine are still alive six years later.

We have an apparent cure for most people with pancreatic cancer—a profoundly swift, deadly cancer—and the position of the U.S. government is that it should be banned. This is real fall-of-empire stuff.

The vaccine-autism connection: a public health crisis caused by unethical medical practices and fraudulent science - PubMed In 1998, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a British gastroenterologist, described a new autism phenotype called the regressive autism-enterocolitis syndrome triggered by environmental factors such as measles, mu...

Source: the agency Kennedy now leads: “The alleged autism-vaccine connection is, perhaps, the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21917556/

RFK Jr.’s New Normal As Trump nominates a new, uncontroversial CDC director, a more restrained version of the health secretary is appearing.

I wish instead of saying “no link has been found between vaccines and autism” they said that it’s a lie started by a doctor who committed fraud in the research and was found guilty of misconduct and unethical violations @theatlantic www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

I talk about this a lot. But I think the short answer is that “the economy” is a bunch of measures that aren’t nec rational nor tied to how much money most people have.

Might have to go to that Sox game now….

Where Americans stand on AI.
(Ipsos)
More, via Opinion Today:
opiniontoday.substack.com/p/260412

Awesome. How hard is that? That’s government working.

I think I have some family home movies of this parade!

That’s a little more of a disclaimer than I’m currently comfortable with? But I guess if the world ends I will need neither my money back nor my book so….

For the first time I am doing signed copies of my FIRST book, John Dies at the End. We're taking orders now and they'll ship in November unless the world ends or something. This is the big paperback anniversary edition, order here: bit.ly/signedjdate

Philosophical diamond sign by Edward Tufte.

You need to pay for news

How a 'Universal Basic Neighborhood' Can Help Americans Live Longer — Streetsblog USA Want to increase your chances of living to 80? A new paper argues we need to start with our neighborhoods — and we need to do it for everybody.

Love this: a "universal basic neighborhood."

Korean MLB advertising with slogan “it’s big ball chunky time”

MLB’s Korean marketing slogan used to be “It’s big ball chunky time”, and I will never stop thinking about it

some other use of this stock photo

Little baby Onyx and his family, meanwhile, are literally poster children for marriage and unmarried parenting, and pest control, and maternity leave in Israel, life insurance, dental insurance, and chiropracty.

That number was in every sxsw panel a few years ago. This year every panel had the ANTHROPIC jobs radar chart and a scare slide of headlines from AI execs talking about job loss.

Air pollution in London, 75 years ago, was awful enough to form an impenetrable layer on the ground that lasted for days and killed thousands.

A better future is always achievable, as long as we work to build it.

How Americans are dealing with gas prices.
(Ipsos)
More, via Opinion Today:
opiniontoday.substack.com/p/260315

I had a vendor saying I could match my data to theirs using the population fields. I was frustrated this didn’t work. Later they admitted they made custom populations using ZCTA. I stopped working with them.

The End of an Era: The Vanishing Negative Effect of Women’s Employment on Fertility ANNA MATYSIAK AND DANIELE VIGNOLI This paper examines whether women’s employment in the 21st century remains a barrier to family formation, as it was in the 1980s and 1990s, or—similar to men’s—it has become a prerequisite for childbearing. We address this question through a systematic quantitative review (meta-analysis) of empirical studies conducted in Europe, North America, and Australia. We selected 94 studies published between 1990 and2023 (N = 572 effect sizes). Our analysis uncovers a fundamental shift in the relation-ship between women’s employment and fertility. What was once a strongly negative association has become statistically insignificant in the 2000s and 2010s—and even turned positive in the Nordic countries, parts of Western Europe (France, Belgium, and the Netherlands), and Central and Eastern Europe. This shift is evident both among childless women and mothers and has occurred across all analyzed country clusters, except for the German/Southern European group, where the relationship has remained negative. These findings challenge longstanding assumptions about work–family trade-offs and suggest a reconfiguration of the economic and social conditions underpinning fertility decisions in contemporary high-income societies. The paper calls for a reconceptualization of the employment–fertility relationship and development of a new theoretical framework that better captures these evolving dynamics in contemporary high-income societies

Important new paper by @amatysiak.bsky.social and Daniele Vignoli showing that the association between women's employment and fertility is no longer negative in most high-income countries as work-family reconciliation policies and practices have increased. doi.org/10.1111/padr...

EFF’s Cindy Cohn’s new book, Privacy’s Defender, hits shelves on March 10th! Hear from Cindy as she talks about the book and her journey advocating for civil liberties in the digital age on Law and Disorder Radio. lawanddisorder.org/2026/03/law...

Things could go one of three ways (says the FT)

The thing in the US seems to be that if anyone hears the tree cut down a bigger one and make a bigger noise.

The way President Trump is handling deportations.
(Reuters/Ipsos)
More, via Opinion Today:
opiniontoday.substack.com/p/260227-top...

Most Americans say President Trump is growing erratic with age, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.
More, via Opinion Today:
opiniontoday.substack.com/p/260225

In Wellesley, a determined effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory What’s unfolding in Wellesley is not that different from other situations across the state when communities and leaders with the best of intentions lose their resolve.

“We’re losing workers & businesses to NC, Texas, Florida, & NH, while the same fight playing out in Wellesley repeats itself across the Commonwealth.”
commonwealthbeacon.org/opinion/in-w...

DHS Wants a Single Search Engine to Flag Faces and Fingerprints Across Agencies Homeland Security aims to combine its face and fingerprint systems into one big biometric platform—after dismantling centralized privacy reviews and key limits on face recognition.

NEW: Homeland Security officials are asking companies to help them combine all of their face and fingerprint systems together into one giant biometric platform.

Buttttttt it's unclear how workable this really is since DHS uses a wide mishmash of proprietary algos.

Can fake meat help solve climate change? Podcast Episode · Volts · 02/18/2026 · 1h 28m

You already love learning about climate and politics through @volts.wtf (am I right?) but today he digs in on a topic after my heart, alt meat as a potential climate solution w/ @brucefriedrich.bsky.social of @gfi.org

Highly recommend. #ClimateInfluence #food

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/v...

Though I’m not an unbiased narrator, the @girliguess.bsky.social endorsement builds trust by not shying away from what people see as knocks against our office.

But it also makes clear what’s at stake in this election.