Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay

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Progressive Democrats have been trying, with limited success, to convince Americans that billionaires are their true enemy. Well, guess who loves to hate billionaires: aggrieved sports fans. Why not take a break from complaining that billionaires don’t pay their fair share of income taxes to focus instead on team owners’ obsession with avoiding the luxury tax by trading away their best players?
~ Nathaniel Frum via The Atlantic

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In the past quarter century, food culture has become ever more personal and confessional; perhaps the inevitable conclusion was that it would encompass, well, its inevitable conclusion. Like so many trends, this one was pioneered by gay men: one of the early luminaries of FibreTok was a sex educator and amateur chef named Alex Hall, who posts recipes on an account called The Bottom’s Digest. I admit to feeling some relief around the breaking of this taboo—after all, everyone poops, and we might as well do it better.
~ Hannah Goldfield via The New Yorker

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A 2026 study found that nafta had a directly measurable impact on American lifespans. Communities exposed to Mexican import competition experienced, on average, a 0.68 percent increase in annual age-adjusted mortality over the fifteen years following the agreement, an effect the authors concluded was large enough to erase prior estimates of nafta’s aggregate welfare gains.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs

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It’s jarring to think that our age—unlike our height or weight—can’t be precisely measured. One can count the rings on a tree to calculate how many years it was alive, but there’s no equivalent marker in humans. Every so often, in the hospital where I work, I notice that a patient has a listed age of more than a hundred and twenty. This is disorienting until I realize that the patient may have come into the hospital with no I.D. and no known contacts, and that they might be suffering from a condition—dementia, schizophrenia—that makes it hard for them to remember who they are, let alone how old. In such cases, the hospital’s computer system defaults to a birth year of 1900.
~ Dhruv Khullar via The New Yorker

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