"Brooke Peder’s leg was amputated after an infection from a tranq wound bore into the bone. She hopes to save her arm, although she reluctantly injects tranq in it."

So reads a photo caption in "Tranq Dope: Animal Sedative Mixed With Fentanyl Brings Fresh Horror to U.S. Drug Zones/A veterinary tranquilizer called xylazine is infiltrating street drugs, deepening addiction, baffling law enforcement and causing wounds so severe that some result in amputation" by Jan Hoffman (NYT).

"According to a survey released Thursday by Kaiser Family Foundation, scarcely one in three parents will permit their children in this newly eligible age group to be vaccinated immediately."

"Two-thirds were either reluctant or adamantly opposed. An Axios-Ipsos poll found that 42 percent of parents of these children said they were unlikely to have their children vaccinated.... This vaccine dilemma occurs at a turbulent cultural moment for parents of young children, who are often judged harshly on social media for their decisions. The choice can appear freighted with political affiliation. A decision can signify, intentionally or not, compassion or disregard for others and a willingness to follow or ignore advice from their pediatrician.... At heart, the decision is about which unknown — Covid or the vaccine — parents fear more.... The argument that vaccinating children contributes to the community’s overall health does not get much traction.... Parents’ paramount focus is the well-being of their own child. Although health officials contend an important reason to vaccinate is to protect the child, some parents said they believed that their healthy children would be injected with a novel vaccine largely to safeguard older adults, who had already lived full lives.... Parents are siloing themselves with like-minded friends, which reinforces their thinking.... ... Abby Cooper of Bergen County, N.J., who is eager to get her five children vaccinated... has friends who refuse. 'Their kids are going to school with my kids and putting them at risk for no reason. It’s very upsetting. So, sadly, I’ve lost friends over this.'"

From "Covid Shots Are a Go for Children, but Parents Are Reluctant to Consent/Vaccinating 5- to 11-year-olds could be a big step toward returning to normal life in the U.S., but even parents who got the shot are worried about how it might affect their kids" by Jan Hoffman (NYT).

If "parents’ paramount focus is the well-being of their own child," then why is the choice seemingly "freighted with political affiliation"?

2 possible answers spring to mind:

1. Parents only openly discuss their decision if it accords with what they believe aligns with their politics. Thus, Democrats, wanting to appear supportive of the vaccine, will kept quiet about their individual decision against vaccinating their children, but Republicans who make the same anti-vaccine decision will go ahead and talk about it. That is, the truth is in the first statement only: "parents’ paramount focus is the well-being of their own child."

2. Parents believe they are individually judging the benefits to their own child, but their judgment is skewed by their political affiliation, so when the various factors are weighed, the sense of belonging to a political party causes the balance to come out the way that fits what they see people on their side doing.

"Is the Forced Contraception Alleged by Britney Spears Legal?/The United States has a dark history of court-sanctioned sterilization, but more recent rulings and legislation suggest it would violate a basic right."

A NYT article by Jan Hoffman: 

The scant law on the question in conservatorship indicates what an outlier the Spears case may be. In 1985, the California Supreme Court denied the petition of guardian parents of a 29-year-old woman with Down syndrome who wanted her to undergo a tubal ligation.

Typically, a conservator has temporary control over the finances and even medical care of an incapacitated person... If a guardian fears that a ward will make financially unwise choices, “the remedy is not to say they can’t procreate,” said Sylvia Law, a health law scholar at New York University School of Law. “It’s unspeakable.”

According to experts in trust and estate law, the handful of cases in which a guardian, usually a parent, has asked a court to order contraception involved severely disabled children. “Such a child would lack the capacity to understand that a penis and vagina could make a baby,” said Bridget J. Crawford, an expert on guardianship law at Pace University law school. “And that certainly is not the Britney Spears case.”

Britney Spears is 39-years-old, so the conservator's decision that she cannot remove the IUD is very close to a determination that she can never have another child. She does have 2 sons, and the breakdown that led to the conservatorship happened right after she lost custody of them. I'm seeing that she was led to believe at the time that the conservatorship would help her regain custody. They are teenagers now, 15 and 14, so the time for living closely with them is also ending:

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"Take a cue from the dog. Put your nose in things and take dedicated sniffs. Name the smells."

"Every expert smeller I met practiced it thousands of times. Pick up a bottle of perfume. Crush leaves between your fingers. I enjoy smells more now. They’re no longer good or bad. They tell me about the world. That’s as close as I get to being doglike."

From "Learning From Dogs as They Sniff Out Their World," by Jan Hoffman (my favorite NYT writer (see this)).

"Cool" adolescents are "pseudomature," and they're not doing too well when they reach their early 20s.

"A constellation of three popularity-seeking behaviors characterized pseudomaturity, Dr. Allen and his colleagues found."

These young teenagers sought out friends who were physically attractive; their romances were more numerous, emotionally intense and sexually exploring than those of their peers; and they dabbled in minor delinquency — skipping school, sneaking into movies, vandalism.

As they turned 23, the study found that when compared to their socially slower-moving middle-school peers, they had a 45 percent greater rate of problems resulting from alcohol and marijuana use and a 40 percent higher level of actual use of those substances. They also had a 22 percent greater rate of adult criminal behavior, from theft to assaults.

Investigating "everyday sadists."

"In the study’s first experiment..."

Students who chose to be bug-killers were presented with three cups, each holding a live pill bug. To anthropomorphize the bugs, each was given a name: Muffin, Ike, or Tootsie. Bug-killers had to drop a bug into a modified coffee grinder, force the top down, and grind the bug up....

(... Though the machines emitted crunching sounds, the researchers said, “no bugs were harmed in the experiment.”)

During the execution of the assignment, some bug-killers quit after one or two. But some asked for more bugs....

Studying college-age females and their "fat talk" (in which 93% of them indulge).

"Alexandra F. Corning, a research associate professor in psychology at the University of Notre Dame... showed 139 undergraduates photos of two thin and two overweight women, each making either a positive or negative remark about her body."

Before reading on, answer this: Which woman do you think was considered most likable?

Dr. Corning professed to be surprised by her result, but I'm not surprised at all.

The most likable woman chosen by the students was overweight and quoted as saying: “I know I’m not perfect, but I love the way I look. I know how to work with what I’ve got, and that’s all that matters.”...

But, she acknowledged, her experiment had limitations. “Are the students really liking these women the most? Or are they saying it because they think they should?” said Dr. Corning. “They might like them more, but would they really want to hang out with them?”

Fat talk is — we're told — "airless and scripted." One person exclaims about her fat and the other responds with an equivalent exclamation about her fat. So it's really small talk, social etiquette like "How are you?"/"Fine. How are you?" But Corning portrays the interchange as a problem to be solved — a "hungry cry for affirmation," met with a "toxic" reciprocation.

Dr. Corning said that to break the cycle, a person shouldn’t engage. But particularly for younger women, it’s hard to say something like, “Hey, no negative self-talk!” or “Why do we put ourselves down?”

I suspect there's a positive side to the "negative self-talk" that's hard for older folks to hear. For one thing, in the script, the second speaker is declining to lie or to reinforce the first female's negative opinion of herself. Instead, she shifts the focus to herself, but in the friendly way of offering company: I'm fat too.

Corning seems to be about examining the presumed problem of low self-esteem among females, so she doesn't consider — as far as I can tell from this article — whether what's really going on with this "fat talk" is a kind of mutual comforting and camaraderie in the denial of what is a health problem. Ironically, the psychologist is joining in this activity with her self-esteem talk.

(Note: The linked article — "'Fat Talk' Compels but Carries a Cost" — is by Jan Hoffman, who wrote my all-time favorite NYT article.)

"Who was your Elizabeth Edwards?"

"The goddess of frumpy wives and older mothers? The cancer patient who would not be defined by her disease? The noble, betrayed wife? The political operative whose complicity in covering up her husband’s infidelity could have cost the Democratic Party the presidency?"

Asks Jan Hoffman, in the NYT, on the day of Elizabeth Edwards's funeral.

"Will the new Forbes Law School Rankings reduce the influence of the U.S. News rankings?"

Asks Instapundit, linking here, and what's a harried law school applicant to think? Forget Harvard! I'm aiming for Williams Law School. And if I can't get into Williams, here's hoping for Princeton Law School — good old Princeton Law School. It's always been so well thought of! *

Now, I can see that way down at the bottom of his post — the one headed "Forbes Law School Rankings" and displaying a list of 50 schools that are not law schools — TaxProf gets around to saying:

Forbes reportedly is at work on its first law school rankings, based in part on an alumni survey and salary information (immediately after graduation and five years out), which Forbes will use to produce a "return on investment."

An interesting calculation. I can already hear the lawprofs' complaints about penalizing schools that support students going into public service. Ah, but here at Wisconsin, the tuition is relatively low. Let's see how we rank, relative to our U.S. News ranking, before we snipe at Forbes. That was my first thought, and I'll bet it's the way most lawprofs think.

***

* That sent me looking for a quote I remember about how well the nonexistent Princeton Law School would rank in any survey of the reputation of law schools. Ah, here it is: a 1998 NYT article by Jan Hoffman — I love Jan Hoffman! — about the problems with the U.S. News rankings:

The deans said that law schools should not be ranked at all.... They protested the reputation questionnaires, which ask respondents their opinion of all the law schools in the country.

''If they were asked about Princeton Law School, it would appear on the top 20 -- but it doesn't exist,'' said John Sexton, dean of New York University's law school.

***

ADDED: A propos of my anticipated criticism of the Forbes ranking, I feel I must reference this oft-referenced Michelle Obama speech:

And I went from college to law school to a big ol' fancy law firm where I was making more money than both of my parents combined. I thought I had arrived....

.... and I had to ask myself whether, if I died tomorrow, would I want this to be my legacy, working in a corporate firm, working for big companies? And when I asked myself the question, the resounding answer was, absolutely not. This isn't what I want to leave behind, this isn't why I went to Princeton and Harvard, this isn't why I was doing what I was doing. I thought I had more to give.

So people were quite surprised when I told them at the firm that I was going to leave this big lucrative paycheck behind and a promising career, and go on to do something more service-oriented....

Also, there's Lionel Hutz...



... he went to Princeton Law School.

An article in the New York Times: "Commoner Captures Princess, Blog Version."

Look out! Jan Hoffman writes a very cool article about me and Meade.

Until now, Meade liked his online anonymity just fine. But at his fiancée’s urging, he agreed to be unmasked here. He is....

The Times has the scoop.