Josh Marshall
The whole Alabama/IVF situation is an example of the number of absurd logical culs-de-sac you get into when you start with premises that are, at least to many of us, not only absurd but which at least a number of these premises supporters don’t even entirely believe. As noted below, Alabama has now passed a law which leaves in place the idea that embryos are full people in the state but gives people immunity from prosecution or civil liability if you kill one of these people.
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Alabama Now Says You Won’t Get In Trouble If You Murder Your Embryo … If It’s for IVF 
No, really. That’s pretty much what the Alabama legislature just did with a new law, hastily passed and now signed by the state’s governor.
As you know, Alabama created a firestorm last month when the state’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in IVF clinics are the legal equivalent of minor children. This ruling sent shockwaves through the United States, pushed a new dimension of the Dobbs/abortion debate to the top of the national election debate and temporarily shuttered the state’s IVF fertility clinics. In response Alabama has now passed a law which appears to have created enough legal assurance to allow the state’s clinics to reopen. This is not just a win for reproductive rights in the state. Numerous couples had their ongoing fertility treatment halted by the ruling.
But as in-state critics have made clear, the new legislation is at best a band-aid rather than a solution.
Read MoreMy post about the iPhone generated all sorts of fascinating responses from TPM Readers. Some of these responses were on the secondary question I raised about the pace of invention and scientific breakthroughs and whether or not it’s slowing down. One of the most interesting replies I got was from TPM Reader DN who sent in this note …
Read MoreI liked your aside about iPhones. I’m writing this from the big American Physical Society meeting (this year in Minneapolis) that focuses on “condensed matter” or solid-state physics, the branch of physics that basically gave us the iPhone and a huge fraction of modern technology. The fact that we, humanity, understand and can control/engineer the properties of materials on a deep level is one of the great intellectual accomplishments of the species, and it’s massively underappreciated. Astro and particle physics get vastly more press and attention in pop culture, but solid-state physics affects your daily life far more. It’s rich and full of beautiful ideas, though admittedly it can be very tough to explain to a general audience.
Why Is Your News Site Going Out of Business?
Over the years I’ve written about structural problems in the digital news industry, often driven by the growth of platform monopolies and other issues. Just in the last few months and even in the last few weeks we’ve seen a new round of publications shuttering or pivoting to publication zombiehood. So why is this happening? Why is your favorite news site suddenly going under? If you’re listening you’ve probably heard the story in general. But I wanted to share some numbers with you that I think will make it much more concrete.
(I think we can add something to the equation here because for a mix of business and personality reasons, we’re willing to share very granular dollar figures that very, very few other publications are willing to share.)
This chart which I just made shows the exact dollar amounts TPM brought in over the previous eight years through programmatic or “third party” advertising. As I think is pretty clear, if this is your business, you’re dead. You don’t have a business.
Read MoreIn this late post below, I discussed the now very consistent polling errors overestimating Donald Trump’s margins over Nikki Haley. I get why some analysts are quick to dismiss the larger import of this phenomenon: people assume you can draw direct, linear conclusions about a general election from polling anomalies in a primary election. And you can’t. But as I said last night, it’s a mistake to say this means nothing. G. Elliot Morris, the new head of 538, has a good piece up about this. The gist is that because of a mix of those sampling and modeling issues discussed in yesterday’s Backchannel, pollsters seem to be having a hard time finding normie Republicans. Needless to say there aren’t many of them these days. And that is part of the polling challenge. But these primaries show they are there and that pollsters seem to be missing a non-trivial number of them.
Outside of Vermont, which Haley appears to have won, Haley is getting beaten just about everywhere tonight. That’s 100% expected. But we are seeing that polling seemed to dramatically overstate Trump’s margins. So for instance 538 had Trump up 49 points over Haley in Virginia. But it looks like it will be just under 30 points. Needless to say these are still very lopsided defeats. But that’s also a pretty big polling miss.
Read MoreFolks, North Carolina Republicans just chose this whack-job as their nominee for governor.
There’s one point I didn’t get a chance to get into in the post below about polling, though I allude to it in the part about crosstabs and subgroups. One thing people do when they don’t like what a poll is telling them is they dig into the crosstabs and find things that just don’t add up. Maybe the party mix seems kind of off. Or they’ll show a very Democratic group favoring Republicans or vice versa.
Basically, don’t do this.
It’s just too good a way to fool yourself.
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Biden Polling: A Guide for the Perplexed (and the Freaked Out)
Over the weekend, Democrats or Dem-adjacent persons watching polling of the 2024 presidential election got knocked over the head with a metaphorical anvil: a batch of polls collectively showing Joe Biden 2 to 4 points behind Donald Trump. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about these polls and polling generally, ranging from the technical, to the what does it mean, to please talk me off the ledge. So I wanted to try to address them here.
First: Are these polls accurate? In an age when no one answers their cell phones let alone landlines, how do we know whether these polls are representative. Who has a landline? etc.
This is a complicated question. Without getting into deep technical details, yes, the pollsters definitely get that landlines are old news and most people don’t even answer unknown numbers on their cell phones. The same applies to text requests for political surveys. Response rates — or, rather, non-response rates — are awful. But pollsters know all of that and they’ve come up with pretty smart ways to deal with it. Without getting too far into the weeds, it comes down to increasingly sophisticated ways of modeling the electorate, using those models to weight the results, and in so doing backing out a representative sample from the data.
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What Is an iPhone?
Living in 2024, one of the big questions we have to ask ourselves is: why aren’t there flying cars? And where’s our colony on Mars? If I wanted to break the moment of levity I could ask: why do people still die of cancer? There’s actually a whole debate about whether and why the pace of invention — or, relatedly, scientific breakthroughs — has slowed compared to the first half of the 20th century. But let me not get ahead of myself.
These questions occurred me because I’ve been working on a project that requires some research on family history. And yesterday as I was putting my iPhone in a locker at my gym, this occurred to me: how would I explain the iPhone to my mother, who died in 1981?
When I thought of this I was thinking about photos and social media and a third, really big thing that is made up of many other, little things — not huge individually but vast and ubiquitous taken together — that we do with this small device. What analogues would I use to explain it?
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