The Miami Herald has gotten the first state documents from Gov. DeSantis’s migrant shipment operation. You can see its report here. The actual documents are here and here.

I’m going through the documents now. Want to join me? Tell me what you find by email. Two things have jumped out at me so far. One is that the contract seemed to put the state on the line for pretty top dollar to spend on flights. $325,000 to fly 8 people. I don’t book a lot of private jets but isn’t that a lot? The State of Florida paid $615,000 just for the Vineyard flights. So just for 40-some people. That’s a huge amount of money.

And then there’s something else.

In the wake of Herschel Walker firing his political director today, news comes that Russia has fired the commander of its Eastern Military District, Colonel-General Alexander Chaiko, over recent battlefield losses in Ukraine.

For you researchers, social scientists and humans generally out there, here’s an interesting journal article in Nature which seeks to measure the impact of Fox News on people’s openness to and uptake of vaccinations. You won’t be surprised to learn that watching Fox doesn’t encourage people to get vaccinated. The key finding is this: “Overall, an additional weekly hour of Fox News viewership for the average household accounts for a reduction of 0.35–0.76 weekly full vaccinations per 100 people during May and June 2021.”

I’m not great at evaluating study methodology and the merits of the structure of a study. I’d be curious what others with more expertise on this front make of the methodology. But my read suggests it’s a pretty sophisticated effort, going to fairly great lengths to disaggregate what is just anti-vax conservatives watching Fox News versus Fox having a specific and quantifiable impact. Check it out.

There are various stories about how Pennsylvania became the “Keystone State.” The truth seems to be mostly hidden in the mists of time. There are a number of contending theories. But it’s not clear which has the real origin of the label. Most of these center on Pennsylvania’s literal centrality in the early United States. It was the keystone (the top-most stone) in the arch which spanned from the New England to the Southern colonies, the keystone of the union. Or it was the necessary keystone in the process of building sentiment in favor of the federal constitution of 1787. But it’s one of the later stories I want to focus on. In the Jacksonian Era — 1820s through the 1840s — Pennsylvania was often referred to as the “Keystone in the Democratic arch,” the sectional coalition made up of — using the jargon of the age — “the working men of the North and the planters of the South.” Let’s state with some understatement that the described coalition and language is rather dated. But the more I look at the numbers in the final stretch, Pennsylvania is the cornerstone. It remains the Keystone in 2022, albeit for other reasons and with a very different coalition.

Let me walk you through it.

If Donald Trump ever grows tired of being faux-bashful about 2024 and actually announces he’s running, we know what at least one item on his agenda will be: purging the “woke and broken” National Archives.