At Goldhammer brings it.... arthurgoldhammer356783.substack.com/p/donalds-de...

Mitt romney, making sense || www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/o...

Thomas Statchen @haroldpollack.bsky.social Amanda Abraham, Christina Andrews, and Colleen Grogan examine Section 1115 waivers concerning substance use disorder. They examine the timeline of waiver reform and assess how well the SUD waivers are working. read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

Today I cancelled my stepmom's Sunday NYT subscription, officially in my dad's name, I've been renewing that for 20yrs. At 94, my stepmom no longer reads the paper. The holidays can be a bittersweet time. We note the empty seats at the table, and we see so many other realities of human aging.

Medicaid waivers to address health-related social needs (HRSN) are under threat due to federal spending cuts, guidance rescinding HRSN language, and executive orders criminalizing homelessness, says @haroldpollack.bsky.social in a new Milbank Quarterly Opinion.

Prooreading posts is apparently for the little peop3le......

Concerning esults reported by Nagler et al: 59% of Americans are neutral/display some degree of support for cutting funds for work that "provides the foundational knowledge about how the natural world works, which might lead to future discoveries about human health www.milbank.org/quarterly/op...

My most recent column in Milbank Quarterly Opinion. Medicaid’s Essential Investments to Address Health-Related Social Needs www.milbank.org/quarterly/op...

Listening to a podcast where Jon Stewart is saying that the ACA is just subsidies to insurance companies. That’s akin to saying that SNAP is just subsidies to supermarkets.

Racing to my train today, I pulled over halfway there with an "oh-f***k" realization: I forgot my phone. Just then, I looked up to see @veppol.bsky.social pull up behind, the phone in hand. Those of us blessed in this life to have folk who have our backs need to earn this out.

Let's talk about the grotesque Führerprinzip sweeping Republican institutions. With receipts. This is one of my favorite documents from the Reagan Library: a White Paper prepared for him that led up to one of the ideas he was most impassioned about, a "North American Free Trade Area."... 1/x

The Real Patriots Will Be Marching Saturday—<i>Against</i> the un-Americans newrepublic.com/post/201921/... via @newrepublic.com

Any followers happen to have at hand recent life tables for Black men in U.S. Urban settings? An authentic Pollack Bird Photography Mug on offer for this....

Yet another attempt to share our piece on neuropsychiatric disorders among emergency department patients with intellectual and developmental disorders..... I"m struck by the prevalent early-onset dementia among patients w/Down syndrome. This graph speaks for itself.… link.growkudos.com/1f3s851ezgg

Beth McGinty and Magdalena Cerda in Milbank Quarterly-- Medicaid Cuts Will Heighten the US Mental Health and Substance Use Crisis www.milbank.org/quarterly/op...

Went to a real gym for the first time in a long while. I turned out to be rusty and complacent in the sparring and physical combat dept. Came away with some impressive bruises in various places from hard contact and a dramatic taikedown. I had just forgotten how tough those treadmills can be .

80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson www.commondreams.org/opinion/80-y...

All articles are freely available now, so check them out. There's still time to add them to your fall syllabi!

Finally there are two book reviews that are especially timely: Ann Keller's review of Pamuk's "Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society" and Robert Ostergard's review of Dahl's "The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure: Why Warning Was Not Enough"

In the Tracking Health Reform section, Gusmano and Thompson analyze the Biden administration's efforts to minimize losses of Medicaid enrollment during the "great unwinding". read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

Last, Hemauer and Warner examine the dynamics of public support for school-based mental health services, an increasingly critical point of access. They offer recommendations for policymakers and local school administrators based on the public opinion findings. read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

Next, Sprague et al. also examine state policy, looking at variation across state-level paid leave policies to assess inequities in access and coverage of these policies in the absence of a federal policy. read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

The next article, by Erickson and Meyer-Gutbrod, examines the interactions between news attention to opioids, overdose rates, and state-level political attention to opioids mortality. read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

The first article by Gudiksen et al. is a qualitative study examining employers' and insurers' perspectives about hospital consolidation. read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/articl...

New issue of @jhppl.bsky.social just dropped (Volume 50, Issue 5). Check it out, for a set of wonderful articles on topics that span health care, opioids, paid leave, and mental health, a great representation of the diversity in JHPPL. Thread here:

A new editorial in @addictionjournal.bsky.social warns that US state and insurance provider policies are limiting patient access to higher doses of buprenorphine, one of the main medical treatments for opioid use disorders: doi.org/10.1111/add.... | DOI: 10.1111/add.70127 @haroldpollack.bsky.social

Someone asked for my 4 fave aphorisms in English prose: 1. Hurt people hurt people 2. Where your treasure is, your heart will be there also 3. Watch the way he treated his last girlfriend. That's the way he'll treat you 4. If you sit down at the poker table and don't know who the sucker is--you do

Removing arbitrary limitations on Buprenorphine is one piece of the puzzle in addressing the opioid epidemic. Nicole Gastala, Brianna Hudak, Mai T. Pho, Katharine Wilcox, and I in Addiction. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/A6UWCB...

“This is one more basic test for the media. Are they going to focus on the pretextual attacks to discredit Cook —the mortgage allegations, or her qualifications — or will they recognize the pattern of a government using its powers to crush any independent sources of power?” *obviously racist attacks

My all-purpose AI reform is banning computers from pretending they are human. Having names, saying "I," pretending to have feelings, representing what they emit as "advice," etc. That's where much of the mischief starts.

This gift link should work. Losing a friend. Older men have the highest suicide rate of any demographic group. This challenge doesn't get nearly the attention it should. www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/13/o...

Losing a friend. Older men have the highest suicide rate of any demographic group. This challenge doesn't get nearly the attention it should. www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/13/o...

Andrew Goodman-Bacon is a terrific lecturer. That is the post.

I cleaned the sensor on my camera. Wow--what a noticeable difference on these zoomed-in pictures... Great return on 10 minutes of effort.

Trapped in an over-written Philip Roth novel--Chapter 68: "Senate confirms Jeanine Pirro as U.S. Attorney for DC." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...

“ceteris paribus, the only constant is change”

i don't know what any of that means but someone asked me my favorite pop-tart and i said brown sugar cinnamon.

I'm an economist teaching ectrics so I start with: let's assume we have no counterfactuals

And then introduce notation to reinvent them?

Someone asked me my favorite econometric concept. Hands-down, I would say the Wald estimator for the effect of treatment on the treated group. It's intuitive to anyone. It's readily estimated with bootstrapped standard errors. Freaking. Awesome.

The first sentence in my new econometrics lecture: "Imagine a world without counterfactuals...."

Great issue!

Essential listening. Israel's clear violations of international law+war crimes that are causing thousands of deaths--command an effective and concerted response. This has nothing to do w/denying Hamas's 10/7 criminality, or rejecting the concept of Israel as a place of refuge for the Jewish people.

Went birding and managed to pocket-dialed an exposure setting on my camera. Fortunately Lightroom allowed me to save some shots. Ugh. Unforced errors.

Sarah McBride says much that must be said about how absolutist progressive advocacy lost its way, and undermines practical efforts to enact progressive policies and legislation through coalition politics. youtu.be/KlbNFsAGFRc?...

A video of my recent @rwjf.bsky.social panel with @povertyscholar.bsky.social, Andrea Campbell and David Adler on Medicaid's past, present and future prospects. @jhppl.bsky.social @haroldpollack.bsky.social @russellsagefdn.bsky.social @thewatsonschool.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG2c...

I just found out that Brad Pitt is starring in an F1 movie. What an awesome predictive-analytics-follow-on to Moneyball. I do hope the movie critiques F1's fundamentally dicey decision to equally value precision and recall.

Got two journal acceptances within a day, on work led by my more-junior colleagues Nate Glasser and Nicole Gastala. I am so blessed with excellent reverse-mentors.

Important new @jamahealthforum.bsky.social study by @angelicameinhofer.bsky.social Bullinger, @carolinehkelly.bsky.social, and Fitzpatrick --- Early School Medicaid Expansions and Health Services for Children With Parental Opioid Use Disorder jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Thomas Friedman, saying what must be said. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/o...