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...

I bring cookies to my econ lectures. At today's hooding ceremony, my student Kendall Straughter handed me cookies onstage when his name was called. A nice surprise. We didn't have a picture onstage, but at least captured a shot w/the cookies at the reception. I'll take the fifth on how many are left

Would you settle for honorable menschen?

When I grow up, I want to be a mensch like my UChicago colleague and friend Elbert Huang. Will be quite the climb.

25yrs ago, I was talking w/Dr. Alex Kemper. I said: "My eye has weird floaters." "Go to Kellogg eye center." I was rushed to surgery. Pediatrics invited @veppol.bsky.social +I to discuss how clinicians interact w/ patents of kids w/disabilities. Ed: Alex Kemper. publications.aap.org/pediatrics/a...

[email protected] on diability equity behind bars is an essential read. scholars.law.unlv.edu/nlj/vol25/is... We so easily overlook a myriad of mundane, readily-addressed barriers that burden prisoners who have hearing or mobility challenges, and much else.

After work bird walk, Washington Park

Some weekend bird pics

Today would be my dad's 96'th birthday. Born three weeks before Anne Frank, he had the chance to live the long, full life that she deserved, that everyone deserves. He passed in October, 2021. Miss you, Dad.

Here at Midway Airport on Memorial Day, these pictures remind us of debts owed. These pictures also remind us of the monstrous evil of racial segregation of our armed forces—a crime perpetuated within living memory of my parents’ generation, and supported by George Marshall+other heroes of that war.

A more personal Substack post than usual from me. I am alive to teach and write on U.S. health policy (in particular, health insurance) because Medicaid (through the Affordable Care Act) saved my life. So, watching Republicans seek to decimate this is personal. open.substack.com/pub/miranday...

TV networks shouldn't run ads touting any product for memory/whatever that carry tiny-bottom-of-the-screen disclaimers of the form: "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease."

Area dotigy researcher ended up wasting time because he decided to take a sloppy shortcut by copy-and-pasting bad code. Root cause analysis suggests he was too effing lazy to write a proper function in R. Oy.

I've finally found a way to keep my zoom calls short.