Human Brain Cells Grow in Rats,

Human Brain Cells Grow in Rats, and Feel What the Rats Feel

Human brain “organoids” wired themselves into rats’ nervous systems, influencing the animals’ sensations and behaviors.

Scientists at Standford observed spontaneous activity of human neurons that had been transplanted into a rat. Pasca Lab, Stanford University




By Carl Zimmer NY Times

Scientists have successfully transplanted clusters of human neurons into the brains of newborn rats, a striking feat of biological engineering that may provide more realistic models for neurological conditions such as autism and serve as a way to restore injured brains.

In a study published on Wednesday, researchers from Stanford reported that the clumps of human cells, known as “organoids,” grew into millions of new neurons and wired themselves into their new nervous systems. Once the organoids had plugged into the brains of the rats, the animals could receive sensory signals from their whiskers and help generate command signals to guide their movements.

Dr. Sergiu Pasca, the neuroscientist who led the research, said that he and his colleagues were now using the transplanted neurons to learn about the biology underlying autism, schizophrenia and other developmental disorders.

“If we really want to tackle the biology of these conditions, we’re going to need more complex models of the human brain,” Dr. Pasca said.

In 2009, after training in medicine in Romania, Dr. Pasca joined Stanford as a postdoctoral researcher to learn how to create human neurons in a dish. He and his colleagues took skin cells from volunteers and bathed them in chemicals that caused them to change character. Now they were more like embryo cells, which can become any tissue in the body.

With the addition of more chemicals, the researchers coaxed the cells to develop into neurons. They could then observe pulses of voltage shoot down the length of the neurons as they lay in a dish.

Dr. Pasca and his colleagues carried out the same experiment again, this time using skin cells from people with Timothy syndrome, a rare form of autism caused by a single mutation that leads to serious heart problems as well as impaired language and social skills.

Growing Timothy syndrome neurons in a dish, Dr. Pasca could see a number of differences between them and typical neurons. They produced extra amounts of signaling chemicals such as dopamine, for example.

But examining single cells could reveal only a limited number of clues about the condition. Dr. Pasca suspected that he could learn more by studying thousands of neurons joined together in circuits called brain organoids.

A new chemical recipe allowed Dr. Pasca to mimic the condition inside the developing brain. Bathed in this broth, skin cells turned into progenitor brain cells, which in turn became tangles of neurons found in the brain’s outer layers, called the cortex.

In a later study, he and his colleagues connected three organoids: one made of cortex, another of spinal cord and a third of muscle cells. Stimulating the cortex organoid caused the muscle cells to contract.

But organoids are far from being miniature brains. For one thing, their neurons remain stunted. For another, they are not as electrically active as ordinary neurons in a living brain. “It’s clear that there are a number of limitations to these models,” Dr. Pasca said.

Scientists began putting organoids in living brains, theorizing that a petri dish limited an organoid’s development. In 2018, the neuroscientist Fred Gage and his colleagues at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies transplanted human brain organoids into the brains of adult mice. The human neurons continued to mature as the mouse brain suppled them with blood vessels.

Since then, Dr. Gage and other researchers have implanted organoids into the back of brain, where mice perceive signals from their eyes. When the animals saw pulsing flashes of white light, the human-organoid neurons responded in much the same way the mouse’s own cells did, according to a study published online in June that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Dr. Pasca and his team were also working on organoid transplants, but they chose to put them into young rodents rather than adults. A day or two after a rat was born, the scientists injected an organoid the size of a poppy seed into a region of the brain called the somatosensory cortex, which processes touch, pain and other signals from across the body. In rats, the region is especially sensitive to signals from their whiskers.

The human neurons multiplied in the rat brain until they numbered about three million, making up about a third of the cortex on one side of the rat brain. Each cell in the organoid grew six times longer than it would have in a petri dish. The cells also became about as active as neurons in human brains.

Even more strikingly, the human organoids spontaneously wired themselves into the rat brain. They connected not just to nearby neurons, but to distant ones as well.

Those connections made the human neurons sensitive to the rat’s senses. When the researchers blew puffs of air over the rat’s whiskers, its human organoid crackled in response.

Dr. Pasca and his colleagues also ran experiments to see how the organoids affected the behavior of the rats, using a water fountain in their chambers.

After 15 days of training, the rats learned they could get a drink from the fountain when their organoid was stimulated. The human organoids were apparently sending messages to the reward-seeking regions of the rats’ brains.

These species-blending experiments raise provocative ethical questions. Before starting the work, Dr. Pasca consulted with experts at the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford, who urged him to pay special attention to the animals’ pain and well-being.

“You’re not just worried about how many mice are in a cage, or how well they’re fed,” said Henry Greely, a Stanford law professor. “This is a new kind of thing. You don’t know what you might see.”

Dr. Pasca’s team found no evidence that the rats experienced pain, became prone to seizures or suffered a loss of memory or control of their movements. “It turns out that the rats tolerate the human graft really well,” Dr. Pasca said.

Giorgia Quadrato, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the new study, noted that the human organoids did not make the rats more human. On learning tests, for example, they scored no better than other rats.

“They are rats, and they stay rats,” Dr. Quadrato said. “This should be reassuring from an ethical perspective.”

But that might not hold true if scientists were to put human organoids in a close relative of humans, like a monkey or a chimpanzee. “It would be a good opportunity to set guidelines to operate in the right ethical framework in the future,” she said.

Dr. Pasca said that the similarity between primates and humans might allow the organoids to grow more and take on a bigger role in the animal’s mental processes. “It’s not something that we would do, or would encourage doing,” he said.

Instead, he is using the implanted organoids to study neurological disorders. In one experiment, Dr. Pasca’s team implanted an organoid from a patient with Timothy syndrome on one side of a rat’s brain and implanted another organoid without the mutation on the other side.

Both organoids grew in the rats. But the Timothy syndrome neurons developed twice as many branches for receiving incoming signals, called dendrites. What’s more, the dendrites were shorter.

Dr. Pasca hopes that he will be able to observe differences in the way rats behave when they carry brain organoids from people with autism and other neurological conditions. Such experiments could help reveal how certain mutations alter the way the brain works.

Dr. Isaac Chen, a neurosurgeon and organoid researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, saw another possibility in the new study: the repair of injuries to human brains.

Dr. Chen envisioned growing brain organoids from the skin of a patient with a damaged cortex. Once injected into the brain of the patient, the organoid might grow and wire up with healthy neurons.

“This idea is definitely out there,” he said. “It’s just a matter of, How do we take advantage of it, and take it to the next level?”

Carl Zimmer writes the “Matter” column. He is the author of fourteen books, including “Life's Edge: The Search For What It Means To Be Alive.” @carlzimmer • Facebook

 

Chelsea Manning: ‘I’m Still Bound to Secrecy’

By Chelsea Manning NY TIMES

Ms. Manning is an American activist and the author of the forthcoming memoir “README.txt,” from which this essay has been adapted.

It is not possible to work in intelligence and not imagine disclosing the many secrets you bear.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when the idea first crossed my mind. Maybe it was in 2008, when I was learning to be an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army and was exposed to sensitive information for the first time. Or maybe the germ of the idea was planted when I was stationed at Fort Drum, in upstate New York. I was tasked with transporting a cache of classified hard drives in a large box in the summer heat, and I began to imagine what might happen if I screwed it up and left the box unattended. If someone managed to get ahold of a stray hard drive, what ripple effects might it cause?

I knew the official version of why these secrets had to be kept secret. We were protecting sources. We were protecting troop movements. We were protecting national security. Those things made sense. But it also seemed, to me, that we were protecting ourselves.

While I felt that my job was important, and I took my obligations seriously, a part of me always wondered: If we were acting ethically, why were we keeping so many secrets?

The months I spent in Iraq in 2009 changed the way I understood the world. Every night, I woke up in the desert at 9 p.m. and walked from my tiny trailer to the Saddam Hussein-era basketball court that the military had converted into an intelligence operations center.

I sat at a computer screen for hours at a stretch, going through reports from our troops in the field. Monitoring reporting was like drinking from a fire hose: The military used at least a dozen different intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. Each gave us a different view of the conflict and of the people and places we were watching. My job was to analyze, with emotional detachment, what impact military decisions were having on this giant, bloody “war on terror.”

The daily reality of my job was like life in a trauma ward. I’d spent hours learning every aspect of the lives of the Iraqis who were dying all around us: what time they got up in the morning, their relationship status, their appetites for food and alcohol and sex, whether they were engaged in political activities, and all the people they interacted with electronically. In some cases, I probably knew more about them than they knew about themselves.

I couldn’t talk about my work with anyone outside my unit, nor about this conflict that looked nothing like the one I’d read about back home or watched on the TV news before I enlisted.

We were seven years into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and people in the United States had begun to pretend that all of the conflict — all the lost American lives and the still-uncounted lost lives of Iraqis and Afghans — had been worth it. Attention turned away. The establishment moved on. There was the recession to deal with. People at home were losing everything. The health care debate was on the news every night. Yet we were still there. Still dying.

I was constantly confronted with these two conflicting realities — the one I was looking at, and the one Americans at home believed. It was clear that so much of the information people received was distorted or incomplete. This dissonance became an all-consuming frustration for me.

The idea that the information I had access to held real power began to flash into my brain more often. I’d try to ignore it, and it would come back.

In the intelligence field, you are vigorously inculcated with the notion that you can’t tell anyone anything about what you do, ever. This secrecy comes to control how you think and how you operate in the world. But the power of prohibition is fragile, especially once the justifications start to seem arbitrary.

During my time in intelligence, I had noticed that there was inconsistent internal logic to classification decisions. And I came to see that the classification system exists wholly in the interest of the U.S. government — in other words, it seems to exist not to to keep secrets safe but to control the narrative.

In December 2009, I began the process of downloading reports of all our activities from Iraq and Afghanistan.

These were descriptions of enemy engagements with hostile forces or explosives that detonated. They contained body counts, coordinates and businesslike summaries of confusing, violent encounters. They contained, in their aggregate force, something much closer to the truth of what those two wars really looked like than what Americans were learning at home. They were a pointillist picture of wars that wouldn’t end.

I burned the files onto DVDs, labeled with titles like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Manning’s Mix. I later transferred the files to a memory card, then shattered the discs with my boots on the gravel outside the trailers. On my next leave, I brought the documents back to America in my camera, as files on an SD memory card. This was every single incident report the U.S. Army had ever filed about Iraq or Afghanistan, every instance where a soldier thought there was something important enough to log and report. Navy customs personnel didn’t blink an eye. No one cared enough to notice.

Uploading the files directly to the internet wasn’t my first choice. I tried to reach traditional publications, but it was a frustrating ordeal. I didn’t trust the telephone, nor did I want to email anything; I could be surveilled. Even pay phones weren’t safe.

I went into chain stores — Starbucks, mostly — and asked to borrow their landline because supposedly my cellphone was lost or my car had broken down. I called The Washington Post and The New York Times, but I didn’t get anywhere.

I recalled that in 2008, during intelligence training, our instructor — a Marine Corps veteran turned contractor — told us about WikiLeaks, a website devoted to radical transparency, while instructing us not to visit it. But while I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.

The website was the publication of last resort, but as the weeks went by and I got no response from traditional newspapers, I grew increasingly desperate. So, on the very last day of my leave, I went to a Barnes & Noble with my laptop.

Sitting at a chair in the bookstore cafe, I drank a triple grande mocha and zoned out, listening to electronic music — Massive Attack, Prodigy — to wait out the uploads. There were seven chunks of data to get out, and each one took 30 minutes to an hour. The internet was slow, and the connection was bad. I began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to complete my work before the store closed. But the Wi-Fi finally did its job.

The fallout was instant and intense. The documents proved, unambiguously and unimpeachably, just how disastrous the war still was. Once revealed, the truth could not be denied or unseen: This horror, this constellation of petty vendettas with an undertow of corruption — this was the truth of the war.

The disclosures became a flash point for a larger argument about how the United States should engage internationally, and how much the public deserved to know about how their government was acting in their name. I had changed the terms of the debate and pulled back the curtain. But while all that was happening, I knew nothing about it. I was in a cage.

Everyone now knows — because of what happened to me — that the government will attempt to destroy you fully, charge you with everything under the sun, for bringing to light the ugly truth about its own actions. What I was trying to do had never been done before, and therefore the consequences were, at the time, unknowable.

Daniel Ellsberg, who had disclosed the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, avoided prison because of illegal evidence-gathering by the Nixon White House (which had ordered a break-in of his psychiatrist’s office, in search of information that might discredit Mr. Ellsberg).

Nobody had gone to prison for this sort of thing; I hadn’t heard of Mr. Ellsberg at the time, but I was very aware of Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency whistle-blower who had been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. He’d faced charges that carried a 35-year prison sentence, but shortly before trial he’d cut a deal that left him with only probation and community service.

I certainly weighed the potential consequences. If I was caught, I would be detained, but I figured at most I was going to be discharged or lose my security clearance. I cared about my work, and it was frightening to imagine losing my job — I had been homeless before enlisting — but I thought that if I was court-martialed, it would damage only the government’s own credibility. I never really reckoned with the notion of a life spent in prison, or worse.

The details of what happened to me are, by now, well known. I was held for several months in a cage in Kuwait. I was sentenced to 35 years in a maximum-security prison, where I spent seven years, much of it in solitary confinement. During that time, I came out as transgender and transitioned. Denied gender-affirming health care, I went on a hunger strike. I attempted suicide twice.

But even in prison I remained active. I began writing a column for The Guardian. I drafted a bill, “Bill to Re-establish the National Integrity and to Protect Freedom of Speech, and the Freedom of the Press,” which I proposed on Twitter and sent to members of Congress. It was meant to outlaw some of the most egregious ways that the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act had been used against me, so that others wouldn’t be put in such a bind for wanting to do the right thing. It also included fixes to the Freedom of Information Act and would give stronger federal protections to journalists. It was a pipe dream and was treated as such.

On Jan. 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted my sentence, and I was released. Everyone expected me to be in shock at being out, to kiss the ground or something. It did feel surreal to be free, but it also felt as if what I’d been dealing with for the previous seven years would never be over. It certainly isn’t over now. I can never leave it behind.

This was my first time as a free woman. I had spent several years transitioning, so I felt comfortable in the way my body moved and felt. Even in prison, with restrictions on hair length and clothing, people had begun to accept me as a woman. They treated me as a human being. But now I needed to navigate a larger world with this new identity.

I emerged from prison a celebrity. I had been made, without consultation, into a symbol and figurehead for all kinds of ideas. Some of that was fun — Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vogue’s September issue. Some of it — the C.I.A. director pressuring Harvard to uninvite me from a visiting fellowship, Fox News seizing upon my very existence as a cheap way to rile up its viewers — was much less so.

The main upside to my notoriety has been that I can do important work. Activism quickly became almost a full-time job. I went to the Pride parade in New York City; I ran for Senate in Maryland; I protested the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and refugees, and President Donald Trump’s reinstatement of the ban on transgender personnel in the military. The political moment into which I emerged is one in which we are figuring out what got us here as a country.

What I did during my enlistment was part of a deep American tradition of rebellion, resistance and civil disobedience — a tradition we have long drawn upon to force progress and oppose tyranny. The documents I made public expose how little we knew about what was being done in our name for so many years.

Despite becoming notorious for my acts of divulgence, I am still, in many ways, bound to secrecy. There are things the media has made public about this story that I can’t comment on, confirm or deny. Certain details remain classified. I am limited to some degree in what I can put on the record.

Some people have characterized me as a traitor, which I continue to reject. I have faced serious consequences for sharing information that I believe to be in the public interest. But I believe that what I did was my democratic and ethical obligation.

Chelsea Manning is an American activist and the author of the forthcoming memoir “README.txt,” from which this essay has been adapted.

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A War In Four Acts

A War In Four Acts Balloon Juice

The chronology of the conflict splits up rather naturally into four phases.

Act I: The Initial Four-Theatre Assault (24 February—6 April)

The Russians launched their assault on four distinct theatres beginning on 24 February: Kyiv was assaulted from Belarus; Kharkiv from Belgorod; Eastern Ukraine from the Russian-controlled rebel areas in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts; and the south—the Azov and Black Sea coast areas, Mariupol, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Mikolaiv from Crimea, with Odesa clearly threatened: the intention of this latter axis evidently not just to create the long-desired “land bridge” from Russia to Crimea, but to reach clear across to Moldova, cutting off any rump Ukrainian state from sea access, leaving it to wither on the vine for easy later pruning.

As we all know, the southern effort was the only one rewarded with anything like success. Kherson surrendered on March 2, a major political accomplishment for Putin’s “Special Military Operation.” Elsewhere, however, things began going sideways immediately. Mariupol was invested, but continued resistance at the iron works tied up (for foolish politically-inspired reasons) military resources needed elsewhere until the final surrender on 17 May, 10 weeks after the invasion began. Zaporizhzhia and Mikolaiv were never taken, and Odesa was never seriously threatened by land.

Kyiv and Kharkiv actually repelled their respective assaults, the former preserving the country from decapitation, the latter, as noted in the Prologue, preserving Ukraine’s ability to wage war effectively by allowing it to use its own railway network as interior lines of communication, while forcing the Russians to move around the country’s periphery. The effort in the Donbas basically just fell down. By late March, the Kremlin had to confront the ugly reality that its grandiose invasion plan had failed miserably and humiliatingly, and its forces around Kyiv were being mercilessly pinned by Ukrainian antitank missiles and destroyed by Ukrainian artillery. Facing fearsome losses, the Russians decided to withdraw from Kyiv and Kharkiv, regroup, and re-scope the plan. The new objective would be more modest, but, they were certain, achievable: pinching off the Ukrainian salient in the Donbas, and securing the more Russian-speaking oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk for annexation to Russia.

Act II: Race to the Donbas (7 April—9 May)

By 6 April, the Russians had completed their withdrawal from Kyiv, and entirely halted efforts to enter Kharkiv, focusing instead on transferring as much combat power as remained in those theatres eastward from Kyiv, and south from Kharkiv, so as to consummate a “classic” of maneuver warfare: the Cannae-style envelopment that has so mesmerized, attracted, and ultimately frustrated so many commanders in history, and which was certainly beyond the meager abilities of the Russian STAVKA. The intention was to force a pincer south from Izyum, while at the same time striking north from Donetsk City, the two pincers meeting more or less at Slovyansk and trapping the greater part of the UA in the salient bulging eastward from Donetsk Oblast into Luhansk Oblast. To the names of famous commanders such as Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, and, presumably, Zhukov, entries for Shoigu and Putin were being prepared, not necessarily in that order.

Among the many problems with this high-concept plan was the fact that many of the units needed to carry it out had been very roughly handled by the UA, and needed rest and refit, for which there was no time as they were rushed around the periphery of Ukraine’s territory. The holding of Kharkiv paid a vast dividend now, as the UA was able to exploit its interior lines of communication to rush its forces to plug the gap in neck of the salient well before the Russians were ready to start ponderously forcing their trap closed. As it turns out, much planning had gone on for scenarios much like this one since 2014, and systems of communication trenches and prepared firing positions resembling WWI lines were already in place, waiting to accept the onrushing UA troops.

There were pitched infantry, artillery, tank and air/counter air battles, but the basic top line story is this: The UA stopped the Russian envelopment maneuver cold. It went nowhere, perhaps predictably (in retrospect, at least). Putin and STAVKA must have been frustrated beyond their powers of expression, even in the powerfully expressive blasphemous vulgarity for which the Russian language is justly famous. Meanwhile, the UA began pushing the Russians back from the Kharkiv suburbs at the end of April, and by 9 May Russian efforts were concentrated on preventing the UA from reaching the border north of Kharkiv. A new, new plan was clearly needed.

Act III: “Watch This Hand…” (10 May—1 August)

(1) Eastern Front

The “new, new plan” that STAVKA devised, after an operational “pause” of a week or so, may have been the only good idea that they had in the entire misbegotten campaign. They decided to go to the Russian army’s one true strength: stolid, grinding, massive, concentrated, artillery-forward assault, pulverizing everything in its path, forgoing fancy maneuvers beyond the Army’s capacity. Gathering much of their eastern strength in Luhansk Oblast, they drove it towards the city of Severodonetsk, an important road crossing on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets river, itself a major geographic feature of the Donbas plain.

Very few people are directly acquainted with the thinking of the UA’s general staff, and I am of course not one of those people. From circumstantial evidence, however, we can now infer that well before this point they got sick and tired of being the Russians’ passive victims, and had begun carrying out a series of feints and deceptions with the objective of ultimately seizing the initiative from the Russians and destroying as much of their army as they could trap. Which, in May 2022, would have sounded batshit insane to any outsider watching the progress of the war. And yet the UA set out to do precisely this.

In mid- to late-May, the UA accepted the Russians’ invitation to do battle in the streets of Severodonetsk. A more knuckleheaded challenge by STAVKA is difficult to imagine. By this point, the Russian army was definitely starting to feel the manpower squeeze, and was beginning its series of increasingly madcap recruitment drives in the outer Russian provinces. Entering an urban battlespace to dispute control of each neighborhood, street by street, against a wily, determined defender, was a cognitively challenged choice—it was tantamount to throwing manpower away for no good reason. Even employing lower-quality DNR/LNR “volunteers” from Luhansk and Donetsk breakaway regions was simply wasteful here.

The UA dragged the fight out at an advantageous casualty exchange rate for as long as possible, reinforcing from the west over the highway bridge. The Russians targeted the bridge with artillery for several weeks, succeeding only in proving how difficult it is to drop a bridge with imprecise artillery strikes rained down on its deck: the efficient way to destroy a bridge is to aim direct fire at its supports. Artillery holes through the deck do not undermine the structure for a very long time, and are easily repaired.

Eventually, having exacted an expensive butcher’s bill, the UA executed an orderly withdrawal from the city. They then repeated the performance in the nearby city of Lysichansk, eliciting an outburst from Igor Girkin, a former Russian commander and nationalist milblogger, who excoriated Putin and Shoigu for allowing the UA to deliberately inflict maximum damage on Russian troops and burn through Russian manpower and equipment.

As May gave way to June, then July, the war in the east entered open fields and took on a predictable pattern: the Russians, having secured Luhansk Oblast, were determined to complete the capture of Donetsk Oblast, but were doing so at a rate of about a mile or less per week. They would pour hellish amounts of artillery on flyspeck villages, then launch combined infantry-armored probes that were often repulsed. When such probes succeeded, the UA forces executed another orderly withdrawal to another position.

There were two remarkable things about this to me at the time. One was that this is not what you expect when a larger, more powerful army is shoving a smaller, weaker one backwards. What you expect, instead, is that eventually a desperate rear-guard action falls prey to a blunder or to an enemy stroke of luck, and there is a rout. But all summer long there was no rout. Obviously there was something wrong with the “smaller, weaker” part. The second remarkable thing was that this was apparently not obvious. The UA somehow managed to play-act a part of a combatant on the ropes, sending its Territorial troops into the fight in Severodonetsk as if it were short of regular army troops, and (probably) arranging for those Territorials to be interviewed in Western media so that they could impress journalists with the dire straits that they were in, with how little preparation they had been given, and with the meager support that they had received from Kyiv. How the UA effectively concealed hidden manpower reserves that should have been in plain view to any careful STAVKA intelligence officer, as well as to well-informed Western analysts1, is a story that I expect historians will be shaking their heads over for years to come.

(2) Southern Front

Well, OK, so the UA was hiding a lot of manpower strength. They also had had some serious armor donations in March/April—220 or so T-72s from Poland and the Czech Republic. Some were probably destroyed setting up firing positions in the east, but there were no reports of big tank battles, so they were still husbanding a lot of potential offensive strength. What for?

Near the beginning of July, something odd happened. The Ukrainian government began issuing a series of PSAs announcing that a campaign for the liberation of Kherson would begin soon, that preliminary operations were in progress, and that civilians in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts should begin evacuating to Ukrainian-held territory, or start making plans to do so, or at least to make valid shelter-in-place plans. Not long after, deep HIMARS strikes at Russian command, control, and communication (C3) and logistical targets such as ammunition dumps began behind Kherson, clearly intended to soften up Russian defenses by pushing those sites back beyond the 91 km (57 mile) HIMARS M-31 munitions’ striking range, lengthening supply lines and degrading front-line control. All this was odd because the PSAs were tantamount to surrendering any hope of strategic surprise for a Kherson offensive. In fact, it looked like such an obvious feint that I was certain the counteroffensive would happen elsewhere, at Zaporizhzhia. I was wrong about that too. The UA had a much better plan.

The Russians reacted to the threat like a pack of junkyard dogs who just heard a chain-link fence being repeatedly smacked with a tire iron. Kherson was a high-value political prize, the only intact capture of the war. Under no circumstances was it to be allowed to be compromised. The Kherson zone, until that time a sleepy operational backwater, suddenly became the recipient of massive reinforcements.

Kherson is on the west/north bank of the Dnipro river, not far from the river’s Black Sea outlet2. Russia attacked Southern Ukraine from, and is supplied from, the river’s east/south bank. The Dnipro is a mighty body of water, by no means fordable by vehicles. There were three bridges that traversed it. By early August, some 25,000 Russian troops had crossed those bridges and were deploying into the triangle between Kherson, Mikolaiv, and Zaporizhzhia, launching spoiling attacks to ruin the coming Kherson offensive, and to push back the HIMARS range.

These reinforcements had to come from somewhere—remember, Russia was scraping the bottom of a depleted manpower barrel as things stood. STAVKA determined that it was appropriate to designate the region north-east and east-south-east of Kharkiv as an “economy of force” area, meaning that the threat to this region was low, and it could be stripped of forces needed in other theatres. Off those forces went to Kherson.

However, before we move on, take another look at the railroad map above. That “economy of force” theatre happens to contain the vital lifeline of the entire Russian Donbas effort: that would be the Belgorod-Kupyansk rail line. Pity if anything happened to that…

Act IV: The Axe Falls (1 August—Present).

(1) Southern Theatre: The Dnipro Bear Trap

Beginning in July, the UA started taking HIMARS potshots at those three bridges across the Dnipro. Remember that the Russians proved at Severodonetsk that it takes a lot of artillery strikes to drop a bridge, although compared to the accuracy of the M-31 HIMARS munitions, Russian artillery rocket strikes are a bit like playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey while drunk. Nonetheless, the Russians had little trouble repairing holes at this stage, as their forces poured over the Dnipro.

In the first weeks of August, however, the UA put on a masterclass on how to drop bridges using precision artillery rockets. It turns out that with the M-31 munitions’ accuracy of a few meters, repeated strikes directly over support structures are perfectly adequate to the task of destroying highway and railway bridges. The three Dnipro bridges were out of service by the second half of August. It gradually began to dawn on the Russians that they had 25,000 troops on the opposite side of the river from their supply train, and they began to frantically construct pontoon (improvised floating, light-duty) bridges. The UA artillery happily targeted these, and anything moving across them.

On 29 August, the Ukrainian government announced that the long-awaited Kherson offensive was finally on, and the UA attacked, after imposing a strict security blackout on media reporting of its operations. The blackout seemed puzzling, at first—after all, the Russians were certain to obtain a clear picture of UA ops from their own units’ tactical intelligence officers within a day or two. The interpretation that emerged from a very lively debate among Adam Silverman’s blog commenters that culminated in a 2 September discussion thread—which I believe holds up well still today—was that a major deception operation was still in progress. That interpretation runs as follows: The Russians, having been tempted to cross the river in force and now cut off from their lines of supply, were gasping as they sucked scarce military resources over ephemeral pontoon bridges. The UA, for its part, could resupply at will from its burgeoning stock of NATO-grade equipment and ammunition, and could drive out that fleet of T-72s from the Warsaw Pact junkyards en masse. Moreover, while the strategic objective of the Ukrainian offensive was obviously Kherson, the Russians were to be kept guessing for as long as possible as to which axes of advance or geographical features might constitute the UA’s operational objectives.

And therein lies the deception. The Russians have been had. The operational objective of the offensive is almost certainly the Russian army itself. The UA has neatly turned the tables on the Russians, putting them in a situation where they are now to be ground down in a battle of attrition, as the Russians had been attempting to do to the UA in the Donbas since May. The beauty of the Dnipro Bear Trap is that it hands total control of the operational tempo and conflict intensity to the Ukrainians. The Russians cannot escape—their heavy vehicles cannot cross pontoon bridges, and all crossings are under artillery observation anyway. That army is never going home. All the UA needs to do is fight in a manner designed to provoke Russian materiel attrition, without necessarily committing to any axis of attack. The Russians will all be in POW camps or dead by some time in October, except possibly for the ones who are very good swimmers in cold water. Whoever thought up this trap is going to get an entry in that historic roll of famous commanders.

When Kherson falls, and the remains of the Russian army beyond the Dnipro is herded into camps, a shattering psychological blow will fall upon Russia, eclipsing all shocks that the Russians have absorbed in the war to date. The political effects on Russian politics, and on International attitudes toward Russia and towards the war are not calculable, but they are certain to be immense. There’s an earthquake coming, and soon.

(2) Kharkiv Offensive: Targets Of Opportunity

On 4 September, soldiers from two different UA battalion-level units uploaded pictures to Twitter from Ozerne, a village on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi-Donets, about 6 km/4 miles from Lyman. From the photos, the crossing had apparently been unopposed, and the smiling troops had the air of boys on a cheeky outing. Still, believing that Lyman was a Russian stronghold, I expected the Russians to come boiling out of there like angry fire ants, and felt sure that a pitched battle would ensue within a day.

There was no battle at or near Ozerne, or Lyman for that matter, at least not that week. Remember “economy of force theatre”? Yeah, well, we didn’t know about that at the time. However, it turns out that the UA did know about it, having presumably done a very careful accounting of where their bag of trapped Russians in the south had come from, and gotten some confirmation from local intelligence sources—it’s their country, after all. They knew that the theatre containing the Belgorod-Kupyansk supply line of the entire Russian Donbas war effort was completely defenseless. For the cost of detaching a few battalions (Michael Kofman estimated 4 or 5 on a recent War on the Rocks podcast) from their main business in the south, they could derange the Russian supply line, and perhaps entirely separate Belgorod from the theatre for which it serves as logistical hub.

This, in my opinion, was the genesis of the now-famous “Kharkiv Offensive” that captured the imagination of the world. It was supposed to be an opportunistic diversion from the main effort in the south, not the headline-grabbing blitzkrieg that it turned out to be. I doubt very much that the UA expected the thinned-out Russians to break and run away as a leaderless, disordered mob, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t plan it that way, but it must have been a very pleasant surprise, as they pushed east and, almost effortlessly, cut the Belgorod supply line at Kupyansk.

The rest of the offensive that followed was natural exploitation, although perhaps it has a purpose beyond liberation of occupied territory. This is not yet necessarily the end for Belgorod.

If you look back at the map, there is a second line farther east, terminating at Starobilsk, which can be reached from Belgorod by means of a detour north, east, then south again, of about 300 km. The detour would be a nuisance, but in Internet network parlance it adds latency rather than degrading bandwidth, especially if the Russians are willing to prioritize military supply train schedules over civilian schedules (want to bet?). So the UA may still need to push further east if it wants to be sure of knocking Belgorod’s supplies out of the war altogether. The advantage of doing so is to put more strain on the resources and scheduling at the remaining distribution hub at Rostov-on-Don, and to ensure that any failure occurring to deliveries from Rostov become critical bottlenecks to the entire Russian war effort.

To close that line, the UA doesn’t actually have to reach it. They just need to get to within 90 km of the Starobilsk rail yard with a HIMARS unit, or even within firing distance of, say, any 10-mile stretch of track, on a decent road with good cover, so that they can fire salvos that make rebar out of stretches of track too long to repair in a useful time. Then Belgorod can go back to being a sleepy border town. I’m sure the local civilian rail passengers would appreciate their schedules going back to normal.

Epilogue: Mobilize This

The big war news story of the past few weeks has been the Russian “mobilization” drive, which is an effort so confused and ill-conceived that I will not let a detailed critique detain us here—tune in to one of Adam’s excoriations of the matter for that, or some of the informed discussions that follow. What I’d like to note here is that at this point, from a logistical perspective, the entire Russian war effort is hanging by a thread, and it almost doesn’t matter whether their mobilization effort succeeds or fails.

Set aside the question of how the raw recruits that are being pulled out of metro stops today are to substitute for the 25,000 mostly contract servicemen (and officers) trapped west of the Dnipro that the Russians are soon going to be forced to write off as a total loss. And of where the combat experience required to train those recruits is to come from. And of whether the Russians should ask the UA nicely for their gear and ammo back, so they can equip a few of them.3

More crucially, the UA is obviously targeting their vulnerable supply rail lines, and have gotten good at it. On 22 September some genius at the Russian supply service decided to run a supply train reported to be full of T-62 tanks from Rostov-on-Don right up to a train station in Yasynuvata, a suburb of Donetsk City, less than five miles from the front line. The train pulled into town and promptly blew up. Obviously, the lessons of the war are not being widely shared among the Russian commands, because there are certainly commanders in the army who learned the hard way to KEEP THEIR GODDAMNED HIGH-VALUE LOGISTICAL TARGETS OUT OF THE 90 KM HIMARS RANGE FROM THE FRONT, but logistics and supply service commanders apparently don’t read those memos. This was not the first Russian supply train targeted by a HIMARS strike. Similarly, the explosion at the ammunition warehouse in Dzankhoi last summer, courtesy of UA/SOF, shows the attention and priority attached by the UA to rail supply targets.

My guess is that the UA wants deep interdiction of all Russian rail links into Ukraine. They’ve got Belgorod nearly off-line, and perhaps entirely off-line if tanks are now shipped to the Donbas from Rostov. Next the UA will want to cut the line from Rostov into Luhansk Oblast through Taganrog. That’s actually nearly accomplished: the border crossing of that line, the town of Vyselky, is 88 km (55 miles) from Marinka, a Donetsk suburb that is currently the site of significant fighting. This is the edge of HIMARS range, meaning that most of the line from Rostov inside Ukraine can already be targeted.

I’m sure the UA would also dearly love to knock the Crimean rail supplies off-line, targeting Kerch or Dzankhoi, or both. These are not impossible goals if the Ukrainian government can cut a deal with the Biden administration for a limited number of accounted-for, agreed-target ATACMS munitions—which have 300 km/188 mile range, and which the U.S. has so far considered too provocative and escalatory to supply to Ukraine. But consider this: a small number of such artillery missiles with warheads specialized for each Crimean target—area bomblets, probably, for rail yards, penetrator high-explosive for bridge supports—would permanently shut off all military supplies to the Southern theatre.4 Then those newly-mobilized recruits can walk, or drive their personal cars to Ukraine, and their stuff can be bused in, but the Russian army will have seen its last tank or artillery shell. And for all intents and purposes, the war will be over.

The ruse really worked beautifully. The Russians were not the only ones suckered: Michael Kofman, an expert on military affairs and on Russian force structure, was interviewed in the War on the Rocks podcast in June. He delivered a careful analysis of the Russian manpower crisis, but then, with no comparable discussion of Ukraine’s manpower situation, or even an acknowledgment that Ukraine provisions manpower entirely differently from the way Russia does, he breezily stated “both sides have now used up their best troops.” as if there were no distinctions to be drawn between the two, and if Russia was exhausted, Ukraine must be also. I admire Kofman, and pay attention to everything he says. I point this episode out to show that lots of people were taken in, along with the Russians.

If you are not familiar with the geography of Kherson’s situation, a quick glance at Google Maps might be a good idea at this point.

As the meme has it, the Russians are at least likely to see some of their ammo returned. The UA operates many of the same heavy-caliber guns and mortars as they do.

It may or may not be worth the trouble of using ATACMS strikes to sever the final two rail connections northeast and southeast of Luhansk, indicated by the red annotation arrows on the map at the top of this post. Luhansk is about 96 km / 60 miles from Bakhmut, where active—and, for the Russians, futile—fighting is currently in progress. This suggests that the city of Luhansk itself, and its rail connections, may be within M-31 targeting range very soon.

Education Divides Everything, Including Life and Death

Education Divides Everything, Including Life and Death

By Thomas B. Edsall NY TIMES

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

The Republican Party has become crucially dependent on a segment of white voters suffering what analysts call a “mortality penalty.”

This penalty encompasses not only disproportionately high levels of so-called deaths of despair — suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse — but also across-the-board increases in multiple categories of disease, injury and emotional disorder.

“Red states are now less healthy than blue states, a reversal of what was once the case,” Anne Case and Angus Deaton — economists at Princeton who argue in a paper they published in April, “The Great Divide: Education, Despair, and Death.”

Case and Deaton write that the correlation between Republican voting and life expectancy “goes from plus-0.42 when Gerald Ford was the Republican candidate — healthier states voted for Ford and against Carter — to minus-0.69 in 2016 and -0.64 in 2020. Stats classified as the least healthy voted for Trump and against Biden.”

Case and Deaton contend that the ballots cast for Donald Trump by members of the white working class “are surely not for a president who will dismantle safety nets but against a Democratic Party that represents an alliance between minorities — whom working-class whites see as displacing them and challenging their once solid if unperceived privilege — and an educated elite that has benefited from globalization and from a soaring stock market, which was fueled by the rising profitability of those same firms that were increasingly denying jobs to the working class.”

Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, described the erosion of economic and social status for whites without college degrees in a 2021 paper:

From 2005 to 2019, an average of 70,000 Americans died annually from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning). These deaths are concentrated among less than college educated middle-aged whites, with the those out of the labor force disproportionately represented. Low-income minorities are significantly more optimistic than whites and much less likely to die of these deaths. This despair reflects the decline of the white working class. Counties with more respondents reporting lost hope in the years before 2016 were more likely to vote for Trump.

Lack of hope, in Graham’s view, “is a central issue. The American dream is in tatters and, ironically, it is worse for whites.” America’s high levels of reported pain, she writes, “are largely driven by middle-aged whites. As there is no objective reason that whites should have more pain than minorities, who typically have significantly worse working conditions and access to health care, this suggests psychological pain as well as physical pain.”

There are, Graham argues,

long-term reasons for this. As blue-collar jobs began to decline from the late 1970s on, those displaced workers — and their communities — lost their purpose and identity and lack a narrative for going forward. For decades whites had privileged access to these jobs and the stable communities that came with them. Primarily white manufacturing and mining communities — in the suburbs and rural areas and often in the heartland — have the highest rates of despair and deaths. In contrast, more diverse urban communities have higher levels of optimism, better health indicators, and significantly lower rates of these deaths.

In contrast to non-college whites, Graham continued,

minorities, who had unequal access to those jobs and worse objective conditions to begin with, developed coping skills and supportive community ties in the absence of coherent public safety nets. Belief in education and strong communities have served them well in overcoming much adversity. African Americans remain more likely to believe in the value of a college education than are low-income whites. Minority communities based in part on having empathy for those who fall behind, meanwhile, have emerged from battling persistent discrimination.

Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:

The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks. There is also a phenomenon among urban Black males that has to do with longer term despair: nothing to lose, weak problem-solving skills, drug gangs and more.

The role of race and gender in deaths of despair, especially drug-related deaths, is complex. Case wrote in an email:

Women have always been less likely to kill themselves with drugs or alcohol, or by suicide. However, from the mid-1990s into the 20-teens, for whites without a four-year college degree, death rates from all three causes rose in parallel between men and women. So the level has always been higher for men, but the trend (and so the increase) was very similar between less-educated white men and women. For Blacks and Hispanics the story is different. Deaths of Despair were falling for less educated Black and Hispanic men from the early 1990s to the 20-teens and were constant over that period (at a much lower rate) for Black and Hispanic women without a B.A. After the arrival of Fentanyl as a street drug in 2013, rates started rising for both Black and Hispanic men and women without a B.A., but at a much faster rate for men.

In their October 2014 study, “Economic Strain and Children’s Behavior,” Lindsey Jeanne Leininger, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Ariel Kalil, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, found a striking difference in the pattern of behavioral problems among white and Black children from demographically similar families experiencing the financial strains of the 2008 Great Recession:

Specifically, we found that economic strain exhibited a statistically significant and qualitatively large association with White children’s internalizing behavior problems and that this relationship was not due to potentially correlated influences of objective measures of adverse economic conditions or to mediating influences of psychosocial context. Furthermore, our data provide evidence that the relationship between economic strain and internalizing problems is meaningfully different across White and Black children. In marked contrast to the White sample, the regression-adjusted relationship between economic strain and internalizing behaviors among the Black sample was of small magnitude and was statistically insignificant.

Kalil elaborated on this finding in an email: “The processes through which white and Black individuals experience stress from macroeconomic shocks are different,” she wrote, adding that the “white population, which is more resourced and less accustomed to being financially worried, is feeling threatened by economic shocks in a way that is not very much reflective of their actual economic circumstances. In our study, among Black parents, what we are seeing is basically that perceptions of economic strain are strongly correlated with actual income-to-needs.”

This phenomenon has been in evidence for some time.

A 2010 Pew Research Center study that examined the effects of the Great Recession on Black and white Americans, reported that Black Americans consistently suffered more in terms of unemployment, work cutbacks and other measures, but remained far more optimistic about the future than whites. Twice as many Black as white Americans were forced during the 2008 recession to work fewer hours, to take unpaid lead or switch to part-time, and Black unemployment rose from 8.9 to 15.5 percent from April 2007 to April 2009, compared with an increase from 3.7 to 8.0 percent for whites.

Despite experiencing more hardship, 81 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement “America will always continue to be prosperous and make economic progress,” compared with 59 percent of whites; 45 percent of Black Americans said the country was still in recession compared with 57 percent of whites. Pew found that 81 percent of the Black Americans it surveyed responded yes when asked “Is America still a land of prosperity?” compared with 59 percent of whites. Asked “will your children’s future standard of living be better or worse than yours?” 69 percent of Black Americans said better, and 17 percent said worse, while 38 percent of whites said better and 29 percent said worse.

There are similar patterns for other measures of suffering.

In “Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States, 1993-2019,” David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, economists at Dartmouth and the University of Warwick in Britain, note that “the proportion of the U.S. population in extreme distress rose from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. Among low-education midlife white persons, the percentage more than doubled, from 4.8 percent to 11.5 percent.”

Blanchflower and Oswald point out that “something fundamental appears to have occurred among white, low-education, middle-aged citizens.”

Employment prospects play a key role among those in extreme distress, according to Blanchflower and Oswald. A disproportionately large share of those falling into this extreme category agreed with the statement “I am unable to find work.”

In her 2020 paper, “Trends in U.S. Working-Age non-Hispanic White Mortality: Rural-Urban and Within-Rural Differences,” Shannon M. Monnat, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, explained that “between 1990-92 and 2016-18, the mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites increased by 9.6 deaths per 100,000 population among metro males and 30.5 among metro females but increased by 70.1 and 65.0 among nonmetro (rural and exurban) males and females, respectively.”

Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”

For rural and exurban men 25 to 44 over this same 28-year period, she continued, “the mortality rate increased by 70.1 deaths per 100,000 population compared to an increase of only 9.6 among metro males ages 25-44, and 81 percent of the nonmetro increase was due to increases in drugs, alcohol, suicide, and mental/behavioral disorders (the deaths of despair).”

The divergence between urban and rural men pales, however, in comparison with women. “Mortality increases among nonmetro females have been startling. The mortality growth among nonmetro females was much larger than among nonmetro males,” especially for women 45 to 64, Monnat writes. Urban white men saw 45-64 deaths rates per 100,000 fall from 850 to 711.1 between 1990 and 2018, while death rates for rural white men of the same age barely changed, 894.8 to 896.6. In contrast, urban white women 45-64 saw their death rate decline from 490.4 to 437.6 while rural white women of that age saw their mortality rate grow from 492.6 to 571.9.

In an email, Monnat emphasized the fact that Trump has benefited from a bifurcated coalition:

The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.

In a separate 2017 paper, “More than a rural revolt: Landscapes of despair and the 2016 Presidential election,” Monnat and David L. Brown, a sociologist at Cornell, argue that

Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.

Three economists, David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson of M.I.T., the University of Zurich and Harvard, reported in their 2018 paper, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” on the debilitating consequences for working class men of the “China shock” — that is, of sharp increases in manufacturing competition with China:

Shocks to manufacturing labor demand, measured at the commuting-zone level, exert large negative impacts on men’s relative employment and earnings. Although losses are visible throughout the earnings distribution, the relative declines in male earnings are largest at the bottom of the distribution.

Such shocks “curtail the availability and desirability of potentially marriageable young men along multiple dimensions: reducing the share of men among young adults and increasing the prevalence of idleness — the state of being neither employed nor in school — among young men who remain.”

These adverse trends, Autor, Dorn and Hanson report, “induce a differential and economically large rise in male mortality from drug and alcohol poisoning, H.I.V./AIDS, and homicide” and simultaneously “raise the fraction of mothers who are unwed, the fraction of children in single-headed households, and the fraction of children living in poverty.”

I asked Autor for his thoughts on the implications of these developments for the Trump electorate. He replied by email:

Many among the majority of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree feel, justifiably, that the last three decades of rapid globalization and automation have made their jobs more precarious, scarcer, less prestigious, and lower paid. Neither party has been successful in restoring the economic security and standing of non-college workers (and yes, especially non-college white males). The roots of these economic grievances are authentic, so I don’t think these voters should be denigrated for seeking a change in policy direction. That said, I don’t think the Trump/MAGA brand has much in the way of substantive policy to address these issues, and I believe that Democrats do far more to protect and improve economic prospects for blue-collar workers.

There is some evidence that partisanship correlates with mortality rates.

In their June 2022 paper, “The Association Between Covid-19 Mortality And The County-Level Partisan Divide In The United States,” Neil Jay Sehgal, Dahai Yue, Elle Pope, Ren Hao Wang and Dylan H. Roby, public health experts at the University of Maryland, found in their study of county-level Covid-19 mortality data from Jan. 1, 2020, through Oct. 31, 2021 that “majority Republican counties experienced 72.9 additional deaths per 100,000 people.”

The authors cites studies showing that “counties with a greater proportion of Trump voters were less likely to search for information about Covid-19 and engage in physical distancing despite state-level mandates. Differences in Covid-19 mortality grew during the pandemic to create substantial variation in death rates in counties with higher levels of Trump support.”

Sehgal and his colleagues conclude from their analysis that “voting behavior acts as a proxy for compliance with and support for public health measures, vaccine uptake, and the likelihood of engaging in riskier behaviors (for example, unmasked social events and in-person dining) that could affect disease spread and mortality.”

In addition, the authors write,

Local leaders may be hesitant to implement evidence-based policies to combat the pandemic because of pressure or oversight from state or local elected officials or constituents in more conservative areas. Even if they did institute protective policies, they may face challenges with compliance because of pressure from conservative constituents.

For the past two decades, white working class Americans have faced a series of economic dislocations similar to those that had a devastating impact on Black neighborhoods starting in the 1960s, as the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson described them in his 1987 book, “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy.”

How easy would it be to apply Wilson’s description of “extraordinary rates of black joblessness,” disordered lives, family breakdown and substance abuse to the emergence of similar patterns of disorder in white exurban America? How easy to transpose Black with white or inner city and urban with rural and small town?

It is very likely, as Anne Case wrote in her email, that the United States is fast approaching a point where

Education divides everything, including connection to the labor market, marriage, connection to institutions (like organized religion), physical and mental health, and mortality. It does so for whites, Blacks and Hispanics. There has been a profound (not yet complete) convergence in life expectancy by education. There are two Americas now: one with a B.A. and one without.

 

Putin Is Trying to Out crazy the West

By Thomas L. Friedman NY Times

With his annexation of parts of Ukraine on Friday, Vladimir Putin has set in motion forces that are turning Russia into a giant North Korea. It will be a paranoid, angry, isolated state, but unlike North Korea, the Russian version will be spread over 11 time zones — from the Arctic Sea to the Black Sea and from the edge of free Europe to the edge of Alaska — with thousands of nuclear warheads.

I have known a Russia that was strong, menacing, but stable — called the Soviet Union. I have known a Russia that was hopeful, potentially transitioning to democracy under Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and even the younger Putin. I have known a Russia that was a “bad boy” under an older Putin, hacking America, poisoning opposition figures, but still a stable, reliable oil exporter and occasional security partner with the U.S. when we needed Moscow’s help in a pinch.

But none of us have ever known the Russia that a now desperate, back-against-the-wall Putin seems hellbent on delivering — a pariah Russia; a big, humiliated Russia; a Russia that has sent many of its most talented engineers, programmers and scientists fleeing through any exit they can find. This would be a Russia that has already lost so many trading partners that it can survive only as an oil and natural gas colony of China, a Russia that is a failed state, spewing out instability from every pore.

Such a Russia would not be just a geopolitical threat. It would be a human tragedy of mammoth proportions. Putin’s North Koreanization of Russia is turning a country that once gave the world some of its most renowned authors, composers, musicians and scientists into a nation more adept at making potato chips than microchips, more famous for its poisoned underwear than its haute couture and more focused on unlocking its underground reservoirs of gas and oil than on its aboveground reservoirs of human genius and creativity. The whole world is diminished by Putin’s diminishing of Russia.

But with Friday’s annexation, it’s hard to see any other outcome as long as Putin is in power. Why? Game theorist Thomas Schelling famously suggested that if you are playing chicken with another driver, the best way to win — the best way to get the other driver to swerve out of the way first — is if before the game starts you very conspicuously unscrew your steering wheel and throw it out the window. Message to the other driver: I’d love to get out of the way, but I can’t control my car anymore. You better swerve!

Trying to always outcrazy your opponent is a North Korean specialty. Now, Putin has adopted it, announcing with great fanfare that Russia is annexing four Ukrainian regions: Luhansk and Donetsk, the two Russian-backed regions where pro-Putin forces have been fighting Kyiv since 2014, and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which have been occupied since shortly after Putin’s invasion in February. In a grand hall of the Kremlin, Putin declared Friday that the residents of these four regions would become Russia’s citizens forever.

What is Putin up to? One can only speculate. Start with his domestic politics. Putin’s base is not the students at Moscow State University. His base is the right-wing nationalists, who have grown increasingly angry at Russia’s military humiliation in Ukraine. To hold their support, Putin may have felt the need to show that, with his reserve call-up and annexation, he is fighting a real war for Mother Russia, not just a vague special military operation.

However, this could also be Putin trying to maneuver a favorable negotiated settlement. I would not be surprised if he soon announces his willingness for a cease-fire — and a willingness to repair pipelines and resume gas shipments to any country ready to recognize Russia’s annexation.

Putin could then claim to his nationalist base that he got something for his war, even if it was hugely expensive, and now he’s content to stop. There is just one problem: Putin does not actually control all the territory he is annexing.

That means he can’t settle for any deal unless and until he’s driven the Ukrainians out of all the territory he now claims; otherwise he would be surrendering what he just made into sovereign Russian territory. This could be a very ominous development. Putin’s battered army does not seem capable of seizing more territory and, in fact, seems to be losing more by the day.

By claiming territory that he doesn’t fully control, I fear Putin is painting himself into a corner that he might one day feel he can escape only with a nuclear weapon.

In any event, Putin seems to be daring Kyiv and its Western allies to keep the war going into winter — when natural gas supplies in Europe will be constrained and prices could be astronomical — to recover territories, some of which his Ukrainian proxies have had under Russia’s influence since 2014.

Will Ukraine and the West swerve? Will they plug their noses and do a dirty deal with Putin to stop his filthy war? Or will Ukraine and the West take him on, head-on, by insisting that Putin get no territorial achievement out of this war, so we uphold the principle of the inadmissibility of seizing territory by force?

Do not be fooled: There will be pressure within Europe to swerve and accept such a Putin offer. That is surely Putin’s aim — to divide the Western alliance and walk away with a face-saving “victory.”

But there is another short-term risk for Putin. If the West doesn’t swerve, doesn’t opt for a deal with him, but instead doubles down with more arms and financial aid for Ukraine, there is a chance that Putin’s army will collapse.

That is unpredictable. But here is what is totally predictable: A dynamic is now in place that will push Putin’s Russia even more toward the North Korea model. It starts with Putin’s decision to cut off most natural gas supplies to Western Europe.

There is only one cardinal sin in the energy business: Never, ever, ever make yourself an unreliable supplier. No one will ever trust you again. Putin has made himself an unreliable supplier to some of his oldest and best customers, starting with Germany and much of the European Union. They are all now looking for alternative, long-term supplies of natural gas and building more renewable power.

It will take two to three years for the new pipeline networks coming from the Eastern Mediterranean and liquefied natural gas coming from the United States and North Africa to begin to sustainably replace Russian gas at scale. But when that happens, and when world natural gas supplies increase generally to compensate for the loss of Russia’s gas — and as more renewables come online — Putin could face a real economic challenge. His old customers may still buy some energy from Russia, but they will never rely so totally on Russia again. And China will squeeze him for deep discounts.

In short, Putin is eroding the biggest source — maybe his only source — of sustainable long-term income. At the same time, his illegal annexation of regions of Ukraine guarantees that the Western sanctions on Russia will stay in place, or even accelerate, which will only accelerate Russia’s migration to failed-state status, as more and more Russians with globally marketable skills surely leave.

I celebrate none of this. This is a time for Western leaders to be both tough and smart. They need to know when to swerve and when to make the other guy swerve, and when to leave some dignity out there for the other driver, even if he is behaving with utter disregard for anyone else. It may be that Putin has left us no choice but to learn to live with a Russian North Korea — at least as long as he is in charge. If that is the case, we’ll just have to make the best of it, but the best of it will be a much more unstable world.