TLP Weekend Edition (August 16-17, 2025)
What we're reading and checking out.
📐 "Geometry Solves Gerrymandering," by Roland Fryer. As Republicans kick off the latest round of gerrymandering (and Democrats threaten to respond in kind), the estimable Fryer believes America is reaching "a new level of insanity that should spur urgent demands for reform." Drawing on his own research about gerrymandering, he posits that one way to stop the arms race is by simply using math—specifically, geometry. Fryer argues that legislatures should draw maps that strive to be as compact as possible, and while he acknowledges that no map is likely to align to this standard, he has developed a baseline measure by which to measure how close to that ideal party-drawn maps are. Using his metric, you can see how much lawmakers tipped their hands on the scales. And he notes, "The empirical data show compactness is not cosmetic; it’s what turns a fixed match into a fair fight."
🌎 “Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist: And why so many climate pragmatists can’t quit catastrophism,” by Ted Nordhaus. In left-of-center circles, it’s de rigueur to be a climate catastrophist because isn’t that what “the science” says? It is not as Nordhaus explains in this lucidly written, essential article in The Ecomodernist. At this point, belief in climate catastrophism is an increasingly counterproductive indulgence fueled by groupthink, sloppy analysis, and a failure to think clearly about risk in a climate context.
Put these two factors together—the outsized influence that exposure and vulnerability have on the cost of extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the very modest intensification that climate change contributes to these events, when it plays any role at all—and what should be clear is that climate change is contributing very little to present day disasters. It is a relatively small factor in the frequency and intensity of climate hazards that are experienced by human societies, which in turn play a small role in the human and economic costs of climate related disasters compared to non-climate factors.
This also means that the scale of anthropogenic climate change that would be necessary to very dramatically intensify those hazards, such that they overwhelm the non-climate factors in determining the consequences of future climate related events, is implausibly large. The amount of warming that is conceivable even in plausible worst case scenarios, in other words, is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes that I once believed in, where tens or hundreds of million, perhaps even billions of lives were at stake…
Why do so many smart people, most trained as scientists, engineers, lawyers, or public policy experts, and all who will tell you, and I say this not ironically, that they “believe in science,” get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?
There are, in my view, several reasons. The first is that highly educated people with high levels of science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and ideological commitments. Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan has shown that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually have less accurate views about climate change overall than climate skeptics and that this remains true even among partisans with high levels of education and general science literacy. Elsewhere, Kahan and others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people are often more likely to stubbornly hold onto erroneous beliefs because they are more expert at defending their political views and ideological commitments.
The second reason is that there are strong social, political, and professional incentives if you make a living doing left of center climate and energy policy to get climate risk wrong. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. There is little tolerance on the Left for any expression of materialist politics that challenge foundational claims of the environmental movement. Meanwhile the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk for which there is no consensus whatsoever.
Whether you are an academic researcher, a think tank policy wonk, a program officer at an environmental or liberal philanthropy, or a Democratic congressional staffer, there is simply no benefit and plenty of downside to questioning, much less challenging, the central notion that climate change is an existential threat to the human future. It’s a good way to lose friends or even your job. It won’t help you get your next job or your next grant. And so everyone, mostly falls in line. Better to go along to get along…
For all its worldly and learned affect, what [climate catastrophism] has resulted in is the creation of an insular climate discourse on the Left that may be cleverer by half than right wing dismissals of climate change but is no less prone to making misleading claims about the subject, ignoring countervailing evidence, and demonizing dissent. And it has produced a politics that is simultaneously grandiose and maximalist and, increasingly, deeply out of touch with popular sentiment.
💉 "Canada Is Killing Itself," by Elaina Plott Calabro. A fascinating look at Canada's experiment in Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID), which has seen a growing demand nine years after the country first legalized assisted suicide. Plott Calabro's deep dive on the subject includes interviews from Canadian doctors, some of whom started out as supportive of the practice in theory but who came to develop reservations as it became a reality. Her big-picture takeaway: "This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?" An excellent piece of journalism well worth reading in its entirety.
⚽️ English Premier League, Opening Weekend. The 2025/2026 EPL season kicked off Friday with last year’s champions, Liverpool, defeating Bournemouth at their Anfield fortress. Arguably the strongest league in world soccer, EPL matches will run from now until May next year with endless exciting storylines. Will Liverpool defend their title? Can Arsenal break its 21-year drought to lift the trophy? Is Man City going to get out of its recent funk? Tune in all season long on NBC, USA, and Peacock.
🎸 Instant Holograms on Metal Films, by Stereolab. Their first album in 15 years finds Stereolab in top form. The band’s “voracious appetite for cycling through international pop styles, whether yé-yé, Tropicália, jazz, funk, shoegaze, or electronic pop” is on full display here. We particularly like this track, “Esemplastic Creeping Eruption,” which sounds wonderful on vinyl, and definitely recommend catching them live this fall if you can. In the meantime, enjoy some soccer and space-age bachelor pad music. Cheers!
Climate change has never been in my Top 500 concerns. And it isn't #501. I worried about it for about five minutes in 1988, and never again. Global Cooling. The New Ice Age. Global Warming. Climate Change. Inadvertent Climate Modification. Global Weirding. The Climate Crisis. The Climate Emergency. 97% of scientists agree! Catastrophic Heating. Extreme Weather. Climate Change Extinction. Jesus Crisis.
The tip off was when the change was made to climate change from global warming. The climate has always changed and always will but this allowed the catastrophists to include all sorts of stuff that has nothing to do with carbon dioxide but makes for dramatic news. Global warming is about global climate but there is also local climate (city heat islands) , regional climate (long term drought in the SW) and just weather which is most of the news.