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This being Sunday, we have a dollop of John Avise‘s photos of North American butterflies. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 16 

This week continues my 18-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  The following is an anecdote rather than a controlled observation, but I wonder whether other WEIT readers have a similar impression:  Twenty years ago, butterflies of many species seem to me to have been far more abundant than they are today.

Silvery Blue (Glaucopsyche lygdamus), male:

Silvery Blue, male underwing:

Silvery Blue, female:

Silvery Checkerspot (Chlosyne nycteis):

Silvery Checkerspot, underwing:

Sleepy Duskywing (Erynnis brizo):

Sonoran Skipper (Polites sonora), upperwing:

Sonoran Skipper, underwing:

Spicebush Swallowtail (Papilio troilus):

Spring Azure (Celastrina laden):

Sylvan Hairstreak (Satyrium sylvinus):

Tailed Copper (Lycaena arota), upperwing:

Tailed Copper, underwing:

Efforts are underway to develop advanced propulsion systems that can reduce transit times to Mars and other locations in the Solar System. These include nuclear propulsion concepts, which NASA began researching again in 2016 for its proposed "Moon to Mars" mission architecture. In a recent paper, two aerospace innovators reviewed some key nuclear-electric propulsion concepts, their respective advantages, and challenges. In the end, they conclude that nuclear propulsion has the potential to revolutionize space exploration and make humanity "multiplanetary."

Deciding how to power a CubeSat is one of the greatest challenges when designing a modular spacecraft. Tradeoffs in solar panel size, battery size, and power consumption levels are all key considerations when selecting parts and mission architecture. To help with those design choices, a paper from researchers in Ethiopia and Korea describes a new machine-learning algorithm that helps CubeSat designers optimize their power consumption, ensuring these little satellites have a better chance of fulfilling their purpose.

Bill Maher’s latest news-and-comedy shtick (8½ minutes) deals with “Trump Devotion Syndrome”:  the sycophancy that imbues the cowards of America who don’t want to offend the Orange Man.  Lots of Presidential rump osculation here! Putting his image on Mount Rushmore and on American currency? But of course!

Oh, and there’s the “transgender mice” he mentioned.  (“We were splicing their genes, not making them compete in women’s sports.”) All in all, this bit is what the kids say is a “sick burn” for MAGA.  And Maher is peeved!

John McWhorter and journalist Rikki Schlott are there, too.

This is a good one; don’t miss it.

A team led by Corrado Malanga from the University of Pisa and Filippo Biondi from the University of Strathclyde recently claimed to have found huge structures beneath the Pyramids of Giza using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology.

These structures are said to be up to 10 times larger than the pyramids, potentially rewriting our understanding of ancient Egyptian history.

However, many archaeologists and Egyptologists, including prominent figures, have expressed doubt, highlighting the lack of peer-reviewed evidence and the technical challenges of such deep imaging.

Photo by Michael Starkie / Unsplash

Dr. Zahi Hawass, a renowned Egyptologist and former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, has publicly rejected these findings, calling them “completely wrong” and “baseless,” arguing that the techniques used are not scientifically validated. Other experts, like Professor Lawrence Conyers, have questioned whether SAR can penetrate the dense limestone to the depths claimed, suggesting decades of prior studies using other methods found no such evidence.

The claims have reignited interest in fringe theories, such as the pyramids as ancient power grids or energy hubs, with comparisons to Nikola Tesla’s wireless energy transmission ideas. Mythological correlations, like the Halls of Amenti and references in the Book of the Dead, have also been drawn.

The research has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which is a critical step for validation. The findings were announced via a press release on March 15, 2025, and discussed in a press conference.

What to make of it all?

For a deep dive into this fascinating claim, Skeptic magazine Editor-in-Chief Michael Shermer appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, alongside Jay Anderson from Project Unity, archaeologist and YouTuber Dr. Flint Dibble, Jimmy Corsetti from the Bright Insight Podcast, Dan Richards from DeDunking the Past, and archaeologist and YouTuber Milo Rossi (AKA Miniminuteman).

Watch the discussion here:

Here you go: the 18 celebrity ailurophiles featured, including photos and videos of their moggies. They include Taylor Swift (of course), Drew Barrymore, Ricky Gervais, Kate Beckinsale, Katy Perry, Martha Stewart, Nicole Kidman, Ellen DeGeneres, Ed Sheeran, Mark Ruffalo, Russell Brand, Robert Downey, Jr., Miley Cyrus, Kat Dennings, James Franco, Jesse Eisenberg (he was on Team Cat when we debated at the New Yorker Festival), Mayim Bialik, and Cameron Diaz.

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From FB; a video of cats going down stairs, most of them awkwardly.. I like “Slinky Kitty”.

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Did you know that there is an American Museum of the House Cat in Sylva, North Carolina? I discovered it when Facebook foisted a short video on me. Here’s where Sylva is, and it’s not far from Asheville (birthplace and burial site of Thomas Wolfe) or Pigeon Forge (home of “Dollywood”).

Some information from the site:

The American Museum of the House Cat is dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition, and interpretation of art, artifacts, and literature of the HouseCat for the purposes of education, historical perspective, aesthetic enjoyment, and for the significance of the unique five million year relationship between man and the domesticated feline.

The Museum was closed for several years, but opened up again in 2023, and is still active. Admission for adults is $10, and $5 for children. Here’s a ten-minute video of a visit to the Museum by “Cashew Paul”.  This looks like a MUST for all cat lovers.

I have two Chessie System playing cards: rarities (see 5:30). You need to know who Chessie is, along with her kittens Nip and Tuck and their father Peek (doesn’t he look proud?). Note also the medieval “petrified cat”, a signed Warhol cat, and a ton of cat art, clocks, ceramics, pendants, stuffed toys, and so on.  And a display of FELIX, my favorite cartoon cat.

And there’s a movie about the curator, Dr. Harold Sims, which I found on YouTube (see below). The blurb on the site:

Little Works of Art, a documentary by Kim Best, is the story of our Curator, Dr, Harold Sims.  Serving as an introduction to our American Museum of the House Cat, this short film details the love and passion Dr, Sims feels for the Cat.  The Cary Theater featured Little Works of Art for their Local Premiers Series in November of 2017.  Little Works of Art then debuted at the 1st Annual New York Cat Film Festival in December of 2017 with the awarded honor of being chosen as the title feature for the Program Two and has been touring the country throughout 2018 with stops in cities and towns from the West Coast to the East Coast delighting cat lovers everywhere.  In 2018 Little Works of Art was one of the films officially selected for the LongLeaf Film Festival held at the North Carolina Museum of History.

Voilà: “Little works of art.”  Don’t miss Dr. Sims’s passion for cats, and what he wants done with his body after he dies. And you get to see more stuff from the Cat Museum.

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Lagniappe: I saw this photo on the FB site Meow, and I needed to find out the details. I found them, of course, on YouTube, on a news report in the video below:

Meet Suki and her staff, Francesca Bourdier.  After Suki attended all the Zoom classes that Bourdier watched, Suki got her own cap and own, but not really a diploma. That’s okay, though.

Quickie with Bob: Extinction Survivors; News Items: Constructed Languages, Exercise and Brain Health, Curiosity Rover Finds Long Carbon Chains, Nanotech Lightsails, Vaccine and Autism Again; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Technology vs Magic; Science or Fiction

We have two new videos from Tara Tanaka in Florida, featuring Wood Storks mating and Great Egrets proffering sticks.  The mating looks like an ungainly act!

Tara’s captions are indented; her Vimeo site is here and her Flickr site is here).

During spring and early summer the sound of male Wood Storks clacking their beaks against the female’s beak as they mate is can be heard frequently from our yard, but we rarely see them. I videoed a pair last week, as their nest-neighbors looked on. If the male had arms, I think he would be really good at patting his head and rubbing his stomach at the same time. The light was hitting their wings in a way that you can see the beautiful iridescent green in their wing feathers that usually just look black. Click to start the videos (there’s also an arrow at lower left): My heart is so full from all of your kind comments on the Great Egret photo and the Wood Storks mating that I wanted to share a video that I shot of the male Great Egret bringing a stick to the nest. I usually shoot video at 60 fps, but switched to 120 fps so I could slow it down and you could see how beautiful his plumes are and how graceful he is as he lands. Hard to believe that many herons and egrets were almost hunted to extinction to provide feathers for women’s hats.

Enjoy this very short, slow-motion video!:

The hazards facing lunar astronauts are many. There's the radiation, the temperature extremes, the psychological challenges associated with isolation, and the risk of important equipment breaking down. But there's also the dust, which constitutes an ever-present background hazard.

Since the second world war, US economic prosperity and major technological developments have hinged upon the government’s commitment to funding scientific research. The Trump administration is ending that

Scientists have long sought to unravel the mysteries of strange metals -- materials that defy conventional rules of electricity and magnetism. Now, a team of physicists has made a breakthrough in this area using a tool from quantum information science. The study reveals that electrons in strange metals become more entangled at a crucial tipping point, shedding new light on the behavior of these enigmatic materials. The discovery could pave the way for advances in superconductors with the potential to transform energy use in the future.

Scientists have long sought to unravel the mysteries of strange metals -- materials that defy conventional rules of electricity and magnetism. Now, a team of physicists has made a breakthrough in this area using a tool from quantum information science. The study reveals that electrons in strange metals become more entangled at a crucial tipping point, shedding new light on the behavior of these enigmatic materials. The discovery could pave the way for advances in superconductors with the potential to transform energy use in the future.

Novel artificial neurons learn independently and are more strongly modeled on their biological counterparts. A team of researchers has programmed these infomorphic neurons and constructed artificial neural networks from them. The special feature is that the individual artificial neurons learn in a self-organized way and draw the necessary information from their immediate environment in the network.

Novel artificial neurons learn independently and are more strongly modeled on their biological counterparts. A team of researchers has programmed these infomorphic neurons and constructed artificial neural networks from them. The special feature is that the individual artificial neurons learn in a self-organized way and draw the necessary information from their immediate environment in the network.

The US has confirmed more than 480 measles cases across 19 states, the highest total since an outbreak in 2019 sickened more than 1200 people

No matter where on Earth you stand, if you have a view of the night sky, and if it is dark enough, you can see the Milky Way. The Milky Way is our home, and its faint clouds of light and shadow have inspired human cultures across the globe. And yet, our view of the Milky Way is limited by our perspective. In many ways, we have learned more from other galaxies than from our own. But when the Gaia spacecraft launched in 2013, all of that changed.

Is it more of a disadvantage to be born poor or Black? Is it worse to be brought up by rich parents in a poor neighborhood, or by poor parents in a rich neighborhood? The answers to these questions lie at the very core of what constitutes a fair society. So how do we know if it is better to have wealthy parents or to grow up in a wealthy neighborhood when “good” things often go together (i.e., kids with rich parents grow up in rich neighborhoods)? When poverty, being Black, and living in a neighborhood with poor schools all predict worse outcomes, how can we disentangle them? Statisticians call this problem multicollinearity, and a number of straightforward methods using some of the largest databases on social mobility ever assembled provide surprisingly clear answers to these questions—the biggest obstacle children face in America is having the bad luck of being born into a poor family.

The immense impact of parental income on the future earnings of children has been established by a tremendous body of research. Raj Chetty and colleagues, in one of the largest studies of social mobility ever conducted,1 linked census data to federal tax returns to show that your parent’s income when you were a child was by far the best predictor of your own income when you became an adult. The authors write, “On average, a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 percentile increase in a child’s income.” This is a huge effect; children will earn an average of 34 percent more if their parents are in the highest income decile as compared to the lowest. This effect is true across all races, and Black children born in the top income quintile are more than twice as likely to remain there than White children born in the bottom quintile are to rise to the top. In short, the chances of occupying the top rungs of the economic ladder for children of any race are lowest for those who grow up poor and highest for those who grow up rich. These earnings differences have a broad impact on wellbeing and are strongly correlated with both health and life expectancy.2 Wealthy men live 15 years longer than the poorest, and wealthy women are expected to live 10 years longer than poor women—five times the effect of cancer!

Why is having wealthy parents so important? David Grusky at Stanford, in a paper on the commodification of opportunity, writes:

Although parents cannot directly buy a middleclass outcome for their children, they can buy opportunity indirectly through advantaged access to the schools, neighborhoods, and information that create merit and raise the probability of a middle-class outcome.3

In other words, opportunity is for sale to those who can afford it. This simple point is so obvious that it is surprising that so many people seem to miss it. Indeed, it is increasingly common for respected news outlets to cite statistics about racial differences without bothering to control for class. This is like conducting a study showing that taller children score higher on math tests without controlling for age. Just as age is the best predictor of a child’s mathematical ability, a child’s parent’s income is the best predictor of their future adult income.

Photo by Kostiantyn Li / Unsplash

Although there is no substitute for being born rich, outcomes for children from families with the same income differ in predictable and sometimes surprising ways. After controlling for household income, the largest racial earnings gap is between Asians and Whites, with Whites who grew up poor earning approximately 11 percent less than their Asian peers at age 40, followed by a two percent reduction if you are poor and Hispanic and an additional 11 percent on top of that if you are born poor and Black. Some of these differences, however, result from how we measure income. Using “household income,” in particular, conceals crucial differences between homes with one or two parents and this alone explains much of the residual differences between racial groups. Indeed, the marriage rates between races uncannily recapitulate these exact same earnings gaps—Asian children have a 65 percent chance of growing up in households with two parents, followed by a 54 percent chance for Whites, 41 percent for Hispanics and 17 percent for Blacks4 and the Black-White income gap shrinks from 13 percent to 5 percent5 after we control for income differences between single and two-parent households.

Just as focusing on household income obscures differences in marriage rates between races, focusing on all children conceals important sex differences, and boys who grow up poor are far more likely to remain that way than their sisters.6 This is especially true for Black boys who earn 9.7 percent less than their White peers, while Black women actually earn about one percent more than White women born into families with the same income. Chetty writes:

Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women.7

So, what drives these differences? If it is racism, as many contend, it is a peculiar type. It seems to benefit Asians, hurts Black men, and has no detectable effect on Black women. A closer examination of the data reveals their source. Almost all of the remaining differences between Black men and men of other races lie in neighborhoods. These disadvantages could be caused either by what is called an “individual-level race effect” whereby Black children do worse no matter where they grow up, or by a “place-level race effect” whereby children of all races do worse in areas with large Black populations. Results show unequivocal support for a place-level effect. Chetty writes:

The main lesson of this analysis is that both blacks and whites living in areas with large African-American populations have lower rates of upward income mobility.8

Multiple studies have confirmed this basic finding, revealing that children who grow up in families with similar incomes and comparable neighborhoods have the same chances of success. In other words, poor White kids and poor Black kids who grow up in the same neighborhood in Los Angeles are equally likely to become poor adults. Disentangling the effects of income, race, family structure, and neighborhood on social mobility is a classic case of multicollinearity (i.e., correlated predictors), with race effectively masking the real causes of reduced social mobility—parent’s income. The residual effects are explained by family structure and neighborhood. Black men have the worst outcomes because they grow up in the poorest families and worst neighborhoods with the highest prevalence of single mothers. Asians, meanwhile, have the best outcomes because they have the richest parents, with the lowest rates of divorce, and grow up in the best neighborhoods.

We are all born into an economic caste system in which privilege is imposed on us by the class into which we are helplessly born.

The impact that family structure has on the likelihood of success first came to national attention in 1965, when the Moynihan Report9 concluded that the breakdown of the nuclear family was the primary cause of racial differences in achievement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an American sociologist serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor (who later served as Senator from New York) argued that high out-of-wedlock birth rates and the large number of Black children raised by single mothers created a matriarchal society that undermined the role of Black men. In 1965, he wrote:

In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure. The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families.10

A closer look at these data, however, reveals that the disadvantage does not come from being raised by a single mom but rather results from growing up in neighborhoods without many active fathers. In other words, it is not really about whether your own parents are married. Children who grow up in two-parent households in these neighborhoods have similarly low rates of social mobility. Rather, it seems to depend on growing up in neighborhoods with a lot of single parents. Chetty in a nearly perfect replication of Moynihan’s findings writes:

black father presence at the neighborhood level strongly predicts black boys’ outcomes irrespective of whether their own father is present or not, suggesting that what matters is not parental marital status itself but rather community-level factors.11

Although viewing the diminished authority of men as a primary cause of social dysfunction might seem antiquated today, evidence supporting Moynihan’s thesis continues to mount. The controversial report, which was derided by many at the time as paternalistic and racist, has been vindicated12 in large part because the breakdown of the family13 is being seen among poor White families in rural communities today14 with similar results. Family structure, like race, often conceals underlying class differences too. Across all races, the chances of living with both parents fall from 85 percent if you are born in an upper-middle-class family to 30 percent if you are in the lower-middle class.15 The take-home message from these studies is that fathers are a social resource and that boys are particularly sensitive to their absence.16 Although growing up rich seems to immunize children against many of these effects, when poverty is combined with absent fathers, the negative impacts are compounded.17

Children who grow up in families with similar incomes and comparable neighborhoods have the same chances of success. In other words, poor White kids and poor Black kids who grow up in the same neighborhood in Los Angeles are equally likely to become poor adults.

The fact that these outcomes are driven by family structure and the characteristics of communities that impact all races similarly poses a serious challenge to the bias narrative18—the belief that anti-Black bias or structural racism underlies all racial differences19 in outcomes—and suggests that the underlying reasons behind the racial gaps lie further up the causal chain. Why then do we so frequently use race as a proxy for the underlying causes when we can simply use the causes themselves? Consider by analogy the fact that Whites commit suicide at three times the rate of Blacks and Hispanics.20 Does this mean that being White is a risk factor for suicide? Indeed, the link between the income of parents and their children may seem so obvious that it can hardly seem worth mentioning. What would it even mean to study social mobility without controlling for parental income? It is the elephant in the room that needs to be removed before we can move on to analyze more subtle advantages. It is obvious, yet elusive; hidden in plain sight.

If these results are so clear, why is there so much confusion around this issue? In a disconcertingly ignorant tweet, New York Times writer Nikole Hanna-Jones, citing the Chetty study, wrote:

Please don’t ever come in my timeline again bringing up Appalachia when I am discussing the particular perils and injustice that black children face. And please don’t ever come with that tired “It’s class, not race” mess again.21

Is this a deliberate attempt to serve a particular ideology or just statistical illiteracy?22 And why are those who define themselves as “progressive” often the quickest to disregard the effects of class? University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed put what he called “the sensibilities of the ruling class” this way:

the model is that the society could be one in which one percent of the population controls 95 percent of the resources, and it would be just, so long as 12 percent of the one percent were black and 14 percent were Hispanic, or half women.23

Perhaps this view and the conviction shared by many elites that economic redistribution is a non-starter accounts for this laser focus on racism, while ignoring material conditions. Racial discrimination can be fixed by simply piling on more sensitivity training or enforcing racial quotas. Class inequities, meanwhile, require real sacrifices by the wealthy, such as more progressive tax codes, wider distribution of property taxes used to fund public schools, or the elimination of legacy admissions at elite private schools.24 The fact that corporations and an educated upper class of professionals,25 which Thomas Piketty has called “the Brahmin left,”26 have enthusiastically embraced this type of race-based identity politics is another tell. Now, America’s rising inequality,27 where the top 0.1 percent have the same wealth as the bottom 90 percent, can be fixed under the guidance of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies and enforced by Human Resources departments. These solutions pose no threat to corporations or the comfortable lives of the elites who run them. We are obsessed with race because being honest about class would be too painful.

Attending a four-year college is unrivaled in its ability to level the playing field for the most disadvantaged kids from any race and is the most effective path out of poverty.

There are, however, also a number of aspects of human psychology that make the powerful impact of the class into which we are born difficult to see. First, our preference for binary thinking,28 which is less cognitively demanding, makes it easier to conjure up easily divisible, discrete, and visible racial categories (e.g., Black, White, Asian), rather than the continuous and often less visible metric of income. We run into problems when we think about continuous variables such as income, which are hard to categorize and can change across our lifetimes. For example, what is the cutoff between rich and poor? Is $29,000 dollars a year poor but $30,000 middle class? This may also help to explain why we are so reluctant to discuss other highly heritable traits that impact our likelihood of success, like attractiveness and intelligence. Indeed, a classic longitudinal study by Blau and Duncan in 196729 which studied children across the course of their development suggests that IQ might be an even better predictor of adult income than their parent’s income. More recently Daniel Belsky found that an individual’s education-linked genetics consistently predicted a change in their social mobility, even after accounting for social origins.30 Any discussion of IQ or innate differences in cognitive abilities has now become much more controversial, however, and any research into possible cognitive differences between populations is practically taboo today. This broad denial of the role of genetic factors in social mobility is puzzling, as it perpetuates the myth that those who have succeeded have done so primarily due to their own hard work and effort, and not because they happened to be beneficiaries of both environmental and genetic luck. We have no more control over our genetic inheritance than we do over the income of our parents, their marital status, or the neighborhoods in which we spend our childhoods. Nevertheless, if cognitive differences or attractiveness were reducible to clear and discrete categories, (e.g., “dumb” vs. “smart” or “ugly” vs. “attractive”) we might be more likely to notice them and recognize their profound effects. Economic status is also harder to discern simply because it is not stamped on our skin while we tend to think of race as an immutable category that is fixed at birth. Race is therefore less likely to be seen as the fault of the hapless victim. Wealth, however, which is viewed as changeable, is more easily attributed to some fault of the individual, who therefore bears some of the responsibility for being (or even growing up) poor.

We are obsessed with race because being honest about class would be too painful.

We may also fail to recognize the effects of social class because of the availability bias31 whereby our ability to recall information depends on our familiarity with it. Although racial segregation has been falling32 since the 1970s, economic segregation has been rising.33 Although Americans are interacting more with people from different races, they are increasingly living in socioeconomic bubbles. This can make things such as poverty and evictions less visible to middle-class professionals who don’t live in these neighborhoods and make problems with which they may have more experience, such as “problematic” speech, seem more pressing.

Still, even when these studies are published, and the results find their way into the media, they are often misinterpreted. This is because race can mask the root causes of more impactful disadvantages, such as poverty, and understanding their inter-relations requires a basic understanding of statistics, including the ability to grasp concepts such as multicollinearity.

Tragically, the path most certain to help poor kids climb out of poverty is closed to those who are most likely to benefit.

Of course, none of this is to say that historical processes have not played a crucial role in producing the large racial gaps we see today. These causes, however, all too easily become a distraction that provides little useful information about how to solve these problems. Perhaps reparations for some people, or certain groups, are in order, but for most people, it simply doesn’t matter whether your grandparents were impoverished tenant farmers or aristocrats who squandered it all before you were born. Although we are each born with our own struggles and advantages, the conditions into which we are born, not those of our ancestors, are what matter, and any historical injustices that continue to harm those currently alive will almost always materialize in economic disparities. An obsession with historical oppression which fails to improve conditions on the ground is a luxury34 that we cannot afford. While talking about tax policy may be less emotionally satisfying than talking about the enduring legacy of slavery, redistributing wealth in some manner to the poor is critical to solving these problems. These are hard problems, and solutions will require acknowledging their complexity. We will need to move away from a culture that locks people into an unalterable hierarchy of suffering, pitting groups that we were born into against one another, but rather towards a healthier identity politics that emphasizes economic interests and our common humanity.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya / Unsplash

Most disturbing, perhaps, is the fact that the institutions that are most likely to promote the bias narrative and preach about structural racism are those best positioned to help poor children. Attending a four-year college is unrivaled in its ability to level the playing field for the most disadvantaged kids from any race and is the most effective path out of poverty,35 nearly eliminating any other disadvantage that children experience. Indeed, the poorest students who are lucky enough to attend elite four-year colleges end up earning only 5 percent less than their richest classmates.36 Unfortunately, while schools such as Harvard University tout their anti-racist admissions policies,37 admitting Black students in exact proportion to their representation in the U.S. population (14 percent), Ivy League universities are 75 times more likely38 to admit children born in the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution as they are to admit children born in the bottom 20 percent. If Harvard was as concerned with economic diversity as racial diversity, it would accept five times as many students from poor families as it currently does. Tragically, the path most certain to help poor kids climb out of poverty is closed to those who are most likely to benefit.

The biggest obstacle children face in America is having the bad luck of being born into a poor family.

Decades of social mobility research has come to the same conclusion. The income of your parents is by far the best predictor of your own income as an adult. By using some of the largest datasets ever assembled and isolating the effects of different environments on social mobility, research reveals again and again how race effectively masks parental income, neighborhood, and family structure. These studies describe the material conditions of tens of millions of Americans. We are all accidents of birth and imprisoned by circumstances over which we had no control. We are all born into an economic caste system in which privilege is imposed on us by the class into which we are helplessly born. The message from this research is that race is not a determinant of economic mobility on an individual level.39 Even though a number of factors other than parental income also affect social mobility, they operate on the level of the community.40 And although upward mobility is lower for individuals raised in areas with large Black populations, this affects everyone who grows up in those areas, including Whites and Asians. Growing up in an area with a high proportion of single parents also significantly reduces rates of upward mobility, but once again this effect operates on the level of the community and children with single parents do just as well as long as they live in communities with a high percentage of married couples.

One thing these data do reveal—again, and again, and again—however, is that privilege is real. It’s just based on class, not race.

In this age of exoplanet discovery, the flaring of red dwarf stars (M-dwarfs) has taken on new importance. M-dwarfs are known to host many terrestrial planets in their putative habitable zones. The problem is the flaring could make their habitable zones uninhabitable.

Between reading science stuff that I’m going to write about elsewhere, and my pleasure reading of a mammoth book (not one about the woolly mammoth!), I don’t have many books to report on. In fact, I’m about to be at a loss for books to read, and thus will tell you what I’ve read as a way of extracting suggestions from readers.

For a while I was on a Holocaust kick, and (as I think I mentioned earlier) I read The End of the Holocaust, by Alvin Rosenfeld, which you can get from Amazon by clicking below. His thesis is that the true horror of the Holocaust has been lessened by everyone using the word to mean “any bad thing that happened to a lot of people.” The book is especially concerned with Anne Frank, who, he says, was just one of a number of young victims who wrote about their situation, and somehow the attention devoted to her alone lessens the experience of other victims. Well, you can argue about that, but I think the book is worth reading now that words like “genocide,” “concentration camp,” and “Holocaust” are being thrown around willy nilly in a way that distorts their original meaning.

After that I read another short but very famous book about the Holocaust, Night, by Elie Wiesel. Click below to see the Amazon link:

Wiesel, a Romanian-born Jew, was taken to the camps with his family when he was young, and managed to survive two of them, writing several books about his experiences (this one, like the others, is either partly fictional or completely fictional but Night is mostly true). Wiesel was separated from his mother and sisters at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and they did not survive (they were probably gassed). Throughout the book he tries to stay with his father and keep him alive, but the father finally expires on a forced, foodless march through the snow as the prisoners are marched to another camp by the Germans as the Russians approach. Wiesel survived, but just barely.

After the war, Wiesel dedicated himself to writing and lecturing about the Holocaust, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.  Night is one of the best books about the Holocaust, at least in conveying its horrors, and was recommended by Rosenfeld in the book above. I too recommend it highly, and, at 120 pages, it’s a short read.

Here’s a photo of Buchenwald five days after its liberation by the Red Army, showing the arrangement of bunks and the skeletal nature of those still alive. Wiesel is in the photo; I’ve circled him next to one bed post. What better proof can you have that you really did experience what you wrote about?

Buchenwald concentration camp, photo taken April 16, 1945, five days after liberation of the camp. Wiesel is in the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left, next to the bunk post. From Wikimedia Commons

And below is the behemoth I just finished, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Circle Award in 2009. Click the cover to go to the Amazon site.

Several people recommended this book highly, and while I think the 730-page monster was very good, I didn’t find it a world classic. It recounts the life of Thomas Cromwell, who started life as the son of a blacksmith but worked his way up to being the head minister of Henry VIII. It deals largely with the intrigues and relationships of Henry’s court, which reminds me of Trump’s America.  Henry was sometimes amiable, but would ruthlessly order the death of those who crossed him, including Anne Boleyn, who met her end simply because she couldn’t provide Henry with a son that could be his heir.  Sir Thomas More is a prominent character, and he too meets his end for refusing to affirm that Anne Boleyn was the lawful queen. Everyone tiptoes around in constant fear of the KIng.

The book is quite involved, and has a big list of characters which are listed on the first page and to which one must constantly refer. It is the convoluted plot and surfeit of characters that made the book hard for me to read. Perhaps I’m getting old and my concentration is waning.  But the dialogue is fascinating, and parts of the book are quite lyrical, with the prose style changing quickly from conversational to rhapsodic. Here’s what Wikipedia says about Mantel’s writing of the book, and the effort shows.

Mantel said she spent five years researching and writing the book, trying to match her fiction to the historical record. To avoid contradicting history she created a card catalogue, organised alphabetically by character, with each card containing notes indicating where a particular historical figure was on relevant dates. “You really need to know, where is the Duke of Suffolk at the moment? You can’t have him in London if he’s supposed to be somewhere else,” she explained.

In an interview with The Guardian, Mantel stated her aim to place the reader in “that time and that place, putting you into Henry’s entourage. The essence of the thing is not to judge with hindsight, not to pass judgment from the lofty perch of the 21st century when we know what happened. It’s to be there with them in that hunting party at Wolf Hall, moving forward with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, but in any case, moving forward into a future that is not pre-determined but where chance and hazard will play a terrific role.”

The book (part of a trilogy) was made into a mini-series for t.v., and here’s the trailer. It feature Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII. Has anyone seen it?

So that’s my reading. Now I ask readers to recommend books for me—and other readers. They can be fiction or nonfiction, so long as they’re absorbing.  I’m not sure I’m yet ready now for another 700-page novel (Amazon’s version says only 600-odd pages, but I have an older edition).  Please put your recommendations, as well as the subject of the book, in the comments.

Clothes that can mimic the feeling of being touched, touch displays that provide haptic feedback to users, or even ultralight loudspeakers. These are just some of the devices made possible using thin silicone films that can be precisely controlled so that they vibrate, flex, press or pull exactly as desired. And all done simply by applying an electrical voltage.