Ari Armstrong's Web Log (Main) | Archives | Terms of Use
Self in Society Roundup 70
Immigration, Trump, education, SCOTUS, wealth, Andy Weir, sheep detectives, and more.
by Ari Armstrong, Copyright © 2026
Immigration Watch
Deporting a Priest: Lindsey Toomer: "Federal officials plan to deport a 78-year-old priest who has lived in Colorado for more than two decades, despite humanitarian concerns regarding his health and fear of persecution in Uganda." Insane and wrong.
Closing Alligator Alcatraz: C. J. Ciaramella: "Good Riddance to 'Alligator Alcatraz,' a Cruel, Expensive, and Pointless Authoritarian Stunt."
Louisiana ICE Facility: NYT: "A report by the Department of Homeland Security's internal watchdog described officers putting one man in a chokehold and stabbing another with a pen."
Texas ICE Facility: NPR: "Immigrant detainees sue over 'horrific' conditions at Texas ICE facility."
Lack of Medical Care: Rae Ellen Bichell: "An Albanian man’s pain grew so unbearable, he said, he pulled out his own tooth as he languished for months in a New Mexico immigration detention center. . . . Hundreds of detainees across at least 33 states allege in federal lawsuits that immigration detention facilities are failing to provide adequate medical care."
Wrecking Families: Alan Taylor: "Samantha, originally from Honduras, was naturalized as an American citizen in 2025 and became the first member of her family to graduate from college. . . . She left Honduras at age 11 with her parents seeking asylum. . . . Marvin [her father] was ineligible for asylum due to a previous deportation, and he remained undocumented in the U.S. . . . The family made a heartbreaking decision to sacrifice family cohesion: Marvin would self-deport to Honduras following Samantha's graduation from Yale, and the rest of the family would remain living in the U.S." The "pro-family" GOP strikes again.
Trump Watch
Coddling Criminals: NYT: "Granted Clemency by Trump, Scores of Jan. 6 Rioters Have Been Accused of New Crimes." The "law and order" party strikes again.
Murdering People: The U.S. government murdering some 200 people on boats unsurprisingly has not curbed the flow of drugs.
Wasting Tax Funds: Eric Boehm: "The federal government lost an estimated $186 billion to 'improper payments.'" Notice that the same Republicans who obsess about improper spending in blue states ignore it when it comes to the federal government under Trump.
Quick Takes
Slaughter Case: Sotomayor: "Chaos will follow." NYT: "Trump Renews Threat to Fire Fed Governor in Wake of Court Loss." Opinion. Brad DeLong, in discussing the related Cook case, calls the Roberts court "deeply cynical and corrupt."
Topaz Museum: Recently I went with my family to Delta, Utah to dig fossils and minerals. An unexpected surprise was the Topaz Museum, dedicated to the history of a WWII Japanese internment camp. You can see some of the extraordinary art works hosted by the museum at its website.
Capitalist Dems? NYT: "Centrist Democrats Rebuke Party's Left Wing: 'We Are Capitalist, Not Socialist.'"
Ancient Capitalism: Surse Pierpoint: A four-thousand-year-old clay tablet from Turkey "specifies the [twelve] partners by name, the starting capital, the profit split, and the penalty for any partner who wishes to withdraw early." Via Cowen.
AI Socialism? WSJ: "Imagine the temptation for corruption if government owns stakes in America's wealthiest companies." Bernie Sanders joins Trump in calling for partial socialism.
Cowen Vs. the Nanny State: Tyler Cowen: "If marijuana and sports gambling can manipulate weak individuals, so can unscrupulous political leaders. A greater realization of individual weakness does not translate into a case for more government action; if anything, it suggests the opposite." Cowen also points to possible drugs and "self-surveillance" to help address problems of addiction.
Graham on Wealth: Paul Graham via Cowen: "I was talking to the founder of a startup I'd funded. I began by asking, as I usually do when I meet a founder, what her growth rate was. 93% last month, she said. I pointed out that this meant her net worth was also growing at 93% a month. She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. And yet she hadn't been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was [who said in effect it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad]. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth."
Autism Therapy Growth: Derek Thompson via Tyler Cowen: "In 2019, there were about 150,000 people working in autism therapy. Six years later, there were 654,000—more than the number of people who work in mining and logging, or telecommunications, or at the US Postal Service." Medicaid seems to be skewing this field pretty dramatically.
Haidt: Here's the new TED Talk. I'm still skeptical about a number of Haidt's claims, and I also see a good side to smart-phone use. Still, I think there's good reason for parents to monitor and restrict their children's device use.
Cowen and Tabarrok on AI: Here's a great 20-minute talk distilling Cowen's views. And don't miss Cowen's and Alex Tabarrok's talk with OpenAI. One thing that struck me about this talk was how young are the crew from OpenAI (as suggested by the video screen). Both Cowen and Tabarrok spoke in glowing terms of AI development, praised the team for doing great work, and talked about AI development as supremely important for human development. The economists said it was an honor to talk with the team, akin to sitting in on Alexander Graham Bell's lab. Tabarrok emphasized that the percentage of hours worked, as a fraction of a person's total life, already has declined from around 50% to 10%, so, he said, an additional drop to 5% is not such a scary proposition. The point that I think the economists underemphasized is that people always will value human contact, so it's just impossible that AI and robots will take over all tasks that humans value.
Noah Smith on Pig Welfare: He argues, reasonably, that "'crating' is torture."
Exercise: Yiwen Zhang et al.: "Compared with no resistance training, 90–119 min/week of resistance training was associated with a 13% lower risk of all-cause mortality (HR 0.87, 95% CI 0.81 to 0.95), 19% lower risk of cardiovascular mortality (HR 0.81, 95% CI 0.67 to 0.97) and 27% lower risk of neurological disease mortality (HR 0.73, 95% CI 0.58 to 0.92), adjusting for aerobic activity." Benefits of weights seem plausible; however, it also seems plausible that healthier people tend to exercise more.
Education Updates
Note: Previously I published updates about education in separate posts, but from here on I plan to merge them into my Roundups.
Spaces for Free Play: Ben Forman argues that, although phones are part of the youth mental health crisis, the deeper problem is lack of free play and space for that.
Teacher Arrested: Katherine Schaffstall: "A high school teacher [Matthew Warden] in Ohio has been arrested on assault charges after he allegedly punched a student in the jaw and tried to hit a second student." Warden claims he was "only joking around."
Art Updates
Note: Previously I published updates about art in separate posts, but from here on I plan to merge them into my Roundups.
Rush: Chris Willman: "Two heroes walked into the Forum—Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson—and three walked out," the third being "new drummer Anika Nilles." Great review for Variety.
Project Hail Mary: I love Andy Weir. See his recent interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's pretty extraordinary that he's written three novels, and two have been turned into outstanding blockbuster movies. Hail Mary is basically a buddy film in space, with cool science and high stakes. Ryan Gosling is fantastic, and the team behind Rocky creates a strange yet endearing character. As others have noted, Weir promotes a can-do attitude of progress. Martian and Hail Mary are two of my all-time favorite films.
Sheep Detectives: I love this film. It's superficially a whodunnit. But really it's about dealing with death, grief, and bigotry. Its argument against evasion is not as strong as Rand's but it's still good. It also has a message about animal welfare but in the context of anthropomorphized animals.
Houdini: The History Channel commissioned a three-hour miniseries about Houdini, with Adrien Brody playing lead. I loved this film (although not everything about it). The first part deals with Houdini's rise to fame as an escape artist, as well as a (largely fictionalized) account of his espionage activities for the U.S. and British governments. The second part deals more with Houdini's rhetorical war on "spiritualism." (See my first and second article about this for Complete Colorado.)
Angine de Poitrine: This French-speaking Canadian band is something like Ventures meets Primus, with a fabricated alien backstory and costumes. Their performance for KEXP is genius.
Miracle: Because hockey was in the air (prior the Avalanche getting sweept), my family watched the Disney film Miracle, about 1980 Olympic hockey. I was struck by how much of the background ties directly to events today: moon missions, conflict with Russia, conflict with Iran, a fuel crisis. In ways the film feels very much a product of its time. Characters smoke in crowded meetings, which today seems crazy. And the coach as portrayed in the film is at times abusive; today the trend seems to be toward calmer, non-abusive, or "positive and understanding," coaching.
Florence Nightingale '85: There's a lot I didn't love about this older TV film; it starts slowly and overemphasizes FN's suitors. Yet it offers a good portrayal of FN's tenacity in her work to reform nursing, especially during the Crimean War. The film effectively portrays the sexism and classism hindering FN's progress. The film emphasizes the aspect of FN's story as a journey of Christian self-sacrifice, but it does also cover aspects of her scientific and medical breakthroughs. It unfortunately omits her work in data analysis. One thing I wonder is to what degree Nightingale invoked a mission from God to cut through social barriers. According to one article, "Because of her deep conviction about universal law, she did not believe in miraculous intervention as an answer to prayer. Human beings must discover the laws of God and apply them for health and wholeness. Prayer is attuning or joining one's personal self with the consciousness of God, which is found in the deepest recesses of one's own being. Nightingale's idea of spirituality as intrinsic to human nature and compatible with science can guide the development of future nursing practice and inquiry." Regardless, FN is a moral hero and one of the most important women in science. By the way, there's also a good Animated Hero Classics on FN.
Is This Thing On? I didn't even recognize Bradley Cooper when he first appeared in this movie. Then I learned that Cooper also cowrote and directed the film, starring Will Arnett and Laura Dern (the entire cast is great), about a man who, in the midst of separating from his wife, turns to stand-up comedy to sort himself out. Meanwhile, his wife returns to sports through coaching. Can they put themselves back together and maybe also get their marriage back on track? I very much liked this film.
Puddles Pity Party: That's a singer dressed as a clown. "Holy Diver" with Primus, AGT.
Sinbad's Work Ethic: Arabian Nights is deeply misogynistic and racist; nevertheless there are some interesting things in it. Here is a quoted poem in Arabian Nights (trans. Malcolm C. Lyons, Penguin 2010, vol. 2, p. 456, Night 538):
It is through toil that eminence is won;
Whoever seeks the heights must pass nights without sleep.
The pearl fisher must brave the depth of ocean
If he is to win power and wealth.
Whoever hopes to rise without effort
Will waste his life in search of the impossible.