Homeschooling done well delivers six evidence-backed benefits

August 14th, 2026

The honest list of homeschool benefits — the ones supported by representative-sample research, not advocacy material — is shorter and more conditional than Internet listicles might suggest:

Homeschooling done well delivers six evidence-backed benefits: pace customization, stronger family relationships, escape from a measurably toxic peer environment (40% of U.S. high schoolers report persistent sadness, per the CDC’s 2023 YRBS), higher-quality cross-age friendships, higher life satisfaction in long-term homeschoolers (Cheng & Watson, 2025), and time for deep, interest-driven work. These homeschool benefits hold when families build intentional social structure. They weaken sharply without it.

[…]

In the 2024–25 school year, roughly 3.4 million American children — about 6.3% of K-12 — were homeschooled. That share has nearly doubled since 2019. Homeschooling is now growing at about 5.4% annually for 2024–25 — roughly three times the pre-pandemic rate of ~2% — per Johns Hopkins’ Homeschool Hub, which tracks the data state by state. Ten states hit their highest-ever enrollment in 2024–25 — exceeding even the pandemic peak. The federal numbers tell the same story from a different angle. The Department of Education’s 2023 National Household Education Survey reports the share of K-12 students homeschooled rising substantially between 2018–19 and 2022–23.

[…]

The stereotype is white, rural, religious, wealthy. The stereotype is wrong.

Start with the federal data. The NHES 2023 survey — the gold standard for this category, with 19,562 K-12 students sampled between January and August of 2023 — gives the cleanest picture available. Homeschooling has grown across nearly every demographic line. The portion of homeschoolers who are White dropped 4 percentage points from 1998 to 2023. About 41% of homeschool families are now non-white or Hispanic, with the fastest growth among Black and Latino families. The Mississippi State team writing in The Conversation in 2026 tracks the same shift.

The income picture is even more counterintuitive. NCES Condition of Education data shows households earning $25,000–$49,999 homeschool at higher rates (8.8%) than households earning more than $150,000 (5.5%). That’s not what most people imagine when they hear “homeschool family.”

What predicts whether a family continues to homeschool? The Mississippi State research, surveying parents who started during the pandemic and continued after schools reopened, found the strongest single predictor wasn’t income, education level, or political affiliation. It was flexibility of work arrangements — whether at least one parent had a schedule that could accommodate being home during the day. The shift to remote and hybrid work that the pandemic accelerated didn’t just keep homeschooling alive past 2022. It restructured the population that could plausibly do it.

[…]

40% of U.S. high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the past year. Among girls, the figure is 53%. The 2013 baseline was 30%. The 2023 number is up by a third in a decade, with no sign of inflection. One in five high schoolers seriously considered suicide. Nearly one in ten attempted it.

Then there is the peer environment. The CDC YRBS 2023 found 19% of high schoolers were bullied at school, up from 15% in 2021. The Pew Research analysis of cyberbullying data found 46% of teens reporting they’ve experienced cyberbullying.

[…]

A classroom of 25 students has to target the median learner. Move too fast, half the class is lost. Move too slow, half is bored. The structural pace is always wrong for most of the room.

[…]

Long-term homeschoolers (8–13 years of homeschooling) had the lowest depression and anxiety scores and the highest life satisfaction scores of any educational group studied.

[…]

Traditional schooling fragments attention by design. Forty-five-minute periods. Bells. Forced transitions between unrelated subjects. The structural assumption is that no academic activity should sustain longer than 45 minutes — an assumption that breaks the moment you watch a teenager who actually cares about something. A 14-year-old who has spent four hours reading a single novel, three hours coding a single feature, or a full afternoon working a single math problem to its bottom is doing something the school day structurally cannot let them do.

[…]

Peter Gray’s work at Boston College has tracked this for decades. His book Free to Learn and his survey with Gina Riley of 232 unschooling families (2013) find consistent patterns of deep, sustained, interest-driven work when kids are given the time. Daniel Greenberg’s longitudinal data from the Sudbury Valley School — a fully self-directed K-12 environment operating since 1968 — shows the same.

[…]

Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, identifies three universal psychological needs that predict motivation and wellbeing: autonomy (feeling self-governed), competence (feeling capable), and relatedness (feeling connected). When all three are met, motivation rises. When any is systematically thwarted, both motivation and wellbeing fall. The 2020 Ryan and Deci review in Contemporary Educational Psychology is the canonical citation.

[…]

SDT is one of the most replicated frameworks in motivational psychology. Yang and colleagues’ 2022 systematic review covered 31 longitudinal studies and 20,804 participants and found autonomy support consistently predicts rising classroom engagement; autonomy thwarting consistently predicts disengagement. The mechanism is established. The application to homeschool is direct: environments that genuinely support autonomy produce different outcomes than environments that don’t.

[…]

In 2014, Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO) conducted the largest survey of homeschool alumni to date — 3,702 respondents, with data analysis support from the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. About 26% reported poor, very poor, or no socialization during their homeschool years. The quality of socialization predicted how prepared they felt for adult life.

The sample is self-selected. The alumni who answered the survey were the ones motivated to answer it, which skews toward people who have a story to tell. But the size of the sample is large enough that the figure can’t be dismissed as a few outliers. And it converges with the qualitative findings of Daniel Hamlin and Albert Cheng’s 2022 mixed-methods study in the Journal of School Choice, which interviewed 31 former homeschoolers and surveyed 140 more. Most reported their social needs were met. A meaningful subset described “culture shock” transitioning into adult environments.

The 25% are not random. They are concentrated in families that homeschooled in isolation — without co-ops, sports, mixed-age peer access, or structured community. The 75% who reported positive experiences are concentrated in families that built intentional social structure.

[…]

Pure unschooling — total absence of routine — underperforms. Pure replication of school at home underperforms. The middle path is real structure (a routine, deliverables, accountability, scheduled check-ins) with real freedom inside it. Strong homeschool families operate more like a deliberately scaffolded environment than like either a classroom or a free-for-all.

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In 1946, a year after the war ended, a new army biological research complex was established at Sverdlovsk

August 13th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekThe Soviet Union’s approach to biological warfare took a new turn in September 1945, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), when Soviet troops in Manchuria overran a Japanese military facility known as Water Purification Unit 731:

The unit, commanded by Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, experimented with anthrax, dysentery, cholera, and plague on U.S., British, and Commonwealth POWs. During the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, porcelain canisters of fleas infected with plague and other primitive biological weapons were used in air raids that killed thousands of rural Chinese.

The captured Japanese documents were sent to Moscow, where they made absorbing reading. They included blueprints for biological warfare assembly plants, far larger and more complex than our own. Japan’s program had been organized like a small industry, with a central production facility fed by continuous research and development.

[…]

In 1946, a year after the war ended, a new army biological research complex was established at Sverdlovsk.

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Tubi has more than 110 million monthly active users

August 12th, 2026

I didn’t realize that Tubi was owned by Fox, but I’m not at all surprised that it has taken off, with more than 110 million monthly active users:

“It really feels like we are seeing both in Tubi’s results and in the market a clear validation of a strategy that Tubi has believed in and been executing for over a decade, which is the power of free streaming, and our belief that consumers — especially this next generation — increasingly want premium entertainment, they want choice, they want it to be on-demand, and they don’t want to have to pay more and deal with rising prices and paywalls and fragmentation,” [CEO Anjali] Sud tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview, noting that other platforms like Disney are contemplating free tiers, while other premium players like Netflix push into the ad-supported business. “I think it’s encouraging that others are seeing the potential that we’ve long believed in in free streaming, and I think it’s validating that that is where the market is going.”

People like free stuff even more than they hate advertising.

The real allure is that they have plenty of classics.

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The casualties inflicted by a brutal epidemic of typhus from 1918 to 1921 made a deep impression on the commanders of the Red Army

August 11th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekA year after taking power in 1917, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), the Bolshevik government plunged into a savage conflict with anti-Communist forces:

Red and White armies clashed from Siberia to the Crimean Peninsula, and by the time hostilities ended in 1921, as many as ten million people had lost their lives. The majority of the deaths did not result from injuries on the battlefield. They were caused by famine and disease.

The casualties inflicted by a brutal epidemic of typhus from 1918 to 1921 made a deep impression on the commanders of the Red Army.

[…]

In 1928, the governing Revolutionary Military Council signed a secret decree ordering the transformation of typhus into a battlefield weapon. Three years earlier the fledgling Soviet government had signed an international treaty in Geneva banning the use of poison gas and bacteriological weapons. The weapons program was placed under the control of the GPU (the State Political Directorate), one of the predecessors of the KGB. It would continue to be supervised by state security organs until the early 1950s.

The 1928 decree represented a momentous decision. Bred in the unsanitary conditions of the battlefront or the slum, epidemic typhus has ravaged mankind for centuries. It is carried by lice from one infected person to another and cannot reproduce outside its host. Unlike typhoid fever, which is caused by salmonella bacteria, typhus is a rickettsial disease, carried by tiny rod-shaped microorganisms.

Once inside the body, the rickettsiae swarm through the blood, breaking down the cell walls of blood vessels as they multiply. Around seven to ten days after infection, victims will abruptly develop the first symptoms, beginning with throbbing headaches and a high fever. The stricken tissues become inflamed as they try to fight off the invaders, triggering a rash that spreads over the body. Spots of gangrene will sometimes appear on fingertips and other extremities as blood circulation slows down. Without treatment, the disease will send its victims into weeks of delirium and is fatal in 40 percent of cases.

Improvements in hygiene eradicated epidemic typhus from most of western Europe in the twentieth century, but it continues to afflict Africa, parts of South America, and Asia. A typhus vaccine was developed during World War II, though it is rarely used today, other than to immunize travelers to regions where the disease remains endemic. Administered in three separate doses over the course of five months, it provides almost complete protection from the disease. It was at one time also used for treatment, but it has been replaced in that capacity by antibiotics.

When the Soviet Union first turned to typhus, there was no known way to control or contain this relentlessly efficient killer. The question facing our scientists was how to harness that efficiency.

Infecting lice with typhus and spreading them among a target population was not practical. Eventually someone hit on the idea of breeding typhus in the labs and spraying it in an aerosol form from airplanes.

Early biological weapons work involved primitive methods. The pathogens were bred in chicken embryos or in live animals such as rats that were killed when the concentration of pathogens was highest and were liquefied in large blenders. The liquid was then poured into explosives.

I learned about the 1928 decree and the early typhus experiments from a set of old reports at the Ministry of Defense. Summaries of experiments and testing, they were purposefully short on detail. No one wanted to commit the full information to paper.

[…]

The first attempts to cultivate typhus in the lab employed chicken embryos. Thousands of chicken eggs were sent each week to the Leningrad Military Academy—at a time when most Soviet citizens were lucky to get one full meal a day. By the 1930s, the Leningrad Academy had produced powdered and liquid versions of typhus, for use in a primitive aerosol.

[…]

The Leningrad Military Academy sent some of its scientists and equipment one hundred miles north to the White Sea, a barren Arctic expanse flecked with tiny islands used to house political prisoners. By the mid-1930s Solovetsky Island, one of the largest, was the second major site of the Soviet biological warfare program.

At Solovetsky, a Soviet prison which later became the hub of Stalin’s “Gulag Archipelago” concentration-camp system, scientists worked with typhus, Q fever, glanders, and melioidosis (an incapacitating disease similar to glanders). Solovetsky’s large laboratory compound was built by prison labor. Many of the prisoners may also have been involuntary participants in our earliest experiments with biological agents.

The summary reports compiled by the Ministry of Defense describe several dozen cases of melioidosis from that period. The material I saw was intentionally vague as to whether humans were involved, but the way the case reports were arranged—with nineteen in one group, eleven in another, and twelve in yet another—suggested an irregular pattern not usually associated with animal testing. And the symptoms described could only have been experienced by human subjects. There have been repeated allegations in the West about Soviet germ warfare experiments on humans, but I have seen no other reports to indicate that these took place after the 1930s.

The research exacted a grim toll on our scientists. One account of a test with plague in the late 1930s ended with a cryptic note: “This experiment was not finished due to the death of the researcher.” Another from the same period reported that twenty workers had been infected with glanders during experiments. The report didn’t say where these experiments took place, or whether the workers had died, but in the days before antibiotics, death on exposure was virtually certain.

[…]

The lieutenant colonel who told me about the tularemia production line at Kirov also suggested that an outbreak of Q fever among German troops on leave in Crimea in 1943 was the result of an attempt to use another one of the biological warfare agents developed by his facility. I was never able to investigate this further, but Q fever was practically unheard of in Russia prior to that outbreak.

Posted in Policy, Science, War | 1 Comment »

One company, Flock Safety, has become the movement’s primary target

August 10th, 2026

Rafael A. Mangual argues that the pushback against Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) is misguided:

One company, Flock Safety, has become the movement’s primary target. Flock cameras, like other ALPRs, capture information about vehicles—not the people inside them—as they pass. They record license plates, along with details such as a car’s make, model, color, and distinguishing features, including bumper stickers, custom paint, or visible damage. That information is stored by flock on behalf of its customers (who actually own the data) for short periods, allowing them to track, and in some cases intercept, vehicles involved in criminal activity.

That police sometimes want to keep an eye out for vehicles of interest shouldn’t be controversial. Agencies have done that as part of AMBER Alerts for years. The idea was simple and uncontroversial: widely disseminating information about such vehicles could help turn ordinary citizens into intelligence assets in child-abduction cases, when time is crucial. AMBER alerts have unquestionably saved lives. The widespread adoption of advanced ALPRs would build on what has been gained from AMBER alerts by making it easier to find vehicles when time is of the essence.

But that hasn’t stopped politicians from across the spectrum—at both the federal and local levels—from announcing support for legislation banning or restricting the deployment of ALPRs.

[…]

For starters, there is no right not to be photographed in public—whether by private citizens or by the government. So-called First Amendment auditors take joy in illustrating this fact. There’s now a whole genre of YouTube content featuring self-styled auditors obnoxiously filming people in public to get them to call the police, who are often forced to admit they can do nothing. Filming public space is, in fact, protected activity.

In addition, the Fourth Amendment has never been understood to prohibit law enforcement officers from observing what is in plain view from a place where they are lawfully present. If an officer walking past a car sees contraband on the front seat, he may act on that observation—even without a warrant.

[…]

The notion that local governments are using these cameras to compile long-term logs of Americans’ movements runs up against several realities. For one, such an effort would quickly create enormous data-storage demands. For another, Flock cameras default to retaining data for no more than 30 days, a setting that most jurisdictions leave unchanged. Many police departments also impose their own restrictions on which vehicles can be searched and under what circumstances. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that the technology can’t be misused (as shown by a handful of cases involving police officers using department assets to track people for personal reasons). But these abuses don’t justify a rejection of the technology any more than some cases of excessive force justify condemnation of policing as an institution.

Posted in Policy, Technology | 4 Comments »

The lesson of Stalingrad would not be forgotten

August 9th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekBiological warfare was the furthest thing from his mind, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), when he entered the military faculty of the Tomsk Medical Institute in 1973 to begin graduate studies as a cadet intern:

I was planning to become a military psychiatrist, until a professor gave me an assignment that changed my relationship to medicine. He asked me to analyze a mysterious outbreak of tularemia on the German-Soviet front shortly before the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942.

[…]

The first victims of tularemia were German panzer troops, who fell ill in such large numbers during the late summer of 1942 that the Nazi campaign in southern Russia ground to a temporary halt. Thousands of Russian soldiers and civilians living in the Volga region came down with tularemia within a week of the initial German outbreak. The Soviet high command rushed ten mobile military hospitals into the area, a sign of the extraordinary rise in the number of cases.

Most of the journals reported this as a naturally occurring epidemic, but there had never been such a widespread outbreak in Russia before. One epidemiological study provided a telling statistic: in 1941, ten thousand cases of tularemia had been reported in the Soviet Union. In the year of the Stalingrad outbreak, the number of cases soared to more than one hundred thousand. In 1943, the incidence of disease returned to ten thousand.

It seemed strange that so many men had first fallen sick on one side only. The opposing armies were so close together that a simultaneous outbreak was all but inevitable. Only exposure to a sudden and concentrated quantity of tularemia could explain the onslaught of infections in the German troops alone. Seventy percent of those infected came down with a pneumonic form of the disease, which could only have been caused by purposeful dissemination.

[…]

“It suggests that this epidemic was caused intentionally.”

[…]

He pointed to the paper I had left on his desk.

“I don’t want to see this until you’ve given it some thought. And never … never mention to anyone else what you just told me. Believe me, you’ll be doing yourself a favor.”

[…]

Years later, an elderly lieutenant colonel who worked in the secret bacteriological weapons facility in the city of Kirov during the war told me that a tularemia weapon was developed in Kirov in 1941, the year before the Battle of Stalingrad. He left me with no doubt that the weapon had been used.

The lesson of Stalingrad would not be forgotten by our biological warfare strategists. In the postwar years, the Soviet high command shifted its attention from battlefield deployment to “deep targets” far behind enemy lines, where there was no danger of infecting one’s own troops.

[…]

The moral argument for using any available weapon against an enemy threatening us with certain annihilation seemed to me irrefutable. I came away from that assignment fascinated by the notion that disease could be used as an instrument of war. I began to read everything I could find about epidemiology and the biological sciences.

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Kleenex was originally marketed as a cold cream remover

August 8th, 2026

I was listening to the Everyday Abundance podcast, when they did an episode on handkerchiefs getting replaced by tissues:

I didn’t realize where the name Kleenex came from:

Kleenex began during the First World War when the Cellucotton company developed a crepe paper gas mask filter. In the 1920s, the product was modified into the menstrual pad Kotex. A further modification of the original crepe paper made it thinner and softer, and the resultant 1924 product was called “Kleenex” and marketed as a cold cream remover. In line with the company’s requirements for their brand names to be short, easy to say, and easy to explain, the name Kleenex was selected as the “Kleen” portion of the name denotes its cleansing purpose with a sensational spelling of the word “clean”. The “ex” was added to show that Kleenex was of the family of products that included Kotex. This was the first marketing of a disposable, paper-based, facial tissue in the Western world, and was sold as a substitute for face towels or cotton wool.

In 1925, the first Kleenex tissue ad was used in magazines showing “the new secret of keeping a pretty skin as used by famous movie stars”. A few years after the introduction of Kleenex, the Cellucotton’s head researcher tried to persuade the head of advertising to try to market the tissue for colds and hay fever. The administrator declined the idea but then committed a small amount of ad space to mention of using Kleenex tissue as a handkerchief. By the 1930s, Kleenex was being marketed with the slogan “Don’t Carry a Cold in Your Pocket”, and its use as a disposable handkerchief replacement became predominant.

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Francisella tularensis is lethal in 30 percent of untreated cases

August 7th, 2026

I don’t recall ever hearing the name tularemia growing up, but I’m pretty sure I was vaguely aware of something called rabbit fever — if only because I’d seen the warning against rabbititis in Hare Tonic:

“And then suddenly everything’d go black!”

Biohazard by Ken Alibek Tularemia is a debilitating illness, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), rife among wild animals and common in the Rocky Mountains, California, Oklahoma, parts of eastern Europe, and Siberia:

It is a hardy organism, capable of surviving for weeks, sometimes months, in decaying animal corpses. Tularemia is primarily transmitted to humans by ticks, mosquitoes, and wild rabbits, though squirrels, sheep, cats, and dogs have also been identified as carriers. While highly infectious, it almost never spreads directly from one person to another.

Victims can be laid up for weeks with chills, nausea, headaches, and fever. If left untreated, symptoms usually last two to four weeks, but they can continue for months. Francisella tularensis is lethal in 30 percent of untreated cases.

After World War II, scientists in the United States, Britain, and Canada developed tularemia for use on the battlefield, where it could immobilize an entire division through the intensive medical care required for each stricken soldier.

Soviet commanders considered tularemia an unpredictable weapon for close-quarter tactical maneuvers. The risk of infecting one’s own troops was high. But we had obtained, from a leading international research institute in Europe, a strain capable of overcoming immunity in vaccinated monkeys.

Our civilian credentials ensured that no questions were asked when we requested it. As far as we knew, there had never been an attempt anywhere in the world to weaponize a vaccine-resistant strain of tularemia. For Kalinin, the project represented a chance to prove what Biopreparat could do.

Five hundred monkeys were ordered from Africa for tularemia tests on Rebirth Island, he explains:

Importing that many animals at one time without arousing suspicion was not as difficult as it sounds. The arrangements were made well in advance by clandestine overseas trading associations run by the Soviet Ministry of External Trade, which also supplied us with the cages and other special equipment.

[…]

Since we were testing a vaccine-resistant weapon, all of the monkeys had to be immunized before they were exposed.

[…]

There was no telephone at the test center, and the only communication with Aralsk was through cryptograms on the army’s closed-circuit communications network.

[…]

Nearly all the immunized monkeys died.

[…]

The next year we conducted new tests with an even more efficient dry variant of tularemia, following all the procedures meticulously, and the new version of weaponized tularemia entered the Soviet arsenal.

[…]

Meanwhile, at Rebirth Island, everything connected to the tularemia test, from research notes to blood samples to the monkeys’ corpses, had to be incinerated.

[…]

Open-air testing at Rebirth Island stopped in 1992. Records of what happened there no longer exist.

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Can you say…hero?

August 6th, 2026

Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire piece Can You Say…Hero? profiles Mr. Rogers:

He was barely more than a boy himself when he learned what he would be fighting for, and fighting against, for the rest of his life. He was in college. He was a music major at a small school in Florida and planning to go to seminary upon graduation. His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television. Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, “there were people throwing pies at one another.” He was the soft son of overprotective parents, but he believed, right then, that he was strong enough to enter into battle with that—that machine, that medium—and to wrestle with it until it yielded to him, until the ground touched by its blue shadow became hallowed and this thing called television came to be used “for the broadcasting of grace through the land.” It would not be easy, no—for in order to win such a battle, he would have to forbid himself the privilege of stopping, and whatever he did right he would have to repeat, as though he were already living in eternity. And so it was that the puppets he employed on The Children’s Corner would be the puppets he employed forty-four years later, and so it was that once he took off his jacket and his shoes…well, he was Mister Rogers for good. And even now, when he is producing only three weeks’ worth of new programs a year, he still winds up agonizing—agonizing—about whether to announce his theme as “Little and Big” or “Big and Little” and still makes only two edits per televised minute, because he doesn’t want his message to be determined by the cuts and splices in a piece of tape—to become, despite all his fierce coherence, “a message of fragmentation.”

He is losing, of course. The revolution he started—a half hour a day, five days a week—it wasn’t enough, it didn’t spread, and so, forced to fight his battles alone, Mister Rogers is losing, as we all are losing. He is losing to it, to our twenty-four-hour-a-day pie fight, to the dizzying cut and the disorienting edit, to the message of fragmentation, to the flicker and pulse and shudder and strobe, to the constant, hivey drone of the electroculture…and yet still he fights, deathly afraid that the medium he chose is consuming the very things he tried to protect: childhood and silence. Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling television—gently, of course—to just shut up for once, and television listened. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are….Ten seconds of silence.” And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, “I’ll watch the time,” and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked…and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds…and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, “May God be with you” to all his vanquished children.

Posted in Education, Media | 1 Comment »

They should properly be called mass casualty weapons, not weapons of mass destruction

August 5th, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekOver the centuries, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), armies have used primitive methods to spread pestilence:

The Romans dropped poison into wells to contaminate their enemies’ water supplies. The English gave blankets smeared with smallpox to Indians in the eighteenth century during the French and Indian Wars. Confederate troops in the American Civil War left corpses of animals to rot in ponds along the path of Union forces. And during World War II, Japanese planes dropped porcelain bombs containing billions of plague-infected fleas over Manchuria.

[…]

Soviet scientists combined the knowledge gained from postwar biochemistry and genetic research with modern industrial techniques to develop what are called “aerosol” weapons—particles suspended in a mist, like the spray of an insecticide, or a fine dust, like talcum powder.

Temperature and weather conditions will determine the success of an aerosol’s dissemination. Bacteria and viruses are generally vulnerable to sunlight; ultraviolet light kills them quickly. Heavy rain or snow, wind currents, and humidity impede their effectiveness.

[…]

A bioweaponeer will know to strike at dusk, during periods when a blanket of cool air covers a warmer layer over the ground—a weather condition called an inversion, which keeps particles from being blown away by wind currents.

We packed our biological agents in small melon-sized metal balls, called bomblets, set to explode several miles upwind from the target city.

[…]

Primitive aerosols lose their virulence and dissipate quickly. In our labs, we experimented with special additives to keep our agents from decaying when transported over long distances and to keep them alive in adverse weather conditions.

[…]

We tested a variety of animals, including rabbits and guinea pigs, but monkeys, whose respiratory systems are so similar to ours, were the most effective surrogates for humans. An average person takes in ten liters of air every minute. A monkey inhales four. If four particles of an agent in a given volume of air killed at least 50 percent of the monkeys exposed to an aerosol, we could assume that ten particles would have an equally lethal effect on human beings.

Our standard measure of success for a biological weapon was referred to as Q50, representing the amount needed to infect 50 percent of all exposed human beings in one square kilometer of territory. The Soviet Union devoted an enormous amount of time and money to developing concentrated aerosols that could reach the Q50 level with minuscule numbers of bacterial cells or viral particles.

The most effective biological weapons go on killing long after they are used. Some viruses, such as Marburg, are so hazardous that casually inhaling as few as three microscopic viral particles several days after an attack would be enough to kill you. Biowarfare strategists often look beyond the immediate target to focus on the epidemic behavior of disease-causing agents.

Unlike nuclear weapons, which pulverize everything in their target area, biological weapons leave buildings, transportation systems, and other infrastructure intact. They should properly be called mass casualty weapons, not weapons of mass destruction.

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Lloyd Vogel comes from the Neighborhood of Make-Believe

August 4th, 2026

I recently watched Tom Hanks’ Mr. Rogers movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (on Netflix), and I wasn’t expecting it to star Matthew Rhys, whom I know through The Americans and, more recently, Widow’s Bay.

Rhys plays a jaded journalist tasked with producing a puff piece on the popular children’s show host, but the experience changes him, and the piece grows into a deeply personal article that earns the cover spot on Esquire.

I may not be a jaded journalist, but I must say that my spider sense started tingling when the wife of Rhys’s character first appeared. Our White journalist in 1998 has a (light-skinned) Black wife? They wouldn’t race-swap a real-life person’s wife, would they?

Well, it turns out Rhys’s character is a made-up journalist, named Lloyd Vogel, and the actual writer was Tom Junod, who married a woman named Janet. They did not have a baby boy soon before the article came out; rather, they adopted a girl. I don’t think Junod had an estranged, alcoholic father, dying, either.

Posted in Media | 2 Comments »

Trafficking in germs and viruses was legal then, as it is today

August 3rd, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekKen Alibek describes (in Biohazard) some of the basics of the Soviet bioweapons program:

At the height of the U.S. offensive biological weapons program, American scientists restricted themselves to developing armaments that could be countered by antibiotics or vaccines, out of a concern for protecting troops and civilians from potential accidents. The Soviet government decided that the best agents were those for which there was no known cure.

[…]

Trafficking in germs and viruses was legal then, as it is today. In the name of scientific research, our agents purchased strains from university research laboratories and biotech firms around the world with no difficulty.

[…]

It was from the United States, for instance, that we obtained Machupo, the virus that causes Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. We picked up Marburg, related to the Ebola virus, from Germany.

The KGB was our most dependable supplier of raw material. They were known within Biopreparat by the code name “Capturing Agency One.” Vials arrived in Russia almost every month with exotic fluids, powders, and cultures gathered by our intelligence agents in every corner of the globe. They were then sent by diplomatic pouch to Moscow, where Biopreparat technicians cautiously repackaged them.

[…]

We were never permitted to travel by air. The consequences of a crash in one of our aging Aeroflot planes was too horrible to contemplate. Instead, dressed in civilian clothes, we returned in the cramped, sweaty passenger compartments of trains, trying to be inconspicuous.

[…]

We even explored AIDS and Legionnaire’s disease. Both, as it happened, proved too unstable for use on the battlefield or against civilian populations.

[…]

One of the most infectious diseases known to man, smallpox, was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980. The last naturally occurring case was reported in 1977, and the medical profession judges the minor health risk associated with a vaccine greater than forgoing inoculation. Today, it isn’t possible to get a smallpox vaccination in the United States, unless you are a lab scientist or a member of the military. This was for us an excellent reason to weaponize it.

Although we officially had a small amount of the virus in the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow—matching the world’s only other legal repository of the strain in the United States—we cultivated tons of smallpox in our secret lab in Zagorsk (now Sergiyev Posad), the famous Russian cathedral city a half hour’s drive from the capital. At Zagorsk, we experimented with the culture until we came up with a weapons-quality variant. Smallpox was then quietly added to our arsenal.

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Once they were no longer censored, they ceased to have a subject

August 2nd, 2026

Fifteen summers ago, Ann Manov was spending 15 hours a week in a neurology lab, sorting fruit flies under a microscope, freezing them in liquid nitrogen, and pureeing their sliced-off heads, but the only thing that made her want to get out of bed in the morning was a class on the Russian short story that was taught by a nervous Russian woman:

I remember only a few things about that class, but among them is Venedikt Yerofeyev’s observation that much of Soviet literature collapsed remarkably quickly with the disappearance of censorship—the work of not just those who wrote in support of socialism, but of those who had opposed it too. Once they were no longer censored, they ceased to have a subject, a raison d’être.

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The most fortunate inhabitants of the Soviet Union were the condemned monkeys of Rebirth Island

August 1st, 2026

Biohazard by Ken AlibekKen Alibek describes (in Biohazard) the Rebirth Island test site in the Aral Sea:

Ten centuries ago, according to Russian legend, there was a mysterious kingdom on the shores of the Black Sea called Tmu Tarakan. Its name was variously translated as the “Place of Darkness” or the “Kingdom of Cockroaches.” Modern-day Muscovites use the phrase whenever they want to describe a destination that is as loathsome as it is remote.

[…]

The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, but it has been shrinking every year since the 1960s when, in a wrong-headed agricultural experiment, Soviet state planners ordered the diversion of the Aral’s river sources into concrete irrigation canals. The canals were to transform this part of Central Asia into a cotton bowl. After the first bumper harvests, the desert soil was exhausted, and local residents have been reaping the consequences ever since. The rivers silted over and clouds of toxic salts billow across the region every year, leaving one of the world’s highest cancer rates in their wake.

[…]

In 1972, two fishermen died when a shift in the direction of the wind sent a cloud of plague over their boat. In the 1970s and 1980s, abnormally high incidences of plague were detected among rodents in inhabited areas north of the testing ground. Following the Soviet collapse in late 1991, doctors reported outbreaks of plague in several areas of Central Asia.

[…]

We used to say that the most fortunate inhabitants of the Soviet Union were the condemned monkeys of Rebirth Island. They were fed oranges, apples, bananas, and other fresh fruits rarely seen by Soviet citizens. Our work teams could only admire this vision of plenty from afar. Each piece of fruit was carefully inventoried and guarded to dissuade members of the scientific teams from giving in to temptation.

[…]

Scientists on the occasional foraging trips into town were shocked to see the earthen huts with no running water that served as dwellings for most of the inhabitants. Malnutrition and hepatitis were common.

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Rats that received xanthan gum for ten weeks developed colon inflammation

July 31st, 2026

Xanthan gum, which helps give ice cream, yogurt, sauces, cakes, and gluten-free pasta their familiar texture, has been linked to gut inflammation:

Valued for its thickening, stabilizing, and gelling properties, it is among the food industry’s most widely used additives. It also helps make liquids safer to swallow for people with dysphagia, a condition that causes difficulty swallowing.

Research from the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) in Brazil, however, raises questions about the effects of prolonged consumption. Rats that received xanthan gum for ten weeks developed colon inflammation, changes in their gut microbiota, and reduced intestinal barrier integrity. The study was supported by FAPESP.

[…]

Xanthan gum is produced through biotechnology by fermenting material with the bacterium Xanthomonas campestris. “It’s a plant pathogen that, in nature, infects a variety of plants and can be observed when cabbage or kale, for example, begin to spoil,” she says.

[…]

The results may help clarify earlier reports connecting xanthan gum with necrotizing enterocolitis in premature infants in the United States. This serious disease causes intestinal inflammation that can lead to tissue death.

In 2012, 22 newborns developed the condition after receiving formula thickened with xanthan gum, and at least three died. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) subsequently prohibited its use in premature infants and advises against using it in infants more generally.

[…]

The researchers also examined the biological pathway through which the inflammatory response developed in the colon. “Xanthan gum is reactive and opens the intestinal barrier, altering a protein [Claudin-2] that’s responsible for regulating permeability between intestinal cells, which triggers an inflammatory cascade,” Rischiteli explains.

[…]

Rats fed the additive developed an inflammatory state marked by greater numbers of lymphocytes, immune defense cells, within the intestinal wall. The response was strongest among animals receiving medium and high doses of xanthan gum.

[…]

The rats also had elevated levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1? and TNF-?, providing further evidence of an inflammatory response. “TNF-alpha, in particular, is associated with the death of cells lining the intestine [epithelium] and the development of inflammatory diseases,” she says.

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