August 8, 2026

CRYSTAL:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Stephen Green

YOU TALKIN’ TO ME? Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s — how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brain.

Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S.

These findings stopped me in my tracks because those two jobs rely on the same thing as my own work: maps.

I have spent more than two decades staring at maps. Not paper maps on a wall, but digital ones with multiple layers: flood boundaries draped over census blocks, car crash hot spots plotted against road geometry, and satellite readings of rainfall stitched across river basins. Much of my work as a civil and environmental engineer is done through GIS – that is, geographic information systems. Engineers like me hold several spatial relationships in their minds at once, reasoning about where things sit relative to one another across scales ranging from a city block to a whole watershed.

I always assumed that spatial reasoning across map layers was purely professional. But that study on taxi and ambulance drivers made me wonder whether all that mental work might be doing something good to the brain.

Taxi driver brains

Of the 9 million death certificates from January 2020 to December 2022 that researchers examined, taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest risk of dying from Alzheimer’s disease out of 443 occupations. After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall.

This pattern did not extend to other driving jobs. The researchers concluded that the key to reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s was not driving itself but continuous real-time navigation: the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change. Drivers whose jobs relied on fixed or predetermined routes, like bus drivers and aircraft pilots, didn’t seem to experience a similar advantage.

I eagerly await Travis Bickle’s profile in the next issue of AARP Magazine: 

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE CRITICAL DRINKER: She-Hulk — The Show That Literally Killed Careers

Let’s make a superhero as lawyer TV series and have no writers familiar with the latter genre on the staff. What could go wrong?

 

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

MEN HAVEN’T MOVED MUCH AT ALL:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green

I KINDA LOVE THIS GUY:

Posted at 12:26 pm by Glenn Reynolds

HAHA:

Posted at 12:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CHANGE:

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: “Does the [military] leader sound like a human LinkedIn post? If so, he or she ain’t it. And they will most certainly hesitate in battle.”

Data Republican’s tweet concludes, “Said radical new woke policies ‘coincidentally’ also happen to require countless billions of dollars in training, remodeling, process changes. The changes are constant, and also are a budgetary feeding frenzy for military contractors and certain agency leaders under Department of War. These changes aren’t just wasted spending on woke stuff. These changes add to a bunch of regulatory red tape in battlefield effectiveness, and are genuinely distracting to our military.”

 

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll

FINALLY:

Posted at 9:29 am by Glenn Reynolds

HAPPY 25TH ANNIVERSARY TO INSTAPUNDIT! This blog started on August 8, 2001. I can’t promise I’ll still be blogging in 25 years — but I can’t promise that I won’t, either.

Posted at 8:54 am by Glenn Reynolds

HENRY VIII SEIZED THE MONASTERIES, SO THERE’S PRECEDENT FOR WHAT I’M ABOUT TO SUGGEST . . .

Posted at 8:53 am by Glenn Reynolds

THIS IS LITERALLY THE MOST EDUCATIONAL THING THAT HAS HAPPENED AT CORNELL IN YEARS AND THEY KILLED IT:

Posted at 8:51 am by Glenn Reynolds

CHABLIS IS A HELLUVA DRUG:

Kamala may have even more jump cuts in her campaign videos than her fossilized former boss, and that’s saying something. Back in 2008, Iowahawk had lots of fun riffing on what happened to Obama when “Teleprompter XD-235” cut out. But at least as long as it was working, he could be counted on to reliably read the text on the screen — and really sell the message — unlike his would-be successors.

 

Posted at 8:45 am by Ed Driscoll

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW:

The truth changes when the needs of the party change, comrade.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

HE’LL BE HAPPY THERE. IT’S BETTER FOR EVERYBODY, REALLY.

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

UNITED ACADEMIC WORKERS: The UAW’s Turn to Universities—and Politics.

[Claire] Valdez offers a preview of what the UAW is becoming: a union that puts politics first and is leaning heavily on higher education to sustain its dwindling numbers. The results of this transformation are changing not just unions but higher ed itself.

The academy is the UAW’s only real growth market, and the union has organized itself accordingly. Counting about 1.5 million members at its late 1970s peak, the UAW now has only 383,000 active members, roughly 100,000 of whom work in higher education, with graduate workers making up the largest and fastest-growing share. The University of California’s academic local alone represents some 48,000 workers—more than the UAW’s total membership at the global automaker Stellantis. Harvard’s graduate students account for another 4,000.

What happens to an industrial union when its fastest-growing constituency holds an entirely different theory of what a union is for?

The career of Brandon Mancilla suggests an answer. He began as a history Ph.D. at Harvard, joined the organizing drive that produced the Harvard Graduate Students Union, sat on the strike-coordinating team that planned campus disruptions during the 29-day walkout of 2019, and became the local’s first president in 2020. Two years later, at just 29, he won the directorship of UAW Region 9A (covering eastern New York, New England, and Puerto Rico) with 58 percent of the vote, unseating the incumbent and handing the union’s long-dominant Administrative Caucus its first defeat on the International Executive Board in more than 30 years.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll