August 8, 2026

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

ABE GREENWALD: After Reality.

It’s not just that Gen Zs came too late to catch the USSR. They came too late to catch the real world altogether. What I’m referring to as the real world here is the manifest multidimensional reality in which humans once spent most of their lives, where they experienced the friction that comes from contact with other real people, challenging ideas, and historical events in real time. All that began to wink out sometime around 2007, when the iPhone was released. In the years since, we’ve migrated ever deeper into our screens and their facsimile of reality. And the pandemic hastened the change considerably.

Many of us, of course, are old enough to have experienced life before and after. There are people alive who’ve witnessed World War II, the Shoah, the Soviet nightmare, the birth of the State of Israel, and 9/11. But younger millennials and Gen Zs simply showed up after the fact—after all the facts. By the time they arrived, they mostly had to make do with the real world’s digital epilogue—“learning” about what happened before they were born from social media, influencers, and AI. What they’re getting is not so much history but a malcontent’s primer on the world that’s rumored to exist outside of their phones. And we’re moving inexorably into an age in which they and younger generations will become the majority.

The online world is a uniquely hospitable environment for both socialism and anti-Semitism to flourish in, and Gen Z (online an average of five hours a day) is being bombarded by both. Like the internet itself, socialism and anti-Semitism are primarily virtual. What do I mean by that? Certainly not that they don’t have monstrous real-world consequences. It’s that, at their cores, they both suppose notional worlds that mirror only the surface appearance of the real one. We often have to remind ourselves that “the internet isn’t the real world,” because the superficial similarities can be deceptive. This applies equally to the worlds of socialists and anti-Semites.

North America could soon be facing quite a spell of bad luck:

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

ASKED AND ANSWERED: What has cardiology gotten spectacularly right, and spectacularly wrong, over the past 30 years?

The treatment of acute coronary syndrome and MI. Young clinicians may not be able to remember how MI care was transformed with emergency PCI and stents but it is amazing. People with MIs often leave the hospital the next day with only a band-aid on their wrist. The heart and person saved.

This has led to fewer cases of heart failure and arrhythmia. I live in a city of million people and rarely do primary prevention defibrillators for ischemic-related cardiomyopathy—because of all these fixes.

The corollary to acute care has also been disease-modifying therapy for CAD. When I started my career, an MI was often followed by another and another. Now, with optimal medical therapy, recurrent events are much lower. Patients with MI usually live long enough to die of something else.

Heart failure care has also been transformed with the four classes of HF medicines. What was once a miserable death sentence has been transformed into a livable chronic condition. Of course, the challenge in HF care is using it wisely, because most cases of HF are not in ambulatory males with solid blood pressure, but in older patients with many co-morbidities.

Catheter ablation technology has been a spectacular success for every arrhythmia except AF. Ablation renders patients with arrhythmias from focal areas like surgical patients: cured. We still have a huge knowledge deficit in AF pathophysiology. More on that below.

In structural interventions, TAVI is nothing short of spectacular. We can extend the quality and quantity of life for many older adults who faced certain death from aortic stenosis—without open heart surgery.

Much more at the link.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds