Author: Art Diamond

The New York Times Discovers Diverse Americans Support the Right to Bear Arms

In a surprising front page article The New York Times presents several diverse new gun owners who differ in gender, race, ethnicity, education, and in some cases who previously opposed gun ownership. But in each case they want to avail themselves of the right to protect themselves.

Sometimes they also see other, secondary, advantages.

(p. A1) Ken Green’s tipping point came as he watched an angry mob storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

John Alvarado’s came during the pandemic, as he evolved from a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal” to a deeply religious conservative.

A spike in anti-Asian violence in that same period is what motivated John Tsien.

For Victoria Alston, it was living on her own again after separating from her husband.

And for Anna Kolanowski, the tipping point came as she walked to a bar one night to meet friends.

. . .

(p. A11) With her parents — Polish immigrants, and longtime gun owners, who were not completely comfortable with her gender transition — Ms. Kolanowski’s new hobby has provided a bonding opportunity.

“It’s kind of cute, like, ‘We have something in common!’” she said.

Ms. Kolanowski and the other new owners said they had expected to feel more confident and self-reliant after buying guns. Less expected, they said, were the new friends they made, and the uplifting sense of having bridged a societal divide.

Several described a profound enjoyment of a pastime they never dreamed would be so satisfying.

Though he dislikes the macho energy that he sees pervading gun culture, Mr. Tsien says he has found shooting to be a deeply meditative, calming pursuit.

He likens the hobby to others he has embraced in the past, like photography and scuba diving, where part of the appeal is mastering a complicated tool and understanding how it works.

For Ms. Alston, the connection with other Black women at her shooting range felt energizing and empowering: “We’re finally becoming less afraid,” she said.

Likewise, Dr. Green sees his gun ownership as a way of defending his Jewish identity.

“One of the reasons the Holocaust happened is because people allowed it to happen,” he said. “Not on my watch.”

Several said they looked for opportunities to talk about their decisions, even with those who were skeptical, in hopes of promoting dialogue and understanding.

In Mr. Alvarado’s church in Maine last summer, he sat by a door in the back, keeping watch. His role on the security team is “where I fit in,” he said. “It feels purposeful, and it feels good to have a purpose.”

For the full story see:

Jenna Russell, Emily Rhyne and Noah Throop. “Moment They Knew It Was Time to Own a Gun.” The New York Times (Thurs., Feb. 20, 2025): A1 & A10-A11.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 16, 2025, and has the title “The Tipping Point.”)

Hackman Was the Inspiring Hero of The Poseidon Adventure

I was surprised to see a commentary on Gene Hackman by Ben Stiller, so I started reading. He wrote that one Hackman film had mattered to him a lot.
I doubted that we liked the same film, but I read on, feeling a bit of hope and suspense. I admit I felt a tingle of triumph when I read that we both liked the same film–The Poseidon Adventure.

Stiller said that at age 7 he watched it in the theatre about 10 times. I don’t remember if I ever saw it in the theatre, but I have watched it more than once and I think about it fairly often. What I think about is what the passengers do when the ship is flipped over by a mammoth wave. Almost all of the surviving passengers start hobbling toward the top deck of the ship, hoping for rescue. But the small band of misfits who had been sitting at Reverend Gene Hackman’s table, plus the cruise singer, are convinced by Hackman that the only hope for rescue is to go in the opposite direction, because the hull is now the highest point of the ship.

He convinces them and he leads them in the right direction. At a key moment he acts to save them. The movie had hope in the face of disaster, perseverance paying off, courage when almost everyone else is going in the wrong direction.

Stiller says that the movie, and Hackman’s character in it, inspired him to want to be an actor. When Stiller acted as Hackman’s son in The Royal Tenenbaums, he finally worked up the courage to tell Hackman how much Hackman’s performance in The Poseidon Adventure had meant to him. Hackman smiled at him and simply said “money job.” Then Hackman got up when they called for them to shoot their last scene together. Stiller stayed sitting for several seconds, seeming stunned. In their scene Stiller tells Hackman that he has gone through a lot recently. Hackman looks at him with great empathy, puts a hand reassuringly on his neck and says “I know.” He says it was the same sincerity that he saw in Hackman’s performance in The Poseidon Adventure, and he doesn’t think it was a money job.

Just now I watched a YouTube interview of Hackman by Johnny Carson on the filming of The Poseidon Adventure. Hackman has a modesty to him, and a sense of humor. He talks about the filming being fun, but also talks of being disappointed that they cut a scene in which he did a difficult stunt. He could have just let the stuntman do it, but he chose to do it. When he was doing the movie he took it seriously.
My take is that as a modest man, when he said “money job” he might have been deflating the awkward intensity of what Stiller had told him, and it might not have been the whole truth.

For Stiller’s full commentary see:

Ben Stiller. “Gene Hackman’s Simple Truth.” The New York Times (Sat., March 1, 2025): A19.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 28, 2025, and has the title “Ben Stiller on Gene Hackman’s Simple Truth.”)

Public Health “Experts” Rebuffed Renegades Who Saw Covid Spread in Aerosols

Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map shows how rigid adherence to the miasma theory of disease shut out alternatives. And an alternative was indeed needed to explain the spread of cholera. But the defeat of the miasma theory for cholera may have been too complete, prejudicing scientists to oppose theories of disease-spread through the air, which turn out to be important for some diseases, such as Covid-19.

(p. C9) In early 2020, as word spread of a frightening new respiratory outbreak in China, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were pressed for advice. Both initially counseled social distancing, guided by the assumption that the disease was spread by large, boggy droplets that fell rapidly to the ground after being expelled by coughing or sneezing.

By avoiding such projectiles and keeping surfaces clean, the reasoning went, infection could be avoided. Yet this advice ignored—with tragic consequences—nearly a century of science suggesting that many respiratory diseases can spread via microdrops that are exhaled during normal breathing and can remain suspended in the air for hours.

In “Air-Borne,” the New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer seeks to explain how public-health officials could have overlooked such an important mechanism of the Covid-19 contagion. He begins his meticulous history with the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, who taught that illness could be caused by “an invisible corruption of the air,” which he termed a “miasma.”

. . .

While the field of aerobiology may have entered the new millennium stuck on a “stagnant plateau,” as one journal article lamented, hope was starting to emerge. Advances in technology led to a more complete characterization of the aerobiome. A range of scientists from around the world, meanwhile, re-examined the possibility of airborne transmission and discovered the evidence against it wanting.

Following the emergence of Covid-19, many of these researchers were appalled by the seemingly reflexive—“mind-boggling,” in the words of one scientist—rejection of airborne transmission by public-health agencies. At first, these renegades individually struggled to have their work published but were largely rebuffed.

After an early Covid-19 outbreak among a choir in Washington state was initially attributed to large-droplet spread, a more detailed analysis by a unified group of skeptical researchers suggested that airborne transmission was far more likely. On Dec. 23, 2021—nearly 21 months after tweeting “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne”—the WHO “finally issued a clear public statement that the virus was airborne,” Mr. Zimmer writes. A triumph for persistent scientists, perhaps, but also a pointed reminder of the complexity, fragility and deeply human dependencies of evolving science.

For the full review see:

David A. Shaywitz. “Microbes in the Mist.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 15, 2025): C9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2025, and has the title “‘Air-Borne’: The Microbes in the Mist.”)

The book under review is:

Zimmer, Carl. Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe. New York: Dutton, 2025.

DNA Analysis Refutes Some Anthropologists’ Pompei Stories

When we visited Pompei many years ago, the plaster castes of of the skeletons of victims created powerful memories. Anthropologists created stories about who they were and what they were doing when disaster struck. Now DNA can be analyzed from the bones, to learn the gender and relatedness of the victims.
What has been learned often refutes the stories. For instance, one group of four was viewed as a mother with her three children. DNA analysis shows that the adult in the group was a male, and none of the four victims was related to each other. The moral of this story seems to be to take anthropological stories based on slender evidence, with an especially large grain of salt.

The DNA analysis is discussed in:

Franz Lidz. “Pompeii Narratives Take a Twist With DNA.” The New York Times (Tues., November 12, 2024): D4.

(Note: the online version of the article has the date Nov. 7, 2024, and has the title “With DNA, Pompeii Narratives Take a Twist.”)

The academic paper reporting the DNA analysis is:

Pilli, Elena, Stefania Vai, Victoria C. Moses, Stefania Morelli, Martina Lari, Alessandra Modi, Maria Angela Diroma, Valeria Amoretti, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Massimo Osanna, Douglas J. Kennett, Richard J. George, John Krigbaum, Nadin Rohland, Swapan Mallick, David Caramelli, David Reich, and Alissa Mittnik. “Ancient DNA Challenges Prevailing Interpretations of the Pompeii Plaster Casts.” Current Biology 34, no. 22 (2024): 5307-18.e7.

Global Warming Allows German Wine Entrepreneurs to Grow a “Superb” Chardonnay

In my Openness book, I argue that the costs of global warming have been exaggerated, partly because environmentalists forget that entrepreneurs can adapt, either lessening the costs, or sometimes even creating benefits. A case of creating benefits is apparently now the growing of “superb” chardonnay wine in Germany:

(p. D4) What accounts for the arrival of . . . German chardonnays? Certain wine regions like Rheinhessen, the Pfalz and the Obermosel have limestone soils, which chardonnay has a special affinity for, but the warming climate has made it possible to ripen chardonnay sufficiently to make superb wines.

Climate change influenced decisions to plant chardonnay in other ways as well.

“Climate change for us does not just mean it’s getting warmer and warmer, it means everything is getting more extreme — frost risk, weeks without rain, hailstorms,” said Klaus Peter Keller, . . . . “Therefore, we must spread the risk a bit more than we would 30 or 40 years ago. Rather than 100 percent riesling we have now 70 percent riesling, 15 percent pinot noir, 10 percent chardonnay and 4 percent others, and we think that will be the structure for the coming 30 or 40 years.”

Mr. Keller said he had wanted to plant pinot blanc rather than chardonnay but that their son Felix had pushed for chardonnay.

“Felix was right,” he said. “Chardonnay is much better adapted to climate change, with thicker skins, and it transmits the soil much better than pinot blanc.”

Felix Keller said by email that his grandfather had tried planting chardonnay in 1988, but that the timing had been wrong.

“Back then, it didn’t ripen every year,” he said. “It took us until 2018 to try again. We believe chardonnay has a bright future in Germany because we now have the climate that used to be in Burgundy in the early ’90s.”

For the full commentary see:

Eric Asimov. “The Pour; A Surprise From Germany: Chardonnay.” The New York Times (Weds., March 5, 2025): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated March 4, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

My book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Ramaswamy Avowed That the F.D.A. “Erects Unnecessary Barriers to Innovation”

The New York Times article quoted below worried that if Vivek Ramaswamy succeeded in “slashing regulation” of drugs, his own drug development firm would have benefitted. Maybe so, but that misses the main point–all the rest of us also would have benefitted by medical entrepreneurs being allowed to create more and quicker cures. Presumably The New York Times was relieved when Ramaswamy resigned from DOGE, but I was discouraged.

I was in favor of Elon Musk’s push to reduce the number of federal employees. But I was even more in favor of Vivek Ramaswamy’s push to deregulate innovative entrepreneurs.

[By the way, isn’t it predictable that The New York Times delights in highlighting Roivant’s one failure, but gives only passing scant mention to its six successes?]

(p. A10) Vivek Ramaswamy is the less famous and less wealthy half of the duo of billionaires that President-elect Donald J. Trump has designated to slash government costs.

. . .

At 39, he is one of the world’s youngest billionaires, having made his fortune in the pharmaceutical industry.  . . .

Mr. Ramaswamy, who owns a stake currently valued at nearly $600 million in a biotechnology company he started, has called for changes at the Food and Drug Administration that would speed up drug approvals.

. . .

Since being named to jointly lead DOGE, Mr. Ramaswamy had until recently been posting on Mr. Musk’s social media site X, hinting about where he may look to make changes in the government.

He called for slashing regulation, not just cutting government spending. He pointed to federal workers focused on diversity as potential targets for “mass firings.”

And he has been taking aim at the F.D.A. “My #1 issue with FDA is that it erects unnecessary barriers to innovation,” he wrote on X. He criticized the agency’s general requirement that drugmakers conduct two successful major studies to win approval rather than one.

Mr. Ramaswamy founded his biotechnology company, Roivant Sciences, in 2014, betting that he could find hidden gems whose potential had been overlooked by large drugmakers. The idea was to hunt for experimental medications languishing within large pharmaceutical companies, buy them for cheap and spin out a web of subsidiaries to bring them to market.

The venture is best known for a spectacular failure.

In 2015, Mr. Ramaswamy whipped up hype and investment around one of his finds, a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease being developed by one of his subsidiaries, Axovant. Two years later, a clinical trial showed that it did not work, erasing more than $1.3 billion in Axovant’s stock value in a single day.

Mr. Ramaswamy personally lost money on paper on the failure, but thanks to the savvy way he had structured his web of companies he and Roivant weathered the storm. Six products have won F.D.A. approval, and today Roivant has a market valuation of $8 billion.

Mr. Ramaswamy sold some of his Roivant stock to take a large payout in 2020, reporting nearly $175 million in capital gains on his tax return that year. But he is still one of the company’s largest shareholders.

If Mr. Ramaswamy recommends changes that speed up drug approvals through DOGE, that could be good news for Roivant, which is developing drugs that might come up for approval during Mr. Trump’s second term. The faster it can get medicines onto the market, the more valuable the company — and Mr. Ramaswamy’s stake in it — stands to become.

For the full story see:

Rebecca Robbins, Maureen Farrell and Jonathan Weisman. “From Ramaswamy’s High-Profile Perch, a Web of Potential Conflicts.” The New York Times (Thursday, January 16, 2025): A10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 15, 2025, and has the title “Ramaswamy Has a High-Profile Perch and a Raft of Potential Conflicts.”)

Hamas Seeks “Genocidal” International Jihad

Israel is a tiny democracy, and a hotbed of innovative entrepreneurship. See Gilder’s The Israel Test and Senor and Singer’s Start-up Nation.

I wish I had posted this entry a year ago–maybe ‘better late than never’. Tiny Israel just wants to be left alone to flourish and innovate; Hamas wants to destroy Israel.

(p. A11) Unfortunately, the tendency of sophisticated observers is to play down what terrorists say they believe. In a phone interview from Washington, Steve Stalinsky, Memri’s executive director, points out that in all the coverage of the war, “we have heard almost nothing about the Hamas ideology. Yeah, sure, sometimes you hear about the Hamas Covenant”—the group’s charter, which spells out its genocidal intentions—“but that’s it, and no one even prints it.”

Memri prints it, and publishes video compilations of Hamas leaders stating their movement’s goal: to build an Islamic caliphate stretching from Palestine across the region and the world. That sounds more like international jihad than Palestinian nationalism.

Headquartered in Washington, Memri monitors and translates TV broadcasts, newspapers, sermons, social-media posts, textbooks and official statements in Arabic, Farsi and several other languages. The work may be drudgery, but it yields a steady stream of articles and viral video clips that condemn the region’s tyrants, terrorists and two-faced intellectuals with their own words.

Memri also documents Gazans’ indoctrination from childhood into a religious ideology that puts them on a war footing. “Their textbooks are our life,” Mr. Carmon says, “but no one paid attention.” Instead, Israeli leaders were convinced that Qatari money and past beatings would deter Hamas.

Mr. Carmon directs me to a recent article in which he writes, “Any Arab who hears American officials say that Qatar is America’s ally would burst into laughter—those clueless Americans, who don’t even know that Qatar is spitting in their face with wild anti-U.S. incitement 24/7 . . . because they only watch the deceptive Al-Jazeera TV in English.” On the Arabic-language channel, he says, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera “is the megaphone of Hamas like it was the megaphone of al Qaeda. Every speech, every statement—everything is aired several times until everybody gets it.”

The article faults the Biden administration for “pleading with Qatar” instead of threatening it: “Just one comment by the U.S. administration that it is considering relocating Al Udeid Air Base from Qatar (without which Qatar will cease to exist within a week) to the UAE will set the Qataris running to bring all the American hostages back home.” Instead, while hostage negotiations stall, the U.S. has quietly agreed to extend its presence at the Qatari base for another decade, according to a Jan. 2 CNN report. Mr. Carmon seems mystified by U.S. weakness. “Since when do experienced American officials conduct negotiations without power pressure on the side?”

. . .

One of Memri’s earliest successes came with Yasser Arafat. By 2002 the Palestinian terrorist leader was used to being feted as a statesman. In a “60 Minutes” interview, however, Arafat was flummoxed when Mike Wallace quoted Memri’s translations of his Arabic speeches: “ ‘Millions of holy warriors are on their way to Jerusalem. Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!’ . . . What does that mean?”

For the full interview see:

Elliot Kaufman, interviewer. “The Weekend Interview; When Terrorists Talk, They Listen.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Jan. 13, 2024): A11.

(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs, added; ellipsis internal to paragraph, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date January 12, 2024 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

Gilder’s book mentioned above is:

Gilder, George. The Israel Test. Minneapolis, MN: Richard Vigilante Books, 2009.

Senor and Singer’s book mentioned above is:

Senor, Dan, and Saul Singer. Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. revised pb edition ed. New York: Twelve, 2011.

Innovative Entrepreneur Bill Gates Believes He Is “on the Autism Spectrum”

In my “Openness” book I argue and present some evidence that toleration for those who think different, including those on the Autism spectrum, will allow more innovative entrepreneurs to flourish, bringing benefits to us all. In the first volume of his autobiography, innovative entrepreneur Bill Gates speculates that he is on the Autism spectrum.

(p. A17) Mr. Gates was, he says, a “happy boy,” according to family lore. He had a wide grin, excess energy and a tendency to rock his body when he was deep in thought. Mr. Gates speculates that today he “probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.”

For the full review see:

David A. Shaywitz. “Bookshelf; A Life of DOS And Don’ts.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025): A17.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 3, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Source Code’: A Life of DOS and Don’ts.”)

The first volume of Bill Gates’s autobiography is:

Gates, Bill. Source Code: My Beginnings. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2025.

My book, that I mention in my opening comments, is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

E. Coli in Organically Grown Carrots Kill One and Sicken 39

Many years ago, when ConAgra was still headquartered in Omaha, I heard a speech by the then-C.E.O. in which he argued that big food producers have processes in place to make food safer than the processes often used by smaller independent local and organic farmers. Stories of contamination of organic food do not prove, but are consistent with, his argument. For instance it was reported in 2024 that organic carrots contaminated with E. Coli killed one person and made 39 others sick. Trader Joe’s was one of the stores where contaminated carrots were sold.

E. Coli in organically grown carrots was reported in:

Johnny Diaz. “Organic Carrots Behind Outbreak of E. Coli; 39 Sickened, 1 Dead.” The New York Times (Tues., November 19, 2024): B5.

(Note: the online version of the article was updated Nov. 18, 2024, and has the title “1 Dead and Dozens Ill in E. Coli Outbreak Linked to Organic Carrots.”)

Streetcar Boondoggles Waste Taxpayers’ Funds

After reading The Wall Street Journal account of the St. Louis streetcar quoted further below, I googled to learn what has happened in the last five years. As of 3/24/25, Wikipedia reported:

The Loop Trolley shut down in 2019 after ridership and revenue fell far short of projections, but was reopened in 2022 after the federal government threatened to demand the return of funds used to build it.

Apparently sunk costs are not sunk if their source is the federal government. So the poor taxpayer is forced to continue to pay more for the “streetcar named quagmire.” The abject failure of the St. Louis streetcar has inspired the Omaha mayor and city council to build their own streetcar, ignoring Warren Buffett’s sensible misgivings.

(p. A3) St. Louis business leaders looking to boost tourism and development spent years bringing the Loop Trolley to fruition, a $52 million streetcar project that runs for 2.2 miles between a historic park and an entertainment-and-business district on the edge of the city.

But it has been a bumpy ride, and now it may have reached a dead end.

The trolley, after just a year of offering limited service, is out of money. The nonprofit that operates the trolley is seeking $700,000 in local funds to continue, or else the service is set to close this month.

. . .

“They were trying to push dollars out in the street to stimulate the economy,” said Jeffrey Boothe, executive director of the Community Streetcar Coalition, which advocates for streetcars. He said some of the projects approved at the time hadn’t done enough analysis or were being proposed by entities that had never operated a transit system before.

The federal government now requires more rigor in its grant applications, he said. “We can chalk it up to lessons learned,” Mr. Boothe said.

The most successful trolley projects, like those in Seattle and Portland, are fully integrated into the existing transportation infrastructure, generating traffic from more than just tourists, said Jeff Brown, chairman of the department of urban and regional planning at Florida State University.

. . .

Only two cars were ready at the outset, so the system could operate only part-time. A third car was needed to be held in reserve for full-time service to assure reliability.

That has held back cumulative ridership to 15,766 since last November and fare income to $32,500 through September this year—much lower than what had been projected under a full-time schedule. The Loop Trolley has also brought in about $689,320 through a 1% sales-tax on businesses along the route, since it launched service last year.

For the full story see:

Joe Barrett. “In St. Louis, Streetcar Named Quagmire.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, December 5, 2019 [sic]): A3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 1, 2019 [sic], and has the title “St. Louis Streetcar Project Running Out of Juice.”)

Songbirds Adapt to Global Warming by Shrinking in Size

In my Openness book I argue that global warming is not as much of a threat as many claim. One part of my argument is that humans, and non-human life too, is much more adaptable than the environmentalists realize. Songbirds discussed below exemplify the point.

(p. A3) North American songbirds have been shrinking steadily in size over the past 40 years, according to scientists who measured tens of thousands of the feathered creatures from dozens of different species and attributed the changes to rising temperatures.

As the birds’ bodies got smaller, their wings gradually got longer, the scientists said in a paper published Wednesday [Dec. 4, 2019] in the journal Ecology Letters. The longer wings, the researchers said, may help offset the loss of body mass so the birds can fly efficiently on their long migrations.

. . .

Warm-blooded animals are generally larger in cold climates and smaller in warm climates because more compact creatures usually release heat more quickly, according to biologists and ecologists.

Given the well-established link, many scientists had predicted in recent years that global warming would affect the size of many animals. Yet until recently, there wasn’t much evidence of the effect at work during modern warming trends.

The new findings are the latest in a series of technical reports this year that link changes in body size among birds to warmer temperatures around the world.

Last month, researchers in Australia who studied physical changes in 82 songbird species, including honeyeaters, fairy-wrens and thornbills, reported in the Royal Society B journal that birds there have grown smaller due to warming over the last half-century, as the annual mean temperature increased regionally by about 0.012 degrees Celsius. They based their conclusions on an analysis of 12,000 museum specimens.

In March [2019], researchers at the University of Cape Town in South Africa who tracked the weight of a long-tailed songbird common across Africa called the mountain wagtail found the species gradually became lighter between 1976 and 1999, as regional temperatures increased by 0.18 degrees Celsius. They published their findings in the journal Oecologia.

For the full story see:

Robert Lee Hotz. “Songbirds Shrink in Size, Study Finds.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 5, 2019 [sic]): A3.

(Note: bracketed date and year added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 4, 2019 [sic], and has the title “Songbirds Are Shrinking in Size, Study Finds.”)

My book mentioned above is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The academic paper in Ecology Letters, mentioned above, is:

Weeks, Brian C., David E. Willard, Marketa Zimova, Aspen A. Ellis, Max L. Witynski, Mary Hennen, and Benjamin M. Winger. “Shared Morphological Consequences of Global Warming in North American Migratory Birds.” Ecology Letters (2019).

The academic paper in the Royal Society B journal, mentioned above, is:

Gardner, Janet L., Tatsuya Amano, Anne Peters, William J. Sutherland, Brendan Mackey, Leo Joseph, John Stein, Karen Ikin, Roellen Little, Jesse Smith, and Matthew R. E. Symonds. “Australian Songbird Body Size Tracks Climate Variation.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 286, no. 1916 (2019).

The academic paper in the Oecologia journal, mentioned above, is:

Prokosch, Jorinde, Zephne Bernitz, Herman Bernitz, Birgit Erni, and Res Altwegg. “Are Animals Shrinking Due to Climate Change? Temperature-Mediated Selection on Body Mass in Mountain Wagtails.” Oecologia 189, no. 3 (2019): 841-49.