Author: Art Diamond

“Persistent Plucky Outsiders” Innovate a Better Way to Stop Bleeding

(p. 20) Charles Barber’s “In the Blood” treats a consequential topic, and contains moments of real insight, drama and humor.

. . .

Though hemorrhage is a leading cause of death in both war and peacetime, we learn, the techniques for stopping it haven’t improved significantly for millenniums. Barber explores the mysteries of the “coagulation cascade” — during which diverse proteins activate in intricately choreographed sequence to facilitate clotting — as well as the “lethal triad” of hypothermia, acidosis and coagulopathy (impaired clotting) that can send the body into shock.

We watch a surgeon at a Navy hospital in Bethesda slit the femoral arteries of a herd of 700-pound pigs, then apply different hemostatic agents to the spurting wounds, to see which substance stops the bleeding best. Most products, backed by biotech and medical companies, fail: The poor beasts bleed out. But zeolite, a simple mineral with hitherto unknown hemostatic properties, saves their bacon every time.

Barber’s earlier books feature persistent, plucky outsiders who strive to change the world, and he finds two more likely subjects in the men who brought zeolite’s lifesaving properties to light. Frank Hursey is the brilliant, nerdy engineer who discovers that this cheap, highly porous mineral, used by industry to absorb radiation, chemicals and bad odors, also happens to accelerate clotting, by mopping up water in the blood and thereby concentrating its coagulation agents. (Later Hursey finds that another inexpensive mineral, kaolin, works even better.)

Barely anyone pays attention to Hursey’s discovery until he partners with Bart Gullong, a down-on-his-luck salesman who rebrands Hursey’s invention “QuikClot” and persuades a military scientist to try it out on people. Hursey and Gullong are soon befriended by iconoclasts within the armed forces medical establishment, more of Barber’s appealing, quirky, determined Davids, who together take on two of the biggest Goliaths around: the military-industrial complex and Big Pharma.

For the full review, see:

Tom Mueller. “The Home Front.” The New York Times (Sunday, Aug. 20, 2023): 20.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 26, 2023, and has the title “A Fight to Save Soldiers, From the Lab to the Battlefield.”)

The book under review is:

Barber, Charles. In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took on the Us Army. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2023.

Threatened Red Knot Shorebirds Numbers Rebound Due to “Warm Ocean Waters” Increasing Food Source From Horseshoe Crab Eggs

(p. A13) The number of rufa red knot shore birds migrating via Delaware Bay beaches to Arctic breeding sites this spring rose to the highest level in four years, according to an independent annual survey.

The count, by land and boat, tallied about 22,000 of the robin-sized birds, an encouraging sign for a shorebird that is listed as federally threatened. The survey’s figures were the highest since 2019, and a sharp increase from a record low of 6,880 in 2021, according to Larry Niles, an independent biologist. He has been monitoring the migration of the rufa red knot, an Atlantic coast subspecies, on the Delaware Bay for the last quarter century.

Dr. Niles attributed the healthier number to the relatively warm ocean waters that aided in the spawning of horseshoe crabs, whose eggs are a crucial food source for the birds. A week or two of gorging on the crab eggs each May allows the birds to regain weight after long-distance flights from as far away as Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, and to complete their migration, one of the longest in the avian world.

. . .

“I was elated to see 22,000 birds this year,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Jon Hurdle. “More Threatened Red Knot Shorebirds Are Seen on Jersey Shore Beaches.” The New York Times (Thursday, June 15, 2023): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story also has the date June 15, 2023, and has the title “Uptick Seen in Red Knots on Jersey Shore.”)

Conservationists Criticize the Woke Who Raise Bees as a Virtue Signal

(p. 1) When the B&B Hotel in Ljubljana, Slovenia, decided to reinvent itself as an eco-friendly destination in 2015, it had to meet more than 150 criteria to earn a coveted Travelife certificate of sustainability. But then it went step further: It hired a beekeeper to install four honey bee hives on the roof.

. . .

The hives are managed by Gorazd Trusnovec, a 50-year-old with a graying goatee who is the founder and sole employee of an enterprise called Najemi Panj, which translates to “rent-a-hive.” For a yearly fee, he will install a honey bee colony on the roof of an office, or in a backyard, and ensure that its bees are healthy and productive. Customers get the honey and the pleasure of doing something that benefits bees and nourishes the environment.

That, at any rate, was Mr. Trusnovec’s original sales pitch. In recent years, he and other beekeepers, as well as a broad variety of leading conservationists, have come to a very different conclusion: The craze for honey bees now presents a genuine ecological challenge. Not just in Slovenia, but around the world.

“If you overcrowd any space with honey bees, there is a competition for natural resources, and since bees have the largest numbers, they push out other pollinators, which actually harms biodiversity,” he said, (p. 4) after a recent visit to the B&B bees. “I would say that the best thing you could do for honey bees right now is not take up beekeeping.”

. . .

Honey bees, it turns out, are a commercially managed animal — essentially livestock, like cows — and large beekeeping operations are remarkably adept at replacing colonies that die. In the United States, about one million hives are trucked each year to places like California, where honey bees pollinate almonds and other crops, Mr. Black said. It’s a major industry. Revenue from beekeeping will reach $624 billion this year in the United States alone, reports IBISWorld, a market research firm.

While techniques for nurturing hives have improved, honey bees remain vulnerable animals. As of a few years ago, nearly 30 percent of commercial honey bees still did not survive the winter months, says the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s a large number and one that puts a financial strain on commercial beekeepers.

“But that’s an agriculture story, not a conservation story,” Mr. Black said. “There are now more honey bees on the planet than there have ever been in human history.”

Figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations underscore the point. The number of beehives around the world has risen by nearly 26 percent in the last decade, to 102 million from 81 million.

. . .

Recently, the Museum of Modern Art posted an image of four hives on its Instagram account, along with text that read, “We recognize the essential part bees play in our ecosystem and that’s why we are proud to provide a home to all these bees here at the Museum.” In London, the sheer quantity of hives poses a threat to other species of bees, says a report issued in 2020 by the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. The city’s financial district is now overrun with what Richard Glassborow, the chair of the London Beekeepers’ Association, calls “trophy bees.”

“We’ve had companies from outside London come with plans to put 20 hives a year on roofs,” he said, “and persuade businesses that this will tick some kind of corporate responsibility box.”

New York City has a similar problem, says Andrew Coté, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association. In February [2023], MoMA asked him to install the hives it recently showed off. He declined.

“The population is already overwhelming the finite floral resources,” he said. “We don’t need more honey bees here.”

. . .

With the number of hives rising, pressure is mounting on less charismatic insects, like moths, wasps and wild bees, which are essential to pollinating wild plants and many crops, and which academic studies have found are in decline. Apparently nobody wants 25,000 moths parked near the C-suites.

Today, hives are so ubiquitous in some places, especially urban areas, that the amount of honey each yields is dropping. Slovenia now produces less honey than it did 15 years ago, (p. 5) according to government figures, even though it has more than doubled the number of hives in the country. That’s because there is not enough nectar to go around, said Matjaz Levicar, a Slovenian beekeeping instructor, and honey bees are consuming it to survive rather than turning it into honey.

“It’s a tragedy,” he said. “In Slovenia, we need to feed honey bee colonies with sugar most of the year.”

For the full story, see:

David Segal and Ciril Jazbec. “Mind Your Own Bees, but Don’t Buy More.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, August 20, 2023): 1 & 4-5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 21, 2023, and has the title “The Beekeepers Who Don’t Want You to Buy More Bees.” The sentence about the $624 billion in U.S. revenue from beekeeping appears in the print, but not in the online, version of the article.)

Heat Wave in India Causes Rise in Mortality

(p. A11) An unusually intense heat wave has swept across northern India in the last four days, with some hospitals in the state of Uttar Pradesh recording a higher-than-usual number of deaths. Doctors there are convinced there’s a link between the punishing temperatures and the deaths of their patients, but officials are investigating what role the dangerous combination of heat and humidity played in the rise in mortality.

For the full story, see:

Alex Travelli and Hari Kumar. “Northern India Endures a Heat Wave, and a Wave of Deaths, as a Possible Link Is Pondered.” The New York Times (Monday, June 19, 2023): A11.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 18, 2023, and has the title “Northern India Endures a Heat Wave, and a Wave of Deaths.”)

Phage Therapy Renaissance-“Once Derided as an Idea for Cranks and Commies”

(p. C7) As engaging as it is expansive, “The Good Virus” describes the distinctive biology and murky history of bacteriophage (generally shortened to “phage”), a form of life that is remarkably abundant yet obscure enough to have been termed the “dark matter of biology.”

. . .

In a South London research institute in the early 1910s, the meticulous English bacteriologist Frederick Twort set out to grow the smallpox virus in petri dishes, hoping it could be “observed and studied like bacteria.” He succeeded in growing only contaminating bacteria, but within these colonies he noticed the occasional small clearing, as if something invisible was killing the bacteria. With the outbreak of World War I, Twort lost funding, closed his lab and published his results in 1915, cautiously suggesting that a virus could be the cause of the observed phenomenon. Few took notice.

Twort’s unlikely competitor would be Felix d’Herelle, a free-spirited Frenchman . . .

. . .

He found the same glassy spots that Twort had observed and (with noticeably less restraint) announced in 1917 that he had discovered a new form of life, which he called “bacteriophage.” D’Herelle went on to use phage to treat five sick boys successfully. But his “wild and abrasive style” (in Mr. Ireland’s words) antagonized his peers, who conspired to undermine him.

D’Herelle’s discoveries inspired many, including George Eliava, a microbiologist from the Soviet Union’s republic of Georgia. In 1936, he would establish the first institute (and still one of the few) devoted to bacteriophage research. Unfortunately for Eliava, he soon ran afoul of the Soviet secret police, who disappeared him in 1937. The institute continued to pursue the development of phage therapy and scored many victories—phage helped treat soldiers suffering from gangrene, for example. But there were also frustrating failures, in part because the phage weren’t adequately purified and often because they weren’t appropriately matched to the specific strain of infecting bacteria.

. . .

. . ., the “dubious and unreliable nature of commercial American phage products” in the 1930s, we learn, meant that “whether they worked for a particular patient was a complete lottery.”

During World War II, the West turned decisively to newly discovered penicillin, sharing the formula for it with the Soviets but not the methods of mass production. Thus the Soviets continued to rely on phage as the therapy of choice for bacterial infections. When a Soviet researcher tried to obtain production rights to penicillin in 1949, he was arrested by government authorities and died under interrogation, all for the crime of nizkopoklonstvo—adulation of the West.

. . .

Once “derided as an idea for cranks and commies,” Mr. Ireland writes, phage therapy seems to be enjoying a renaissance. Having been sustained for years by an idiosyncratic global community of true believers, phage-based medicines have now attracted the attention of high-powered biotechnologists and investors.

For the full review, see:

David A. Shaywitz. “The Enemy of My Enemy.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 5, 2023): C7.

(Note: ellipses added. In the original, the Russian word nizkopoklonstvo is in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date August 4, 2023, and has the title “‘The Good Virus’ Review: An Unlikely Healer.”)

The book under review is:

Ireland, Tom. The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Fish Would Remember More if Hot Water Could Be Air Conditioned

(p. A4) . . ., a new study suggests for the first time that high water temperatures can cause memory loss in reef fish, and even render them unable to learn at all.

. . .

The researchers designed a maze with a reward in one hallway. For about two weeks before maze training began, three groups of fish were gradually exposed to different temperatures: 28to 28.5 degrees Celsius for the control group, 30to 30.5 Celsius for the second, and 31.5 to32 Celsius for the third.

. . .

The researchers spent five days training the fish to navigate the maze and to associate a blue tag with their reward. Five days after training ended, they tested the fish to see which groups could remember how to find the tag, and their reward, in the maze.

The control group did well, quickly remembering how to reach the reward in the maze. But fish in even the moderately hot group didn’t fare as well. Although they learned to navigate the maze quickly during training, five days later, all evidence of their experience had vanished. In earlier experiments, Dr. Luchiari found that damselfish could remember experiences for at least 15 days, so an inability to remember the maze after only five was striking.

Fish in the hottest group failed to learn the maze at all, taking roughly the same amount of time to navigate it throughout the whole experiment.

For the full story, see:

Rebecca Dzombak. “Fish Get More Forgetful In Higher Temperatures.” The New York Times (Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023): A4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 23, 2023, and has the title “Damselfish in Distress: Warmer Seas Might Be Clouding Their Brains.”)

Caution in Interpreting Alternative Explanations of Ancient Artifacts

A few weeks ago, an article highlighted the finding of female bones in a burial along with a sword. It was interpreted that the sword belonged to a distinguished female warrior and was interpreted as evidence against patriarchal assumptions.

(p. D1) The epitaph on more than one Roman tombstone read: “A gang of doctors killed me.”

Medical remedies have improved since those times — no more smashed snails, salt-cured weasel flesh or ashes of cremated dogs’ heads — but surgical instruments have changed surprisingly little. Scalpels, needles, tweezers, probes, hooks, chisels and drills are as much part of today’s standard medical tool kit as they were during Rome’s imperial era.

Archaeologists in Hungary recently unearthed a rare and perplexing set of such appliances. The items were found in a necropolis near Jászberény, some 35 miles from Budapest, in two wooden chests and included a forceps, for pulling teeth; a curet, for mixing, measuring and applying medicaments, and three copper-alloy scalpels fitted with detachable steel blades and inlaid with silver in a Roman style. Alongside were the remains of a man presumed to have been a Roman citizen.

The site, seemingly undisturbed for 2,000 years, also yielded a pestle that, judging by the abrasion marks and drug residue, was probably used to grind medicinal herbs. Most unusual were a bone lever, for putting fractures back in place, and the handle of what appears to have been a drill, for trepanning the skull and extracting impacted weaponry from bone.

The instrumentarium, suitable for performing complex operations, provides a glimpse into the advanced medical prac-(p. D4)tices of first-century Romans and how far afield doctors may have journeyed to offer care. “In ancient times, these were comparatively sophisticated tools made of the finest materials,” said Tivadar Vida, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Eötvös Loránd University, or ELTE, in Budapest and leader of the excavation.

Two millenniums ago Jászberény and the county around it were part of the Barbaricum, a vast region that lay beyond the frontiers of the Empire and served as a buffer against possible outside threats. “How could such a well-equipped individual die so far from Rome, in the middle of the Barbaricum,” mused Leventu Samu, a research fellow at ELTE and a member of the team on the dig. “Was he there to heal a prestigious local figure, or was he perhaps accompanying a military movement of the Roman legions?”

. . .

The tool-laden grave was discovered last year at a site where relics from the Copper Age (4500 B.C. to 3500 B.C.) and the Avar period (560 to 790 A.D.) had been found on the surface. A subsequent survey with a magnetometer identified a necropolis of the Avars, a nomadic peoples who succeeded Attila’s Huns. Among the rows of tombs, the researchers uncovered the man’s grave, revealing a skull, leg bones and, at the foot of the body, the chests of metal instruments. “The fact that the deceased was buried with his equipment is perhaps a sign of respect,” Dr. Samu said.

That is not the only possibility. Dr. Baker said that she often cautioned her students about interpreting ancient artifacts, and asked them to consider alternative explanations. What if, she proposed, the medical tools were interred with the so-called physician because he was so bad at his practice that his family and friends wanted to get rid of everything associated with his poor medical skills? “This was a joke,” Dr. Baker said. “But it was intended to make students think about how we jump to quick conclusions about objects we find in burials.”

For the full story, see:

Franz Lidz. “Old Roman Medicine Wasn’t So Pleasant.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 13, 2023): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story also has the date June 13, 2023, and has the title “Scalpel, Forceps, Bone Drill: Modern Medicine in Ancient Rome.”)

To Cut Out Costs of Car Dealership Middlemen, Tesla Is Selling Direct from Indian Reservation Showrooms

(p. D6) Tesla is ramping up efforts to open showrooms on tribal lands where it can sell directly to consumers, circumventing laws in states that bar vehicle manufacturers from also being retailers in favor of the dealership model.

Mohegan Sun, a casino and entertainment complex in Connecticut owned by the federally recognized Mohegan Tribe, recently announced that the California-based electric automaker will open a showroom with a sales and delivery center this fall on its sovereign property, where the state’s law doesn’t apply.

The news comes after another new Tesla showroom was announced in June, set to open in 2025 on lands of the Oneida Indian Nation in upstate New York.

“I think it was a move that made complete sense,” said Lori Brown, executive director of the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters, which lobbied for years to change Connecticut’s law.

. . .

Brown noted that lawmakers with car dealerships that are active in their districts, no matter their political affiliation, traditionally opposed bills allowing direct-to-consumer sales.

. . .

Over the years in numerous states, Tesla sought and was denied dealership licenses, pushed for law changes and challenged decisions in courts.

. . .

Tesla opened its first store as well as a repair shop on Native American land in 2021 in New Mexico. The facility, in Nambé Pueblo, north of Santa Fe, marked the first time the company partnered with a tribe to get around state laws, though the idea had been in the works for years.

For the full story, see:

SUSAN HAIGH, Associated Press. “Tesla to Open Showrooms on Tribal Lands to Circumvent Laws.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, Aug. 13, 2023): D6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 5, 2023, and has the title “Automaker Tesla is opening more showrooms on tribal lands to avoid state laws barring direct sales.”)

Allow Us to View the “Artifacts of Human Suffering” That Enable Us to “Appreciate the Epic Achievements of Medicine”

(p. D1) The Mütter Museum, a 19th-century repository of medical oddments and arcana at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, attracts as many as 160,000 visitors a year. Among the anatomical and pathological specimens exhibited are skulls corroded by syphilis; spines twisted by rickets; skeletons deformed by corsets; microcephalic fetuses; a two-headed baby; a bound foot from China; an ovarian cyst the size of a Jack Russell terrier; Grover Cleveland’s jaw tumor; the liver that joined the original “Siamese twins,” Cheng and Eng Bunker; and the pickled corpse of the Soap Lady, whose fatty tissues decomposed into a congealed asphalt-colored substance called adipocere.

. . .

The celebrity magician Teller, a Philadelphia native, called the Mütter a place of electrifying frankness. “We are permitted to (p. D5) confront real, not simulated, artifacts of human suffering, and are, at a gut level, able to appreciate the epic achievements of medicine,” he said.

But, like museums everywhere, the Mütter is reassessing what it has and why it has it. Recently, the institution enlisted a public-relations consultant with expertise in crisis management to contain criticism from within and without.

The problems began in February [2023] when devoted fans of the Mütter’s website and YouTube channel noticed that all but 12 of the museum’s 450 or so images and videos had been removed.

. . .

Ms. Quinn had tasked 13 unnamed people — medical historians, bioethicists, disability advocates, members of the community — with providing feedback on the digital collection. “Folks from a wide background,” Ms. Quinn said in an interview.

. . .

Blowback to Ms. Quinn’s ethical review was ferocious. An online petition garnered the signatures of nearly 33,000 Mütter enthusiasts who insisted that they loved the museum and its websites as they were. The petition criticized Ms. Quinn and her boss, Dr. Mira Irons, the president and chief executive of the College of Physicians, for decisions predicated on “outright disdain of the museum.” The complaint called for the reinstatement of all web content and urged the college’s board of trustees to fire the two women immediately. (To date, about one-quarter of the videos have been reinstated.)

Moreover, in June [2023], The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece entitled “Cancel Culture Comes for Philly’s Weirdest Museum,” in which Stanley Goldfarb, a former director of the college, wrote that the museum’s new “woke leaders” appeared eager to cleanse the institution of anything uncomfortable. Robert Hicks, director of the Mütter from 2008 to 2019, voiced similar sentiments this spring when he quit as a museum consultant. His embittered resignation letter, which he released to the press, stated that Dr. Irons “has said before staff that she ‘can’t stand to walk through the museum,’” and it advised the trustees to investigate her and Ms. Quinn, both of whom Dr. Hicks believed held “elitist and exclusionary” views of the Mütter.

. . .

Dr. Hicks remains unhappy with the new perspective. “Dr. Mütter would have been confused at the dictum that the museum should be about health, not death,” he lamented in his resignation letter. “The principle emblazoned at the entrance of many anatomy theaters, ‘This is where the dead serve the living,’ is readily understood by museum visitors without special guidance by Dr. Irons.”

For the full story, see:

Franz Lidz. “Should a Hall of Human Curiosities Dial It Down?” The New York Times (Tuesday, August 15, 2023): D1 & D5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed years, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 13, 2023, and has the title “A Museum of ‘Electrifying Frankness’ Weighs Dialing It Down.”)

For more on the innovative surgeon who founded the Mütter Museum, see:

Aptowicz, Cristin O’Keefe. Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine. New York: Gotham Books, 2014.

“FDR’s Policies Laid the Foundations for Generations of Hardship” for Black Americans

(p. A13) Just past the midway point of “Black Americans, Civil Rights, and the Roosevelts”—a powerful and powerfully disturbing exhibition at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum—you can pick up a headset and listen to parts of a secretly recorded White House meeting on Sept. 27, 1940 (a transcript is also provided).

. . .

. . ., FDR nonchalantly settles into condescension and caricature. He emphasizes his appreciation of black servicemen, recalling “my colored messenger in the Navy Department”: “I gave him to Louis Howe, who was terribly fond of him.” And he promises to support opportunities for Negroes. In the Navy, he suggests, they could play in bands: “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a colored band on some of these ships, because they’re darn good at it.”

It is a shock to come upon these words. They even raise a question of just how much the administration’s sluggishness in dealing with racial issues was due to the power of Southern Democrats.

. . .

. . . the exhibition argues . . . that FDR’s policies laid the foundations for generations of hardship. The Social Security Act of 1935, for example, is criticized for not including “farm and domestic workers, who were disproportionately Black. This kept nearly two-thirds of Black workers out of the program”—in part, the text suggests, because of Southern Democrats’ racist influence. The exhibition also argues that the “redlining” of neighborhoods by Roosevelt’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which mapped out areas with the highest probability of mortgage defaults, harmed the very neighborhoods where most blacks lived, with an effect lasting generations.

Racism, of course, should not be dismissed as a factor, but these are complicated issues, and much literature challenges any sweeping assertions. Did racism play an important role in excluding farm workers and domestics from Social Security, as the exhibition ends up suggesting? A 2010 Social Security Administration paper argues otherwise, noting that 74% of all excluded workers in those categories were white. Moreover, the act also excluded the self-employed, crews of ships, and employees of nonprofit religious and educational institutions. A 1997 paper in Political Science Quarterly argued that such initial exclusions were likely due to difficulties in how taxes and payrolls were handled, adding too many challenges to the administration of a new social program. Studies of redlining have also led to questions about its racial origins and effects. Redlined areas housed large proportions of a city’s black residents, but about three-quarters of the inhabitants were white. And as a 2021 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests, the maps were reflections of economic conditions, not racial demarcations, and “had little effect” on the distribution of federal mortgage activity.

For the full exhibition review, see:

Edward Rothstein. “Black Americans and the New Deal.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the exhibition review has the date August 23, 2023, and has the title “Black Americans, Civil Rights, and the Roosevelts’ Review: A New Look at the New Deal Era.”)

The 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper mentioned above was published online in 2022 (in advance of print publication):

Fishback, Price, Jonathan Rose, Ken Snowden, and Thomas Storrs. “New Evidence on Redlining by Federal Housing Programs in the 1930s.” Journal of Urban Economics (online on May 11, 2022).

To Charge EV on Road Required Downloading an App, Which Required Non-Dodgy Cell Service

(p. B5) The adoption of electric vehicles represents the biggest shift in our energy and transportation systems in more than a century—but it’s also the biggest shift in consumer electronics since the debut of the iPhone. On both counts, progress is accelerating in the U.S. And on both counts, we are far from where we need to be.

A recent 1,000 mile road-trip in the longest-range electric vehicle you can buy brought this home for me. That journey was as worrisome as it was thrilling, and it clarified how much more needs to be done for drivers to have a consistent and satisfying experience on par with buying a gasoline vehicle.

. . .

On my trip, there was one moment in particular when the future felt like a big step backward.

It happened when I arrived at a street charging station in Montreal, and discovered that I’d have to download an app and prepay for the electricity I wanted to use. Cell service was dodgy, and I had to find a better signal to download the app. Had I been unable to find a decent signal, I would have been out of luck. (Even once I downloaded the app, the first station I connected to didn’t work—another issue that sometimes comes up at charging stations.)

Unfortunately, having to download an app is common practice for proprietary networks.

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Mims. “Why America Isn’t Ready for the EV Takeover.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 10, 2023): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 9, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)