AJSperbs

Living in interesting times. Everything old is new again.

[yael🦕 @birdhonks]

Some of the first slaves of the Transatlantic slave trade were Sephardic Jews

[Hamavin Yavin @hamavinyavin]

RABBI: Kollel is based on the Yisochor-Zevulun relationship.

ME: So Yisochor just studied Torah for centuries?

RABBI: Yes.

ME: But had no prophets, 1 obscure judge, and 2 kings so evil God cursed them eternally?

RABBI: This why we don’t learn tanach in kollel.

[N Havs @NhavsMaimonides]

The Ibn Ezra wrote that most people die without souls.

Man does not “have” a soul as if it were a separate piece of equipment.
“Soul” is the name we give to the human capacity to make choices that are not dictated by biological necessity. If a person only follows his instincts, he is a sophisticated animal.
He only becomes “human” at the moment he chooses to act against his nature for the sake of a value that is not grounded in that nature, and if that moment never comes, he is soulless.

[Josh Barro @jbarro]

Like half of studies are "one manifestation of conscientiousness is correlated with another manifestation of conscientiousness" https://t.co/sHpfMFVyYP

[Ryan James Girdusky @RyanGirdusky]

1/20 births in the entire state of NJ comes from the Ultra Orthodox Jewish community in Ocean County.

That is wild.

[New York Magazine @NYMag]

Pattern baldness affects roughly 80 percent of men and nearly half of women over the course of their lives. After decades of snake oil and broken promises, we may be approaching a real inflection point — not just in the science of hair loss but in how the world thinks about baldness itself. For centuries, losing your hair was considered one of life’s cruelest fates, and the only dignified thing to do about it was often nothing at all, since the available fixes — wigs, plugs, spray-on dyes — were somehow even more humiliating. That logic is shifting. Imperfect though many of them still are, treatments are losing their stigma. Into this cultural moment comes a new drug called PP405. Unlike Minoxidil or Finasteride, which can help preserve the hair you have, PP405 is more ambitious, aiming to revive follicles that have already shut down by reprogramming the metabolism of their stem cells. In theory, it doesn’t just slow hair loss; it reactivates the parts of the scalp that have already surrendered — and seemingly without side effects. We may not be at the end of baldness, exactly, but for the first time it feels within sight — the faint stubble of hope.

Revisit Lane Brown’s report on the promise of PP405 and the potential coming of the great unbalding — and see how celebrity stylist Chris McMillan imagines what some of the world’s most famous balds might look like with if their hair grew back: https://t.co/emDtMO0RiO

[Rafi DeMogge רפי דמוג @HeTows]

By conservative estimates, 30-40% of Jewish babies in the US are born to Orthodox mothers.

The future of American Jewry is increasingly Orthodox and right-wing, and due to very low fertility and high levels of intermarriage among the non-Orthodox, the pace of change is much faster than in Israel.

[Lakshya Jain @lxeagle17]

Some actual hard data on this: there is a really sharp gradient on antisemitism by both race (nonwhite Americans) and age (younger Americans).

https://t.co/B4Q7juvDzN

[Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTeslo]

It's a myth that egg freezing doesn't work. It works extremely well for women who freeze young. It has low success rates for women in their 40s and late 30s, when fertility has already declined significantly.

- Women who freeze enough of their eggs in their twenties have the same success rate using those eggs later as they would have had using them fresh in their twenties: 85-90%.
-Women generally freeze too few eggs and too late (median age: 37). This is why overall success rates reported in papers are low.
- Women's fertility does not drop off rapidly after age 35. That's a myth caused by faulty data. The decline is earlier and more linear.
- Clinics in Spain are significantly cheaper but just as good or better than British or American ones in success rates. I got my eggs frozen in Valencia last week.
- Clinic choice matters a lot. Average success rates can vary between 25% to more than 60% probability of live birth per embryo transfer for the worst and best clinics, respectively.

https://t.co/qViONGyBK6

@_revoluzia_ and I are both in our late 20s, and both decided to get our eggs frozen, so that we could definitely have the number of children we wanted, regardless of where life takes us. Recent technological improvements make egg and embryo freezing an effective 'fertility insurance'.

We share our lessons from the process in a new article for Works in Progress.

[AJSperbs @AJSperbs]

@JacobAShell NYC is building one off the UES. The first segment opened last year.

[Steve McGuire @sfmcguire79]

Harvard used to have a cap on Jews. It appears the university has fewer Jewish students now than it did then.

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

The culture shift is real, this Disney cruise ship ad aimed at dads is fantastic:

[Marc Goldwein @MarcGoldwein]

𖦹🚨Debt Spiral Alert 🚨꩜

CBO thinks R>G by 2031 -- meaning interest rates will exceed the growth rate. At that point, debt can spin out of control!

A short 🧵

[Christopher Landau @DeputySecState]

This is one of my favorite anecdotes from this job. 36 years ago, President George HW Bush received the President of Bolivia, Jaime Paz (accompanied by his young sons) at the White House, and Paz gave Bush a golden family cross. Bush wrote Paz a characteristically gracious thank-you note and said that he would give instructions to return the family heirloom when one of the Paz boys became President. As fate would have it, one of them, Rodrigo Paz, was elected President of Bolivia last year. The Bush Library promptly contacted us, and yesterday in Doral @SecRubio returned the cross to the new President Paz with a copy of the note. And the best part? President Rodrigo Paz was able to share this story with his now 86-year-old father. Kudos to all, especially the @Bush41Library. Promises made, promises kept! 🇺🇸🤝🇧🇴

[נדב איל Nadav Eyal @Nadav_Eyal]

President Trump’s response when asked whether Israel had forced his hand to attack Iran.

[Modern 🇮🇱 Talmud @ModernTalmud]

Babe wake up, I made Khamentashen

[Jacob Ben-David Linker 🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸✡️🇺🇸🕎🇺🇸 @JacobALinker]

You can debate the merits of how Israel fought the war, but the amount of humanitarian activity the Israelis facilitated and the various actions the Israelis took to move people out of combat zones belies the idea that the Israelis had any sort of specific intent to destroy a substantial part of the Palestinian population of Gaza for the purpose of extinguishing them as a national category. And that intent aspect is THE central part of what makes genocide genocide.

[1] Israel paused fighting in 2024 order to vaccinate upwards of 600,000 Palestinian kids below the age of 10 against Polio; and 1.1 million vaccines total.
[2] 90,000 aid trucks went to Gaza by June 2025, totaling 1.8 million tons. 1.3 million of that was food.
[3] 79,000 trucks of food specifically went in by July 2025, carrying 1.7 million tons of food.
[4] 100,000 large trucks (not all trucks) reached Gaza by mid-August 2025, totaling 1.9 million tons of aid. This apparently included 4,000 tons of baby formula.
[4] 112,000 trucks carrying 1.8-1.9 million tons of aid went to Gaza by early 2026
[5] The IDF and Israeli Electric Corporation restored a power line (which Hamas broke) to supply energy to a desalination plant serving 900,000 Gazans. It also cooperated with the Egyptians and Emiratis to link the Mawasi enclave (relative safe zone) to a desalination plant in Sinai.
[6] As of October 29, 2023, Israel had two pipelines going into Gaza providing 28.5 million liters of water. This was compared to 49 million liters before the war, which relied on three pipelines. The third pipeline was knocked out of operation by Hamas's October 7th attack, so the amount of water Israel was providing was the maximum it was able to provide. At that point 2 of Gaza's 3 desalination plants were operating too.
[7] Israel continued to provide electricity to the Gaza Strip until March 2025, when Hamas rejected extension of the ceasefire. Electricity was restored in July 2025 in response to worsening humanitarian conditions.
[8] In response to worsening humanitarian conditions which were approaching famine by July 2025, the Israelis unilaterally paused fighting
[9] As of late 2023, the Israeli military reported having sent approximately 15 million text messages, 12 million recorded phone calls, and made more than 40,000 personal phone calls to Gazans, alongside dropping hundreds of thousands of warning leaflets, in order to get them to evacuate areas of military operation.
[10] By December 2023 they published an interactive, block-numbered map of the Gaza Strip on December 1, 2023, designed to identify specific areas for military operations and guide civilian evacuations. The map divides the enclave into hundreds of small zones, with instructions for residents to evacuate to designated safe areas, such as Rafah, via social media and QR-coded leaflets.
[11] The Israelis cooperated with the 2024 Gaza floating pier project, intended to provide a new outlet for aid going in to Gaza
[12] The Israelis coordinated with outside countries on air drops
[13] The Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said it distributed 187 million meals by November 2025.

The main counter example somebody is going to bring up in response to the above is going to be how from March 2025 to July 2025 the Israelis stopped supplying electricity and how the Israelis put in an 11-week blockade from March to May 2025, and continued to regulate aid tightly until July 2025.

But in the December 2024 to March 2025 truce period enough aid went in that should have lasted for another six months. The Israeli government's assumption was that people in Gaza had adequately stockpiled aid to last a pause until new mechanism of aid provision [Gaza Humanitarian Foundation [GHF]] which Hamas and others hopefully couldn't steal from or divert came into effect. This proved to be a stupid and reckless assumption because people didn't stockpile aid equitably during the truce period and the GHF's distribution very effective at distributing aid widely across geography due to a variety of reasons. But being stubborn and obstinate isn't the same as having the specific intent of trying to make people go hungry.

And when the situation got really bad, the Israelis paused fighting to resolve the humanitarian crisis in July 2025. There was international pressure, yeah, but they still participated.

Meanwhile Egypt closed the Rafah Crossing in 2024 and it remained closed throughout the war. And the UN and other NGOs were highly resistant to actively cooperating with the Israelis in aid provision matters, including protection for their distribution (they even said they preferred "Gaza Police" - meaning Hamas - protection). And Hamas and other criminals were diverting and hoarding aid. A bunch of the reasons for there being aid issues were from actors other than Israel.

The Israeli response to a bunch of this was "well if it's not our fault it's not our responsibility to deal with it", which annoyed a lot of people (and I think indicates a shocking degree of inability to recognize that even if not the Israelis' fault its still the Israelis' problem). But the point remains that the source of much of the humanitarian issue was the UN, NGOs, Egypt, Hamas, and Palestinian criminal gangs.

[Sickos Committee @SickosCommittee]

Here's your yearly reminder that an alligator is a reptile, except during Lent when it's a fish.

[Under Secretary of State Jacob S. Helberg @UnderSecE]

WE IN AMERICA HAVE NO INTEREST IN BEING POLITE AND ORDERLY CARETAKERS OF THE WEST’S MANAGED DECLINE!

[Seascape Nature @SeascapeNature]

Central Park, New York