CDC’s laboratory on sexually transmitted diseases is shut by Trump administration

 Statnews has the story:

CDC’s top laboratory on sexually transmitted diseases is shut by Trump administration
‘We are blind,’ researcher says, noting the lab is crucial to tracking drug-resistant gonorrhea and other diseases  By Helen Branswell April 5, 2025

"At a time when the world is down to a single drug that can reliably cure gonorrhea, the U.S. government has shuttered the country’s premier sexually transmitted diseases laboratory, leaving experts aghast and fearful about what lies ahead.

"The STD lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a leading player in global efforts to monitor for drug resistance in the bacteria that cause these diseases — was among the targets of major staff slashing at the CDC this past week. All 28 full-time employees of the lab were fired.

...

"A CDC white paper on antibiotic resistance released during the first Trump administration listed drug-resistant gonorrhea as one of five urgent threats facing the country. Antimicrobial resistance to that last drug that reliably works to cure gonorrhea, ceftriaxone, is rare but on the rise globally."

 

High school and higher education (30 second video)

 Someone recently sent me this old video snippet (about 30 seconds) from an interview in Stockholm in 2012.  Whenever I'm asked about my high school career I try to emphasize that I'm a big fan of education, even though I didn't finish high school.

Note to the un-Facebooked: if, like me, you don't have a facebook account, you may have to close a facebook come-on before you can see the video.

The market for rare (and signed) books

 Books inscribed by the author are stories in themselves.

Here's a story published last year in The New Yorker about the rare book market, and the art of selling.

A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending
Glenn Horowitz built a fortune selling the archives of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Alice Walker. Then a rock star pressed charges.  By Tad Friend

"Every form of collecting is an effort to stop time, but book collecting is a singularly hopeful incarnation of that wish. It is nourished by twin beliefs: first, that our most glorious ideas and fancies have been bound together in crushed morocco or polished calf—sacred repositories that must be conserved against fire and water and forgetfulness. And, second, that ownership of great literature in its most talismanic form will ennoble you. Horowitz cultivates these credos in his clients, yet his usual practice is to wrest books from the grip of one, bestow them into the hands of another, then wrest them back for a third. When I told him that Susan Cheever, the writer and the daughter of John Cheever, said that Horowitz had paid her handsomely for her father’s inscribed novels and letters “because Glenn is a gentleman, and because he wanted to help me,” he seemed offended. “I like Susan enormously,” he assured me, “but I bought from her at prices that allowed me to sell the material profitably.” 

...

" Traditional collecting aims at first editions in “pristine” or “mint” condition; the booksellers’ wry joke is “Never judge a book by its contents.”

A user's guide to Experimental Economics, by Muriel Niederle

 Here's a magisterial handbook chapter, by Muriel Niederle

Experiments: Why, How, and A Users Guide for Producers as well as Consumers  by Muriel Niederle
NBER Working Paper 33630, DOI 10.3386/w33630,  March 2025A

Abstract:"This chapter is intended as an introduction to laboratory experiments, when to use, how to evaluate them, why they matter and what are the pitfalls when designing them. I hope that users as well as consumers will find Sections that broaden their views. I start with when an economist might want to run an experiment. I then discuss basic lessons when designing experiments. I introduce a language to start a systematic description of tools we have when designing experiments to show the importance or role of a new model or force in explaining behavior. The penultimate chapter provides an advanced toolkit for running experiments. I end this chapter with my views on pre-registration, pre-analysis plans and the need for replications, robustness tests and extensions. "

...

"While I hope to convey general lessons, I will make them more accessible and understandable by providing specific examples. These will often, though not always, come from my own papers, or from economists whose work I know exceptionally well (mostly my advisors, students or coauthors). While this may seem self-serving, the main reason is that for those experiments I know– rather than have to infer– why authors made certain choices. And one aspect of experiments that will become obvious almost immediately, is that they require the researcher to make a lot of decisions. This chapter therefore is in no way a literature survey, nor really a highlight of amazing papers. It rather showcases papers whose history I am exceptionally familiar with. I will also not provide negative examples, but rather present potential pitfalls, with one exception in Section 3.1 "

The Economist as Designer: Susan Athey's AEA presidential address

 Susan Athey, throughout her career and in her presidential address to the AEA, has added to our vision of how economists can make our way in the world.

Presidential Address: The Economist as Designer in the Innovation Process for Socially Impactful Digital Products  By Susan Athey,  American Economic Review 2025, 115(4): 1059–1099, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.115.4.1059

"This paper provides an economic perspective on data-driven innovation in digital products, focusing on the role of complex experiments in measuring and improving social impact. The discussion highlights how tools and insights from economics contribute to each stage of the innovation process. Key contributions include identifying problems, developing theoretical frameworks, translating goals into measurable outcomes, analyzing historical data, and estimating counterfactual outcomes. The paper also surveys recently developed tools  designed to address challenges in designing and analyzing data from complex experiments "

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I'm fond of papers that consider "The Economist As..."  See e.g.

Monday, January 30, 2017 Economists as artisans, doctors, entrepreneurs...dentists, engineers and plumbers

and

The economist as engineer: Game theory, experimentation, and computation as tools for design economics,  AE Roth, Econometrica, 2002 

 

Headlines that could have been dated April 1

 This year there's one headline that stands out from all the others:

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.  By Jeffrey Goldberg

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Back before the  November election, the headlines that seemed most Foolish were much more cheerful

 French pole vaulter video: Anthony Ammirati dislodges bar with penis, costing him medal opportunity at 2024 Olympics

    (And here's the video)

LAPD Raids Medical Lab For (Nonexistent) Weed, Get Gun Stuck In An MRI Machine