Back again after another big week in the world. I don't have much preamble this week.

I do have a lot to say, since I haven't had much time to write non-5-things posts in a few weeks, but I don't want to bury it all in here so instead I'll just leave it off.

Oh, also. I learned this week while scrolling through Max that "5 Things" is apparently a CNN thing. Oops. So I'll be mulling a rename to this, I guess.

1. 5 Takeaways From New Research About A.D.H.D.

My wife was diagnosed with ADHD at, uh, 35, I think? She's out of town this weekend, but she'll correct me if I'm wrong. I understand this to be a common activity for neurodivergent women - spending half a life beating yourself up for being lazy, stupid, awkward, or whatever else then suddenly getting that ADHD and/or Autism diagnosis that can re-frame your entire life up to that point.

This article is...well, let's back up. I understand how science works. I understand that scientists must develop hypotheses, design rigorous experiments to test and measure those hypotheses, and carry out those experiments. And that, especially when it comes to human-scale experiments, they often must run for years. And that as such, "established science" may often slightly trail a layperson's understandings of things.

Even so, it's jarring to read this article and see things like "[researchers]...have found that drugs like Ritalin and Adderall...don’t make you smarter" and that researchers are developing "a new model that considers A.D.H.D. primarily as a mismatch between a child’s unique brain and his environment." These things, I think, are common knowledge to people who have lived with ADHD but it's still important to use the scientific method to measure and confirm these observations and understandings.

Anyway, this is worth a read, even if it does feel at times like it has the typical NYT disconnection from reality. The longer article it is distilled from is a better read and feels a little bit less like it's treating people with ADHD as space aliens, but it's Real Long so I wanted to first link the short one then you can decide if you want the longer source.

2. A Newsletter Writer Reflects On Leaving Substack

I was not familiar with the referenced newsletter before reading this. And to be honest I'm still not. I've added it to my RSS reader, but haven't actually read anything from it yet.

I moved my other blog from Substack to managed Ghost a few months ago, with like 3 posts, 2 subscribers, and 0 monetization. It always feels a little disingenuous for me to suggest the same move for people with like actual followers and income because that's not something I have ever once in my life had to be concerned with. So it's interesting to read from folks who do have Actual Things to migrate. Typically, I have seen success stories, though I suppose I'm less likely to hear other stories because people would not be around to tell it.

Anyway, one part of this post really stood out to me: "I would encourage you to keep encouraging people to leave Substack, for very good reasons. But I’d also encourage applying a level of clarity to the effort. The Nazi bar metaphor is a useful one, but it’s time to recognize that if you’re in the U.S., the lesson of the story was ignored, and now the country has become a Nazi bar."

I think this is, sadly, completely true. There's an interesting calculus to be done between not patronizing nazi bars and willingly ceding every area of public life and public discussion to nazis. I don't have the right answer to this, and I don't think there is a single right answer. As someone who has never once meaningfully participated in public discourse, abandoning these platforms between 2017 and 2020 was very easy. But I know it's not the same for everyone.

I'll always encourage people to leave Substack or to leave corporate social media or to degoogle etc etc etc. I've been doing that for many years now, even if my reasons for doing so have slightly shifted. I think the only way to shift public discourse off of X is to shift people participating in public discourse off of X, but I can't tell people to sacrifice their own voice or their own sources of income in the meantime to do so.

Anyway, Ghost is great - both for self-hosted and managed hosting.

3. Director of ICE Says Deportations Should Operate More Like Amazon Prime

I'm not going to spend a bunch of words on this because (1) I did that last week and (2) the words and the actions of these evil assholes from ICE speak for themselves.

I like to think that people still just don't actually know what's happening here. They don't realize that ICE are rounding people up and shipping them off without their due process of judicial review. They don't realize that ICE aren't just sending them back to their home countries but are sending them to one of the most notorious prisons in the world. They don't realize that the federal government is silently revoking visas and legal protections as pretense. They don't realize they are invalidating legally-issued social security numbers. They don't realize that the government has admitted to mistakenly shipping people off and claiming they have no method or responsibility for retrieving them.

Ultimately, I like to think that the average American is uninformed rather than being so full of hate and devoid of empathy as not to care about any of this or indeed to actively celebrate it. But then I see articles like this and how open they're being about all of this. And...well it's always a safe bet that Americans are uninformed, but... I'll just leave it there.

4. How a $2,000 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured

Well I couldn't leave tariff-related articles entirely off the list, could I?

Lots of people have lots of opinions about the reality of manufacturing consumer electrics in the US at-scale. But hearing about some of the realities of it from a company that kinda-sorta is already doing it is very informative.

I don't have much more to say about this than what is in the contents of the interview, just it's good to see some actual informed and substantiated information on this topic rather than guesses from uninformed people or people who are being purposely misleading.

5. Starship Alexandria: A podcast about sci-fi and fantasy books

I'm going to yet again bend the rules here a bit and recommend something that isn't written. Well the immediate link is written, but it describes audio content.

This here is a new podcast from SFF authors Adrian Tchaikovsky and Emma Newman where they talk about a piece of media that one of them has recommended to the other. There is something very joyful about listening to 2 nerds geek out about something that they love, and all the better when those 2 nerds are authors who have each written books that I myself tend to geek out about (have you read Planetfall? or Service Model?).

If you're looking to add a bit of positivity to your day, give the first episode a listen.