HMM: Prosecutors Have Pulled Data From More Than 100 Phones Seized From Inauguration Day Protesters.

HMM: Treatment with a simple chemical restores DNA repair to aging mice.

A recent paper published in Science shows that a chemical used in the DNA repair process, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), has a concentration that declines with age. This decline may drive the age-associated accumulation of DNA damage—a finding that suggests supplementing NAD+ might offset some of the effects of aging.

The team behind the paper used human embryonic kidney cells (which grow well in the lab) to look at the role of this chemical. The authors found that NAD+ binds to the protein “deleted in breast cancer 1” (DBC1), which—as its name implies—was previously implicated in cancer. DBC1 normally binds to and inhibits another protein that performs DNA repair. But NAD+ blocks this interaction, releasing the inhibition on DNA repair.

Therefore, as NAD+ concentrations decline with age, it’s possible there is insufficient NAD+ to bind to the DBC1 protein, leaving it free to block DNA repair.

To test this proposed mechanism in a living organism, the authors used aging mice. As expected, NAD+ concentrations declined as the mice aged. With its decline, DBC1 was increasingly binding to and shutting down the DNA repair enzyme. The authors then gave the mice the chemical precursor to NAD+, which should restore their NAD+ concentrations. Once the mice were given this treatment, their DNA repair activity increased, and the levels of DNA damage were reduced.

I take Niagen, which contains nicotinamide riboside, a precursor to NAD+. Does it help? Ask me in 20 years.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Why, yes I can, considering TNR’s response to the Obama-approved government “slimdown” in 2013:

As Jim Geraghty tweeted in 2013, “The New Republic: Your first choice for violent, authoritarian, eliminationist rhetoric!”; little has changed since Marty Peretz left the building, apparently.

GET ‘EM WHILE THEY’RE YOUNG: Teen Vogue Writer Tweets ‘All White People Are Evil’

MIKE ALLEN: Inside the Trumpcare meltdown.

When the balky hardliners of the House Freedom Caucus visited the White House earlier this week, this was Steve Bannon’s opening line, according to people in the conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building:

Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill.

Bannon’s point was: This is the Republican platform. You’re the conservative wing of the Republican Party. But people in the room were put off by the dictatorial mindset.

One of the members replied: “You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn’t listen to him, either.”

Started on the wrong foot: Repeal-and-replace was always snakebit. Ryan had begun the process before Trump’s inauguration. “He boxed us in,” said one person close to the fight. “We didn’t have any choice.”

Was always wobbly: Trump relied too long on assurances from Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and HHS Secretary Tom Price that they had the process in hand. And “Ryan was telling him it was fine, and they’d bring it together at the end.” Instead, the bottom fell out.

What a mess.

WELL, THEN MAYBE THE CDC SHOULD SPEND MORE TIME ON THIS SUBJECT, AND LESS TIME ON SALT SHAKERS AND SATURATED FAT: The Real Threat To National Security: Deadly Disease. Especially since they were wrong about the saturated fat. And the salt. . . .

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1417.

AL HUNT: Democrats Have a Gorsuch Problem.

SCIENCE! Student Discovers Previously Unknown Form of Oppression.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Foreign Students Say U.S. High School Classes Are Absurdly Easy.

When the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy surveyed foreign exchange students studying in the U.S. in 2001, it found that they thought that American education was a cake walk compared to secondary education in their home countries. And when it conducted the survey again in 2016, it found that exchange students thought that U.S. education was even less challenging than before. . . .

Foreign exchange students’ perceptions of U.S. education clearly depends on their own educational background and their school placement. Students placed in underperforming Chicago schools, for example, are more likely to say that U.S. education is easier compared with foreign students placed at top-tier high schools in upper-middle class university towns.

The study doesn’t offer details about these alternative variables that might offer a more granular account of where U.S. schools are succeeding and failing; nonetheless, the overall picture—that teenagers from abroad overwhelmingly think that American schools demand less of them than schools in their home countries—is not exactly a ringing endorsement of this country’s educational establishment.

Well, our educational establishment — like most of our establishments these days, really — sucks.

GOOD: NRA Will Target Democrats Who Vote Against Gorsuch.

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OUT: TRUMP’S AN ANTI-SEMITIC REINCARNATION OF HITLER.

In: Trump son-in-law’s ties to Israel raise questions of bias.

MY LATEST NEW YORK OBSERVER COLUMN: Art of War meets art of the deal. Tillerson pulls a Trump card on North Korea.

THE NATURAL ENDPOINT OF SOCIALISM: Venezuela is out of food, out of medicine, and running out of gas. That’s right: “The country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world is now running out of gasoline.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: “Constitutional Carry” Passes in North Dakota.

MEGAN MCARDLE: If it’s easy to reach lawmakers, they’ll ignore you.

The problem with political action is that it’s hard. You have to get up early, go to meetings, write your representative, find a stamp for the envelope you don’t have for the letter you want to write your representative.… Shouldn’t technology solve this problem, and make it easier to get the political results we want?

Apparently, someone’s been asking that question. My social media feed has supplied me with word of a new application that aims to make political action as easy as sending a text.

The idea is that you text the word “resist” to a number, and after getting a small amount of information (your name, your ZIP code) it will let you set up a letter to fax to your senator. It’s the sort of thing you can do with any spare moment.

It’s a great idea — at first. It’s so great that I suspect it will soon devalue the fax as political currency.

Allow me to explain. There’s a hierarchy of political actions that you can take to impress your legislators with your commitment to an issue. Sending a letter or calling is high on that hierarchy; social media, email and signing Change.org petitions ranks much lower. The new service effectively acts as a political currency converter, allowing individuals to do something easy (text) while appearing to have done something less easy (fax).

There is a reason that more primitive means of communicating with your legislator tend to make them more interested in what you have to say: Those forms of communication cost more of your time, and therefore indicate a level of commitment that might reflect your intentions to donate and vote (for or against the lawmaker in question).

Showing up in person, of course, shows still more commitment.

AT AMAZON, New DASH Buttons galore.

SADLY, THIS IS PROBABLY THE SORT OF THING IT WILL TAKE TO BRING BACK CIVILITY AS A GENERAL NORM: Trump Supporters Disrupt California Attorney General Town Hall.

Supporters of President Donald Trump disrupted a town hall held by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra in the Inland Empire town of Ontario on Thursday evening, the San Bernardino Sun reports.

Becerra has led California’s charge against many of President Trump’s policies. Earlier this week, for example, he filed a brief supporting a lawsuit by Santa Clara County challenging the president’s executive order that threatens sanctuary cities with the loss of federal funding.

An earlier town hall at the San Bernardino Valley College had proceeded without incident, the Sun reports. However, in Ontario, Becerra faced a hostile audience.

The hair-pulling stuff goes both ways. And it appears that Trump supporters are willing to pull some hair.

STEWART BAKER: Surveillance Sauce For The Goose. Imagine it’s 2020 and Trump is spying on Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.

Faced with that scenario, who thinks the press would be mocking Harris’s claim that her campaign was wiretapped by its enemies? So why are reporters mocking Trump’s?

Fact is, there’s a very real problem at the bottom of President Trump’s complaints. The Obama administration decided to conduct what was bound to be one-sided surveillance. Any evidence the investigators turned up would hurt the President’s adversary, not his side. The same would be true of any leaks. And widespread distribution of intelligence from the investigation would dramatically increase the risk that his adversary will be hurt by leaks. If you’re the President, or anyone in his administration, what’s not to like?

Who made the decision to expose the Trump campaign to this scrutiny and the risks that came with it? Thanks to FISA, national security surveillance decisions must be made mainly by political appointees. This is meant to be a protection for civil liberties but it’s the reverse in a partisan context.

Indeed.

DEMOCRATS: Kamala Harris Won’t Vote For Gorsuch Because He Rules With The Law Not Feelings.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why College Graduates Still Can’t Think.

Traditionally, the “critical” part of the term “critical thinking” has referred not to the act of criticizing, or finding fault, but rather to the ability to be objective. “Critical,” in this context, means “open-minded,” seeking out, evaluating and weighing all the available evidence. It means being “analytical,” breaking an issue down into its component parts and examining each in relation to the whole.

Above all, it means “dispassionate,” recognizing when and how emotions influence judgment and having the mental discipline to distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reason—then prioritizing the latter over the former.

I wrote about all this in a recent post on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae website, mostly as background for a larger point I was trying to make. I assumed that virtually all the readers would agree with this definition of critical thinking—the definition I was taught as a student in the 1980s and which I continue to use with my own students.

To my surprise, that turned out not to be the case. Several readers took me to task for being “cold” and “emotionless,” suggesting that my understanding of critical thinking, which I had always taken to be almost universal, was mistaken.

I found that puzzling, until one helpful reader clued me in: “I share your view of what critical thinking should mean,” he wrote. “But a quite different operative definition has a strong hold in academia. In this view, the key characteristic of critical thinking is opposition to the existing ‘system,’ encompassing political, economic, and social orders, deemed to privilege some and penalize others. In essence, critical thinking is equated with political, economic, and social critique.”

Suddenly, it occurred to me that the disconnect between the way most people (including employers) define critical thinking and the way many of today’s academics define it can be traced back to the post-structuralist critical theories that invaded our English departments about the time I was leaving grad school, in the late 1980s. I’m referring to deconstruction and its poorer cousin, reader response criticism.

Just more Gramscian Damage.

POOR RICH PEOPLE: Financial Stupidity.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED, COVERING YOUR BOOBS IS MICROAGGRESSION: Staring at boobs may give a boost to male lifespans.