11 Items from the week | 19 Apr 25
News from the past week, and a few other things.
👋 Hello Reader, I hope you’re doing well. Here are 11 items that stood out to me this week.
1. A New Picture of Global Migration
The human species is on the move. Last year there were more people living outside of their birth countries than at any other time in modern history, according to the United Nations. It’s a sea change that will reshape politics, economics and civil societies for generations. It’s no coincidence that 2024 was also a year of defeat for incumbent political parties, as leader after leader was voted out of power in democracies at the center of the human storm. This great global migration is a staggeringly complex phenomenon with countless causes and implications. Yet perhaps no other issue is as pressing and as little understood by the average citizen and policymaker alike. Government records differ wildly from country to country, surges in illegal immigration are often only evident in retrospect and information isn’t collected at all in some corners of the world. As is the case with so many other things, we don’t even know what we don’t know.
NOTE: Great interactive infographic on migration around the world.
2. States’ Demographically Adjusted Performance on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress
Earlier today, the federal government released the 2024 scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is the only nationally comparable measure of student achievement that is reported for every state on a regular basis, but comparing states’ NAEP scores is misleading for many purposes because states serve very different student populations. For example, more than 20 percent of children live in poverty in Alabama and Mississippi, compared with less than 10 percent in New Hampshire and Vermont. For nearly 10 years, the Urban Institute has published adjusted scores that capture how well students in each state score on the NAEP compared with demographically similar students around the country. We determine these adjustments by calculating how each individual student who takes the NAEP scores relative to students nationwide who are the same gender, age, and race or ethnicity and have the same free and reduced-price lunch receipt status, special education status, and English language learner status. We calculate adjusted scores for 2024 using our analysis of student-level data from 2022 and applying it to the unadjusted 2024 scores released earlier today. Our prior research has shown that this is a reliable way to adjust the state-level scores before student-level data are available. These adjustments have important limitations, including challenges with accurately measuring income across different states and differences across states in the implementation of programs like special education. But the adjusted scores come closer than the unadjusted scores to capturing the relative effectiveness of state policies.
NOTE: An update from my previous posts on the NAEP data (that was released in late January)—this one adjusts the data based on demographics. Below are two charts sorted by best in 8th grade math and best in 8th grade reading.
8th Grade Math - Top 10 (Demographically adjusted)
8th Grade Reading - Top 10 (Demographically adjusted)
3. U.K. Supreme Court Rules Trans Women Can’t Be Defined as Women
Britain’s top court ruled only those born female can be considered women, a landmark judgment that excludes transgender women from the legal definition and paves the way for tighter limits on female-only spaces and services. The decision Wednesday by the U.K.’s Supreme Court came after a yearslong legal fight over the definition of a woman in a 2010 equality law, and could have far-reaching implications for the protections and freedoms given to transgender women in the U.K. “The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological women and biological sex,” said the court’s deputy president, Lord Hodge.
4. Does the West Need a Religious Revival?
For the past 50 years, to be smart and sophisticated also meant being secular. The New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris—dominated intellectual circles, scoffing at faith as an outdated superstition, a social illness to be eradicated. And for a time, they seemed to be winning. In 1972, 90 percent of Americans identified as Christian. By 2022, that number had plummeted to 64 percent, while the religiously unaffiliated surged from 5 percent to 30 percent. The trend was similar across Europe. But as churches emptied, people began searching for meaning elsewhere—politics, activism, astrology, and therapy started to fill the void God once occupied. And now, after decades of decline, faith is creeping back. A new Pew study suggests Christian identification in America may be ticking upward again. And a recent piece by The Free Press’s Peter Savodnik showed that this revival is being led by many of our leading intellectuals. What’s going on? Could it be that humanity needs religion? [In late February], 1,300 people packed into the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas, for a Free Press debate on this subject.
NOTE: This video involves a number of things I love—people engaged in reasoned debate, talk about whether a society needs religion, impacts of digital devices, comedy, and more. Highly recommend watching.
And on that note:
5. Record number of adult baptisms in France shows surge among youth
France’s Catholic Church will welcome more than 10,384 adult catechumens at Easter this year, marking a 45% increase from 2024 figures, according to data released by the French Bishops’ Conference. The French report reveals the highest numbers ever recorded since the survey began over 20 years ago. Even more striking is the demographic shift — young adults now constitute the largest segment of converts. The trend mirrors similar developments seen elsewhere in Europe. The National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, recently reported unprecedented attendance at Ash Wednesday Masses across France this year, with churches experiencing standing-room-only congregations and an influx of young people.
6. Crime is down, way down [in San Francisco]
Citywide crime in San Francisco is now at its lowest point in 23 years. And in the past year, San Francisco saw one of the biggest drops in crime among major U.S. cities, including a 45% drop in property crime in the first quarter of 2025, alone. The decrease in crime began under former Mayor London Breed, and has accelerated under Mayor Lurie. In 2025, the crackdowns at the 6th Street Corridor, Jefferson Square Park, and Market and Van Ness cleared out drug dealers and stolen goods markets. Even with the positive momentum, crime is still present. Dispatch calls to 16th and Mission streets have spiked to their highest level in a decade. But more dispatch calls also means more crime is being fought, rather than ignored.
7. Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams says company targeted ads at teens based on their ‘emotional state’
Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former director of Global Public Policy for Facebook and author of the recently released tell-all book “Careless People,” told U.S. senators during her testimony on Wednesday that Meta actively targeted teens with advertisements based on their emotional state. This claim was first documented by Wynn-Williams in her book, which documents her time at Facebook and the “careless” disregard from its top execs, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, about the power the tech company wields in the world and its capability to do harm. Though the focus of Wednesday’s hearing was largely on Meta’s dealings with China and how it may have misrepresented its plans in prior congressional hearings, the senators were also keen to ask about Instagram, given that the social app had been the subject of earlier congressional investigations into Meta’s harms to children back in 2021. She said the company was letting advertisers know when the teens were depressed so they could be served an ad at the best time. As an example, she suggested that if a teen girl deleted a selfie, advertisers might see that as a good time to sell her a beauty product as she may not be feeling great about her appearance. They also targeted teens with ads for weight loss when young girls had concerns around body confidence, Wynn-Williams said. In a company statement, Meta denied the allegations in Wynn-Williams’ testimony, calling them “divorced from reality and riddled with false claims.”
NOTE: And relatedly:
8. The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem
When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead? Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI. Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set. Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen raises another issue. Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. (Meta has claimed that it “took precautions not to ‘seed’ any downloaded files” and that there are “no facts to show” that it distributed the books to others.) OpenAI’s download method is not yet known.
9. Nuclear Energy Support Near Record High in U.S.
Americans’ support for the use of nuclear energy as an electricity source in the U.S. has risen six percentage points, to 61%, since Gallup’s last measurement, in 2023. This is just one point shy of the 2010 record high for this question that has been tracked since 1994; it includes 29% of U.S. adults who say they “strongly” and 32% who “somewhat” favor nuclear energy. At the same time, 20% of Americans “somewhat” and 15% “strongly” oppose using nuclear energy.
10. Why Songs Seem Shorter—And Why It’s More Complicated Than You Think
From viral TikTok tracks to bite-sized Grammy-winning singles, it appears that popular music is getting shorter than ever. As drawn from Chartmetric’s own 2024 Year in Music Report, the average Spotify charting song was around 3 minutes long—nearly 15 seconds shorter than in 2023 and 30 seconds shorter than in 2019. It may be tempting to blame shrinking song lengths on the short attention spans of listeners in the streaming age. But music journalist, songwriter, and co-host of the podcast Switched on Pop, Charlie Harding, believes there are more factors at play than one might expect. “This trend is multi-variant, with lots of influences,” he told Chartmetric. “It’s not just technology, it’s not just culture.” Differences in song length can also be largely attributed to differences in song structure based on genre. Ambient tracks and ballads, for example, lend themselves to longer forms, whereas hip-hop and pop songs are shorter in nature. When it comes to popular genres in recent years, however, it appears that the five top genres of pop, hip-hop, alternative, dance, and Latin music all are getting progressively shorter on average.
NOTE: And on that note (pun intended), below is what I listened to while compiling this newsletter: Phish, who are known for their long songs. Highly recommend for background music while you’re working.
11. Phish – You Enjoy Myself —> Wave of Hope
Have a great Easter!
The Curator
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