Biden’s Cognitive State: Stable

I decided I should run numbers for Biden, as I did yesterday for Trump. As in analyzing Trump’s language, I used a speech from the 1980s as a baseline before looking at more recent speeches.

In the absence of complete medical reports, the quality of their speech provides perhaps the best proxy for evaluating both men’s cognitive state. In transcripts of their speeches, sentence complexity drops with age for both. Trump averaged 20 words per sentence in a 1980 interview; Biden averaged 18.7 words per sentence in a presidental campaign speech in 1987. Biden’s baseline grade level is 12.9, Trump’s 10.5.

Jumping ahead several decades, both men’s speeech demonstrates decreased complexity, as measured by sentence length, vocabulary, and other metrics.

But unlike Trump’s, Biden’s speech patterns have remained stable in recent years.

In three randomly chosen speeches from the past five years, Biden’s data are comparable. Average sentence lengths of speeches from 2019, 2021, and 2024 are 13, 16.6, and 14.2, while grade-level calculations come in at 9.5, 9.2, and 9.6.

Right-wing Republicans have asserted since before his presidency that Biden is mentally unfit for the office. In 2021, Lauren Bobert tweeted that cognitive decline made him a security risk. Moderate Republicans, however, found him sharp, well prepared, and cogent in discussions of policy and legislation.

The contrast is clear: unlike Biden’s, the complexity of Trump’s speech continues to drop.

Trump’s confident pugnacity has not changed.

But his speeches, and the thought processes they reveal, indicate that he is increasingly unable to grapple with complicated ideas and delicate negotiations. Even in comparison to 2017, the idea of Trump representing the United States in interactions with global heads of state is … unsettling.

Democrats have focused, appropriately, on Trump’s policy proposals and his extremist rhetoric, rather than descending to personal attacks. 

But the evidence of dwindling cognitive capacity and agility afforded by Trump’s speeches is hard to ignore. Americans across the political spectrum should worry, a lot, about his ability to govern.

Trump’s Cognitive Decline is Obvious

Words. Words are what I know how to do things with. So I decided to do some things with words. And I have to tell you, I was really surprised and dismayed by what I learned.

Claims are flying that Presiden Biden is incompetent, not fit to finish his term, much less serve for another four years. But what of former president Trump? He’s been called a danger to democracy, unfit to rule — but on account of his character, but not his cognitive state.

I got curious. I pulled an interview Trump gave in 1980 as a baseline, and I compared that with two speeches and an interview from the past decade: 

• October, 1980, interview with Rona Barrett
• October, 2017, speech at the Heritage Foundation
• April, 2023 interview with Time Magazine
• July, 2024 speech at the Republican National Convention

Speech analysis provides a good window into cognition. More sophisticated speakers use a wide vocabulary and complex sentence structures that reflect depth, breadth, and subtlety in thought. Cognitive decline is accompanied by a decrease in these metrics, pointing to shrinking capacity for attention to complicated issues. Like, for example, international politics.

For the purpose of this analysis, I used online text analysis tools that count the number of words in each sentence, as well as the number of unique words in each passage. As a proxy for word complexity, they calculate the average number letters and syllables per word, and compare words used against a list known to most fourth graders in a study done in 1984.

They crunch the numbers using several different formulas, whose results are usually expressed as a number corresponding to a grade level. If the text is assigned a 10, it means the average tenth grader will understand it easily.

I pasted excerpts from each of Trump’s speeches and interviews into two different online text analysis tools (in case programming details produced different results; they didn’t), and I averaged the results produced by four formulas.

In the 1980 interview, Trump spoke at a grade level of 10.5, averaging 20 words per sentence. In the 2017 speech, this went down to grade 9, and 12.5 words per sentence. Sentence length in the 2023 interview was comparable at 12.9, but the grade level slipped again, to 7.4.

In his convention speech this month, Trump averaged 9.4 words per sentence at a grade level of 5.9.

For context and comparison, in a 2023 speech at Fisk University, Vice President Harris averaged 23.5 words per sentence and spoke at a grade level of 11.3. In his comments on the RNC shooting, President Biden used 14 words per sentence on average, at a grade level of 10.8.

Given the evidence of Trump’s speech over the years, he is clearly unfit to serve another term as president, not only on grounds of the threat he and his associates pose to democracy, but also because of the decline in his cognitive abilities.

Carbon Dioxide: Too Many New Records

We humans are pushing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere five times faster than we were in the 1960s. We’ve reached not only a new record of 427 parts per million but also a new record in the amount of increase in one year.

Scripps Institute of Oceanography

The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is twice what it was prior to industrialization in the 19th century, and higher than it’s been in several million years — when sea levels were 78 feet higher than today. 

Also: a quarter of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted in the past 175 years has been absorbed by the oceans, which are becoming more and more acidic as a result. Bye-bye, coral reefs. 

The amount of CO2 the oceans can absorb has slowed since the start of industrialization — so more of our excess CO2 is going into the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, we’ve pushed atmospheric methane to a level approaching three times what it was before the Industrial Revolution, mostly because the amount of livestock we’re farming. Rice paddies, landfills, and fossil fuel extraction also contribute.

Methane heats the air a lot faster than carbon dioxide does. It degrades in about a decade into water and — yikes! carbon dioxide. 

CO2, unfortunately, is niiiiice and stable. It hangs around for hundreds of years. If we could somehow end all emissions by 2100, it would take thousands of years for CO2 to drop to its pre-industrial level.

Y’all, I’m nervous. Every day, I choose hope that we can manage as a human family to reduce consumption, transition to renewable fuels, and make peace. But despair over the world we are leaving the coming generations is never far from my mind. 

What if NJ Transit Actually Served New Jersey?

New Jersey Transit mostly exists to get people from the hinterlands to and from Newark and New York; you can also go to Trenton, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City.

The European Union, population density 109 per km2, supports a rail network that goes even to the tiniest towns, via high-speed rail and a gazillion local lines.

New Jersey, with 488 people per km2,  has more than four times the population density of Europe, but only the tiniest fraction of the rail network. It turns out I’m not the only person who imagines a more robust rail system.

Reddit: creolefish

Here’s the thing, though: this is still a commuter system with NYC/Newark and Philadelphia as the hubs. 

New Jersey is already among the states with the lowest number of cars per capita, at 674 cars per thousand residents. The European Union, despite all those trains, averages 567 cars per person — not so different from New Jersey. But we drive almost twice as far every year than they do — 14,263 miles per year, on average, compared to Europeans’ 12,000 km, or 7440 miles, per year.

(Montana, on the other hand, has almost two cars for every person in the state. Including children. How do they find the time to drive them all?) 

Connecting all of New Jersey without having to transfer in Newark or Secaucus would take only two more rail lines, each starting at the Hudson River in the north, and running west, south, and finally east to the Atlantic Ocean.

The inner ring would go from Stevens to Stockton, with stops at Montclair State, Seton Hall, Monmouth, Georgian Court, and the community colleges in Essex, Union, Middlesex, Monmouth, and Ocean counties. 

The outer ring would run from Fairleigh Dickinson to Atlantic City, by way of the community colleges in the north, east, and south of the state, with a stop at Cape May.

It would transform the state.

• The availability of public transit would increase access to college. Low-income students can study at community colleges around the state for free, but the effective tax is that they need cars to get to class. Driving cheaper, older cars means less reliable transport on top of more repair bills, plus car insurance and gas.
• Reducing by even a quarter the average amount New Jersey residents drive every year would cut tailpipe emissions by more than 3 million metric tons: New Jersey has 2.5 million cars whose owners drive them, on average, 12,263 miles every year, emitting, on average 5 metric tons of carbon dioxide each, or collectively 12.5 million metric tons of CO2.
• Lower-income residents rely on an outrageously slow bus network to get to work and run errands; replacing these bus lines with trains would speed their trips dramatically (and get yet more vehicles off the roads).
• If half the people who went to the shore on a summer weekend could easily ride the train, they’d get to spend more time swimming, flirting, and eating ice cream, and less time stuck in traffic and hunting for parking. With only half the traffic on the roads, the drivers would get there faster, too.
• If teenagers could take a quick train ride to meet up with friends in the next town, we could worry a whole lot less about them driving under the influence.
• Roads with fewer cars are safer for pedestrians and cyclists. And making biking safer would reduce driving even more: almost 40 percent of the time someone gets in the car, they drive three miles or less. A leisurely three-mile bike ride to go to work or run an errand takes fifteen minutes — barely enough to break a sweat. And spending 30 minutes a day on a bike instead of driving and parking makes people healthier and happier.

Less road rage. More time for exercise. Lower emissions. More leisure time. Can we afford NOT to upgrade the system?

What Professors Do: Too Many Things

Social media right now is full of faculty plaints about the difficulties of making it through the final weeks of the semester. In past years, I’ve commented myself about the frenetically intense workload of this time of year.

A lot of it is about reading, grading, and providing feedback on ALL THE THINGS. One year, I calculated during the last week of the semester that I had approximately 1100 pages of student writing left to grade for students in three courses. I swore I would never make that mistake again. Counting the pages, that is.

The end of the academic year is also filled with symposia, thesis presentations, awards, and other rites of passage. I love to attend these, congratulate students, and meet their families, yet they add to an already intensely busy time.

Being on disability with Long Covid means I have time to think about how we got here. Shifts in how we think about teaching, the increasing roles of technology, the politicization and defunding of higher education, and the attendant move from tenured to contingent faculty all play major roles.

In my own undergraduate courses in literature and philosophy forty years ago, I took a midterm and a final exam, and wrote a paper near the end of the term. I could retrieve the final exam and the paper by going to the prof’s office and shuffling through a box left outside the door. Each item would have a grade at the top of the first page, maybe some marked typos, and possibly an enigmatic check or two in the margin. Teaching students writing as a process of drafting, revising, and rethinking — that you could “write to learn,” as Donald Murray put it — had not yet reached my faculty.

I became a literature professor after years of teaching composition. I took for granted that students should write a lot, with opportunities for informal, creative, and open-ended writing as well as more directed assignments. My students analyze, compare, and synthezise ideas, and they engage in meta-cognition about their reading, writing, and learning.

I assign a sequence of related writing assignments in all of my courses. I give a lot of oral and written feedback to help students see what they are good and and what they can get better at. I encourage and require drafting, revisions, expanding work, writing about the same topic for different audiences. So the way I teach takes a lot of time and energy in engaging with students and their work.

Add pandemic learning losses and the fragmenting mental health of young adults in a polarized nation facing down climate change. Professors are mandated to report if we notice students struggling. We refer students to appropriate resources on and off campus. We make phone calls to student life staff to ask them to reach out. We extend flexibility and grace to try to help students make it through courses, semesters, degrees.

These changes have happened in the context of broader social shifts. New technologies affect teaching more than you might think. Decades ago, I typed a two-page syllabus, made copies, and handed it out on the first day of class. We spent a few minutes reviewing major due dates, I’d explain the rationale for how the course was organized, and we would jump right into discussions of ideas.

Today, the syllabus is a contract between students and faculty, and contains pages and pages of information about policies and expectations, rubrics and grading criteria, uploaded to course management systems before classes start. Students buy books online rather than in a campus bookstore; usually, they have them by the third week of classes. Medieval texts exist in numerous editions and translations, and I’m lucky if students all end up with the versions I’ve planned on, and can be on the same page and even reading the same words.

The politicization of higher education has direct consequences on college faculty and their relationships with students. I’m not going to romanticize the past — there have always been plenty of students majoring in beer and bonhomie, doing the minimum they can to get through.

But current disdain among many segments of the US population for education and educators, alongside consistent defunding of higher education by state and federal governments and widespread hiring of hostile administrators with little respect for faculty, have wrought sea changes.

College and university faculty design courses and programs, they evaluate and re-evaluate the role of distribution requirements and the shape and extent of the major, and they create and revise policies on various aspects of student life. The emergence of AI-mediated writing is a current challenge for individual faculty and university policy: students need to understand appropriate uses and limitations of tools such as ChatGPT in fostering and not substituting for their own critical and original thinking. 

Across the nation, administrators, boards of trustees, and state legislatures are axing tenured professors, or simply not replacing them whey they retire. Classes are covered by hiring faculty to terms of just a few years, supplemented by numerous part-time instructors who teach at three or four different institutions to try to get by. 

Ever-fewer tenured professors shoulder the work of faculty governance and service to the profession, while coping with more stressors than ever before. So many are retiring or leaving the profession. Harvard and Stanford are never going to have trouble keeping faculty, but I wonder how much longer community colleges and regional universities can hire the faculty to keep offering courses and programs.

Textile Recycling

I just found out I can donate clothing, shoes, linens, and bags — in any condition — to Helpsy, a B Corp founded in 2017 with dropoff locations across the northeast United States, including one four miles away. I’ve been collecting used textile scraps for a couple of years as I try to figure out how to keep them out of the trash. 

Pre-covid, I could have biked there to make the donation. Now though, I’ll make a drop when I’m driving that way anyway.

Since 1960, there’s been an explosion in the amount of textiles produced globally — and in the amount that goes into landfills in the United States — as tracked by the EPA. Americans today buy more than 100 pounds of clothing a year, and the vast majority of that goes into landfills.

Here at Casa Criatura, we try not to throw stuff away. It starts with thinking hard before we buy things. We need clothing, of course, and we aim for items that are well made and not trendy. We use mesh wash bags to protect more delicate items and wash in cold water. 

But we make purchasing mistakes, especially when shopping online for used clothing, and sizes and shapes change with the years, and we end up with clothing we can’t use any more.

There are many good options for keeping lightly worn, good quality clothes out of landfills. We’ve sent clothing to ThredUp, donated it to clothing drives for young professionals, or dropped it off at Goodwill. We’ve sent bras that no longer fit (hellooo menopause) to I Support the Girls.

The local ASPCA can use all the worn towels and blankets we can donate. Old T shirts and kitchen towels make great rags, which we use instead of paper towels, and just keep rewashing and reusing. 

But jeans don’t make good rags, socks get holes, and even Sheertex tights wear out eventually. Some towns and cities in New Jersey collect textiles for recycling in publicly located bins, and I’d been thinking about bringing along a bag of textiles for the next time I’m near Hoboken or Clifton. Non-ideal.

I’ve had my eye on For Days, which charges $20 to take your clothing and then gives you back “Closet Cash” you can use to shop affiliated retailers. But I’ve never gotten it together to commit to their take-back bag.

So I’m probably more excited than I should be to know that I’ll be able to take my bag of rags and drop it off just a few miles away without paying to have it shipped.

Inconvenience Fee

I started the day today with a telemedicine appointment with a pulmonologist with the Post Covid Recovery Program at Rutgers. He prescribed a new inhaler that might improve my asthma symptoms. On the neurological stuff, he had no suggestions beyond what I am already taking.

Current research, he said, suggests it’s a mitochondrial disease: the body can take in oxygen, but doesn’t use it the way it’s supposed to. I’ve been following covid news, natch, and had seen a report about this, but he explained it helpfully.

He was a nice guy. He understood what I am experiencing, and what my job entails and why I can’t do it. He was kind. I wanted to cry, just from being seen. He couldn’t access a bunch of my medical record, because it’s in various different systems used by different doctors in different practices. “American exceptionalism,” he said, completely dead-pan.

He said most people with long covid get better after two and a half or three years.

TWO AND A HALF OR THREE YEARS.

It’s been eight months.

I went off to CVS and picked up the new inhaler.

I went to my GP’s office and dropped off a form for her to explain why I am unfit for jury duty. I had to print it out from the county website and fill out parts of it. Once she’s had time to fill it out, I have to go back to the office and pick it up. Then I have to mail it to the jury duty administrator. I am supposed to return it within five business days.

I went to the police station. Climbed down a double set of stairs, rang the bell, told them what I need, waited (standing) while they decided if they were going to let me in, pulled open a heavy door, wrote a check for four (4, FOUR!) dollars, and stood at the little window while the person on the other side processed the form, filed my check, filled out the temporary handicap parking tag, and punched out the month and year.

And climbed back up the double set of stairs and drove home, exhausted. 

Renewable online: driver’s license and car registration. But not the handicap hang tag. For today, I am done for.

I am on the couch with Stella, listening to music. Maybe I’ll read a little more of my current mystery novel. I’ve been binge reading Joyce Lionarons’s Matthew Cordwainer series,  and having finished, I started over at the beginning. 

I don’t usually nap, but it’s not impossible. Unlikely though, given the combination of rage, frustration, and fear that I live with all the time these days.

Oh, and on the “memo” line on the check, I wrote “inconvenience fee.”