October 27, 2026

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Between 2017 and 2023, about one in 65 teen girls and one in 200 teen boys received a transgender-related mental-health diagnosis in Oregon. And in Washington, at least 15,437 minors listed a transgender-related diagnosis on their health insurance claims during those same years.

Those numbers are extremely high—the 2022 rate among teen girls in Washington was nearly 600 times greater than the gender dysphoria rates listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

“Having better data on the prevalence of transgender-related diagnoses among youth is especially important because diagnosis opens the door to medical interventions—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries—with potentially irreversible, lifelong consequences,” Leor Sapir writes. “Systematic reviews of evidence—the gold standard in evidence-based medicine—have found a lack of credible evidence for benefits from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and the most common surgery, mastectomy.”

And yet states like Washington have championed this “gender-affirming” care model for youth with gender-related issues. Oregon and Washington, in fact, are considered “sanctuary states” for pediatric gender medicine.

“Thus, like Oregon,” Sapir writes, “Washington has systematically eliminated barriers to pediatric medical transition, and as in Oregon, this happened in parallel to the state experiencing a surge in the number of minors with transgender-related diagnoses appearing on their health insurance claims.”

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On Wednesday, Cornell University’s Faculty Senate will vote on a resolution of no confidence in the university administration. The vote comes after more than 200 Cornell professors released a letter stating the university fosters a “culture” of “structural violence” and “sexual assault.” “We [failed] to create spaces where you feel safe to share your experiences,” the professors write.

“Reality check for these stale academic tropes: Cornell has no epidemic of structural violence,” Heather Mac Donald writes. “If it did, the Sisterhood would presumably long ago have warned its less worldly members to stay away from such a cauldron of physical abuse.”

Indeed, from the 2005–2006 academic year to the 2025–2026 academic year, applications to the school rose 160 percent, with half of the increase coming from women. In 2024, the female undergraduate admission rate was 9.3 percent, compared with 7.6 percent for male applicants. “Once on campus, female undergraduates move in a soothing bath of feminist curricula, faculty, and student services administrators,” Mac Donald writes, “the latter dedicated to the proposition that anyone not white, male, and heterosexual needs protection from toxic white masculinity.”

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Earlier this month, the National Basketball Association issued memos to teams and sportsbook partners stating that bets on small plays—like missed shots and opening tip-off winners—would no longer be allowed. The ban follows the federal investigation of several NBA players for betting on their own performances.

The NBA isn’t the only sports league having second thoughts about betting. The National Football League recently urged the Supreme Court to intervene in the legal battles over the prediction-market platform Kalshi. Even though it functions much like online sports betting, Kalshi claims it should be exempt from state sports gambling bans since it operates as a derivatives exchange.

Public opinion is starting to turn against sports gambling, too, with 56 percent of Americans saying it undermines the integrity of the games.

“The popular backlash shouldn’t surprise us,” Josh Appel writes. “As with drugs, legalization didn’t just transfer the existing population of gamblers from black markets to regulated ones. It also opened up a path for new gamblers who might never have placed a bet without the existence of Draft Kings, FanDuel, Kalshi, or Polymarket.”

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A number of proposals making their way through Congress address the supposed threats of artificial intelligence. One would create a tax on tokens—data units that large-language models like Claude and ChatGPT process when generating text.

It’s similar to the “bit tax” that economist Arthur Cordell proposed for the internet in the 1990s. The bit tax would have levied about eight cents of tax on one megabyte of data. The idea? To address concerns about the web displacing human workers.

But imagine if that tax had passed, Garrett Watson and Andrew Lautz point out. “Streaming one hour of music currently uses about 30 megabytes of data, meaning you would pay an extra $2.40 just to listen to your favorite album,” they write. “An hour-long video conference at work uses nearly 500 megabytes of data, meaning it would cost your company $40 more just to host a meeting.”

Similarly, the cost of a token tax would increase with usage, which would mean more fees for AI companies, and likely more fees for consumers.

“Tax policy should be principled, not reactionary,” Watson and Lautz write. “It should support the same kinds of innovation that have turned the United States into a global leader in AI—and enable individuals and businesses to find ways to use it to accelerate economic growth.”

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