WEEKEND EDITION- Super Primary Takeaways, Quitting Intensive Parenting, Nanobots Used to Clean Wounds

This is a compilation of some of the most compelling stories of the week.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explored the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,

(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week in politics somewhere calling this week's primaries mid
term Super Tuesday. As Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, Oregon, and
Idaho all cast primary votes, former President Trump proved that
his endorsement is still very much coveted in Republican circles,

(00:47):
but not all of his preferred candidates want. We also
saw the complete fall of Representative Madison Cawthorne and a
mixed bag of news for Democrats. For more on some
top takeaways, will speak to Aaron Blake, senior political reporter
at Washington Post. The former president has endorsed a lot
of candidates. A lot of them are incumbents and people
who you would expect to win, so we tend to
focus on the races where the outcome is actually somewhat

(01:10):
end doubt, and Tuesday brought a couple of key ones.
One was in North Carolina Senate race where he lined
up behind Congressman Ted budd who went on to win.
The others in the Pennsylvania Senate race where he lined
up behind mem at Oz, whose race was still uncalled
on Wednesday afternoon very close could be headed to a recount.
So it kind of fills out a picture of some

(01:32):
of these primaries in which the former president has endorsed,
where he seemed to help some of these candidates but
maybe not necessarily made them beloved by the entire Republican
Party electorate. It so it's going to be something fascinating
to watch looking forward to, especially with a lot of
primaries this month including his endorsements. Yeah, and but overall
still right, a very coveted endorsement. You know what. This

(01:55):
is kind of been the where the Republican Party has
been grappling with a little bit of we still fully
continue to embrace the former president, which it seems like
by and large they have or should we start moving
on the endorsement, though, like I said, it's still very
coveted right now. And I think it's important to also
note that, you know, we're we're talking about which candidates
Trump endorses, but even the candidates that the former president

(02:19):
hasn't endorsed will often very much align with his policies
or say nice things about him, trying to win over
that Trumpian base, even if they don't have the endorsement
to go along with it. And so there's no question
that the Republican primaries right now are an affirmation of
Trump's kind of strangle hold on the direction of the party.
And I don't think we should lose sight of that

(02:39):
just because he doesn't necessarily get to pick who the
winners and the losers are. Let's stick with Pennsylvania for
a little bit. The governor race on the Republican side,
Doug Mastriano won his primary there, and now he's an
interesting character, right He's an election truther. He approached the
capital on January six, he was at one of the
rallies there. He's been promoting some Q and on and

(03:02):
other conspiracies, but still he managed to win the Republican
primary there. Our number one goal is first is a
restore freedom right. So on day one, any mandates are gone. Yep,
on day one, any JAB for a job requirements are gone.

(03:30):
On day one, school transparency will be ordered. I mean,
there's so much here. On day one, c RT is over.
When this was happening, I was thinking back to about
a decade ago, and Republicans had a number of rather
extreme nominees who were running in some very winnable races,

(03:52):
often red leaning territory like Missouri, Indiana, races that they
expect to win, and they wound up with Canada. It's
like Todd Aiken, Sharon Angle, Richard Murdoch who wound up
losing pretty winnable races. And I think that the party
back then was in many ways kind of powerless to
affect those primaries and pushed through a more electable candidate.

(04:13):
And that's very much true today and I think mass
Triano is maybe the biggest example of that thus far.
If you look at the way the Republican Governors Association
responded to that, they didn't even say anything nice about
him in their statement on this on Tuesday night. So
I think that's that's very telling and it shows that
the party is is worried about how some of these

(04:33):
candidates might screw up races that they should be winning
and what what should be a very good election year
in the mid terms. Moving on, Madison Cawthorne in North Carolina.
He lost the primary. Interesting characters, seen as a rising
star for some time. Then he got into all sorts
of personal issues and you know, saying on a podcast

(04:54):
that he was being offered drugs and orgies and and
all sorts of crazy stuff. And right away everybody started
turning on him, and it seems to kind of let
into the primary. He lost, Yeah, and and by a
pretty resounding margin. I mean that the end result was close.
His opponent was about thirty four thirty five percent, he
was about thirty two. But an incumbent getting only less

(05:17):
than one third of the vote is pretty much unheard of.
When you're an incumbent, usually hope for a crowded primary
field because it'll split up the vote. Well, in this case,
that crowded primary field wasn't even good enough for him.
I think it just reinforces that the party, at least
under certain circumstances, can guide things in a certain way
in a primary, and at least in this case when

(05:37):
it comes to Madison Cawthorne, they were able to get
rid of somebody that they really wanted to get rid
of pretty badly. How about Democrats, how did they fare
in this? They had some wins, some nod. President Biden also, uh,
you know, some of the picks that he made, the
endorsements that he made, still trailing pretty far behind and
all that. It's interesting because the Democratic primaries tend to

(05:59):
be a little bit lower profile, They're not as crowded,
the dynamics aren't quite as clear. You don't have the
all the candidates rushing to be the Bernie Sanders supporter
like you do the Donald Trump supporter on the Republican side.
So it makes a situation where it's not so clear
what kind of campaign these candidates want to be running.
And what we saw on Tuesday was very much kind
of a mixed bag of more far left candidates winning

(06:22):
a few races, including summerly in Pennsylvania, but losing in
other races where there was real resistance to them and
lots of funding to try and stop them. But then
we also have something like the Pennsylvania governor's race where
Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman is very much a progressive populist,
somebody who the party maybe wouldn't have wanted to run

(06:42):
in the race like this ten years ago. But they've
kind of come around to the idea of having less
moderate candidates in some of these races because they want
to get the base out there too. And so the
Democratic Party, the jury is built still very much out
on what direction that party is headed in, and it
really varies on a race to race basis. Well, we'll
keep an eye out for all of this. The midterms
are are starting to take more shape, and we'll get

(07:04):
some more clearer pictures of candidates and then also the
issues that are coming up. Aaron Blake, senior political reporter
at the Washington Post, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you. Next, we'll talk about the dominant model of
modern parenting and it might be time to quit it.
Intensive parenting, also known as helicopter parenting, is a model

(07:27):
where parents try to over extend themselves by trying to
maximize their child success. The researchers show that it can
lead to parental burnout and harma child's competence and mental health.
For Warren, how to get away from this anxiety driven
intensive parenting will speak to Elliott Haspell, early childhood policy
expert and contributor to the Atlantic. The challenge is that
intensive parenting doesn't actually get us the goals that we wanted,

(07:52):
counter productive the ideas we want our kids to be
successful in an uncertain the world until we're going to
kind of clench a really it around them. What the
evidence shows us rapsive evidence almost any way you look
at it, is it actually ends up hurting children's mental health,
especially when they become out lessons and young adults, and
it really stresses parents out, and actually stressed out parents

(08:13):
are not generally a super effective parents. And so what
I'm writing here is saying there's lots of evidence and
evidence for years and years and years that intensive parenting
can be very counterproductive, but it's not actually causing any changes.
There's a writer for another writer for The Atlantic, kid Julian,
who talked about how actually now kids are protectionally more
overparented than they have been in the past. And so

(08:36):
my sort of point here is we need to figure
out something to replace intensive parenting instead of just telling
parents don't do that. Quick question here though, right, if
if we have research saying, you know, it's not the
most beneficial thing. Why is it the most dominant kind
of form of parenting right now? Yeah, I think it's fueled, right,
So it's what I would consider it maladaptive. What they

(08:58):
mean is logical even create a story by which it
makes sense, but actually it doesn't work. And so you know,
it appears to be a solid suggest or response to
this anxiety, and there's lots of reasons behind it. But
to sort of distill it, right, the future looks pretty uncertain,
as usually looks pretty uncertain for your kids. What you're
gonna do is try to control everything you can control

(09:21):
to give them the best chance of success. Until there's
an appeal to it, right, Like I might not be
able to control climate change, and I'm not to be
able to control think of inequality, but I can do
everything in my power to smooth the path that my
kids can get to into a good college. And that's
the way the logic can goes. And so it's very
seductive in a way, And it's not until you kind

(09:44):
of go a few sentences further into the thought that
you guys, actually does not not getting us where we
want to go. What are some of these new methods
that we can maybe replace this with that. You have
a couple of different ideas. You know, one is obviously
for the parents them selves, right, You need parents to
prioritize themselves in a way as well get adequate amounts

(10:05):
of sleep. That way they're a little more happy and
fulfilled and that will pass along to the children. And
a couple of other suggestions too. Yeah, So my read
on the holes of the parenting and child outcome literature
is that we actually need to reject the idea there's
like this system or method that we need to be
moving forward on when we think about how to parent.
But actually we can kind of calm down and realize

(10:28):
that so long as we're providing a reasonable amounts of
love and support and care, and obviously they're going to
be times when we need to lean in more times
when we need to lean out. But if we we
broadly do with this this pediatriition and psychologists from the
forties and fifties called good enough parenting. But doesn't mean
it's mediocre, does they need it's apathetic. It means there's
literally a point at which if you try to continue

(10:50):
to optimize, you're gonna do more harm than good, and
so finding that that sort of good enough point where
does it doesn't mean that, like we want to think about,
being a latively whole, calm, happy person will generally make
you a better parent. Giving the children, you know, a
room to fail within a reason actually helps them grow
their competence. And so my piece is really saying, let's

(11:13):
reject let's not just say no more intentive parenting now
we're going to do gentle parenting, or no more intensive parenting,
now we're going to do the r I parenting. It's
not we can't keep replacing these models with other models.
We have to do is reject the fundamental premise that
there is a model out there, um and understand what
actually drives effective child development is this sort of metaphor

(11:35):
of really being more of a gardener, you know, but
just setting the conditions, reaching that good enough point and
not striving for perfection. Yeah. Another way to kind of
think about it, did you mentioned in the article is
thinking of different aspects of it as dials, you know,
dials you can ramp up all the way to ten
so that you can leave down to one and you know,
displaying love, spending quality time. These things are should be

(11:57):
high on that priority list, you know, other things, right,
non serious problems for their kids, things that they should
learn how to handle themselves. You know, that could be
dialed down a little bit lower because you shouldn't you know,
again to the helicopter pairing, the intensive parenting, should try
to steer away from that, giving them a little bit
of independence and and learn it for themselves. That's absolutely right,
you know, it's uh And everyone has their own values

(12:20):
as a parent or in the family, and everyone's situations
like I'm certainly if you you know, I'm a parent
of neurotypical children, a few of a child as a
significant developmental you know, the issue like that's going to
look different, the kind of inputs that you need. But yeah,
you know, broadly speaking, I think we can think about
like one of these guiding principles of parenting in that

(12:41):
will help us make these decisions. Should I sign my
GID up for that and then another extracurricular Do I
need to be doing their homework, you know, for them
tonight or should they go out with you know, go
talk to a friend on the phone tonight. There's these
sort of micro level decisions, you know, I think we
can get in their head about them. But if we
understand that actually, not helping your kill with your homework
one night is not going to uh foreclose their future

(13:04):
of getting into uh in the college, which I think
is someboys can feel like that much pressure. It can
help us all start to start to calm down. Yeah, well,
I know a lot of parents feel pressure on all
sides of this, So just some food for thought on
all of it. Elliott Haspell, early childhood policy expert and
author of Crawling Behind America's Childcare Crisis and How to
Fix It. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks

(13:26):
so much for having finally for this week. When we
think of nanobots, our minds can begin to wander about
incredible microscopic machines capable of repairing bone or healing and
illness or even more in the farious things we see
in sci fi movies. Well, we aren't quite there just yet.
Scientists have been able to get nanobots to swim around

(13:47):
the wound, deliver antibiotics, and help kill bacteria. For more
on how these nano bots work will speak to Max Levy,
contributor to Wire. It really is sort of fascinating. I
think that a lot of people when they think about
nanotechnic aology, they think about these tiny little robots that
could swim around and do pretty much anything you would
want them to do. And what it was sort of
funny and realizing this story is that that's more realistic,

(14:11):
I suppose um than than one might have been one
might expect. So, so what's really cool about these nanobots
is they're basically like tiny little rocks that have these
proteins on top of them, and what they're able to
do with those proteins is move around. The proteins can
cause a sort of chemical reaction that converts chemicals into

(14:32):
mechanical energy and allows these things to move around as
if they have motors all over them, and it addresses
actually a pretty interesting and important problem in the world
of biomedicine. I think that we have a tendency to
think about drugs, whether we're talking about antibiotics or cancer drugs,
anything that you might ingest as very easily moving around

(14:56):
the body. You know, you like you pop a pill,
and whether you have pain in your foot, or a
headache or a toothache, or maybe in an infection somewhere
in your body, you typically think that, oh, yeah, you
can just pop a pill and it'll address it. And
that is true to an extent. But what research like
this sort of addresses is that there are also some
problems that are harder to reach just by ingesting a

(15:18):
pill or being injected with something that the bloodstream can
take you only so far. You can have germs that
linger within mucus, within biofilms kind of like dense colonies
of bacteria in your lungs. You might have infections or
cancer sort of in around the cells lining lining your

(15:40):
bladder or urinary tract. These are typically a lot harder
to reach. And it totally makes sense, right, what you're
talking about is the kind of traditional way of diffusion,
say it kind of you know, antibiotics and all these
other things diffused throughout your body. It will only go
so far, right, But if we can load them up
with these little motors and give them direction, then they
can treat other the of these other hard to reach

(16:01):
places like you said, in the mucus and whatnot. And
so this is what a team of scientist was doing
in Spain and Barcelona in other places. A lot of
them kind of teamed up together to get this experiment done.
But what they did was infect mice. Unfortunately, right, this
is where you always got to go through. But tell
us about this experiment they did because they infected scratched

(16:21):
mice along their backs, giving them an infection. And in
one scenario they just put some of the antibiotics without
the nanobots on one end. It really just kind of
cleaned up that end. But the ones that did have
the bots swam the length of the injury and delivered
the antibiotics to everything. So it's you know, it's kind
of proving that they can reach those harder to reach areas. Yeah,

(16:43):
that's that's exactly right. So it turned out to be
a very clever way of designing this experiment. I think
that typically when you're trying to prove that an antibiotic works,
for instance, on an animal, you might just treat the
entire wound or just apply some antibiotic over entire area
and and sort of see what happens. But but this
they were trying to challenge themselves a little bit more
to really see whether they could cover a region that

(17:07):
they're not administering an antibotic too. And that's that's sort
of the whole idea exactly as you mentioned that they
want to demonstrate the power of motion, of active motion,
not just that they have a drug that can work.
And so yeah, exactly as you said, what they what
they did is they administered these nanobots that were sort
of loaded up with an experimental antibiotic, and what they

(17:29):
found was that they have evidence that these things will
swim around a wound and even though they're placed on
one extremity one third of the wound, that nanibots can
take the antibiotic and treat the drug resistant bacteria that's
throughout the wound, so it'll cover the entire length of
that wound, whereas just an antibiotic alone can't do the
same thing. So, um, this is certainly interesting in that

(17:51):
regard and the fuel used for it. It's urrea, right,
so it's found in a lot of parts on the body.
Obviously not's non toxic, but this is a little feel
that the motors use. And when you're talking about other
applications and what's going on there, thinking about things to
treat kidney stones, you know, a bunch of different areas
where in the body you can find plenty of that

(18:12):
that fuel source at least Yeah, urrea is biocompatible with
I mean, it's naturally produced in the body. And what's
particularly useful is that it's very prevalent in a region
of the body that can be prone to infections, can
be prone to certain things like kidney stones, to cancers even,
And that's just the urinary tract, right, So you're sort
of like urethra, kidneys, bladder, any sort of issues that

(18:37):
you have in that space, you'll have fuel because you
have you have the aurea there, right. So if you
in a case where maybe you don't have like a
dense fluid like mucus or something, but you have a
stagnant fluid such as in the bladder, you know that
you're able to actually get these things to swim around
because there's plenty of area in the bladder, right, I mean,
it's it's a component that is part of the process
to for us to produce urine, right, So it's around there. Yeah,

(18:59):
I mean, just super interesting stuff right where we go
from sci fi and whittle it down and we kind
of realize that we're slowly getting there in certain aspects
of it. So I hope that this research continues and
really kind of starts to pay off a little bit more,
but it seems like they're on the right track for now.
Max Leavy, contributor to Wired. Thank you very much for
joining us. Thank you so much for having me. That's

(19:23):
it for this weekend. Be sure to check out The
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The Daily Dive and I Heard Radio, or subscribe wherever
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(19:44):
has been engineered by Tony Sorrentina. I'm Oscar Ramirez in
Los Angeles and this was your Daily Dive weekend edition.