In 2001 investigative reporters working for The Boston Globe uncovered evidence that the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston was moving priests around to conceal rather than adequately address their sexual abuse of minors, a problem the reporters themselves had trouble believing … Continue reading
Last month (link) I mentioned the problem of misinformation voters as distinct from low-information voters. Low-information voters just don’t pay a lot of attention to politics, which I admit is completely understandable if a problem for a democracy. But by … Continue reading
As I mentioned a few weeks ago (link), overall U.S. life expectancy fell slightly in 2015. We should be careful about reading too much into a small one-year decline (it also fell in 1980 and 1993), but we shouldn’t ignore … Continue reading
Last week I read an interesting blog post from Kevin Drum based on two sets of U.S. crime data collected two different ways by separate parts of the Justice Department. Data derived both from large-scale population surveys and from police … Continue reading
An article on the Vox website (link) argues that in many ways the world is getting better, vastly so in comparison with 200 years ago. For example: In 1820 about 90 percent of the world population lived in what we … Continue reading
A lot of politicians from multiple parties showed up on The Late Show with Steven Colbert during its first year on the air, and a lot of them tried to show they had a sense of humor. Some of them … Continue reading
In French class in high school I heard about a popular Paris newspaper called Le Canard Enchainé, the Enchained Duck, a name that’s hard to forget. It turns out that Le Canard turned a hundred in 2016, having been started … Continue reading
NPR, which stands either for National Public Radio or News for Pigs and Rabbits, has managed to find ten things about this year’s election that weren’t awful. The full list is here and includes Bill Clinton playing with balloons, Bernie … Continue reading
I’m really, really late posting this. If I’m not mistaken, it dates back to the July 21 edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, back when they were broadcasting live every night after the Republican National Convention. But there’s … Continue reading
The Republicans running the North Carolina state legislature are currently holding a special session for the purpose of ramming through major changes to state government. They kept plans to hold the special session secret, announcing it just as another special … Continue reading