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Walker and Obama
Back in June, before the recall election, I argued against the view that a Walker victory spelled trouble for Obama’s re-election campaign in Wisconsin: “if Walker actually wins by 7, it means there’s...
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The GOP’s electoral triumph
You knew there was one, right? While the national party was crying in its beer, Wisconsin Republicans held the State Assembly and took back the State Senate, undoing the results of last year’s recalls...
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18% of Americans think Barack Obama is Jewish
Per page 13 of this AP poll, the proportion of people who believe Barack Obama is a Muslim went from 17% down to 10% between January 2010 and September 2012. However, 18% now think he is Jewish. I...
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In defense of Nate Silver and experts
Cathy goes off on Nate Silver today, calling naive his account of well-meaning people saying false things because they’ve made math mistakes. In Cathy’s view, people say false things because they’re...
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Guest post: Stephanie Tai on deference to experts
My colleague Steph Tai at the law school wrote a long, amazing Facebook message to me about the question Cathy and I have been pawing at: when and in what spirit should we be listening to experts? It...
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With all due respect
I think I heard this phrase finally lose the last shred of its meaning this morning on NPR. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL): “The Republican Party has been in many respects, with all due respect, the party...
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Framing the jobs report
The Wall Street Journal‘s headline today: TEPID JOB GROWTH FUELS WORRY: Unemployment Rate Hits 7.8% as Economy Stays Sluggish Doesn’t the word “hits” there kind of make you think the rate rose to...
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The irrevocable change brought about by the Civil War
From the Harvard reunion book entry of Edward Learoyd Cutter ’06, a coal dealer in Boston, concerning his vacation trips to Charleston, SC: We have been extremely fortunate in knowing a few of the old...
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Who does Public Polling Policy think is challenging Scott Walker?
We got a PPP robopoll today. First of all, I want to note that the recorded voice on the phone was a middle-aged man with the worst case of vocal fry I’ve ever heard. Anyway. Much of the poll was of...
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The helicopter was invented a long time ago
“…she had to stay with him at nursery school every morning for four months, or else he went into a violent frenzy of tears and tantrums. In first grade, he often vomited in the morning when he had to...
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Is philosophy worse for women than math is?
My philosopher friends today are all talking about the resignation/firing of Colin McGinn, a pretty well-known philosopher as I understand it, who as it turns out has been sending e-mails to his...
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The greatest danger which today confronts the white race
I needed to look at R.A. Fisher’s review of John Maynard Keynes’s treatise on probability, which was published in Eugenics Journal, which I was trying to figure out if JSTOR has, and that led me to...
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Why is the California state legislature so polarized?
Check out this chart, from a Measuring American Legislatures post on the possibilities for the upcoming NJ Senate appointment: What’s going on with California? There are other states where the...
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Scalia was right
As Caleb Crain pointed out way back in 2003, Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down Texas’s anti-sodomy laws, argues that the majority’s reasoning leaves the federal...
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Statistical chutzpah in the Indiana school grade-changing scandal
I wrote a piece for Slate yesterday about Tony Bennett, the former Indiana schools czar who intervened in the state’s school-grading system to ensure that a politically connected public charter got an...
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Incarceration rates have gone up really, really fast
I knew — everybody knows, right? — that the US imprisons a lot more people than it used to, but I don’t think I’d really appreciated the magnitude of the change over my lifetime. This chart goes up to...
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Jews, intermarriage, and the love that is actually quite comfortable speaking...
Do Jews have a future? Maybe, but only if we stop marrying goyim, says Jack Wertheimer, a professor at JTS, in a long article I found infuriating for reasons I find hard to articulate. Maybe you guys...
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PC run amok
It’s very strange, in restrospect, that certain aggrieved personalities of the 1990s held that the world was going to hell because some people started saying “differently abled” instead of...
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Wisconsin and the Common Core math standards
I have been inexcusably out of touch with the controvery in Wisconsin about the adoption of the Common Core state standards for mathematics. I present without comment the text of a letter that’s...
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“The global warming crowd has a problem”
Such a weird lede in this op-ed from Berkeley physicist Richard Muller. ”The global warming crowd has a problem” sounds like he’s going to lay down 800 words of climate change denial! But no — what...
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