June 30, 2017

NASA images capture worst Siberian wildfires in 10,000 years.



California lawmakers have tried for 50 years to fix the state’s housing crisis. Here’s why they’ve failed. NIMBYs to the left of me, hedge funds to the right — here I am, stuck in a hovel with you.



As Climate Changes, Southern States Will Suffer More Than Others.



Since bottoming out nationwide in Q1 2012, median home prices nationwide have increased 69 percent while average weekly wages have increased 9 percent during the same time period. Note that this is NOT inflation-adjusted.



Researchers Crack the Brain’s Facial-Recognition Code.



A Deadly Brain-Invading Worm Is Disturbingly Widespread in Florida.



The Rise of the Thought Leader. How the superrich have funded a new class of intellectual. “Intellectual.”



Democrats’ and media’s focus on Russia almost allowed Republican health care bill to pass.



An homage to the cheque (or check).



Americans who live in relative comfort are emotionally invested in politics, especially in the aftermath of the election, but in a degraded form of politics that caters to the voyeurism of news junkies and the short attention spans of slacktivists.



The leaders of the Democratic Party and their loyalists seem to hear themselves as the sole voice of reason in an insane moment. They don’t grasp that they’re speaking a particular and provincial language—the institutional formalism and propriety of the professional middle class of the late twentieth century—and even less why that language enjoys less resonance now than in its 1990s heyday.



June 29, 2017

Donald Trump is an ambassador from the abyss. Alienation is threatening democracy. Only solidarity can save it.



The Implications of Search Engines Powering Ad Networks.



I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People.



Typecasting: The Use (and Misuse) of Period Typography in Movies. This bothers me more than it should.



When 1/3rd of minimum wage workers have a college degree, something has clearly gone wrong with our economy.



June 28, 2017

Seattle’s higher minimum wage is actually working just fine.



The amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it.



Trumpcare Will Kill People. Why Is That So Hard to Accept?



The mere presence of your smartphone reduces brain power, study shows.



Next global crash could come “with a vengeance”, central bankers at the Bank for International Settlements have warned, citing debt fears in China and other emerging markets.



Life in America, in six charts.



Scientists come up with neural mechanism—and possible fix—for chronic pain.



Apple finally admits it: The iPhone and iPad are computers.



June 27, 2017

In a hundred years, when historians and whoever deals with economic issues look back (hopefully not economists as we understand them), they aren’t going to be that impressed that Western Capitalism outlasted Soviet Communism by forty or fifty years.



Job applicants over 40 filtered out by employers.



Why didn’t great painters of the past reach the level of realism achieved today by many artists? Realism isn’t as real as you think.



The U.N. Sent 3 Foreign Women To The U.S. To Assess Gender Equality. They Were Horrified. I’m horrified and I live here.



Push on with the ‘great unwinding’, BIS tells central banks.



How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists.



Operation Tracer.



How Pro-Life and Anti-Abortion Culture Kills Women.



In Towns Already Hit by Steel Mill Closings, a New Casualty: Retail Jobs.



Amazon Is Trying to Control the Underlying Infrastructure of Our Economy.



June 26, 2017

Technological change and the future of financial intermediation.



TSA considers forcing airline passengers to remove books from carry-ons.



The tyranny of Twitter: How mob censure is changing the intellectual landscape. Twitter is the place for leftist virtue signaling.



Public library use in U.S. highest among Millennials. And now that Boomers don’t visit them anymore, they want them gone. Pull that ladder up, weld shut the access port.



The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence.



The WaPo strikes another blow for the Deep State against Russia.



E-Trade’s New Ad Campaign Is Everything That’s Wrong With Capitalism.



Democrats are still obsessed with Jill Stein. They should start obsessing over nonvoters instead. “In Michigan, the 2016 undervote was sizably larger than the Stein vote, and dwarfed Trump’s margin of victory.”



Silicon Valley has a bad habit of “inventing” things that already exist.



Working-class women are too busy for gender theory – but they’re still feminists.



Dislike of candidates or campaign issues was most common reason for not voting in 2016. Those wily Russians, making bad candidates look bad. What will they do next!



(Geo)Political Risk and the Price of Oil.



June 25, 2017

Debunking detox, diets and wellness.



Escaping the Inferno.



Found in an old manuscript.



It Is Humanly Impossible to Be a Good Newspaper Columnist.



Examples of Cool Capitalism. Much if not all of the supposed-left policing of behavior is neoliberlism at work destroying labor rights (the world is better off if even unpleasant people/”deplorables” have jobs).



Taking On the Frat Boys.



San Francisco Is Burning. A series of strange and unsettling fires in the Mission District have people wondering: Are the city’s landlords using arson to drive out low-income tenants?



Political Opponents Overestimate the Extremity of Each Other’s Ideologies but Underestimate Each Other’s Certainty.



Men Can Be So Hormonal.



Centrist Democrats are now the great defenders of social justice? Please.



June 24, 2017

Where Would We Be Politically If Hillary Clinton Had Won?



The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson.



No hot food for you.



Against Murderism.



How the United States became a ‘second-tier’ country.



Scientists say they have found the first direct evidence that the immune system does attack the brain in Parkinson’s disease.



Solving the Scorching Mystery of the Sun’s Erupting Plasma Jets.



Explanation and critical realism.



Ancient oak’s youthful genome surprises biologists.



Discrimination as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from French Grocery Stores.



Something happening here.



June 23, 2017

The 1% in U.S Will Own 70% of Wealth by 2021: Study.



Mitch McConnell overcame polio with the help of the government.



Ultra-Thin Camera Creates Images Without Lenses.



The tragedy of FireWire: Collaborative tech torpedoed by corporations.



Where Gravity Is Weak and Naked Singularities Are Verboten.



How the Pill Made the American Economy Great.



America’s Massive Retail Workforce Is Tired of Being Ignored.



Facial Recognition Is Coming To US Airports. That “implausible” dystopia so many sf authors wrote about? Yeah, it’s happening.



How the Rhetoric of Responsibility Hurts the Welfare State.



The US Government Wants to Permanently Legalize the Right to Repair.



McDonald’s Hits All-Time High As Wall Street Cheers Replacement of Cashiers With Kiosks.



June 22, 2017

Mississippi is rejecting nearly all of the poor people who apply for welfare.



Venezuela is proof that the rich will be insulated from economic ruin.



Conglomerates Didn’t Die. They Look Like Amazon.



Without cultural appropriation I contend that we would have little culture of any sort worthwhile at all. Indeed, we’d all be sitting in caves still, banging two rocks together.



We Are Inches From A New World War, And Clintonists Are To Blame.



Over 170 years after Engels, Britain is still a country that murders its poor. The US, too.



New CAA study says diverse casting increases box office potential across all budgets. Something that has been obvious to everyone except Hollywood execs for 20+ years.



The end of the cosy game of politics.



The Use and Abuse of ‘Information’ in Biology.



When Sleeping In The Car Is The Price Of A Doctor Visit.



Wal-Mart to Vendors: Get Off Amazon’s Cloud.



How Conspiracy Theories Changed Our Way of Thinking.



Crimson Tidings.



June 21, 2017

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.



Obesity now kills more people worldwide than car crashes, terror attacks, and Alzheimer’s combined. “Fat but fit” is a comforting fiction.



Power Causes Brain Damage.



Private Power, Public Values: Regulating Social Infrastructure in a Changing Economy.



He threw $25 million down the drain and nothing happened to him in a world in which a woman who is 10 minutes late for her minimum wage retail shift because the school bus didn’t show up to get her kid not only gets fired but is confidently told that she deserves nothing better.



Unions, Workers, and Wages at the Peak of the American Labor Movement.



Lionfish Are Eating Fish We Didn’t Even Know Existed.



On currency.



It’s not the government’s job to say if ‘Slants’ is too offensive. Or ‘Redskins.’ The problem is — contra social justice warriors who for some reason trust the gov’t if it appears to be on their side — when they decide “social justice” is a slur. Or your preferred word or term.