September 20, 2017

The Real Unknown of Climate Change: Our Behavior.



World Wide Web Consortium abandons consensus, standardizes DRM with 58.4% support, EFF resigns.



Fertility effects on earnings are: (i) negative, large, and long-lasting; (ii) driven by fertility effects on hourly earnings and not so much on labor supply; and (iii) much stronger at the extensive margin than at the intensive margin.



The Social Life of Opioids.



Why Land and Homes Actually Tend to Be Disappointing Investments.



The Fed, a Decade After the Crisis, Is About to Embark on the Great Unwinding.



Top medical experts say we should decriminalize all drugs and maybe go even further.



The Senate Is Close To Undermining The Internet By Pretending To ‘Protect’ The Children.



How the aristocracy preserved their power.



Nearly all the money spent on promotion in each of the 3 years went to drugs with little to no therapeutic gain.



Dinosaurs Laid Blue Eggs—And That’s a Big Deal.



Sudden Death During Triathlons: Risks Higher Than Expected.



September 19, 2017

Big Tech makes vast gains at our expense.



The learned helplessness of Equifax.



America: not such a great place to grow old.



American Hospitals are Ungodly Expensive.



Hidden heritability due to heterogeneity across seven populations.



What Mannequins Say About Us.



Libraries Can Be More Than Just Books.



Refusing to build public toilets doesn’t make homeless people go away. It creates a public health crisis.



Mathematicians Measure Infinities, Find They’re Equal.



Meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time.



No, We Cannot Shoot Down North Korea’s Missiles.



Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese.



September 18, 2017

Disability backlog tops 1 million; thousands die on waitlist.



To do without a cellphone — and soon, if not already, a smartphone — means estranging oneself from normal society. We went from “you can have a portable communication device” to “you must have a portable communication device” practically overnight.



For the National Parks, a Time of Reckoning.



Amazon earned Seattle’s hostility. This is a very good article.



Science Denial Across the Political Divide. Liberals and Conservatives Are Similarly Motivated to Deny Attitude-Inconsistent Science.



Can American soil be brought back to life?



In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 43 minutes.



September 17, 2017

About 40% of “worker” ants just hang around, doing nothing. So like most corporations?



On climate change and human futilitarianism.



This is retirement in modern America: working your ass off in an Amazon warehouse for $10.50 per hour while living in a shabby RV.



Playgrounds.



Idylls of the Liberal: The American Dreams of Mark Lilla and Ta-Nehisi Coates.



To treat back pain, look to the brain not the spine.



University of Wisconsin and the aftermath of destroying professor tenure.



Cancer Survival Rate Between Countries.



Millennials stagger under extreme debt, but why?



September 16, 2017

We consume so much fiction, much of it containing clear allegories for fascists and nazis or straight up nazis, and we cheer for the rebels or the magical children or whoever as they engage in physical violence, very often killing enemies, to fight the threat of genocide or some other mass murder. But when the real thing comes along, suddenly some scuffles in the street and broken windows are not acceptable?



Poor diet is a factor in one in five deaths, global disease study reveals.



Intellectual Property Laws: Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing. I don’t think they even bother with the whole sheep’s clothing thing any longer.



As Alaska Thaws, Everything Changes.



8,500 Verizon customers disconnected because of “substantial” data use.



The 13th-century revolution that made modern poetry possible.



How A Warm Winter Destroyed 85 Percent Of Georgia’s Peaches.



Amazon is skewing the whole country’s retail sales data.



September 15, 2017

Florida’s Poop Nightmare Has Come True.



Redoing the Electoral Math. I argued that demographics favored the Democrats. I was wrong.



A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men. Polari is a dialect rather than a language, but still very interesting.



I watched my patients die of poverty for 40 years. It’s time for single-payer.



The Democrats who can’t quit Hillary Clinton. There are far more Hillary dead-enders than Bernie ones. I hope neither of them ever runs again.



‘OK. Let’s do it!’ An oral history of how NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn came to be.



Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Get It. “What Happened” is proof that she doesn’t understand the lessons of the 2016 election.



After Hurricane Harvey, don’t empower the engineers. Please.



The Case of a Brain-Damaging ‘Sonic Weapon’ in Cuba Is Only Getting Stranger and Scarier.



September 14, 2017

In Surprise Vote, House Passes Amendment to Restrict Asset Forfeiture.



Hurricane Harvey Lays Bare Our New Bargain With Nature.



The Hardening of Consciousness.



Solar now costs 6¢ per kilowatt-hour, beating government goal by 3 years.



Chelsea Manning: The Dystopia We Signed Up for.



There’s no ‘gay wedding cake’ exception to anti-discrimination laws.



The Growing Backlash Against Big Tech.



Two Forests Offer Clues to Yellowstone’s Fate in a Warming World.



September 13, 2017

We live in a world in which people stopped grappling with the reality of nuclear war so long ago that we have whole generations that don’t fully understand its implications, and older generations who used to understand it but have let the memories fade.



Buried deep under an island in the Baltic, the world’s first permanent nuclear-waste repository is nearing completion. If all goes according to plan, future generations may not know it’s there.



The Facts are True, the News is Fake.



Particles in Tattoos Can Travel to Lymph Nodes, Study Finds. That is lymphatically bad.



After a Dozen Hurricanes and 40 Years, What Has and Hasn’t Changed.



The Scrutable West: Industry Bias, Whitewashing and the Invisible Asian in Hollywood.



Farewell to the Greatest Space Mission of Our Time. The Cassini spacecraft spent 13 years orbiting Saturn. It revealed the planet and its rings in striking detail, found liquid around every corner, and invigorated the idea that alien life not only exists, but could be right on our doorstep.



How Silicon Valley’s Monopolies Abet Conservative Propaganda.



Dystopies : « Il existe un sentiment de ruine inédit depuis 1930 »



September 12, 2017

Evacuate for hurricane, lose your job. Is this a great country or what?



How Silicon Valley is erasing your individuality. The perils of monopoly.



The religious right is winning.



Equifax’s Maddening Unaccountability.



Economic roots of post-truth politics.



Seven Days of the Heroin Epidemic.



September 11, 2017

‘Straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale’: Insiders claim CIA director Pompeo is turning agency into a Christian hotbed.



How Wall Street Is Cashing In on Climate Catastrophe. Come hell or high water, the finance industry will make a killing.



Instincts.



Debunking the myth: “An armed society is a polite society.”



The Othering of “Economic Illiteracy.”



I’ve seen the reality of what happens after disasters like Hurricane Irma – it’s different to what you’ve been told.



Bacteria Use Brainlike Bursts of Electricity to Communicate.



Are elite universities ‘safe spaces’? Not if you’re starting a union.



September 10, 2017

US forecast models have been pretty terrible during Hurricane Irma. NOAA’s best weather model seems to be getting worse with hurricanes, not better.



In a Summer of Wildfires and Hurricanes, My Son Asks “Why Is Everything Going Wrong?” The catastrophic results of climate change that even many “liberals” assured us wasn’t gonna happen is happening.



Researchers find secret, warm oasis beneath Antarctica’s ice that could be home to undiscovered species.



Clinton and Blair and Brown re-launched the left, or murdered it, depending on your point of view, with their new idea. Leave wealth with the wealthy and give the poor debt. Free the financial world from silly FDR-era restraints and irksome, stupid regulations and allow a rising tide of debt to float all boats.



Equifax Lobbied To Kill Rule Protecting Victims Of Data Breaches.



Equifax Screwed Up Its Data Breach From Nearly Every Angle.



How can you go about finding ‘who you really are’ if the whole idea of the one true self is a big fabrication?



As Planet Rages With Fires and Storms, Ire Aimed at Murderous Climate Denialism.



The Bad Science Behind Campus Response to Sexual Assault. Assertions about how trauma physiologically impedes the ability to resist or coherently remember assault have greatly undermined defense against assault allegations. But science offers little support for these claims.



September 9, 2017

The Department of Justice Is Overseeing the Resegregation of American Schools.



We inhale up to 10 billion mold spores daily; here’s why you haven’t died yet.



Cassini, Römer and the Velocity of Light.