March 22, 2019

Why Gen Z Loves Closed Captioning. I’m Gen X and I generally turn on closed captioning for any movie or show these days.



A multicellular way of life for a multipartite virus. Holy hell viruses are weird.



There Is No Reason to Cross the U.S. by Train. But I Did It Anyway.



How the American fervor for deregulation contributed to the 737 Max crashes.



A Beautiful If Evil Strategy. Someone who understands the system and is therefore not a blithering idiot.



Serving is skilled labor. Despite more and more Americans working in the service industry, these jobs still aren’t generally considered worthy careers.



ask the readers: when you’re the chronically sick coworker.



March 21, 2019

More Than Meets the Nose.



Students don’t seem to be getting much out of higher education.



Rules for Autocomplete.



As air pollution gets worse, a dystopian accessory is born. The air is getting more dangerous to breathe all over the world — and a suite of companies are hoping to capitalize with a new fashion item.



New study provides evidence that we need different drugs for men and women.



Startups Lose in a Low-Rate World, and the Fed Is Blaming Itself.



Fermi Satellite clocks ‘cannonball’ pulsar speeding through space.



Dokos shipwreck.



Why rich parents are more likely to be unethical.



Sutor, ne ultra crepidam.



It just became easier for employers to dump retirees’ pensions.



Hating Big Pharma Is Good, But Supply-Side Epidemic Theory Is Killing People.



Longer is better.



Factoring the effects of climate change into real estate investments.



March 20, 2019

Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty.



What’s wrong with blaming “information” for political chaos.



America today is not the America that I arrived in. Both the left and the right are arguably in a darker place, pushing their own form of tribal politics—both of which are a threat to America’s liberal democracy, whose core promise is to protect individuals regardless of their tribal affiliation.



The U.S. Wants to Keep the UN in the Dark About Geoengineering Efforts.



Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety.



As expected, we found a positive association between childhood musical enrichment and musical achievement in adulthood. Interestingly, however, the total variance in musical achievement as well as the relative importance of genetic influences increased with a higher level of musical enrichment. Training makes better people even better (increasing achievement and likely cognitive inequality).



Loading Dock Manifesto. Cripes, that is good writing, and I rarely say that.



One year in, Facebook’s big algorithm change has spurred an angry, Fox News-dominated — and very engaged! — News Feed. This is not “time well spent.”



Surprise medical bills lead to liens on homes and crippling debt. The entire economy is becoming more and more scam-based.



March 19, 2019

The Twin Insurgency. The postmodern state is under siege from plutocrats and criminals who unknowingly compound each other’s insidiousness.



The Fed has exacerbated America’s new housing bubble. Loose monetary policy has buoyed assets but did not create meaningful supply.



Excluded by banks, minorities in California became their own lenders.



Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right – after 2,469 years.



Drug which makes human blood ‘lethal’ to mosquitoes can reduce malaria spread, study shows.



Beer and pop cans are not being recycled because car and airplane makers don’t like recycled aluminum.



Kamala Harris Celebrates Her Role in the Mortgage Crisis. The Reality Is Quite Different.



Myspace apparently lost 12 years’ worth of music, and almost no one noticed.



It takes a thousand times more water to grow an acre of crops for human consumption, than it takes to grow an acre of cow on wild range.



A recent study by the Public Policy Institute that found that annual retail prices for more than 100 top brand name medications used by chronic sufferers have, on average, more than tripled in cost since 2006.



Role of muscle loss in the age-associated reduction in VO2 max.



The Male Feminist Movement Time Forgot.



March 18, 2019

Flawed analysis, failed oversight: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system.



The number of companies involved in drug development today is lower than at any time since 1914.



The Real Reason Middle America Should Be Angry. Like many “flyover” cities, St. Louis’s decline is not mainly a story of deindustrialization, but of decisions in Washington that opened the door to predatory monopoly.



The Disturbing Truth About How Airplanes Are Maintained Today. In the last decade, most of the big U.S. airlines have shifted major maintenance work to places like El Salvador, Mexico, and China, where few mechanics are F.A.A. certified and inspections have no teeth.



The European Union is a liberal empire, and it is about to fall.



Despite criticism of social media for spreading the initial video that the New Zealand terrorist live-streamed, the reality is that authorities and social media worked hard to stop the shooter and also to contain the spread of links to the video. In fact, they may have gone too far in attempting to scrub the Internet of the perpetrator’s presence, making it more difficult to understand how he was radicalized.



Why we should be honest about failure.



Making money with licenses.



March 17, 2019

Exploring the behavior of a gas as it transitions between quantum and classical states.



The Profound Emptiness of Beto O’Rourke.



How Parents Are Robbing Their Children of Adulthood. Today’s ‘snowplow parents’ keep their children’s futures obstacle-free — even when it means crossing ethical and legal boundaries.



Letterlocking: the long-lost art of using paper-folding to foil snoops.



Onium.



Ablative Humanity.



How white supremacists fixate on an all-white Europe that never existed.



Can we handle the truth?



The Decivilization of Venezuela.



As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling.



March 16, 2019

The Amazon Drama.



Silicon Valley’s Fingerprints Are All Over the College Bribery Scandal.



News Organization Like Reuters Supporting The EU Copyright Directive Is A Shameful Support For Censorship.



Major Ice Ages May Be Caused By Tectonic Collisions.



The human cost of insulin in America.This is the list of what Laura Marston has sacrificed to keep herself alive: Her car, her furniture, her apartment, her retirement fund, her dog.



Why Climate Change Pundits Aren’t Convincing Anyone.



Industries turn to Bracewell lobbyists to scuttle product safety rules.



The admissions scandal highlights the “Big Lie” about college: It has nothing to do with education and everything to do with status.



March 15, 2019

To know ourselves, we must first know the Neanderthals.



Meet India’s starry dwarf frog, lone member of newly discovered ancient lineage.



The web we broke.



Capitalist Freedom Is a Farce.



Exercise reduces the startle reflex during periods of unpredictable threat.



Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past.



How a bad business decision may have made the 737 Max vulnerable to crashes.



Google as a search engine is becoming useless.



One company bought all the retail outlets for glasses, used that to force sales of all the eyewear companies and jacked up prices by as much as 1000%. Economy based on scams and “experts.” Great.



Pests and the plant defenses against them drive diversity in tropical rainforests.



We Can Thank Agriculture and Soft Food for the ‘F’ Word, Claims Provocative New Study. I find this fairly likely. Morphology shapes phonology.



Residents born in state.



Ketamine works great for depression and other conditions, and costs $10/dose; the new FDA-approved “ketamine” performs badly in trials and costs a fortune.



March 14, 2019

Cancer Patients Are Getting Robotic Surgery. There’s No Evidence It’s Better. High-tech surgical robots aren’t an improvement over traditional operations, the F.D.A. warns. For some patients, the robots may be worse. But see, they can charge you 10x as much. That’s “better” in their eyes.



Abolish the Billionaire Class.



Gentrification Is a Feature, Not a Bug, of Capitalist Urban Planning.



The Politics of The Green New Deal: Part 1.



How the Rich Really Play, “Who Wants To Be An Ivy Leaguer?”



Destruction from sea level rise in California could exceed worst wildfires and earthquakes, new research shows.



Colbert Smears Tulsi Gabbard To Her Face While Telling Zero Jokes. Establishment patsy, like anyone else who makes it onto TV.



Pressure Cooker: the morality of home cooking.



Give me back my monolith.



Facebook’s Data Deals Are Under Criminal Investigation.



With days to go until the #CopyrightDirective vote, #Article13’s father admits it requires filters and says he’s OK with killing Youtube. Most media companies would be fine with rolling back to 1990.



Rewarding Neglect and Punishing Investment in Struggling Neighborhood.



March 13, 2019

Research carried out in partnership between the nonprofit Hives for Humanity and the University of British Columbia showed that honey collected from urban beehives can accurately measure how polluted a city is.



Vaccines Against Measles And Other Diseases Confer Added Protections.



You can simultaneously think markets are a useful civic tool and recognize obvious, egregious failures. Alas, most people can’t actually hold two ideas that conflict in some way in their head at once.



Modern Monetary Theory: Democrats Should Try New Economic Ideas. QE did not work out fine: massive asset inflation, bubble.



Your Environment Is Cleaner. Your Immune System Has Never Been So Unprepared.



This story of how rich people schemed and broke the law to get kids into college is a perfect capsule of America now.



On Surveillance in the Workplace.