Quick Read
Overly frightened people with a casual attitude about others’ right to disagree with them may be talking as if you’re unleashing death bombs on your community if you don’t subject your children to COVID-19 vaccines, but nationally, at least, you’re not alone: Around 29% of parents with kids ages 5 to 11 said their kid…
Our system is set up to ensure that infrastructure, like school buildings, is left to rot. That dynamic is inevitable when (1) budgeting and negotiations are tilted so heavily in favor of labor and (2) taxpayers can be bullied or forced into spending the additional money to repair or replace buildings when they become bad…
Somewhere in the wilds of Rhode Island progressive social media in the past couple months, I came across the Rhode Island Department of Corrections’ “Fiscal Year 2020 Annual Population Report.” I think the context in which it was deployed like a statistical weapon was to support the claim that inmates at the state Adult Correctional…
As we construct the stories by which we understand reality, we tend to romanticize people when they’re generalized. In healthcare, for instance, patients are “people who need help,” and we have a set of emotions and moral ideas associated with them as a concept. The problem is people need all sorts of kinds of help,…
One of the questions on my mind when I thought to create the Rhode Island Public Schools October Enrollment application in Anchor Rising’s People’s Data Armory was the effect of COVID and shutdowns. As the chart below shows, enrollment in 2020 was down about 3% from the prior year, and it slid a bit rather than…
Nobody should feel encouraged by statements from Democrat Mayor Jorge Elorza or the other Democrats who run the city after another shooting in Providence on Saturday night. Elorza may claim to “understand that our community needs and deserves to feel safe,” but that isn’t possible when authorities refuse to be clear about what’s going on.…
John the Baptist’s suggestion to Roman soldiers in today’s Gospel reading at Roman Catholic Mass has always left me feeling as I was missing some historical context: And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” He said to them in reply, “Whoever has two tunics should share with the person who has none.…
Ed Driscol draws our attention to an essay on Tablet in which Liel Leibovitz, which definitely deserves the “read the whole thing” tag: You may be among the increasing numbers of people going through The Turn right now. Having lived through the turmoil of the last half decade—through the years of MAGA and antifa and rampant…
Lean back a moment and clear your eyes. If you’re older than thirty, recall lessons you learned when you were young — that it is always wrong to discriminate against people based entirely on the color of their skin. Now read this short paragraph: One of the [Providence school] district’s current incentives, which will continue…
Attitudes like this, from former Providence Journal reporter and University of Connecticut journalism professor Mike Stanton fascinate me. Commenting on Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee’s hesitance to impose a statewide mask mandate, Stanton writes: Yes, poor leadership. Because it’s contrary to what the doctors & experts recommend. I went to PPAC the other night; they required…
