Quick Read
The headline that the Providence Journal gave to Mark Patinkin’s latest column puts things in a useful context: “It’s just a cold, right? I thought a booster made me invulnerable — but I got COVID.” If we step back a pace and look at things objectively, we might indeed wonder what makes COVID something other than…
This suggestion from Nicole Solas has stayed near the top of my “to post” list for a month because it gets to an important strategic discussion too often rushed through on the Rhode Island right. Nicole retweeted the picture used as the featured image of this post, which was posted by Kara. The “thank you”…
Is it just me or do the people who support mask mandates seem deliberately to be avoiding the points that those in opposition are actually making? At some point after my post responding to his call for a statewide mask mandate, Boston Globe reporter and columnist Dan McGowan tweeted a link to the CDC’s (incredibly one-sided)…
Charter schools offer a prime example of how the easy access to data enabled by Anchor Rising’s People’s Data Armory can shed light on public debate. Listening to public debate about charter schools and how they take money from regular district schools, one gets the impression of advantaged families drawing resources away from disadvantaged ones,…
Activist-paid-as-academic Timmons Roberts of Brown University rends his garments in the Boston Globe that the Transportation & Climate Initiative (TCI; i.e., another layer of gas tax) never managed to ignite. The question of his headline is, “Who killed the TCI?,” which I’ve already answered. In a word, it was Biden, who quickly drove up the cost…
Just about every hot topic these days has something surreal about it — something that’s obviously not true or at least certain, that is affecting how hundreds of millions of people are having to live their lives. An early revelation for me, when I first moved from creative writing toward essay writing, was that an…
Yesterday, a post in this space looked at the way in which Trinity Rep leveraged woke identity politics to bully a Providence Journal theater critic over a critique in her generally positive review of A Christmas Carol. Today, let’s consider a letter that RI ACLU Executive Director Steven Brown (a white man) and Policy Associate Hannah Stern…
Oh, Dan, Dan, Dan. In drug trials, researchers give a control group of participants a placebo (or a pill with no medical effect) because it is understood that just doing something can have an effect on people’s symptoms, or at least their perception of their symptoms. In most cases, the effect is small, which is why…
Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the school-shooting story in Oxford, Michigan, is that it shouldn’t have happened at all, judging from details provided by Tim Meads in the Daily Wire: The morning of the attack, school administrators met with the boy’s parents and showed them disturbing notes found that day indicating the boy was willing…
Judging by social media comments, mainstream media types have been thrilled to hear from NPR that people are dying with COVID-19 at a higher rate in Trump-supporting counties across the United States. Of course, substantive analysis would require many more caveats than our social-media-driven culture tends to address. As the article concedes, the analysis does…