Justin Katz
By its nature, advocacy journalism glosses over the details that many would consider crucial. Headlines from a pair of such articles by Katie Mulvaney in the Providence Journal illustrate the point: Six months pregnant with nowhere to go – an unhoused woman’s plight on RI’s streets After months of sleeping on the street, pregnant woman finally…
These stories come much too quickly to keep up, digest, and consider, but Mel’s review of Letitia James’s campaign finance reports a few weeks ago is worth a look: What might we find in RI, if we looked?
Letting 17-year-olds vote in primaries if they’ll be eligible to vote in the associated general elections is certainly reasonable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t note a pair of conspicuous questions along the way. Firstly, why do Democrats seem always to want to expand voting toward the most manipulable constituencies? Secondly (and perhaps relatedly), why…
In the last couple decades, Americans (at least those who occupy seats in academia and mainstream media) appear to have lost their ability to distinguish between upholding a principle and supporting any given people who might benefit from that principle from time to time. Nobody likes to defend groups that are broadly deplored, like Nazis…
This legislation is hardly the most-pressing matter facing Rhode Island at the moment: Sen. Frank A. Ciccone III and Rep. Enrique George Sanchez are sponsoring legislation to require most businesses in Rhode Island to pay their employees weekly. Has either of these legislators ever had to make payroll for a business? One suspects they simply…
John DePetro and Justin Katz explore various subjects about which journalists aren’t free to be clear.
Yesterday, I listened to Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy album all the way though for maybe the first time because it’s the 574th best-selling album, and I’m tracing that list from the top. The band’s prior recording, Vs., had been such a disappointment that I didn’t bother with its follow-up. Vs. came out while I was a…
This is certainly not where I’d have placed the dots if somebody asked me to guess: That Rhode Island College is the least expensive, and doesn’t seem to produce a great effect isn’t a surprise. Johnson & Whales, however, is surprising, and New England Institute of Technology is even more so, both in how expensive…
John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss the ways in which Rhode Island’s political elites distract and mislead the public.
The focus of the related article is explaining why the American Northwest was unique in the country in its increase in emissions from 2022 to 2023, but Rhode Island is a conspicuous red dot on Michael Thomas’s map: If accurate, this result shows “net zero” proclamations to be so much hot air, but what happened?…
