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I’m torn between assuming that chickens must have really strong lobbyists and thinking voters need to begin questioning the priorities of the people they’re putting in office: Neighboring states soon could see an influx of shoppers in search of eggs if Massachusetts lawmakers don’t come to an agreement on a new animal welfare law. New…
A growing set of tools, beginning with charts showing trends in public school enrollment, will help Rhode Islanders bring reality to public debates and government decision-making.
In case you’re wondering (like I did) whether Elon Musk walks the walk he’s talking here, he does: “I think one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate,” Musk explained on Monday evening, as recorded by the New York Post. “And yet, so many people, including smart…
Here’s an interesting take on a policy that’s apparently new to South Kingstown: A local chapter of the nation’s largest teachers union has acknowledged the importance of school choice, at least for its own members. Thanks to an agreement quietly reached between the South Kingstown, Rhode Island, chapter of the National Education Association and the…
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…
The very obscure reference of my subject line is to Jonathan Coulton’s song, “I Crush Everything.” Spoiler alert: It’s about a lonely sea monster that has banished itself to the bottom of the sea because everything it tries to get close to and hug it crushes. The chorus came to mind as I read Dennis…
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…
Wherever you look to find your bogeymen or whether you support some individual or organization or oppose it, modern society absolutely requires you to keep an eye out for the nudging that Joel Kotkin describes: Nudging grew out of research into behavioural economics, and was popularised in Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s 2008 book, Nudge.…
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…