It doesn’t pay for animals to miss out on reproductive opportunities. That’s why when a female baboon is at the peak of her fertility cycle, her buttocks get red and swollen, thereby alerting males to their reproductive opportunity. Cattle, too, try to take advantage of fertility, with females getting quite frisky when they are in…
Here is another great picture from the people at Vox. It shows the United States in the middle of OECD countries, when it comes to spending on social services, like healthcare, unemployment, and the like. Despite being in the middle, however, the US is better understood as an outlier, on two extremes of this spectrum….
Let’s face it – us men are disgusting. So public policy experts are left to figure out how to keep us from behaving in our normally disgusting manner. Here’s one approach (thanks to Geoff Riley for bringing it to my attention): Think it will work?
Thanks to the popularity of medical television shows, most people have witnessed hundreds of fictional cardiac arrests in their lifetime. In most of these scenes, the patient loses consciousness, and the medical team rushes to the bedside: “He’s in V-fib.” “Get me the paddles.” The team performs urgent chest compressions for a few seconds. Then…
One year does not a trend make, but it does look like prices for health insurance under Obamacare next year will decline, on average. Ezra Klein, over at Vox.com, produced a nice picture of these prices: Who knows: in the long run, maybe the name of this law – The Affordable Care Act – will…
From time to time in this blog, I take a moment to celebrate fine writing. Here is an example I came across in an article in Smithsonian magazine from May 2014. The author, Corey Powell , was trying to explain how astronomers use gravitational “tug” to indirectly reveal the existence of planets. In other words, they can’t…
A while back, one of my favorite journalists – Sarah Kliff, from Vox – published a picture showing which chain restaurants win the award for offering the highest calorie entrées. I figured it was time to recirculate this gallery of infamy. Here is the Vox picture of these award winners: These are truly staggering sums….
A while back, my friend and colleague Brendan Nyhan sent out a disturbing picture showing that moderate politicians, from both the Democratic and Republican parties, are less likely to run for seats in the House of Representatives than more extreme politicians: Very disturbing trend! It is hard to see the policies of our country improving if…
Friends and family are painfully aware of how obsessed I have become with Beethoven lately. My plan is to have 10 of his piano sonatas in my brain and fingertips at any one time, ready to play by memory on demand. I’ve been listening to his music, studying his scores, and even reading biographies. And…
I expect we all agree that the presidency is not a job for a shrinking violet. We acknowledge that a president without self-confidence would be a disaster in the making. But just how confident do we want our president to be? Is the kind of extroversion that helps people succeed in modern political campaigns also…