Events

By now you may have heard that Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who oversees elections in Georgia, and who is running for governor of Georgia this coming Tuesday, claims the Democratic Party hacked the voter registration database. No. What happened is, when the state Democratic Party's voter protection director reached out to his office directly after being alerted to a gaping data vulnerability, he turned his own malfeasance into an attack on his opposition: By the time Democrats reached out to...

We're two days from the mid-terms, but naturally pundits are thinking about what the vote will tell us about the next presidential race: Trump’s eventual adversary confronts a daunting balancing act: He or she must be tougher than usual without being callous, mingle the right measure of pugilism with optimism, and avoid the self-examination and self-recrimination that never trap Trump. But for starters, Trump’s Democratic opponent must emerge. And that will be tricky in a field of prospective candidates...

It turns out, cemeteries provide really good observational data on climate change: [T]he value of this greenspace has only grown as the communities around them have densified and urbanized — leaving cemeteries as unique nature preserves. In the case of Mount Auburn, people have consciously planted diverse trees, shrubs, and flowers from all over the world and cared for them tenderly over decades or even centuries. In other cases, though, plants that might otherwise be replaced by foreign varietals can...

This morning's sunrise in Chicago, at 7:26, will be the latest until 6 November 2021. It is not the latest possible sunrise; that would be the one we'll have at 7:29 on 6 November 2027 (and had on 5 November 2016). I do not really understand the law passed in 2007 that moved our return to standard time from October to November. Who wants to wake up before dawn? Not me. Tomorrow the sun rises at 6:28. (I will probably do the same around 8.)

This morning we in the US got the news that the employment rebound that started under President Obama has continued, giving us the best employment picture in 50 years. Yet at the same time, despite robust wage growth in some places, families still feel squeezed. The Economist suggests this may come in part from business concentration depressing wages through the same mechanism through which monopsonies increase prices: In perfectly competitive markets, individual firms wishing to sell their widgets must...

When I moved three weeks ago, I switched a couple of bookshelves around and thought more consciously about where I put my books. For instance, I put all the books I haven't read in one place: The problem is, this bookshelf only contains books I haven't read yet. In fairness to myself, people gave me maybe 15% of them. And I'm pretty sure one or two are on loan. Still...no more books until I finish these! (Unless something really interesting comes out.)

No, we have not wiped out 60% of all animals, FFS: Since Monday, news networks and social media have been abuzz with the claim that, as The Guardian among others tweeted, “humanity has wiped out 60 percent of animals since 1970”—a stark and staggering figure based on the latest iteration of the WWF’s Living Planet report. But that isn’t really what the report showed. Ultimately, they found that between 1970 and 2014, the size of vertebrate populations has declined by 60 percent on average. That is...

CityLab discusses a University of Richmond project to map Congressional elections going back to 1840: “Electing the House” makes the most robust and comprehensive dataset to-date of Congressional elections available in a user-friendly format, offering additional dimension of insight into the current political moment. It is the first part of a series, which may include visualizations of historical data on Senate elections in the future. Theproject features an interactive map, presenting each district...

So, I'm "Crash" Davis today. (There's a deeper message there.) My company didn't field a lot of costumes today, sadly. So there was a small possibility that I could end up an Internet meme before 5pm. Updates as the situation develops.

The journalistic fetish with trying to find balance when none exists has cropped up today in reporting on President Trump's false assertion that he can end birthright citizenship by executive order. He simply has no such power; the 14th Amendment lays out the rule in plain English. Of course, the president doesn't actually intend to draft such an order. He was lying. Anyone paying attention to the man for any length of time can see that, except perhaps his base, who tend to have a limited grasp of what...