Updating a series I started in 2013. Despite what people in my generation were told, it's not true that, "facts are useless in an emergency." Knowing basic facts is the key to detecting bullshit, which thrives in conditions of basic ignorance. In this post I suggest you and your students memorize a small number of…
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Trigger warnings don’t work (in experimental settings)
The movement toward universal content warnings in college courses does not seem to have been justified by evidence of their effectiveness, especially in light of possible downsides.
Journal peer review times, crowdsourced edition (with your help)
How many times have you asked a friend, colleague, mentor, or random social media crowd how long it took to get reviews from a particular journal? Lets expand and deepen that circle a little.
What’s the story? Family demography at the end of progress
Against a perception of normal modernity that is on some kind of track that we can try to get a handle on while we work around distractions like a pandemic, climate change, diverging and growing inequality, the centrifugal tendency of identities to be fragmenting, and policy incoherence.
The Takeaway on Gen-Z, rest of the interview edition
The parts that made it into the show, and the parts that didn't.
The median mother is 30, TV interview edition
When you look at what has happened since the recession in 2008, the decline in birth was pretty dramatic, but it was all among women under age 35.
How do researchers use, and experience, social media?
I made a short survey on how researchers use and experience social media. If you work in an academic or other research setting, in the US, and use social media at least in part for your work, please consider taking a 10- minute survey. Feel free to share! Here's a link: https://bit.ly/3LXGMa0 Thank you!
Overturning Roe and the modern family
Conservatives get one thing right: Abortion rights are a fundamental, clash-of-civilization-level battle. What is at stake, in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is a woman’s autonomy over her own body, yes, but with it the foundation of modern family life.
The pandemic road, with data
Two year follow-up to a post on path dependence.
Mexico City’s program to distribute ivermectin to 200,000 COVID-19 patients, and the bad science that propped it up
They gave ivermectin to thousands of people outside of a controlled experiment. Was that unethical and bad medicine given the state of knowledge in late 2020? Yes.
Family Inequality 