“Notorious” RBG Credits Brett Kavanaugh for Making Female Law Clerks the Majority
Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.Scott Applewhite/AP Photo Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh squeaked through his confirmation hearing last year after being accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexual assault during a high school party. Women’s groups vigorously fought his confirmation and warned that his presence on the court would pose a significant threat to hard-fought legal…
James Stimson Answers My Questions About the Stimson Mood Index
Yesterday I wrote a post about the latest results of James Stimson’s national mood index, and I had a couple of questions about it. First, I wondered what it meant to say that a lot of people had a “liberal” view on something like inflation or the deficit. Second, I wondered if the increasing liberalness…
The Images Coming out of Hong Kong Are Simply Jawdropping
Hong Kong, Sunday, June 9, 2019. Vincent Yu/AP Photo More than a million people took to the streets in Hong Kong Sunday to protest a proposed law that would allow extraditions from the city to mainland China, a move critics say would give China power to remove political dissidents without input from local authorities and judges.…
Are We Too Pessimistic About Happiness?
I was diddling around with some stuff after reading that New Zealand will henceforth be prioritizing happiness—“well-being and life satisfaction”—over economic growth, and came across this scatterplot about perceived happiness vs. actual happiness: In every single country, the average estimate of happiness is far lower than actual reported happiness. Every single country! In the US,…
Trump Finally Admits His Behavior Is “Not at All ‘Presidential’”
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before leaving the White House in Washington, Wednesday, March 20, 2019.Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo Late Saturday night, President Donald Trump acknowledged that “it is not at all ‘Presidential’” to attack the media the way he had when he criticized MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch, after the news host called Trump a criminal…
How US Government Funds Meant to Stop Poaching May Have Ended up Funding Torture
This story was originally published by HuffPost and is shared here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The House Natural Resources Committee has launched a bipartisan investigation into whether federal conservation grants support organizations linked to alleged human rights abuses overseas. The probe follows a BuzzFeed News investigation in March that found the World Wide Fund for Nature,…