Category: Kevin Drum

This is a battle that I suppose I have no hope of winning, but it would sure be nice if journalists (and marketing folks) could stop throwing around the term AI for everything that works a little better than it did last year. It’s true that some of the advances in things like machine learning,…

Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.The Washington Post has today’s least surprising headline: This is so appalling. It doesn’t even matter what the reason is. Maybe it’s mass delusion. Maybe it’s cowardice. Maybe it’s just the…

Here in California, new lockdowns and travel restrictions are the order of the day. This extreme response to rising COVID-19 cases is based on ICU capacity, so it’s perfectly reasonable. However, it’s prompted a spate of articles about how the coronavirus is “raging out of control” in California with an astonishing 22,000 new cases recorded…

The US surpassed 6 deaths per million on Friday. Our trajectory looks scary as hell, though it’s possible that some of this is just making up for the artificial Thanksgiving dip. It might flatten out a bit by next week, though it will certainly keep climbing. Here’s the coronavirus death toll through December 4. The…

Isn’t this adorable? Needless to say, the licking only lasted a few moments, at which point Hopper sensed a change in mood and gave Hilbert a little swat. Then they passed each other on the fence and went their separate ways.

Here’s an interesting chart: This chart comes from a new paper by Taeho Kim of the University of Chicago, who investigated the rate of police-related homicides in cities that adopted body cams vs. those that didn’t. There are, of course, lots of things going on that could mess up these results, so Kim used an…