Race and Racism
- ProPublica visualizes racial disparities in educational outcomes, including suspensions, segregation, and achievement, across the United States.
- “Today, white students make up 40 percent of Charlottesville’s enrollment, and African-American students about a third. But white children are about four times as likely to be in Charlottesville’s gifted program, while black students are more than four times as likely to be held back a grade and almost five times as likely to be suspended from school, according to a ProPublica/New York Times examination of newly available district and federal data.” The NYT reports on the same data.
- “Most white Americans will never be affected by affirmative action. So why do they hate it so much?” Carson Byrd in the Washington Post.
- “advances in genetic technology have put white supremacists into a kind of anticipatory lather.”
- “With this incident we’re faced with a kind of catch-22: Genetic ancestry testing is demanded as proof and then denied as proof.” Alondra Nelson on Elizabeth Warren and the geneticization of racial identity.
Climate Change
- “We wrote this report / at your request, and with care. / Will you listen please?” Climate change research Andy Reisinger summarizes the newest IPCC report in a series of haiku.
- “If you want to lie to yourself, hide it in a model.” On the moral choices embedded in climate change economic models.
Economic Sociology
- “Economists don’t just love Uber—the company loves them back.” On “Ubernomics” and the implications of proprietary corporate data.
- “an underappreciated irony of accelerating economic inequality has been the way it has exposed behaviors among the ultra-rich that mirror the supposed “pathologies” of the ultra-poor.” Brooke Harrington reports on an unexpected finding from her work on wealth managers.
- Marxism meets Netflix? Reading “Salt Fat Acid Heat” through the 1844 Manuscripts.
- On the role of court in enforcing predatory inclusion in subprime auto lending.
Watch Your Right
- “18% of Americans now think that false accusations of sexual assault are a bigger problem than attacks that go unreported or unpunished, compared with 13% in November last year.” And other findings from a new Economist survey on #MeToo.
- “YouTube’s design has made it a powerful tool for far-right recruiting. There’s a tremendous library of far-right content on the site, as one might expect on a largely unregulated video uploading service, and the alt-right spends significant effort spreading these videos on alternate platforms.”
Etc
- “Recent studies have shown that performance rates on many statistical tasks increased from four percent to 24 percent when the problems were presented using the natural frequency format.” On improving how we teach and communicate probability.
- Are you a grad student or new PhD with an idea for a survey experiment? Check out TESS!
