Wes Anderson Centered
When Living Wage Is Minimum Wage →
Finding information on who would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage is surprisingly difficult. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes an annual report that gives a breakdown of minimum-wage earners by age, sex, education and other factors. But the report does not distinguish, for example, between a 22-year-old single mom trying to feed her kids and a 22-year-old college student working a few shifts to keep her debt manageable.
Worse, the official report provides no information on people who earn just above the minimum wage — even though that group dwarfs minimum-wage workers. To learn more about this larger group, we have to look at the Current Population Survey, a monthly review conducted by the Census Bureau, which allows for a much more detailed analysis of the low-wage workforce.
Good data and good data analysis may not always provide us with answers, but it will always expand the conversation.
Child’s Illustrated Guide to Recognizing Satanic Ritual Abuse →
In 1990, in the middle of the moral panic over Satanic ritual abuse (an almost entirely imaginary phenomenon), Doris Sanford published "Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy," which was "based on months of intensive research into the nature and practice of satanic ritual abuse." Sanford claimed that "Any child who has been ritually abused will recognize the validity of this story."
But wait—pictures!
/via this isn’t happiness
‘It’s time for us to start making the news a little nerdier.’ →
At other times, commentators cite statistics even as they decry their uselessness. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, wrote a blog post on the eve of the 2012 election that critiqued those of us who were “too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us.” Instead, “all the vibrations” were right for a Romney victory, she wrote.
Among other things, Noonan cited the number of Romney yard signs, and the number of people at his rallies, as evidence that he was bound to win. But these “vibrations” are, in fact, quantifiable. You could hire a team of stringers to drive around randomly selected neighborhoods in swing states and count the yard signs. And news accounts routinely estimate the number of attendees at political rallies. Noonan could have formulated a testable hypothesis: Do yard signs predict election outcomes better than polls do?
The problem is not the failure to cite quantitative evidence. It’s doing so in a way that can be anecdotal and ad-hoc, rather than rigorous and empirical, and failing to ask the right questions of the data.
I’ve read a few of the features that FiveThirtyEight has published already and they all looked pretty promising for the site overall. And while I can’t swear that I will always understand what FiveThirtyEight is talking about, I’m certain that I will be giddy when they keep making traditional pundits look silly.
‘This is huge, as big as it gets.’ →
Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.
Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved.
If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.
The Times piece I’m linking to above is a little longer, a little more jargon-y, but it includes this wonderful layman’s breakdown:
Click to enlarge.
This piece from The New Yorker’s Elements blog is a bit more, no pun intended, down to earth.
Either way—sounds like today is a big day. I’m sure it’ll be all over the evening news.
‘Do just boys play hockey?’ →
Like most good Canadian kids, my three-and-a-half year old daughter Elizabeth loves hockey. She’s been to somewhere close to 175 hockey games in her young life, beginning when she was just three months old. With credentials like that she’s about ready to adopt a pseudonym and start her very own NHL trade rumors blog.
All joking aside, about two weeks before the Sochi Olympics began, Elizabeth asked my wife Kristi and I, “Do just boys play hockey?” Shocked, we quickly explained that in just a few short weeks she’d be able to see, to use her words, “girls” play hockey on TV.
I used to see stories like Bradley’s as cheesy. I used to view incidents like Shannon Szabados becoming the first female player in Southern Professional Hockey League history as stunts.
And then I had a kid—a daughter, to be precise.
And now everything is different.
Font Men
You may not have heard of Jonathan Hoefler or Tobias Frere-Jones but you've seen their work. Before their recent split, they collectively ran the most successful and well respected type design studio in the world, creating fonts used by everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the President of the United States.
Font Men, gives a peek behind the curtain into the world of Jonathan and Tobias. Tracking the history of their personal trajectories, sharing the forces that brought them together and giving an exclusive look at the successful empire they built together.
I think calling what’s happening between them a “split” is mildly underselling it.
Your Dislike of the ‘True Detective’ Finale Says More About You Than the Show →
The season finale answered all of TD’s looming questions, but some fans, having already opened so many mental doors into labyrinthine passages, were loath to see most of them get shut behind them. Fan speculation about who the show’s big bad would be led down some semi-plausible avenues (Marty’s father-in-law is the Yellow King!) and some sillier ones (the Yellow King is Maggie!). A lot of fan theories centered on the idea that Marty’s daughter Audrey would be directly implicated in the Carcosa cult’s misdeeds, even after the seventh episode revealed that she had grown up just fine. I was a little horrified by how many online comments were versions of “What a rip-off that Marty’s daughter didn’t get abused by the cult!”
I had no idea that Molly Lambert was recapping T.D., but it comes as no surprise that I 100% agreed with her take on the finale. Reading this got me even more excited for the upcoming season of Mad Men, even more so that the actual Mad Men promo material, because it means I’ll get to read her recaps.
‘It doesn’t have to be understood to be real.’ →
Peter hadn’t seen his son for two years at the time of the Sandy Hook killings, and, even with hindsight, he doesn’t think that the catastrophe could have been predicted. But he constantly thinks about what he could have done differently and wishes he had pushed harder to see Adam. “Any variation on what I did and how my relationship was had to be good, because no outcome could be worse,” he said. Another time, he said, “You can’t get any more evil,” and added, “How much do I beat up on myself about the fact that he’s my son? A lot.”
The further we get from the Sandy Hook Massacre, the less sure I feel that gun control laws are the appropriate response to trying to prevent something like it from ever happening again. And that isn’t to say that I don’t believe in gun control; my purely theoretical beliefs about guns would have second amendment supporters foaming at the mouth. But Solomon’s piece about Peter Lanza and his deeply damaged son tells a complex, nuanced tale about an ongoing struggle that, with the clarity of time spent reflecting and time spent away from the raw emotions, obviously could not have been easily solved by one action or even two or three. And not to be spoiler-y, but what Peter Lanza admits in the final paragraph of this piece—it cut me to the bone.
If you find the piece as compelling as I did, consider listening to the author on this week’s episode of The New Yorker Out Loud podcast—he goes into more detail about the interview process and discusses the themes and questions he raises.
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey →
I finally got to watch the first episode, “Standing Up in the Milky Way,” of the Neil deGrasse Tyson-hosted rebooted series last night and I was floored. This is must-watch television. Lucky for you, it’s available on Hulu right now.
I cannot wait until my daughter is old enough to see this series.