Andrew Sullivan points to Ron Brownstein on the Census Bureau report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage in 2008 to find that on every major measurement… …the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during...

Just back from kayaking on the Oconee River, sitting on the launch-ramp waiting for my ride, I perused the NYTimes on my iphone. There I found this massive investigation of water pollution: Almost four decades ago, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to force polluters to disclose the toxins they dump into waterways and to give regulators the power to fine or jail offenders. States have passed pollution statutes of their own. But in recent years, violations of the Clean Water Act have risen steadily...

How I use RSS. RSS is too slow. RSS is dead. No it’s not. Rest in peace. RSS is alive and well. We’re seeing the rise of the real-time web. I’m reminded that back in the day I had a small spat with Fred Wilson when he said Email is dead. And I said no it’s not. I felt vindicated this week when Wilson implored, Don’t forget about email. Indeed, everything old is new again and many of us are saying, as danah boyd so eloquently rants today: For my own sanity, I need one...

Andrew Sullivan: [Alan Turing] was one of the greatest minds of modern time, a founding father of computer science, and his legendary breaking of the Enigma Code may have been a tipping point in the struggle against Nazism. Few men have contributed so much to human learning or to his country’s survival. But Turing was persecuted into suicide by the homophobia of his time and barred from entering the US because he was a homosexual (now America reserves that distinction to homosexuals with HIV)....

The upside of the Kindle’s tether could be that when lost or stolen, Amazon would use its technology to help you get it back. Don’t count on it. The NYTimes: Samuel Borgese, for instance, is still irate about the response from Amazon when he recently lost his Kindle. After leaving it on a plane, he canceled his account so that nobody could charge books to his credit card. Then he asked Amazon to put the serial number of his wayward device on a kind of do-not-register list that would render...

Ostensibly because of this…. Keith Olbermann is going after Glenn Beck. Via James Joyner, “Somehow, this reminds me of Mad’s long-running Spy vs. Spy series.” [Link mine] KatRose calls it A Truly Worthy Cause. She goes on to use her academic access to quote local media accounts of Beck’s career as a morning zoo schlock jock. She finds “no smoking guns.” I find all of it a bit depressing. Sunstein’s an equal opportunity target. Here my defense of him...

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (08-205), the Supreme Court case that will decide whether the government has the right to restrict corporate political advocacy or whether such regulation is a violation of the First Amendment, is set for re-argument on Wednesday. The case originated in the past term. SCOTUS blog has a full argument preview. In a segment entitled Is McCain-Feingold Censorship? Bill Moyers Journal had Trevor Potter, president and general counsel of The Campaign Legal...

Does anyone still believe that the Republicans entered into negotiations on health care with a good faith belief that compromise could be achieved? Rudy Giuliani certainly does. On Meet the Press this morning, Giuliani explained why he believes it was President Obama who never made a good faith effort to bring Republicans on board. This clip shows Giuliani was given his due to explain his side of the debate. But when Harold Ford Jr., chairman of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, got turn...

Inside Higher Ed wonders, What’s that saying about glass houses? The chief lawyer for South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has sent letters to Clemson University, the Medical University of South Carolina and the University of South Carolina asking about their use of state-owned or leased aircraft, and who travels on such flights, The Greenville News reported. The article noted that the governor’s new interest in such issues comes as the governor is facing a barrage of criticism over his use...

Ezra Klein has a column today in the WaPo’s Food section. In it he ponders, Is Technology a Friend or Foe to Food? A 2003 study [link to abstract or purchase] by economists David Cutler, Ed Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro found that the rise in obesity over the past few decades could not be explained simply by food becoming cheaper or people consuming more meals in restaurants. It was the result of technological achievement. The major differences in caloric intake aren’t due to larger meals....

This one’s made its way around my office today. Technically Incorrect: [C]onsider the plight of Vicki Walker, an accountant with ProCare Health in Auckland, New Zealand. According to the trusty New Zealand Herald, ProCare, in dismissing Walker, told her that her e-mail style had caused ripples of disturbance in the serene landscape of her fellow workers’ minds. Her sins, for there were reportedly several, were that she used capital letters, bold typefaces and, perish the mere concept,...

I am a long-time critic of sex-offender registries (see, most recently, here). Part of the problem is we’re too quick to use the sex-offender label — an estimated 674,000 people appear on registries across the country — diluting its efficacy. Another is that even with registries we are too often too trusting to recognize the wolf at the door. But the bottom line is sex-offender registries don’t work. And the Phillip Garrido case clearly demonstrates the limits of sex offender...

You might remember that last week I pointed to Jonah Lehrer on Mirror Neutrons and porn. This week he’s guest posting for Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. His debut post yesterday was instigated by this LA Times story on the normalization of pot. Jonah says pot may one day be the new Prozac: I recently moved to Los Angeles and I'm still adjusting to all the medical marijuana stores – there are two within a mile of my apartment. And it's not just the dispensaries, with their...

UPDATE: It’s back Here’s what happened. ———— I didn’t notice because Gmail is still accessible via IMAP and POP, so I’m getting it via Mail and Outlook. It’s also apparently accessible via iGoogle. The official Google Twitter account, 18 minutes ago: We’re aware that people are having trouble accessing Gmail. We’re working on fixing it. Apologies for the inconvenience http://bit.ly/31kL4B The link goes to their status page (which...

Jordan Golson, responding to Gene Munster’s claims — he thinks we’ll see Apple TV by 2011 — says maybe: Munster also thinks the Mac maker is going to launch a television that wirelessly syncs with your other Apple devices, and predicts an Apple set-top box with TV input and DVR capabilities. Both Chris Albrecht and I think most of that stuff is bunk, but I’m going to have to disagree with my colleague on this TV subscription deal. A lot of the pieces fit together too nicely...

Errors begin to tell the story… The Independent: In our article, “Annie get your lawyer: Leibovitz sued over $24m loan” [link] (1 August 2009) we quoted an anonymous source who said that Art Capital Group were ‘pretty scary guys, they are predatory lenders’. The article also included a statement from Annie Leibovitz’s publicist that the lawsuit brought by Art Capital Group is part of its continued harassment and attention-getting efforts. We accept that the allegations are false...

He’s not big on unwed mothers or no-fault divorce either. The Left is having a field day with Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell’s law school thesis (PDF) from CBN University. Founded by Pat Robertson and named for his Christian Broadcasting Network, the school is now known as Regent University. TPMMuckraker has the juiciest excerpts and this DNC statement out today: In Bob McDonnell’s preferred Virginia, women would be stigmatized for choosing to work outside...

Kathleen Deveny questions our squeamishness about the C word: [A]s the proud owner of the anatomical bit derided by the word in question, I have begun to wonder why we ever got so worked up about it in the first place. Why has it retained the power to outrage when other coarse language has found its way onto the playground? The C word has been in use since at least 1230, according to the Oxford English Dictionary online, when it referred to a street name, Gropecuntelane (bet I can guess what went...

Farhad Manjoo marshal’s the evidence that browsing at work makes us more productive: Indeed, there’s no empirical evidence that unfettered access to the Internet turns people into slackers at work. The research shows just the opposite. Brent Corker, a professor of marketing at the University of Melbourne, recently tested how two sets of workers—one group that was blocked from using the Web and another that had free access—perform various tasks. Corker found that those who could use...

In Vanity Fair: CNN changed the nature of politics and political reporting by compressing the time it took for something to happen, for it to become widely known, and for newsmakers and the public to react to it (i.e., the news cycle) to half a day—whereas the newspaper news cycle, from next-day publication to day-after reaction, was 48 hours, and network television’s news cycle, from one day’s evening news to the next day’s evening news, was 24 hours. Politico brings the news cycle down...

His Vanity Fair pieces were a guilty pleasure for me. From his CNN obit: Called “Nick” by his friends, Dunne was putting the finishing touches on his final novel, which he said he planned to call “Too Much Money,” when his health took a turn for the worse. He flew to Germany earlier this month for another round of stem cell treatments at the same Bavarian clinic where the late Farrah Fawcett was treated. He was hospitalized upon his return to New York, then sent home. As a...

And in other news…. Microsoft apologized Tuesday for using photo editing techniques to change the race of a person depicted on the company’s Web site. In a photo on the company’s U.S. Web site, three businesspeople–one black, one white and one Asian are shown as part of a pitch for Microsoft’s business productivity software. In the same photo on the site of Microsoft’s Polish subsidiary, a white head is placed over the black person’s body, although the hand...

WaPo: Swine flu could infect half the U.S. population this fall and winter, hospitalizing up to 1.8 million people and causing as many as 90,000 deaths — more than double the number that occur in an average flu season, according to an estimate from a presidential panel released Monday. That panel, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), released both a massive report assessing H1N1 preparations and recommendations. Ezra Klein on our health care system: We have...

Ted Talks: Eric Giler wants to untangle our wired lives with cable-free electric power. Here, he covers what this sci-fi tech offers, and demos MIT’s breakthrough version, WiTricity [Wikipedia entry] — a near-to-market invention that may soon recharge your cell phone, car, pacemaker. Endgadget: What started out as an MIT project two years ago has now progressed into a full-fledged company — ladies and gentlemen, meet WiTricity Corp [link]… Based on magnetic induction, the...

Jonah Lehrer is a fascinating fellow. A contributing editor at Wired, he’s the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist and How We Decide. I became familiar with him through his work on WNYC’s Radio Lab. Today he got to thinking about mirror neurons: Mirror neurons are a classic illustration of a scientific idea that’s so elegant and intriguing our theories get ahead of the facts. They’re an anatomical quirk rumored to solve so many different cognitive problems that one almost...