Category: Uncategorized

The Minimum Wage: How Much Is Too Much?

Research suggests that a minimum wage set as high as $12 an hour will do more good than harm for low-wage workers, but a $15-an-hour national minimum wage would put us in uncharted waters, and risk undesirable and unintended consequences. (via The Minimum Wage: How Much Is Too Much? – The New York Times) Krueger… Continue reading The Minimum Wage: How Much Is Too Much?

Why Do We Admire Mobsters?

even as late as the nineteen-twenties, Italians and Italian-Americans were often considered “other” by much of the rest of the country. In fact, many people subscribed to what criminologists call the alien conspiracy theory of organized crime—the idea, as Finckenauer puts it, that “Southern Italians came to us with evil intent to create criminal enterprise… Continue reading Why Do We Admire Mobsters?

Global warming ‘hiatus’ never happened, Stanford scientists say

An apparent lull in the recent rate of global warming that has been widely accepted as fact is actually an artifact arising from faulty statistical methods, Stanford scientists say. … “By using both datasets, nobody can claim that we made up a new statistical technique in order to get a certain result,” said Rajaratnam, who… Continue reading Global warming ‘hiatus’ never happened, Stanford scientists say

What Is The One Fact Humanity Needs To Know?

if you could preserve only one single sentence, I would push for: ‘The natural world is not governed by whimsical gods, but is essentially mechanical and can therefore be understood and then predicted by people, using careful observation, experimentation, and measurement, and importantly by testing your explanations to try to refute them.’ It’s this reiterative… Continue reading What Is The One Fact Humanity Needs To Know?

Female Spies and Gender-Bending Soldiers Changed the Course of the Civil War

In this climate, women made great spies precisely because of the way 19th-century society underestimated them. During the Civil War, they “were able to take society’s ideas about the weakness of womanhood and brilliantly exploit them,” Abbott says. “Women were always supposed to be the victims of war, not the perpetrators. One of my favorite… Continue reading Female Spies and Gender-Bending Soldiers Changed the Course of the Civil War