Kevin Drum 🕸

Kylie Jenner wore a faux lion head to Paris Fashion Week and got a thumbs-up from PETA: In a statement to DailyMail.com, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk praised Jenner and Shayk for possibly making a statement against trophy hunting....Newkirk also urged the fashion stars to give up using wool products, which PETA says leads to the ...continue reading "Do we need to be more sensitive toward silkworms?"

Dan McLaughlin got caught recently by a speed camera and then, a few days later, received a citation in the mail. Normally, that would just be one of those things: What is obnoxious, however, is that the pretext for this particular ticket is “speeding in a school zone” even though it was based on a ...continue reading "How come no one knows how to drive in a school zone?"

Today is astronomy week. First up is our newest comet, C/2022 E3, aka "The Green Comet." Comet photography is tricky. Normal subjects, like galaxies or a nebulas, don't move across the field of stars, so you can tell your scope to guide based on star positions and everything will be fine. But if you do ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

I don't remember who pointed me to this, but here's a short excerpt from a 2022 survey done by Populace, an education think tank, about what people expect of K-12 education: Only a third of Americans have college degrees, so I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that "prepare a meal" ranks higher than "prepare ...continue reading "What do we want from our school systems?"

Here's an incarceration chart from my buddy Rick Nevin: It looks like incarceration rates went down in both 2020 and 2021, and indeed they did. Between 2019 and 2021 the prison incarceration rate for ages 18-19 declined from 1.07% to 0.84% to 0.55%. For the entire age cohort of 18-24 year-olds, prison incarceration rates went ...continue reading "Incarceration rates for the young continue to drop hard and fast"

You've probably heard that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has banned the new AP African American test because it is "inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value." No further explanation or detail was provided, so nobody knows precisely what this means. However, if you're curious about which sections of the test probably offend ...continue reading "Raw data: The AP African American Studies test"

Apparently Britain's National Health Service is having problems these days. What's the solution? More privatization? More accountability?  More doctors from overseas? I don't want to pretend that the NHS's problems aren't complex. But at least one of them is pretty simple. Consider this chart from a couple of years ago: This is plain enough. In ...continue reading "BREAKING: Tories slashed spending on NHS and service cratered"

Here are average SAT scores since 1980: These scores have been adjusted for a couple of renorming and recentering changes since 1980, so they're comparable from year to year. The exception is 2017, when a scoring change was made that can't be adjusted for. Scores from 2017-2022 are presented with no adjustments. It's an odd ...continue reading "Raw data: SAT scores over time"

By popular request I have searched for a simple comment editing plug-in. I found one called Simple Comment Editing Plug-In, which sounds like just the thing. Anyway, I installed it, so now you can allegedly edit your comments within ten minutes of posting them. Give it a whirl and let me know if it works. ...continue reading "Comments can now be edited"

Here is Charlie watching the second round of the Australian Open. He was, of course, rooting for the unseeded young American Jenson Brooksby to beat the jötunn of Norway, Casper Ruud. Which he did. Mainly, though, Charlie just liked watching the little pong thingie that kept going back and forth across the screen.

Sami Scheetz, a state representative in Iowa, tweets today about a bill introduced by state Republicans that restricts the kinds of food that can be purchased with SNAP (food stamps): It's obvious that this is intended to make low-income workers on SNAP even more miserable than they already are. But there's more. As the list ...continue reading "Iowa Republicans working hard to make poor people even more miserable"

Which state has suffered the worst change in its economy over the past 12 months? Here are the bottom 20 in job openings and layoffs: Oddly, there are only five states that are on both lists (Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, Indiana, and Utah). You'd think there would be overlap, wouldn't you?

Several months ago Donald Trump lost his bizarre lawsuit against an array of his worst imagined enemies. On Thursday his enemies had their say: A Florida-based federal judge has ordered nearly $1 million in sanctions against Donald Trump and his attorney Alina Habba, calling the former president a “mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial ...continue reading "Donald Trump ordered to pay Hillary Clinton $172,000"

This is the dome of the crematorium at the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris—permanent resting place of Jim Morrison and lots of other famous folk. It's a great picture because there's scaffolding covering the entire building right now, which extends up to about an inch below what you can see from this angle. You'd ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Uber-blogger-turned-substacker Matt Yglesias was profiled in the Washington Post last week, so now everyone is talking about Matt Yglesias. What's his secret? Why is he so popular? Whatever you happen to think of the quality, wit, or erudition of Matt's writing, there's no question that one of his talents is sheer quantity. He can churn ...continue reading "Quote of the day: Putting your fingers on the keyboard"

Nouriel Roubini is . . . not optimistic these days: What I have called megathreats others have called a “polycrisis” — which the Financial Times recently named its buzzword of the year. For her part, Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, speaks of a “confluence of calamities”. The world economy, she ...continue reading "I would like to never hear the word “polycrisis” again"

All year long I kept hearing that labor unions were making a comeback in 2022. Apparently I was misled: The good news, such as it is, is that the number of private sector union members went up by about 200,000. But that was only because the number of total workers went up. The unionization rate ...continue reading "Raw data: Union membership continues to fall"

Check out the latest numbers for PPI inflation: PPI is basically inflation at the wholesale level: it's the price that domestic producers get for the initial sale of their products, and it's often a forerunner of consumer inflation. As usual, I'm showing monthly inflation that's been annualized. Headline PPI came in at -5.8% and core ...continue reading "Today brings yet more evidence that inflation is falling"

This is from the "Things That Make You Go Hmmm" file. It's the pediment (?) of a building in Paris photographed from the Coulée Verte.

Brad Plumer says on Twitter Don't think I understood how dramatic China's demographic shift was until I saw this graph. Let's take a look. Here's the chart Brad is talking about: That is indeed pretty startling. Then again, here's the same chart for the United States: This isn't quite as startling, but it's not wildly ...continue reading "China’s demographic plunge started in 1990, but crashed starting in 2018"