Today at 10:30 ET/9:30 CT AM I an going to be on CNN, talking about the latest campus shooting. I am being paired with John Lott, who argues that more guns cause less crime. His work has been widely and consistently discredited by much better statisticians than me, both his partisan opponents and non-partisan fact…
Say goodbye to the Illinois History Museum. Bruce Rauner has pulled the plug. There’s something populist about museums like this. They tend to be free or cheap, they serve school kids from across the state, and they make our history accessible and interesting. Naturally, Billionaire Bruce isn’t going to permit that sort of thing to…
This was by far the most interesting thing I read yesterday: Menstruation as a Hack by science-writer Suzanne Sadedin. She goes through the whole process by which human fetuses operate as parasites on their mothers (as opposed to in other mammals where the mother’s control the process), thanks to the “ravenous hemochorial placenta.” Therefore, she…
A local story went national yesterday. A mother arrived at school to find her child separated from the other kids and wearing a garbage bag. According to the mother one official defended the practice by saying since there was no rule explicitly against it, it wasn’t actionable. Meanwhile, Chicago Public Schools is cutting vast sums…
I am a cynic about most high-prestige awards, institutions, and other fancy things. Somehow, though, the MacArthur fellowships (aka the “genius” grants) manage to please me every year. Whatever their process, which is mostly opaque, they find both high profile and low profile scholars and creators who just do outstanding work. We’ve had a good…
A proposal to build a home (note: I do not know the people building or running this home, so I cannot vouch for it. I am generally opposed to this kind of large-scale establishment, but some are alright for some people) for adults with developmental disabilities in Atlantic met with opposition. Not in backyard, they…
Well, my move to Wix was a disaster. I did, however, defeat sunk cost bias and moved back here. I’ll be writing more about the lessons of the disaster in the next week or so. Here’s what I wrote this week, even as I continue to work on my book and other long-term projects. Inspiration…
An act of kindness at a Chicago-area McDonalds has been getting a lot of attention over the last week. A customer, Destiny Carreno, saw an employee decide to close his till and go help a disabled man eat lunch. Carreno took a picture, placed it on Facebook, and went viral. Her Facebook post has nearly…
Many children with Down syndrome are born with holes in their hearts. In many of those cases, the holes close by themselves as the children grow older. Unless you meet the Pope, in which case USA Today has decided to clickbait it as a miracle. The Pope asked my husband, ‘How old is she? What’s her…
Yesterday I published a brief post on Flowers v. Gopal, in which some rich California folks are trying to declare a neighboring autistic child a public nuisance. I’ll have more to say about the case, including answering the, “but but he wasn’t a nice kid!” comments I’m getting (short version: If he didn’t have autism…