Things We Know That Aren’t True, Poverty and Terrorism Edition
You might think that poverty breeds terrorism. It’s a fairly intuitive view, and it has been trumpeted by some major figures. Here’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for instance: “You can never win a war...
View ArticleThe Tip Jar Shall be the Downfall of this Great Republic, Evidence from 2012...
Tipping is an aristocratic conceit — “There you go, my good man, buy your starving family a loaf” — best left to an aristocratic age. The practicing democrat would rather be told what he owes right up...
View ArticleBowling Alone at the Supreme Court
What happens when your findings get away from you? In 2007, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, most famously the author of the book Bowling Alone, released findings from a huge survey of...
View ArticleWho Will Cry for the Campus Bookstore?
Over at the New Republic, Mark Athitakis plays a very small violin for a threatened institution: the college bookstore According to the National Association of College Stores, which represents...
View ArticleFaces of Debt: Beware “the College Loan Repo Man”
For decades, one of the driving impulses of American liberalism has been to expand people’s access to good things — to open up the doors of higher education, banking, health insurance, and the like to...
View ArticleWho’s Most Optimistic in America? The Answer Will Break Your Heart
This is a finding that has turned up in a number of studies, and it’s always fascinating: Many of the demographic groups that have fared the worst during the recession—including young adults (ages 18...
View ArticleThe Oy of Cooking
Over at Slate, Tracie McMillan writes about the trouble with having a prevailing food ethic that both glamorizes cooking and promotes it as an everyday practice: When the stories we tell about cooking...
View ArticleSilicon Valley’s Siege of Higher Ed
The new tech boom in the Bay Area isn’t just driving up rents in San Francisco; it’s also driving up anxiety levels at America’s universities, and for good reason: According to the National Venture...
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The Buffalo Massacre Spinoff Economy
You can learn a lot about a time and a place from its choice of building materials. In the 1880s, for instance, a street in Topeka, Kansas was paved with buffalo skulls. That’s just of several...
View ArticleIs America’s ‘Strategic Pivot’ Towards China Premature?
In the cover story of our inaugural issue back in April, we took note of the Obama administration’s strategic pivot towards Asia and the commensurate shift away from our entanglements in the Middle...
View ArticleCilantro Hatred Explained by Modern Science
But not, according to your coriander-loving correspondent, excused: Julia Child loathed the stuff, one in six Nature staff (informally surveyed) says it tastes of soap, and a popular website collects...
View ArticleA Genealogy of the “Makers/Takers” Theory of America
The Mitt Romney video you’ve probably heard about—the one where he talks about the 47 percent of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the...
View ArticleHurricane Sandy and the Presidential Election
An October surprise is usually something ginned up by a political campaign, but this year it seems that mother nature has one up her sleeve, in the form of Hurricane Sandy. What effect might this have...
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The Last Word on ‘Accidental Racist’: Brad Paisley Probably Isn’t Talking to You
In case you missed it, last week the country music star Brad Paisley came to the attention of a whole bunch of folks who don’t ordinarily write about country music, thanks to his new song “Accidental...
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The Shoppers of Babel
We live in a world of global brands but local tastes. Arabs tend to drink their tea slowly; Indians load theirs with spices and sugar. So Lipton ships a different optimized formula to each, under its...
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A Toast Story
All the guy was doing was slicing inch-thick pieces of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them. But what made me stare—blinking to attention in the middle of a workday morning as...
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