Michael O'Hare

NPR has changed its rules for journalists [HTs and more discussion: Daily Kos, James Fallows] from reporting “both sides” of any issue to including expert judgment about the sides’ relative weight. This is a very big deal. Print journalism used to be quite partisan, but around the turn of the 20th century, wire services started […]

Romney won the Maine caucuses and the CPAC straw poll, and the Washington Post tells us: Coupled with his victory in Saturday’s straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, the Maine win gives the GOP front-runner and former Massachusetts governor a substantial [sic] boost heading into a 17-day period in which there […]

Kevin Drum notes that 65% of people in a WaPo poll approve of drone attacks on “suspected terrorists”, even on American citizens. The question mixes up some important issues, and Kevin dissects out whether a death penalty, no matter how delivered, for being suspected is OK. But a lot of people are also very antsy […]

Mitt Romney usefully points out that his tax rate is more like 50% than 15%, because the corporations from which he got his capital gains paid a corporate income tax of 35%, more or less. Good point! Anyone whose income comes from the private sector can add 35% to his actual tax rate, and should […]

I missed this while it was happening, but it got some attention in the NYT today. New Hampshire has enacted a law that seems to give parents unilateral power to line-item veto their kids’ curriculum in public schools. The law looks like a can of worms, because the parents’ substitute material has to be “sufficient […]

At my company (less in my unit of it), teaching is basically treated as a tax you have to pay to do your research, and faculty are hired and promoted for research and encouraged to avoid this tax where possible; indeed, one of our principal recruitment gestures is a reduced teaching load for the first […]

Keith Keith Humphreys says he not only doesn’t use his cell phone when driving (CWD), but doesn’t talk to people when they are driving. Good for Keith, and the National Transportation Safety Board, which has recommended a flat ban on using cell phones while driving, hands-free or not. Columnist Debra Saunders, weighs in with one […]

Kevin Drum channels Brad DeLong to recall a Calvin and Hobbes sequence in which Calvin’s dad reassures him that it’s colder in the winter because the earth is farther from the sun then than in the summer. Kevin asks for a survey to find out how many people believe that. As it happens, a small […]

…is a wonderful short story by E.M. Forster, set in a dystopia where everyone lives underground in little cells and only communicates with others via technology. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, UC Berkeley’s email, calmail, crashed and has been available in fits and starts at best ever since (for several days only via a web […]