I do, for the record, believe that rape culture is real, and I don’t see that Aaron Bady has cause to accuse me of not. I will cop to thinking that the term “rape culture” itself has acquired some of that buzzwordy fuzziness that comes from the rise of left-wing-politics-as-popularity-contest. But I deeply believe that […]

I want to advance an understanding of someone’s political value as a simple ratio of number of political interactions that are primarily negative or critical in character total number of political interactions This is based on a crude theory of political economy that  interactions between those who substantially agree are necessarily interactions where there is […]

I have no coherent response to the allegations against Woody Allen, just feelings of powerlessness and sadness. The substance of those allegations is so horrific and heartbreaking that coherence is beyond me. It’s physically nauseating to think of. So I’m left speechless. I feel the need to react to an ancillary point that is growing […]

[Update: I’ve been convinced by readers that, while this is a good example of the power of selection bias, it doesn’t really work as an example of regression to the mean.] I thought that this graph was a good way to talk about regression to the mean. You hear that term thrown a lot online these […]

So yesterday I went to my health clinic here at Purdue. I went to have a followup appointment and get a refill on a prescription I’ve had since last September of so. I went to the Purdue University Student Health (PUSH) center. It’s quite a comprehensive clinic; I’ve had everything up to and including minor […]

When I first read that Sean Wilentz piece a few days ago, about halfway through I settled on the notion that he was actually just doing a favor for someone at the magazine. Wieseltier or Foer or Hughes called Wilentz into his office and said, “Look, this isn’t gonna be pretty, but you’ve gotta be […]

Here in the university, we have become used to a common form of argument calling for our replacement via online-only education. It goes something like this: yes, we may concede that early returns on online education are discouraging, but that even if we never get to the same quality of education, a large enough decrease […]

  That’s me, in the picture, or me in my old alter ego, Philip D. Bag. Philip D. was the brainchild of some private contractor working for some Connecticut state environmental agency. This would have been sometime in summer 2007. This was after I’d come home from a fun but ultimately directionless couple years living […]

So I’m getting some pushback about this prior post that compels me to clarify what I wasn’t arguing. Here’s what people seem to think I meant: Megan McArdle is only a successful journalist because she’s a woman. I don’t think that, didn’t write that, and in fact I thought I had gone out of my […]