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for lack of what is found there
Louis Menand in The New Yorker: The funny thing about the resistance all these writers put up to the idea that poems can change people’s lives is that every one of them had his life changed by a poem....
View ArticleThe Academic “Success Sequence” – Get Lucky at Birth, Mostly
Matt Bruenig critiques the concept of the “Success Sequence” quite convincingly here. There are a lot of just-so stories in our culture about what it takes to be a success. Typically, these stories are...
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I can teach you regression discontinuity design in two images
Like so. (Fake charts I made with fake data, btw.) No Treatment Effect Significant Treatment Effect You already get it, right? Typically, when we perform some sort of an experiment, we want to look at...
View Articlethrowing out the individual differences baby with the group differences...
Group-level differences in cognitive ability are in the news again, thanks to the quickly-notorious Google memo on the company’s diversity efforts. You can find a lot of stuff written about these...
View ArticleSyllabus: Public Writing in de Tocqueville’s America
We’re in an interesting political era, to put it mildly. I don’t just mean “Trump’s America,” or the specific partisan aspects of our contemporary situation. I mean also that we’ve been publicly...
View Articletransitioning out of freelancing
Hey gang, I’m back from vacation and excited to get back to work here on this project. Lots of cool stuff in the works for here, including hopefully some audio and video content soonish. (Not a...
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Study of the Week: More Bad News for College Remediation
Today’s Study of the Week combines two subjects we’ve talked about recently on the ANOVA, college remediation and regression discontinuity design. The study, by the University of Warwick’s Emma...
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standardized tests are tools of inequality, not equality
Consider this fairly recent NYT piece, titled “A Simple Way to Help Low-Income Students: Make Everyone Take SAT or ACT.” The essay talks about research that shows that making these tests mandatory in...
View ArticleEvaluating the Relationship Between VST Score and Lexical Diversity in...
Abstract: Researchers in language learning divide a given learner’s passive vocabulary, or words that can be defined on request, from his or her active vocabulary, or words that are utilized in the...
View Articlemy book is available for preorder
On Amazon. I’m sorry release is so far away but it’s out of my hands.
View Articleanother feast for the worms
I have not had Deadspin or the other Gawker Media on my regular media diet for awhile. This isn’t because of any particular problem with them but because I dramatically reduced my media consumption...
View ArticlePublished Work
Selected Popular Publications On corporations as the greatest threat to free speech, for the Washington Post On the threat of Republican antipathy towards universities, for the Los Angeles Times On...
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you already live with eugenics (maybe)
At some point, maybe a year ago or a little more, I began to get panicky emails that said that people were saying that my book was a race science book. (Interesting in part because the book did not...
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let me explain all of Star Wars to you heathens
So in the typical way of the internet a sad situation recently played out which had the effect of making all sides look bad. The actor John Boyega, who wonderfully realized the main character in...
View Articleyou can’t choose to be trad
As I understand it there’s been something of a boom in people pursuing the “trad” mindset, whatever that means – a knowing pursuit of more traditional ways of thinking and ways of being, as opposed to...
View Articleyou guys please hold it together, for me
The book comes out August 5th. (Preorder it here!) I frequently feel like I can’t possibly wait that long. But I can – and so can you. By which I mean, of course people are probably talking all kinds...
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Elizabeth Wurtzel, 1967-2020
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Dan Callister/Shutterstock (4871343h) Elizabeth Wurtzel, New York – 10 Jun 2015 I had one little run in with Elizabeth Wurtzel, some five or so years ago. We were both on a...
View Articlesome personal news
So things are a bit of a mess for me, which I suppose is disappointing given all of the doctors, drugs, therapists, meetings, and more. But whose life isn’t a mess? The news is that I’m losing my job....
View Articlethe only catch was Catch-22
I’ve written about this before, so maybe this is just part of the greatest hits. I don’t know. We are living in an era in which we have ostensibly seen improvements in the visibility of people living...
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