We like to think jury trials - and criminal processes generally - are about a quest for “truth.” But more and more evidence shows most people’s brains are pretty well wired to make a snap judgment as to which side of an issue they are on and then adjust their views of the facts accordingly. Most people don’t look for…

I like the house metaphor, but there’s one a teacher of mine uses that I think also works.

Depends on the measure you want to use. We typically rank pretty high in per capita GDP as well as overall GDP, net assets, asset reserves, etc.

If you felt like engaging them - and really there’s no reason to, but why not - you might point out the massive infrastructure investments in rural America (and specifically Appalachia) that were put in place in the New Deal and after, which had the effect of creating a much more robust safety net in those regions…

The idea that talking about racism is somehow divisive or improper irks the hell out of me. I get this from white students sometimes when I bring up disparities in police violence - that somehow documenting it, and poking holes in the mythology that police are here to protect and serve everyone equally is the real…

The tourists get hit with hotel taxes and surcharges on rental cars - but no it isn’t quite the same as would come in with a broader sales tax.

And Fireball is for bringing up the volume on latent racism to blatant. Because I doubt these two were really repressing much rather than saying it more quietly.

Spielberg? Woody Allen (too obvious, probably)? The possibilities are numerous.

I can assure you that being curly coated does not make dogs hypo-allergenic in any absolute sense.  What changes is that because they don’t shed they tend to leave less dander around, which is what people like me are allergic to. So I can be in a house with a curly coated dog without immediately seizing up, but if I…

Inbreeding has given bulldogs a lot of major health issues that tend to shorten their lives.  Ditto for a lot of purebred dog lines. 

Would Bevins have walked into a rural white school and claimed to be shocked not to find a thriving slate of academic enrichment activities? This is a private school in Louisville - I would have been shocked if they didn’t have all sorts of clubs and activities.

“And why did I have to wear a tie when you couldn’t be bothered to look better than a Best Buy department manager?”

Yep. Literally the first Supreme Court case that made the right to counsel meaningful - Powell v. Alabama in 1932 - grew out of a group of black kids and a group of white kids getting in a fight while they were all riding a train illegally. By most accounts the black kids won the fight, the white kids turned around…

On census forms, white encompasses most Hispanics, white trash (including all sorts of fun titles like lubbers, mudlarks, hillbillies, and so on), Irish, Slavic, Pole, Italian, Jewish, Catholic and every other group with and has for quite some time. But in popular meaning, white meant Anglo-Saxon Christians at the…

She’s off duty, but she was working. Moonlighting as security is pretty common for police officers - some places explicitly allow it, others explicitly ban it, but it is done all the time because cops almost all have carry permits, have their own cuffs and can call in favors with the department (or at least people…

He uses the “frozen snake” and completely misses the point.

I don’t disagree with the premise and in the context of the US it definitely tends to have a white (as currently defined broadly) tilt. But I’d also suggest anyone interested in the general failure of people collectively to do the right thing to check out Mancur Olsen’s The Logic of Collective Action (basically we’re…

The working assumption of many otherwise intelligent friends of mine (not Trump voters mind you) was that some how the institutions of government would make him govern in a more centrist manner - never mind he was dead center of the GOP view and the vast majority of the GOP hasn’t given a shit about collaborating with…

LBJ had a great line on that:

100 million otherwise eligible Americans (overwhelmingly white, although also a heavy dose of hispanic nonvoters in many places where they could in theory be very important like Arizona and Texas). Drives me bonkers.