I thought The Wire was great for a lot of reasons. I think that I can safely say, though, that it never occurred to me to try to use it to break the ice with anybody. Not that I’ve never caught myself with some weird, small act of racism, but sometimes I hear about real things that other white people do and just have…

I feel like Larry David might just be expressing the instantiation of a rule that he probably believes (and that I certainly do), which is that even when something’s awesome, a lot of the people who say that it is have no idea why and are just following the crowd. I feel this way about popular bands, movies, books,…

I don’t know. I’m pretty compelled by some economic analysis that many people including myself have done (this is my field) to conclude that systemic discrimination against women (or for that matter, select races, trans and gender nonbinary people, etc.) is not actually beneficial to me overall. Undoubtedly my path…

I think that the stereotype that millennials want to run from facts is definitely affecting the way that we’re heard.

This is my favorite scene from television ever.

We had a peer mediator program in my elementary school where they taught us to get everybody to use “I statements”, and I’ve found the habit very valuable in life. When I’m talking about my feelings, I try not to confuse those with assertions about external realities. There’s a world of difference between, “You’re…

Speaking as a highly privileged millennial cis-gender white man who uses “I feel” a lot, I’m not convinced that this is all about defensiveness or insecurity. I don’t use “I feel” to replace “I think” or “I know” or any other declarative about facts external to my own head; I use it to convey information about my…

Reagan was not for unilaterally destroying all of our nuclear weapons. He did however stake a lot of political capital on the idea of negotiating with the Soviets to reduce nuclear stockpiles, with the goal of abolishing them.

Reagan was actually in favor of reducing our nuclear stockpile. So it’s not an “FU” for his daughter to have been on the same side.

I wanted 15 more WoT books, personally. Forget acts; write interesting things and I’ll keep reading them.

And today I added “zaftig” to my passive vocabulary. Thank you.

TBH, as long as the federal government continued to hold the land on which federal buildings in D.C. sit, the new state-like entity of D.C. wouldn’t have really any powers of that anyway. The status quo is an anachronism from before the courts sorted out some of the details of federalism; D.C. will remain powerless,…

I appreciate your joke. Genuinely, thanks for the laugh.

It is true that the South is more conservative than (most of) the rest of the country. But Sanders insinuated that that was the reason that it went for Hillary, which is absurd. Hillary Clinton has recorded huge margins of victory among PoC, and to suggest that her support is simply coming from conservative (read:…

I lived alone in grad school, and it turns out that my introverted habits outstripped my actual introversion preferences. I was not happy. I’d consider a place like this because it’s good for me. You can live alone if it’s good for you.

Keep in mind that physicians in the U.S. also typically hold the purse strings, at least if they are in private practice. It is unclear how the derision of society generally is supposed to keep wages for pediatricians low relative to cardiologists when there is a demand for their services.

I’d say that it’s fairly obvious that women and “women’s work” have been looked down and continue to be. And in the U.K., I can see a straight line between the prestige of a specialty and its compensation. But in the U.S., that’s a pretty hard line to draw. There’s little reason, in general, to think that people get…

Even if we found that there had been no separation in the earnings by specialty before the influx of women into the medical profession, this would not provide any evidence to distinguish between the hypothesis advanced in this article and one in which women were prevented in various ways from entering professions…

I did. I’m having trouble believing that you did. It doesn’t seem that anyone here is “swatting away” the gender wage gap, or ignoring it. Rather, you are treating arguments against the claim of a certain mechanism for the enforcement of that gap as a denial of the existence of the problem, despite everyone in the…

I’m sorry, but you thought that Nyd was “swatting away” the gender wage gap by clearly stating that the amount attributable to same-profession, same-age, same-region, etc. discrimination was about 4-8%? I don’t think that you were trying very hard to parse that one, then.