On deck very soon

A bunch of the 170 are still in the queue. I haven’t been adding to the scheduled posts for awhile, instead I’ve been inserting topical items from time to time—I even got some vicious hate mail for my article on the electoral college—and then I’ve been shoving material for new posts into a big file that now has a couple hundred items, I’m not quite sure what to do with that one, maybe I’ll write all my posts for 2017 on a single day and get that over with? Also, sometimes our co-bloggers post here, and that’s cool.

Anyway, three people emailed me today about a much-publicized science news item that pissed them off. It’s not really topical but maybe I’ll post on it, just to air the issue out. And I have a couple literary ideas I wanted to share. So maybe I’ll do something I haven’t done for a few months, and bump a few of this week’s posts to the end of the queue.

Before that, though, I have a post that is truly topical and yet will never be urgent. I’ll schedule it to appear in the usual slot, between 9 and 10 in the morning.

12 thoughts on “On deck very soon

  1. Here’s an idea:
    Over at ComicsIDontUnderstand.com, Bill Bickel ordinarily does one post a day. But once a year, he does 24 posts in 24 hours. This might be a particularly good idea for posts on a particular theme, or posts that aren’t maybe quite as interesting once you look at them again.

  2. Somewhat related: Is Vox a serious venue to write articles in? I saw an article there that sounds made up:

    http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/12/15/13952790/racial-profiling-america-germany

    I’ve lived in Germany for 14 years, and the story this person tells sounds implausible to me. I’m sure there is profiling in Germany, but the account this reporter presents is based on her experience with no evidence to back it up. I find it odd that this magazine just publishes a first person account without any statistics to support the story.

    • Shravan:

      Vox, like any media outlet including APSR, JASA, and PNAS, has quality control issues. I think the articles that I’ve published in Vox are pretty damn good. Then again, I think that about the articles I’ve published in APSR, JASA, and PNAS, and I can’t say I agree with everything that appears in these journals.

    • Vox constantly frames highly contentious opinions on X as some pseudo factual “X, explained” account. It just becomes very tedious and I’ve kind of stopped reading Vox despite being initially quite excited about it. Their explainers are simply inferior to Wikipedia.

      But to be fair, the article you link to is a first-person account of something, not a report.

        • They might. Looking at vox.com/first-person we see stuff like:

          “My scary, awkward, hopeful conversation with my dad about why he voted for Trump”
          “13% of Americans don’t use the internet. Until a few months ago, I was one of them.”
          “I made 6 figures at my Facebook dream job — but couldn’t afford life in the Bay Area”

          There’s a lot of blogging-style opinion writing being published these days, not just at Vox but also at Slate, Salon etc and even at the NYT or the Guardian.

        • Interesting; I am out of touch it seems. I mostly read the New Yorker, and when I want to know what’s happening in the US I watch the Daily Show or the Late Show on youtube, and recently SNL is also starting to deliver informative content about international relations.

          Looks like there is a real gap in the field someone should exploit. All we need is a statistician who can write well, who can study important problems quantitatively and deliver some Fermi-style estimates of what the heck is really going on.

        • >”when I want to know what’s happening in the US I watch the Daily Show or the Late Show on youtube, and recently SNL is also starting to deliver informative content about international relations”

          This is quite a vote of confidence for the US mainstream media. Have you checked out the Onion? http://www.theonion.com/section/politics/

        • >Looks like there is a real gap in the field someone should exploit. All we need is a statistician who can write well, who can study important problems quantitatively and deliver some Fermi-style estimates of what the heck is really going on.
          The gap’s been filled, it’s known as “Data journalism”.

          Best known outlet for this type of journalism is probably Nate Silver’s 538.

  3. I was wondering what article everybody emailed you about. Then I saw “Spatial heterogeneity of climate change as an experiential basis for skepticism” in PNAS. Took a quick glance and wow, it’s bad.

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