Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 13 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 10 years.
More than 650,000 Americans could vote on whether they want to become the 51st state of the US. I'm referring to, of course, Washington, DC. On Friday, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser called for a citywide vote to turn at least some of the federal district into the 51st state in America. "I propose we take another bold step toward democracy in the District of Columbia," Bowser said, according to the…
When we calculated the lead exposure risk of every census tract in America, one major finding stuck out: The vast majority of areas at risk are in urban areas. And health officials generally cite deteriorated lead-based paint in the home — not lead in pipes — as the leading source of lead exposure, which is why relatively inexpensive housing policies can work to reduce incidences of lead…
The biggest news outlets have published more negative stories about Hillary Clinton than any other presidential candidate — including Donald Trump — since January 2015, according to a new analysis of hundreds of thousands of online stories published since last year. Clinton has not only been hammered by the most negative coverage but the media also wrote the smallest proportion of positive stories…
Earlier this week, 36,000 Verizon workers — most of whom work in the company's ailing landline phone sector — went on strike. A jaunt through the US Bureau of Labor Statistics ' work stoppage archive tells us this strike is the largest in the United States since 45,000 workers (also Verizon employees) walked off the job in 2011. But going back even further, to the heyday of union membership,…
By now, the screenshot has probably appeared in your Twitter timeline. It appears to be an excerpt from an interview with Avatar director James Cameron, in which Cameron unashamedly admits to planning the four recently announced Avatar sequels out of sheer spite: Someone showed me a tweet by this woman Dana something. Dana Smith? And it was, I’m paraphrasing here, but basically something along the…
Bernie Sanders has spent months hammering Hillary Clinton for accepting millions of dollars in speaking fees from Wall Street in the runup to her presidential bid, while refusing to release transcripts of the speeches to the public. Sanders has done it so many times, he's even come up with a favorite joke: "I am going to release all of the transcripts of the speeches that I gave on Wall Street…
Yellow fever , a much-feared mosquito-borne virus, has sickened thousands of people and killed hundreds in Angola over the past five months. A cluster of cases first appeared in Angola's capital, Luanda, in December, and the virus has now sickened people in 16 of the country’s 18 provinces. People infected in Angola have already taken the virus to China, Kenya, Mauritania, and the Democratic…
Since the day Scarlett Johansson was cast as Motoko Kusanagi , the cyborg and lead character of Ghost in the Shell , the film has been criticized for its whitewashing and erasure of its Japanese roots. Instead of excitement that Masamune Shirow's iconic manga will be brought to life, the conversation about the project has centered on the decision to use white actors to tell a Japanese story. On…
When we think about productivity in an economy, we are normally referring to the output of human workers. But some segments of the economy also feature a nonhuman labor force. Dairy cows, for example, are a key part of the milk industry. And according to this striking chart from the US Department of Agriculture, their productivity has surged over the past generation: USDA Cow wages, presumably,…
At Thursday night's Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton called out the moderators of all nine debates for never asking a single question about abortion or reproductive rights. Clinton made the remarks after an exchange about Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. "I want to say something about this, since we're talking about the Supreme Court and what's at stake," Clinton said. "We've had eight…
