On the night of August 7, 1930, the small city of Marion, Indiana became the site of one of the most infamous and haunting episodes of racial violence in American history—the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. What makes this event particularly searing in the American consciousness isn’t just the brutality of the act. […]
Outgoing governments often try to craft a legacy for themselves by introducing policy traps that incoming governments find hard to undo, such as Rishi Sunak’s National Insurance cuts in 2024 or Gordon Brown’s introduction of the 50p top rate of income tax in 2010. Keir Starmer just did something similar by initiating a huge expansion in the […]
Steve Stewart-Williams has recently published an informative and readable new book (link at the screenshot just below), and my 4000-word review of it for Quillette just appeared (click second screenshot below for the review): As I implied, my review is laudatory, with only a few (really one) reservations, which is minor. It’s not a “page…
Here is a single image that captures the extent to which we are lost. Khadija Patel stands at the Palace of Westminster, recipient of the British Citizen Award 2026 for her “work empowering young women.” She is covered from head to toe. Only her eyes are visible. The official caption celebrates her as a champion…
Suppose that apples sell for more than oranges and Parliament in it’s wisdom decides that, at last, apples and oranges must be compared. Not by shoppers — shoppers are biased, they merely reveal what they are willing to pay — but by a tribunal, which will determine whether apples and oranges are of truly equal…
Paul Goldsmith announced: A re-elected National Government will modernise sexual consent laws to specify there must always be a “yes,” rather than an absence of a “no,” National’s Justice spokesperson Paul Goldsmith says. “National is focused on fixing the basics in law and order, and modernising our consent laws is an important part of that.…
In my post Equality Act 2010 I discussed the UK’s absolutely insane wage policy: In short, supply and demand have been replaced by judges and labor boards with the authority to deem which jobs are “equal” and therefore should be paid equally….No one is alleging that male and female warehouse workers were paid unequally or…
I am fuming. It is 2026 and the rest of the world is unwinding the destructive and nonsensical policies of the trans madness era, and here in New Zealand they are continuing to be embedded. Today, news broke that a female prison officer who now “identifies as a man” has managed not only to extract an apology and a […]
Bob Edlin writes – News has reached Professor Jerry Coyne of the New Zealand Parliament debating a bill (which passed on its first reading) that would legally define a “man” and a “woman” this way: 13A Meaning of woman or female In any legislation, regardless of gender identity,— (a) woman means an adult human biological […]
How absent are women from city streets in the developing world? We answer this question using GPS-linked wearable cameras and randomized street audits across ~900 kilometers of roads in greater Mumbai. Across 4000+ street images containing 23,000+ visible person observations, women account for 16.4% of visible people in Mumbai and 14.7% in Navi Mumbai, far…
Jack Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American professional baseball second baseman who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era.Robinson broke the baseball color line when the Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base on April 15, 1947. The Dodgers, by signing Robinson, heralded the end of racial segregation in professional baseball that had relegated black players to […]
In a decision split along ideological lines yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on trans-identified boys and men competing in girl’s and women’s sports were Constitutionally legal. Although the judges were unanimous in arguing that those laws did not violate Civil Rights laws (Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education), they…
Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed…
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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