Do Corruption and Transparency Drive Down Voting?
Learning how the sausage is made can turn your stomach, more so when you can see the reconstituted meat bits. Which may put people off their appetite for politics.
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Corruption, Confirmation Bias, and Sexy Statistics
Is Illinois still really corrupt? Is Chicago still really segregated? It depends on who you ask, and how they decide to write their headlines.
Illinois's Medicaid Mess
The state is way behind on its Medicaid bills, and facing a hugely expensive backlog, as it has periodically over the past couple decades. The state doesn’t have a lot of options for cutting back on its Medicaid spending, but there are a couple areas where substantial progress could be made.
One Last Push
Push launched years ago as the pregnancy journal of a soon-to-be father who was trying to piece together the weird changes to his wife and his life. It resurrected itself a short time later as a travel blog to the Far East with baby in tow; then it buckled under the weight of diapers and bottles and Elmos, and disappeared for a few years. Now my wife is pregnant with our third child, which seems a good occasion to reignite the blog.
Three's a Crowd
My wife is pregnant again. What could we possibly be thinking?
How Much Do We Want Social Mobility, Anyway?
Social mobility has declined in America since the post-war boom, and the effects have been particularly hard on the lowest ten percent of the population. It’s an American ideal, but it’s not as easy or appealing as it looks.
What Does the Obama Campaign Know About You?
It’s a lot, depending on your interaction with the campaign or related causes. But it’s nothing compared with Target, which can predict whether or not you’re pregnant, down to which term.
Traffic Overflow: Crime Versus Accidents, and More
In an analysis of fatal and serious pedestrian crashes, the city found that they correlate with high-crime areas. It’s long been a phenomenon of interest to law enforcement and sociologists.
The Case for Chicago Speed Cameras
The debate over speed cameras has focused on pedestrian fatalities, and specifically child pedestrian fatalities. And it’s been at cross-purposes over some less than useful data. Expanding the scope makes a better case for them than the administration’s presented.
Airplane Cloud Rings and Falling Ice Injuries
Why a “hole-punch” cloud appeared over O’Hare last Friday, a brief history of falling ice injuries in Chicago, and the diversity of our city’s falling-ice warning signs.