The overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant.
Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data | Reuters
At this point, the sensible, evidence-backed, research-based policy position is that the most efficient way to “fight crime” is to improve the material conditions of people by housing the homeless and guaranteeing a universal basic income.
Any position that suggests more investment in law enforcement is either unaware of the prevailing facts, or willfully ignoring them.
MLB is “essentially in the business of content creation for the gambling industry now."
Breaking down the Shohei Ohtani-Ippei Mizuhara story by Craig Calcaterra
This captures the dynamic of all major sports in 2024. They’ve all mostly existed to create content for the television industry for decades, but this pivot that subjugates coverage of the actual sport to “how does this affect the spread” has been particularly painful.
Git is the closest thing we have to software from the future. I wrote Minimalist Git because I’ve seen too many developers get lost in its advanced features and I wanted to show there is a simpler way to be productive and keep your codebase safe.
Minimalist git by Ben Garvey
A great reminder that while git is extremely powerful, you can do most of what you need with a handful of commands.
Bookmarked Why Wall Street Won’t Stop Trump by .
“Woke capital” is a myth, a shallow analysis that mistakes advertising and brand management for ideology. What do corporations really want? The answer is the same as it’s always been: tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, and a labor market more favorable to employers than to workers.
Bookmarked Jobs for Delaware Legislators by .
Delaware tolerates a General Assembly with an ethics crisis which rivals our national Supreme Court… Speaker of the House Valerie Longhurst’s PAL has benefited from a 1300% increase in public appropriations under her tenure.
Bookmarked Fluxblog 455: good night to the Pitchfork era by .
Media corporations are not our friends. They don’t care about writers, they don’t care about audiences, and they don’t care about subject matter. Working for them is like surfing – you can ride a wave for a while but it will eventually crash. Major media corporations like Condé Nast and the New York Times are attractive to writers because they seem like firm institutions that are less likely to collapse, but that’s just an illusion.
Bookmarked Delaware lawmakers are headed back to Dover. Here’s what they’re focusing on in 2024 by .
Senate Republicans argue that Delaware’s bail reform bill passed in 2018 has “resulted in high recidivism” – a criticism that Republicans across the country have used in recent years as states moved away from cash bail.
However, the data doesn’t back up that claim. In fact, the “return to prison” rate has declined 60% since 2019, according to data from the state Department of Justice.
Do you see how easy this is? You don’t simply have to parrot things that are inaccurate, just because an elected official says them. Thank you, Amanda.
This is what disability advocates have said all along, not that it usually sinks in: The able and the disabled aren’t two different kinds of people but the same people at different times.
Unraveling My Medical Mystery by Tom Scocca
Happy Delaware Day!
I’m celebrating by looking at the Delaware state flag and asking “is this the banner we want to represent our state’s values?”
Read it in The Delaware Call.
The Mountain Goats last night at The Queen in Wilmington.
Great energy, great show, great setlist, including the first time I’ve ever seen an act come out for another encore after the house lights went up.
An Opinionated History of Modern Rock
Hypothesis: while it is usually impossible to pick a precise genesis of any cultural movement, for the purposes of this exercise, R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe” gave birth to “modern rock,” and Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” killed it. I slid in some obvious precursors to R.E.M. and covered the dénouement and fallout from OK Computer as well.
This one has been kicking around my head for a while, inspired by tapes teenage me made off of Philly’s own WDRE (RIP), late nights staying up for 120 Minutes (their 1993 year end best of episode was a foundational text), countless mixtapes, mix CDs and playlists made and received over the years, and Matthew Perpetua’s exhaustive work cataloging and curating the last 40+ years of music (here’s a thread of his playlists I referred to heavily while creating this playlist.)
Listen on Apple Music, Spotify or Last.fm.
Delaware earns a C- on Common Cause’s Community Redistricting Report Card
Perhaps the perfect encapsulation of Delaware Way politics: Delaware Democrats, who held the Governorship and both houses of the General Assembly, ran an “inadequately transparent” process in which “incumbent protection appeared to trump protecting communities of interest or consideration of public testimony” and still managed to gift Republicans a district (the new RD 4, which moved from Wilmington to Sussex County).
How can we take pride in and venerate the supposedly good things Americans in history did but ignore and dismiss the bad things? How can we pick and choose our moral inheritance at will? How does the need for us to downplay slavery, colonization, and Jim Crow continue to be such a strong political force? And whose interests does this down-playing serve in 2023?
Beaver Hall, Junior Year
Inspired by the announcement of REM’s “Up” reissue, I took a trip back to Fall ‘98, my first semester away at Penn State. Here’s the contemporaneous music that was spinning in my dorm room on the 4th floor of Beaver Hall.
Listen on Apple Music, Spotify or Last.fm.
Folks, it seems like there’s a pending announcement of new music from Charles Bissell of The Wrens coming next week. This is not a drill. Prepare accordingly.
Lucky enough to have seen Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service last night at the Mann. My son’s first concert (he’s a huge Postal Service fan). I think we both made a bunch of core memories; I know I did.
Sunny Day Real Estate last night in Baltimore.
Still can’t believe how tight these guys sound and how well Jeremy’s voice holds up.
Three candidates have announced their 2024 candidacy for Delaware’s lone U.S. House seat. How did they use branding to differentiate themselves in an already crowded field?
In the next installment of “The Politics of Design,” I critiqued all three for the Delaware Call.