Marijuana: Less Dangerous Than Aspirin
I don’t for a minute buy cannabis “fatalities”. It’s impossible to kill yourself with pot. The press reports “cannabis-related” deaths which is surreal. David McCandless, who devised the…

Rolando Peñate lives in Brooklyn, is Design Lead at OpenGeo, part of the design team at The Open Planning Project, and occasionally syndicates parts of his life here.
Marijuana: Less Dangerous Than Aspirin
I don’t for a minute buy cannabis “fatalities”. It’s impossible to kill yourself with pot. The press reports “cannabis-related” deaths which is surreal. David McCandless, who devised the…
David Cole wonders:
[T]he prison boom has high costs for all of us. A new prison opens somewhere in the United States every week. Imprisoning a human being in this country costs a minimum of…
The Bishops And Health Insurance Reform, Ctd
A reader writes:
As your earlier reader noted in passing, the Catholic Bishops refused to accept the “segregation” of federal funds from abortion dollars. Under that scheme, health insurance…
If China remains culturally closed, the Chinese Century will never come to pass. Instead, the United States—a country that has struggled with race and racism for centuries, and in the process…
The reasons seem pretty obvious:
The party-buckers on the 220-215 vote on Saturday night included 39 Democrats who voted against the bill. Of them, 31 represent districts that voted for John…
High-speed rail fact of the day
American Intercity rail service is slower today than it was in the 1940s.
Here is the full article, by train expert Mark Reutter. It is a good look at some of the obstacles facing a…
DiA notices that the leaders of both parties are no longer overwhelmingly southern:
Southerners haven’t lost their country, but they have lost power—a power they disproportionately enjoyed for…
Why it's harder than before to get into your favorite college
Caroline Hoxby reports:
This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective….
Jonah Lehrer reviews some research showing the cognitive benefits of arts education:
The current obsession with measuring learning certainly has some benefits (accountability is good), but it…
It’s good to see Eric Cantor actually distance himself from the notion that Obama is another Hitler, and to talk of inclusion as an important GOP value. But when you see what his actual proposals…
“Too big to fail is too big” is not a new idea (http://bit.ly/3FyMUo), @whitmo. Heard of the Glass-Steagall Act? http://bit.ly/1hBefd
Sen. Burr took $700k from defense contractors and the Chamber of Commerce—then sided with them against rape victims: http://bit.ly/oHpUb
Researchers have been able to create new human senses of a sort…and to cross-pollinate two different senses in order to, for example, see with your tongue.
With Arnoldussen behind me carrying…