Quickies

Quickies: Don’t Mess with John Lewis, Trump and Bad Scientific Studies, and Fighting Violence in California Wine Industry

  • Representative John Lewis is Not to be Trifled With – “You may disagree with Representative John Lewis. In Georgia, you may vote against him. You can send angry letters to his office. But do not fuck with Representative John Lewis. He has seen worse than whatever you have to give him, and he has handled it better than you could possibly ever begin to. Since 1959, he has stood up for his beliefs, and he has faced abuse and prison and beatings and violence for it, and not once has he ever backed down. And he is not about to start now.” From Radium.
  • Aziz Ansari: Why Trump Makes Me Scared for My Family – “I asked a young friend of mine, a woman in her 20s of Muslim heritage, how she had been feeling after the attack. ‘I just feel really bad, like people think I have more in common with that idiot psychopath than I do the innocent people being killed,’ she said. ‘I’m really sick of having to explain that I’m not a terrorist every time the shooter is brown.’ ” From Amy.
  • Trump’s success ‘deranges’ bridge players, shedding light on biomedical studies – “The purpose of the paper, Gelman said, was to call attention to studies ‘that report dramatic and silly claims based on statistically significant p-values.’ Among his favorites: that obesity is contagious and that scores of everyday foods either increase or decrease the risk of cancer. Such claims go up in smoke with better research.”
  • Farmworkers push back against machismo and abuse in California’s wine country – “In addition to enduring harsh working environments — grueling hours doing back-breaking work and handling grapes that have been sprayed with pesticides — female fieldworkers also grapple with the added risks of verbal and physical harassment from male colleagues and supervisors. A culture of machismo and patriarchy reigns where the grapes grow in Sonoma. The violence and stigma women encounter in the fields and where they live is as invisible as their existence in the country.”
  • We Study What Makes People More Liberal. But What Makes Them More Conservative? – “Cold cash and colder calling don’t seem to have much impact on the outcomes of elections, for either the left or the right, Green said. In general, the most interesting thing scientists have learned from studying persuasion across the political spectrum is that there don’t seem to be any big differences in how persuasion works at either end.”

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Mary

Mary Brock works as an Immunology scientist by day and takes care of a pink-loving princess child by night. She likes cloudy days, crafting, cooking, and Fall weather in New England.

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