Vaguely interesting (Nov 30)

(1)  “[P]eople increase their generosity when the recipient (or an observer) is connected and can gossip to … others whom they might interact with in the future.”

(2)  “Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year.”

(3)  “[O]verall violent crime … is projected to be 1.5 percent lower in 2015 than 2014.”

(4)  “Americans evenly split on sending troops to fight Islamic State.”

(5)  “Even after spending his ‘entire career’ thinking about p-values, he said he could tell me the definition, ‘but I cannot tell you what it means, and almost nobody can.’”

Vaguely interesting (Nov 28)

(1) “Among adults, the previously established positive correlation between age and happiness has dwindled, disappearing by the early 2010s.”

(2) “Wealthier Americans are much more likely to say that people would just stop begging if we all stopped giving money.”

(3) “French Muslims experience extraordinary discrimination in the job market.”

(4) “40% of Millennials OK with limiting speech offensive to minorities.”

(5) “In 1938, the polling firm Roper found that 67% opposed ‘German, Austrian and other political refugees’ coming to the U.S.”

Vaguely interesting (Nov 19)

(1)  “From 1958 to 1961, conservative racial views strongly predict Democratic identification among Southern whites, a correlation that disappears after President Kennedy introduces sweeping Civil Rights legislation in 1963. We find that defection among racially conservative whites explains all of the decline in relative white Southern Democratic identification between 1958 and 1980.”

(2)  How to create more terrorists: Engage in militarized and Islamophobic counter-responses to terrorism.

(3)  “Long before the destruction and death in France last week, Trump’s presidential campaign was following the path of right-wing working class parties in Europe.”

(4)  Young adults in the U.S. are living in their parents’ homes at rates not seen since 1940.

(5)  “Under civil forfeiture laws, police can take someone’s property without proving the person was guilty of a crime …. The law then allows police to absorb the value of this property … as profit …. And to get this property back, a person has to go through a lengthy, complicated, and often expensive legal process — and may not succeed at all.”

Vaguely interesting (Nov 9)

(1)  “[W]orld religions are associated with … the promotion of ‘slow’ behaviours such as altruism, self-regulation and monogamy … and the condemnation of ‘fast’ behaviours such as selfishness, conspicuous sexuality and materialism.”

(2)  “Together these results reveal the similarity across countries in how religion negatively influences children’s altruism, challenging the view that religiosity facilitates prosocial behavior.”

(3)  “According to McKinsey, as much as 45 percent of the activities that people are paid to perform today could be automated …. Once robots can accurately process and understand natural languages, an additional 13 percent of work activities in the U.S. could be automated, they say.”

(4)  “What is driving the decline in swing voters? Smidt shows that voters are increasingly cognizant of the sharp differences between the Republican and Democratic parties.”

(5)  Pew finds that from 2007 to 2014, the percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans increased from 16% to 23%. That’s 7% in 7 years, which, if true, is a really fast shift.

Vaguely interesting (Nov 8)

(1)  “[A]fter participating in [theory of mind] training to learn about mental-state concepts, 3-year-olds who originally had been unable to lie began to deceive consistently.”

(2)  “The Republican Party’s core socioeconomic voting groups are wealthier households and businesses, both of which benefit when social welfare is provided through the tax code rather than through explicit spending.”

(3)  “I have no idea how the United States economy is doing.”

(4)  “[E]ven when they’re breaking the same rules, studies have found black students are punished more often and more harshly than their white peers.”

(5)  How states and private companies extort money from prisoners and their families.