All Thoughts Being Equal

Follow-up to: Diagnosis of an overwhelming fear, pt. 1 ; Adventures in bad statistics, Big Gay edition I. So there's a video going around. A woman dresses pretty generically—jeans, a black crew-neck shirt—and walks around New York City... and experiences "over 100" instances of street harassment in 10 hours over a few days. I have a few problems with this methodology. On the one hand, it's great that people are documenting this sort of everyday experience: one's personal life history doesn't translate well over the Internet, so any little bit helps. On the other hand... The big problem is with the editing. Out of nine major online media sites who reported this— CNN , USA Today , Business Insider , New York Post , Vox , Slate , Huffington Post , Salon , and Jezebel —none of them caught this on the first go around. Then Slate and Salon realized something was up: it's almost all black and Latino men. Yikes. The Jezebel writer had this commentary i...

Earlier this month, Jordan Weissmann at Slate 's Moneybox column wrote two interesting—and highly disturbing—pieces on the material nature of poverty in the United States. The first details why poverty is still miserable , and the second includes graphs on how the poor spend their income . Both are well worth the time to read in full. And they're important, because it's not hard at all to hear a curious sort of reasoning in favor of this status quo from the likes of FOX News . On the July 19, 2011 edition of Your World With Neil Cavuto , guest host Stuart Varney and guest Robert Rector discussed the following statistics about America's poor families, and how the "definition of poor families [isn't] what it used to be":