Women leading universities
For all the attention paid to the controversy last month over how three presidents of America’s most elite universities handled questions about anti-semitism on their campuses, one fact drew little note: all three of the presidents were women. In 1986, only 9.5 percent of presidents in higher education were women, and over a third of…
The long decline in election fraud
Voter fraud and manipulation were widespread and barely hidden in the United States of a century ago. Think Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Now not so much. The conservative Heritage Foundation runs a database of “proven instances of voter fraud” from the present back to as far as 1948. They have found 1,384 instances in…
Racial health equity improving
Overall cancer deaths in the US have been declining since the early 1990s, but they declined the most among those for whom the rate has been highest – Black men, according to a government study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The healing field is still not level, as Black Americans still die…
China’s smog
Over the past seven years, China – the world’s largest producer of air pollution – has reduced its total emissions by 40 percent. That reduction amounts to about three quarters of the global reduction in emissions, according to a report by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. China’s air quality is still…
Heat Waves
Note that heat waves are still less frequent and less extreme in the US than they were a century ago, according the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment report. But they have indeed been rising in frequency since the 1960s with no end in sight. Yet heat mortality – the rate of deaths attributed to…
Heat waves
Note that heat waves are still less frequent and less extreme in the US than they were a century ago, according the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment report. But they have indeed been rising in frequency since the 1960s with no end in sight. Yet heat mortality – the rate of deaths attributed to…