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Three Years Maternity Leave, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I read with interest your series about maternity leave. I've been looking at the data and the anecdotes posted, but I think there is something  more related to deeply cultural expectations and less with the law going on here.

I lived in Germany for 4 years, working for a German research institution as a biology researcher. In that time period we adopted an infant. Germany does indeed offer 12 months paid parental leave after the birth or adoption of a child (14...

Healthcare And November

by Patrick Appel

Jay Cost contends that the Democrats lost electoral support because they passed health care reform. Chait counters:

It's obviously true that the Democrats lost a lot of support "duringthe health care debate." The health care debate took about a year. Myargument is that, during a period in which unemployment was rising andthe Democrats controlled the entire government, Democrats would havebled support regardless of what they were debating. If they declined tocarry out their...

About My Job: The Pharmacist

by Conor Friedersdorf

A male reader writes:

I'm a full time pharmacist in a smallish community hospital.  What people think about my job, and the media misinterprets, is that I spend all day counting pills.  Look at any news story about a pharmaceutical product, or a pharmacy, or a drug recall, and there is a stock loop of footage of someone counting tablets.  The media never shows a pharmacist counseling a patient, conferring with a physician, giving an immunization or any of the hundreds of...

Combat Troops in Everything But Name Remain

By Conor Friedersdorf

The best thing you'll read about President Obama's speech on Iraq is here, and I'd like to associate myself with everything in this excerpt:

What President Obama called the end of the combat mission in Iraq is a meaningless milestone, constructed almost entirely out of thin air, and his second Oval Office speech marks a rare moment of dishonesty and disingenuousness on the part of a politician who usually resorts to rare candor at important moments. The fifty thousand...

Protesting Too Much, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

This clip is simply too much. It shows Glenn Beck talking about how he wore a bulletproof vest to his rally and how Alveda King - a "marked woman for standing on that step with me" - bravely chose not to. Can anyone point me to a single reported death threat against Beck? All I could find was one via Twitter, and that was six months ago, and it quickly disappeared. Google News has nothing.

I know Beck is a melodramatic showman, but the fact that he thought he might be...

How Parties Swallow Insurgents

by Patrick Appel

Over the weekend, Ambidner wrote that national political parties are "withered." Hans Noel counters:

[T:]his parties-are-dead diagnosis makes three mistakes. First, itextrapolates from a small number of cases, forgetting that such caseshappen all the time. Second, it assumes that party insiders areincapable of learning from outsider challenges, despite all theevidence that they do. But most importantly, it misunderstands what an"intra-party squabble" really is. Today's outsider...

Baby Got Snacks

by Zoe Pollock

Nick Baumann over at Mother Jones rightly points out that our nod to the Buzzfeed mashup of the richest rappers and their worst lyrics probably drew a good amount of inspiration from this amazing site, Snacks and Shit. Chris Macho and Chris D'Elia have been keeping tabs on the worst lyrics since February 2009. Thank you guys for my new favorite.

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Engagement Gifts

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Costly signaling makes sense as a reason many people give for buyingdiamonds, although I'm not sure it really works as a defense given allthe options of costly things.  More importantly, though, it seems toput the emphasis rather strangely on "signaling," a message which mightbe partially for your mate (one hopes she knows that message already)but is really targeting anyone else that might see and/or desire her.As such it's little more than designing and using...

One Way To Shore Up The Housing Market

by Patrick Appel

Yglesias advocates more legal immigration:

Adam Ozimek offers up some quantitative research on the scale of the effect citing research from Albert Saiz (

One way to especially take advantage of this effect and politicallyframe it as housing stabilization policy would be to create a specialnew class of visa...