I don't know who put it there.

A list, from 2017, of "Latin American Female Theologians you should know about."  If you're interested in theology, this is a way of helping expand (I presume) your horizons.   

Child mortality, dropping significantly in almost all places where it is still a real presence, but doing so unevenly.  More evidence that the population boom was a matter not of people multiplying like bunnies, but of people not dropping like flies.  

This is morally evasive and ashamed, finally only begrudgingly admitting "awkwardness and false starts, confessing to plants among them,"  but apart from that, has some good and provocative points.  (Also, I know a lot of people at Union, and have a lot of respect for their scholarship, so I'd eventually like to hear from one of them about this.)

Story about an old psychology experiment that many psychologists thought for a long time "refuted" free will.  Now it looks like psychologists have realized that there may have been some conceptual assumptions baked into the argument for refutation that could be plausibly challenged.  And so the story seems to not be as sound as they had thought.  A good cautionary tale for arguments that yell "science!".  Truly.  Investigate things.

Here's a fascinating piece (kind of a parallel to the psych one) on the trickiness of economic data, and the way studies can be, well, he's too polite to say it but I am not, manipulated:

“Depending on the methodological choices made, very different stories can be told about what is happening to wages in America. This means that any statement about pay or wage trends has to be treated carefully. Since when? Using what inflation measure? Which workers? Here we have considered just four of these choices. We have not considered other consequential decisions, for example, the relative merits of measuring wages only, or total compensation, which includes employer-provided benefits like health care. Some analysts strongly prefer compensation to wages. They argue that total compensation best reflects the ultimate purchasing power workers receive for their labor, citing the fact that for the median wage earner, wages represent just two-thirds of their total pay. It is not that there is one right answer. But the choice of method should ideally be driven by a clearly articulated question at hand. Wherever possible, multiple results using different methodologies should be shown.

The danger is that researchers select methods that deliver results in line with their own priors. This is the empirical equivalent of what philosopher Bernard Williams warned against: “smuggling your answer into your question”. When it comes to a question as important to the quality of life of the middle class, the central concern of our initiative, the need for caution and transparency is especially great.”

I liked Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker.  But I had no idea about what happened to him since then.  This piece is really amusing on it all:

“The sheer existence — and vertiginous decline — of the Jeremy Renner Official app is weird and inexplicably hilarious. But like the rest of Renner’s current image, it’s also a symptom of our current, confusing moment in pop culture and the economy built around it, where it’s unclear if the truly massive Hollywood star is increasingly a relic of the past. Why does Jeremy Renner have an app? A music career? An Amazon store? Because contemporary stardom is weird and contradictory and more impossible than ever to navigate, let alone master.“

Happy Friday!