It's a new month!  I didn't realize this till after noon today, scarily enough.  This year will be strange to remember.

A good review of what seems to be a pretty thorough biography of Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish social theorist who wrote Modernity and the Holocaust and Liquid Modernity, among other works.  And a very nice ending to the review (and perhaps to ZB’s life):

Wagner’s last sentence suggests he had finally resolved the Polish/Jewish dichotomy by achieving a unique identity as Zygmunt Bauman. That is no doubt true, but I was struck by something else: that, for all the difficulties and uprootings of his life, he not only stubbornly refused the role of victim but also managed to achieve the rare status – rare at least in interesting biographies – of being a happy man.

The liberal arts produce graduates who are employed. This is a useful study. 

Further countering that argument are the positive associations we observe on a secondary outcome and in our restricted sample. In both the full and restricted sample, we observe a positive relationship between an institution’s LASEO score and a secondary labor market outcome -- the likelihood that a student whose parents are at the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution moves to the top 40 percent of the income distribution by their early 30s. This suggests that liberal arts and sciences educational experiences may provide value-added for low-income students in particular. We also observe a positive association in the restricted sample of non-liberal arts institutions between an institution’s LASEO score and its graduation rate.

William Frey at Brookings looks over the data about immigration to the US in the 2010s:

The decade has also shown a dispersion of foreign-born persons to less urbanized states in the “middle” of the country, especially those that Trump carried in the 2016 presidential election. All of this makes clear that foreign-born population changes in the 2010s differ sharply from those during the nation’s higher-immigration years. This, along with increased immigration restrictions instituted by the administration since the onset of COVID-19, could likely lead to a very different immigration scenario for the 2020s with diminished overall population growth. 

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.“  One of the most famous lines in film, and naturally one of the most missed quoted and misunderstood. This piece offers some background. Also, The Man Who Shot liberty Valance remains one of the great movies of all time. And philosophically quite profound.

Hey this is a pretty good article about affordable housing in Virginia and state politics around it.

This is not a study about whether God exists, this is a study about why and how brains come to believe in gods. Our hypothesis is that people whose brains are good at subconsciously discerning patterns in their environment may ascribe those patterns to the hand of a higher power.  

Interesting finding—having an unconscious capacity to perceive patterns, and anticipate their extension, seem to have a stronger belief in the existence of God—I suppose they mean, if they do believe in God already?