Ezra Klein

By Harold Pollack Tuesday’s New York Times includes a nice story “The epidemic that wasn’t” recounting the crack baby scare of two decades ago. Quoting distinguished experts such as Brown University’s Barry Lester and Boston University’s Deborah Frank, Times reporter Susan Okie recounts that sorry history, in which real medical uncertainty, media sensationalism, and the […]

by Nicholas Beaudrot This graph from This graph from Think Progress shows the tremendous partisan gap in news channel appearances during the debate over the stimulus bill. In addition to giving lie to the notion that MSNBC is somehow a liberal news channel, Republicans outhustled Democrats across the board. I realize a certain number of […]

by Ryan Avent Back when everyone was discussing whether or not we should bail out the automakers, some folks were suggesting that saving the Big Three could help Detroit transition into a hub for the production of green technologies. I tended to point out that the Big Three had often fought against policies that would […]

By Dylan Matthews Yes, yes, Matt makes some good points about lobbying, but you really can’t write a post about Richard Berman without mentioning that his son David founded the Silver Jews, and just wrote a letter on the band’s message board blasting his father’s line of work. On that note, the Silver Jews sure […]

by Nicholas Beaudrot House Roll call on the motion to suspend rules and pass the DTV transition delay. Because this is a vote to “suspend the Rules and pass”, a 290 vote-threshold was required and not met. I see no pattern to the set of Democrats who voted against delay or the Republicans who voted […]

by Tom Laskawy It’s been a bad week for food safety. First, it was the peanut butter, then it was the High Fructose Corn Syrup and now it’s deadly antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria (aka MRSA) in CAFO pigs (and their minders). And of course, as Bill Marler – litigious scourge of the food industry – reminds […]

By Dylan Matthews I’m guessing Danny Boyle really wishes this story hadn’t broken until after Oscar voting ended: Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, two of the child actors in “Slumdog Millionaire,” are still living in the slums of Mumbai, despite the film’s $14 million budget and worldwide success. Ali earned 500 British pounds ($710) for […]

by Ryan Avent The conservative economists who have argued against the stimulus, as a whole or in parts, have generally tried to do so in a reasonable fashion. I mostly think they’ve got it wrong, but they’re at least trying to use theory and data to assemble a coherent story about why the stimulus might […]

by Ryan Avent To follow up on the last post, consider this bit of news from the American Society of Civil Engineers — it would cost some $2.2 trillion to bring our nation’s current infrastructure stock into a state of good repair. Now to be fair, the American Society of Civil Engineers has an interest […]