this week i

learned that samuel morse, inventor of morse code, painted this portrait of eli whitney, inventor of the cotton gin.


read..

(1) findings from sipp

the overall unemployment rate, which is a fairly good proxy for how hard it is to find work, was almost twice as high in 2009 as in 1996.  yet the number of families getting tanf in 2009 was less than half the number getting afdc in 1996

(2) music access

 spotify estimates that fully four million of the songs it carries have never been streamed, not even once


(3) churchill defies the biographer

 at the height of the war the american ambassador to the court of st. james's was sleeping with the prime minister's daughter, and the president's special envoy was sleeping with the prime minister's daughter-in-law.  special relationships indeed

a sharp dissonance emerges between churchill as the jovial bulldog of popular american imagination and the somber reality of a life scarred by bitterness and tragedy: in all, suicides close to churchill included a brother-in-law, a former stepfather, a daughter's estranged lover, a former daughter-in-law, a son-in-law, and a daughter

(4) el-sisi

twenty prisons have been built since sisi took power


(5) a/b testing in modern campaigns

 we have three major voter suppression operations under way


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