This is not what critical race theory says: "Critical race theory, Guelzo says, is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded. Kant…

Among the indefinitely many evil things the Trump administration has done that will take years and years to fix (and in this case has undoubtedly cost many lives already).  Propublica has the story.

UPDATE: Dahlia Lithwick has some helpful context, including litigation from the 1970s involving forced sterilizations of poor Latina women in California.  Lithwick also recounts some of the more familiar history about the early 20c legal history of forced sterilization (endorsed by SCOTUS in Buck v. Bell and Justice Holmes' declaration that "three generations of imbeciles…

UPDATE (8/26): This should surprise exactly no one, but apparently upper levels of the Mafia Donald regime pushed for the change.  This is after all the same regime that scuttled an earlier testing plan in order to score political points against blue states.   The CDC now recommends against testing asymptomatic people who have a…

The latest trendy idea.  It sounds great in some limited contexts, especially as a way to protect healthcare workers.  It also sounds suspiciously like a way for Trump and Co. not to do the actual work of testing and contact tracing, or to guarantee a general social safety net.  It's like some funhouse mirror version…

Stuart Elden at Progressive Geographies is curating a list of "geographers, sociologists, philosophers etc. on covid 19." There's a ton of fascinating material there, and he is updating it regularly.

At company called unacast has used cellphone tracking data to produce a “Social Distancing Scorecard.”  It breaks down the US by state and county to measure the distances that cellphones travel as a proxy for social distancing.  It then grades areas from A to F based on the percentage decrease. Obviously this is a rough…

It seems that Trump is descending into his usual self-aggrandizement and racism – somebody must have slipped something into his Diet Coke for Monday's (semi) coherent performance.   Unfortunately, that's now worn off.  If you haven't seen it, the Washington Post skewers the blatant hypocrisy of Fox News.  Also, the Trump administration was given the opportunity…

As communal life comes screeching to a collective halt for the indefinite future (including not-quite-Italy-but-close bans on movement in San Francisco), and as public health officials go into “more lockdown is better” mode, it seems important to underline at least three things: (1) no one knows what they are doing, hence (2) these measures are…

In one easy chart: