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We have a very, very small number of visitors who sometimes “spray paint” the same long comment on many posts. When a line of these typically multi-paragraph comments is googled, it shows that the same comment has been spray painted on many other websites as well. We will be deleting these, both concurrently and within [...]
Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
February 12th, 2013
Category: Blogging
The well-respected blog “The Phronetics” has merged with the Reality-Based Community
January 28th, 2013
Category: Blogging
Each week, we get from Google Analytics a report of which individual posts resulted in the most visitors to RBC. Our archive holds over 12,000 posts, but the leaders are almost always posts from the current or prior week (note that post-based entries are a rarity, people usually enter by the main page or from [...]
January 12th, 2013
Category: Blogging, Rhetoric and Framing
I really liked Mark’s post about how people who think all policy analysis is just rhetoric are suspicious of, or even angry at, anyone who points out a fact that is inconsistent with their ideology. It leads me to re-post the bulk of my earlier explication of what RBC does and does not do:
January 3rd, 2013
Category: Blogging
Andrew Sullivan is making waves on the web for giving back the Boeing and striking out on his own. The experiment addresses an intriguing question: Can a blogger actually make it as an independent business or will his audience run away in search of free content? In my scientific life, I have to conduct experiments [...]
December 17th, 2012
Category: Blogging
The powerful posts here about the Newtown massacre have generated many passionate and intelligent comments and also an unusually high number of abusive and trolling remarks. I started editing some out and it was difficult to do much more than cut the few most egregious cases without having threads fall apart. I could even see [...]
October 27th, 2012
Category: Blogging
The election is nigh and passions are understandably intense. Yet the “play nice” rules of RBC remain unchanged. I just deleted some comments from recent posts in which the writer engaged in abuse/name calling, including a few that proved Godwin’s point. Elections or no, we have a civil community here…let’s keep it that way. Thank [...]
August 3rd, 2012
Category: Blogging, Moral philosophy
Two years ago, a British newspaper editor emailed Mark Kleiman and me and asked us to write a short piece about crime and drugs. We dutifully did so and promptly sent it to him. But he didn’t respond. I rang him up a week later and asked if he had received it. He said “Oh [...]
June 26th, 2012
Category: Blogging, Journalism (Online and Otherwise)
Ezra Klein offers an extraordinarily perceptive analysis of how lobbyists influence Congress, Minjae Park cuts through the simplified rhetoric about how admitting international students necessarily promotes cultural interchange at U.S. universities, Kevin Drum worries about a coming inter-generational struggle among Americans, Kathleen Geier illuminates the work of film critic Andrew Saris and journalist Gitta Serenyi, [...]