Checkout Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre. From a review:

Medicine is broken. We like to imagine that it’s based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature surrounding a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by industry. We like to imagine that regulators let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve hopeless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients.

(The End of Time.)

(Burka Avenger.)

Checkout Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen. An excerpt:

Average is over is the catchphrase of our age, and it is likely to apply all the more to our future.

This maxim will apply to the quality of your job, to your earnings, to where you live, to your education and to the education of your children, and maybe even to your most intimate relationships. Marriages, families, businesses, countries, cities, and regions all will see a greater split in material outcomes; namely, they will either rise to the top in terms of quality or make do with unimpressive results.

I have to constantly resist the urge to isolate myself. I want to withdraw, which may surprise many who know me because I spend so much time in the company of others. These connections I foster and feel obligated to come from an understanding that we need one another to survive. Read more…

(Approved for Adoption.)

Tufts Magazine has an artilce by Colin Woodward titled “Up in Arms: THE BATTLE LINES OF TODAY’S DEBATES OVER GUN CONTROL, STAND-YOUR-GROUND LAWS, AND OTHER VIOLENCE-RELATED ISSUES WERE DRAWN CENTURIES AGO BY AMERICA’S EARLY SETTLERS.”

If you understand the United States as a patchwork of separate nations, each with its own origins and prevailing values, you would hardly expect attitudes toward violence to be uniformly distributed. You would instead be prepared to discover that some parts of the country experience more violence, have a greater tolerance for violent solutions to conflict, and are more protective of the instruments of violence than other parts of the country. That is exactly what the data on violence reveal about the modern United States.

(Documented.)

(Running From Crazy.)