Miles Kimball

You don't buy the idea that the police protest the protests not just by a certain amount of brutality but also by shirking their jobs with the excuse that they will get in trouble if they are too active in policing?— Miles Kimball (@mileskimball) October 20, 2021 One of the most severe forms of police brutality is...

The other day I got a CT scan at UCSF, to check for possible aneurysms (don’t worry, I don’t have one). My insurance and I were charged a total of over $20,000 for this service. This is over 4 times the maximum price that most sources will list for a brain CT. Out of pocket, a CT scan can cost as little as a few hundred dollars.Our politicians — both Democratic and Republican — are working on ways to curb surprise medical bills. That will be a good thing, but the problem runs much deeper....

A friend asked me recently why almost all diets fail. The most basic answer is that I don’t know. But I do have some possible reasons:First, we have what is now called a “lipostat” which has a gravitational pull bringing us back to a steady-state weight. As I write and quote in “How Rising Anorexia Can Go Along with...

I am a believer. I am also a skeptic—an open skeptic. For almost 40 years, I believed Mormonism. Toward the end of that time I also believed critics of Mormonism and believed in evolution as something so important, it should play a more central role in my vision of life and the universe than it did in Mormonism. Now I...

Source: Adina Voicu/Pexels Depression makes everything harder: motivation is low, we get little pleasure from things we normally enjoy, we have no energy, and relationships tend to be strained. Small wonder it's the leading cause of disability in the world, according to the World Health Organization. Several treatment options are effective in reducing depression. The majority of psychological treatments with strong research support are cognitive-behavioral (CBT),...

President Biden’s agenda is in peril. Democrats hold a bare 50 seats in the Senate, which gives any member of their caucus the power to block anything he or she chooses, at least in the absence of Republican support. And Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are wielding that leverage ruthlessly.But here’s the truly frightening thought for frustrated Democrats: This might be the high-water mark of power they’ll have for the next decade.Democrats are on the precipice of an era without any...

Christopher Mims is one of my favorite technology writers. He reported on a fascinating paper by Anuraag Sing, Giorgio Triulzi and Christopher...

The Nobel Prize goes to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens. If you seek their monuments look around you. Almost all of the empirical work in economics that you read in the popular press (and plenty that doesn’t make the popular press) is due to analyzing natural experiments using techniques such as difference in differences, instrumental variables and regression discontinuity. The techniques are powerful but the ideas behind them are also understandable by the person in the...

The slimemoldtimemold.com series “A Chemical Hunger” has been a mother lode for things worth talking about in understanding the rise of obesity. I have written three posts in reaction already:Are Processed Food and Environmental Contaminants the Main Cause of the Rise of Obesity?Livestock Antibiotics, Lithium and PFAS...