Before you get all excited about male birth control
When you’re a public health grad student and something related to health hits the news, your friends make sure you see it. Since there’s a lot of bad science writing on the internet this can be rather...
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Facebook's brilliantly self-interested organ donation move
How can social media have a big impact on public health? Here’s one example: Facebook just introduced a feature that allows users to announce their status as organ donors, and to tell the story of when...
View ArticleOur future selves will mock this (I hope)
Smiling people holding hands. Walking on the beach. Inexplicable doves flying through blue skies. Terrible side effects discussed cheerily by a honey-voiced narrator…. That’s right, this post is about...
View ArticleObesity pessimism
I posted before on the massive increase in obesity in the US over the last couple decades, trying to understand the why of the phenomenal change for the worse. Seriously, take another look at those...
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"As it had to fail"
My favorite line from the Anti-Politics Machine is a throwaway. The author, James Ferguson, an anthropologist, describes a World Bank agricultural development program in Lesotho, and also — through...
View ArticleAlwyn Young just broke your regression
Alwyn Young — the same guy whose paper carefully accounting for growth in East Asian was popularized by Krugman and sparked an enormous debate — has been circulating a paper on African growth rates....
View ArticleThe greatest country in the world
I’ve been in Ethiopia for six and a half months, and in that time span I have twice found myself explaining the United States’ gun culture, lack of reasonable gun control laws, and gun-related...
View ArticleDo they know it's Christmas? No, because it isn't.
Remember “Do they know it’s Christmas?” That’s right, the 1984 hit song intended to raise money for famine victims in Ethiopia. If that’s not ringing a bell (See what I did there?) then here’s the...
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Uninformative paper titles: "in Africa"
When I saw a new NBER working paper titled “Disease control, demographic change and institutional development in Africa” (PDF) pop up in the NBER RSS feed I thought the title sounded interesting, so I...
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Merci, FIFA
This is a French-language FIFA billboard about Ebola: It has 11 anti-Ebola messages from famous footballers, which happen to be printed small enough to be unreadable from the street or sidewalk. Not...
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