The perils of covering Donald Trump

There seem to be two standard rules of political reporting when it comes to US presidential elections. One is that the media has a vested interest in a close race because that generates more interest in the news and thus more readers and viewers. Hence there is always more breathless reporting generated by positive news and polls favoring the candidate who is behind and negative news about the one who is ahead. So in the current race, where Donald Trump is behind, any poll that shows him close to or tied with Hillary Clinton gets wide coverage. But statistically, when two candidates are within three or four points of each other, there will always be some polls that show them to be tied or the one who is behind on average to be even ahead slightly, and the number of polls that show this in this race are what one might predict purely on statistics.
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Don’t be a slowpoke in the left lane

I have been doing a lot of long-distance driving recently and once again encountered an issue that I have ranted about in the past and that is those drivers who camp out in the left lane permanently. And the people doing this cross all ages and both genders. So I was glad to see NPR doing a story on it with the title Don’t Be A Slowpoke: Why Left Lane Driving Causes Traffic.
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The myths about hydration

I grew up in Sri Lanka, a tropical country where the days were hot and one perspired a lot. And yet, there was little fear of dehydration. We drank water with meals and the occasional cup of tea but no one carried around bottles of water. Even when my friends and I played cricket all day, we drank when we were thirsty but that was about it. The idea that dehydration was a danger lurking that had to be staved off constantly was foreign to us.
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When getting even leads to disaster

We know that people can act irrationally out of anger, reacting completely out of proportion to some real or imagined slight and doing dangerous and threatening things as a result. The most obvious examples are of road rage, but we also have cases of people harming and even killing others in domestic or neighborhood disputes. But in most of those cases, people are acting out of anger.
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Can Trump lose among many subgroups and still win?

Some years ago, there was an odd feature of the scores on the SAT exam that students in the US take in large numbers and that many colleges use as one of their admission criteria. They found that the overall average SAT score was declining but that when the scores were disaggregated by ethnicity, the average scores of every subgroup (white, black, Hispanic, Asian) was rising.
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How Roger Ailes got taken down by a ‘dumb blonde’

I mentioned in a previous post that my schadenfeude has limits when it comes to actual physical harm done to people and their families. But I have no limits to my enjoyment when it comes to how the odious, sexist, serial harasser Roger Ailes of Fox News got his comeuppance at the hands of someone who was widely seen as a dumb blonde. As I have noted before, former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson may have played a dumb blonde on her network but she is no fool.
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