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New NYT: Our short attention span on foreign disasters
From my new Upshot column: Saturday’s huge earthquake in Nepal killed at least 5,000 people, injured more than 8,000, and affected millions more. Relief efforts are underway to aid the survivors. The extent of American aid may be limited, however, by our collective attention span. In the days since the quake, the riots in Baltimore
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New NYT: Fact-checking improves citizen knowledge
From my new Upshot column: Fact-checks of politicians’ statements have become increasingly prominent in media coverage of American politics. With dedicated fact-checkers like PolitiFact and recurring features in newspapers like The New York Times and news agencies like The Associated Press, more journalists are trying to assess the accuracy of claims made by public figures
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New NYT: Why CA approach to vaccines could backfire
From my new Upshot column: In a number of states, parents are allowed to opt out of legal requirements to have their children vaccinated before entering school by claiming a “personal belief” or “philosophical” exemption. These provisions have raised a great deal of concern since the Disneyland measles outbreak, including in California, where it began.
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New NYT: How Walker dodged the inauthentic label
From my new Upshot column: It may be called waffling, flip-flopping or evolving, but every four years new presidential candidates find themselves adjusting inconvenient positions that might hinder their bid for the nomination. What’s striking, though, is how some candidates who make these changes are portrayed as inauthentic by party elites and primary voters, and
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New NYT: Divisive GOP primary risks overstated
From my new Upshot column: Will the fight for the G.O.P. presidential nomination be Hillary Clinton’s secret weapon in the 2016 election? Not according to the best political science research. It’s often thought that divisive primary fights damage presidential nominees in the general election. People close to Hillary Clinton endorsed this theory in a Politico
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New Monkey Cage: Changing academic research
From my new Q&A at The Monkey Cage with Dan Hopkins: DH: So it sounds like you want to bring actual practice more in line with the deductive ideal in which we test previously stated hypotheses, is that right? Can pre-registration solve these kinds of problems on its own? BN: Actually, I’m skeptical that preregistration
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New NYT: Misleading Clinton poll reporting
From my new Upshot column: Has the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account hurt her in the polls? You might think so if you read a CNN article published Monday night, which reported that “unfavorable views of Hillary Clinton are on the rise” after disclosure of her use of the email
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New NYT: Hillary Clinton’s management paradox
From my new Upshot column: Although the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s email is unlikely to damage her chances to reach the White House, her use of a private account as secretary of state suggests a larger set of concerns about her management approach. How did her staff not warn her about the political and security
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New NYT: Voters unlikely to care about Clinton email
From my new Upshot column: The report Monday that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state raises a number of important questions about government transparency and access to public records. Unsurprisingly, however, the conversation quickly veered from matters of policy into ominous speculation about the political
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New NYT: Why Obama is often accused of being disloyal
From my new Upshot column: When Rudolph Giuliani said that he does “not believe that the president loves America,” he became the latest in a long line of public figures to question the loyalty or allegiance of the country’s first nonwhite president. While these criticisms are ostensibly directed at Barack Obama’s worldview, as Mr. Giuliani