Chris Blattman

[embedded content] Little Richard at the 1988 Grammys “Interestingness = Novelty + Importance” and other simple writing advice from The Atlantic‘s David Thompson “When the Taliban offers you—a pregnant, unmarried woman—safe haven, you know your situation is messed up.“ One of my best pandemic decisions: a subscription to cooking magazine Milk Street Tales of the manuscript thief: Someone, or possibly a cartel of someones, was impersonating influential figures in the publishing industry to...

We estimate the impact of the Green Revolution in the developing world by exploiting exogenous heterogeneity in the timing and extent of the benefits derived from high-yielding crop varieties (HYVs). HYVs increased yields of food crops by 44 percent between 1965 and 2010. The total effect on yields is even higher because of substitution towards crops for which HYVs were available, and because of reallocation of land and labor. Beyond agriculture, our baseline estimates show strong, positive,...

It began a few years ago, when prominent democracy rating organizations started downgrading the United States, putting its institutions on par with Panama, Argentina, or Romania. In retrospect, that seems like the good news. Last year, the international security and intelligence expert Greg Treverton predicted the breakup of the union in a piece titled Civil War Is Coming. And early this year, in a book titled The Next Civil War, journalist Stephen Marche outlined America’s many future...

There’s a pattern that we frequently see in the development of a new technology. Initially, the practical functionality is limited by the technology itself – what’s built and used is close to the limit of what the technology is physically capable of doing. As the technology develops and its capabilities improve, there’s a divergence between what a technology can physically do and what it can economically do, and you begin to see commercialized versions that have lower performance but are...

I’d come to Colombia to find a man named Isaac Bedoya, described by the Colombian media as Latin America’s most notorious sloth trader. The country’s wildlife authorities estimate that he and his accomplices captured and sold as many as 10,000 sloths into the pet trade during the three decades before his conviction in 2015. That is Natasha Daly writing in National Geographic on the sloth cartel, with photos by Juan Arredondo. But (as is so often true in so-called organized crime, but seldom...

Topography of Colombia If you like Wordle, you might also like this history timeline game (via Kottke) Great thread on why violence sometimes rises, sometimes doesn’t, when police pull back What happens to crime in US cities when police pull back? It depends. When police reduce proactivity for reasons other than a viral incident, most papers don’t find a crime increase. But when a pull back accompanies a viral incident, most papers find that crime rises. Citations👇 — Aaron Chalfin...

The statistical assistants at ISI were literally called ‘computers’ (I was a bit taken aback when on the first day a man came to see me and said “I am your computer, sir”). One day when I was chatting with this human ‘computer’, he said some years back he had worked with a foreign professor who was rather short-tempered and used to scream at him for the slightest delay or lapse. (It so happened that I knew this professor). I said he should have protested if the professor was unnecessarily...

Censorship is hard: Fight Club is getting an entirely different ending in a new online release in China, where imported films are often altered to show that the law enforcement, on the side of justice, always trumps the villain. The 1999 film by David Fincher originally ends with the Narrator (Edward Norton) killing his split personality Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). With the female lead Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), he then watches all the buildings explode outside the window and...

A friend asked this on Twitter, and it got me thinking about our approach. To a lot of people, unless it’s a resort, taking kids abroad sounds challenging, expensive, and anything but rejuvenating. We’ve found the opposite. Our foreign trips are easier, cheaper, and more more rewarding and replenishing than our US holidays. Gradually, over regular trips to Latin America, a few Western Europe visits, as well as Canada and Vietnam, we’ve figured out some things that work for us. On the chance...

A photoessay with Bolivian skateboarding girls, via kottke Gimlet is killing it podcast-wise, including this 2-part Heavyweight episode and this one from Crime Show — whatever you expect from the titles, you will be wrong Tatooine sucks With such an experienced President and team, why isn’t Biden’s foreign policy coherent and bold? How you can study history in the field rather than the archives I would have never discovered these dynamics if I had stayed in the archives alone. It was only...