Two things to read today
Hey folks I’ve been tied up with IRL stuff this week — a conference talk and doctor’s visits for the kids — so we’ll be getting back to a regular publishing schedule tomorrow. In the meantime, if you’re hankering for some good data let me recommend the following two pieces, both of which have left me considerably smarter than I was before I read them!
Charles Gaba with a great analysis of how the partisan dimensions of Covid mortality have shifted since the beginning of the pandemic. It’s anchored by a nifty animation of death rates by county-level Trump vote share which vividly illustrates the shift from blue to red counties over the past 18 months or so.
Astral Codex Ten with a deep dive into the research on Ivermectin. He basically arrives at a fairly unsurprising place: “I think the conventional wisdom - that the most extreme ivermectin supporters were mostly gullible rubes who were bamboozled by pseudoscience - was basically accurate.” But the story of getting there is a bit more complicated than I’ve seen it portrayed elsewhere. It’s also a primer on how to be better at parsing scientific studies. In the end it all hinges on… parasitic worms?
See you tomorrow!