What makes Keith Wallach's apartment extraordinary is not the least bit evident at first. The kitchen of his lower Harlem studio is diminutive but tidy. The furnishings — a queen-size bed, a considerable couch and a bureau — dwarf the space but look nearly new. Surfaces are cluttered in a way that suggests once something is put down, it stays there for years. Yet the place is clean. In fact, the most remarkable attribute of Wallach's home is that he is in it, because for years he was part of a small but conspicuous segment of the population: People who live on the streets, suffer from ... Read More
State of the Investigative Art
March 25, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
Wonderful article in (the January/February) magazine on how the Internet is opening new doors to journalists investigating political money and its role in both the electoral and public-policy processes ("Deep Throat Meets Data Mining"). While the Sunlight Foundation is doing some great stuff, I would like to alert you to groups like ours that have been doing data acquisition and analysis. We're doing amazing stuff (I should say the youngsters here who live and breathe the 'Net are ... ) with new data visualization tools. We have been for more than 15 years. By way of background, you ... Read More
Race Ball: Our National Pastime?
March 16, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Although half a century has passed since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, a suspicion has persisted that white fans are less than enthusiastic about rooting for black players. Among scholars, this belief can be traced to a pair of studies — one from the early 1970s, another from the early 1980s — that found an average attendance drop of 5 to 10 percent for games with an African-American starting pitcher. In a paper published in December, economist Philip Hersch of Wichita State University revisited the same question using a much larger data set, ... Read More
Meet the Real Islam
March 15, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In the final Republican presidential debate last year, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, speaking about America's adversaries in the so-called "war on terror," told the audience: "This is about Shi'a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate." So many powerful groups, representing hundreds of millions of people, united against freedom and moderation and democratic ideals. Quite a harrowing thought. Lucky ... Read More
Making a Market for Kidneys
March 12, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
When Monique Wisdom learned that her mother, Annette Kaiser, needed a life-saving kidney transplant, she didn't hesitate to offer one of her own — after all, Kaiser had adopted Monique and her brother when their birth mother died of AIDS. But the 24-year-old loan officer had to think twice when she got a call one day last fall from Dr. A. Osama Gaber at The Methodist Hospital in Houston, where the transplant was to take place. Gaber was proposing a swap: Wisdom would donate her kidney to a person she had never met, Jesus Martinez, a 36-year-old shipping and receiving clerk. In exchange, ... Read More
The Bonfire of the Housing Vanity
March 11, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
On Dec. 21, 2008, The New York Times seemed to solve America's confusion over the ongoing global financial crisis with an explanation both simple and familiar: Like so much else, our economic meltdown could be blamed on the blinkered right-wing zealotry of President George W. Bush. Under the heading "The Reckoning," a 5,000-word front-page story titled "Ownership Society: White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire," by a team of four Times reporters, examined how Bush entered office "vowing to spread the dream of homeownership" and then "pushed hard" to expand it. The results, the story ... Read More
Everyday Miracles
March 9, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Forty-something years ago, when I was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., I was a sickly thing. I weighed only 6 pounds. I had a strep infection and wouldn't eat. The doctors put me in an incubator and treated the infection, and within a few weeks I was well enough to go home to my family's split-level in the suburbs. A few years ago, a 9-year-old boy named Samson came down with strep. But he lived in rural Rwanda, not suburban Pittsburgh, and his family did not have the pennies needed to take him to the clinic to be treated. He developed rheumatic heart disease that damaged his heart valves, and for ... Read More
Downsizing CEO Paychecks
March 4, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
The paychecks and perks of CEOs are once again the subject of government scrutiny and public anger, just as they were during previous economic downturns. Scholars are split on whether the Wall Street meltdown and subsequent government bailout will reverse the rapidly rising rate of corporate executive compensation, a trend that has caused concern for a decade. Two studies released in December, based on data from the long-ago good times of 2007, suggest things may be shifting. The Corporate Library, an independent corporate governance group, reports the median pay raise for the 1,864 chief ... Read More
Profit, Thy Name Is … Woman?
February 27, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
Any action that shows a consistent correlation to high profits would probably be of interest to companies struggling to swim against the tide of these perilous economic times. But one corporate policy seems to address both diversity and profitability issues in a single blow: Over the past several years, my colleagues and I at Pepperdine University have tracked the performance of Fortune 500 companies with a strong record of promoting women to the executive suite and compared their performance to that of other firms in the same industries. The correlation between high-level female executives ... Read More
