Tabs from Here and There

Here's what's been filling up my browser tabs for past week or two.

A nice graphic from Mother Jones, accompanying an article about how America's drinks got to be so big:

I remember those seven-ounce cups at McDonald's, I think, even in the late 1960s.

Continuing with the food theme, I'll bet you didn't know there's a website that contains nothing but photos of former Pizza Hut restaurants.


I've often noted the way these buildings are reused (for instance, there's one on the edge of northeast Minneapolis that's a vegetarian Indian restaurant), but this blogger did something about it.

Last weekend's "Up with Chris Hayes" had a great segment on some new research that found state legislators of both parties consistently over-estimate how conservative their constituencies are. It's not yet peer-reviewed, but the work by two graduate students found that “nearly half of conservative politicians appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than is the most conservative district in the entire country.” Liberals weren't quite as far off, but they, too, think their constituents are farther right than they are. The finding held up on a range of issues, such as health care and same-sex marriage. The Washington Post's Wonkblog has a longer story on it, including scatter graphs from the paper. Link to the full paper (pdf)

The Daily Kos recently ran a guide to the conservative movement in one handy chart. They break down the movement into teabaggers, paleocons, corporate cons, neocons, theocons, and libertarians and provide useful categories like pet concern and biggest ally, plus short phrases to describe each type of conservative's perspective on a range of the usual topics. One topic is Obama, and the adjectives for each are Dictator, Communist, Socialist, Appeaser, Infidel and Tyrant.

The ACLU has begun a nationwide investigation of police militarization. My experience at the large, peaceful protest during the 2008 Republican National Convention made this real for me. It's a shock when you see the streets of your city occupied by what might as well be the military, even if they wear badges.

Informationisbeautiful.net has a nice (but scary) visualization of carbon challenge we face:


Lots more on the site.

I wanted to save Barbara and John Ehrenreich's article about the rise and decline of the professional managerial class. As with so much of her work, it doesn't fit into the list of topics I usually put in my filing system. I think it's an interesting article to read around the same time as Chris Hayes's book Twilight of the Elites.

This is fun, but also serious: More than you ever thought you could know about the differences between the U.S. and Europe when it comes to how egg sales are regulated. To wash or not to wash? To refrigerate or leave at room temperature?

And finally, I'm peeved with myself that I can't find a link to a piece of scholarly research I read about in the past few weeks; the tabs have failed me. It found that teen pregnancy itself is not the cause of the bad outcomes everyone associates with it -- rather, it was the low socio-economic status the mothers started with. Women from the same SES were no better off, on average, than the teen mothers among them, if I remember it correctly. Anyone who knows what I'm referring to, let me know. I think it was posted in the context of the discussion about the New York City ad campaign which many saw as shaming women. (Here's Melissa Harris-Perry's letter to Michael Bloomerg about the campaign.)