Moses > Recent Status Updates

A lot of interesting stuff in here, but the writing is a bit sloppy (e.g. a reference to a police killing in "the town of Montgomery, Maryland," when Montgomery is the name of the county), which makes me question how much to trust it. Also weird tone that's often formal but then dips suddenly into casual/salty language

I was curious how this had such great reviews - the first couple pages didn't seem special, but now I can't put it down! Arthur Sackler is a fascinating villain - I didn't realize he basically invented pharmaceutical marketing, or that he used other people's names for his companies in order to obscure the massive conflicts of interest (owning a pharma ad co. and its biggest rival and a "medical newspaper", etc)

Cute, wholesome, perhaps a bit corny/cliche/clumsy at times, but a fun read

Cool book so far, very philosophical

So many weird little errors in this book! In a map (p156) that shows line graphs for each state's vote totals over time, Minnesota goes red three times in the past half-century. In reality, while Minnesota has had several close results, it hasn't voted for a Republican president since Nixon in 1972. I'm confused about how this error even happened - the data is correct on other maps in the same book.

I'm perplexed by the author's annotations on the violin plots. He seems not to confuse mean and mode when he states that the counties won by Clinton are distributed "around a mean of 52%." I was so surprised by this claim that I downloaded the data myself, re-taught myself how to analyze it in R, and found a mean of 58%. Just because the peak of the curve is at 52% doesn't mean that's the mean! Smh

Gosh, this is a sloppy book! The snake chart (p134) ranks Utah as bluer than WI in 2016, sorting the states by GOP vote % rather than margin of victory. Trump got 46% of UT votes, but won by 18 points due to a strong 3rd party showing. Not only does the author fail to note this peculiarity, he even describes Utah as one of "the states with the most marginal results that went Trump's way," which is simply inaccurate.

I was really excited for this book, but it's been a letdown so far. A lot of surprisingly poorly designed maps, dry/clunky text, and poor editing. The map on page 113 (which I'm currently on) is shockingly inaccurate - nearly every state is the wrong color based on the key. Nevada and Pennsylvania, for instance, are shown as having margins of victory above 30% in 2016. Disappointing.