Good on Paper

Was leaving behind our nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles a mistake? If so, why did so many different groups of people make the switch to farming? The researcher Andrea Matranga spent more than a decade looking at the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic era and found that humanity’s decision to settle down was driven by climactic shifts and the need to insure against famines. 

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What exactly happened to the Kamala Harris campaign in this year’s presidential election? Host Jerusalem Demsas and Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist and the host of The Bulwark Podcast, tick through the competing narratives about why the Democrats lost and which ones actually hold up.

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Do higher levels of immigration lead to lower wages? The Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma breaks down the misconception that immigration creates an economic burden—when actually the opposite is true: Immigrants are a source of economic growth.

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Grocery store prices are up. Politicians have tried to pin it on supply-chain problems, price gouging, and corporate greed—or “greedflation.” But Ernie Tedeschi, a former chief economist of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, wonders if something else is going on. And it might just have to do with store-brand mac and cheese.

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How is party ideology formed? Is it based on political strategy to garner the most votes? Or is it based on ideas and beliefs? The Georgetown professor Hans Noel traces the shift from the Civil War to the civil-rights movement to understand how Democrats and Republicans seemingly flipped sides during the 20th century—and what that says about the parties today.

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Are tariffs good? Or bad? And why do politicians love to talk about them so much? Scott Lincicome lays out the high costs of tariffs and who really bears the brunt.

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How does a nation pull its residents out of poverty and into the developed world? The researcher Oliver Kim looked into how Taiwan, and a few other East Asian countries, managed to rise from a poor nation to the ranks of the global elite in just a short amount of time.

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Would you donate a kidney? Would you do it for $50,000? Vox’s Dylan Matthews gave his to a stranger. But it made him wonder: Shouldn’t he have been paid?

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Crime peaks during the summer for adults. But the economist Ezra Karger found that the same can’t be said for kids: It peaks during the school year.

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When do fact-checks work? And when do they backfire and cause someone to dig in? Yamil Velez, a political scientist at Columbia University, set up an experiment using chatbots and found that people can change their mind, even on deeply held beliefs. Except under one condition: when the chatbot is rude.

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