Christopher Dornan

Does the news reflect what we die from? What do Americans die from, and what do the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News report on?

The US news media pay far more attention to homicide as a cause of death than disease. No surprise there. What's surprising is how US news outlets across the political spectrum don't differ much in how they report on what kills us. Fox News and New York Times basically have the same emphases.

What Americans Die from?

And what the media reports on...

Our World in Data ourworldindata.org/does-the-new...

Suddenly starting to get real interested in how the territory of Canada handled the turbulence of being right next door to the United States of America the last time it had a civil war. Much of what I know about what happened in US-Canada relations in the late 1800s comes from Murdoch Mysteries.

I get that Canada must be careful not to rile the beast next door. I understand that we can do something without saying anything. We can make trade deals with other nations and otherwise hold our tongue. I regret it, but I get it. There will come a time, though, when we'll have to say something.

Here's one for you. I adore this building at the University of Glasgow. It's a nondescript cube except for its facings. There is no doubt about the department therein and no one would ever remember its official name. That's just the Math Building.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch!

Even funnier tell the University you’ll give them 50 million dollars so long as a faculty building has to use the name of a town in Wales in its name.

The Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch Faculty of Architecture!

🤣😂🤣😂🥲😂

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I imagine a generic university, where all the buildings are named Donor Hall, Donor Centre, and Donor House.

I'm sufficiently old that the Robarts Library was known to me and my contemporaries as Fort Book.

Nothing makes me feel good like scrolling through multiple TikTok videos of medical school students going through their newly minted AI generated textbooks and making slideshows of all of the errors including completely made up muscles and tendons - can’t wait to age in this hellscape

I thought Batman destroyed this

NYT Spelling Bee recognizes the word ontogeny but not neoteny?

Watch today is a Soviet-made handwound “medical watch” from 1989 by Slava. The scales help you determine the patient’s heart rate. You must wait until the seconds hand reaches 0 or 30, then count 15 patient pulses. Where the seconds hand is on the scale at that moment is the heart rate.

I picked the wrong time to start feeling empathy.

Dear fellow Canadians (and Danes, Scots, Czechs, Spaniards, Japanese -- the full roster of NATO and G7 members),

Look out your windows right now. Do you see anything resembling this going on in your country?

They’re not smashing any windows yet, so this is just Nacht in America.

This gentleman teaches a course in the history of antifascism at Rutgers University.

The far-right and health: an evolving political crisis Across Europe and North America, racism, xenophobia, and far-right nationalism have become normalised in public and political discourse, leading many people to feel anxiety and fear of violence, discr...

The far-right and health: an evolving political crisis - The Lancet www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Hegseth says Wounded Knee massacre soldiers will keep Medals of Honor Historical records say the US army killed about 250 Lakota Sioux people in the 1890 massacre in South Dakota

Even if you believe that Wounded Knee was a battle, not a massacre of non-combatant women and children, it was fought on US soil and presumably both sides showed courage and valour. So why are there no medals for the bravest of the Lakota? There are statues to Confederate generals.

Trump says American flag burners will be ‘immediately arrested’ under executive order President Donald Trump directs law enforcement to immediately arrest anyone burning the American flag, threatening a one-year prison term under his executive order.

It’s still okay to burn Confederate flags though, right?

If you haven’t seen how exchanges go these days in the White House press briefing room, watch this. Trump fangirl with press credentials asks Trump fangirl press secretary a question about why the Democrats are evill. It’s like a backbencher asking a contrived question to their own front bench.

This is reassuring and good to know. Since PM Carney has yet to pass a budget, am I correct in assuming that these sound economic metrics are attributable to the Trudeau-Freeland government?

They all wanted to be Carlin, but now they're all Rogan.

After Declining to Give Trump a Sword for King Charles, a Museum Leader Is Out

Next time Carney has to meet with Trump, he might present the president with a sword made of solid gold that was used by an American soldier to lop off Sir Isaac Brock's head on the battlefield in 1812, and a museum curator was fired because he thought the sword was too important to be a gift.

After Declining to Give Trump a Sword for King Charles, a Museum Leader Is Out

Very Trump-era story.
1. The sword has no meaning for Charles, but matters for the Eisenhower Museum.
2. Illegal for the museum to give away US property!
3. Trump makes no distinction between personal/public property.
4. The person who did the right thing was fired.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/a...

Without a precise definition of what's meant by "the media" there's nothing to be measured. If the news media now include OAN and Newsmax, an avid viewer would rate them very highly on trustworthiness. It's not that trust in media has collapsed, it's that people now trust different media.

It's trying to measure a thing that can't be measured. What exactly does the story mean by "the media"? Sit coms and talk shows? No, It means news journalism, a genre that resides in media companies but is not the companies themselves. Whatever the news media were in 1972, they are not anymore.

Gen Z, millennials, and Republicans drive trust in media to the lowest ever recorded, a shocking collapse of 40 percentage points since 1972 | Fortune Trust in media has never been lower, Gallup says. A shocking 70% of U.S. adults have “not very much” confidence or “none at all” in what they see and hear.

This story rather illustrates its own point. It comes from one of the trustworthy legacy media titles (Fortune). It informs us authoritatively that people no longer trust the legacy media to get things right. And in doing so it sorta gets the story wrong.