This is why we will always have the textbook battles:

History, for Zinn, is looked at from “the bottom up”: a view “of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army.” Decades before we thought in such terms, Zinn provided a history for the 99 percent. Many teachers view A People’s History as an anti-textbook, a corrective to the narratives of progress dispensed by the state. This is undoubtedly true on a topical level. When learning about the Spanish-American War, students don’t read about Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill. Instead, they follow the plight of foot soldiers sweltering in the Cuban tropics, clutching their stomachs, not from Spanish bullets but from food poisoning caused by rancid meat sold to the army by Armour & Company. Such stories acquaint students with a history too often hidden and too quickly brushed aside by traditional textbooks.

But in other ways—ways that strike at the very heart of what it means to learn history as a discipline—A People’s History is closer to students’ state-approved texts than its advocates are wont to admit. Like traditional textbooks, A People’s History relies almost entirely on secondary sources, with no archival research to thicken its narrative. Like traditional textbooks, the book is naked of footnotes, thwarting inquisitive readers who seek to retrace the author’s interpretative steps. And, like students’ textbooks, when A People’s History draws on primary sources, these documents serve to prop up the main text but never provide an alternative view or open a new field of vision.

History is narrative, narrative doesn’t exist without perspective, and perspective is subjective.

Adam Ozimek has one:

Whether it’s expanding educational opportunities, more infrastructure spending, wage subsidies, or tax cuts, many of the plans proposed for improving the country have one thing in common: They cost money. And even if we don’t increase spending or cut taxes, the projected growth of entitlements means we’re probably going to need more revenues in the future anyway. Therefore an important task for economists and policymakers is figuring out the most efficient places to raise tax revenues. One idea that doesn’t get enough discussion is a federal property tax on luxury homes.

Taxing luxury houses has a lot of desirable features. First, many luxury homes are located in areas with highly restrictive zoning. This means the value of the home includes economic rents, which are efficient to tax. In political and fairness terms, taxing wealth that is built on keeping out affordable housing and preventing new development certainly has its appeal.

Taxing housing wealth is also efficient compared with taxing other kinds of wealth because it’s impossible to move and difficult to hide. If you tax financial wealth, you have to worry that wealthy households will park their money in offshore accounts, thereby creating a distortionary cost and also limiting revenues. However, with rare the exception of million-dollar houseboats, you can’t park a mansion overseas. It’s also a lot harder to hide the value of a mansion because house sales data are generally publicly available. Once you know what nearby homes are selling for, combine that with a building square footage and lot size and you can get at least a general idea of what a house is worth. Valuing a home is a much simpler and more transparent task than valuing someone’s financial wealth.

What I like about it is that it’s a way to tax wealth instead of income, and it’s a way to do so where you can specifically target the wealthy. Since it would disproportionately target residents of blue states and blue areas, where real estate costs are higher, you might even get Republicans on board! (Okay, probably not.)

The main area of concern I would have is the camel’s nose. It could become like the AMT where it starts to involve more and more people, or the thresholds could shift downward to where we now have a federal property tax in addition to a income taxes and others.

So says science:

The motivation for the study was to apply cognitive tests that have already be tried out on dogs and tortoises on cats, in order to clear up some misconceptions around cats’ bad reputation for being unsociable.

“Increasingly cat cognition research is providing evidence of their complex socio-cognitive and problem solving abilities,” the authors wrote in the paper. “Nonetheless, it is still common belief that cats are not especially sociable or trainable. This disconnect may be due, in part, to a lack of knowledge of what stimuli cats prefer, and thus may be most motivated to work for.”

The test took 50 cats both from people’s homes and from a shelter and deprived them of food, toys, and people for a few hours. Then, researchers presented the cats with different stimuli within four categories: human socialization, food, scent, and toys.

The researchers concluded that there were no significant differences between the homed and the shelter cats, and that most cats preferred human socialization to any of the other categories. Half of the cats preferred social interaction to every other stimulus type, while only 37 percent preferred food.

My daughter has become obsessed with cats. She draws them every day at school and plays with them at night. Her teacher is begging us to get her one on her behalf. Other than that my wife and I have allergies to some (though few) cats, the main concern we have is that she likes the idea of cats more than she would like an actual cat. She liked puppies until we got one.

Good to know that if we get one they’re not psychopaths, I guess.

At least, not if those cities are Toronto and Vancouver.

Even though scholars have not proved these factors are the direct causes of Vancouver and Toronto residents exhibiting the least life satisfaction of 98 communities in Canada, the researchers found they are strongly correlated to residents’ lack of a sense of well-being and belonging.

In a new study titled How Happy are Your Neighbours?, John Helliwell, Hugh Shiplett and Christopher Barrington-Leigh discovered Canadians are happier in smaller towns. “We found life to indeed be less happy in the cities,” they write. “This was despite higher incomes, lower unemployment rates and higher education in the urban areas.”

A quick glance here tells me that Winnipeg is the town for me, or maybe Hamilton.