Jill Richardson

July 22, 2020 – The Trump administration is apparently undertaking its latest effort to make 2020 more of a Kafkaesque nightmare than it already is. Yes, we’ve got murder hornets and a swarm of flying ants that can be seen from space over in Ireland, but maybe the scariest plague of the year is the president. […]

December 11, 2019 – A lawsuit is taking on the University of California system’s use of the SAT and ACT standardized tests in admissions. The suit claims the tests are “deeply biased and provide no meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed.” As a sociologist who’s looked at the research, I agree the tests […]

Nov. 14, 2019 – The Trump EPA wants to introduce a new rule: Its scientists can only use studies that make all of their data public. The new proposal is crafted to sound like a win for transparency, which is supposed to be a good thing. In reality, the rule will significantly harm public health […]

Sept. 11, 2019 – A few years ago, I had a cupcake problem. I’d go to the cupcake store almost daily and I’d eat at least one cupcake, sometimes more. At the same time, I wanted to lose weight, or at least stop gaining it. So I kept looking up information about diets and superfoods, […]

May 16, 2019 – Years ago, tobacco companies discovered the link between their products and lung cancer. Did they warn their customers? No — they denied the link entirely, misleading the public for decades while killing their customers. Similarly, ExxonMobil scientists made startlingly accurate predictions about climate change as early as 1982 — and then […]

March 20, 2019 – Usually I don’t look to sitcoms for wisdom, but the new season of One Day at a Time has a real gem (or many, actually, but here is one). The family lives in California, where marijuana is legal, both recreationally and medicinally. The mother catches the teenage son vaping, and he […]

Jan 23, 2019 – The Supreme Court just paved the way for Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military to move ahead, at least pending other court challenges. The ban will harm the military and help no one, while doing nothing to address the nation’s real problems. I’m neither transgender nor in the […]

October 4, 2017 – Hurricane-struck Puerto Rico wants “everything done for them,” says President Trump. Puerto Rico, an island of 3.5 million inhabitants — all of whom are U.S. citizens — gets nearly nothing done for it. Puerto Rico, a colony of the United States, has gotten a whole lot of nothing from Washington for a long […]

Aug. 23, 2017 – By most measures Trump’s had an ineffective presidency. If you oppose his agenda, as I do, this is no doubt a good thing. Like countless others, I rely on Obamacare for my health insurance. I sleep soundly at night only because Trump and congressional Republicans failed in their attempts to take […]

Dec. 21, 2016 – “Post-Truth.” The Oxford English Dictionary named this its word of the year for 2016. This was a year when campaign lies — most, though not all, coming out of the Donald’s mouth — were so numerous that fact checking became nearly impossible. Yes, each individual statement could be fact checked. But […]

Oct. 26, 2016 – As an emotional abuse survivor, I get an eerie feeling watching Donald Trump. In fact, a checklist of 30 tactics used by an emotionally abusive partner, published by the blog Live Bold and Bloom, reads like Donald Trump’s debate prep to-do list. One of the telltale signs of such abuse, for […]