Avoiding facile lessons from the Brexit vote

There has been much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair about the UK voting in a referendum to leave the EU. There have been some analyses of the demographics of the vote that looked at how each of the over 300 local authorities voted and comparing that with the demographics of that area. The analysis suggests that those voting to leave were more likely to be older, less formally educated, have lower incomes, and live in areas that had smaller population densities and fewer foreign-born and unmarried people.
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What happened with justice Kennedy between Fisher I and Fisher II?

Opponents of affirmative action, like opponents of abortion, have been steadily chipping away at it hoping to make it so marginal as to be effectively dead or to even land a final blow that eliminates it altogether. In the case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (that I discussed earlier here) they thought that the latter moment had come, at least when it came to affirmative action in public university admissions because all the signals were that the court would rule against the UT’s policy of using race as a a limited factor in their consideration of prospective students.
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Second thoughts on Brexit?

There seems to be some confusion in the UK about what to do now that the referendum on leaving the European Union resulted in the Leave side winning. It appears that there is a possibility that the UK may not actually leave after all. The actual process of leaving only begins when the government invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty that forms the basic structure of the union and there seems to be hesitancy on both sides about triggering it.
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Parents using mobile phones and ignoring children

I was doing some yard work in the front recently and on the same afternoon noticed on two different occasions young mothers walking along the sidewalk with their toddlers in tow. As is often the case with children at that age, they were chatting away about all the wonderful things they saw around them. But the mothers were oblivious because they were completely absorbed by their cell phones, staring at them as they walked along.
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Surprise Brexit vote by UK

The voters in the UK surprised everyone, including the pollsters, by narrowly voting to leave the European Union by a margin of 51.9% to 48.1%. England and Wales voted to leave by fairly comfortable margins while Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain by even larger margin, leading some to predict that this vote may not only lead to a break with the EU but also a breakup of the UK itself. As late as the day before the vote, the Remain group had seemed to be gaining in the polls with the result that stock markets had risen in anticipation, so the victory by the Leave group came as a real shock.
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Donald Trump hates to be criticized about anything

A curious feature about Donald trump is that he hates to acknowledge that he is not perfect in any way. It is quite extraordinary really. This quality was on clear display during the primary race when Marco Rubio made that jab about Trump having small hands. It was clear that Rubio was crudely implying a correlation between hand and penis size that has no justification whatsoever but rather than dismissing it as a childish jibe, Trump actually defended the size of his hands.
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Supreme Court upholds University of Texas Affirmative Action program

The US Supreme Court issued an opinion today that rejected the claim by Abigail Fisher that she had been denied admission to the University of Texas because she was white, thus ending an eight-year long saga in which her case twice went to the high court. The ruling was 4-3 with justice Elena Kagan recusing herself because of her prior involvement with the case while she was Solicitor General. Justice Anthony Kennedy joined with justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer in the majority opinion.
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