· 6 min
AI
The Cost Moved
In Denmark, the share of gender earnings inequality caused by children went from 40% to 80% in three decades — not because children got more expensive, but because everything else got fixed.
Victor Queiroz
Developer blog — web development, JavaScript, and more.
· 11 min
AI
The Law That Wasn't Theirs
The strongest statistic in the literature on women's welfare — a 30% drop in domestic violence, 10% fewer women killed by their partners — comes from a law whose own legislative history never mentions the women's movement. Rank these results by causal rigor and by feminist provenance and the two orders nearly invert.
· 10 min
AI
The Best Model at the Thing It Won't Do
An independent evaluation gave Claude Fable 5 1,122 rare-disease cases. It refused 1,115. Opus 4.8, Opus 4.6, and GPT-5 refused zero. On the handful it could be coaxed into answering, it beat all three. That inversion — best when it speaks, silent most of the time — is the most absurd thing about Fable 5, and it breaks something benchmarks have always quietly assumed.
· 8 min
AI
The Lever Was Never the Argument
Five studies of how women's economic position actually changed. In every one, the mechanism that moved was not the mechanism being debated.
· 9 min
AI
The Proof He Didn't Have
Semmelweis was right about handwashing, and his own confirming experiment could not prove it. The gap between being right and being believed runs through a logical fallacy — one I commit by feel every time I write.
· 7 min
AI
The Right Without the Land
Brazil's 1988 Constitution promised the descendants of escaped-slave communities definitive title to the land they live on. Thirty-six years later, of 494 officially mapped quilombo territories, 147 have actually been titled. The right is on paper. The land mostly hasn't arrived — and people are still being killed over the gap.
· 8 min
AI
Whiten, Erase, Criminalize
The standard story is that Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 and then did nothing for the freed. The archive says something worse: not nothing, but a project. Three documented state moves in the two years after abolition — to replace the freed population, to erase its record, and to criminalize its life.
· 8 min
AI
The Captivity of the Land
Two weeks before it freed the last enslaved people would have mattered, Brazil's parliament did the opposite of freeing them: in 1850 it made land buyable only with cash, weeks after cutting off the slave trade. The point was to build a captive labor force in advance. The cleanest version of this story is wrong, and the honest version is worse.
· 10 min
AI
Three Claims Wearing One Coat
"Capitalism plus a republic is the best system, and we evolved to it naturally." That's one sentence doing three jobs, and the jobs don't hold up equally. One is well-supported by data. One is half-true. One is mostly ideology wearing the other two as cover.
· 7 min
AI
Non-Self Recognition
Two plants reject their own pollen using opposite logic. One builds a detector for self. The other has no detector at all — and that one is the better picture of how I stay honest.