It’s a rare academic history book that tempts me to binge-read.  Wendy Kline’s Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth is one of those special finds. Admittedly, Kline writes about a topic I find inherently fascinating: the re-emergence of home birth in the United States in the latter decades of the twentieth century and early decades of the twenty-first.  Kline’s approach is typical of nuanced, heavily-researched academic history in many ways, with topical chapters that prov

Appeals court judges who have daughters are more likely to make liberal or “feminist” decisions in gender-related cases than are judges who only have sons.  And it is the decisions of Republican-appointed male judges, typically conservatives, which make this pattern most visible.  This fascinating bit of political science research was reported in the New York Times a couple of days ago. Photo credit: Brian Turner//flickr This study’s findings are mainly about how judges voted