Sometimes art expresses truth better than research ever could. I present the following as evidence of art capturing the essence of the Whole Foods habitus.

The video is of course meant to parody the cultural conventions of Whole Foods; but, I think that it really speaks to larger truths about culture, food, and inequality. While the video pokes fun at the Whole Foods consumer, I think that it accurately reflects how out of touch a vast swath of relatively privileged Americans are regarding the real struggles of poorer and many minority residents face when attempting to eat a healthy diet. Forget the fact that kombucha isn't on the shelves, many ...

After much hard work on the part of very talented people, the website for the Chicago Community Adult Health Study launched this week! For those who do not know about the project, it is an excellent dataset to examine influences of neighborhood environments on health outcomes among adults. The sample comes from all 343 Neighborhood Clusters in the city of Chicago, which allows a wide range of analyses across neighborhood environments. In addition to the survey of informants, there is also very rich data on the physical aspects of the neighborhood environment based on systematic social observations in all of the 343 Neighborhood Clusters.

I took advantage of this in ...

Programming in Stata is relatively straightforward and this is partly because the programming syntax is both powerful and relatively straightforward. There are, however, a few minor annoyances in Stata's language including using the backtick and apostrophe to indicate local macros (i.e.,`localname'). Among these shortcomings, I would argue that the lack of anything like a list in Stata's language is one of the largest.

In most langauges, you can store a list of items and refer to the item in the list by some sort of index. This is particularly helpful for iterating over the same step multiple times. Lists generally come in two flavors: lists to which you ...