My home is the sea

This article in the New York Times magazine, is the worst article I've read in a long while. I don't know too much about statistical analysis. But I've taken basic logic and, while I won't pretend to catch every misleading use of a statistic, quite a number were obvious to me. I find the choice of title particularly humorous... perhaps an irate editor selected it, rather than the author? (Correct if I'm wrong -- and I'm not -- but wasn't "How I learned to love the bomb" a bit ironic?) The accompanying photo by Masood Kamandy's pretty nice, though. My selection for a choice paragraph:

"The autonomists have been losing the public-relations war, but they're trying to fight back. O'Toole has founded the American Dream Coalition to do battle with what he calls the ''congestion coalition,'' his term for opponents of new roads. The autonomists collect stories of smart-growth problems, especially from Portland, Ore., which became planners' poster city by building light-rail lines, eschewing highways and severely restricting suburban development. But nearly 90 percent of its commuters still drive, and highway congestion increased in Portland more than any other American city in the 15 years after the first light-rail line opened. Meanwhile, housing prices rose sharply, making Portland one of the less-affordable cities for home buyers."

I'll leave it up to you to figure out why that might be and how that might contradict the argument of paragraph. (Caveat: I certainly agree that there is value in adding HOT lanes or converting current lanes into HOT lanes.) In not-entirely-unrelated news, the price of oil busted $50 a barrel for the first time.