October 31
October 30
A list of 53 reasons to vote this year. "46. Because many thousands of Americans have died needlessly from Covid-19." (That should actually have been #1.)
I don't know who needs to hear this but... Colorado is not a rectangle. And not just because the Earth is round. Surveying errors mean that the seemingly 4-sided state actually has 697 sides.
October 29
Vanity Fair's cover story profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Reading this, I really worry about how much weight we're placing onto this one person, supporters and detractors alike.
The LIGO experiment has been incredibly successful, detecting 50 gravitational wave events in the past 5 years. "As surreal as it seems, the detection of gravitational waves has now become commonplace..."
Raised on 3 TV channels & the local newspaper, baby boomers are ill-equipped to navigate the digital media landscape and are being radicalized by Fox News, talk radio, and social media. "It feels like he's been indoctrinated into a cult."
On the basis of his resume, no one would hire Donald Trump to do any sort of job. So maybe don't vote for him either?
A 30-minute briefing with Anthony Fauci on current state of the Covid-19 pandemic conducted by JAMA editor in chief Howard Bauchner. Topics: national mask mandate, Thxgvng safety, treatment drugs, vaccines, etc.
Production hasn't even started on season 2, but Ted Lasso has already been renewed for a third season. I was totally charmed by this show and its titular character.
October 28
Can lab-grown brains become conscious? And if they can, should people be allowed to grow and destroy them?
Bummer: Alt-weekly City Pages is closing after 41 years due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Small local businesses of all kinds are just going to disappear.
America Is About to Choose How Bad the Pandemic Will Get. "If Donald Trump is reelected, he will continue to downplay the threat of the coronavirus, and more Americans will fall ill." And die.
Quiz: Can You Tell a 'Trump' Fridge From a 'Biden' Fridge? "The current scores suggest that as a whole, we can't distinguish people's politics from glances into their fridges much more reliably than if we just flipped a coin."
Why You Shouldn't Worry About Studies Showing Waning Coronavirus Antibodies. "It's normal for levels of antibodies to drop after clearing an infection, and that they represent just one arm of the immune response against a virus."
October 27
No, Skiing Isn't a Welcome Place for People of Color. "Skiing has long served as an escape for white people from multicultural politics and accusations of privilege, and that is precisely why we can't leave race out of it."
October 26
Arctic ice is too thin to properly test out a new Russian icebreaker. On the plus side, it might not be needed if the climate keeps going like this?
This article about the role of close friendships in a society that privileges romantic relationships is worth a read. "When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable."
David Fincher says there probably won't be a 3rd season of the excellent Mindhunter series. The show is too expensive and viewership is not high enough to support it.
October 23
Another thing that people are doing during the pandemic is repainting their home interiors. And a quarantine palette has emerged. "What we want on our walls now are blues and greens; organic neutrals..."
October 22
Tom Vanderbilt on the benefits of playing video games with your kids. (My son read this in my copy of Wired, interrupting himself several times telling me to read it. "He makes lots of good points!")
I don't know if a monopoly is to blame, but Google's search results for many things have been *awful* for years. SEO garbage has swamped the genuinely useful and thoughtful results.
October 21
Oh goody, the new 2021 human glands have been announced. "A team of researchers...has discovered what may be a set of previously unidentified organs: a pair of large salivary glands, lurking in the nook where the nasal cavity meets the throat."
October 20
I Was In Charge of the Deck Chairs On the Titanic, and They Absolutely Did Need Rearranging. "When the Titanic slid beneath the waves, taking hundreds of souls with her, she did so with the most becoming, loveliest deck amenities imaginable."
Kamala versus Daenerys and the difference between mispronunciation & dispronunciation. "As far as I can tell, Americans have no problem saying 'Daenerys Targaryen.' Or 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.' Or 'Hakeem Olajuwon.'"
From Scientific American (for unscientific Americans): Eight Persistent COVID-19 Myths and Why People Believe Them. It wasn't lab-engineered, it's not just the flu, natural herd immunity won't work, etc.
Succession's Logan Roy and Gerri Kellman team up to advise Wisconsin voters on how to f*cking vote early, by f*cking mail, or in f*cking person. This is canon now, right?
Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking. This is from Richard Brody, so you know going in that it's not a list of the greatest hits (heavy hitters like The Thin Blue Line or Hoop Dreams aren't on here).
A timeline map of where Covid-19 cases occurred in the US. NYC + cities at first, then the South, and more recently the Midwest/West.
October 19
What A Summer Of COVID-19 Taught Scientists About Indoor vs. Outdoor Transmission. "If there is one thing we can definitively state, it's that this virus is much, much less likely to spread outdoors than in."
From the NY Times, a great profile of the inspiring Angela Davis. "As a bridge between the past and present eras of protest, Davis can explain both what went right and wrong while also helping to shape the future."
The Swedish COVID-19 Response Is a Disaster. It Shouldn't Be a Model for the Rest of the World. "From early on, the Swedish government seemed to treat it as a foregone conclusion that many people would die."
Coronavirus in Africa: Five reasons why Covid-19 has been less deadly than elsewhere. "The continent's strength lay in its tried and tested community health systems."
Which states had the best pandemic response? "If the country as a whole had the same per capita death rate as Vermont, the nationwide death toll would be 30,000 instead of more than 215,000."
Herd immunity without a vaccine = mass murder. "The real death toll needed to reach herd immunity could far exceed one million."
October 16
Inside the Fall of the CDC. "How the world's greatest public health organization was brought to its knees by a virus, the president and the capitulation of its own leaders, causing damage that could last much longer than the coronavirus."
Alan Taylor has been curating photos online for so long that you kinda forget how good he is at it. Each photo here is related to the previous photo either visually, thematically, or metaphorically. Fun to figure out the connections.
What I've Learned From Having A Trans Partner. "My partner doesn't want his body. But I do."
A new analysis published in JAMA puts the number of excess deaths in the US between March 1 and August 1 at 225,530. Only ~150K were officially attributed to Covid-19 (so the true death toll is 50% more than the "official" count).
Was reminded of the limits of self-preservation by this Atul Gawande interview: Trump could have easily won re-election had he taken even moderately effective action against Covid-19 in March or April. It was a gimme and he just. couldn't. do it.
October 15
A list of the 10 greatest works of journalism of the past 10 years. Writers on the list include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, and Michelle Alexander. The NY Times' 1619 Project is there too.
Nature (the science journal) supports Joe Biden for US president. "We cannot stand by and let science be undermined. Joe Biden's trust in truth, evidence, science and democracy make him the only choice in the US election."
October 14
Welcome to Fall, the Two Days Between Summer and Winter. "O.K., is that sleet? It's sleeting now. And it says that tomorrow it's supposed to be in the eighties. Then it's going to snow. How is that possible?"
LeBron James continues to expand our concept of excellence. "What Americans insist on seeing as a deficit, you remind us is part and parcel of our cheat code. You are Black abundance."
October 13
How a Road Trip Through America's Battlegrounds Revealed a Nation Plagued by Misinformation. "Unlogic is not ignorance or stupidity; it is reason distorted by suspicion and misinformation..."
Sean Penn & Ann Young Lee used their non-profit organization CORE to build one of the largest coronavirus testing programs in the US. Free tests for 10s of 1000s of daily patients, results back in ~48 hours.
Aw, this sucks. Netflix announced that there will be no second season of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. My kids and I really loved this show – I wish more people would have watched it.
Cristiano Ronaldo has Covid-19. It's astounding that so many of the world's best footballers have had it: Neymar, Zlatan, Mbappe, Pogba, Di Maria, Navas, Dybala. Fit or no, some are likely to have long-term health problems because of this.
October 12
Teens and young adults are having a hard time reasoning with QAnon-obsessed parents who have become radicalized by social media. "I love my dad, but at the same time I kind of hate him for this."
Facebook is finally updating their hate speech policy "to prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust". Tho after years of being a welcoming place for harmful misinformation, this is like using a teaspoon to bail out a cruise ship.
Etsy has banned merchandise related to the death cult QAnon from their platform. A search on the site just now yielded zero results.
A profile of Dolly Parton in the New Yorker. "In the partisan world of country music, Parton's persona defies categorization, at once down to earth and soaring high."
October 10
I don't like the language here that school reopening fears were "overblown". With high Covid rates country-wide, parents & staff were correct to be concerned. We should be happy we prepared and were wrong. I hope the success continues.
October 9
No, wearing a mask doesn't make you sicker. So why do some people say that it does?
October 8
Kiss List: Writer/artist Galen Beebe kept track of every person she's kissed and graphed the results & attributes of those encounters in a bunch of different ways, e.g. "my enjoyment level / how long I'd known them".
This statement from the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine is lukewarm. I guess we're supposed to assume they are talking about the White House? (And Senate?) Name names, folks...don't beat around the bush.
October 7
"100,000 Stars is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood." Super fun/informative and I love this playful warning: "Please do not use this visualization for interstellar navigation."
A recent study shows that people adhering to an intermittent fasting diet didn't lose more weight (statistically speaking) when compared to those in a control group. "People in clinical trials [tend] to lose weight no matter what you do."
Everyone I know is either drinking more these days or has stopped drinking. If you're in the latter category (or would like to be), check out Good Drinks, a new book of alcohol-free cocktails recipes from Julia Bainbridge.
Interesting to see the CRISPR Nobel go to Charpentier & Doudna over George Church & Feng Zhang – the two groups have been jockeying for invention credit for years. But Nobels can only be shared by a max of 3 people.
October 6
In the US, women (especially married women) are faring worse in the recession than men. "Married women lost almost 1 million jobs last month. (Single men gained 1.2 million.)"
10 things you need to know to stop a coup. "5. Focus on widely shared democratic values, not on individuals."
The trailer for Iron Mask. An action movie starring a 66-year-old Jackie Chan and a 73-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger? Sure, why not.
October 5
The Case for Dumping the Electoral College. "It effectively dilutes the votes of African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans, because they live disproportionately in populous states."
Reddit's "Am I the Asshole?" forum reveals the casual sexism of the American male. "Sexism has fully lulled them into a sense of moral superiority that blinds them to their own explicitly terrible behavior."
October 2
It's looking like Saturday's White House event introducing Amy Coney Barrett as the SCOTUS nominee was a superspreader event. At least 5 people who were there have tested positive for Covid-19. (scroll up in thread...)
Trailer for The Witches, an adaptation of the Roald Dahl book directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Octavia Spencer, Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci, and Chris Rock. Premiering on HBO Max on Oct 22.
Irish court: Subway's bread isn't bread. It's too sugary and therefore it "should thus be classified as confectionery".