Dear Ma, My child was born last Friday. I wish you could meet them. The first time I saw their face in person (strikingly similar to their 3D ultrasound, but here, not an echo of a person but a real-life human being in front of me), they couldn’t breathe.
“This kind of user-friendly experience is something we keep dreaming that more newsroom voter guides will feature.” #Media [Link]
“If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.” #Health [Link]
“You have people who stormed the Capitol, who led to the death of law enforcement, who tried to overturn an election and fracture democracy. And they're getting two months, three months, six months. And Brittany Martin gets four years.” #Democracy [Link]
“Meckler’s warmer temperatures suggest that CO2’s capacity to warm during that time in Earth’s past was higher than was found in earlier studies. “This would lead to a higher climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2,” the paper says.” #Climate [Link]
Happy Labor Day to everyone who celebrates the organized labor movement today in the US. This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for August, 2022. A note: it’s taken me a while to hit publish on
It’s late in the evening and we’re in the hospital while our son slowly makes his way to birth. I’m a sea of emotions, but one of the biggest is the feeling of uselessness: just as I couldn’t carry the baby, I can’t help take
“American Indian and Alaskan Native people have experienced a particularly precipitous drop in life expectancy since 2019, going from 71.8 to 65.2 years. This kind of loss is similar to the plunge seen for all Americans after the Spanish Flu.” #Health [Link]
“Multiple Republican midterm candidates have removed from their campaign sites references to particularly strict anti-abortion stances, a shift from primary campaigning to the approaching general election and an indication of growing concern in the Republican Party over how to handle abortion policy post-Roe v. Wade.” # [Link]
“I like to think of myself as an independent contractor who threw out his nine-to-five job for about five to nine different jobs over the course of a year, a contractor with significantly less of the legal protections established in the past hundred years or so by Congress and the
“It is simply impossible for students to work their way through college in the way previous generations could. And at the same time, states have reduced funding to their public colleges that historically allowed schools to charge low tuition prices.” #Democracy [Link]
My opinions on web business models have changed over time. I agree that advertising was one of the web’s original sins, although at this point in its cultural life I’m not sure I’m prepared to say that it was the only original sin. At the same time,
