Make Your Voter Guide ICONIC

“This kind of user-friendly experience is something we keep dreaming that more newsroom voter guides will feature.”  #Media [Link]

I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health

“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]

A Black protester voiced anger at police in South Carolina. She got 4 years in prison

“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]

New technique shows old temperatures were much hotter than thought

“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]

Reading, watching, playing, using: August, 2022

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

Soon

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

U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

“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]

Republican candidates are changing how they handle abortion after Roe v. Wade

“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]

Capitalism Gives Me the Freedom to Pursue as Many Side Gigs as I Want to Pay Off My Increasing Bills And Loans

“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

Why I Changed My Mind on Student Debt Forgiveness

“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]

Paying for the web

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,

Person-Centered Terms Encourage Stigmatized Groups’ Trust in News

“Participants trusted articles that used person-centered terms for their group more than articles that used stigmatizing terms.” Understandably.  #Media [Link]