Saturday, November 25, 2017

Weekend Reading: The Hooray for Antibiotics Edition

The sinus infection proved to be the last straw... on Tuesday, I acknowledged I wasn't getting better, and went to the doctor. The antibiotics he gave me have helped clear up the infection, but I'm still a bit run down.

But I was able to enjoy Thanksgiving, and yesterday, we took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather and went down to the beach to take pictures for our Christmas cards.  The kids couldn't resist playing in the water, and got wet and sandy... but had heaps of fun. 

There was so much family fun yesterday that I didn't have a chance to sit down and write up this week's links. I suspect that once I'm back to being a regular employee, this might happen somewhat frequently. We'll see! Anyway, better late than never... here they are now:

In self-promo: I announced Annorlunda Books' 2018 acquisitions. And the first Inbox Stories newsletter went out. Here is the free edition.

Adam Serwer's article about Trump supporters and their brand of nationalism is really, really good. The section on David Duke's almost successful campaign in Louisiana was particularly powerful. I remember his campaign, but didn't remember how close he came to winning. Will this time be the time we look the racism in American culture in its face and finally try to deal with it? I wish I felt confident that we would.

You should read Savannah Maher on what fall is like for Native Americans. I want us to do better. Getting rid of offensive sports team names and mascots and honoring our treaty agreements would be a good start....


Tim Miller on donating to Doug Jones as a Republican, and how weird it is that this is such a big deal. (I wrote and mailed my postcards for Jones this week... there is still time for you to join in that campaign if you'd like. Go to postcardstovoters.org for details.)

This is an old article about abortion rates around the world, but I think about it often and I shared it on Twitter this week so I'll share it here, too. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, since I am sure there are some anti-abortion voters who will hold their noses and vote for Roy Moore because Jones supports abortion rights. 

I saw a tweet from Ross Douthat arguing that the way around the way abortion twists our politics is for Democrats to start nominating anti-abortion candidates in places like Alabama. I would argue that another, better way would be for conservative thinkers like Douthat to acknowledge and address the data that shows that across cultures and belief systems, abortion bans don't work. If you really thought that reducing abortion rates was more important than anything else, you'd work to make quality birth control available to everyone. That's what the data tells us will work. I understand that there are cultural and religious reasons people do not do that... but what does it say when so many people can set aside their religious beliefs to vote for a child molester, but not to support something that will actually reduce abortion?

Last I heard, the number of new cases in our Hep A outbreak is now declining, but it was a big outbreak, and as this article in Wired points out, it exposed the cracks in our society.

Brigid Schulte on the Thanksgiving that almost led to divorce. Her description of how she and her husband found their way back from the brink sounds a lot like what Mr. Snarky and I have done from the start: talk about the chores and our expectations and try to find our way to an arrangement that works for both of us. It got harder (much harder) when we had kids. The work multiplied, but also once the kids hit school age we had to reckon with all the work that flows to me first because the mom is the default contact for schools and classmates. I won't claim we have that problem solved, but we're getting better at handling it.

Here's something happy: Latino film critics on Coco


I've got no beef with companies doing things manually while they figure out how to automate (or if it is worth automating), but this seems like a case where they needed to be upfront about the fact that this work is being done by people, not machines:


Bunny!


Another bunny!



Bunnies!

4 comments:

  1. EarthSciProf5:27 AM

    Glad to hear that the antibiotics helped and that you’re on the mend!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glad that you're doing better!

    ReplyDelete
  3. EarthSciProf6:41 AM

    Also, thanks for the link to the reviews of Coco by Latino film critics. Have passed it along to a few people already, including my sister who lived in Mexico for several years.

    ReplyDelete

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