march 2021

a river below (2017), fish meat (2012), raising shrimp (2013), miss representation (2011), anthropocene (2018), yiyi (2000), the last blockbuster (2020), audrey: more than an icon (2020), da 5 bloods (2020)

Vox - Performing to an empty Times Square
Narratively - The Man With the Golden Airline Ticket
Politico - A Harriet Tubman $20? That’s Just the Beginning
Reasons to Be Cheerful - We Can Eliminate Child Poverty
EcoCult - Is Leather Truly a Byproduct of the Meat Industry?
NYT - The Vaccine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired.
NPR - Are We Raising Unhelpful, Bossy Kids? Here's The Fix
Scientific American - Trans Girls Belong on Girls’ Sports Teams
Harper's Bazaar - The Virus, the Vaccine, and the Dark Side of Wellness
MIT News - New study shows rich, poor have huge mortality gap in U.S.
Marketplace - Why rich people tend to think they deserve their money
LA Times - L.A. restaurants struggle with a new form of dine-and-dash
Teen Vogue - We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs
BBC - Covid: From boom to bust - why lockdown hasn't led to more babies
Nat Geo - Remembering the night two atomic bombs fell—on North Carolina
Tax Policy Center - Who Gets the Tax Benefit For Those Checkout Donations?
NYT - The U.S. Is Sitting on Tens of Millions of Vaccine Doses the World Needs
Scientific American - Killings by Police Declined after Black Lives Matter Protests
Al Jazeera - 2020 marked 15th straight year of declining world freedom: Report
Life Hacker - Why You Should Never 'Unsubscribe' From Illicit Spam Emails and Texts
SF Gate - The bizarre tale of the world's last lost tourist, who thought Maine was San Francisco
Winston-Salem Journal - North Carolina sends 6-year-olds to court. Why some say it's time for change.
Upworthy - A scorching hot take on why younger people say 'no problem' instead of 'you're welcome.'
Huff Post - ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents
ProPublica - Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years
The Globe and Mail - Is your butter not as soft as it used to be? The pandemic and our urge to bake is partly to blame – along with palm oil
News Medical - 50% of men struggle to identify a woman’s vagina correctly on a diagram: Survey

The Guardian - A $15 minimum wage isn't just about justice. It's good economics
CNBC - Walmart and McDonald’s are among top employers of Medicaid and food stamp beneficiaries, report says

Sky News - Human penises are shrinking because of pollution, warns scientist
"Dr Swan believes that the rapidly decreasing fertility rate means that most men will be unable to produce viable sperm by 2045."

U.S. leads among countries that spend the most on public health care
Public Citizen - Analysis: How For-Profit Health Care Worsened the Pandemic
"About one-third of COVID-19 deaths and 40% of infections were tied to a lack of insurance"

Vogue - What Happens When One Partner Is Vaccinated and the Other Isn’t?
wow, I barely related to this article at all. maybe it's cause j got vaccinated because of his hospital job where he was closely interacting with dozens of covid patients each night, but I was not envious in the slightest, just very relieved. I suppose I'm holding him back from some things, but his parents aren't fully vaccinated yet, and la restrictions are pretty tight anyway so I don't feel like we're missing out on much. and certainly not due to me. 

The Atlantic - There’s No Real Reason to Eat 3 Meals a Day
I have NEVER understood why some people (my mom) insist on eating 3 meals a day, even on weekends when we slept in until like 10am. breakfast at 10:30am, lunch at 12:30pm, dinner at 6:30pm? ludicrous. eat when you're hungry. obviously.

Nation World - 125 people got $500 per month free for 2 years. Here's what happened.
I'm very intrigued by UBI, tho I wonder if it would have the same results if 1. people thought the payments would go on forever and 2. everyone got it. if you think the payments will stop, might you be more careful with it now? also if you're one of the lucky few that get it, will you try hard to maximize your windfall? something tells me no. i can't help but think of that stat online that 70% of lottery winners eventually go broke (here's a related article)

NYT - Major Evangelical Adoption Agency Will Now Serve Gay Parents Nationwide
"...more than 20 percent of same-sex couples with children have an adopted child, compared to 3 percent of straight couples, according to a 2016 report... Gay couples are also significantly likelier to have a foster child."

The Hill - Warren's wealth tax would cost 100 richest Americans $78 billion
how do only 100 people have $78 billion to SPARE? like, this isn't their total wealth, this is just what they would pay in taxes!

FiveThirthEight - Why So Many Men Stuck With Trump In 2020
"...men who identified as completely masculine on the survey agreed that the Trump administration has a strategy on COVID-19 — setting them apart from all other men and women. (Compared with other respondents, completely masculine men were also much more evenly split on the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, more likely to believe that wearing a mask was more about being politically correct than about preventing the spread of COVID-19, and more likely to oppose a national mask mandate.)"
"One analysis even found that men who were considered more sexist were more likely to report having contracted the virus."

february 2021

focused on reading books this month rather than watching tv at nights. finished 5 books, with 3 of those started this month :)

shaun of the dead (2004), the quest of alain ducasse (2017), what we do in the shadows (2014), baby God (2020), in the mood for love (2000), the fight (2020)

deborah blum - the poison squad: one chemist's single-minded crusade for food safety at the turn of the twentieth century
caitlin doughty - Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
sam Harris - the end of faith: religion, terror, and the future of reason
piper kerman - orange is the new black: my year in a womans prison
danny meyer - setting the table: the transforming power of hospitality in business

Food and Wine - The Customer Is Not Always Right
Axios - The future of "smart" cities is in street lights
NYT - McDonald’s Workers in Denmark Pity Us
The Nation - Bill Gates Gives to the Rich (Including Himself)
Nautilus - Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing
Inverse - Scientists unearth a consequence of solar panels in the Sahara
Restaurant Dive - McDonald's CEO: Chain will do 'just fine' with higher wages
ProPublica - They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?
KHN - They Pledged to Donate Rights to Their COVID Vaccine, Then Sold Them to Pharma
Vox - Why businesses can still get away with paying pennies to employees with disabilities
PBS - COVID-19 has already cut U.S. life expectancy by a year. For Black Americans, it’s worse
The 19th - Most nursing homes say they won’t be able to stay open another year due to pandemic costs
USA Today - GoFundMe CEO: Hello Congress, Americans need help and we can't do your job for you
The American Prospect - Reps Would Have to Resign From Corporate Boards Under Democrats’ Ethics Bill
Denverite - In the first six months of health care professionals replacing police officers, no one they encountered was arrested
ProPublica - People Over 75 Are First in Line to Be Vaccinated Against COVID-19. The Average Black Person Here Doesn’t Live That Long.

Gizmodo - Is Amazon Evil and Am I Evil for Using It?
Matt Ruby - Just how evil is Amazon? And am I awful for being a Prime addict?

NPR - Spurred By The Capitol Riot, Thousands Of Republicans Drop Out Of GOP
The Hill - Tens of thousands of voters drop Republican affiliation after Capitol riot

The Guardian - US police three times as likely to use force against leftwing protesters, data finds
"Law enforcement officers were also more likely to use force against leftwing demonstrators, whether the protests remained peaceful or not."

organizing

What's the correct way to organize your bookshelf?

if you have a fair number of books, and if you ever plan to find one again easily, by genre is the only way to organize!!! within genres, I also group by author, series, subject, chronologically, and, sometimes, book size. which is why I try to stick with the medium format of soft covers. looks better.

january 2021

spent a lot of time on the job boards this month so usually had something on in the background.

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie (2018), Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017), my Scientology movie (2017), scotch: a golden dream (2018), vice (2018), the search for general tsao (2015), kasama: infinity (2018), bombshell (2019)

BBC - 'Butterfly child' given life-saving skin
Politico - ‘Coward’: MAGA internet turns on Trump
GQ - Is Your Beloved Outdoors Gear Bad for the Planet?
BBC - The 432-year-old manual on social distancing
Medium - Why Everyone’s Suddenly Hoarding Mason Jars
AP News - Identical twins aren’t perfect clones, research shows
AP News - Vaccine rollout hits snag as health workers balk at shots
Buzzfeed - The Pro-Trump Mob Was Doing It For The ’Gram
NYT - Pence Reached His Limit With Trump. It Wasn’t Pretty.
Vice - The Emerging Fetish of Laying Alien Eggs Inside Yourself
Vogue - A Fashionable History of First Ladies on Inauguration Day
AP News - EXPLAINER: Why do the media call races in US elections?
NYT - Another Arrest, and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match
Defense One - Pentagon Won’t Throw Traditional Farewell Ceremony for Trump
Atlas Obscura - Meet the Photographer Hunting for the Scars of Soviet Rule
Complex - How Crocs Capitalized on Streetwear and Came Back From the Dead
Vox - The big decision before Elon Musk, now the richest person in the world
Bloomberg - The Rich Are Minting Money in the Pandemic Like Never Before
The Economist - The Japanese authorities understood covid-19 better than most
Foreign Policy - ‘We’re in a Worse Place Today Than We Were Before He Came In’
Smithsonian - How the Pledge of Allegiance Went From PR Gimmick to Patriotic Vow
NYT - Beyond Impeachment, a Push for Ethics Laws That Do Not Depend on Shame
The Guardian - Facts won't fix this: experts on how to fight America's disinformation crisis
Business Insider - Trump administration staffers are getting snubbed while hunting for jobs.
Buzzfeed - Facebook Has Been Showing Military Gear Ads Next To Insurrection Posts
FiveThirtyEight - The Police’s Tepid Response To The Capitol Breach Wasn’t An Aberration
The Undefeated - Attack on the Capitol shows America’s racial double standard is alive and well
Washington Post - The $3,000-a-month toilet for the Ivanka Trump/Jared Kushner Secret Service detail
Washington Post - Lawmakers with stock holdings vote in ways that juice their portfolios, data shows
Politico - ‘He has an obligation to them’: Attorney for ‘QAnon shaman’ asks Trump to pardon rioters
Salon - Government study shows taxpayers are subsidizing “starvation wages” at McDonald's, Walmart
The 19th - About 700,000 parents with young kids left the workforce in 2020. For many, loss of child care was to blame.
Refinery29 - Like Other Republicans, Meghan McCain Only Cares About Fixing A Problem Once She’s Experienced It
ProPublica - He Made a Minor Mistake Filling Out an Unemployment Form. Then the State Demanded $14,990 From Him.
Toronto Star - How a ‘Schitt’s Creek’ character stirred debate about actors faking accents and Hollywood’s diversity
SB Nation - Philadelphia is greasing up lamp posts with Crisco to stop Eagles fans from climbing them after the NFC Championship
Business Insider - Bumble removed its political filter after people said they used it to lure conservatives who were at the Capitol riot into sending incriminating evidence
Business Insider - Some among America's military allies believe Trump deliberately attempted a coup and may have had help from federal law-enforcement
Business Insider -  Leaked documents show White House blocked a critical government website to recruit election workers during the COVID pandemic and while Trump railed against voter fraud.

Reuters - Why Indonesia is vaccinating its working population first, not elderly
I absolutely agree with this strategy. 

CNN - The US economy lost 140,000 jobs in December. All of them were held by women
"According to new data released Friday, employers cut 140,000 jobs in December, signaling that the economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic is backtracking. Digging deeper into the data also reveals a shocking gender gap: Women accounted for all the job losses, losing 156,000 jobs, while men gained 16,000."
"It also highlighted another painful reality: Blacks and Latinas lost jobs in December, while White women made significant gains."

Yahoo - Column: U.S. billionaires are done with Social Security taxes for 2021, but you'll pay all year
"...by eliminating the payroll tax cap entirely, would make Social Security indisputably solvent for at least 40 years..."

December 2020

i rediscovered tv this month and have therefore stopped reading, lol.

safety not guarenteed (2012), how to change the world (2015), sky ladder: the art of cai guo-qiang (2016), ramen heads (2017), i feel pretty (2018), plus one (2019), last christmas (2019), happiest season, year one (2009), palm springs, neat: the story of bourbon (2018), crazy not insane

NYT Magazine - Taste Test
NYT - The Real Estate Collapse of 2020
The Verge -  Nature is not healing
BBC - The Family With No Fingerprints
Lifehacker - How They Made a Vaccine So Fast
Food 52 - The Lonely Legacy of Spam
Wired - The Devastating Allure of Medical Miracles
Huffington Post - The Myth of the Ethical Shopper
Atlas Obscura -  How a White Lie Gave Japan KFC for Christmas
Washington Post - Is It Okay to Laugh at Florida Man?
Texas Monthly - How the Unchecked Power of Judges Is Hurting Poor Texans
Quartz - Experts are sounding the alarm about the dangers of gas stoves
Politico - Washington's Secret to the Perfect Zoom Bookshelf? Buy It Wholesale.
NPR -  You Want To Move? Some Cities Will Pay You $10000 to Move There
Politico - Flint Has Clean Water Now. Why Won't People Drink It?
Vanity Fair - Inside the Very Big, Very Controversial Business of Dog Cloning
NPR - 'Toxic Individualism': Pandemic Politics Driving Health Care Workers From Small Towns.
The Guardian - The year of Karen: how a meme changed the way Americans talked about racism
Study International - More money goes into the US prison system than it does on education
Los Angeles Magazine - The Homeless Republic of Echo Park: life (and death) in L. A. 's fastest growing tent city.
Time - The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure.

Pro Publica - The Pandemic Hasn’t Stopped This School District From Suing Parents Over Unpaid Textbook Fees
WTF schools charge students for textbook rentals? that's total bullshit.
"Indiana is one of at least nine states that allow school districts to charge fees for required textbooks, according to the Education Commission of the States, a national education policy organization."
"Education advocates say that the state’s constitution guarantees a “tuition-free” education, not a free education."

Washington Post - As organized religion shrinks, faith-based charities worry about the future
As more people turn away from organized religion, churches and other worship communities face a struggle to keep marshaling their corps of volunteers. Churchgoers, mostly elderly, reliably turn up to staff food banks, clean up after hurricanes, and cook hot meals after natural disasters. Of the 74 groups that belong to the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, 40 are faith organizations. But the white Christian denominations to which most Americans used to belong are dwindling, and many younger people who consider themselves spiritual but unaffiliated will not replenish the supply of church volunteers and have no comparable institution around which to organize.

fivethirtyeight - Women Won The Right To Vote 100 Years Ago. They Didn’t Start Voting Differently From Men Until 1980.
Pew Research - Men and women in the U.S. continue to differ in voter turnout rate, party identification
"about half of U.S. adults (49%) – including 52% of men and 46% of women – say granting women the right to vote has been the most important milestone in advancing the position of women in the country"

november 2020

still reading a lot. stayed off social media for a few days following the election, hoping not to get too caught up the drama. got laid off in the middle of the month and was suddenly then too busy to read, somehow, lol, but starting watching documentaries again.

capital in the 21st century (2019), the crown (season 4), tell me who I am (2019), kids the ground, sacred cow, human nature

NYT - He Married a Sociopath. Me.
Vox - America’s gun problem, explained
Bloomberg - The Global Fertility Crash
Popular Science - How humans created color for thousands of years
Curbed - Why we can’t build small homes anymore
Vox - The case for hiring more police officers
The Atlantic - The Accidental Experiment That Changed Men’s Lives
Popular Mechanics - The Truth is in the Muck
NPR - Twin Birthrate Drops For First Time Since The '80s
Smithsonian Magazine - The Science Behind Your Cheap Wine
Vox - Coronavirus is exposing all of the weaknesses in the US health system
ESPN - The ugly, gory, bloody secret life of NHL dentists
BBC - Lifting the lid on Japan’s amazing bento boxes
The Atlantic - Why Everything Is Getting Louder
BBC -  The cheap pen that changed writing forever
AP - Where you die can affect your chance of being an organ donor
Vox - The challenge of combating fake news in Asian American communities
The Atlantic - Why Most of America Is Terrible at Making Biscuits
Esquire -  The Crushing Reality of Zoom School
NPR - When Shoplifting Is A Felony: Retailers Back Harsher Penalties For Store Theft
Business of Fashion - How the Puffy Vest Became a Symbol of Power
FiveThirtyEight - Why Are Great Athletes More Likely To Be Younger Siblings?
The Guardian - .Should we stop keeping pets? Why more and more ethicists say yes
Medium - Forget Shutdowns. It’s ‘Demand Shock’ That’s Killing Our Economy.
Marie Claire - Inside the Growing Movement of Women Who Wish They'd Never Had Kids
Inverse - Lab-Grown Meat Also Creates an Benefit: Ethical Zebra Burgers
Mental Floss -  The Reason Why No Photography is Allowed in the Sistine Chapel
CNN - Crispy, spicy and hugely popular: Why chicken sandwiches are taking over America
Washington Post - To David Chang, the ‘ethnic’ food aisle is racist. Others say it’s convenient.
NPW - At The Mercy Of An App: Workers Feel The Instacart Squeeze
Art & Design - How the ‘Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World’ Got Its Logo
Harvard Business Review - A Short History of Golden Parachutes
FiveThirtyEight - What Should The Government Spend To Save A Life?
Marie Claire - To End Sexual Abuse in Churches, Dismantle Purity Culture
The Atlantic - How Pink Salt Took Over Millennial Kitchens
NPR - Now That More Americans Can Work From Anywhere, Many Are Planning To Move Away.
The Conversation - The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European
Bloomberg - Covid-19 Explodes the Myth That Women 'Opt' Out.
LA Times - Small turkeys are in high demand this Thanksgiving. Good luck finding one
National Geographic - Millennials and Gen Z are spreading coronavirus—but not because of parties and bars
Time - Low Wages, Sexual Harassment and Unreliable Tips. This Is Life in America’s Booming Service Industry
Refinery 29 - This Racist Form Of Voter Suppression Is Killing Democracy — & Nobody’s Talking About It
NBC - A fight over gifted education in New York is escalating a national debate over segregated schools
The Conversation - A quarter of US parents are unmarried – and that changes how much they invest in their kids
Bultimore Sun - John Waters bequeaths his art collection to Baltimore Museum of Art, whose bathrooms will be named in his honor  :D

The Atlantic - Why IVF Has Divided France
Apartment Therapy - Why 70 Percent Alcohol Disinfects Better Than 91 Percent, According to a Microbiologist

The Atlantic - Why Some People Become Lifelong Readers
I think the definition of a reader needs to be revised. I don't read many books anymore, but I read hella articles. I mean, obviously, look at this blog. I only note the interesting articles I've read that month, but I read at least 5 times more than what is listed. so I read at least 100 articles, on fairly broad topics, every month. assuming each article averages 5 minutes long, that's 500 minutes which is over 8 hours of reading articles a month. it's not much, but I think it definitely qualifies me as a "reader" even if it's not books. 

The Atlantic - What Happened to American Childhood?
"We know they affect nearly a third of adolescents ages 13 to 18, and that their median age of onset is 11, although some anxiety disorders start much earlier (the median age for a phobia to start is 7)."

The Atlantic - America's Health-Inequality Problem
"The U.S. has one of the largest income-based health disparities in the world... Only Chile and Portugal have a larger income-based gap in the health status of their citizens."
"Furthermore, while two-thirds of Americans report that “many” people in their country can’t access the health-care they need—10 percentage points higher than in any other country—Americans were less likely than average to say that it’s unfair that wealthier people can afford better health care. “We found that ethical concerns about the fairness of income-based health-care disparities were less common in the United States than in most of the other countries in our sample,” the authors write."

Vice - Brave: Corporations Stand In Solidarity With the Communities They Exploit
"In reality, the vast majority of these companies have business models explicitly designed to profit from what MLK called the “triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.” Dignified jobs have always been at the forefront of racial justice campaigns for good reason: Poverty is just another form of violence—“the worst form,” according to Mahatma Gandhi."