REMEMBER WHEN EVEN SUGGESTING THIS SORT OF THING WAS TREATED AS CRAZED CONSPIRACY THEORY: Wuhan lab researcher linked to military scientists, NBC News finds.
The best memes that sum up the last 10 days in Australia.
New Republic: End The War On Whistleblowers
Hollywood Battles With Insurers Over COVID Claims
Fireman’s Fund gives the example of a nonessential crewmember having face-to-face contact with a movie director and then reporting infection, requiring a costly shutdown for 14 days. Who pays? – The Hollywood Reporter
Just 23 Tweets About The Sydney Lockdown That Will Make You Laugh, Weep And Rage-Punch A Hole In Your Wall
WE’RE GOING TO FIND THAT EXTENDED LOCKDOWNS DID MORE HARM THAN GOOD: Did Pandemic Policy Make Americans More Aggressive? “Data from the CDC show a sharp increase in the number of Americans experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression. Are many breaking under the stress?”
People need to be more aggressive in responding to bureaucratic bullshit.
Related: Lockdown killed my mother — and thousands like her.. “‘It’s cruel,’ she would say, over and over again, in the painful phone calls from her care home.”
Question: Will there be any accountability from public health bureaucrats for the harm done?
Answer: Ha, ha, of course not. Accountability is for the little people.
Caitlin O’Connor and James Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread(Yale, 2018)
There will be one post per day for three days, all of which can be found here (as they are published
Cnn-Video: Man With Alzheimer's Falls In Love With Wife All Over Again
IT KILLED 100 MILLION IN THE 20TH CENTURY: The truly scary China Virus variant.
Democrat Mocks Threat From Communism; Vietnamese Survivor Fires Back.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Back in the good old days, communism wasn’t a threat because of heroic figures like this kid
TikTok is taking the book industry by storm, and retailers are taking notice
NBCNews – “BookTok has sent old books back to the top of bestseller lists and helped launch the careers of new authors. Videos with the BookTok hashtag have been viewed a collective 12.6 billion times… BookTok’s impact on the book industry has been notable, helping new authors launch their careers and propelling books like Silvera’s to the top of bestseller lists years after their original publication. Madeline Miller’s “The Song of Achilles,” E. Lockhart’s “We Were Liars” and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” — all of which were published before BookTok began to dominate the industry — are among some of the other books that have found popularity on the app years after their initial release. Retailers like Barnes & Noble have taken advantage of BookTok’s popularity to market titles popular on the app to customers by creating specialized shelves featuring books that have gone viral. “We’re identifying these trends as big opportunities,” Shannon DeVito, director of books at Barnes & Noble, said. “So [Barnes & Noble store managers] say, ‘Let’s create a table, let’s create a shelf, let’s create a statement because I know I have so many customers coming in saying, ‘I saw this trending on TikTok.’’…”We’ve seen big box retailers jump at the chance to engage with the #booktok community, like Barnes and Noble creating a dedicated ‘TikTok BookTok Reads’ section both online and in-store from creator recommendations,” a TikTok representative wrote in an email to NBC News. “We’ve also seen creators and brands lean into the #BookTok community – from the publisher side, Penguin Random House is very in-tune with #BookTok trends and frequently collaborates with creators.” The app has been pivotal for introducing younger audiences to reading, DeVito said, as well as for introducing older titles to new readers and for helping new authors find an audience. The BookTok phenomenon also closely coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, which DeVito credits for people craving an emotional connection with others that they satisfied through reading…”
Fast Company: “…Data show the pandemic has set women back. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has added 36 years to the global gender gap. This is a defining moment that will set the direction for equal pay moving forward—both for women and for companies committed to achieving pay equity because it’s the right thing to do. Without a renewed commitment, we are at risk of eroding all the incremental progress we’ve made over the past decade. The moment of hire defines an employee’s pay equity journey. If a woman isn’t paid fairly from day one (compared to her peers doing similar work), it’s likely she’ll never catch up.
TALES FROM AMERICA’S BLUE ENCLAVES: Judge Sentences ‘Smallville’ Actress Allison Mack for NXIVM Sex Slave Cult Charges. “Mack confessed to manipulating women to become sex slaves for Raniere through the DOS (Dominus Obsequium Sororum) sorority. Two documentary series — Starz’s Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult and HBO’s The Vow — explain how Raniere created a self-help organization/cult and used it to prepare women to become his sex slaves. Mack trapped women into ‘master-slave’ relationships on the false premise of self-improvement, then coerced them to have sex with Raniere.”
- “How could it be that a single cat-call, which occurs in isolation, contains seemingly innocuous content, and should therefore by all accounts be nothing more than a communicative pinprick, can nonetheless wrong its target?” — Lucy McDonald (Cambridge) takes up the question
- A bike tour of Amsterdam inspired by Spinoza — along the “Spinozaroute” are 11 specially decorated benches with unique QR codes for free related podcast episodes on humans and nature
- “Without the Comb, the Razor is too dangerous” — metaphysics, ideology, sexual orientation, and more, in an interview with Peter Finocchiaro (Wuhan)
- “The failure of the Board of Trustees to approve tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones is doing great harm to the standing, reputation, and integrity of the University that I have served energetically since 2003” — Marc Lange (UNC Chapel Hill) has some words for the Board
- A collection of video interviews with philosophers — and video explainers on topics in ethics, logic, and more, from Sahar Joakim (St. Louis CC)
- “The Stone showed that there is a large audience for philosophical ideas, a fact which still surprises and pleases us” — John Kaag (UMass Lowell) and Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson) on the end of the NYT’s dedicated philosophy column
- “Pragmatic genealogists take an idea whose practical value is in doubt, or elusive, and try to reverse-engineer the idea’s function in human affairs by figuring out what practical concerns, if any, it answers to” — Matthieu Queloz (Oxford) on pragmatic genealogies of ideas, such as “state of nature” models