It’s been a rough week of news, kittens. Between the British election (which went the way I thought it would but much more overwhelmingly than I anticipated) and the impeachment news in the US, I’m feeling pretty grim overall. Taking a step back, the largest takeaway I continue to have is that all of the old ways of categorizing people and voters seem fundamentally overturned. Old party lines have been redrawn along very different agendas and it’s foolish for anyone, of any political persuasion, to rely on traditional default allies. MAGA and Brexit have subsumed any other conversation or loyalty. Normally these flips take at least a generation, now it’s happening in single term limits. Setting aside my personal biases, it’s academically fascinating. I still think the direction of travel is badly dangerous.
Here’s a week of reading to help you muddle through. It’s entirely election-free, for your mental health and mine.
Yes, I saw the story about the banana. I cackled.
An interesting news story out of Finland! While I would obviously like to see more female leadership overall, I’m also interested in younger leadership in politics. In the same way that we have actively promoted other forms of diversity, I think we need badly to add more elected representatives in the age ranges of the electorates they represent…ie, I’d like more millennials representing me because I’d trust them to have a more personal and correct view of my experience and priorities as a citizen.
What a grim, grim piece of reporting–thanks to aggressively pursuing FOIA requests for years.
Climate change, like the gun debate, often serves as shorthanded for wider culture wars in American society. It’s tribalistic and unhelpful when facing planetary crisis, so I was pleased to read this piece on how the tide may be changing with a key demographic. It’s self-evident to me that the agriculture industries could turn into one of our biggest assets in dramatically reworking our ways of living around necessary change.
Why yes, I would like a decade perspective of our Queen and Goddess Beyonce.
OH DUCKLINGS, I will have much to say on the glory of the knitwear of Knives Out later, but in the meantime this article will suffice more generally.
Ugh. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m very convinced that being on hormonal birth control for a decade contributed significantly to my health challenges (especially regarding mental health and anxiety). Let me be clear, I am NOT a person who dismisses hormonal treatments and scientific medicine and people who try and peddle pseudoscience around health enrage me. But I wish I had been much more proactive about seeking medical guidance on what was the best option for me long before I finally did so. Don’t make my mistake, peeps. If you’re not feeling right, physically or mentally, ask for help!
This should have been a much bigger news story, but of course it landed among all NAFTA 2.0 and impeachment news and so got a bit lost in the shuffle.
Good for her! Though I’m reminded that she herself once said something to the effect that the grownups would laud her and probably not do anything to fix the problem…
And all shall bow before him!
This piece thoughtfully lays out the debate I’ve been having with myself for most of my adult life, and which I believe to be the simmering argument beneath a lot of American politics. What do we need to adapt or tweak, and what do we need to tear down and rebuild outright?
“Global inequality is now more about disparities in opportunity than disparities in income.”
Yes, give me a longform read on this meme!
Jia Tolentino, who you may remember from my recent favorites posts if you weren’t already familiar with her writing, has dropped her latest for The New Yorker on how our current media and online life is leading to a fairly comment “lewk,” as the children say. What this reveals about is is…a bit scary.
Small Dog Syndrome 