December 8, 2021
RIP Robbie Shakespeare
Wickedest Bass in Reggae Dead at 68. Alongside his Riddim Twins counterpart Sly Dunbar, the bassist played with everyone from Black Uhuru to Bob Dylan across more than four decades. [more inside]
Fusion, Shmusion
Read the papers and it seems like a fusion power plant is imminent—we’re just a few years away from our first fusion generator and then to widespread commercialization. After all, that’s what the fusion companies themselves are saying.
Tokamak Energy: A working power plant connected to the grid by 2030 • General Fusion: Demonstration power plant beginning operations in 2025 • Helion Energy: We’ll do it in 2024 • First Light Fusion: Yeah, 2024 • Zap Energy: 2023—so there!
But if we’ve learned anything from the Theranos debacle, it’s that we can’t take any company’s claim at face value when “fake it till you make it” is a standard corporate motto. (Slate)
Lawless loggers
This report from the redoubtable Australian Broadcasting Corporation uses some really nice data visualization to reveal the extent to which the Victorian State Government's own logging company has been illegally logging steep slopes in Melbourne's water catchment. [more inside]
Everybody But Your Dog
Bro. ... Bro. *Bros.*
We headed to the restaurant with high hopes — eight of us in total, led into a cement cell of a room, Drake pumping through invisible speakers. It was sweltering hot, and no other customers were present. The décor had the of chicness of an underground bunker where one would expect to be interrogated for the disappearance of an ambassador’s child.Geraldine DeRuiter's review of Bros, a Michelin-starred restaurant that chose not to serve actual food. ((Medium | original site)
HHS investigation into Covid test failure at CDC
Secret Investigation Documents Reveal How The CDC’s First COVID Test Failed In the Pandemic’s Early Days. "Federal investigation records obtained by BuzzFeed News show how one of the most pivotal mistakes of the pandemic fell on an overburdened CDC lab with only three full-time employees." By Dan Vergano. [more inside]
Love and Economy. The Business of Marriage
Linda Besner Takes a Look at the Marriages of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. Romance is famously a form of lunacy, irrational to the core. But historically, marriage is a business deal. Building a shared life seems to demand a sophisticated form of double-entry bookkeeping, in which a column counting cash and a column counting feelings are somehow reconciled. [more inside]
Winning as a first-time candidate
I've worked in politics for a long time and all the candidates that I've worked for in the past were always much older than me. They're in their fifties or sixties and they have much more established careers. And so when they call up a friend who is also a senior-level executive, and they ask, ‘Hey, can you cut me a check for $2,700 bucks?’ They're like, sure, I can do that. For me, I was calling my friends who were all younger and being like, can you chip in a hundred dollars? And can I call your mom? From a Q&A with Delegate-Elect Elect Irene Shin, Virginia House of Delegates in Campaigner, a new weekly newsletter exploring the tactics that drive winning political campaigns. [more inside]
the least we can do is involve patients in the analysis
Immunologist Dr. Akiko Iwasaki explains the possible mechanisms of long COVID (aka Post-Acute Sequelae of Covid-19, aka PASC) in a October 29, 2021 webinar for the National Institutes of Health. Links to timestamps on: post acute infection syndromes in general; two types of long COVID (including the fatigue syndrome associated with mild infections); disease hypotheses (2 possible causes); treatments for symptoms (including vaccines); three different cohort studies; and on long COVID patient involvement in the research. [more inside]
Shrek and the ‘Digital Postracial"
Jamie Loftus, known among other things for detailed scholarly discussions of popular media, offers a review of a recent academic conference about the films Shrek. (previous stuff by loftus)
Sanna Marin: Finland's PM sorry for clubbing after Covid contact
Finland's Prime Minister is 36 years old, went out clubbing till 4am, left her work phone at home and was therefore unreachable to get a text telling her she needed to quarantine. Sanna Marin went on a night out in Helsinki on Saturday, hours after her foreign minister had tested positive.
"on the inside I was screaming curses to Jupiter"
“And to the Republic” by Rachel Kolar is a fantasy story about an alternate civic religion for the US and one sister frantically trying to persuade another: "I didn’t hurry out the door, since that would raise suspicion. Instead, I stopped at the shrines as I always did, lighting my incense to Mercury for a safe commute and to Washington, Lincoln, and the paters patriae for the health of the Republic, before sliding behind the wheel of my car and punching my sister’s number into my cell phone." [more inside]
Amor es Amor
Yesterday, Chile's congress finally approved equal marriage rights for all, including adoption rights. [more inside]
VTubing as a safer way to stream
“It’s kind of like an escape. You have artistic freedom to present yourself however you want,” she says. “It's like a mirror, but it shows you what you want to see. It’s powerful, but also comforting.” - How trans women are finding safe spaces on Twitch and YouTube
"A person cannot consent to what amounts to fraud and torture"
Bill C-4 will make conversion therapy illegal in Canada once the formality of royal assent has been completed. After a couple of earlier failures to get the bill through Parliament and some intra-party strong-arming by Conservative leader Erin O'Toole, it passed both the House and the Senate with unanimous consent. Bill C-4 goes beyond the government’s previous attempts at a ban by making it a crime to make anyone undergo conversion therapy, regardless if they consent. [more inside]
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