Alas, a Blog

1. When Thin is a Trans Requirement | Autostraddle
   “These experiences are rarely given airtime, partly because the few trans people in the public eye are almost universally thin, and partly because fatness and transness together bring a double burden of stigma: they’re both seen as a form of excess & violation of public norms, and they’re both met with community policing and shaming.”
2. US State Policies, Politics, and Life Expectancy – MONTEZ – 2020 – The Milbank Quarterly – Wiley Online Library
   “Results show that changes in life expectancy during 1970-2014 were associated with changes in state policies on a conservative-liberal continuum, where more liberal policies expand economic regulations and protect marginalized groups. States that implemented more conservative policies were more likely to experience a reduction in life expectancy.”
3. Afghanistan: 3 Unlearned Lessons – by Nonzero – Nonzero Newsletter
   And a fourth lesson: We really should stop attempting “interventions” like this.
4. Opinion | Anna Harris of Texas who works with indigent defendants says she was arrested in retaliation for her work – The Washington Post
   Interesting stuff about a “holistic” model of providing legal defenses to people who can’t afford their own, versus the standard model.
5. Texas has betrayed women – UnHerd
   “Not content to simply outlaw abortion, they have constructed a law that maximises the humiliation, stigma and degradation on any woman who seeks to end a pregnancy. In Texas, every woman’s entire community has been deputised to police her most private choices.”
6. On Twitter, I discussed why we shouldn’t infer a lot from that study which found that spoilers make readers enjoy stories more.
7. The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms – The Markup
   “Holding 17 different factors steady in a complex statistical analysis of more than two million conventional mortgage applications for home purchases, we found that lenders were 40 percent more likely to turn down Latino applicants for loans, 50 percent more likely to deny Asian/Pacific Islander applicants, and 70 percent more likely to deny Native American applicants than similar White applicants. Lenders were 80 percent more likely to reject Black applicants than similar White applicants. … In every case, the prospective borrowers of color looked almost exactly the same on paper as the White applicants, except for their race.”
8. How Oslo Achieved Zero Pedestrian and Bicycle Fatalities, and How Others Can Apply What Worked | TheCityFix
9. Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue – Scientific American
   Good article from 2016; unfortunately, I don’t think much has changed since then. “Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. And yet, you might still open a study on genetics in a major scientific journal and find categories like “white” and “black” being used as biological variables.”
10. Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analogy
    “But because the analogy between races and dog breeds incorrectly privileges biology over the social and historical factors that have led to the development of racial constructs, here we demonstrate how genetic data fails to substantiate the racial categorizations used in the U.S. today and their equivalence to dog breeds.”
11. Will the Child Tax Credit End Traditional Welfare? – The Atlantic
    The headline should replace “end” with “replace,” and “traditional welfare” with “TANF.” And, I doubt it will, but I wish it would.
12. Don’t Believe the Hype (About Believing): You Don’t Need Religion to be Happy | Religion Dispatches
13. Amia Srinivasan · Does anyone have the right to sex? · LRB 22 March 2018
    “The question​, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.”
14. The Ides of August
    A persuasive essay about what happened in Afghanistan. “I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were.”
15. ‘For me, this is paradise’: life in the Spanish city that banned cars | Cities | The Guardian
    “On the same streets where 30 people died in traffic accidents from 1996 to 2006, only three died in the subsequent 10 years, and none since 2009. CO2 emissions are down 70%, nearly three-quarters of what were car journeys are now made on foot or by bicycle, and, while other towns in the region are shrinking, central Pontevedra has gained 12,000 new inhabitants.”
16. To survive, China’s biggest gay dating app became a pharmacy – Rest of World
    “It’s trying to make sure the state will not mistake it as a gay activist organization,” said Chan. “It must, in order to survive.” The app was founded by a gay cop who was forced to resign after he was outed.
17. Podcase recommendation: Dead Eyes.
    Somewhere within the show, Connor Ratliff describes his podcast as being a lot like “Serial,” if the mystery were about something of no importance whatsoever. In this case, Ratliff – an actor – “embarks upon a quest to solve a very stupid mystery that has haunted him for two decades: why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in the 2001 HBO mini-series, Band Of Brothers.” I’ve listened to the whole first season now, and it’s surprisingly entertaining.
18. What podcasts are y’all enjoying? I’m particularly interested in non-political podcast recommendations.

Top image: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Bottom image: Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash

1. Mandate the Covid-19 vaccine, not masks – Vox
   “The federal government could require vaccination for its own employees, as President Joe Biden is reportedly considering, and offer incentives, financial or otherwise, for others to do the same. Local and state governments could require vaccines for their employees, health care workers, schools, and public spaces, from restaurants to museums. Even without any government support, private organizations could act alone, requiring vaccinations for their employees and, ultimately, proof of vaccination for anyone on their premises.” Edited to add: Yes, Covid-19 vaccine mandates are legal – Vox
2. Opinion | Generation labels mean nothing. It’s time to retire them. – The Washington Post (and an alternative link).
   “…measuring and describing social change is essential, and it can be useful to analyze the historical period in which people were born and raised. People should write books and articles on these topics. But drawing arbitrary lines between birth years and slapping names on them isn’t helping.”
3. “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian draws specific details from my life.
   Interesting essay by the woman who the viral short story was partly based on.
4. Amanda Knox: Does My Name Belong To Me?
   Kind of an interesting comparison to the Cat Person link above. Knox, through no fault of her own, is famous for a murder where no one remembers the name of either the victim or the killer. Now there’s yet another movie based on her life, and publicizing with her name, without consulting her at all.
5. LA Wi spa anti-trans protest: How an apparent hoax created real violence.
   A transphobic hoax (about a made-up trans woman changing in front of made-up children) led to a transphobic protestor stabbing two people – a counterprotester and also one of his allies.
6. Critical race theory battles are driving frustrated, exhausted educators out of their jobs
   “In Eureka, Missouri, the only Black woman in the Rockwood School District’s administration resigned from her position as diversity coordinator after threats of violence grew so severe that the district hired private security to patrol her house.”
7. Christopher Rufo and the Critical Race Theory Moral Panic
   An article about the right-wing journalist most responsible for creating the CRT booga-booga hysteria.
8. Burger King workers in Nebraska depart and leave message on outdoor billboard: “We all quit”
   Good for them!
9. Lyme disease vaccine: the frustrating reason there isn’t one for humans – Vox
   The answer is, there is a vaccine for Lyme disease. It’s safe and it works. But anti-Vax hysteria drove it from the market, and now no pharm company wants to touch it. Honestly, of all the things people are okay with free speech being limited for – the sex trades, copyright issues, libel, etc – I think one of the strongest cases can be made for banning or publishing anti-vax ideas outside of a list of accredited peer-reviewed journals. Would it have costs? Yes. But the alternative isn’t “no costs,” but hundreds of thousands of people needlessly suffering illness or death, and everyone being less safe.
10. Loki was a trans story. The Marvel show played with gender… | by Katelyn Burns | Jul, 2021 | Medium
    I enjoyed Loki. I wasn’t as excited by it as I was by Wandavision, but I thought it stuck the landing better.
11. Trans kids in the US were seeking treatment decades before today’s political battles over access to health care
12. Two classes of trans kids are emerging – those who have access to puberty blockers, and those who don’t
13. Why Statistics Don’t Capture The Full Extent Of The Systemic Bias In Policing | FiveThirtyEight
14. Spotify Has Changed The Way We’ll Be Losing Our Music Libraries – The Atlantic
    But all forms of music libraries have always gotten lost – think of how hard it is to play LPs, let alone cassette tapes, let alone 8-tracks.
15. People in Missouri are wearing disguises to secretly get vaccinated: doctor – Raw Story
    This is perfectly normal.
16. This link farm is decorated by a mini-gallery of comic book covers by British cartoonist Brian Bolland.