This has been a rough week. My politics crush, Elizabeth Warren, dropped out, leaving us with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, neither of whom I’m exactly thrilled with as candidates. I mean, I’ll vote for whichever of them wins the primary, but they don’t exactly excite me or fill me with confidence. Maybe I’ll feel better after we find out who a potential VP will be.
At any rate, it’s Friday, a thing I am grateful for, because it has, indeed, been a rough week. Here’s all the reading I’ve saved up and/or dug up – lot of good stuff in here.
Also, because we deserve it, a cute and funny video at the end.
Covid19 News
One thing to know about covid19 is that the facts on the ground are changing fast as we learn more about the disease. What you knew yesterday may not necessarily be true today.
Here’s a few resources to keep up with what’s going on:
- The Vox guide to Covid-19 coronavirus – Vox.com’s roundup of their reporting on covid19.
- AP: Dogs, Cats Can’t Pass on Coronavirus, but Can Test Positive – To sum up, as far as we know right now, your pets aren’t passing covid19 around, and they don’t seem to be getting sick, but they can test “weakly positive” for covid19 after being around you while you have it. We know this from two cases in Hong Kong where two dogs tested “weakly positive” after their humans were quarantined for the disease for some time.
- STATNews.com: We’re learning a lot about the coronavirus. It will help us assess risk – Lots of great new details in here, well worth a read. Couple of quick hits: kids don’t seem to be passing the disease around the way we’d expect them to; most transmissions seem to be happening in households, not out in public; and reinfection after having covid19 doesn’t seem to be nearly as big a deal as was initially reported. (At least, as far as we know right now; see above.)
- The Atlantic: Exclusive: The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing – “‘I don’t know what went wrong,’ a former CDC chief told The Atlantic.”
- AV Club: Tito’s Vodka forced to tell people not to use it as hand sanitizer ingredient – I want to send Tito’s social media team a beer for what they had to do yesterday, those poor bastards. Also, for the love of little puppies with heart-shaped spots, please do not make DIY hand sanitizer. Most of the circulating recipes don’t have a high enough alcohol content to kill viruses, and the ones that do will dry your hands out so badly that it makes you more susceptible to catching viruses and bacteria. Just wash your hands properly with soap and water. Proper hand washing is more effective than hand sanitizer, anyway.
Economic News
Brief advisory: I don’t actually know a lot about economics. Here’s what I do know: the signs don’t feel good, recession-wise. I’m getting a wee bit nervous about it, y’all. If you haven’t been already, now’s a good time to start battening down what hatches you can, ’cause I think if covid19 doesn’t do anything else, it’s definitely going to make the economy shit itself.
- CNN Business: Oil prices crash 8% as OPEC and Russia fall out over the coronavirus crisis – “Oil prices crashed 8% to their lowest level in nearly three years on Friday as major producing nations failed to agree on supply cuts aimed at addressing the collapse in global demand caused by the coronavirus outbreak.”
- ABC News: Stocks sink, bond yields take another breathtaking drop – “Stocks kept falling Friday, and bond yields took more breathtaking drops as a brutal, dizzying couple weeks of trading showed no sign of letting up.”
- Bloomberg (the news site, not the dude): Credit Market Endures Worst Day in a Decade on Virus Rout – “U.S. credit markets are suffering their worst day in a decade as fears intensify that the spreading coronavirus will hurt corporate income and some companies’ ability to repay debt.”
Good Reads
- The Atlantic: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake – “The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.”
- The Atlantic: The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America – “In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry.”
- Vanity Fair: “How Could You Not Connect the Dots?”: Inside the Red-Pilling of State Department Official Matthew Gebert – “For years, Gebert, a white nationalist, flew under the radar, both at State and in his quiet Virginia suburb (‘I’ve had Nazi milk,’ one neighbor says). Now, coworkers wonder: How the hell did he pass security screenings? And, most importantly, are there others?”
- Scientific American: No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay In The Air – “Do recent explanations solve the mysteries of aerodynamic lift?”
- Curbed.com: When living apart keeps you together – “For some couples, sharing their hearts doesn’t mean sharing a home.”
- Anil Dash: The lost infrastructure of social media. – “More than a decade ago, the earliest era of blogging provided a set of separate but related technologies that helped the nascent form thrive. Today, most have faded away and been forgotten, but new incarnations of these features could still be valuable.”
Image credit: Newspapers, JonS on Flickr.
Notes & Thoughts 