The Most Interesting Articles Read This Week — September 08, 2023

It’s been a hot minute since my last post (life has a funny way of passing by without you realizing it!), but I have a few articles from the past few weeks that I thought I’d share.

First up is an article I came across from this Tumblr post titled Natural and human dimensions of a quasi-wild species: The case of kudzu and boy is it fascinating! This article (and the post) changed how I think about and see Kudzu (which — if you live in the Southern United States is pretty much EVERYWHERE). I can’t wait to try and spin it and use it for a project at some point.

How Turkey Replaced the Ottoman Language is another fascinating article — I learned a lot reading this post, and it got me thinking in depth about language and colonialism.

If you read one article this week from this list, let it be this fantastic in-depth article by Ronan Farrow on Elon Musk. Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule is a long, but well worth it read and I highly recommend people read it.

In My So-Called #TradWife Life by Anne-Helen Peterson (of the Culture Study substack), the author attempts to live like a #TradWife and explores her experiences. The Elle article is complemented by this post from Anne published around the same time and it’s well worth the read. As a note — this video breaks down “the gender essentialism to radical terf/christian nationalist” pipeline really well and it’s just a great video.

How two pop culture Twitter accounts turned into the internet’s wire service is a really interesting dive into two of the most popular twitter accounts (I follow them both myself) and how they have changed political and pop-culture reporting recently.

While the Maui wildfires haven’t been in the news as much lately, Locals have been sounding the alarm for years about Lahaina wildfire risk is still a worthwhile read about climate change and disasters like the wildfire occurring more frequently and more devastatingly.

Finally, 600 years ago a king tried to deny a post-pandemic labor shortage was real — and it ended up killing hundreds of people from 2021 is still relevant today — especially as people are going to work still sick, not testing, and infecting other people without a care in the world because we’ve forgotten:

Covid is airborne: it is in the exhaled breath of infected people. 2/3 of covid spread comes from pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic people — they show no symptoms. It’s estimated that 30% of all covid cases are asymptomatic. Rapid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic infections. Vaccination and treatment like Paxlovid are your last lines of defense. Covid-19 is not just a respiratory infection, it is a multi-organ, systemic disease; a serious vascular, neurological, immune-system-damaging, sometimes brain-damaging, randomly disabling disease (CDC: 1 in 5; PHAC: 50%).

It typically shows up with respiratory, flu-like symptoms. Post-infection immunity has shortened to 28 days. Everyone infected is at high risk for serious heart problems; the risk of deadly blood clots is elevated for one year.

Long covid will result from multiple reinfections, at any severity of infection. Each reinfection does cumulative, worsening damage and increases long covid risk. There is no treatment for long covid. There is no cure for long covid. There is no prevention for long covid. Everyone of every age and health status can get long covid. Here is what long covid looks like. The AMA wants people to know that getting reinfected is “akin to playing Russian Roulette.”

- From Violet Blue’s Pandemic Roundup: September 7, 2023

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy and find some new articles to read this week. Have a great weekend!