It’s time once again for news and views you can peruse. It’s another Weekly Reader! And as always, if you have a link you’d like to share, let me know in the comments!
Why I’m Not Coming Out as Bisexual on National Coming Out Day (from Medium): “I’m not coming out as bisexual on National Coming Out Day because being bisexual means coming out every time I’m in a new relationship, because if I’m dating a woman they’ll think I’m gay and if I’m dating a man they’ll think I’m straight (they’re also making assumptions about who I’m dating if they think that — and there are more options than two).”
‘Family Guy’ Is Still Just as Transphobic as Ever (from Out): “There’s also a long, boring joke where a waiter can’t figure out if Ida is a woman or a man while she’s on a date with Brian the Dog and then when they go back to a hotel to have sex later in the [episode], Brian says he’s worried someone will find out he’s having “goofball sex” (whatever that means). He’s reassured by his family that in 2019, “things that were gross five years ago are heroic.”
Thanks for calling me gross and saying anyone willing to have sex with is me a hero, Seth. That’s just great.”
RealClear Media Has a Secret Facebook Page to Push Far-Right Memes (from The Daily Beast): “It’s a far cry from the usual fare on RealClearPolitics. Founded in 2000, the site was an early online aggregator of political news, curating links to widely read politics stories and opinion articles in other major outlets. The site has become synonymous with its polling aggregator, which is regularly cited by news organizations on both sides of the aisle as an objective metric of major political races. In recent years, the site has expanded to cover health care, finance, foreign policy, and more.”
30,000 People Were ‘Disappeared’ in Argentina’s Dirty War. These Women Never Stopped Looking (from History.com): “For decades, the women have been advocating for answers about what happened to their loved ones. It’s a question shared by the families of up to 30,000 people “disappeared” by the state during Argentina’s “Dirty War,” a period during which the country’s military dictatorship turned against its own people.”
NASA Hands Elon Musk a Reality Check (from The Atlantic): “It’s practically in the job description for NASA administrators to tell contractors to meet deadlines, but the public back-and-forth felt unprecedented; how many contractors also have a Mars spaceship project on the side?”
Planned Parenthood has been building a secret abortion “mega-clinic” in Illinois (from CBS News): “Since August 2018, Planned Parenthood has used a shell company to construct the facility, leaving no public trace that the former medical office would become one of the largest abortion clinics in the country. CBS News first visited the site in August, while it was still being built.”
Why Jeffrey Epstein loved evolutionary psychology (from The Outline): “Epstein provided lavish funding to a number of prominent academics whose work is relevant to evolutionary psychology, most notably the mathematical biologist Martin Nowak and the eccentric evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, and was connected to others, like the psychologist and public intellectual Steven Pinker. Epstein’s appeal to these scientists may have been nothing more than the allure of easy money unencumbered with the usual restrictions of a National Science Foundation grant. However, the explanations for human behavior developed in these scientists’ work must have been appealing to a man of Epstein’s proclivities. For example, Steven Pinker has described men as likely biologically predisposed to aggression, violent competition over women, and even rape, while evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller wrote that sexual selection, male-male competition, and mate choice can explain why men have dominated the “political, economic, and cultural life in every known society.””
A floating device created to clean up plastic from the ocean is finally doing its job, organizers say (from CNN): “The Ocean Cleanup system is a U-shaped barrier with a net-like skirt that hangs below the surface of the water. It moves with the current and collects faster moving plastics as they float by. Fish and other animals will be able to swim beneath it.”
Mark Meadows and the Undisclosed Dinosaur Property (from The New Yorker): “It’s also possible that Meadows wanted to avoid drawing attention to the Colorado property and the complicated and perhaps unflattering story behind it. The property is not an ordinary piece of land but a rich site for finding dinosaur bones, and this appears to be the primary reason that Meadows bought it. Those bones then became the subject of a long-running fight among young-Earth creationists—and they are likely the reason that Meadows sold the land, ultimately, to Answers in Genesis. Meadows’s involvement with the land may have been, in part, a moneymaking venture, but it seems chiefly to reflect his commitment to, and entanglement with, the contentious and controversial world of creationist paleontology.”
How detective work is being used to rescue kids from the foster care system (from Vice): “Often, the people Prudden and his team find are unaware that they even have a relative in the system. After being approached by Extreme Recruitment, Nadine Jackson recently moved from Minnesota to Missouri to adopt 17-year-old Tyjuan, her biological grandson who had lived in nine different group homes in the last eight years.”
‘Do you ever think about me?’: the children sex tourists leave behind (from The Guardian): “Brigette, 10, and her 11-year-old cousin, Arianne, aren’t in school because they have a stomach bug. There is no toilet and no running water, and no means of cooking other than over an open fire. Even when she is well, Brigette is often too hungry to tackle the 10-minute walk to school. Brigette’s mother is a sex worker. And Brigette knows that somewhere, far away, in a barely imaginable but often-thought-of place called England, she has a father. She knows only his given name: Matthew.”
That’s all for now. Stop by again for more information you may find fascinating. Until then, happy reading to you!
