It’s time once again for news and views that you can peruse! It’s another edition of your Weekly Reader! As always, if you have something you’d like to share, drop a link in the comments! The more articles, the better! Because sharing is caring! So feel free to share away.
The Worst Disease Ever Recorded (from the Atlantic): “Scheele’s team estimates that the fungus has caused the decline of 501 amphibian species—about 6.5 percent of the known total. Of these, 90 have been wiped out entirely. Another 124 have fallen by more than 90 percent, and their odds of recovery are slim. Never in recorded history has a single disease burned down so much of the tree of life. “It rewrote our understanding of what disease could do to wildlife,” Scheele says.”
So someone you like is accused of something bad (from Ashley F. Miller via The Orbit): “In these times we feel an instinctive reaction, we want to believe that the people we like are not Bad People. We find ourselves tempted to defend them, to say nice things about them, to paint their behavior in the best light and read their apologies with rose-colored glasses.
I would like to offer some rebuttals to the thoughts you may be having.”
Making Me Safer (from Almost Diamonds via The Orbit): “The rhetoric that got us here, though? That is about me. It’s about me as a white person doomed to see “my race” die out. It’s about me as city-dwelling possible target of terrorism. It’s about me as a woman facing religious sexism. It’s about me and the threat I present as an atheist. It’s about me as a sinner where the cost of sin is death.”
I Want to Miss the Moorhens (from The Perfumed Void via The Orbit): “I used to think I didn’t get attached to places. The past was a haze, an awful mystery I yearned to escape. My heart was not heavy when my family moved us from New Jersey to Florida when I was 10, and it was lighter still when I finally left Miami to seek my fortunes in Ottawa, Canada. I had much to flee. It was only later that I found something to mourn.”
Marvel just got back together with the X-Men. But it’s complicated. (from Vox): “But while the merger seems like a better home for the X-Men and Fantastic Four, and perhaps some better movies on the horizon, there are still some big problems — time, continuity, and fitting these characters into Marvel’s cinematic formula— that Marvel will have to deal with.”
Netflix’s Our Planet Says What Other Nature Series Have Omitted (from The Atlantic): “But this time, the messages delivered by that familiar voice are different. Here, much of the awe is tinged with guilt, the wonder with concern, the entertainment with discomfort.”
Here’s Why You Should Stay Hopeful Right Now (from John Pavlovitz): “We can’t allow our present troubles to overcome us.
We cannot be overwhelmed by the pain in our path, to the point where we are no longer willing to feel it or respond to it.
We can’t wilt in the face of hateful, fearful people who would make the world less diverse and less equitable.
We can’t become apathetic or stay silent or sidestep the turbulence of engaging the ugliness outside or doors or on our social media feeds—because the multitudes whose feet traversed this place previously, refused to.”
A Secret Database of Child Abuse (from The Atlantic-Warning! Some may find this extremely disturbing, so tread cautiously!): “Thus did the Jehovah’s Witnesses build what might be the world’s largest database of undocumented child molesters: at least two decades’ worth of names and addresses—likely numbering in the tens of thousands—and detailed acts of alleged abuse, most of which have never been shared with law enforcement, all scanned and searchable in a Microsoft SharePoint file. In recent decades, much of the world’s attention to allegations of abuse has focused on the Catholic Church and other religious groups. Less notice has been paid to the abuse among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian sect with more than 8.5 million members. Yet all this time, Watchtower has refused to comply with multiple court orders to release the information contained in its database and has paid millions of dollars over the years to keep it secret, even from the survivors whose stories are contained within.
That effort has been remarkably successful—until recently.”
And that’s it for this time around. Drop by again for more linkages that you didn’t know you had to read! Until then, happy reading!
Iacon East 