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!
China Installed Its Top Cop to Steer Interpol. Then He Disappeared. (from the Wall Street Journal via MSN): “In China’s long bid to gain greater influence on the global stage, placing a senior cop at the top of Interpol was meant to be a diplomatic achievement. China wanted to shoulder a bigger role in the world of international law enforcement. It also wanted Interpol’s help reeling in fugitives facing charges of alleged corruption back home, where President Xi Jinping had launched a crackdown dubbed Operation Fox Hunt.
In a twist, Mr. Meng, leading the hunt, became a target.”
America’s border wars: three weeks in a land of trauma (from the Guardian): “Prolonged exposure to toxic stress raises blood pressure, heart rate, and floods the brain with cortisol and other chemicals, which can rewire neural pathways and change the very architecture of the mind. In children, too much toxic stress can sabotage the nervous system and affect learning, memory and decision making. It can elevate levels of inflammation in the body that cause heart disease, stroke and autoimmune disease, and disrupt growth and development. It can even alter your DNA and change how it gets expressed.”
Abortion Doesn’t Harm Women. Banning Abortion Harms Women. (from Rewire News): “The same senators who express such concern about the harm caused to women by abortion are silent when it comes to opposing these particular attacks on the programs that promote women’s health. Some of them are more than silent—they’ve actively voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and supported programs to kick families struggling to make ends meet off Medicaid.”
Why I Don’t Care If You Wouldn’t Have Existed (from Heinous Dealings via The Orbit): “There are a lot of things that only exist because of horrible acts committed by someone or someones in the past. Modern medicine owes a lot to blatantly racist attitudes towards non-whites, including but certainly not limited to the actions of German Nazi scientists. Technological advances are often result from military needs and funding. Every non-Native resident of Canada, Australia, or the US is living on stolen lands marked by the blood of attempted full genocide.”
The Woman Who Challenged Darwin’s Sexism (from the Smithsonian): “At the time, Blackwell made no acknowledgement of this (admittedly minor) oversight. But what happened next suggests that the error did not go unnoticed. In fact, it was this assumption that minds of learning must be, by default, male that she would address in her second book—one aimed squarely at Darwin and other elite male scientists of his time.”
This neuroscientist is fighting sexual harassment in science—but her own job is in peril (from Science Magazine): “Indeed, McLaughlin has made bitter enemies: Last fall, she says, she was anonymously FedExed a box of feces. And her scientific career is now on the line. Her tenure process was frozen for 17 months starting in 2015 while VUMC investigated allegations that she had posted anonymous, derogatory tweets about colleagues. The probe was spurred by complaints from a professor whom she had testified against in a sexual harassment investigation. VUMC closed the probe without disciplining McLaughlin, but in 2017 a faculty committee, having previously approved her tenure, unanimously reversed itself, according to university documents. Absent a last-minute reprieve, she will lose her job on 28 February, when her National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant expires.”
For LGBTQ People Christian Schools Can Be Traumatizing (from Rewire News): “When Morgan Stringer first started attending French Camp Academy, a Christian boarding school in French Camp, Mississippi, during her sophomore year of high school, she instantly found a group of friends. That summer, however, two of her friends were expelled for “homosexual activity.””
What Was the Washington Post Afraid Of? (from New York Magazine): “I’d believed, in the fevered months of #MeToo, that journalism could swoop in where other institutions had failed to hold big-league abusers accountable. But what would unspool that spring was a lesson beyond any one story or media organization. It was about the limits, despite undeniable progress, of journalistic institutions to tell these stories of sexual misconduct.”
The Death of an Adjunct (from The Atlantic): “To be a perennial adjunct professor is to hear the constant tone of higher education’s death knell. The story is well known—the long hours, the heavy workload, the insufficient pay—as academia relies on adjunct professors, non-tenured faculty members, who are often paid pennies on the dollar to do the same work required of their tenured colleagues.”
And that’s all for this edition. Drop by again for even more brain-tickling facts and links that you didn’t know you couldn’t live without. Until then, happy reading!
Iacon East 