It’s time once again for news and views that you can peruse! It’s time for another Weekly Reader! As always, if you’ve got something you’d like to share, drop a link in the comments!
Trump’s Big Lie is hurting Republicans’ efforts to get out the vote (from Salon): “Over the past three years, Trump’s Big Lie has become the main organizing principle of the Republican Party. There had been a festering sense of grievance and resentment among the GOP base for decades which Trump skillfully tapped into. But ever since his flukey win in 2016, his insistence that the succession of losses the party has suffered under his leadership were all the result of rigged elections, has taken a toll. Among the Republican faithful these days are quite a few who question whether it’s even worth it to participate.”
Inside the increasingly ugly GOP fight over a Texas runoff (from Politico): “It takes uncommon political skill to survive a runoff as an incumbent. And Gonzales not only has to win over voters, but he also has to confront attacks from members of his own conference who are enthusiastically campaigning for Herrera. That enthusiasm only grew after Gonzales called conservatives “scumbags” in a recent TV interview and said Gaetz “paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties.””
Abortion bans drive away up to half of young talent, new CNBC/Generation Lab youth survey finds (from CNBC): “Yet findings like these suggest that state abortion bans could have a profound effect on how and where the next generation of American workers will live. And by extension, on the companies that will hire them.”
Kristi Noem’s animal cruelty is hurting the GOP financially (from Salon): “”They’re just attacking me like crazy right now,” she said. “But listen, that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing because it makes you stronger, and it teaches you, really, what you’re up against. And it makes you recognize how much they lie. How much they will twist. How much they will manipulate. And you just have to be strong and be happy warriors.””
The Climate Crisis Is Already Transforming the Family (from The New Republic): ““You would think that race and inequality would come up at some point in the research on the kid question,” Sasser observes. Unfortunately, she continues, “They don’t. Much of the research about climate emotions—a lot of it focused on ‘eco-anxiety’—focuses on the experiences of young, white, middle-class people.” Many polls and surveys don’t ask about race; those that do are frequently dominated by white respondents who often have college degrees. Sasser cites one Canadian survey that was 83 percent white, another of Americans that was 88 percent white and 93 percent college-educated, and another from New Zealand in which 21 out of 24 young people interviewed were white.”
Inside Trump’s stunning flip-flop on early voting (from Axios): “In Pennsylvania, three Republican groups including the GOP’s top fundraising committee for state-level leaders spent $1.5 million ahead of last week’s primary to organize supporters to vote by mail.”
The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population (from Politico): “Broadly speaking, the people who have paid as much as $1,000 to attend the conference are members of the New Right, a conglomeration of people in the populist wing of the conservative movement who believe we need seismic changes to the way we live now — and who often see the past as the best model for the future they’d like to build. Their ideology, such as it exists, is far from cohesive, and factions of the New Right are frequently in disagreement. But this weekend, these roughly aligned groups, from the libertarian-adjacent tech types to the Heritage Foundation staffers, along with some who likely have no connection with traditionally conservative or far-right causes at all, have found a unifying cause in natalism.”
Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning (from Slate): “How did this captain know—from 50 feet away—what the father couldn’t recognize from just 10? Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew know what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for is rarely seen in real life.”
People have been searching for this song from ‘The X-Files’ for 25 years. Until now (from NPR): “The saga began with Lauren Ancona lounging on the couch at her parents’ house outside of Philadelphia. She was zoned out on her phone, with an old episode of The X-Files playing in the background, when a particular tune from the show caught her ear.”
Mercy me: Photos show what humans have done to the planet in the Anthropocene age (from NPR): “Years before this final vote, photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier were inspired by the ongoing debate over this new geological era. These three Canadian artists traveled to 22 countries to research and document “places of obvious, physical human incursions on the landscape,” says filmmaker de Pencier.
They created over 50 images capturing the impact of humans on the Earth, like a sprawling, 30-acre garbage dump in Kenya, large swaths of deforestation in Borneo and waterways damaged by oil siphoning in Nigeria.”
Rare photos give a glimpse into the lives of wild cats in Malaysia’s tropical jungles (from CNN): “These wild cats are notoriously elusive and, besides the tiger, understudied. According to the IUCN Red List, the global inventory for threatened species, there are few records or population estimates available for the Borneo bay cat, the marbled cat and the flat-headed cat. Despite this, almost all Malaysia’s cat species are classified as endangered, vulnerable or near threatened, due to habitat loss, poaching and climate change.”
Bumblebee babies are dying in their nests because global temperatures are getting too warm, study finds (from CBS News): “The optimal temperature range for bumblebee nests is between 82.4 and 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit. And when the heat rises just slightly higher to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, Kevan said it becomes “lethal, despite the remarkable capacity of bumblebees to thermoregulate.””
Japan Has Said Goodbye to Its Life-Sized Gundam (from Gizmodo): “While there are several statues of true-scale replicas of the franchise’s giant robots in Japan, the Yokohama Gundam was the first of its scale to feature advanced mechanics—36 moving parts in total—that allowed the mobile suit to perform rudimentary movements from its framework display, including kneeling, walking in place, and moving its arms and head. But after extending its intended exhibition length twice beyond its originally planned 2022 closure—in part spurred by the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic and due to overwhelming demand to the attraction, which saw nearly 2 million visits during its run—the Yokohama Gundam has moved for the last time.”
Cats with MDR1 mutation at risk of severe reactions to popular medication (from Phys.Org): “While the ingredient eprinomectin, which is found in products like NexGard COMBO and Centragard, appears safe and effective for the significant majority of cats when used at label doses, a study conducted by Washington State University’s Program for Individualized Medicine identified a risk of severe adverse effects in cats with the MDR1 genetic mutation.
Genetically affected cats lack a protective mechanism that prevents certain drugs, including eprinomectin, from entering the brain and causing serious neurological toxicity.”
How Twitter can ruin a life (from Vox): “Isabel Fall was on a path to becoming herself, and then she wasn’t — and all because she published a short story. And then her life fell apart.”
States find a downside to mandatory reporting laws meant to protect children (from NPR): “”There’s a long, depressing history based on the approach that our primary response to a struggling family is reporting,” says Mical Raz, a physician and historian at the University of Rochester in New York. “There’s now a wealth of evidence that demonstrates that more reporting is not associated with better outcomes for children.””
Humans Will Soon Go Extinct Unless We Can Find 5 More Earths (from Popular Mechanics): “This mass extinction starts with species loss, includes habitat loss, and leads to the breakdown in the natural order of things such as the food chain and soil fertility. To put it bluntly, the current way of Earth will kill off human’s way of life, according to Barnosky.”
Project 2025: The Right’s Dystopian Plan to Dismantle Civil Rights and What It Means for Women (from Ms.): “They argue that “the Left” opposes equality and liberty established in the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: “It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good—that the ruling class disdains” (p. 14).
Yet this “inalienable right to self-direction” does not appear to extend to pregnant women or LGBTQ people.”
How a post falsely claiming migrants are registering to vote spread to millions in four weeks (from NBC News): “While verification requests are not necessarily a one-to-one tally of people registering to vote, the X post falsely presented such numbers as if they were, suggesting that nearly 1.9 million individual voters registered in such states without a photo identification, only using the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.”
Over 100 far-right militias are coordinating on Facebook (from ArsTecha): “Individuals across the US with long-standing ties to militia groups are creating networks of Facebook pages, urging others to recruit “active patriots” and attend meetups, and openly associating themselves with known militia-related sub-ideologies like that of the anti-government Three Percenter movement. They’re also advertising combat training and telling their followers to be “prepared” for whatever lies ahead. These groups are trying to facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county. Their goals are vague, but many of their posts convey a general sense of urgency about the need to prepare for “war” or to “stand up” against many supposed enemies, including drag queens, immigrants, pro-Palestine college students, communists—and the US government.”
That’s all for this week, but don’t fret. I’ll be back again with more reading material for you to browse through and bookmark! Until then, have a great rest of your week and happy reading!
Iacon East 