Vox: We don’t have a president, or a plan
Reading Time: 6 minutes It is shocking. More than 60 days after President Trump declared a national emergency over the novel coronavirus, there is still no clear national plan for what comes next.
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Vox: The agonizing story of Tara Reade
Reading Time: 12 minutes Reade’s latest allegation is far more serious and comes in a far more fraught political context. The story that both she and her corroborating witnesses are telling has changed dramatically. This leaves me — all of us — in an agonizing place. I’ve written many articles through the Me Too era. It’s unrealistic to demand “perfect” victims. And, like most who come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct or assault, Reade has suffered for speaking out. In several exchanges this year and last year, she’s shown me disturbing messages she’s received online.
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The only non-negotiable is to erase white supremacist culture
Reading Time: 3 minutes Don’t just talk to your kids about the killing of a 24-year-old innocent Black man in Brunswick County, Georgia. Talk to them about what white supremacist culture is and how you have inherited it and you probably all have some blindspots to it. Talk about how it shows up in your home and how you are now, as a family, committed to eradicating it because it only produces victims. You are a victim of it because it limits you to being a violent, oppressive, entitled conspirator to the system.
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Vanity Fair: How Trump Gutted Obama’s Pandemic-Preparedness Systems
Reading Time: 8 minutes It is this federal-support piece that has been missing, sources I spoke with say. Testing for COVID-19 has been abysmal. Lacking guidance and support from the White House, governors have been left scrambling to obtain ventilators and personal protective equipment for frontline workers, creating a sellers’ market.
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Politico: ‘The Nightmare Scenario’: How Coronavirus Could Make the 2020 Vote a Disaster
Reading Time: 10 minutes Preparations need to happen right now. If you’re expecting five times the number of absentee-ballot applications — like Wisconsin saw — you’re going to need to have a printer set up for that, and you’re gonna need to have a procedure set up to mail those ballots out. And if people have to apply for absentee ballots individually, those are all going to have to be processed. Lots needs to happen now that wouldn’t ordinarily have to happen quite so early.
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Forbes: The Dr. Fauci of the 1918 Spanish Flu
Reading Time: 7 minutes A public health official getting fired over unpopular social distancing measures during a pandemic has an eerie echo today, when business leaders and politicians are chafing against restrictions urged by authorities to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. But it was precisely these restrictions that enabled Seattle and other cities in Washington to protect themselves from the Spanish flu—and similar actions helped Kansas abate another influenza wave in the fall of 1919.
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This Should Not Come as a Surprise
Reading Time: 4 minutes The really, really unsettling thing about this “news” is that if the United States government were to falter, the majority of Americans don’t freaking want the most corrupt, racist, incompetent, dangerous, selfish, greedy, power-hungry, science-averse, lying, deliberately obtrusive Administration in the entire history of the United States to be the administration that survives whatever chaos unfolds. Who wants the administration that has worked harder to erode this government and its institutions than any group of Americans in history to be in charge of reconstituting the US if everything goes to crap?
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Obviously, the virus isn’t racist, but the systems we have in place are
Reading Time: < 1 minute Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know. ‘Obviously, the virus isn’t racist, but the
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Huffpo: Navajo Nation Reports More Coronavirus Cases Per Capita Than All But 2 U.S. States
Reading Time: 3 minutes Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know. Only New York and New Jersey have more
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Vox: This study on flower resilience is the most beautiful thing I’ve read during the pandemic
Reading Time: 10 minutes It’s not often I find the text of an academic article to be riveting and even beautiful. Here, I was hooked: “Virtually no research has addressed response to accidents involving flowers,” ecologists Scott Armbruster and Nathan Muchhala write. “Yet flowering stalks are often subject to accidental collapse, as when a scape blows down in the wind or coarse litter falls onto a stem …” Great Darwin’s ghost! This is a scientific oversight.
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