Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, don’t miss Louise Hung’s exploration of AAPIs on television, and how the Simpsons and Roseanne controversies reflect a changing world.
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‘The Labor of Bringing a Baby Into Appalachia‘ (Alecia Swasy for Fusion)
Many regions of the rural U.S. have poor access to perinatal care. This is a vivid look at how this plays out in practice.
Hahn travels between three clinics to see 60 women a day. If there’s a January blizzard, the birth rate soars nine months later, forcing Hahn to sleep on a twin bed in his office for two weeks, sometimes delivering 20 babies in 10 days. He’s delivered nearly 9,000 babies, but he has lost count of the exact number.
‘Why I’m Giving Up On Preventative Care‘ (Barbara Ehrenreich for Lithub)
This firebrand of critical thinking about social issues is pushing back on deeply-held beliefs about medicine in a new book that we can’t wait to read. This excerpt is a great taste.
I had a different reaction to aging: I gradually came to realize that I was old enough to die, by which I am not suggesting that each of us bears an expiration date. There is of course no fixed age at which a person ceases to be worthy of further medical investment, whether aimed at prevention or cure. The military judges that a person is old enough to die—to put him or herself in the line of fire—at age 18. At the other end of life, many remain world leaders in their seventies or even older, without anyone questioning their need for lavish continuing testing and care. Zimbabwe’s former president, Robert Mugabe, recently turned 90, and has undergone multiple treatments for prostate cancer.
‘How Trump Moved the Mexican Border North‘ (Emily Gogolak for Politico)
In Texas, a vision of a not-too-distant future, and one that some people are already living.
Every time she sees someone in uniform she says she thinks she might never see her son again. “Recently, a cop stopped me, and I felt the life leaving me,” she said. “I cried, I cried.” The officer let her go without inspection. Her husband, from Veracruz, Mexico, is also undocumented. He was out working on waterlogged houses.
‘Dog rescuers, flush with donations, buy animals from the breeders they scorn‘ (Kim Kavin for The Washington Post)
Want to hear something bananas? Rescue organisations are getting so good at their jobs that they’re having trouble locating dogs to rehome, so they’re buying them from the breeders they claim to hate in some sort of bizarre rescue dog laundering operation. (Protip: Adoptable mixed breeds are being killed at a shelter near you right now, so maybe…start there instead of ‘rescuing’ a purebred?)
The smaller populations of shelter dogs make it harder for some rescue groups, especially those dedicated to specialty breeds, to find what adopters want. One golden retriever rescue group turned to the auctions after seeing 40 percent fewer dogs coming in as of 2016. At the auctions, such rescuers describe buying purebreds and popular crossbreeds like goldendoodles and maltipoos as “puppy mill rescue.”
‘A Farewell to Fuckboys in the Age of Consent Culture‘ (Minda Honey for Longreads)
The #MeToo movement has many of us examining our own pasts, thinking about relationships long gone and the people who once inhabited our lives. That self-examination is forcing us to confront some things about ourselves, the people we used to be, and the people we used to date.
He had a problem with taking things that didn’t belong to him. The last I heard of him, one of his friends told me he had a baby on the way and had been locked up for pulling a gun on a pizza delivery guy at his own apartment. It wasn’t hard for the police to figure out where to find him. Who knows if it’s true, but when I Google his newscaster name, a name he shares with many men, the only link relevant to him is a Florida mugshot from around the same time for an out-of-state felony charge.
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Photo: Randy/Creative Commons