Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, everyone’s favourite agony aunt is back with the rundown on using time-tested Russian espionage techniques to dump your crappy boyfriend.
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‘Every Last Drop‘ (Alice Driver for Topic)
Water scarcity is a pernicious problem that should be solvable. So why do so many people still lack access to safe, clean drinking water?
Mexico City’s low-income residents depend on water deliveries to sustain their daily lives, and the schedules of Garduño Espinosa and the other women in her neighborhood are closely tied to the erratic rhythms of the pipas—a ritual so demanding it can prevent women in poor neighborhoods from holding a job outside the home. According to the city’s government, nearly 20 percent of its 21 million residents can’t count on having running water on any given day.
‘A Woman’s Work: The Art of the Day Job‘ (Carolita Johnson for Longreads)
This hybrid essay-cartooning piece should resonate with a lot of people who’ve struggled with the same issues depicted therein.
My ultimate plan was to take some kind of art course that wouldn’t take up too much bandwidth in my brain, get my BFA, and use it to pursue a Masters in, guess what? Last laugh would be mine: English Majordom. All I had to do was sit tight and draw stupid pictures for teachers who I considered artistic sell-outs, who were glad to put up with me and any other student whose only real talent was possessing parents with enough dough to finance their nice salary and benefits for four years.
‘Escape to the Azores Islands, 1,000 Miles From Land‘ (Diana Marcum for Medium)
Can you develop nostalgia by proxy for a place you’ve never been?
He said that in the mornings he hauled cattle for a living and made good money doing it. He could afford a tractor. But the oxen were his tie to “the old country” he had left as a teenager — the Azores, nine Portuguese specks of land surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean for about nine hundred miles on every side. So he plowed the way they had during his childhood on the islands and, according to him, the way they still plowed them today.
‘Here’s Why It’s So Impossible to Get Reliable Diet Advice From the News‘ (Emily Oster for Slate)
Tired of the endlessly conflicting advice about diet you see in the news? (Is wine good for us or bad for us this week? Does eating fat make us fat?) So are a lot of scientists. Bad science reporting is part of the problem here, but that’s actually not the whole picture.
Published studies on this often give lip service to this problem, and sometimes the resulting media coverage does too. It goes by many names—residual confounding, omitted variable bias, selection bias, “correlation is not causation.” But too commonly it is a throwaway in both studies and coverage; you’ll see a line like, “A limitation of our study is the possibility of residual confounding,” with little follow-up to give a sense of how large this can be. This often leaves us with the impression that, actually, these concerns are pretty minor. Are they? Or is this problem an endemic curse on studies of diet?
‘Captive Audience: How Companies Make Millions Charging Prisoners to Send An Email‘ (Victoria Law for Wired)
Email access should expand connections to the world for incarcerated people. Instead, it’s just another way to milk money from them and their families within a capitalistic system of exploiting people who are at the mercy of lucrative contracts to provide what should be basic services.
Prisons are notoriously low-tech places. But urged on by privately owned companies, like JPay, facilities across the country are adding e-messaging, a rudimentary form of email that remains disconnected from the larger web. Nearly half of all state prison systems now have some form of e-messaging: JPay’s services are available to prisoners in 20 states, including Louisiana.
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Photo: Vladimir Postovit/Creative Commons