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Now, the links you’re here for:
To Have or Not to Have Children in the Age of Climate Change (Katie O’Reilly, Sierra)
“A millennial journalist with a long professional and personal bucket list, I can picture myself living a fulfilled existence without procreating, and I respect that there are plenty of ways to parent without making children myself. And yet, I’m not immune to the biological imperative that’s kept humankind going for 200,000-plus years. Moreover, I like kids. I grew up in a large, boisterous family and to some extent absorbed the notion that I’d someday replicate such a unit. So I’m feeling an acute sense of urgency. We’ve got about as much time to ward off unlivable heat, flooding, famine, warfare, and human displacement as my reproductive system has, statistically, to make a baby.”
A test with no answer (Sophia Jones, Marie Claire)
““So-called virginity testing is nothing more than an assault on young women with no scientific or medical basis,” says Jonah Bruno, director of communications at the New York State Department of Health. And yet, girls and women are suffering from the fears and consequences of “failing” a virginity test and grappling with the aftermath of being forced to undergo such an invasive exam.
“It’s “rape by instrument,” says B, a now-31-year-old woman who asked to be identified by her first initial only because of the blowback she might get from her family. Twenty years after what she calls an “extraordinarily traumatic” forced hymen exam, B is still working with a therapist to cope with the ordeal that drastically changed how she saw herself, her body, and her sexuality.”
Women with dementia outnumber men by two to one – and researchers are only just starting to work out why (Sarah Graham, The i)
“Globally, women with dementia like Sofia outnumber men by two to one. Women make up 500,000 of the 850,000 people living with dementia in the UK, and up to 70 per cent of carers for people with dementia are also female. Despite this, science is still a long way from understanding how sex and gender affect your risk of developing dementia. In fact, it’s only in the last three years researchers have even begun to scratch the surface.
“Dr Antonella Santuccione Chadha is a doctor and co-founder of the Women’s Brain Project, an organisation advocating for women’s brain and mental health. The project began three years ago when scientists came together to debate what some prominent female American philanthropists were saying: dementia is more prevalent in women.”
I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb (Allie Conti, Vice)
“The bad news, which went unstated, was that I had unknowingly stumbled into a nationwide web of deception that appeared to span eight cities and nearly 100 property listings—an undetected scam created by some person or organization that had figured out just how easy it is to exploit Airbnb’s poorly written rules in order to collect thousands of dollars through phony listings, fake reviews, and, when necessary, intimidation. Considering Airbnb’s lax enforcement of its own policies, who could blame the scammers for taking advantage of the new world of short-term rental platforms? They had every reason to believe they could do so with impunity.”
‘My husband squeezed my hand to say he wanted to live, then I found a way to save him’ (Natasha Lipman, BBC)
“Thanks to their medical insurance, taken out for $35 before the trip, Tom was med-evaced to Frankfurt, where doctors found that the initial cause of the problem was a stone expelled from his gallbladder that had got stuck in his biliary duct. Inside the cyst they found a murky, brown fluid that indicated this wasn’t a new infection. As they worked to figure out what was happening, Tom started to fall into a coma.
“”I was hallucinating, thinking I was in Egypt, seeing hieroglyphs on the walls, really losing it,” Tom says. “Because of the infection in my gut – and by this point I hadn’t had much sleep in a few days – I was getting pretty crazy. The doctors came back and said, ‘This is the worst infection on the planet. This is an infection that’s closed down hospitals in Germany. It’s called Acinetobacter baumannii.'””
Image credit: Mouli Choudari