Larger Link Round Up: Part 1

I have a Pinterest board of links that keep accumulating and I figured, why not throw them here for others to enjoy? I'll break all the links down across a few posts.

Losing Weight

In my case, it was my husband who started pointing out my inflated sense of responsibility. “Why are you doing this?”, “Yes, I see – but what do you want to do?” Turns out, I don’t have more resources than everybody else – just like our house does not have any miracle extra space. Making space for somebody else’s priorities just means you have fewer resources to spend on yourself. And that’s ok – if you chose to do that. But sometimes you may be living with extra weight you’re not aware of.


Henrietta Lacks: science must right a historical wrong

But the story of Henrietta Lacks also illustrates the racial inequities that are embedded in the US research and health-care systems. Lacks was a Black woman. The hospital where her cells were collected was one of only a few that provided medical care to Black people. None of the biotechnology or other companies that profited from her cells passed any money back to her family. And, for decades after her death, doctors and scientists repeatedly failed to ask her family for consent as they revealed Lacks’s name publicly, gave her medical records to the media, and even published her cells’ genome online. (Following an outcry, the genome was soon removed.) Nature later published the genome of another HeLa line1 after the Lacks family reached an agreement with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to approve its release.


Motherhood on the line

Like many girls and women who migrate, Fania wanted to make decisions about her body. Her story of motherhood is not about a defining act of violence. It is about the mundane issues that women and girls in many parts of the world face every day: lack of financial autonomy, the idea that girls should be the first to sacrifice their education, the stigma and shame associated with female sexuality. As Fania would discover, women seeking asylum in the U.S. face additional risks, including being separated from their children or coerced into sterilization.

Coronavirus Was In U.S. Weeks Earlier Than Previously Known, Study Says

Researchers found coronavirus antibodies in 39 samples from California, Oregon, and Washington as early as Dec. 13 to Dec. 16. They also discovered antibodies in 67 samples from Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin in early January — before widespread outbreaks in those states.


A new way to think about the transition to motherhood

When a baby is born, so is a mother -- but the natural (and sometimes unsteady) process of transition to motherhood is often silenced by shame or misdiagnosed as postpartum depression. In this quick, informative talk, reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks breaks down the emotional tug-of-war of becoming a new mother -- and shares a term that could help describe it: matrescence.


WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH ALL THIS GRIEF?

I do not know how to talk about this grief. This American grief that I now carry in my heart, in my bones, in every cell and sinew of my being. This grief with which I wake up and go to sleep, this grief that has caught me, some nights, on the way back from the bathroom. It’s too big for me to frame, too vast for me to organize. It’s been overflowing the banks of each and every day since March 13, when the nation began to shut down and then looked up to see that we were dying.


Post-It Dreams

But it is the private material culture that speaks to our survival; how we exert dominion over our imaginations in a world that constrains our bodies so violently to a place, a history, a stereotype, a disposable data point.


Why Your Digital Detox Didn’t Work — & What To Do Instead

Rather than opting out of the attention economy in service of participating in capitalism in other ways, i.e. being more productive, Odell critiques the value of productivity itself. She encourages us to spend less time on Facebook and Twitter not so that we can become better workers, but so that we can be more human. “Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new,” Odell writes, “whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.” I discovered that this obsession with productivity was why my digital declutter didn’t make me happier. Newport’s focus on optimization centers on the output we can achieve when we’re not distracted by our technology. I guess that’s to be expected from someone whose repertoire includes titles like Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I may have been more focused after my digital declutter, sure, but what was I focused on? Work. Production. Doing more by way of digital minimalism, not less.