Sociologist/demographer specializing in mortality, racial inequity, Covid-19. Avid theater-goer, inconsistent powerlifter, and erstwhile operator of an all-volunteer bookstore. Toddler parent. Living not-quite-car-free in Minneapolis. she/her
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The last passenger pigeon died 111 years ago today and not a day goes by that I don't think about how their flocks numbered in the *billions*, that their roosts covered 100+ square miles, that they collapsed trees with their nests. America is incomplete without them
š§Ŗ And House appropriators say: no cuts to NIH budget! House subcommittee version just came out (link below). Holds NIH flat at $48 billion. To be clear: this is far from over. But a good sign that science still matters across both sides of aisle. YOUR VOICE MATTERS!!
I still say Nightswimming
Oh, we do that constantly!
Compare the murky, indeterminate data on school closures to the stark, decisive findings on vaccine hesitancy. Republican policies and rhetoric killed hundreds of thousands of people! We donāt need to bolster this fake narrative. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
This āblue states closed schools too longā narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but itās arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
When nation-states stop publishing statistical tables.
projects.library.wayne.edu/12thstreetde...
Reminds me of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement taking over the Wayne State newspaper, but keeping the sports and Greek Life coverage untouched
One of my favorite state fair creative activities objects this year: a quilted infographic documenting climate change.
I was happy to wait! I find her desire to have time alone to "read" to be quite charming
I donāt think we should justify that set of choices. It *was* wrong to open high-risk places for adults (gyms!!!) while sacrificing kidsā education. That doesnāt mean schools shouldāve been open at the height of the pandemic.
I do think something like this is the next phase for us! Right now weāre just thrilled that sheās not clamoring to get up early like most of my friendsā kids of similar age. Like her parents, she wants to laze around in bed with a book in the morning.
Long thinking ensues. āSeven minutes!ā āCan I hug you now or should I wait?ā āWait,ā she says dismissively, and returns to her book
Typical morning over here: Weāre way late getting up my kid (who hasnāt yet had the insight that she can leave her room herself, & isnāt going to get it from us) & I finally go in. Sheās āreadingā (she canāt read) in bed āMama, I donāt want you to disturb meā āOk, when should I come back?ā 1/
Iāve honestly felt very discouraged in continuing to seek out and plan for various small acts of resistance since we moved, especially calling our representatives regularly when it doesnāt seem to change the outcome. The whole essay is worth your time, but this part helped me a lot today:
(No right on red, anywhere, certainly helps a ton)
I've only been here since midnight on Tuesday but I legit haven't experienced that yet here (and we're out and about all day except when my kid is napping), it's a dream. I don't think of NYC as having good or pedestrian-friendly drivers, but I genuinely do feel a lot safer here than in Mpls
What I dislike about the endless "I've been making this point for ages and I'm tired" locution is that it puts all the emphasis on how the poster is right, so right, so sadly and tragically disregarded in their utter correctness, instead of on the actual political point and *welcoming people to it*
I don't believe that it's mostly pre-internet generations with this linguistic tic; my impression has been that it's largely people roughly my own age, a cohort (elder Millennial) that became very online in formative social years. 1/2
Did you mean that as rudely as it sounds?
That definitely seems like a you problem
Such a small thing that makes such a dramatic difference to how safe I feel walking around w my kid: In this part of Manhattanāvery unlike my part of Minneapolisāthe vast majority of drivers stop at the stop line, not at or in the crosswalk The cars are still way too high, but not next to my head!
Both interviews are very good! I really liked the point NQ made at the end about how universities, as a major employer in many labor markets, can actually do a lot to ensure fair hiring practices among some of their graduates
Can see fans filing into the Wonderwall, mostly wearing black. They'll be silent for two minutes to start the match, then sing "You Are My Sunshine," as well as holding up a banner that Austin FC fans made following the Uvalde shooting - that horrifyingly is making its third MLS stop (after NSH).
Thank you!
The city does need to make it possible for low-wage city workers to get to work and other places cheaply. A better mass transit system is the best way to do this in every respect, including letting people access the *enormous* savings of not owning a car
www.startribune.com/minneapolis-... Here is a gift link to my Strib commentary on the need to end the delay and act now on high capacity magazines and firearms in MN.
Texting and driving is never worth it. Please donāt ever ever do it.
I think it betrays an imagined audience of People Who Annoy Me Online rather than My Potential Coalition Partners, which bodes poorly for the politics IMO
One of the weirder left-ish internet tics is the compulsion to front load how tired you are by, I guess, the fact that mass politics involves more than simply asserting your correct opinion a lot of times. Weāre all tired but itās not really the key point to make!
i think about the ādo not splitā principle from hong kong often
They did if you count schools briefly closed, in a decentralized pattern repeated across much of the country, because there was no available teaching staff due to everyone being infected with Omicron as a lasting CDC shutdown of schools (I am pretty sure that this actually accounts for memories)
I bet some of them will exceed their parents!
I read three chapters of Playworld while my kid ran around the water feature (never mastering the pattern that the fountains turn on in succession, running with delighted shrieks to each one as it began to spout, arriving just as it ended), so in the end, a good time was had by all
Just for 10 months!
Expect a lot of UES Playground Adventures in this space
A better moment was when my kid approached a screaming baby and screamed back. This antisocial behavior intrigued the baby, and so began a duet of shrieking in alternation, culminating in goodbyes with a happy baby and his laughing mom
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TIL: Upper East Side parents are ruthless and will stand at the top of the desirable tallest slide and shamelessly let/help their older kids repeatedly skip my (unaccompanied, because why do kids need an adult to send them down the slide?) 3-year-old in line
It is so enraging and so devastating that weāve just accepted this as normal. Itās not normal. Nothing about it is ok.
Thatās so kind of you! Thank you
Them: āCities are all rotting hellscapes!ā Cities:
Whatās the best way (for those of us in health research fields and also for all of us regular people) to support the CDC heroes fighting back?
Iām watching part one of āHurricane Katrina: Race Against Timeā on Hulu and a community organizer pointed out that the evacuation order ahead of the storm came āat the worst time in America to be poor: the end of the month. If you donāt have any money, how can you leave?ā
Courage and fear are both contagious
CDC employees standing up and walking out in light of the mass shootings, firings, and *waves hands in the air* everything else. #USAnotRFK Lets gooooo
ššÆ Stunts are good politics because they send signals of how serious problems are to the public & media. This is why, e.g., university presidents should have gathered en masse on the Capitol steps to make the public aware of the existential threat to higher ed all the federal budget cuts pose.
Massive walkout underway at CDC. RFK jr. must resign so that we can be safe.
We go through several gallons a week š¬
The 3-year-old is settling in: Holding a kazoo: āitās my first time in New Yorkā Matt: āyes, itās your first time LIVING in New Yorkā Fiona: āNo, itās my first time with a KAZOO in New Yorkā
This Norbert Wiener quote will stay with me: āThe world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.ā
āDid it make sense to treat unclaimed time as a problem? Weāve solved it algorithmically, and now have none.ā
This is rightāthat part of campus has roads running through it, notably the one that the green line is on.
Madison, WI also has buses on its mostly-pedestrian core street that connects the Capitol to the campus.
Monarez is playing her weak hand perfectly, and should be a model for institutional resistance for the next four years: 1. Make them fire you 2. Donāt go along to get along 3. Donāt apologize, have confidence in your own integrity and the importance of your role 4. Always escalate the conflict
This is such a great idea. Excess mortality estimates are so crucial... and *so* tricky. We have very little expert consensus about how they should be done. Changing that is a really smart, consequential research frontier to focus effort on.
My family is the dril post about candles but with milk and fruit "That makes sense," you think, "you have a preschooler" WE WERE LIKE THIS BEFORE
Protect MN and Moms Demand Action are coordinating a community vigil at 8:00pm tonight at Lynnhurst Park, 1345 W Minnehaha Pkwy. Please join us.
This is a great thread about the proposed designs for the Lake Hiawatha area redesign. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to do something important and our feedback will make a huge difference for us and future generations. Please review the plans and give your feedback at the linked survey!
the richest man in the world buying a presidential election, getting run out of the administration for being a weird diva, then pivoting to jerking it to anime cartoons full time is somehow more Roman than anything that ever happened in Rome
the most useful thing LLMs can is force us to do is to reconsider the way we use linguistic dexterity as a proxy for intelligence
talked to a volunteer at a later stop on the hint who said they've been planning this for about a week and a half. i LOVE this. HAVING COOL IDEAS and MAKING THEM HAPPEN instead of focus-grouping a bunch of republicans. AMAZING.
In Opinion | Almost every new lifesaving drug starts with government-funded research. But what happens when that funding is cut? In this Opinion video, meet the scientists who are trying to save the lives of you and your family.
I donāt even think itās necessarily performative. I was part of a social group of 3 people with first births due at the same timeāwe didnāt know each other before pregnancy but were friends of friends (now weāre real friends). Iām the only woman of the three of us. Itās not hard to include us all!
Love to see that @jamellebouie.net engaged with my @hammerandhope.bsky.social essay on class, identity, black politics, labor and @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social in depth today at the @nytimes.com. Iām a bit blown away. Shared below as a thread:
My kid was in a whiny mood at nap time. She put her hands on the edge of her bed and whined, āI want my hands to be like this all the time but I cannot because I have to do so many other things with my hands! I need twenty hands!ā Girl, I KNOW
Thank you!
Only good thing about that site
This is a great guess but I have been convinced by the math models of these selective mortality processes that itās not plausible this has a large enough effect for that to be the answer. I donāt have time to elaborate at the moment but Iāll try to later on. Itās a question near and dear to my heart
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More here
This is in reference to this article
20 years ago, the WHO published a pair of reports estimating the number of annual deaths attributable to climate change. I was fascinated to learn that there have been few attempts since to revisit this fundamental question about the impact of global warming on humanity -- until now. The story:
The majority is those things but you also see a clear pattern of increasing mortality at these age groups from cardiometabolic diseases and other natural causes
āYoungerā here goes up to age 64! There are immunological mechanisms where younger adults are at greater riskāI have written about these before in the context of the 1918 flu. My stance is that itās not impossible that this pattern is long Covid, but it would need to be *quite* specific
Iām not invested in the terminology but I think the clear facts are that we are neither in 2020-2021 nor in 2019
I agree that Covid is v likely to be a substantial factor in reducing health & raising mortality in the long term. But I think people who knee-jerk assume itās driving these immediate trends are most likely wrong. The question we should be worried about IMO is what happens in the longer term w both
Thatās (partly) what our article is about! slate.com/technology/2...
Minneapolis culture for those who donāt know it
Iāve been spoofed! (But seriously, the challenge for people who think Covid infections are the main story here is to explain why a comparable increase *hasnāt* happened for any of the 45+ age groups)
Technically Dr, but I really donāt care about that! & yes, the point is there are tons of explanations that seem plausible in some ways, yet canāt necessarily explain the specific pattern here (mortality failing to return to prepandemic trend for ages 25-44, uniquely) & itās not clear whatās up
Covid and total!
By the measure of deaths and of hospitalizations. There is no comparison.
Thank you!
Really, no one told you that?!
I am so interested that thatās your first reaction because I am OBSESSED with the idea that thatās a big part of this story and most of my coauthors think Iām a lunatic lol
They gifted me with the opportunity. I grabbed it with both hands
I chose it!
Oh yes!
I actually have some unpublished work in progress about this. More details when weāre ready to share, but the short answer is: no, actually
Donāt worry, I love it!
Actually, momās wrigley, dadās field (It would be worth a marriage, though)
He kept his own name (but our kid has mine!)
I meanā¦ it is a GREAT name
Not sure how many actually read the articleā¦! (Based on my mentions, a lot fewer than how many comment)
I disagree. To say that 2020-2021 is a distinctive period in our relationship with Covid is not to say that Covid isn't an important public health threat today (it is). We are neither living in 2020-2021 nor in 2019.
CORRECT
I took it! When I was 7
Precisely.