The Ides of March: a short but relevant history lesson about the Roman calendar.
Me and White Supremacy Workbook: Layla Saad turned her her viral Instagram challenge into an email format: “the Me And White Supremacy Workbook will lead you through a journey of personal reflection and deep shadow work. The purpose of this workbook is to educate people with white privilege as to their internalised racism, and facilitate personal and collective change to help dismantle the oppressive system of white supremacy.”
Observations on Burnout: A tech-leaning anatomy of burnout that applies to plenty of other industries, as well. This sarcastic/ironic line about what keeps people stuck in the rut that leads to burnout hits very close to home when it comes to my past experiences: “In short, the [worker] should never feel like their actions have any actual positive impact on the state of things but should have just enough hope that maybe the next time will be different.” And to be fair, I found some of the advice frustrating: it says to help recover from burnout, to address health issues that you’ve been ignoring. Which is reasonable advice, but it disregards the fact that many people burning out in the first place may have been doing so because they can’t afford or don’t have access to mental or physical healthcare.
The Western Erasure of African Tragedy: Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed last week, killing all 152 souls on board. The accident was a tragedy, and the same kind of plane (a Boeing 737 Max 8) that crashed in Indonesia in October, but the Western media is (as usual) choosing to highlight the loss of non-African lives, or to question the safety of the airline itself. (Ethiopian Airlines is no less safe than any other airline.)
Inequity in consumption of goods and services adds to racial–ethnic disparities in air pollution exposure. A research article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States highlighting environmental racism. From the abstract: “We show that, in the United States, PM2.5 exposure is disproportionately caused by consumption of goods and services mainly by the non-Hispanic white majority, but disproportionately inhaled by black and Hispanic minorities. On average, non-Hispanic whites experience a “pollution advantage”: They experience ∼17% less air pollution exposure than is caused by their consumption. Blacks and Hispanics on average bear a“pollution burden” of 56% and 63% excess exposure, respectively, relative to the exposure caused by their consumption.”
IBM didn’t get permission from subjects before their photos were fed into its facial-recognition system: Sadly, but unsurprisingly, IBM used Flickr photos for its facial recognition research. Spoiler alert: plenty of other companies don’t either. The sad reality is that if photos of you have ever been online, they could’ve been archived into data sets for these purposes. The sadder reality is that even if you expressly do not consent or opt out (which is difficult, if not impossible, to do), we don’t really know if our wishes are being honored.
Hubble captured an image of galaxies colliding, 230 million light years away. The image is fascinating, but it’s also fascinating that, according to the article, the collision was “first spotted by astronomer William Herschel on June 11, 1784, who thought it was a single oddball galaxy with an exceptionally strange shape.”
60 Minutes covers the court case where a group of kids are suing the U.S. government to halt the use of fossil fuels. (Fair warning: the video auto-plays. A transcript is below the video.) The plaintiffs have amassed 50 years of evidence showing that government officials have known about the dangers of burning fossil fuels and its impact on climate change for over 50 years, as well as 50 years of evidence showing the government hasn’t done anything substantial to address it.
Indian tribe revives heirloom seeds for health and climate security. “The Dongria Kondhs, devotees of their mountain gods in the remote hills of eastern India, are custodians of dozens of vanishing seed varieties. With the region in an agrarian crisis due to recurrent droughts and erratic rainfall, the tribe is on a mission to return to its farming roots and resuscitate long-lost heirloom crops.”
Remove Google fonts from the most popular WP themes: the themes I have experience with are a bit too complex for the suggestions here, but this is an awesome place to start. For this site’s current theme (a heavily simplified GeneratePress), the Disable Google Fonts plugin did the trick.