This One's An Example Of Why Editors Are Important For Actual Publications, Because OOF, The Italics In Here đł
Darlings! Itâs Friday and the below Reading List is a bit all over the place, so I hope you enjoy my brain deluge and have a wonderful weekend.
And folks, I wanted to draw your attention to this Sydney Morning Herald story on the Australian COVID vaccine terminated due to HIV âfalse positivesâ, not as a criticism of this program (though false HIV positives are⊠yikes!) but as a celebration of the fact that this isnât the only vaccine - THIS IS HOW SCIENCE WORKS, and it is so cool. You see, we arenât even a year out from when COVID-19 crippled everything and we already have more than one effective vaccine, including one that is being rolled out around the world as I type. There is SO much awful in the world right now, but can we sit back and appreciate that we got vaccines to a brand-new deadly zoonotic virus in less than a year. Science is SO DAMNED COOL and some humans truly can step up when history asks them to. So may that give you some hope as you deal with the increasingly oppressive [gestures wildly at 2020]
REQUIRED LISTENING and READING LIST
Taylor Swift, evermore - Thatâs right, gonna spend much of the weekend binge listening to TSwiftâs surprise album. One quick critique after listening to the first four songs though (Iâm saving song five for a break today): Ms. Swift, the entirety of âtolerate itâ, especially the line ââi know my love should be celebrated, but you tolerate itâ, should include a content warning for divorced millennials, because OOF that hits in a specific place. And Ms. Swift, thank you for fully embodying that the best revenge is living well.
Ruth Graham, The Rise and Fall of Carl Lentz, the Celebrity Pastor of Hillsong Church (The New York Times) - I am fascinated by whatâs been happening at Hillsong Church around the antics of the leader of its NYC chapter. Look, Iâm not here to condemn anyone for marriage infidelities - what happened is between him and his partner and their family, and it is up to them as to how the decide to move forward. What I do take issue with is that those infidelities happened whilst Mr. Lentz was leading an outpost of a religious organization that explicitly states it is a âa gay welcoming church... not a church that affirms a gay lifestyleâ (emphasis mine), a very PR way of restating âhate the sin, love the sinnerâ and couching its anti-gay political postures in quasi-positive language. Cuz I seem to remember that committing adultery is one of those lifestyle choices the Bible doesnât care for and explicitly calls out, unlike the muddiness around how âhomosexualâ was translated from bible version to bible version. And Iâm not uncomfortable with that balance in my brain: I can take issue with the unrealistic and bigoted restrictions put on human sexuality and gender by most of the worldâs religions (because humans be human, yo!) while also observing that if youâve built your glass house on volunteer leadership and labor that explicitly excludes openly gay people, perhaps donât throw rocks dâaffaire: structural hypocrisy isnât a great look. See also: The sad irony of celebrity pastors in The Spectator and He Is a Victim of His Own Churchâ: Carl Lentz, Ranin Karim, and Hillsongâs Unfurling Scandal in Vanity Fair. (Can you tell I went down a rabbit hole yesterday? Yes.)
Julia Marcus, The Danger of Assuming That Family Time Is Dispensable (The Atlantic) - As a woman who has spent two weeks in a basement quarantine so that I can spend time with my parents for the holidays, THIS ARTICLE HITS.Â
Ben Elgin, These Trees Are Not What They Seem (Bloomberg) - Speaking of building guilt-assuaging narratives on nothing in ways that may actually encourage bad behavior, CARBON OFFSET CREDITS!Â
Cody Cottier, What Explains the Decline of Serial Killers? (Discover Magazine) - Embarrassing that Cottier got ahold of my internal monologue most days of the week (seriously, WHY NO EARLY AUGHTS SERIAL KILLERS?!?!), but no matter.Â
Wow, I went hard on capitalization, bolding and italics today. Thanks for sticking with it. And be kind to yourself
xoxo Amy