If I wanted to, I could share a billion things I’ve read over the course of the last couple months. But I confess that I have been fighting off a bad case of information overload. I’m trying to limit my reading to select times, and only to things that are legitimately informative or sincerely enjoyable.
What I’ve Been Reading and Sharing
White Supremacy
It is men like these, with hot heads and cold steel, these with yearnings of heroism, the vigilantes who mask vengeance as valor, who cross their social anxiety with racial anxiety and the two spark like battery cables.
We’re Still Living and Dying in the Slaveholders’ Republic
From the beginning of the American project, the powerful individual has been battling for his constitutional freedom to harm, and the vulnerable community has been battling for its constitutional freedom from harm. Both freedoms were inscribed into the U.S. Constitution, into the American psyche. The history of the United States, the history of Americans, is the history of reconciling the unreconcilable: individual freedom and community freedom. There is no way to reconcile the enduring psyche of the slaveholder with the enduring psyche of the enslaved.
Pandemic World
The reason Zoom calls drain your energy
Being on a video call requires more focus than a face-to-face chat, says Petriglieri. Video chats mean we need to work harder to process non-verbal cues like facial expressions, the tone and pitch of the voice, and body language; paying more attention to these consumes a lot of energy. “Our minds are together when our bodies feel we’re not. That dissonance, which causes people to have conflicting feelings, is exhausting. You cannot relax into the conversation naturally,” he says.
The Answer to All of Your Social Distancing Loophole Questions Is No
But a lot of folks are still approaching coronavirus from a place of, What are my personal odds of illness, and, if I get sick, of surviving the illness? versus, How can I not harm other people? It’s not just people who have been inside for a couple weeks without symptoms, either; people who are sick are engaging in astonishing mental gymnastics to convince themselves that, yes, they might have COVID-19, but they aren’t actually that contagious, and anyway, they are bored and want to go for a jog, so can you please leave them alone about it!!!
People, sigh
‘A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal
And that’s the point: Movements only really work if they grow, if they build. If they move. And that’s almost always an additive process. The trick, I think, is figuring out how to make it possible for more people to join in.
To earn an opponent’s respect, speak—don’t type
Another result was considerably more interesting: The medium through which our participants received the other person’s message affected their evaluations of the person’s mind. Evaluators who listened to what an opponent had to say were less likely to derogate their opponent’s intellect than a person who read their opponent’s opinions. That is, the tendency to dehumanize the opposition was reduced when evaluators listened to the opposition’s voice.
Memory misfires help selfish maintain their self-image
“Most people strive to behave ethically, but people sometimes fail to uphold their ideals,” Carlson said. “In such cases, the desire to preserve a moral self-image can be a powerful force and not only motivate us to rationalize our unethical actions, but also ‘revise’ such actions in our memory.”
Religion & Coronavirus
How Doctors and Scientists Apply Faith on the Front Lines
“To be honest, at this point I’m pretty tired and find it hard to pray. I take some comfort in thinking that God is with us in everything, whether in illness or in working hard to relieve it,” he said. Denholm hopes that Christians around the world will support each other while physically distanced. “The support of communities is critical for all of us right now, and I’m grateful for all the ways that groups are finding to care for each other, and especially the most vulnerable,” he said.
Indeed, most of the religiously affiliated groups covered in this analysis say ventilators in short supply should go to patients who need them most in the moment, which might mean that fewer people survive but no one is denied treatment based on their age or health status. This view is shared by roughly six-in-ten of both evangelicals (60%) and Protestants from historically black churches (59%). Only one-third of evangelicals believe that priority should be given to those who are most likely to survive with aggressive treatment.
The Plight of a Hospital Chaplain During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Butler believes that the work that health-care providers do is sacred. Since only providers can enter patients’ rooms, they are—at least during the pandemic—called upon not just to attend to patients’ physical needs but to help facilitate their goodbyes. Chaplains, meanwhile, are meant to focus on patients and their families, but they have deep, trusting relationships with their colleagues, and they want to help. When care teams lose longtime patients, Butler sometimes hosts meetings at which to talk about and grieve the loss.
