Diving into the bookmarks is sadly not as refreshing as I would like during this canicular summer. Here are some recent links, however, that stood out:
Revisiting season 7 of CBC's Someone Knows Something, a frankly underrated True Crime investigation
→ Link to CBC Gem page (but the podcast can be found wherever you find your podcasts); I genuinely think every person living in Canada with a uterus or who is taking hormone therapy of any kind (including for treatment of endometriosis and PCOS amongst so many other conditions) needs to listen to episode 6 "Mississippi" from season 7 (released in 2023) of the podcast Someone Knows Something. The murderous wing of the evangelical anti-abortion movement has deep roots throughout Canada — post-Roe USA is a giant red flag for what could happen north of the 45th parallel, because you can bet the farm that those very same forces are trying to criminalize abortion throughout Canada.
Throughout the 2023 season, host David Ridgen and American journalist Amanda Robb investigate the 1998 murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian — Robb’s uncle — who was shot in an act of anti-abortion violence, and from there untangle the story of a serial killer of abortion providers aided and abetted by Christian fundamentalists across Ireland, Canada, the USA, and France.
Edward Snowden is warning against ChatGPT and OpenAI on Twitter:
→Link to Tweet; well, that's genuinely worrisome.
On top of the reproducibility crisis in science, there's also a paper mill crisis: hundreds of cancer papers mention cell lines that don’t seem to exist
→ Read Brainard's article on Science.org; what a bloody hell of a mess this is going to be to untangle. Since 2022, I've been informally maintaining an annotated bibliography on medical research of all kind concerning endometriosis — I had noticed that even in two short years, many of the few papers I've been following have been retracted, sometimes with barely a comment. Every time I see a citation of a recent study nowadays, be it in a video essay, a book, or in another paper, I can't help but wonder if the paper will still be available in 18 months.
Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) describes in a multi-post thread the 72 hours of French Twitter after Macron announced the dissolution of the Assemblée nationale:
→ Read the full thread on Twitter; I really recommend reading through it if you missed out on what felt, for a brief moment, like a Good Old Pre-Musk Twitter Political Frenzy.
Building a town that doesn't exist — how web design, social media, and narrative design join forces in surprising ways
→ Have you ever heard of Question Mark, Ohio? Read all about it on Dan Sinker's blog. Or, better yet, head straight over questionmark.town and start digging.
How Do You Know If You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire?
→ Well, that's a cheerful title if you're on the side of the rebel Jedi! This 2020 Mother Jones article is worth a revisit, not only to wonder at what the article predicted rightly and wrongly (?), but also because I think about it every time I run into a giant epic solutionless governmental bureaucratic mess:
The fall of an empire—the end of a polity, a socioeconomic order, a dominant culture, or the intertwined whole—looks more like a cascading series of minor, individually unimportant failures than a dramatic ending that appears out of the blue.
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