Links and Musings

It’s pretty simple: where a damn mask

The public health debate on masks is settled, said Joseph G. Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard. When you wear a mask, “You protect yourself, you protect others, you prevent yourself from touching your face,” he said. And you signal that wearing a mask is the right thing to do.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/30/science/wear-mask-covid-particles-ul.html

• They lost the Civil War and fled to Brazil. Their descendants refuse to take down the Confederate flag.
• Hamilton, In Fiction And History, Is Key To Understanding The Electoral College

• The Confederacy Was an Antidemocratic, Centralized State – The actual Confederate States of America was a repressive state devoted to white supremacy.

Food fight

• The 3 Weeks That Changed Everything – Imagine if the National Transportation Safety Board investigated America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
• Coronavirus Brings American Decline Out in the Open

Best SF Novel: The City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders

Best Fantasy Novel: Middlegame, Seanan McGuire

Best Horror Novel : Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James

Best YA Novel: Dragon Pearl, Yoon Ha Lee

Best First Novel: Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

Best Novella: This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

Best Novelette: Omphalos, Ted Chiang

Best Short Story: Bookstore at the End of America, Charlie Jane Anders

Best Anthology: New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, Nisi Shawl

Best Collection: Exhalation, Ted Chiang

Best Magazine: Tor.com

Best Publisher: Tor Books

Best Editor: Ellen Datlow

Best Artist: John Picacio

Best Nonfiction: Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction, Lisa Kröger & Melanie R. Anderson

Best Art Book: Spectrum 26: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, John Fleskes

Full list and the other nominees for the 2020 Locus Awards

• More than 1600 Polling Places Have Closed Since the Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act
• We Talked to 3 DOCTOR WHO Doctors at the Same Time
• Ken Burns Calls Confederate Statues ‘Racism Memorialized in Our Public Spaces’ in a Must Watch Video
• New research explores how conservative media misinformation may have intensified the severity of the pandemic – The three studies paint a picture of a media ecosystem that entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking steps to protect themselves and others
• Lawmakers mount new attacks on Section 230 and encryption

• Facebook creates fact-checking exemption for climate deniers 
• A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists – What’s different, in this moment, is that the editors of our country’s most esteemed outlets no longer hold a monopoly on publishing power.

• Juneteenth and the Meaning of Freedom – Emancipation is a marker of progress for white Americans, not black ones.
• The Gaps Between White and Black America, in Charts
• The real cyberwar is Goliath, slaughtering an army of Davids
• The Future of Work in America Is in the Office – Some counterpoints to WFH