Links: Research and social justice

[sonia]

The Study That Debunks Most Anti-Abortion Arguments by Margaret Talbot via oursin.

Foster and her colleagues decided to compare the women in the two groups—those who received the abortion they sought and those who were compelled to carry their unwanted pregnancy to term—on a variety of measures over time, interviewing them twice a year for up to five years. [...] Moreover, when people assess what will happen in their lives if they have to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, they are quite often proven right.

How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering by Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich. NY Times, Aug. 24, 2020, but came up in this recent Twitter thread from DamonMotzStorey. Redlined -> fewer trees -> hotter in summer and during unprecedented heat domes. Although oddly my neighborhood is full of old trees, despite having been redlined before it was gentrified.

The great sleep divide by Katherine Ellison, Knowable Magazine, 7/3/2021 via Body Impolitic.

A paradigm shift is implied in all of these sleep strategies. Sleep has traditionally been seen as a purely individual responsibility: don’t drink coffee at night; keep the room dark; don’t look at your phone in bed, etc., etc. Troxel, Jean-Louis and other scientists argue that we need to widen our perspective to reimagine sleep as a public health opportunity.

“We need to think of population-level interventions,” says Troxel, “including policies to ensure that healthy sleep is not merely a luxury for those who can afford it.”

Who’s Afraid of the Four Day Work Week? by Anne Helen Petersen. I worked 3 days/week last time I had a programming job, and got as much done as my full-time coworkers. But then I worked 2+ days/week at my bodywork practice, so I wasn't improving work-life balance, sadly. "This is the principle at the heart of the four day week: working less can actually mean working better."

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*takes notes on all of these*

[sonia]

Now *you* can have lots of open tabs! :-)

[silveradept]

I should like to have less work days, and more remote work time, and I would likely still be as productive as I am being crushed in with others all the days that we are offering services, with no remote work any more at all.

I'm also not surprised that racist policies have put BIPOC in noisier and less safe neighborhoods and given them more stressful jobs that also contribute to additional stress.

[sonia]

I hope you can get some remote work days back (without a new lockdown, I mean).

Yeah, the variety and breadth of ways white supremacy has made the lives of BIPOC difficult is astonishing and heart-breaking.

[silveradept]

Day off, remote day, I'll take either. It made doing errands and helping the housemates to theirs so much easier.

I think the thing that surprises me, because I don't have to live it every day, is how deep that particular well goes. It's difficult to believe that people will go that low and lower to maintain what power they think they have.