I think something that’s unexpectedly nice about having such a delay between when I save articles and when I post them here is that I get to reread the pieces again, the good pieces that are divorced from the culture war and the whole outrage news cycle thing.
Good posts of September:
This great piece on labour day + this great takedown of it (scroll down past the blurb)
And that was a theme that cropped up again in Professor Blumin’s class, that there were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were:
1) avoiding work, and
2) drinking
Labour history is so interesting, because it’s political enough that you’re always doing history and historiography at the same time. More than many other fields in history, facts are obscured, twisted, and blown out of proportion for contemporary power struggles, and you always need to think about when the pieces were written and how the world thought then.
Rivethead is going on my to-read list. Should I also start doing a monthly book review post?
Dorms for Grownups: A Solution for Lonely Millennials?
“It’s the best of both worlds,” she told me. “You have roommates, but they’re not roommates.”
One of over a dozen pieces I read over a few days when discussing the possibility of co-housing with friends after graduation. That description of millennials is uh, like, me irl. Co-housing as a concept is something that really appeals to me, and a very ideal thing would be for me to do an internship at an architectural or development firm that does things around this.
Sioux City: Straightening Buses and Getting Route-Length Right
A train that comes every half hour had better have a roundtrip length that’s just less than an integer or half-integer number of hours, counting turnaround times, to minimize the time the train sits at the terminal rather than driving in revenue service. The same is true of buses, except that scheduling is less precise.
A fascinating, practical (but not technical or jargony) guide to how to make good bus routes. Not comprehensive, of course, but I like short interesting tidbits better anyways.
Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong
Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.
A very long piece but very worth the read. I’ve been saying a lot of the stuff in here for a while – it seems absolutely wild that the recommendations given to fat people are so ideologically driven with absolutely no care given to the effectiveness of the advice. Did you know that we can’t even test the hypothesis that fat people who have lost weight are healthier than fat people that haven’t? “Because there is no method available to produce the result that would have to be produced—significant long-term weight loss, in statistically significant cohorts—in order to test the claim“? Society highkey needs to get a grip and stop blaming individuals for becoming fat ugh.
One thing though, is that I think it’s very important to cite lots of sources when writing about such a contentious topic, to kind of pre-emptively shut up the nay-sayers? I’ve yet to see a good takedown of Big Fat Lies, which has 27 pages of bibliography to its 197 pages of content. But I know that news sites don’t like to do that, usually citing fake reasons like “it makes the page look cluttered” and having actual reasons like “we don’t want to give more traffic to our competitors”. But that’s a rant for another day.
Getting To A Fifty/Fifty Split of Parenting Duties
The only way to get the child to be parented 100% of the time the way you want to parent him is by doing 100% of the parenting yourself. If you don’t want to do that, you have to accept that sometimes your coparent will do things differently than you will.
#goals, and lots of practical advice on how to get there. Pretty much all the advice also works for housework in general, which is probably more useful for me as someone who is Definitely Attracted To The DINK (D+INK? Four-or-more-I’m-not-picky-INK?) Lifestyle.
