Elsewhere for May 3, 2020

You should read this for 5/3/2020:

Art, Music, and Film

Art history majors are thrilled that ‘Animal Crossing’ gives them a chance to shine
Hear Classic Rock Songs Played on a Baroque Lute: “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “White Room” & Mor Thank to the efforts of Baroque lutenist Daniel Estrem. I particularly admire “House of the Rising Sun.”
Dutch researchers coax secrets from Girl with a Pearl Earring

You Can Now View 4 Million Items in the British Museum’s Online Collection

Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language

H/T: Elizabeth Featured – Diversity Check: Removing Dehumanizing Language from the Discovery System

Coronavirus | COVID-19

Man dressed as grim reaper to visit Florida beaches that reopen too early
Amazon tech workers are calling out sick in protest over COVID-19 response “Amazon tech workers are calling out sick today in protest of the company’s treatment of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The action, which will consist of a live streamed series of speakers in lieu of a physical rally, is a sign that the protests at Amazon’s warehouses have galvanized portions of the company’s white-collar workforce.”

A software engineer in Seattle who asked to remain anonymous “given Amazon’s recent history of retaliation” checked his email after receiving the invitation, only to have it vanish ten minutes later. He had found the earlier panel “eye opening,” particularly the disparity in how tech workers and warehouse workers are being treated during the pandemic: while he and his colleagues were sent home immediately after a coronavirus case was confirmed at Amazon’s headquarters, warehouse workers aren’t being informed when coworkers test positive and social distancing is haphazardly enforced.

See also: Amazon’s white-collar workers are starting to stand up for their blue-collar colleagues
Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice “The state is about to find out how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.”

“We can’t figure out a way to make the numbers work to sustain business and pay rent and pay everybody to go back and risk their lives,” he told me. “If we tried to open on Monday, we’d be closed in two weeks, probably for good and with more debt on our hands.”

Georgia’s brash reopening puts much of the state’s working class in an impossible bind: risk death at work, or risk ruining yourself financially at home. In the grips of a pandemic, the approach is a morbid experiment in just how far states can push their people. Georgians are now the largely unwilling canaries in an invisible coal mine, sent to find out just how many individuals need to lose their job or their life for a state to work through a plague.

‘We’re Literally Killing Elders Now’

An estimated 70 percent of coronavirus deaths in Minnesota have been linked to long-term-care facilities. In at least six states, these fatalities account for half of all COVID-19 deaths, and according to the World Health Organization, half of all coronavirus fatalities in Europe have been traced to nursing homes too. Some of this mortality is linked to long-term-care facilities that are shoddily run or that violate health standards. But most of them are doing the best they can with what they have. And they don’t have much.

An Open Letter to Other Library Directors | Opinion

If your plan is to begin reopening as soon as possible, or engaging in curbside soon, then I want to see the library director and administrators on the front lines of service. I want them to be the ones to take books out to the cars, handle materials, and empty book drops.
Remember, when people say “That’s why you make the big bucks” (they don’t say that too often in libraries), this means you. Our lower-paid employees are often our most vulnerable in terms of being able to handle sickness and unplanned financial setbacks.

Don’t Mix Your Cleaning Products
Tribes Were Supposed To Get $8 Billion In COVID-19 Aid. They’ve Gotten $0.

Food and Drink

First the Negroni; now the Martini: Stanley Tucci teaches us to make a martini and he takes his ‘stirred not shaken’
The power of pickles: a guide to preserving almost everything – from jam-making to chutneys
The secret to San Francisco’s famous sourdough: bug poop
You Should Eat More Black-Eyed Peas
The Mohito Just in time in terms of all that mint . . .
layered yogurt flatbreads

But instead of frying them right away, you brush them with oil, sprinkle them with scallions, and roll the pancake into a tight cigar, and then the cigar into a snail. This snail of wound dough is left to rest again, and then rolled into the final pancake. The hidden layers of flour and oil help the layers lift and separate into flaky layers as you fry the pancakes.

Slow Cooker Chickpea Curry with Sweet Potatoes and Red Peppers

History and Archaeology

Pompeii ruins show that the Romans invented recycling “Excavations reveal that rubbish left outside the city walls wasn’t just dumped. It was being collected, sorted and resold”

Science and Nature

Scientists discover new species of turtle that looks like a muddy rock
Hubble celebrates 30 years in space with a gorgeous landscape of stars
‘I can see a bird. What is it?’: a beginners’ guide to backyard birding
“Crazy beast” lived among last of dinosaurs

Scientists think that the badger-like creature, known as Adalatherium, would have burrowed – helping it to evade predatory dinosaurs. This could explain how it evolved to such a size.

The public voted. These are some of NASA’s all-time best photos of Earth.

Society

The Brew’s Guide to Quarterly Earnings

Technology

When David Bowie Launched His Own Internet Service Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

Women’s Work

A Secret Love review – moving portrait of two women’s 60-year romance

The romance between Terry and Pat never seems to have gone stale. Terry was a pioneering sportswoman, a baseball player in the professional women’s league that inspired the Penny Marshall movie A League of Their Own. She was 22 in 1947 when she met the love of her life, Pat, then 18. They’ve kept the early love letters, the bottoms ripped off in case they were caught by the authorities.

Skeletal damage hints some hunter-gatherer women fought in battles “Traditional views of females being largely responsible for gathering food may be too simplistic’

Women’s reputation as nurturing homebodies who left warfare to men in long-ago societies is under attack. Skeletal evidence from hunter-gatherers in what’s now California and from herders in Mongolia suggests that women warriors once existed in those populations.

💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰

Trump’s claim the Postal Service loses money on every e-commerce package it delivers

In the end, Treasury cannot show us USPS is actually losing money on its contract with Amazon, as Trump claims. It can assert only that USPS does not know whether it makes a profit.

President’s intelligence briefing book repeatedly cited virus threat
Why Trump Was Deaf to All the Warnings He Received

he Washington Post reports that the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, an intelligence report on national-security threats, mentioned the coronavirus “more than a dozen” times in January and February, a period during which the Trump administration was doing little to prepare for a pandemic, and when the president himself was often downplaying the threat the virus posed to the United States. The oversight would come as a surprise if not for the long line of warnings that the president is known to have ignored.
Here’s a partial timeline:

How New Jersey’s Governor Figured Out Trump “Phil Murphy discusses the state’s efforts to mitigate its coronavirus infections and lower its death rate, the second-highest in the country.”

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

The Getty Has a Free Animal Crossing Art Generator