Elsewhere for April 17, 2021

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You should read this for 4/17/2021:

Art, Music, and Film

Beeswing by Richard Thompson review – beyond Fairport Convention
Joss Whedon’s ‘The Nevers’ is a weak remix of his formerly good ideas

With the latest application of his style, call it the Nevers configuration, it’s clear that Whedon has less of a creative signature and more of a single notebook page of ideas he’s been using since the late ’90s.

Women take the floor: an exhibition that shifts the male gaze of art history

Biden Begins

A pair of misleading GOP attacks on Biden’s infrastructure plan

In 2018, the Treasury Department examined the tax filings of small businesses. In 2010, it found, fewer than 6 percent filed as C-corporations. On top of that, the net income of those small businesses filing as C-corporations was negative; little is likely to have been paid in taxes. (By contrast, large businesses filing as C-corporations reported significant net income.)

Books, Libraries, Writing, and Language

H/T Carrissa P. Via Twitter @byrnesong: That beekeeper heart honeycomb image. A thread.

Coronavirus | COVID-19

Trump officials celebrated efforts to change CDC reports on coronavirus, emails show

Trump appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services last year privately touted their efforts to block or alter scientists’ reports on the coronavirus to more closely align with then-President Donald Trump’s more optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to newly released documents from congressional investigators.
The documents provide further insight into how senior Trump officials approached last year’s explosion of coronavirus cases in the United States. Even as career government scientists worked to combat the virus, a cadre of Trump appointees was attempting to blunt the scientists’ messages, edit their findings and equip the president with an alternate set of talking points.

Coronavirus Vaccine FAQs: What’s Up With Side Effects? Should You Still Double Mask?

Food and Drink

Jay Rayner: The old scrapbook recipe collections that tell the story of our lives

Statement of the obvious: online recipes now threaten these fabulous collections. There’s a chicken teriyaki recipe on the website natashaskitchen.com which I have cooked many times. I have never printed it out. I search it up every time, even while acknowledging its rather sad that I do so. An internet search history will never be as romantic as a scrapbook. It’s time, I think, to put a sheet of A4 through the printer. Perhaps it’s time we all did. Because without these collections we’ll lose a significant slab of our shared cultural, and edible, history. Future historians will not be able to work out our life stories through the dinners we dreamed of making. That would be a crying shame.

Know your apples: a connoisseur’s guide to tasting cider

History and Archaeology

Roman stately home unearthed in Scarborough ‘potential world first’

The excavations revealed a large complex of buildings, including a circular central room with a number of rooms leading off it and a bath house.
Mr Emerick said it was not clear what the building was used for but described it as a Roman version of a stately home, possibly owned by somebody of wealth and status.
He added: “We’ve spoken to a number of leading Roman academics about it and we’re all trying to find a comparable site and we are struggling.

Politics and Society

‘These are our homes’: LA gay bars fight to stay afloat after year of shutdown

Oil Can still had a siren on site that staff used in the 60s to warn customers that police were coming and allowed them to quickly switch to partners of the opposite gender, said Dominguez: “New generations aren’t going to get to know this space.”

John Oliver’s deep dive into nursing homes is eye-openingly grim

Science and Nature

Tim Dowling: is the dog’s friendship with the fox sweet – or a bad omen?

The dog and the fox are not enemies, but friends. If you open the front door at night, the dog will often run out between your legs to chase the fox down an adjacent lane. When the dog stops chasing the fox, the fox turns and chases the dog. They usually take it in turns for about half an hour, until the dog runs out of steam. Sometimes when I return home after dark, I pass the fox waiting patiently under a street lamp for the dog to come out and play. My wife thinks it’s sweet and regularly goes along to watch. I think it’s a bad omen.

Indian jumping ants have ability to shrink brain and re-grow it — study

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Technology

FBI nuked web shells from hacked Exchange Servers without telling owners

In a Department of Justice press release published today, the FBI states they used a search warrant to access the still-compromised Exchange servers, copy the web shell as evidence, and then remove the web shell from the server.

. . .

As there was concern that notifying the owners of these servers could compromise the operation, the FBI requested that the warrant be sealed and that notification of the warrant be delayed until the operation was finished.

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Women’s Work

Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus

he grew up in Hungary, daughter of a butcher. She decided she wanted to be a scientist, although she had never met one. She moved to the United States in her 20s, but for decades never found a permanent position, instead clinging to the fringes of academia.
Now Katalin Kariko, 66, known to colleagues as Kati, has emerged as one of the heroes of Covid-19 vaccine development. Her work, with her close collaborator, Dr. Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania, laid the foundation for the stunningly successful vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

This Top Biden Economist Has A Plan: Create Jobs, Address Inequality, Ignore Trolls

“I’m not really going to be satisfied if we return the economy to February 2020,” Jones told NPR. “I think we can do better than that. I think we can return the economy to a time when wages were growing for workers, when bargaining was strong, when we saw benefits really increasing.”

Interview: Peggy Seeger: ‘Folk is full of raunchy songs, but they’re not often sung’

As an older woman, people also ignore what you say. It’s as if you’re not there. I keep talking.

How Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower’s account

A sea of dark dunes, sculpted by the wind into long lines, surrounds Mars’ northern polar cap and covers an area as big as Texas. In this false-color image, areas with cooler temperatures are recorded in bluer tints, while warmer features are depicted in yellows and oranges. Thus, the dark, sun-warmed dunes glow with a golden color. This image covers an area 19 miles (30 kilometers) wide.

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