This week: Data view of drought / Enduring Confederate lies / The man who fell from the sky / The Library of Alexandria / Pheromones
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1. Numbers explain how and why West bakes, burns and dries out
By Seth Borenstein | Associated Press | July 2021
“The American West is baking, burning and drying in intertwined extreme weather. Four sets of numbers explain how bad it is now, while several others explain why it got this bad.”
2. Scientists link Earth’s magnetic reversals to changes in planet’s life and climate
By Bobby Bascomb and Adam Wernick | Living on Earth :: The World | April 2021
“The discovery of a fossilized tree in New Zealand is providing scientists with insight on how magnetic pole reversals could affect life on Earth.”
3. What is the point of menstruation?
By Marnie Chesterson | CrowdScience :: BBC Sounds | June 2021
“So few other animals menstruate, why did humans evolve this rare and costly cycle?”
4. Cross Your Legs, Stretch Your Hymen, Toss Your Ambition: The World According to Early ‘Marriage Classes’
By Danielle Dreilinger | LitHub | May 2021
“The only difference between partners the authors mostly did not address was the one most obvious to us, race, though Bowman warned that biracial children would be miserable because they would have ‘white aspirations’ but be unable to fulfill them due to their ‘colored’ appearance.”
5. ‘These Blazing Stars … Just Disappeared’: The Missing Generation of Women at the Washington Post
By Paul Volpe | Politico Magazine | May 2021
“The newspaper “made history … by appointing its first female executive editor. But why did the newspaper have to look outside its own ranks for a woman to lead the newroom?”
6. Why Confederate lies live on
By Clint Smith | The Atlantic | June 2021
“For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe.”
7. The Underground Railroad attempts to upend viewers’ notions of what it meant to be enslaved
By William Nash | The Conversation | May 2021
“[M]ore and more academics recognized the limitations of the older, impersonal terminology and started to embrace ‘enslaved’ and its variants.”
8. Disability History in the United States
By Christopher Rose, Joan Neuberger and Henry Wiencek | 15 Minute History :: UT Department of History | 2014-2020
Also see: Scientific, Geographic & Historiographic Inventions of Colombia | Populism | Women and the Tamil Epics
9. Out of thin air: the mystery of the man who fell from the sky
By Sirin Kale | The Long Read :: The Guardian | April 2021
“In 2019, the body of a man fell from a passenger plane into a garden in south London. Who was he?”
10. Pheromones
By Melvyn Bragg | In Our Time :: BBC 4 | 2009-2019
Also see: The Boxer Rebellion | The Library of Alexandria | Munch and The Scream | The Zulu Nation’s Rise and Fall
stillness of heart 