A bunch of links to interesting content that I have come across on the internet
Public Health professor’s ‘Coverage Denied’ book dives into health insurance quagmire
Unlike most of us who stress out over and decry the ever-escalating cost and complexities of health insurance coverage, Pitt’s Miranda Yaver did something about it. She wrote a book.
Rather than a hollow rant on over-familiar complaints, however, “Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States,” points to possible paths forward. Published by Cambridge University Press and released on April 23, “Coverage Denied” — loaded with data as well as patient and physician narratives culled from 111 interviews — lays out a number of coverage-reform proposals.
US health care and health coverage is unfortunately still an incredibly important subject. The steep increase in health care costs for many Americans certainly hasn’t made the subject any less relevant.
What if all you knew was extremist politics? Welcome to being young in America.
Fascinating article about how the young people in USA has never known a time without extremist politics. Those of us, who are older, can remember a time before regular school shootings, Trump and far-right talking points being pushed by main-stream right-winged media, but this has been part of the whole life of young people – the first president they remember is Trump.
Why you should keep getting mRNA vaccines
The COVID pandemic ushered mRNA vaccines into the spotlight, and the technology has even greater potential. Here’s what to know about the way that they work, their safety, and more.
The article is very US-centric, focusing on US politics and US numbers (the cite a study showing that mRNA covid vaccines prevented 8 million infection in the first six months, without mentioned that this was in the US alone – worldwide numbers were much higher). Even so, the fundamental message is still worth spreading – mRNA is a safe type of vaccines, and we should use this technology in the future.
Half of the population in Dallas County, Alabama, where Selma is located, was African American in 1965. But less than 2% of the county’s registered voters were Black. That wasn’t for lack of trying. They were excluded by systematic racism. Leaders like John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. understood that being denied rights was intolerable, and that nothing would change until Black Americans had the same ability to exercise the right to vote that white citizens did.
Alabama newspapers largely ignored events leading up to Bloody Sunday in Montgomery. As marchers approached the state capitol, the local press spilled more ink over what Governor Wallace was eating for lunch as the marchers approached the city (“Roast beef, green beans, corn muffins, sliced peaches, plastic-wrapped chocolate cakes, buttermilk and iced tea,”) than they did on the march itself.
It was national media coverage that drew the public’s attention to what was happening. On March 7, 1965, when a then-25-year-old John Lewis led over 600 peaceful marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and was met with brutality from state troopers, it was the footage shown on network news that night that shocked the nation’s conscience into finally doing something. By Sunday, March 21, 1965, with the country’s attention focused on them and joined by Dr. King, the original 600 protesters swelled to close to 8,000 people and the march from Selma to Montgomery began. A federal judge, Frank Johnson, ordered the troopers who had attacked them previously to protect them. By the end of the year, the Voting Rights Act was passed and signed into law.
Protest is brewing again in Selma. In the wake of Callais, and the overt gerrymandering and dilution of the Black vote that the Supreme Court now says is legal, protestors marched today.
Once again Selma is at the front of the fight for civil rights, and once again they are largely ignored by national newspapers and other media.
Turkeys Circling A Dead Cat Are Probably Wary, Not Working Dark Magic
I think I will let the headline speak for itself, except that I will link a bluesky post that includes a gif of the video that the article mentions, since it is no longer on twitter – and since you shouldn’t give twitter traffic
— grooveholmes.bsky.social (@grooveholmes.bsky.social) 15. maj 2026 kl. 04.08
If the embedded post doesn’t show, you can go to it here.
You Can’t Build Useful Alliances With Fascists, Dumbass
I hope we all now understand that forging strategic policy partnerships with fascists is like trying to develop an intimate relationship with a running chainsaw.
Great piece by Karl Bode
USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths
The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.
“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.
This was back in November. Think of how many hundred of thousands of deaths the decision has caused since then.
Looking at the same model as the article is referring to, the impact after a year is 262,915 adult deaths and 518,428 child deaths, so 781,343 total deaths.
For some reason the impactcounter has been retired, but we can assume that the impact after the first year will be similar to the impact afterwards. This means that Trump, Musk and the Doge team have the blood of millions on their hands.
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