Wednesday Links: The Ghost Map, SDH, health behaviors, and more!
RWL #327
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Two more days till spring break! Woo-hoo! Sadly, there will be no videos of “professors gone wild” as I will be spending the week at the LHH working. I happily have an R&R (revise and resubmit) on my retiree article, so I will be focused on that, along with catching up on some grading. Also happily, as of this newsletter, I have ⅔ of my juniors placed in excellent internships. We have several new sites this year that I am excited about and can’t wait to visit the students this summer.
I have sort of a public health theme this week, with articles about social determinants, mental health, health behaviors, the origins of COVID, and more. In that theme, I also want to recommend the book Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, which I just finished reading last night. I realize I am late to the game on this one by a few years, but this is a phenomenal telling of Dr. John Snow’s proof that cholera was a water-born disease caused by the contamination of the water supply by human waste. Snow is considered the father of modern epidemiology. He proved cholera was caused by contaminated water in the 1850s, before the medical establishment had germ theory. He used maps to provide the link between the spread of the disease and the water supply. The book is a page turner, even though I knew the basic outlines of the story. Highly recommend even if you are not especially interested in public health. Johnson weaves together medicine, disease, history, architecture, city planning, and more into a fascinating story.
(Image above is from College Woods, just across of the LHH, after our recent snow storm, which was still not a snowpocalypse.)
OK - that’s it for me - enjoy this week’s links! I’ll be back Sunday with an essay. As usual, willing good for all of you!
Read
What: The Guardian, The big idea: are we responsible for the things we do wrong?
Why: A balanced discussion of the social determinants of health. From the article:
Over years of working as an inner city GP, I have met people whose daily habits and apparent choices seemed inexorably to be pushing them towards an early grave. One person would eat a single vast meal comprising huge amounts of junk food washed down with litres of fizzy drink, exacerbating a number of medical conditions. Thinking about the forces that conspired to create this lifestyle helped me move beyond the unhelpful, frustrating view that this was simply a lone individual screwing up. In the context of stressful working conditions, being depressed, living in inadequate housing, and knowing how to access cheap, familiar and tasty food that’s ready to eat, it made sense for that person to do what they did. Getting from one poorly paid shift to the next left little time, resources or energy to change direction.
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What: Advisory Board, What 11 minutes of exercise a day could do for your health
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2023/03/03/daily-exercise
Why: This is a summary of a review of 196 articles on the impact of physical activity. The result:
Overall, 75 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic exercise each week was associated with a 23% decline in the risk of premature death. In addition, this amount of exercise lowered the risk of cardiovascular disease by 17% and the risk of cancer by 7%.
If I were left to my own devices, I probably would not be very consistent about exercising, but my wife makes sure we exercise (almost) every day. We are animals and we are designed to move. It’s remarkable how if you are not true to that, the body begins to fail.
So read this article as part of your daily motivation to get out there and move your body!
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What: Bob Hicok, Calling Him Back from Layoff, The Poetry Foundation
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54793/calling-him-back-from-layoff
Why: This is one of those recommendations I am going to make where my recommendation is longer than the article itself. Read the poem - it is short and will take you under a minute. Sometimes poetry can express a life experience with more power than thousands of words of prose. In this case, Hicok captures the pain on both sides of a layoff and a call back. And you thought poetry was all about roses and lovers calling out wherefore art thou? It resonates with me because, although I never laid anyone off, I did make plenty of decisions to fire people (mostly chapters, for Army readers, but a few civilians, too). Some of those moments still haunt me many years later.
There are tens of thousands of people being laid off right now, and my guess is it will get worse, but we’ll see.
Read the poem - especially if you think you don’t like poetry.
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Watch
What: Peter Zeihan, COVID: What Really Happened in Wuhan? (4 min)
Why: My man Zeihan makes some interesting points. We don’t know if COVID was zoonotic spillover or a lab leak. (The CCP probably does, but we don’t). We do know the CCP covered up the virus for two weeks, and allowed international flights out of Wuhan during that time. That we do know.
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Listen
What: As We Work, Yes, There's a 'Right' Way to Brag at Work. Here's How (19 min)
Why: How to brag better. That’s something I actually spend time talking to my students about. This was a fun pod worth a listen. From the description:
Despite what you might have been told, your work doesn’t always speak for itself. That’s why it’s necessary to toot your own horn and brag about all the good things you’re doing on the job. But, how do you do that without annoying your boss or alienating your peers? Meredith Fineman, who helps people learn how to brag better, gives us a crash course in suave self-promotion.
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What: People I (Mostly) Admire, Chicago’s Renegade Sheriff Wants to Fix Law Enforcement (63 min)
Why: I want to really recommend this interview. I spent a significant amount of time studying the economics of crime during my PHD studies, especially prison and prison policy. This interview is with Chicago’s sheriff, who is quite progressive in all good ways from what I can see. The prison system primarily impacts the least powerful in our society, so if you care about social justice, you should care about what happens in our prisons and jails. This is a good starting point.
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