By the Beautiful Sea
We interrupt this newsletter (but not for long) to accomodate a transition
I’ll be back on Wednesday with our regular content. Right now, I am still unpacking, going to the grocery store, and figuring out how the fancy coffeemaker in the rental house works.
Meanwhile, check out the links below!
Following up on the `stack:
Do you remember the post where I looked at anti-vax conspiracists in the chiropractic and osteopathic care communities? As Davey Alba and Sheera Frenkel of The New York Times report, state medical authorities (perhaps goosed into action by FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine) are starting to discuss disciplining these fraudsters—some of whom make a fortune on selling supplements as an alternative to Covid-19 vaccination. (August 27, 2021)
Short takes:
The northwestern Gulf Coast is reeling from Hurricane Ida: our hearts are with you, Louisiana and Mississippi. In New Orleans, which took a direct hit, the storm toppled an electrical tower that survived Katrina in 2005. Approximately 1 million people have lost power so far as the storm barrels north. The storm surge was so powerful that the Mississippi River is currently flowing in reverse. (Sergio Chapa, Bloomberg News, August 29, 2021)
Robert Albritton just stunned the media world by selling Politico to the German media company Axel Springer for a cool $1 billion. In 2006, Albritton—perhaps understanding that the ubiquity of free publishing platforms and the rise of Facebook signaled death for independent blogging— created Politico as one of the first political mega-blogs. You can read about it here. (Ben Smith, The New York Times, August 29, 2021)
I missed this terrific article about trans-Atlantic heritage practices and their relationship to slavery and colonialism when it first came out. Like you, perhaps, I have a regrettable habit of letting the New Yorker pile up unread. Sam Knight’s “Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History” (August 16, 2021) examines how some of England’s leading families amassed the wealth and physical objects that represent that country’s public history. After you read it, you might want to listen to Noël Coward’s 1928 satirical song about these historic piles, “The Stately Homes of England.”
Catherine Hall and her team investigated the capital accumulated from slavery in the Legacies Of Slavery Dept at University College of London