What can we learn from Covid policies?
Plus: Title 42, the 'icy heartbeat', and is India ready for global power?
Hi!
I’ve taken some time off of writing Fair Warning, partly because trying to recover from surgery (still! It’s been 8 weeks and I am still experiencing pain) and partly because work has been busy in a sort of good-but-challenging way and I wanted to spend more of my time outside, or at least, not-at-a-screen. So here I am at a screen looking at stuff. For you!
On the home front
Title 42 dramatically changed who arrived at the border
This looks at the impact on immigration of Title 42, which was “a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order that allowed the Trump and Biden administrations to rapidly expel migrants during the pandemic without being given a chance to seek U.S. asylum”.
Does Your Local Museum or University Still Have Native American Remains?
“Three decades after legislation pushed for the return of Native American remains to Indigenous communities, many of the nation’s top museums and universities still have the remains of thousands of people in their collections.” This is an open database so you can check institutions near you.
Another ProPublica story, this time about the Supreme Court. It’s an “interactive guide to rights the Supreme Court has established — and could take away”.
Elsewhere
This is an in-depth look at the sea ice—the ‘icy heartbeat’—in Antarctica and how it’s changed over time. Scientists aren’t really sure if it’s a longterm trend or a blip. This does a great job of explaining sea ice and how it changes during the year.
The most popular person in European street names is a woman
Before looking, I guessed the name would be Marie and I was close! But streets named after men outnumber streets named after women by ten to one, and “even if all new streets were named after women, the imbalance would take centuries to rectify.”
Is India ready to become the next global superpower?
Super interesting look at how India’s population will soon overtake China, but goes into a lot of detail around birth rates and contraception. One interesting stat that I didn’t know is that among women who use contraception, 60% of them use a permanent solution—ie surgery—and it’s heavily incentivised.
Odds and ends
The Worst Covid Strategy Was Not Picking One
Three years and 7 million deaths later we finally know the outcomes from different countries and how they approached the pandemic. This story lists seven lessons from seven different nations. This is my favourite story this week because it’s a smart piece of analysis exploring how we could learn from these missteps and successes in a future pandemic situation.
A fun (“fun”) calculator which tells you if you’re middle class or not, according to where you live in the US and your household income. What’s interesting is that essentially “middle class” is a feeling, more than a reality or combination of facts—even people on very high incomes consider themselves middle class.
The entire history of Premier League teams in one chart
Does what it says on the tin! This links to Reddit, just FYI.
A nice daily game from The Pudding. Using 5 photos from the location, you have to guess where (on a map) it is. I got to 415 miles away which I am kind of proud of!
See your identity pieced together from stolen data
This is kind of terrifying! I’ve been caught up in nine breaches in the last decade…
That’s everything I have for this week!