|
Listen To This Story
 |
PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to picks@whowhatwhy.org.
US Restores Protections for Alaska’s Tongass National Forest (Maria)
The author writes, “Road construction and timber harvest will be restricted in more than nine million acres of roadless areas in southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the United States Department of Agriculture announced last week. For nearly two decades, the Tongass, the country’s largest national forest, was protected under a federal policy from 2001 known as the roadless rule, which banned logging and road-building throughout much of the national forest system. In 2020 … the Trump administration exempted the Tongass from these restrictions. The new decision, which took effect Friday, reverses the Trump-era rule and reinstates the former protections.”
Florida May Force High School Athletes to Disclose Their Menstrual History (Reader Steve)
The author writes, “Florida is debating whether to require all high school athletes to disclose their menstrual history. Parents and experts generally agree that it’s important for student athletes to be in good health. But many critics say a new draft physical evaluation form by the Florida High School Athletics Association (FHSAA), which makes the menstruation questions mandatory, is part of the state’s attempt to roll back transgender rights.”
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence — Widespread Job Losses (Sean)
From IoT for All: “McKinsey & Company reckons that, depending upon various adoption scenarios, automation will displace between 400 and 800 million jobs by 2030, requiring as many as 375 million people to switch job categories entirely. How could such a shift not cause fear and concern, especially for the world’s vulnerable countries and populations?”
Doctors Aren’t Burned Out From Overwork. We’re Demoralized by Our Health System. (Russ)
The author writes, “Doctors have long diagnosed many of our sickest patients with ‘demoralization syndrome,’ a condition commonly associated with terminal illness that’s characterized by a sense of helplessness and loss of purpose. American physicians are now increasingly suffering from a similar condition, except our demoralization is not a reaction to a medical condition, but rather to the diseased systems for which we work. The United States is the only large high-income nation that doesn’t provide universal health care to its citizens. Instead, it maintains a lucrative system of for-profit medicine. For decades, at least tens of thousands of preventable deaths have occurred each year because health care here is so expensive.”
Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Like This? (Dana)
From The Atlantic: “Marjorie Taylor Greene arrived in Congress in January 2021, blond and crass and indelibly identified with conspiracy theories involving Jewish space lasers and Democratic pedophiles. She had barely settled into office before being stripped of her committee assignments; she has been called a ‘cancer’ on the Republican Party by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; and she now has a loud voice in the GOP’s most consequential decisions on Capitol Hill because her party’s leaders know, and she knows they know, that she has become far too popular with their voters to risk upsetting her. Nobody saw her coming.”
Molly’s Last Ride (Sean)
From Bicycling: “Twelve-year-old Molly Steinsapir crashed onto the pavement from a Rad Power e-bike and never woke up. With a poorly regulated e-bike industry, who is responsible when a child dies?”
Zookeepers Say They’ve Solved the Mystery of How a Gibbon Got Pregnant by Herself (Mili)
The author writes, “For two years, a zoo in southern Japan had been puzzled by a mystery: How did Momo, a gibbon kept alone in her cage, get pregnant? The 12-year-old white-handed gibbon lived by herself and was never joined by a companion. Some of her neighbors are males, sure, but their cages are separated by sturdy bars and jagged chicken wire fencing. It was inconceivable to the zookeepers that they could have mated through the two layers of barriers. She gave birth in 2021 to a yet unnamed male gibbon with black hair and white fur trimming around its face. But with the help of DNA tests, zookeepers in Nagasaki prefecture have identified the baby gibbon’s father. And they say they’ve figured out how the ape’s parents met.”
