Links, Thursday 1st September

Well shit. There's now a very serious danger of yellow fever taking hold in Kinshasa, a city of 10 million people :( :(

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"The first “gold standard” clinical trial of ketamine for the ongoing treatment of major depression was launched in Sydney on Tuesday and will involve seven research institutions and 200 patients from across Australia and New Zealand." Guardian

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Fascinating account of the minibus taxis that ply the outlying suburbs of NYC. We're quite used to seeing these in developing countries, but it seems they're an effective solution whenever public transport infrastructure has been neglected.

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A timely reminder that a lot of the fuss about testosterone levels in women's athletics is pure racism. It's basically only women of colour who are subjected to this sort of snide commentary.

[CN: some of the blatantly racist comments are reproduced in the article]

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Apologies for the cis-sexist language in this article, but there's some useful harm reduction information in there. Basically, people with relatively more oestrogen in their system tend to be more sensitive to the effects of MDMA, and sensitivity can be affected by the menstrual cycle.

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Not sure how sound a piece of biblical scholarship this is, but it's a cool thought

"The Israelites took the transgender trope from their surrounding cultures and wove it into their own sacred scripture. The four-Hebrew-letter name of God, which scholars refer to as the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, was probably not pronounced “Jehovah” or “Yahweh,” as some have guessed. The Israelite priests would have read the letters in reverse as Hu/Hi — in other words, the hidden name of God was Hebrew for “He/She.” Counter to everything we grew up believing, the God of Israel — the God of the three monotheistic, Abrahamic religions to which fully half the people on the planet today belong — was understood by its earliest worshipers to be a dual-gendered deity."

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"Only after the fact—when it no longer required vision or courage or personal sacrifice; when the Civil War was over and the effort to distance ourselves from the moral stain of slavery had begun—did large numbers of white Americans grow interested in being part of the story of African-American liberation." New Yorker

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Annoying that this presumes (monogamous) marriage as the default form of long-term romantic relationship, but there's some good insight in there.

"The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures."

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"Long depicted as a controversial figure caught between two competing worlds of the Dutch and the Khoi‚ Krotoa is also credited with being among the chief architects of the Afrikaans language" Times Live

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I think a lot of people who eat meat like to pretend to themselves that animals in modern, industrialised slaughterhouses are killed in a basically humane way. I'm sorry, but this is not the case, and never has been.

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Ugh, horrible but predictable that the gentrification of Woodstock is leading to evictions on this scale :(

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A good round-up of some of the current state of knowledge about dental best practice

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This is some useful advice for dealing with harassment in a public place