Weekly roundup 02–24–23

I highlight a few interesting things I’ve seen, heard, read, or thought about this week. A little belated once again!

Best reads 📚

• One Year Inside a Radical New Approach to America’s Overdose Crisis by By Jeneen Interlandi. “We spend roughly five times as much incarcerating people with substance use disorders as it would cost us to treat them, and the return on that expenditure has been meager at best.” This piece explores options that work better.
• Ian Fishback’s American Nightmare by By C.J. Chivers. This is an enraging but beautiful told tale of a soldier and a whistle-blower against torture, who, like so many others, was undone by a health care system that utterly failed. It is long but worth your time. “Fishback himself had an active application for V.A. benefits when he died… throughout his final slide the V.A. presented obstacles that effectively denied treatment — until the agency’s offer came minutes before his body was found. It was not just that Fishback seemed to have been handled as if he were unwieldy refuse from a distant war; the case was indicative of the abysmal nature of mental health care for the powerless, veterans and nonveterans alike, which he called “basically a body-stacking machine”
• The New York Times Is Repeating One of Its Most Notorious Mistakes “Rosenthal, who led the Times from 1969 to 1986, is perhaps most frequently remembered now for something he adamantly refused to do: cover the LGBTQ rights movement, particularly the AIDS crisis, with the scope or respect it deserved.”

Media criticism is not de facto activism. If I saw reporting I assigned being used in courts to harm marginalized communities I would review those pieces and try to understand why. The knee jerk refusal to even consider this is mind boggling. — Elizabeth Spiers, contributing writer, NYT Opinion

Photo 📸

Michaela Roman, engagement journalism ’20, is back to help teach our social media tools class!

🔥This is (NOT) fine 🔥

Higher education remains under assault. Just a couple of examples:

• The University of Texas System has paused new diversity, equity and inclusion policies on hold and launched a review of them. The announcement was made at a board meeting with no discussion or vote, as reported first by The Austin American-Statesman.
• The DeSantis higher education bill is as bad or worse than expected. Julian Davis Mortenson, a law professor at the University of Michigan, breaks it down in this thread.
• “On Wednesday, after a class where he discusses racial justice, he says the dean and the provost were waiting for him” at Palm Beach Atlantic University.