On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
Note: Regular readers may have noticed that my blog posts are rather infrequent at this time. I am taking a break from blogging through the Summer and intend to be back this Autumn. There are over 3,500 older posts always available to peruse here.
“Everyone is tired because individually we’re trying to do all the things that can only really be achieved by communal living.” via @gemelliz
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” —John Kenneth Galbraith (2002)
Long COVID puzzle pieces are falling into place – the picture is unsettling
Despite overwhelming evidence of the wide-ranging risks of COVID-19, a great deal of messaging suggests that it is no longer a threat to the public. Although there is no empirical evidence to back this up, this misinformation has permeated the public narrative.
The data, however, tells a different story.
COVID-19 infections continue to outnumber flu cases and lead to more hospitalization and death than the flu. COVID-19 also leads to more serious long-term health problems. Trivializing COVID-19 as an inconsequential cold or equating it with the flu does not align with reality.
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the Rise of Italian Fascism
Despite the renewed interest in the 1918 influenza pandemic as a frame of reference for anticipating potential effects of COVID-19, evidence of its impact has largely come from economic and social studies. Here we extended this work by looking at political outcomes, and we suggest a prima facie case for its contribution to the rise of populism: Italian Fascism. Our analysis shows a significant correlation between influenza deaths and vote share for the Fascist Party in 1924, even after accounting for other determinants of the rise of Fascism. Looking at Mussolini’s newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, we also found that the rhetoric of some of today’s populist politicians concerning the COVID-19 pandemic mimicked that of earlier Fascist leaders.
Lesson learned from the COVID-19 pandemic: toddlers learn earlier to read emotions with face masks
In conclusion, our findings demonstrate that toddlers exhibit an enhanced ability to interpret emotions from masked facial expressions after one year of exposure to face masks. This observation provides a positive response to our initial inquiry regarding whether the altered availability of facial visual features during the COVID-19 pandemic might hinder or delay the development of emotion recognition skills in early childhood. Our results indicate that this is not the case; conversely, such development appears to undergo an acceleration. The resilient and adaptable nature of the brain, even under challenging conditions, likely fosters adaptation to enhance the face processing skills in young children, enabling them to successfully engage in social interactions.
