Jason Johnson Peretz

Medical anthropologist, theologian. Oxford. San Francisco. Tweets on global health, human rights, medicine & tech, MENA region.

[Daniel Pink @DanielPink]

Tonight you'll have a free hour. Spend it on a person, not a platform. Who's the call you keep postponing?

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

I’m reading There Is No Place for Us, and one thing keeps hitting me over and over:

Homelessness is rarely a single event. It’s a cascade.

A cancer diagnosis. A lost job. Postpartum depression. A missed paycheck. A broken car. A ten-week wait for mental health care. An eviction notice.

The system expects people to experience hardship one problem at a time.

Real life doesn’t work that way.

People grieve while paying bills. Parent while searching for apartments. Work while falling apart. And one bad month can erase years of stability.

That’s why this conversation matters so much. Homelessness does not simply mean living on the street. It means motel rooms. Living with relatives. Sleeping on couches. Packing five people into one bedroom. Constantly wondering where you’ll be next month.

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[David Sirota @davidsirota]

With today's passing of Alan Greenspan, the one thing you are obligated to do is watch this C-Span clip of Greenspan being utterly destroyed by Bernie Sanders, at a time when every other lawmaker was praising Greenspan as a hero as he created conditions for the financial crisis.

[Esteban F-Hinojosa @EFdezHinojosa]

Este editorial de NATURE sostiene que la forma en que las nuevas generaciones consumen información está cambiando radicalmente. Concluye que si los científicos quieren seguir influyendo en el debate público, tienen que adaptarse a ese nuevo formato del ecosistema informativo y que la comunicación científica del futuro deberá ser cada vez más breve y visual.

Cada época moldea los instrumentos con los que busca la verdad, pero eso, a su vez, también transforma la capacidad para atenderla. En la cultura contemporánea, la atención parece dispersarse en haces cada vez más breves. Y el riesgo de que eso cambie nuestra forma de pensar es elvado. N. Postman advirtió que una sociedad puede llegar a preferir lo que entretiene a lo que explica. Así que el verdadero escollo estará en lograr que la búsqueda de la verdad sobreviva al cambio de formato. Habrá que ver si seguimos siendo capaces de distinguir entre información -que puede consumirse en segundos- y conocimiento -que exige concentración y tiempo-. Ninguna revolución tecnológica debería volver obsoleta esa importante diferencia

[Monica Gandhi MD, MPH @MonicaGandhi9]

HANTAVIRUS: Let's start with obvious. Global pandemics in 1918 (influenza) and 2020 (coronavirus) are from viruses easily spread by respiratory contact which is why flu/coronaviruses most of concern for pandemic potential. Hantavirus is an RNA virus in bunyavirus family, can be

[Georgy Kantor @GeorgyKantor]

A postdoc in the history of Syriac Christianity at Oxford, in the research project of the brilliant Lucy Parker. https://t.co/2JpsXDN06M

[Antigone Journal @AntigoneJournal]

Time for the Antigone Spring Books Give-away! 40+ books and pamphlets on offer worldwide. Just repost this message and follow us, and on Sunday 3 names will be drawn. 1st chooses 20 things, 2nd 12, 3rd gets the rest. We'll add details of the items over coming days. Good luck all!

[Antigone Journal @AntigoneJournal]

Of Nobel Prize winners in the 20th century, here are the percentages of atheists/agnostics by prize: Literature (35%), Medicine (8.9%), Chemistry (7.1%), Economics (5.2%), Physics (4.7%), and Peace (3.6%). For the outstandingly talented religious faith and reason seem to coexist.

[Philosophy Matters @PhilosophyMttrs]

Calvin, epistemologist

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The people in this photo aren't friendlier than you. Their apartments are just smaller. So small that Parisians basically gave up on living indoors and moved their living rooms onto the sidewalk. And that was the whole plan.

In the 1850s, a city planner named Baron Haussmann tore apart medieval Paris and rebuilt it. He widened streets into boulevards, capped every building at five stories, and added one rule that explains this entire photo: the ground floor of every building had to be a café, a bakery, or a shop. The apartments above were intentionally tiny. Some were single rooms carved out of old mansions. No garden. Barely any sunlight. A private balcony was something most Parisians would never have.

So the café became home. You ate breakfast there. Held meetings there. Received your mail there. By the late 1700s, Paris already had close to 2,000 of them. In 2002, there were still 1,907. Even now, after years of closures brought that number to about 1,410, the coverage is absurd: a 2020 city study found 94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of a bakery. When COVID shut indoor dining in 2020, Paris ripped out parking spaces, turned them into outdoor terraces, and let 9,800 cafés and restaurants keep them permanently.

An American sociologist named Ray Oldenburg wrote a book in 1989 called The Great Good Place. He had a name for spots like the Parisian café: "third places." Not your home, not your office, but the casual in-between spots where you actually get to know people. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, the corner store where the owner knows your name. His whole argument was that American suburbs were built with only two zones, your house and your job, connected by a car. No sidewalk café, no place to bump into a neighbor by accident.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a national health epidemic in 2023. Being alone all the time is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Half of American adults say they feel lonely. Weekly socializing dropped from 5.5 hours in 2003 to just 4 hours in 2023, and it never bounced back after COVID. Americans between 15 and 29 now spend 45% more time alone than they did in 2010.

The scene in this tweet looks like a personality trait. It is a 170-year-old engineering project that works exactly as designed.

[Team Talarico @TeamTalaricoHQ]

.@JamesTalarico: The kind of religion that says you can treat people however you want as long as you have a personal relationship with Jesus is an abomination.

Scripture says you can't love God and hate other people.

You can't love God and abuse the immigrant.
You can't love God and bully the outcast.
You can't love God and oppress the poor.

We spend so much time looking for God out there, that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us.

[Alexandra Sharp @AlexandraSSharp]

For the next 48 hours, @ForeignPolicy will drop its paywall on all Iran coverage! Here are some of the biggest news stories you should read to understand the U.S.-Israel war against Iran. 1/8

[Comment @commentmag]

“I was attempting to lead our congregation through crisis while grasping for something to hold on to in my personal faith. When I most needed God to act and show his face, he remained hidden.”

Ryan Cochran on God's divine hiddenness.
https://t.co/QKUsnksgpN

[Philosophy Matters @PhilosophyMttrs]

Who is Walter Mignolo, architect of decoloniality? A prominent architect of decolonial theory, his diagnosis of European colonial ills is both penetrating and flawed … https://t.co/zikO5gA8s5

[Cassie Pritchard @hecubian_devil]

You can resolve an unfair inequity 2 ways: help the worse-off group, or harm the better-off group. The Fairness value is satisfied either way

This was a huge general problem in Woke 1, and a reason why we must abandon “privilege” as a framework, instead focusing on “harm”

“Privilege” as a framework has TONS of flaws, but one of them is that it implicitly and unavoidably frames inequities as problems of better-off groups having something unearned, unfair, and unjust—privilege. Even if the “privilege” in question is something like “grace and empathy for their disability,” which is actually a good and necessary thing everyone should get, or if the “privilege” is “being served and protected by police, instead of occupied and assaulted.” Again, that’s just a good and correct state of affairs all should enjoy. There’s nothing wrong with it; the only problem is its *absence* among the oppressed and marginalized. The problem is not that some people get what they need, but that other people are *harmed*.

But “privilege” as an analytic lens *unavoidably* suggests a resolution to the problem—removing the privilege! This is really unhelpful when the privilege in question is *something good that all people deserve*. It absolutely fosters zero-sum, race-to-the-bottom thinking. It implicitly endorses the ways in which the marginalized are harmed! It validates the harm, by narratively framing the *absence* of that harm as an unearned reward for belonging to an oppressor class! Privilege, in other words, necessarily implies that *what harms the marginalized is the correct and fair state of existence for all people.* Privilege *valorizes* racism, ableism, misogyny, and so on. It does so by locating the moral problem—the violation of the fairness principle—in *the absence of these kinds of harm* enjoyed by “privileged” counterparts.

Privilege is a fucking psyop to make everyone worse off, to neuter and splinter liberatory coalitions. Privilege unavoidably implies that “when black people suffer, that’s good—we just need to make other people suffer equally.” Any “justice” framework that logically validates existing racist harm is totally unacceptable.

And this is only ONE of the many analytic and practical problems with privilege. It is one of the most toxic, anti-liberatory, anti-solidarity theories ever devised. It should be seen as revolting and anathema on the left.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Went down the rabbit hole on this one. The answer is actually wild.

5,000 years ago, Sumerian merchants in modern-day Iraq needed a number that's easy to divide. They picked 60. It has 12 divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60). Base-10 only has four. That's 3x as many ways to split something evenly, which matters when you're dividing grain and wages and can't handle repeating decimals.

The counting method is the best part. They used their thumb as a pointer on the three bone segments of each finger. Four fingers, three segments, that's 12 per hand. Track multiples of 12, on the other hand, and you hit 60. No pen needed. Merchants in parts of Asia still count this way today.

The system spread from Sumer to the Babylonians, then eastward to Persia, India, and China, and westward to Egypt and Rome. By 1800 BC, Babylonian students were using base-60 to calculate the square root of 2 to six decimal places on clay tablets. One student's homework from 4,000 years ago, now at Yale, holds the most accurate computation found anywhere in the ancient world. The Greeks adopted it for astronomy, which locked it into navigation, cartography, and eventually clocks in the 14th century.

People have tried to kill it. During the French Revolution in 1793, France mandated decimal time: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. New clocks, new laws, the whole thing. Lasted 17 months. Workers hated getting one day off every ten days instead of one every seven. They tried again in 1897. Scrapped by 1900. The metric system replaced feet and pounds across most of the world. But 60 minutes in an hour? Untouchable.

60 is just too good at being divided. You can split an hour into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, twelfths, or twentieths and land on a whole number every time. Try that with 100, and you get ugly decimals for thirds, sixths, and most common splits. 5,000 years of civilizations looked at that math and came to the same conclusion: 60 wins.

[Winter @MsWinterrrr]

The CVS Health Chair David Joy looks hypnotized by AOC.

Lmfao she's so good at this.

[Jake Walker @jake_doubleyoo]

The world needs to know how fucking sick the 1981 Oresteia trilogy is

[Rolling Stone @RollingStone]

Long Covid Is Real — And It’s Changing an Entire Generation

Hundreds of thousands of kids in America are struggling with an illness that many doctors and schools refuse to recognize.e

Feature: https://t.co/q0QjHOh9Bq