Katherine Bracken

[Dr. Sean Mullen @drseanmullen]

That mystery virus you had — and passed on to 100 others while contagious for 10-14 days — won’t just cause a week of illness. Statistically, about half of them will face Long Covid after repeat infections (3/4 of the US already have a chronic condition), and about 10 will die years earlier than they should from heart attacks, strokes, or other accelerated diseases. You did that.

[Katherine Bracken @phgrrl_2015]

@drseanmullen @JoellasWorld Could you talk more about why being vaccinated with Novavax makes asymptomatic infection more likely? I haven’t heard that before.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

For children to flourish, they need to grow up reading and being read to.

The following is a list of essential books for any beloved children in your life. And they’re brilliant enough that they can be enjoyed equally well by adults.

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS, preferably in a kid-friendly version. These shockingly strange stories of magic and adventure fired the minds of authors like Lovecraft, Dickens, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters.

FIVE CHILDREN AND IT and THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET, by Edith Nesbit. A series of books about four children who have misadventures with a Psammead and a phoenix. The way Edith portrays kids was a major influence on Narnia and Harry Potter.

A WRINKLE IN TIME, by Madeleine L’Engle. Awkward, brainy Meg Murry must travel to the ends of the universe to rescue her father, in a visionary fusion of science, mysticism and cosmic horror leavened by L’Engle’s gentle Episcopalianism.

LITTLE WOMEN, by Louisa May Alcott. Not just for girls. Alcott is second to none as a writer of characters, and in telling the story of the March sisters and Laurie, she becomes the closest thing we have to an American Dickens.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. Harold Bloom called them the greatest children’s fantasies ever written, and they are my personal favorites. Every child needs to know the Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare.

THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN, by George MacDonald. A girl named Irene must battle a race of sinister goblins with soft feet who are threatening to abduct her and force her into marriage. The influence of MacDonald’s Goblins can be seen in The Hobbit.

THE WESTING GAME, by Ellen Raskin. A child’s first introduction to the mystery genre. Turtle Wexler is one of the all-time great children’s book heroines, and reading the end of this book as an adult still brings me to tears.

A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH and TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, by Jules Verne. Some of the most thrilling adventure stories ever written, satisfying a child’s fascination with things that live in the sea or beneath the earth.

A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS, by Lemony Snicket. A masterpiece of contemporary fantasy, Snicket’s unique blend of whimsy, Gothic horror and clever wordplay birthed a generation of darkly funny, verbally precocious readers.

Read to your kids. Teach them that reading is for pleasure, not to pass a test. Let them read what they love. Let them see you reading books with joy and enthusiasm. That’s how you get a child to fall in love with reading. That’s how you make a lifelong reader.

[EveryLibrary @EveryLibrary]

"It's official, the small buzz around graphic novels for kids has become a mighty roar. One clear reason is the many benefits graphic novels offer to reluctant and avid readers:
Boots confidence
Contextual support
Comprehension skills
Promotes creativity and imagination"https://t.co/u4Kqr6OwZJ
#Library #Libraries #GraphicNovels #Creativity #Imagination #FunToRead #ReadingComprehension #ContexualSupport #ConfidenceBooster

[Sesame Street @sesamestreet]

Let it grow! 🌷🌻💚

[Taylor Lorenz @TaylorLorenz]

@bethbourdon @JenLawrence21 @PiperK @seanspicer Covid is currently mass disabling millions and killing hundreds of thousands. It is the number 1 chronic disease in children. Every covid infection permanently damages ur body/brain. The population level effects are staggering. Mask up and fight for disease protections

[Taylor Lorenz @TaylorLorenz]

@bethbourdon @JenLawrence21 @PiperK @seanspicer We don’t need people to just mask when they’re sick. They doesn’t stop transmission at all. By then it’s too late. People are MOST contagious when they’re pre symptomatic and most spread is happening asymptotically. That’s why masking *when you feel healthy* is crucial.

[Ev Hanson @EvHanson2]

For myself, this is one of the most important pieces written about taking covid precautions when most people don’t. It resonated so deeply with me. I think it will resonate with many of the folks that I interact with here.
@drseanmullen

https://t.co/CFvjftw6Ik

[Katherine Bracken @phgrrl_2015]

@garthnix Thank you!

[Katherine Bracken @phgrrl_2015]

@LorenzoTheCat Jethro, nest making specialist

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

I don't think people understand the gravity of the situation as the UN is preparing for possible nuclear weapon use in Iran.

This is a picture of Tehran. For you uneducated, untraveled, never-served, warhawks licking your chops at the thought of bombing it. It's not some low population desert. There are families, children, family pets. Regular working class people with dreams. You're sick to want war.

Tehran is a city of nearly 10,000,000 people. Imagine nuking Washington, Berlin, Paris, London, or beyond, bombed with nuclear weapons.

I gave up my diplomatic career to leak this information. I suspended my duties so as not to be part of or a witness to this crime against humanity, in an attempt to prevent a nuclear winter before it is too late.

Yesterday, nearly ten million people protested “No Kings” in the United States. The possibility of the use of nuclear weapons must be taken very seriously. It's dangerous. Act now. Spread this message worldwide. Take the streets. Protest for our humanity and future. Only the people can stop it. History will remember us.

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

Cuba is experiencing nationwide blackouts, and clinicians have requested N95s. I will donate a dollar for every RT this gets in the next hour.

MAKE ME PAY.

James is organizing a fundraiser. Venmo: James-Ray-24

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Richard Engel @RichardEngel]

Trump says people with learning disabilities are “dumb.” We are not.

[Cat (CovidSolidarity) @CovidSolidarit1]

Superb public health messaging from the Durham County Department of Public Health.

Take note @UKHSA

[World Health Network @TheWHN]

Every COVID infection adds risk, not protection. The more times someone is infected, the higher their risk of developing Long COVID.

Reducing infections is one of the most important ways to protect long-term health. The Five Pillars of Protection help lower risk by layering prevention strategies: clean indoor air through ventilation and filtration, high-quality masks, testing, vaccination, and staying home when sick.

When these protections are used together, they help reduce transmission and protect both individuals and communities.

#LongCOVID #COVIDPrevention #CleanAir #Ventilation #MaskUp #InfectionPrevention #PublicHealth #COVIDSafety #COVID19

[World Health Network @TheWHN]

COVID is not “just a cold.” Even mild or asymptomatic infections can cause lasting health effects, damaging blood vessels and organs, affecting the brain, and weakening the immune system. Reduce possible harm by avoiding infection and reinfection — preventing COVID is possible through measures such as masking, ventilation, testing and vaccination.

#COVID #COVID19 #PublicHealth

[Piralis @PiralisArt]

@arianajasmine__ Many local libraries offer literacy classes as well, either formally or informally.