Thread of the best papers and books I read in 2020, roughly in order.

[thread]

Folks at Marvel were trying to figure out how to launch phase 4 of the MCU, incorporate the addition of the X-Men, the relaunch of the Fantastic Four, and help the MCU on Disney+ get off the ground, and Feige was like:

The meta goes deep on WandaVision. This bit might be unintentional, but there's poetry in Marvel Studios launching its first foray into TV shows with a show about TV shows. Some history:

The previous Marvel TV properties were (mostly) run by Marvel Television and Jeph Loeb. They did some brilliant work, but the MCU films largely ignored the goings-on over there.

Now everything is in one house. It has the potential to be a huge freaking mess.

Part of the problem is how to insert the "first family" of Marvel comics into the MCU timeline. The Fantastic Four are old-school. The MCU heroes we know looked up to them and went to them for advice. Now they are going to get an MCU origin story. That's a conundrum.

Kevin Feige is a big comic nerd with a whole team of comic nerds, and one of them was probably like:

"Hey, did you know the witch who mentored Wanda was a nanny for the Fantastic Four? Maybe she could be in this."

In the shadowy corners of the shortwave spectrum lurk the Numbers Stations: strange radio broadcasts of mysterious blocks of numbers in creepy monotone voices!

It's actually an old form of spycraft which is still in use today. And as it's #WorldRadioDay let's take a listen...

A Numbers Station is a type of one-way voice link for sending information to spies in foreign countries.

Operating on Short Wave radio bands they transmit a secret code of spoken numbers. Use of Numbers Stations peaked during the Cold War, but some are still operating today.

Numbers Stations are operated by various national intelligence agencies. At set times on a pre-arranged frequency a musical tone is played, followed by a speech synthesised voice reading out blocks of numbers. To most listeners it sounds both creepy and meaningless.

However to spies it can be vital. The numbers can be decoded to reveal a message, provided the spy has the right One Time Pad (OTP) - a random number key that is only used once before it is destroyed. OTP encryption is impossible to break if done correctly.

Why broadcast your secret message on Short Wave? Because it can be picked up across the globe. All a spy needs is a shop bought SW radio, a pencil, and the correct One Time Pad and they - and only they - can decipher the message. No complex kit is required.

So I was talking to @gewt about Job: A Comedy of Justice and I came up with a theory that I think explains why Heinlein's late-period work is so kinda-terrible and why I still enjoy it so much

So Heinlein had always been very interesting in the short parts of his novels, like the little snippets inside chapters. He had a very fun writing style, and wrote some fun dialogue with fun characters, right?>
It probably comes from how much of his early stuff was short fiction

And I think what happened with a lot of his longer works is that he'd just start writing fun bits and hope it would end up going somewhere or having a bigger plot by the end. like eventually he'd figure out where this was going, then go back and rewrite it into a cohesive whole

and I'm sure he had editors that'd help this process. No editor would let you publish something as rambly and changing-gears-every-other-chapter as The Number Of The Beast, for example... unless you were God-King Of Science Fiction 1980s Robert Heinlein.

so basically I think what happened is that by the 80s (when he was in his seventies!!) he lost the drive to go back and rewrite and he was too Untouchable for editors to make him.

Did you know:

—in old-timey-times women got abortions w no constraints?

—ads for abortion were so common in the 1800s they were blasé?

—native women controlled their fertility & men had no say?

Today's @OrdEquality ep will blow your freakin’ mind

There's this perception that women didn't have abortions in the past— that we were somehow better & more “moral” in the past— but, that could not be further from the truth.

Women have always controlled their fertility throughout the entire history of time. — Dr. @lmacthompson1

We interviewed @LorettaJRoss Prof, Co-founder @sistersong_woc & Godmother to the reproductive justice movement:

"Emperor Augustus was complaining about elite Roman women not having enough children... Roman women were using knowledge from Egypt to practice fertility control..."

"I discovered that the kidnapped, enslaved Black women who were brought over in the slave trade actually brought knowledge about abortifacients with them. And so, they were secretly controlling their own fertility on these plantations." — @LorettaJRoss on @OrdEquality

"Black women have been fighting for reproductive self-determination since our arrival in this country." —@LorettaJRoss on @OrdEquality

Musicians and their constant battle with substance abuse: A [thread] of studies & findings on the subject 👇

45% of UK musicians reported issues with alcohol. "Entertainers experienced performance-related incentives to drink before, during and/or after a show; including anxiety, matching their intoxication level to the audience’s, and ‘reward-drinking’"

(Forsyth, et. al. 2016)

One study of 226 musicians in New York State found that substance use was “markedly elevated compared to general population samples”

(Miller & Quigley, 2011, p. 401)

One study of 168 significant and famous jazz musicians found that their mean age at death was only 57.2 years.

(Patalano, 2000)

One study of the autobiographies of rock musicians reported that 62% contained a description of the artist’s personal addiction story. (Oksanen, 2013)

Also, the confessional recovery memoir is now an established and popular genre. (Oksanen, 2013; Forsyth, Lennox & Emslie, 2016)