It is past due time we talk about microaggressions on interviews (a thread #MedTwitter #AcademicTwitter):

First, microaggressions are harmful! Despite their name, they signal “you don’t belong here” to marginalized groups.

Second, interview days are already nerve-wrecking.

I wrote a lot of pieces in 2020! As we close out the year, I want to share a short list of my favorites. (thread)

In March, while we all watched in horror as the Trump administration botched the initial response to the pandemic, I wrote for @Independent about the bizarre and unjust access many healthy celebrities gained to COVID tests, which were quite scarce.

In April, when it was apparent Joe Biden was on his way to winning the nomination, I wrote for @washingtonpost on why progressives should have optimism about a Biden White House.

In June, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling affirming employment protections for LGBTQ people. It's cause for celebration, but as I wrote for @Cosmopolitan: this is a mere fraction of LGBTQ equality. We *must* pass the Equality Act.

That same month brought controversy as J.K. Rowling seemed to be completely unaware of the violence and discrimination faced by trans and non-binary people. So, I wrote about my own experiences in that vein for @USAToday in the hopes of educating folks:

If you post something to twitter, a social media platform by which ideas are shared, and you don't want people to comment on it or provide their opinions, you can use many tools on twitter (locking account, changing who can reply).

Calling disagreement "disrespectful" is bizarre

If you wish to curate replies, you have many options. First, you can change who can reply.

"Everyone can reply" opens it up to the world
"People you follow" ensures that people you've selected are only able to reply
"People you've mentioned" means just that - specfically.

/2

note that this does NOT stop retweets nor does it stop "quote tweet replies", an annoying type of reply that twitter SHOULD allow you to block if you choose.

/3

Alternatively, you can select individual replies you don't like, and remove those from the conversation. In response to this, i'm picking on the lovely @dranniehickox's reply (i'm happy with it!)

Note: people will see "the author has hidden this, would you like to see?"

/4

Another excellent option is to lock your account. This means that you can 100% control who sees your content, and your content is not re-tweetable.

/5

How I grew @prov_pizza 3650% over the last month.

This is me trying to build in public like @thisiskp_ and being transparent like @jackbutcher.

A visual thread. 👇🍕

1/ The secret towards getting these gains? Start from zero.

The stats after 4 weeks:

0 —> 77.4K Impressions
0 —> 6,130 Profile visits
0 —> 490 Likes
2 —> 73 Followers, sorry for the bait ;)

Here are some of my key learnings. 👇

2/ @jamierusso taught me to remix the content of others.

With only 9 followers I added some pizza sauce to Jamie’s content.

It got me over 4K impressions on a single tweet.

3/ The key to a good remix: add value.

With @prov_pizza I tried to add:

- Another perspective.
- Humor.
- Pizza. This usually does the trick ;

4/ Remixes were a pitfall too.

I was tempted to remix anything from anyone I found interesting, because it seemed to work.

@foundbryan taught me to stick to my niche.

This year has been momentous, with a new virus, a new job writing about that virus (114 articles!) and many new sources, readers and Twitter followers. To chronicle this insane year, I'm compiling some of the stories I'm proudest of. A thread.

Exactly a year ago, my family and I were headed back from Vietnam, with no idea how close we had been to the outbreak brewing in China. It took me a while to realize the gravity, but this first story I wrote about the virus still (mostly) holds

In March, it became increasingly obvious from research being published that the virus could spread in the absence of symptoms. Yet US officials were still mostly pooh-poohing it. In this article I talked to scientists who knew

We know now that some of the worst effects of Covid-19 are because of the body's immune response, not just the virus itself. There were just early hints of that when I wrote this piece about cytokine

In this story in May, I delved into what we knew about the relationship between the viral dose and the risk of infection -- a topic we still know woefully little