Thursday roundup (brought to you by long story)

RoundUp: possibly carcinogenic and linked to antibiotic resistance. Why wasn't there greater oversight?

Whither Singapore.

Why is Nicaragua buying Russian weaponry?

I didn't steal your job.

This goes for any democracy (i.e., that's what the article speaks to). Embedding the tweet so you can actually access the article:

There’s nothing undemocratic about protesting Netanyahu’s policies (or those of any elected govt) http://t.co/D1Ubm7VoM7
— Rose glow barberry (@rgbrb) March 26, 2015

While I'm embedding tweets: guess what this was about:

Caption this picture pic.twitter.com/7P2b8G0uLi
— Rose glow barberry (@rgbrb) March 26, 2015

Was the intentional Carlson email any less offensive?

On women in comic books:

Marguerite Bennett, who co-writes the Thor spin-off Angela: Asgard’s Assassin with Kieron Gillen, remembers being frustrated as a young reader. “I couldn’t quite articulate why certain things felt off to me,” she writes via email. “Many women were obviously one-dimensional: perfect girlfriends, nagging shrews, femmes fatales – tragic, scorned, disposable women. But even with living heroines, something felt sour and discordant. These heroines were capable, competent, fearless, and yet they somehow wound up swooning or helpless or used only for male validation. Most of western literature focuses on male power fantasies. No one much cares about what a female power fantasy would be.”

and

Kelly Sue DeConnick invoked another household object when she told Comics Alliance in 2012: “Never mind the Bechdel test, try this. If you can replace your female character with a sexy lamp and the story still basically works, maybe you need another draft. They have to be protagonists, not devices.” For decades, too many female characters failed the Sexy Lamp Test.

I'm too tired to get into this to the extent that I like to, but this old Modern Love column came up in conversation today. I love these excerpts:

I simply had come to understand that I was not at the root of my husband’s problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn’t happen.

It’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within. Relying on any other equation can be lethal.

I wanted to say a bit more about her response to her husband's crisis, which was to give him the space to figure things out in a way that minimized the pain for her and her family. I thought about that a lot in the context of less formal relationships, particularly with various exes. I've written about the last in this context, I think. You can have your crisis; you can be not sure that you want to stay together, but please understand that I'm going to move on with my life in the meantime. I previously thought it was pure obliviousness--a passive inconsiderateness--that drove him to f* with my ability to do that, but now I wonder whether it was a delibearte control mechanism. I'll never know. Maybe more on this later, with stories from another ex.