This week’s pigeon is an English Carrier, a domesticated pigeon that Charles Darwin noted was “a fine bird, of large size, close feathered, generally dark–coloured, with an elongated neck.” (Darwin wrote quite a bit about pigeons as he worked out his theory of evolution. Sneer at pigeons all you want — they have been at the center of science and culture for a long, long time.) (Image credits)

Long neck, short newsletter. It’s been one helluva week for me, and I’ve barely paid attention to the news or to the Internet. I did watch the first night of the Democratic debates, but I tapped out after about ten minutes of night two and avoided the punditry altogether. (Exception: Lili.) It does feel as though many in the media are steering the information ship directly into the same rocky shoals of 2016. 2020 — You decide: seasickness or death.

(The ed-tech news is all déjà vu and I-told-you-so these days too: “Pearson Hack Exposed Details on Thousands of U.S. Students,” “She Was Arrested at 14. Then Her Photo Went to a Facial Recognition Database,” and what not.)

Light reading: “The Last Days of John Allen Chau” by Alex Perry. “Candy Land Was Invented for Polio Wards” by Alexander B. Joy. “Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman” by Jia Tolentino, whose new book, Trick Mirror, I cannot wait to read.

Yours in struggle,
~Audrey