Change Convos monthly top picks: 5 links we loved in January

Written by Pat Heffernan | 2/4/16 11:09 PM

This is a little bit of a cheat because our five favorite posts for change makers and communicators were actually published over a six-week period rather than a month. But we’re guessing that like many of us, you missed a few things between the end of 2015 and the start of the new year. So this is your first not-to-miss ICYMI for 2016.

Monthly top picks: 5 links we loved in January

Animated Life: Mary Leakey (NY Times - VIDEO)

Make a moment to watch this (fantastic) short documentary remembering the paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey, who discovered footprints of human ancestors on the African savanna — it’s hard to describe. #MaryLeakey #WomenHistory #VideoStorytelling

How Many People Have Been Shot in Your Neighborhood? (Slate)

An interactive map of shootings in America. "Aurora, Newtown, San Bernardino seem far away? Gun violence hits closer to home than you might think. Slate teamed up with The Trace, a site dedicated to gun news, to show just how close. Enter a location and up pops a map showing shootings near you in the past year, with details and links to news stories, where available. The results might be surprising." #GunsInAmerica #Vermont

Aha. It’s Official. (Pew Research Center)

A majority of American households are no longer in the middle class. You’re likely to have suspected as much, but it’s a startling confirmation. Crunching government data, Pew researchers found that in early 2015, more adults were either in lower- or upper-income household than adults who were in middle-income households. Back in 1971, they note, the middle class made up 61 percent of the population. #IncomeInequality

“The Strange Life of Q-Tips, the Most Bizarre Thing People Buy” (Washington Post)

Marketers will want to explore the story of “one of the only, if not the only, major consumer products whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against.” #Q-Tips #CPGmarketing

“In Defense of Flat Earthers” by Lizzie Wade, (the Atlantic)

In this beautifully written piece by science writer Lizzie Wade, she confesses to at first thinking with disgust about B.o.B’s recent #FlatEarth Twitter crusade: “Will Americans insist on rejecting everything that 100 percent of scientists agree on?” She then moves on to build a compelling case to support her conclusion that “B.o.B’s Twitter crusade illuminates the best qualities of outsider physics: its skepticism, its curiosity, and its fierce desire to make sense of a confusing world in a rigorous way. These same values lie at the heart of mainstream science, too.”

#FlatEarth #TweetStorm