Hello and welcome to part nine of my seemingly infinite monthly round ups of interesting and thought provoking journalism I've read under lockdown. The question of whether we are or aren't still under lockdown in the UK is one of many that will crop up this month, along with the wider issue of Covid (always). There's also a lot of music based content, which might (or, then again, might not...) lighten the load a bit.
Despite the events of last week, I've not actually got any analysis of anti-racism and Black Lives Matter this month. Not because I've stopped caring, more because - from a journalism perspective at least - something like a ripple effect seems to be happening.
From reporting on individual tragedies, a lot of coverage of the issue has spread out, like a ripple in a pool of water, to wider areas of discussion. This is not just a big debate that won't go away anytime soon, it's also become a series of specific discourses within specific professions and areas of life. Many of which I've highlighted with stories published over the past couple of months, many of which I will no doubt link to in the months to come.
There has been some discussion this month about Stan culture, a particularly hardcore sub group of fan culture, and the impact it's having on the ability to have free and frank discussions about artists work within the music press. Junkee this month argued the case for anonymous music reviews, particularly when reviewing artists with a massive stan culture around them. The writer Hannah Ewens was interviewed by Bitch about her book Fangirls, which is due to be published in the US soon (it was published in the UK last year), and she also talked about stan culture and how it differs from fan culture.
Also in music and subculture news, Waging Non Violence published an optimistic piece on how to be punk in a pandemic. There's also some lovely nostalgic musings on seventies punk in this piece for The Courier. Less lovely is the news that female British artists are massively underrepresented on UK radio. Vice are also maintaining that there's no such thing as independent music in an age of Coronavirus.
Covid wise, there has been some interesting news stories this month. Local lockdowns kicked in in Greater Manchester, parts of Lancashire and parts of Yorkshire at the end of last month, and just over a week later the Manchester Evening News revealed that local contact tracers in Blackburn were having far more success contact tracing people who'd been exposed to Covid than the national scheme had. The threat of micro lockdowns within lockdown also had the MEN pondering the ramifications for local politics. In a sea of misinformation and fake news, The New Scientist provided a calm and dispassionate analysis of Russia's claims to have found a coronavirus vaccine. They also assessed Sweden's Covid strategy. You can read their Coronavirus essential guide here. As the return to school beckons for students across England, Ireland and Wales, Full Fact did a report on Covid transmission risks in schools.
One of the biggest UK stories this month was the exams fiasco, with thousands of students seeing their results downgraded by a computer algorithm created by OFQUAL at the request of a UK government eager to prevent grade inflation. The Overtake produced a heartfelt response to the tragedy of thousands of students from deprived backgrounds seeing their predicted grades downgraded. Whereas the New Statesman concentrated on those ultimately responsible.
Another big story to rear its head this month was immigration, with an unwelcome return to the Brexit wars and deeply unpleasant newspaper headlines. In the midst of all the heat and anger, Full Fact took the time to answer the question 'Do refugees have to stay in the first safe country they reach?' And the answer, from a legal perspective, is No. In other news, there's a man travelling across Europe in order to write the message 'Stop Brexit' with a GPS tracker.
The New Scientist revealed that a number of cases of fatal cardiac arrests in the US could be masking opioid deaths. They also summarised studies that suggest mindfulness meditation can make depression and anxiety worse.
The i's housing reporter, Vicky Spratt, wrote a very though provoking piece about the increasing trend for converting shipping containers into housing, and what it's like to actually live in one.
Vice, meanwhile, were one of the first to report on the disputed election in Belarus, and specifically on the claim that the internet in the country was tampered with during the vote.
Shani Silver accurately satirises the 'Morning routine', Sarah Ditum swears off journalism as a career, and we end this months series of lockdown reads with a juicy deep dive into the original fake news network.
Wash your hands now.
Photo one by Rosie Kerr on Unsplash
