Tuesday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Carrie Arnold examines our current state of knowledge about the prevalence and effects of long COVID. Tanya Lewis discusses the particularly acute risks COVID-19 creates in the course of a pregnancy. And Violet Blue writes about the dissonance involved in an ongoing pandemic having been erased from our culture. 

- Shandel Menezes reports on the wholesale corporate buyout of what was previously affordable housing, with the result that a basic human need and right is being priced out of reach. Cory Doctorow discusses how dollar stores and other corporate giants are systematically squeezing out every possible dime (and undermining every possible competitor) from rural and underserved communities. And Marc Fawcett-Atkinson points out how the federal government's current subsidy for groceries in northern communities services primarily to goose profits rather than to make food available. 

- Robert Kuttner discusses what comes next as neoliberalism is exposed as having nothing to offer the vast majority of people other than exploitation and precarity. And Martin Regg Cohn argues that the future of democracy depends on our winning battles for information, truth and equality over well-funded forces pushing the opposite of each.  

- Finally, Scharon Harding reports on the EU's proposed effort to entrench some right of repair for consumer electronics - though its plans are based on keeping control in the hands of manufacturers rather than consumers and independent providers.