Meanderings, 3 February 2024

Florida for three weeks at this time of year for northern Illinoisans is more than enjoyable. We share a condo with Kris’s sister, take two long walks, spot a few birds (palm warblers, Florida’s buffy red shouldered hawk, red bellied woodpeckers, and ibises in abundance), and usually see gators furtively poking their eyes out of the water in their adventures of catching something worth eating. We are here just long enough to miss at least some of the frigid air and deep snow. We’ll be stopping in South Carolina to play a round of golf with a good friend.

Photo by Rick Meyers on Unsplash

Good for Connecticut:

Connecticut will cancel roughly $650 million in medical debt for an estimated 250,000 residents this year, Gov. Ned Lamont announced Friday, saying it is the first state to provide this type of relief.

The effort will liberate many residents from “the cloud” over their heads and give them more freedom to buy a home, start a business or continue with their education, Lamont told CNN. That will help them strengthen their financial standing in a state with a large wealth gap.

“It’s a debt that you had no control over,” Lamont told CNN. “It’s not like you overspent. You get hit by a health care calamity.”

Residents whose medical debt equals 5% or more of their annual income or whose household income is up to 400% of the federal poverty line, or about $125,000 in 2024, are eligible.

Those who qualify do not need to apply – they will receive letters in the mail saying their debt has been eliminated as soon as this summer. More than 1 in 10 Connecticut residents have medical debt in collections.

John Hawthorne reports on the new book Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammons:

If you’re even a sporadic listener to National Public Radio, Sarah should be familiar. She’s been a correspondent, a podcaster, a campaign reporter, guest host for All Things Consider and Morning Edition. Even then, you may not know that she grew up in an evangelical family in Kansas City², attended a conservative charismatic congregation, went to Christian school (with Bob Jones and Abeka textbooks), and graduated from a Christian College. She is also part of that first wave of millennials who had to struggle to navigate faith and culture.

Sarah’s book is one part memoir, one part reporting on leading exvangelical figures, and one part social history drawing from the leading scholars of evangelicalism. I told her that her reference list looks like my personal library. As I was reading, I would think “she should have included so-and-so” and then they’d show up in the next chapter.

Like those other memoirs referenced above, Sarah narrates the pieces of her evangelical upbringing that proved challenging: the gloss in her school textbooks and the material ignored, the impact of James Dobson’s theories of child-rearing (which have damaged at least one generation of adults), suspicion of those outside the bubble.

Good on these donors:

A Kansas youth baseball league will be able to replace a statue of Jackie Robinson that was stolen and destroyed last week after a flood of private donations – and a commitment by Major League Baseball.

Pieces of the statue were found burned in a public trash container on Tuesday, five days after it was cut off at the ankles and taken from a field for League 42, a nonprofit that provides low-cost baseball registration for children and is named for the jersey number worn by Robinson, who broke the Major League’s color barrier as its first Black player.

A week after the theft, the cost of replacing the statue is now covered, thanks to a GoFundMe campaign that has received nearly $170,000 as of Thursday morning. Bob Lutz, League 42’s founder, announced Wednesday MLB also committed to funding the replacement, writing on X it had “formalized their support for our youth.”

“We are grateful for their contribution to our mission of celebrating Jackie’s legacy through the youth of Wichita,” Lutz said.

A league source told CNN the MLB commissioner’s office and all 30 teams have committed funding toward the cost of replacing the statue and other means to support League 42.

The amount of the pledge was not immediately announced.

Good for the appendix:

Smith grew up to be a professor of anatomy at Midwestern University and editor-in-chief of a journal called The Anatomical Record. And all these decades later, Smith has made a mark in the field by studying the very organ that threw off her family's vacation plans in 1992.

She acknowledges that the appendix has a bad rap as a useless organ that can cause you pain and require emergency surgery. "But it turns out recent research shows it does have functions that can help us," she says.

NPR's Short Wave spoke to Smith about what the appendix is good for and how a future where appendicitis can be prevented or treated without emergency surgery could be on the way. …

So what are the appendix's beneficial roles?

It turns out that the appendix appears to have two related functions. The first function is supporting the immune system. The appendix has a high concentration of immune tissue, so it's acting to help the immune system fight any bad things in the gut.

The second function that it serves is what we refer to as the safe house. So this was a hypothesis that was put forward by a team from Duke University in 2007. And they argued that the appendix may serve as a safe reservoir for the beneficial gut bacteria that we have.

During times of gastrointestinal distress — you know, a diarrhea episode where all of your good gut bacteria is getting kind of flushed out of the system — the appendix is kind of this blind tube with a very narrow diameter and narrow lumen, so the good bacteria doesn't get flushed out of the appendix. The idea is it's safe during this time of gastrointestinal distress and it can then exit the appendix and recolonize this good bacteria throughout the rest of the gut.

So the appendix is kind of helping us in two ways, both within the gut: It's helping to fight off invading pathogens, but also to repopulate the gut with this beneficial bacteria after gastrointestinal issues.

Good for exercise snacks:

Maybe your day, every day, consists of largely uninterrupted sitting: commuting to work, being at a desk, going to meetings, commuting home, then lounging on the couch. If that’s the case, new research in Sports Medicine offers good news: Even short bursts of activity of a few minutes can help lower the known risks of sitting too much.

In the meta-analysis, researchers looked at 32 studies, which all included physically inactive but otherwise healthy adults. The “exercise snacks” were all achievable by study participants, such as walking for brief periods, and were done throughout a day rather than in a single session.

Researchers found that these brief bouts of movement may prompt people to work toward the recommended amount of daily activity, and could improve some health outcomes—for example, those who move more tend to be at lower risk for cardiovascular disease and most cancers, they concluded.

“Exercise snacks seem to be a feasible and safe way for people to become more physically active,” according to lead author Matthew Jones, Ph.D., senior lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at University of New South Wales Sydney in Australia.

“The health benefits of this approach are probably greatest in those who go from doing nothing to doing something, and they are likely most appealing to people who want to become more physically active but are not able or willing to do more traditional, continuous physical activity,” he told Bicycling.