Taylor van Doren, PhD
@taylorvandoren.bsky.social
550 followers 210 following 560 posts
Asst Prof of Medical Anthropology at High Point 🟣 Former NSF postdoc at UAA ❄️ Biological Anth PhD from Mizzou 💀 Pandemics, inequality, demography, diseases! 👩🏻‍💻 she/her/hers 🩵
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taylorvandoren.bsky.social
pandemic studies is community health
pandemic studies is public health
pandemic studies is global health

people may have "pandemic studies fatigue" but some of us were here before, during, and will be long after, because we need continuous pandemic studies.
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
This would have been enough to end a political career permanently not that long ago
propublica.org
Kristi Noem, while governor of South Dakota, supplemented her roughly $130,000 salary by secretly accepting $80,000 donated to a political nonprofit she was affiliated with, records show.

She never disclosed this income on federal ethics forms.

(Published June)
Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations
A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics requirem...
www.propublica.org
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
I'm obsessed with not just the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded to cheeto in command, but that the explanation of why it WAS awarded to María Corina Machado included a paragraph on why it would NEVER be awarded to cheeto in command
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
I have so many potential papers with just analyses and results finished that will probably never get done. I need a team to finish these off so they see the light. There’s just not enough time for me to get to them. If you need something to do, let me know - you can have it all
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
You'll be able to sync up with the 5G soon. Mine only just connected last week. Just keep getting the shots and you'll be good.
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
One of the most important things to remember right now is that you have to keep it 100 on the land, the sea, the sky
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
okay what the f*ck is this. sorry for saying f*ck on the picture of a pastor. but literally. every new picture is worse than the one before.
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
Dusting off the Newfoundland death records. Hello old friends, haven't seen you since dissertation station.
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
I just declined to revise a manuscript for a journal for the first time. I thought maybe it's better not to force it and one of the reviews would have been near impossible to overcome (both based on what they said and their attitude about the paper). So, it feels bad, but here we are.
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
The last time I went to the movie theater was April 2019 for Avengers: Endgame. I was 8 weeks pregnant with my daughter. Today I took that daughter to see her first movie in theaters! We saw Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie, and she was a perfect movie theater citizen.
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
Also yes, this is my map, and yes, it's possible I'm the only person who has made one of these to put Missouri in dark green. I am from Missouri and it deserves more respect honestly.
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
I've seen a lot of these maps lately, and I just wanted to say that I think a lot of them are way too definitive and that it's silly to color the entire map red between California and New York. Surely you can hold space for more nuance than that.
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
I realized something. In the 1st half of the semester in my Mass Media & Society class, I taught the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death", whose author argued that the future was Huxleyian rather than Orwellian. My student's had read neither 1984 nor BNW. There's a message in here somewhere
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
Okay, it hasn't occurred to me in a while that I could just buy a hard copy of the Dictionary, and now I'm like "I should buy this hard copy version of the Dictionary"
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
The pope is now radical left (I assume is what they will say)
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
Okay I was planning on teaching Death Without Weeping (1993) in one of my upper level ethnography classes, but now flipping through this book again years later I'm afraid it's way too intense. I hate that I'm even thinking this way. This is an important book (flawed, yes, but important).
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
Deciding in real time to possibly change an ethnography on my syllabus next semester solely because I cannot find the one I originally wanted to teach on my bookshelves
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
so I asked chatgpt a coding question and the whole thing is just absolute shite. nothing works and if I thought it could get confused, then I would think it was confused - but it doesn't have a brain, so it's not thinking at all
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
this is, quite simply, psychotic
chrismurphyct.bsky.social
This is delusional but you don’t have to read the whole thing.

Boils down to: he’s shutting down the government because he thinks he’s a king.
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
uh I have just found out about TPUSA's Professor Watchlist and I have never wanted to more immediately leave academia than after seeing this website. I am so terrified right now, it needs to be said
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
Why are two-word surnames kicking y’all’s asses so much
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
To a page titled “Elderly,” which was all about people over age 65. Um, no???? An Elder is not just an old person???? If we’re gonna have AI in everything can we at least make it work please???
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
I was revisiting a paper I wrote 3 yrs ago published in an Elsevier journal, and I noticed “AI-generated topics”: words in your article you could click on and it would take you to an AI-gen page to “learn more”

I noticed “Elder” was highlighted in my paper, so I clicked on it and it took me…
taylorvandoren.bsky.social
How did we get to the point where being able to write well on your own is an “advantage” in this world instead of a baseline ability? I’m horrified by this.