MinnPost Picks: on a funeral directors’ convention, more partisan media and anti-vaxxers’ use of Holocaust imagery

‘I feel like a survivor’: Inside the funeral industry’s 2021 national convention, Mic

There’s one side of COVID I haven’t spent any time thinking about: funeral directors. Throughout the pandemic, funeral home workers have put their lives on the line to hold ceremonies for the many, many people who’ve died from COVID, along with all the usual death reasons. So maybe it’s no surprise they wanted to let loose at the National Funeral Director’s Association 2021 convention and expo. But it’s not all fun and games. Writer Eleanor Cummins also focuses on a challenging dynamic that I can only imagine exists in many industries. The old guard vs. the new school, tradition vs. progress, and how the field is slowly coming into the 21st century in terms of environmental practices, LGBTQ inclusion and technology.
—Laura Lindsay, membership manager

Left-wing Midwest media outlet launching with backing from Dem donor, Politico

It used to be that you were entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts. That’s changing as big money donors on both political edges have decided they need to create their own media to feed their own facts to their own side. The excuse is that local media is fading away, but they often target locales like Twin Cities with healthy local media that just happen to be political battlegrounds.
—Peter Callaghan, state government reporter

Antivaxx Holocaust, The Sword and the Sandwich

“Culture Warlords” author Talia Bracha Lavin has been reporting on far-right extremism in the U.S., and, in this article, addresses the vile concept of anti-vaxxers’ wearing yellow stars. The yellow star was used to identify Jews during the Holocaust, marking them for extermination. Lavin breaks down how extremely offensive this practice is, particularly in the context of how the Nazis conspired to confine a typhus epidemic to the concentration camps and ghettos. Brave physicians, like Dr. Rudolf Weigl, secretly created vaccines that had to be smuggled into Jewish ghettos to battle this act of biological warfare.
—Corey Anderson, creative director

Wet’suwet’en land defenders say B.C., federal inaction prompted enforcement of Coastal GasLink eviction, The Narwhal

The Narwhal wrote about why Wet’suwet’en land defenders and their supporters issued an eviction order against Coastal GasLink workers and blocked road access to a pipeline project last week.
—Jonathan Stegall, user experience engineer