Read this for some guilty laughter Don’t bother getting the buy-in of local people. Don’t worry about the sustainability of your ‘research project’ – worry about meeting deadlines for grant applications. Don’t spend too much time trying to understand the country which is at the heart of your project; instead, fill your research paper with references to "lots of poverty and death, helpless people, corrupt national or local governments, [and] something about colonialism".

Health policy consultant Desmond T Jumbam’s brilliant satirical editorial in BMJ Global Health is a crash course in everything that is wrong with ‘global health’ – a project ostensibly about globalising the public health discourse, but in effect another hegemonic tool in the hands of the predominantly white, western elite within this field. I am not even the target of Jumbam’s satire, yet as a journalist writing on global mental health, I found myself laughing awkwardly, almost guiltily, as I read, then reread this little masterpiece.

Tanmoy, Sanity correspondent BMJ Global Health: ‘How (not) to write about global health’ (reading time: 10 minutes)
Why some men refuse to wear masks People refusing to wear masks has become one of the more baffling and frustrating phenomena of the Covid-19 pandemic. It seems like such a simple thing to do to protect oneself and others. There are many theories on why this particular measure has been met with such resistance, but this article comes closest to explaining it. The anti-mask movement seems to be primarily male, because masks trigger in men the same sense of emasculation that condom wearing does.

That ‘masculine swagger’ as a highly valued quality is back in fashion under a president like Donald Trump who subscribes to notions of masculinity that are performative and celluloid. Mask wearing is linked not only to that toxicity but also to how society as a whole is oriented towards glorifying independence and rule breaking. Bleak but really clarifying.

Nesrine, Better Politics correspondent Scientific American: ‘The condoms of the face: why some men refuse to wear masks’ (reading time: eight minutes)
Why the search for extraterrestrial life tells us more about ourselves Clara Sousa-Silva is amazing. She’s an astrochemist who has fallen in love with phosphine, a weird gas produced on rocky planets almost exclusively by life in environments without oxygen. This week, she was part of the team that discovered what might be the first signs of life on another planet, in the atmosphere of Venus.

To hear her talk about why she does what she does is like opening a window into the core of the knowledge about what life itself is, and how diversity and creativity are what make life possible. What is toxic and deadly to one species (phosphine to humans) could be the basis of an incredible alien ecosystem. And people like Sousa-Silva who celebrate that diversity are the people who will change humanity’s view of the known universe and what it means to be ourselves.

Eric, Climate correspondent YouTube: ‘Finding unusual aliens’ (viewing time: 21 minutes)

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