A recommendation

I met Sarah Steimer when I was first figuring out how to make a newsletter early last year. She is a culture writer in Chicago, and as we muddled through the course we were taking, she immediately stood out for her funny, self-aware, and down-to-earth takes. When the course ended, we started up a weeklyish hourlong co-working practice as an effort to keep us accountable to our newsletter goals. I sputtered — it’s ok, I got there — but she took flight, launching her very funny, very smart culture newsletter within a couple of months. 

I subscribed to Hater’s Guide to Living Well immediately, mostly out of affection for Sarah, but it quickly became something I wait for and then read with relish once it hits the inbox. The way she finds joy and humor in the inanity of daily life and the bullshit firehose that is pop culture makes the smiles, and her little life notes are both validating and inspiring. I love having her in my eyeballs and I think you might, too.

A correction

The email version of last week’s post said there were no animal data to support an mRNA vaccine for Ebola. That was incorrect: There were no published human data.

The 4 stages of Girl, What?

I’ve been losing sleep while preparing to hike the Tour du Mont Blanc, a 2-week, 110-mile up-down-up-down in the Alps. I’m more apprehensive than anything because I’m still dealing with the fallout of this, which I got from this, which I got while doing this. (Coincidentally — or not at all — I’m going on this trip with the author of the very good newsletter at that last link.)

I leave tonight, and over the past week, my two remaining brain cells have been working overtime grasping at ways to minimize my pack weight, which has meant a lot less time thinking about everything happening in the world. Which is why I’m still a little hung up on something I heard last week.

After the news broke that a smattering of New World Screwworm (NWS) cases had turned up in Texas, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins went on the old CNBC Squawk Box and said the parasite “is not a disease, it’s just a little pest.”

I went through all the stages of Girl, What? beginning with self-doubt: Had I been taking the definition of “disease” for granted all this time? I’d thought that a disease was any pathology that caused dysfunction in any part of a person’s body, including their mind. NWS in particular seemed to qualify as a zoonotic disease, which is an infection that can pass from animals to people. Was I missing something?