What this newsletter is really, really about

In 2019, I took a profile-writing class from one of my all-time favorite writers. The first day of the class, we sat in a northern New Jersey conference room and dissected a packet of celebrity profiles we’d read in advance. We were trying to understand what made each of them great, which meant scouring them for the answers to these three questions:

• What is this story about?

• What is this story really about?

• What is this story really, really about?

This was not a joke, the writer explained. A celebrity profile might be about a particular person, but it’s really about what that person represents in the world — the greater pattern their existence illustrates, and why that pattern matters in a particular place and time.  

She continued: What a truly great profile is really, really about is what the writer sees in the celebrity that they also see in themselves — the truth they recognize in the person’s story that lights them on fire. What any story is really, really about is something universal, because it’s something that matters deeply to you.

That was 6 years ago, but it’s still a useful framework for understanding what this newsletter is trying to do.

Landmansplained will nominally be about public health, at least for now. (What is public health? Watch this space.) The main reason for this is that public health is what I know. I’m a physician (internal medicine and pediatrics + adult infectious disease, if it matters to you) and a graduate of the CDC’s disease detective program. I’ve also been a health reporter since 2015, most recently at the explanatory journalism outlet Vox.

But what this newsletter really hopes to do is show readers that public health is nuanced. Lots of people out there talk in very binary ways about lots of issues, including public health issues (the Covid response! vaping! sex ed! the CDC!). These conversations suggest there are only two answers to public health questions: a right one and a wrong one. That misses a ton of messy middle, where people with different values can have wildly different and simultaneously correct responses to the same dilemma. Ignoring that middle isn’t just inaccurate — it’s also deeply alienating to people who correctly sense most issues are actually complicated.

What matters most to me — what this is really, really about — is getting us to talk to each other, even when we disagree. Most of that is about listening and curiosity, so I intend to do a lot of listening here (more on that later). It’s also about filtering out bad-faith engagement, because we don’t have time to waste (more on that later, too).

I’m interested in lots of things that aren’t really public health, and when I want to go off-piste, I will. Since we’re still in the experimental phase, the goals here might change some in the next few months. Whatever happens, I’ll be eager to write about the things you want to read about — so please email me any tips and ideas at [email protected].