Period 15
Book news
My tour dates are now all official! I really hope you’ll come see me at some of these venues.
April 26th at The Literary Book Bar in Champaign IL with Toby Beauchamp
May 8th at Town Hall Seattle in Seattle WA with Angela Garbes (ticketed)
May 9th Science on Tap at the Alberta Rose Theatre (ticketed)
May 15th at Politics & Prose in Washington DC with Ed Yong
May 16th at Labyrinth Books in Princeton NJ with Catherine Clune-Taylor
May 24th at Women & Children First in Chicago IL with Heather Corinna
I also have a few nice reviews to share from The New Yorker and Science News! You can also find me on the Smarty Pants podcast, and WILL’s The 21st Show, which were both really fun. Next week there will be more interviews released and more reviews!
Only four days until my book is out, after which I’ll totally stop talking about it, right?
Right???
In newsletter news – there are now enough of you that I have to move up to the paying tier for Buttondown. Which I’m happy to do – and I’m not adding a subscription fee. As a professor I see this as the cost of doing science communication work, which is an extension of my job. It’s not the same as if I were producing a body of work as a freelancer whose salary did not include an expectation of this sort of work.
Tell your friends to subscribe if you think they’d like to learn a weird period fact and read my randomly curated links that are mostly here to remind you that in a pandemic we are supposed to care about each other and not abandon those who are immune compromised, disabled, elderly, and/or cannot afford to be sick for a few weeks and lose their wages or get fired!
Links
People with cognitive complaints from long COVID have reduced blood flow to their brains, especially the frontal cortex.
Three years later, COVID is still a health threat. Journalism needs to reflect that, by Kendra Pierre-Louis. The whole thing is fantastic but as I look toward a book tour that I’m both excited by and nervous about – because I am greatly increasing my risk of getting COVID by doing them – I thought I’d at least share this part:
“This idea that we should not shame people for ignoring Covid recommendations — even when it was costing lives — became pervasive. So much so that in an early 2021 article I wrote for Slate about the social benefits of shame, I noted that, “regardless of how abhorrent a person’s behavior is, apparently the worst thing you can do is shame them for it.”
What was less obvious to me at the time, but has become clearer in the intervening years, is that many in the press did not, in fact, oppose all uses of shame. The same news outlets that were saying with one breath not to shame people who bucked Covid restrictions were with another shaming those who continued to be concerned about Covid once vaccines emerged. One example: “Very liberal Americans remain more worried about the virus than almost any other demographic group, including the elderly,” wrote David Leonhardt in an August 2022 column. “That pattern does not seem consistent with scientific reality, given that the very liberal are younger than any other ideological group and that Covid’s effects are far worse for older people.”
Bias is baked into Leonhardt’s analysis. By focusing on one metric — age — he skips past others, such as the fact that liberals tend to be more diverse and people of color are more likely to live in multigenerational households, where a young person risks not only infecting themselves with Covid but also spreading it to a parent or a grandparent. Nationwide, more than 200,000 children have lost a parent or caregiver to Covid, with teens and people of color most represented. None of those factors show up in Leonhardt’s reasoning about why a youthful demographic might be concerned about Covid.”
We often think of breastfeeding as free because we do not value domestic labor, nor breastfeeding bodies. In “No such thing as a free lunch: The direct marginal costs of breastfeeding,” published a few weeks ago in the Journal of Perinatology, the authors show the many ways breastfeeding is costly, especially for lower-income workers. I am glad to have breastfed both my kids, for almost six years combined, and I’d do it again. That doesn’t change the cost of the pump and pumping equipment, the hours lost, the multiple rounds of mastitis, how carefully I had to monitor my eating and drinking the second time around (I’d hemorrhaged badly after kid two and it took a very, very long time to replete my blood, not to mention I remained severely dehydrated for a while and therefore did not experience a high supply when my milk first came in). Neither of my kids were good with anything but breastmilk the first six months, and the first one didn’t even take a bottle until seven or eight months in, which was intensely constraining on my life and my travel.
Just as I discuss in PERIOD, breastfeeding is another way much of the public world doesn’t make room for having a body. The reason I’m always posting about COVID stuff is that the ways we stopped caring about disease transmission is another symptom of this. Our material bodies matter – caring about how all bodies can thrive is part of the life’s work of being human. We can choose to care more about this even when our governments bow to corporate interests. Humans were meant to be cooperative, communal, and caring. And even if we weren’t – wouldn’t we rather?
Weird period fact
Years ago I read a few papers suggesting that hormonal contraception is less effective the more you weigh. This was on my mind as I saw a new paper recently argue that we could reduce the dosage of hormonal contraception without sacrificing efficacy, and thus reduce side effects even further. So, I looked to see what the current literature says.
Fifteen or more years later, the story is not that much clearer. Overall it seems our best guess is that efficacy does not appreciably change for heavier or larger people across most preparations. However the studies used to determine this are for the most part very small and/or underpowered. So, for instance, the Cochrane review I found on the topic comes out on the side of weight not mattering to efficacy, yet the review itself does show that the findings are somewhat mixed.
I’ve been learning about clinical trials for a committee I’m on, and I’m struck by the fact that a lot of the time these trials are disincentivized to have anything but the most homogeneous of samples so as not to introduce certain times of variation. But this means that there are often BMI cutoffs, which means early phase testing of contraceptives may not always include people who are heavier. I’m not sure how much phase 4 and post-market testing works to include people with BMIs over 30, 35, or 40 – so we just don’t have a lot of research to say for sure.
Sources: Dragoman, M. V., Simmons, K. B., Paulen, M. E., & Curtis, K. M. (2017). Combined hormonal contraceptive (CHC) use among obese women and contraceptive effectiveness: A systematic review. Contraception, 95(2), 117–129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.contraception.2016.10.010
Hormonal contraceptives for contraception in overweight or obese women—Lopez, LM - 2016 | Cochrane Library. (n.d.). https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD008452.pub4/full