Period 16: Pub week!!!
The book is finally out and… amazingly nothing has changed in my life. My oldest kid is still impossible to get out the door in time for school. My geriatric dog still poops in the house.
But cool things have happened, nonetheless!
Perhaps biggest is that an op-ed I wrote for the Washington Post, which is an adapted excerpt from the book, has gotten massive attention. It was so popular that WaPo put it in the print edition this past week, in their top picks newsletter, and in a “readers react” feature that highlighted some of the top reactions to the piece.
I also have an extended excerpt in WIRED this week, drawing from the final chapter on how we might imagine period futures.
I was on the Talk Nerdy Podcast this week –Cara Santa Maria is an amazing host! Two more interviews will be out next week that I’m excited to share as well.
And finally I was on a segment of this week’s NPR Science Friday, interviewed by THE Maddie Sofia.
I am an academic and our lives are full of rejection and dead ends. So I tend to anticipate bad things happening instead of good things. But I have to say… this week is trying really hard to make an optimist out of me.
(The real story is that the most critical people are of course the ones who are the truest optimists, since we’re the ones who have the clearest sense of how the world SHOULD be and we fight to make it happen. But I am grumbly and cantankerous on the outside.)
I hope you’ve read enough excerpts and newsletters at this point that you want to read the book – and that if you like it you tell a friend. In the meantime I’ve got some links and a weird period fact to share!
Links
The New York Times just ran a piece, “The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social,” on the various ways people are seeking community online as social media platforms decay into ad machines. I’ve tried to get into Discord and Mastodon, and know I should try harder with LinkedIn. It’s hard when so many of my friendships and professional contacts were formed through Twitter (as much of a dumpster fire as it was, and as much of an aircraft-carrier-sized dumpster fire it now is). Anyway, I mainly wanted to mention this article because it discusses Minus, an app that allows you to post no more than 100 times, which was developed by Ben Grosser who’s also here at the University of Illinois.
Ed Yong is back from sabbatical! His first piece back at The Atlantic is all about long COVID – in particular how our intentional ignorance about it is a way for people to pretend the pandemic is over. Go read the whole thing, then sit with the final paragraph:
Most of all, long COVID is a huge impediment to the normalization of COVID. It’s an insistent indicator that the pandemic is not actually over; that policies allowing the coronavirus to spread freely still carry a cost; that improvements such as better indoor ventilation are still wanting; that the public emergency may have been lifted but an emergency still exists; and that millions cannot return to pre-pandemic life. “Everyone wants to say goodbye to COVID,” Duggal told me, “and if long COVID keeps existing and people keep talking about it, COVID doesn’t go away.” The people who still live with COVID are being ignored so that everyone else can live with ignoring it.
I found an article that I think this crowd will find interesting – at least, either you are really, really into menstrual cycles, in like an uncomfortable way, way more than me, OR you are more likely someone who is generally science curious (OR somewhere in the middle). If you’re in the science curious group, I think there is a chance that you also think about how science gets communicated, what barriers there are to sharing it, disseminating it, and how we actually distinguish between high and low quality work. This is a really accessible, well-written paper (one co-author is ANOTHER badass friend here at Illinois, Jodi Schneider) that considers all these issues. For instance: preprints were supposed to get science in the hands of the people faster! But then it’s not always clear to non-specialists that these works are not vetted and many never get formally published. Then we must uphold peer review! But weird and bad papers make it past peer review and either persist, or get retracted, and those retractions don’t even necessarily lead to their being cited less. How should we think about the various issues of what it means to produce “authoritative” science? You’ll have to read to find out.
Weird period fact
This one comes from a follower on Twitter! They sent me this Wikipedia page about “menstrual extraction” in response to my WIRED excerpt - this was a device that helped extract the uterine lining (and anything else up in there), developed by guerrilla activists in the 1970s. What I admire about this effort is that it was claimed to be a way of getting rid of menses, as a way to deny the additional claim that it was a unique form of abortion. As you may remember, other weeks I’ve discussed that long acting reversible contraception inhibits a lot of autonomy of the patient, often requiring a lot of doctor visits, doctor insertion and removal, prescriptions, and more. Personally I’d want safety research done before I’d use a device like this. But these are the positions people find themselves in when they have so few ways to exert autonomy over their bodies.