Period #4, A Not-So-Hidden Book Gift Guide
These newsletters are coming at irregular intervals – just like adolescent and perimenopausal periods often do! I’m going to keep aiming for putting something out each Friday but until we’re after the holidays there will definitely be some skipped periods. (Who wants a period every week anyway?)
This week I’ve been getting preliminary research done for a new project, which has had me finally deciding to switch from Endnote to Zotero if only because I need a better place to store my 5,500+ pdfs (and 9,900+ citations) than an unwieldy, increasingly slow folder on my desktop (that yes is also cloud synced). Anyone have advice for someone trying to batch upload thousands and thousands of pdfs? I’ve been doing it at night while watching Wednesday.
A few cool links that are secretly also a gift guide if you are like me and buy lots of books this time of year (and these are just regular links, no affiliate links here)
1. I have been following Alice Wong’s writing and activism for a while now. Her medical crisis this summer brought into stark relief for me the institutional and governmental failures to ensure people get to live in community and get the care they need. If you are not familiar with her story or disability activism more generally, read this interview from last week and then pick up her new memoir Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life.
2. Perhaps you will be with family this winter. Perhaps they are racist. A lot of the polite advice is that you should “under-react” in the holiday season. And maybe that’s the safest option for you! But maybe also you want to finally be the person who for the first time actually and openly resists problematic discourse at the holiday table. If so take a read of Saira Rao’s piece “Dear White Women: It’s Time to Say Something to Those Racist Family Members” and then while you’re at it maybe buy the book she co-authored with Regina Jackson White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How To Do Better.
3. I’ll admit it: when Emily Oster first wrote Expecting Better I sent it without reading it myself to new parents I knew. I was taken with the “data on pregnancy is total crap” argument because, well, it’s true. Data on pregnancy is crap. However not too long after I realized she devotes a lot of time to the idea that alcohol is ok in pregnancy (I’m sorry to say that unequivocally it is not) and that increasingly her beat is cherrypicked data to advance provocations that make people feel good doing bad things.
And that makes me mad.
Thankfully, much smarter people than me have written scathing critiques of Oster’s particularly dangerous perspective on family risk and covid. Dr. Adia Benton offers her own thinking and links to some of the best critiques in this Snowzzies award piece. If you are looking for book recs to go with this last link I have three though only one I’ve read so far: Benton’s own book HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone, but also I see two new books as good companion pieces to this read, Steven Thrasher’s The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide and Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want.
One weird period fact
If we expand the definition of “weird” a bit here from how I’ve been using it and towards “are you effing kidding me” then I have a good one for you today. You all know by now I’m a big fan of covid mitigation and not intentionally infecting billions of people with a disease with profound long-term consequences, yes? And that air quality, air filtration, and masking are all crucial to this?
Well, it matters for your ovaries, too.
You may recall last year I wrote a piece for American Scientist about how phthalates and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals affect menstrual cycles – this was a chapter we ended up pulling from my upcoming book. Something I only talk about a little bit there is the fact that air pollution – particulate matter (PM) mostly from engine combustion and factory waste – is part of the equation. In a new paper in Environmental Research, scientists looked at the impact of air pollution on ovarian reserve over ten years in Shandong Province, China. They found a negative association, meaning as PM exposure increased ovarian reserve (measured by anti-Mullerian hormone levels) decreased. This adds to the growing body of evidence that air pollution is harmful to health and may be part of the reason we see other fertility issues in certain populations on the rise (e.g., preterm birth, miscarriage, infertility, sperm count and motility decreases). This kind of pollution can also come from building materials and poor ventilation – so going inside doesn’t fix things.
We need global, national, and local commitments to clean air, and healthy workplaces should exceed current ventilation and filtration standards. In the meantime if you can, consider additional air filtration in your home, and MASK UP when you are in other indoor spaces. If you want to get pregnant or are pregnant, it’s good for you and any fetus/potential fetus to both avoid covid and avoid air pollution.
Source: Pang et al (2023). Air pollution exposure and ovarian reserve impairment in Shandong province, China: The effects of particulate matter size and exposure window, Environmental Research, 218: 115056, doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2022.115056