0:06
against easy definitions
I think a lot about how social media has given us a whole new type of special problem: it’s pushed us to seek, both externally and internally, easy definitions. And that is something that has become so deeply engrained into how we think today, that if we’re not careful, we can base entire life decisions around it.
I see it as an issue that’s been perpetuated by social media and then trickled down into all sorts of other things: how we navigate identities, relationships, and more. Never before in history has anyone had to write a 150-character bio that had to convey seemingly everything there is to know about them to strangers. Never has anyone had to curate a snapshot of themselves that should be immediately comprehensible, easily categorisable, that so much might hinge on: social perception, career opportunities. Until today.
Social media encourages what I think of as the fragmentation of ourselves: the need to figure out how to categorise ourselves, in order for people who stumble upon us to immediately understand what we’re about. A need to be easily defined. I speak to creative friends who are putting themselves out there and are haunted by the perpetual struggle of having to figure out how to convey all their passions, all the different sides of themselves, and all that they care about and create, in a way that others can understand immediately. Social media gurus will tell everyone to ‘pick a niche’, but no human is a niche. We’re multifaceted, multi-passionate, and impossible to categorise easily – that’s what makes people interesting.
My favourite thing when getting to know people is slowly uncovering their contradictions. You meet someone and decide you perceive them as this type of person in your mind, only to later see sides of them that don’t actually fit in with that image. Social media makes us feel like we understand each other based on what we see – we assign ourselves categories and labels and share them with each other, and forget how one-dimensional that really is. To me, the most interesting people evade categorisation; they are full of fun mysteries and contradictions and resist forming an identity that’s so solid it will hinder them from being explorers.
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
While building my career, I’ve struggled too often with the fact that I need to convey, in a quick and easy way, who I am and what I do. I am always exploring; my identity is forever changing, and I am careful not to fall into a trap of identifying too much with one thing and forgetting that I have the freedom to be whatever I feel drawn to be. For that reason, I’ve always found it suffocating hearing the advice that I’d have to pick a niche for the sake of being easier to define. I am deeply interested in a hundred different things, and every season of life brings new passions and rabbit holes and explorations; discovering them is one of the most exciting parts of life. We lose ourselves in something, only to end up finding more of ourselves through it. This exploration is an essential part of becoming.
If ‘picking a niche’ is something we do for algorithms, for the sake of being easy to categorise and understand, then resisting that is what we can do for ourselves. We have to intentionally leave space for our natural evolution, and resist falling into a place where we feel like we have to stick with something just because that is what we’ve declared we are. Here’s what I am: I am curious, I am excited, I am optimistic, I am creative, I love learning and exploring and talking to people and digging deep into ideas. I am also a writer, an entrepreneur, a speaker, a content creator, an author, a photographer, a podcast host. I love books and fashion and art and film and travel and food and music and nature and on and on and on. All of these things are part of myself, we can hold equal love for a dozen things just as we can for people. We all contain multitudes, and social media is just a fragmented glimpse into that. A niche helps algorithms, it doesn’t help people – we are beings meant to explore and hold multiple truths and contradictions all at once.
My favourite people in history are those you couldn’t ever describe in one sentence. Richard Feynman was a Nobel-prize winning physicist, and he was also an artist, a musician, a writer, and more. Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman is the book I’ve gifted to friends most often: it is a biography that’s so fun to read, because it shows us what a life is like when it’s unapologetically led by the values of curiosity and exploration. You expect Feynman to be one way, then he surprises you again and again by being something completely different. Uncovering every contradiction is a delight – it shatters the neat category you place him into in your mind little by little. Similarly, I grew up loving David Bowie and his music.
3:24
They Killed the Man Who Put the Bible in Your Language
History shows the church once treated a Bible anyone could read as a threat. In 1536 William Tyndale was strangled and burned for translating Scripture into plain English, and earlier John Wycliffe met the same fate after his bones were exhumed. The motive wasn’t theft—it was control; when people could read the text themselves, they weren’t dependent on clergy to explain it. The article points out that the original biblical call to “search the Scriptures” was meant as encouragement, not a warning against private reading. It argues we don’t need a priest as a gatekeeper, and offers a plain‑language guide to the passages that often make readers quit.
3:54
I Got The Shelf Back
This morning I told you about Tyndale. Strangled and burned for putting the book in plain words.
Now an update on my end.
The store is back.
Some of you know it went dark. It got hijacked months ago. Work I bled over, locked behind a screen I could not open. I let it sit because fighting for it felt like fighting fog.
I stopped letting it sit.
I got the account back. Then I tore it to the studs and rebuilt it. New shelf. One place. Every guide I keep pointing you to.
The verses that get twisted, laid open. The passages where people quit, walked through line by line. Plain words. No seminary. No fog. No priest between you and the page.
This is the help they once burned men for. And for the first time in months, all of it sits in one open place.
Walk the shelf: https://biblicalman.gumroad.com
Go look. Then send it to the one person who was told they were not qualified to read it.
4:31
Ordinary Mysteries: Stories from an Unfinished Town
These are stories about ordinary people in an ordinary town.
No one is the hero.
No one possesses the answers.
They gather in diners, churches, waiting rooms, living rooms, and funeral homes. They fall in love, disappoint one another, bury parents, worry about their children, question old beliefs, laugh unexpectedly, and continue with the difficult work of being human.
Their lives overlap. Their stories do not proceed in straight lines.
Like life itself, they remain unfinished.
This is the second story in the Ordinary Mysteries series. If you'd like to meet these characters from the beginning, you can read Part One, The Thursday Table.
People often imagined that working in hospice meant becoming accustomed to death.
Maria had never found that to be true.
What she became accustomed to was something much stranger.
She became accustomed to the different ways people waited.
Some waited by talking. Some by cleaning. Some by searching the internet for miracle treatments everyone else had already ruled out. Some became experts overnight in medications whose names they could barely pronounce. Others sat quietly beside the bed, holding a hand that no longer squeezed back.
Very few people knew how to simply remain.
After eleven years at the hospice center, Maria had stopped believing there was a right way.
There were only different forms of love.
By Thursday morning she had already worked three consecutive twelve-hour shifts. The fatigue she carried was not dramatic enough for strangers to notice. It simply settled into her movements, making everything take a little longer than it had ten years ago. She climbed the steps to Sam’s diner without hurrying, knowing the others would already be there.
The bell above the door announced her arrival.
Sam looked up from behind the counter.
“There she is.”
He reached automatically for the coffee pot.
The Thursday table had become one of those habits nobody remembered creating. No invitations had ever been issued. No one had decided to make it a tradition. It had simply happened the way certain paths appear through a field after enough people choose the same direction.
Harold looked up from the newspaper.
“Morning, Maria.”
Elaine slid over without being asked.
“You look exhausted.”
Maria smiled.
“I’ve looked worse.”
Elaine considered her for a moment.
“That’s true.”
Tyler laughed into his coffee.
Jenna was already halfway through grading a stack of essays. Sophie was reading something on her phone that seemed to require equal measures of concentration and disbelief.
Outside, someone walked a golden retriever past the front window. Across the street the florist arranged buckets of flowers on the sidewalk, although the heat would have them drooping before lunch. A garbage truck rumbled slowly through the intersection.
Ordinary Thursday things.
Sam filled Maria’s mug.
The conversation picked up where it always seemed to, as though the week between Thursdays was merely a long pause. Some stories no longer required explanation. They simply belonged to the table now.
“Long week?”
She wrapped both hands around the warm ceramic before answering.
“Full.”
Sam nodded.
He had learned years ago that people often answered different questions than the ones they had been asked. Sometimes that was where the truth lived.
Nobody pressed her.
That was one of the reasons she kept coming back.
People who spent their lives helping others often developed an unfortunate habit of trying to rescue silence before it had finished speaking. The Thursday table seemed unusually resistant to that temptation.
The conversation drifted toward summer gardens.
Elaine insisted tomatoes no longer tasted the way they had when she was young.
“They’re bred to survive shipping instead of becoming tomatoes.”
Tyler said every generation believed fruit used to taste better.
“Because it did,” Elaine replied.
Harold folded his newspaper.
“I suspect memory has improved more tomatoes than sunlight ever did.”
Even Elaine smiled at that.
Maria listened while stirring cream into her coffee. She liked watching conversations move the way creeks moved around stones, changing direction without anyone deciding they should.
Her thoughts wandered back to Tuesday afternoon.
Mr. Ellison had been unconscious most of the day. His daughter had spent hours reading aloud from a Louis L’Amour novel she wasn’t entirely sure he could hear. His son had fixed the blinds twice, then apologized for fixing them. The grandson had driven nine hours in silence because he wasn’t ready for music.
Just before sunset, Mr.
7:35
What About When a Woman Kills a Man? A Feminist Responses to the Misogynists.
My next two essays will be a reading list for global feminist solidarity (oh, and I’ll be adding more reading lists; they + previous ones are archived HERE), and a piece on a real-life traditionally matrilineal society, and what life is like for women who live in that state today (based on personal knowledge & research from women in that state). At least one of these will be paywalled, possibly both. If you’d like access to read those essays and my full archive and to support my anti-rape advocacy in the real world, please sign up for a paid subscription.
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Have you heard of the Siya Goyal case yet? Siya Goyal is a twenty year old woman who has been charged with killing her twenty-six year old fiancé, Ketan Agarwal. On June 18, she allegedly pushed him off a cliff at centuries-old Lohagad Fort. The case is being very hotly debated and covered by both traditional media and social media in India.
The marriage had been arranged by Ketan’s uncle, who insisted it was a good one. They both held degrees, both were from Hindu families, and it wouldn’t be amiss to guess it was a good caste match. The problem was that Siya had a boyfriend already, Chetan Chaudhary. Videos have surfaced showing them celebrating her birthday in 2024.
Both Siya and Chetan have reportedly confessed to police. Ketan’s family are reporting that she could have declined the match and marriage, because no one was forcing it. They are also reporting that she attempted to murder push him to his death at the same ancient fort on June 14. She had them claimed that she was merely trying to push him out of the way of a snake. Investigators are also pointing to her lover Chetan wearing a hoodie to the fort on the morning of the murder, when temperatures had reached 33 c (over 91 f), and that he didn’t bring his cell/mobile phone with him to the site of the murder.
Reddit and YouTube rumors are reporting that he told investigators that they killed Ketan because she didn’t want to bring dishonor to her family. Given class, Westernization (eg., Siya’s social media show her writing in English and wearing Western clothes), and urbanity, it is likely that they did not approve of Chetan, and they pressured for the marriage with Ketan rather than forced it. The family-oriented dynamics of Indian culture play a role, too; one that would be different in individualistic American/Western culture.
Siya Goyal came from an affluent family in Pune, Maharashtra, India. A sophisticated, wealthy city full of universities with a literacy rate that’s higher the U.S.’s1. It’s located in India’s wealthiest state. Ketan’s family was supposedly even wealthier, and he worked as chief marketing officer for their real estate development group. Their families reportedly spent ₹14 crore (140 million rupees, about $1,483,000 USD) on their planned wedding, arranging for two private planes to fly guests into a palace.
As with news stories anywhere in the world, the affluence adds a layer of glamor and intrigue, and fascination for people As with victims around the world, wealthy and higher class ones receive more attention.
Indian men, especially of the men’s rights and anti-feminist variety, are especially fixated on the murder as evidence that women are violent and men are truly suffering under this violence. They are using this as a reason to bash feminism and feminists. One Reddit post I saw exclaimed Hypocrisy of Feminists regarding Siya Goyal Case; and there are more in that vein. Calling women hypocrites for their silence on the case. Women aren’t silent about this though, I’ve across plenty of posts in which Indian women were bashing her “tacky” clothes and “ugly” face.
Let me point out a few things to these men: I am a feminist advocate, activist, and writer who is writing about the case. If the case is proven, Siya Goyal should be vilified as any male murderer would be. Murdering a young man instead of, say, running away with her lover is an act of selfishness.
10:52
Can video games help us better understand quantum mechanics?
The world of quantum video games is vast – there are hundreds that are either inspired by quantum mechanics or use quantum computers in their development. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan explores how these could change our understanding of quantum physics, or even help us make better devices
11:08
Ancient human DNA found on cave art for the first time
DNA from ancient humans has been found on a prehistoric cave painting and on cave walls, demonstrating the potential to one day identify individual artists and resolve the debate over Neanderthals' artistic abilities
11:21
I have a 100 per cent chance of getting cancer due to a rare gene
A rare variant of a gene called TP53 means Tracy Hutchinson has an extreme risk of developing cancer anywhere in her body, causing endless anxiety and requiring regular whole-body MRIs and other screening
11:33
The irony of the hantavirus quarantine
This week, the hantavirus outbreak officially ended. The Americans who had been quarantining can finally go get a coffee in public again, because we are past the 42-day window that defines the Andes virus incubation period.
CDC and HHS are calling the containment a success. And it is. A lot of unglamorous work went into keeping it small—with WHO leadership from the beginning; experts in global migration, rodent-borne disease, and special pathogens who understand this virus; the biocontainment teams in Omaha; the local and state health departments doing the daily monitoring.
But one thing also can’t be ignored: the Administration’s response was dripping with absolute, extreme irony.
American citizens were ordered to be held in a federal facility against their will after CDC’s own medical reviewer and other outside experts recommended they be allowed to be monitored at home. The orders were signed by Jay Bhattacharya as acting CDC director. This is the same guy who built a public profile arguing that the Covid-19 response went too far against medical freedom, now taking away more freedom from U.S. citizens than CDC scientists deemed necessary. (And an Administration that continues to discredit, undermine, and disparage scientists working during the Covid-19 response.) Eventually, after pushback from public health and states, the White House and HHS let the cruise ship passengers go quarantine at home, but also suggested extreme conditions, such as wearing ankle monitors.
Talking about plans (and criticizing other people’s plans) is easy; actually implementing plans in a real-world health emergency is much harder.
Now that it’s happening with Covid-19 contrarians, does this mean we can finally have an honest national reckoning? Can we finally have a serious conversation about the role of non-pharmacological interventions like social distancing, contact tracing, and masking, the trade-offs, where authority lies, and… humility?
12:54
Elisa Port: Discuss THE BREAST ADVICE Book
“I may be the expert in cancer, but you are the expert in you.”—Elisa Port, MD
Dr. Elisa Port is Professor of Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Chief of Breast Surgery for the Mount Sinai Health System; Director of the Dubin Breast Center; and Director of the Center of Excellence for Breast Cancer at the Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Center, a NCI-Designated Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is remarkably well qualified to provide guidance for prevention and treatment of breast cancer, and runs a model program at Mount Sinai in New York (←we’ll get into why I say that).
She has just published a terrific book that centers around the concept of informed optimism. Many of her patient stories are integrated.
We tried to cover the waterfront during our conversation including:
—4 Ws for reduction of risk: weight, walking, wine, and working out (especially in Nature, “green exercise”)
—Only 10-12% of women will ever develop breast cancer during their lives
—Role of adipocytes (fat cells), aka estrogen and inflammation factories
—Misinformation (underlying the need for this book)
—Pervasive myths of magic supplements, with safety issues of unregulated intravenous drips and others when analyzed turned out to be crushed up, dried house plants
—Total body MRI: mixed results from her patients
—Breast cancer on the rise in young women. Dr. Port relates about recent patients diagnosed in their 20s. Some without BRCA or other pathogenic mutation. Why?
—Mammograms in non-dense breasts pick up 80-90% of breast cancer. It’s the 40-50% women with dense breasts, which the scan is trying to find a polar bear in a snowstorm, is a problem. The problem with false-positives.
—Use of AI with mammography for increased initial detection, prevention, detect high-risk in women with a “normal” mammogram, and risk of heart disease (see my recent Ground Truths and piece in The Lancet on this important topic)
—Mount Sinai provides Transpara AI (the one validated by the big Sweden trial of >100,000 women) to all women getting mammograms FOR FREE. That is the best validated AI tool in medicine today!
—How a mammogram saved a patient’s life, not about breast cancer!
—Hormone replacement and birth control pills. How to assess benefit and risk in women young and older? Differences in the hormone risks.
—Tamoxifen for primary prevention in high-risk people. Reduction of breast cancer in 50% or more in these women. In some subgroups reduction as high as 80%!
—GLP-1 drugs may reduce breast cancer risk and this may not just be related to weight loss
—Lack of utilization of Genetic testing (it could be your father). I disagreed with respect to use of polygenic risk scores, as I wrote about in SUPER AGERS
—“I just wanted to scream out on top of the mountain about genetic testing, family history, and early screening.” Tennis legend Chris Evert
—The lack of our ability to assess the immune system in the clinic and how that could change the face of prevention and very early detection of breast cancer
An infographic summary I made on Dr. Port’s book with the help of NotebookLM
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