Happy Friday, all. My Friday dispatches are usually paywalled, but I’m throwing this one in for free today, as a little summer treat. Enjoy!
For the past week or so, there’s been a social media trend circulating with influencers stating the so-called “propaganda they aren’t falling for.” It started as a funny way to rip on expensive trends and overhyped locations, but quickly morphed into the most boring person you've ever met trying to sound controversial.
When I came across this post, something in me snapped. All of the anger I’ve felt as a health and science communicator, my frustration with the MAHA movement, everything that’s pissed me off about this wave of anti-intellectualism that’s been brewing for more than a decade, had just had enough.
So I left an angry comment about access to potable water and my northern European skin burning at every possible opportunity, piled onto a few other angry comments, and was promptly blocked.
Frankly, if I hadn’t regularly seen this particular influencer at The Wing, I would have assumed this was a Russian AI bot deployed to further erode distrust in American systems.
Disdain and suspicion of ‘experts’ is nothing new, but there’s something that’s been brewing since COVID that increasingly worries me. Ignorance and misinformation used to be considered deeply lame and a sign of low intelligence—my fellow Millennials likely remember those cringey chain emails that older relatives would circulate in 2007 warning about Obama’s ‘secret Muslim identity!’
Now misinformation is a glossy, packaged aesthetic. Don’t like a diagnosis? Had a bad experience with a medicine? Now you can reinvent yourself as a ‘soft girl’ who drinks raw milk (?), believes sunblock is more toxic than the sun (??), uses beef tallow for…everything?????
At the same time, I also intimately understand that our health care system is broken. It’s reactive and disease-driven, and access to care is only promised if you capitulate to the American work ethic. We should be angry about this.
Instead, ire is directed at medical professionals and medicines, rather than at a system that exists to maximize the profits of insurance professionals and incentivizes viewing patients through the lens of a checklist.
One of the challenges I continually face in my career is the public health sector’s struggle to effectively communicate its goals. Now associated with just vaccines and quarantines, it’s seen as an opposing force to a true ‘healthy living.’ But at its core, public health is quiet. The benefits are quiet, cumulative, and not designed for an algorithm.
Public health cannot win the PR war by shouting louder than influencers, but it can try to make the case that collective care isn’t the enemy of individual wellness.
Proper public health is about prioritizing movement and getting your seasonal shots. It’s not about fearing the sun, but getting vitamin D while also reducing your risk of skin cancer. It’s having gratitude for the reliable potable water we have in this country, while also advocating for stringent lead testing (which, yes, requires government intervention) in our water supply.
But in our Lord’s year 2025, nuance and gray areas are not tolerated.
Happy summer 2025! I may be a grown ass woman, but there’s something about a season punctuated by two long weekends that I’ve grown to really love and embrace. Here are a few things I’m focused on for the next 8-10 weeks:
Making it to the Rockaways (and more importantly, Rippers) more than once.
Hunting down the cheapest and best beauty treatments in the city. I’m tired of all the VC-backed beauty and spa chains proliferating the city. I want to know about the mean older woman who hasn’t raised her prices since the Obama era, and leaves your skin absolutely glowing for days after a treatment. Even better if they have absolutely zero web presence!
Creating a summer reading list centered on East Coast prep world-building. I absolutely devoured Carole Radziwill’s book ‘What Remains’ over the long weekend, her memoir of marrying into the Kennedy family and losing her closest friends (JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette) a mere month before losing her husband to cancer. The descriptions of coastal Massachusetts, New York City in the late ‘90s, and yes, Kennedy gossip, were a world I never wanted to leave. I've recently added these books to my Goodreads account, and I'm open to any recommendations that fit this criteria:
The Guest, Emma Cline
The Barbizon: The Hotel that Set Women Free, Paulina Bren
The Friday Afternoon Club, Griffin Dunne
When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion, Julie Satow
Spending as much time as possible on the Connecticut shoreline this summer. Yes, I’m lucky to have easy access to it via my marriage, but I truly believe it’s such an underrated gem compared to The Hamptons and the Jersey Shore. (No shade to either, I love a Hamptons weekend, but it does get very scene-y!)
That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!
Mattie