"How many Americans even know what color the ribbon is for prostate-cancer awareness?"

From "What Does It Take to Get Men to See a Doctor? Men in the U.S. live six fewer years than women. One clinic is trying to persuade men that getting checked out could save their life" (NYT).

Toxic masculinity” has become a catchall term.... But when researchers first began using the term, they meant something narrower and more specific: a culturally endorsed yet harmful set of masculine behaviors characterized by rigid, traditional male traits, such as dominance, aggression and sexual promiscuity. Men trapped in this man box, as it is sometimes called, are less likely to seek medical care and are more likely to engage in risky behaviors detrimental to their health, such as binge drinking or drug use.... Even seemingly positive attributes associated with traditional masculinity, such as providing for one’s family... can have negative health consequences. They may put work ahead of addressing medical concerns.... Or they may take on dangerous jobs or work extreme hours. But why do some men hold so tightly to these cultural notions about masculinity that lead them toward worse health? The answer may be traced to how fragile manhood itself can feel.... 

Let's talk about the home page of The New York Times.

As it looks right now:

1. I had thought the Jeffrey Epstein story was running out of energy, but here it is back on the front page and in the top spot. But it's a real estate story: "A Look Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan Lair." As if we're into his mystique!

2. Sharing the top of the page is "How to Break Free From Your Phone" — a generic self-help topic, not news at all. The pretty blue of the sky in the illustration lines up with the blue sky in Jeffrey Epstein's stairwell. The legs of the phoneless woman in the grass chime with the legs of the stairwell woman. Both women grip something tubular — one, a flower stem and the other, a rope. We are reminded that Jeffrey hanged himself — reminded whether he did it or not. 

3. 2 things to angst over: declining school enrollment and a nuclear reactor on the moon.

4. Something that isn't even vaguely surprising — an old bookshelf contained a particular old book. It might be worth $20,000. Who cares!? This is like the news that somebody won the lottery. The winning ticket is rare, but you know it's in the great mass of tickets, and somebody found it.

5. Suddenly, it's time to talk about your intestines. That seems to scream: slow news day.

6. At last, the name Trump appears. Tariff business. The ongoing story. The photo is of immigrants — caption (outside of my screen shot): "Trump’s New Tactic to Separate Immigrant Families."

7. And then, there's Thomas Friedman, supplying the overarching and very high-level-abstract theme: "The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away." It begins: "Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened...."

***

Strangely low-level anxiety wafts up from the usual jumble of well-worn topics.

"Academics are unsure if removing soda from SNAP would improve public health."

"Data is scarce: No state has piloted a change, and researchers can’t remove people’s benefits for a study because of the arbitrary harm it might cause. Lisa Harnack, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, found a way to test the concept by finding people who were eligible for SNAP but not enrolled. She created a 'SNAP-like program' that gave some people normal SNAP benefits and gave others similar benefits but excluded soda (participants could still buy whatever other food they wanted with their own money). Her first study found lower calorie intake and improved nutrition among the people who couldn’t purchase soda with their benefits, but her follow-up study did not.... [Another] study found it would probably reduce rates of obesity — but even so, [the researcher said]... 'If you try to solve this problem using SNAP as a lever, so only SNAP people are impacted by it, what we’re likely to do is just increase stigma for people who are trying to make ends meet.'"

From "Should Food Stamps Pay for Soda? Colorado and Texas are among the states aiming to change what food and drink can be bought with SNAP benefits" (NYT).

"Replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar would cost thousands of American food manufacturing jobs, depress farm income, and boost imports of foreign sugar, all with no nutritional benefit."

Said John Bode, head of the Corn Refiners Association, quoted in "Trump's Coke push will cost thousands of farm jobs, corn group warns" (Axios).

Oh, that's rich — we're supposed to feel sorry for the folks who make high fructose corn syrup. 

"Even low doses of CBD may cause harm to the liver in some people, FDA study finds."

NBC News reports.

Scientists from the Food and Drug Administration’s Division of Applied Regulatory Science carried out a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial last year to assess how low-dose CBD affects liver function in a group of healthy middle-aged men and women.... The goal was to give them a typical amount that might be used by consumers.... While the vast majority of people in the trial were unaffected, 5% showed greatly elevated levels of the liver enzyme aminotransferase, a known marker of liver cell damage or inflammation.... Women appeared to be more vulnerable than men....

"'The 'never go outside without S.P.F. 50' approach treated sun exposure as if it were universally harmful,' said Dr. Lucy McBride..."

"... an internal medicine physician in Washington, D.C.... Research has found that spending more time in the sun is associated with lower blood pressure....Sunlight may also help support the immune system by controlling inflammation and immune cells.... A well-known benefit of sun exposure is that it triggers the body to produce vitamin D.... The research on sunshine’s potential benefits is still quite limited, so it’s hard to know how to interpret or apply it, or how to square it with the risks for skin cancer, Dr. McBride said. And you shouldn’t stop using sun protection altogether, she said.... Ultimately, it may make sense to consider sunlight's potential benefits along with its harms, Dr. McBride said. 'Skin cancer remains a serious threat,' she said. 'But it is about moving beyond fear-based, one-size-fits-all messaging.'"

From "What are the Health Benefits of Sunshine? We’ve been taught to avoid the sun at all costs. Is that right?" (NYT).

Missing from the article is anything about the chemicals in sunscreen we've been urged to slather on repeatedly and excessively. Personally, despite being at great risk for skin cancer, I don't use the stuff. I go out in the very early morning or I use clothing for protection or I try to stay mostly in the shade. Here I am a year ago, in the semi-shade, interacting with a mushroom...

... and if you're inclined to say Althouse, you need to get that spot on your back checked out, let me assure you, I have!

"Through it all, Europeans tried their best to bear up, especially in places where air conditioning is still a luxury, or frowned upon."

"Some people worry about the pollution it causes; some older Italians just believe it’s bad for health."

From "Dangerous Heat Grips Much of Europe, With More to Come/A punishing heat wave broke records in southern Europe and hasn’t peaked yet in some places, prompting warnings to residents, employers and tourists to alter their habits" (London Times).

What is this belief held by older Italians... and could they be right? People love the comfort of air conditioning and at some point feel fiercely attached to it and resistant to hearing that it might be bad. Obviously, it's bad for the environment, but what about our health? 

But first, what exactly to the old Italians think? According to Grok, the idea is that you should keep you body in balance and not move it back and forth between hot and cold. And they speak of "colpo d’aria" or "colpo di freddo" — "blow of air" or "blow of cold" — as a cause of various pains and respiratory ailments. There's a mistrust of modern inventions and a preference for traditional ways, such as opening windows, fanning, and seeking out the shade. Natural seems better than artificial. 

Is there an element of truth in that... truth... or beauty?

I wondered if The London Times had ever talked about "colpo d’aria" in any other article. Answer: Yes, 3 times:

"Having spent two years in a mild hysteria over tap water, I no longer have my old, unthinking faith in it. Sometimes I miss that naïveté."

"But in its place, I have something better. The whole ordeal encouraged me to ask questions and engage others in dialogue instead of trafficking in superstition — to make up my own mind. Instead of simply relying on the warnings of others, I did my own research, learning that tap water is subject to more regulation than bottled water; the most recent survey of L.A. tap water showed it to be compliant with the Environmental Protection Agency’s measures.... Drinking tap water feels to me like a kind of civic duty too, because it means consuming the public resource that an ostensibly well-intentioned government system — and not a for-profit bottled-water company’s marketing firm — has worked hard to offer its citizens....."

Writes A. Cerisse Cohen, in "The Unparalleled Daily Miracle of Tap Water/Paying closer attention to what was coming out of my faucet changed the way I see the world" (NYT).

I drink tap water, and I always have. 

"When she tried to call her other dog, 'I couldn’t speak,' she said. As she walked downstairs to let them into the yard, 'I noticed that my right hand wasn’t working.'"

"But she went back to bed, 'which was totally stupid.... It didn’t register that something major was happening,' especially because, reawakening an hour later, “I was perfectly fine.' So she 'just kind of blew it off' and went to work."

From "A Ministroke Can Have Major Consequences/So-called transient ischemic attacks can eventually lead to cognitive declines as steep as those following a full-on stroke, new research finds" (NYT). 

Message: seek immediate treatment. 

"Research on chemicals that have been vetted by the F.D.A. tends to be extremely narrow in focus, looking mostly for cancer, genetic mutations or..."

"... organ damage in animal or laboratory studies. This means the ingredients in our coffee creamer, cereal, ketchup and frozen pizza aren’t tested for more subtle effects on long-term health, or whether they may increase the risk of the other common chronic diseases, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes.... Regulators also don’t routinely re-examine chemicals already on the market — checking if new science has emerged suggesting they might be dangerous — something European regulators do.... In short, the rules that are supposed to protect Americans from food hazards don’t reflect the reality of how people eat — or how they get sick — today. There are a couple of reasons for this. The F.D.A. was established in the early 1900s, as America was urbanizing and industrial food processing was taking off. Back then, food made people sick mainly through poisoning. Now our diets make us chronically ill, causing diseases that develop over decades...."

From "Kennedy Is Right About the Chemicals in Our Food" (NYT).

"One divide in the MAHA movement is between those who are focused on the nation’s food system — concerned about petroleum-based food dyes, highly processed foods and seed oils..."

"... and those who believe the nation’s health problems stem from the use of vaccines. Means shares Kennedy’s focus on eliminating food dyes and ultra-processed foods. At times she has promoted health practices that public health experts warn can be harmful, such as drinking raw-milk smoothies. 'We’re never going to hear anything about the safety of vaccines from Casey Means,' Mike Adams, an anti-vaccine advocate who runs the far-right website Natural News, said in an X live-stream on Thursday. 'Because again, she’s an impostor, she’s a plant, airdropped into the movement to change the narrative so you don’t talk about vaccines. Instead you talk about this other stuff — seed oils or whatever.'..."

I'm reading "Uproar over surgeon general pick exposes MAHA factions among RFK Jr. allies/Casey Means, a prominent nutrition advocate in the Make America Healthy Again movement, has been described as insufficiently critical of vaccines" (WaPo).

I know Casey Means from this great episode of Joe Rogan (from last October):

Excerpt:

"Sensient develops its natural colors starting with the seed. It has developed a variety of beets, for instance, that are larger and more saturated in color...."

"After the produce is harvested, Sensient pulps, pulverizes and strains the purple sweet potatoes, red radishes and grapes into a rainbow of extracts, powders and liquids. The process also eliminates the flavors of most of the underlying fruits, vegetables or other plants, but not all. 'You’re never going to take the taste out of strawberry juice. It’s going to be a little acidic, a little strawberry-ish. And that works well for a strawberry flavor in a kids’ cereal.... But nobody is dying for a carrot-flavored cereal.' Even though the color... doesn’t often change the taste profile... the appearance does signal certain flavors — or intensity of flavors — to consumers.... 'If you reduce the color saturation level of a drink, your mind may tell you it’s going to taste less sweet or less sour than the original color.... Duller hues may signal that this is a duller flavor or stale for some people, while for others it may signal that it’s a more natural color, something found more in nature.'..."

From "No More [Synthetic] Food Dye in Froot Loops? Not So Fast. Companies make packaged food without synthetic dyes in other countries. But despite pressure from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the change isn’t likely to happen quickly in the United States" (NYT).

The senses are interwoven. Some of us, including me, have little or no sense of smell, and a lot of what is referred to as taste is really smell. For me, the look of a food or drink contributes a lot to the illusion of flavor. By the same token, if some orange food that used to be flavored artificially were flavored with something made from carrot that smelled a bit of carrot, I wouldn't notice that unwanted smell. But I would notice the duller orange, and that would cause it to taste less... orange. It's complicated. I feel a little sorry for the food companies that find themselves in such a predicament after spending so much time and effort working to please us with everything that is non-nutritional about food and drink. 

"Many gums are made using plastics like polyethylene and polyvinyl acetate... This helps give gum its elasticity...."

"The new study suggests that most of these plastics are released from gum within several minutes, so if you tend to spit out gum and start a new piece as soon as it loses its flavor, it may be better to stick with the same piece for as long as you can."

The NYT doesn't seem to concerned about ingesting plastic in this article, "Is It Bad to Chew Gum All Day? Here’s what to consider before you pop in that second (or third or fourth) piece."

I'd say yes, it's bad. Obviously. But what do I know. There are some gums without plastic. See "I Tried 6 Non-Toxic Gum Brands With Safe, Plastic-Free Ingredients" (The Green Choice).

I tried one of them one time. It was terrible. And expensive.

"A startup called Sperm Racing, run by four teenage entrepreneurs from the US, said it had raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium..."

"... on April 25. Eric Zhu, the company’s 17-year-old co-founder, said the inaugural event would pit samples taken from two healthy young university students against each other on a racetrack 20cm (8in) long and modelled on the female reproductive system.... 'We want to turn health into competition,' Zhu said. 'Sperm is surprising as a biomarker. The healthier you are, the faster sperm moves.'... A live video feed, magnified 40 times to display the 0.05mm spermatozoa, will track the samples’ progress....The event will be run over three races in front of a crowd of 4,000 spectators, and feature play-by-play commentary, instant replays and leaderboards, according to Zhu.

I'm reading "What to expect from ‘world’s first competitive sperm race’/A fertility startup raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium this month" (London Times).

With the sperm expected to swim at a speed of 5mm per minute, each race will take something like 40 minutes. There are 3 races... and room for 4,000 spectators. Interesting concept, and congratulations to the teenagers for getting $1.5 million and an article in the London Times, but I think success here depends on the quality of the play-by-play commentators.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "What is the key to doing good play-by-play commentary for a long race, say 40 minutes?"

"I feel I’ve lived my life well, but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done."

"I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant."

Said Daniel Kahneman, on March 19, quoted in "There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death" (NYT). On March 27th, he followed through with his plan to die by assisted suicide.

Another quote: "I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go."

Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in "behavioral" economics. You may know his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

"This is a patient that was very sick.... It went through an operation on Liberation Day, and it's going to be... a very booming country."

"It's going to be amazing, actually.... The operation's over, and now we let it settle in. You see the plants are starting to construction, already. We have many plants — Indiana massive auto plant...."

Do you like the reasoning through analogy? The economy is a person, its supposed problem is a sickness, the tariffs are a surgical procedure, and the patient is in the post-op stage. That might be a difficult stage, with various pains and struggles. Even if this is a good analogy — economies are like human bodies, and tariffs are like an operation for an illness, and the immediate effect is a stage in the recovery from surgery — we still don't know if the right medical treatment was chosen and performed successfully.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Could you summarize the Susan Sontag book 'Illness as Metaphor' and say whether it has some use in critiquing the above-stated analogy about the economy?"

That book is less about using illness as a metaphor to explain something other than illness and more about using something other than illness to explain illness. From "Illness as Metaphor" (commission earned):

"Cory Booker didn’t go to the bathroom for 25 hours. Is that … OK?"

Headline at The Guardian, where we're told..

[H]e seemingly didn’t pee once the whole time. (A rep for Booker confirmed to TMZ that he did not wear a diaper during his speech.)

I would have written: A rep for Booker confirmed to TMZ that Booker claimed he did not wear a diaper during his speech. Or, if the rep claimed personal knowledge of which unseen garments Booker wore: A rep for Booker corroborated Booker's claim that he did not wear a diaper during his speech.

Does anyone believe that? It seems reckless. Does Booker want to appear reckless? He may think that appearing reckless is better than being thought of as having worn a diaper. But the fear of being thought of as having worn a diaper is ableist and ageist. And yet, look at our Congress.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "At the State of the Union speech in 2025 — I know it wasn't officially a 'State of the Union' — what percentage of those in the audience were wearing diapers — in your estimation? Consider how long in advance they needed to get to and remain in their seats, the expected length of the speech, the length of time after the speech before access to facilities, and the age and frailty of the members of Congress."

Anyway, the Guardian's answer to its question — "Is that … OK?" — is no.

"I have a tendency to do things that scare me, just for the sake of it. I've done skydiving, parachuting; I rode a motorcycle across India aged 63."

"I've also driv[en] semi trucks for a living, hauling 53 foot containers across the country. One day, parked at a huge truck stop in Texas, I got it into my head that it wasn't fair that I, a burly man in his sixties, could no longer skip like I did when I was seven. I asked myself why the case might be, and of course it was one of self consciousness. Had I been with my wife or a friend we could certainly do it. We'd be two adults playing like kids for a lark. But do it alone?"

That's the top comment on "Is Skipping Really a Good Workout? It feels like play. Here’s what fitness experts say about using the activity as a training tool" (NYT).

"The male reproductive system, in particular, seems to be under plastic assault."

"Men with severe erectile dysfunction were found to have up to seven types of plastic in their penises. (That study, published in 2024 by researchers in Miami, was the first to detect microplastics in human penile tissue, which was extracted from six individuals who were undergoing surgery to get an inflatable prosthesis.) Microplastics have also been found in human semen samples. One experiment conducted in China, from October, found that all the semen and urine samples from 113 men contained microplastics. The samples that contained Teflon (the chemical PTFE), which coats cooking utensils, cutting boards, and nonstick pans, had reduced sperm quality, lower total sperm numbers, and reduced motility...."

From "There’s a Spoon’s Worth of Plastic in Our Brains. Now What? An investigation into what microplastics are doing to our bodies" (NY Magazine).

ADDED: Ironically, the inflatable prosthesis is plastic. 

AND:

"My first time in this Oval Office was in... 1962... I came here... and I had a meeting with my uncle who was President... He was involved deeply, as we all know..."

"... in restoring physical fitness in this country.... At one point during his administration, he challenged Americans to do a 50-mile walk, which I ultimately did. But I remember the day that my father completed his walk. We were staying at Camp David, and my father came in after 18 hours walking on this towpath with his feet bleeding and blisters on them...."

Said RFK Jr. at the beginning of the short speech he made after his swearing in yesterday. I wrote quite a bit about that speech, here, but I did not include that part, and this morning I'm seeing an important reason why I should have. 

RFK Jr. began his remarks with JFK's physical fitness program, and then he extends beyond his uncle to his father, who took the uncle's challenge very seriously, and we hear of his father's wounds — his wounded feet. I think of Christ's wounds, so often detailed in art, and here, we are given grisly details — "bleeding and blisters." RFK Jr. began with a family story — father, son, and holy President — and a grand mission — physical health. 

From that beginning RFK Jr. spoke of how his father came to run for President in 1968.