"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.... 

"At first, my hair came back as you’d expect, as the softest stubble. At about half an inch, though, there started to be a distinct ripple. The ripple evolved..."

"... into ’90s Billy Crystal (I clearly was not specific enough when I wished for the hair in 'When Harry Met Sally…'). There was a Nancy Reagan moment. And since then, it has gotten darker — and more and more (and more) poodle. I call this the haircut nobody asks for, or Baby’s First ’Do. It has changed the shape of my face. Old friends don’t recognize me. They seem to share some of the discomfort I feel standing in front of the mirror: Who is this? It’s like I uncanny-valleyed myself."

Writes Rachel Manteuffel, quite charmingly, in "Cancer changes you, but I never saw my new hair comingIt’s not clear why chemotherapy gave me curls, but when life gives you Garfunkel..." (WaPo).

"'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!

"Winter’s short days and long nights aided my first attempts at becoming nocturnal. My husband bundled up and came with me on night walks."

"Friends gathered for an evening snowshoe. As the globe turned toward spring, though, the sun’s rays became stronger and the days stretched on. I stayed in.... But I grew restless and started heading out for night hikes.... A few weeks in, I was running along Lake Ontario when I stopped to watch the sun dip below the horizon. I became obsessed with that transition, stopping to watch it whenever I could. It slowed me down enough that I began noticing how a day ends in stages... 'civil twilight'... 'nautical twilight'... '[a]stronomical twilight'.... The sun wasn’t setting.... I was the one rotating away, a fleck on the back of an enormous spinning globe. Once I sorted out my relationship with the universe, my perspective changed. The fading light made me feel small and out of control — which was exactly why I loved it...."

Writes Claire Cameron, in "Skin Cancer Made Me Nocturnal. It Was Illuminating. How the earth’s rotation taught me to find peace in the face of death" (NYT).

I like the way this essay never mentions sunblock, as if slathering enough lotion all over — and over and over — could give a sun-vulnerable person the power to cavort in blazing full sun like a model in a beach vacation ad. 

The writer — whose father died of melanoma when he was 42  — is doing what I do and avoiding the sun. She's doing sunsets. I do sunrises. It's the same idea. I also do a second walk most days. I simply find heavy shade. That doesn't work when the leaves are down, but that's when it's cold and there are layers of clothing.

The spiritual dimension of dusk and darkness is there for anyone to dip into, but it is different when you feel driven into it by a very real threat of death from skin cancer. 

"Large or small cancer was still cancer. Once a cell has gone haywire in your body and learned how to replicate itself in a campaign against you..."

"... can you ever feel safe? I thought about the large mass in my breast and pictured the cells marching like fire ants on a raging tour of my interior. Five days later, while I was driving, the surgeon called to tell me I did not have cancer. I had a fibroid-like mass with a jagged surface resembling cancer’s starburst shape. He had two radiologists confirm this. 'I am so very sorry,' he said. 'This was a lesson for me. Always wait for the test results.' That moment at the wheel is still perfectly preserved in my mind, the flood of relief, the blinding joy. I will die someday of something, but it probably won’t be from this. The lesson for me was that Danny was a partner for the long haul, however long or short this life might be."

Writes Beth Apone Salamon in "We Had to Break Up. He Refused. 'I love you,' I told him, 'but this is over'" (NYT).

This is a "Modern Love" column. The headline refers to the part, when she thinks she has cancer and tells her husband, whose first wife died, slowly, of breast cancer, that they have to break up because he doesn't deserve to go through the same thing twice. That's interesting. An offer he can't not refuse.

But I was more interested in the ideation about cancer. Those metaphors: a cell gone "haywire" and "fire ants on a raging tour." 

"How much empathy can the country muster for Biden? In both red states and blue ones? In the well-lit spaces on social media and in the darkest corners?"

"Among his supporters and those who voted for his rival? Biden doesn’t have the benefit of having been out of office for years. And while he has been on a redemption tour of sorts, only history can define his presidency. Nostalgia hasn’t had a chance to cast him in a warm glow. The scars of a political dogfight haven’t even begun to scab over. The old ones are still raw and weeping, even as the country accumulates new ones. Vice President JD Vance argued that it was possible to have two thoughts about Biden at once: to wish him good health while also, essentially, calling him a terrible president in the same breath."

Writes Robin Givhan, in "Biden was empath-in-chief. Can a divided country offer him empathy? In the face of Biden’s cancer diagnosis, does the country have the capacity for empathy despite the political rancor, distrust, alternative facts and lies?" (WaPo).

Shame on us for wanting to know the truth about what happened? Who was President these past few years? We're supposed to sink into a pool of respectful silence and not demand to know? We're not supposed to be skeptical about the timing of the cancer news, which seems so perfectly aimed to shut us up about Tapper's book and the Hur recordings?

And what is this "redemption tour of sorts"? I had not noticed. I had to ask A.I., which pointed me to his "paid speeches, interviews (e.g., his appearance on The View), and international trips (e.g., attending Pope Francis’ funeral in Rome)." He wasn't waiting for years to pass, wounds to heal, and nostalgia to set in. He and his enablers were doing positive propaganda. Why should we shut up? Answer: because he has an aggressive cancer. Of course, we feel the silencing power.

What ugly people we are to still want the truth! Who was President these past few years?!

"I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has... that has also spread to my bones.... My life expectancy is: maybe this summer...."

Coffee With Scott Adams 5/19/25 https://t.co/miG4jySdsD

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 19, 2025

"Weirdly, since it's old news for me, I've just sort of processed it.... And I have to say, you know, everybody has to die... and it's kind of civilized that you know about how long you have...."

"Society doesn’t allow women of color to be vulnerable at work. When you’re a first, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt."

"I want to be clear: I do not regret my decision to keep my life private while in office. This piece is no apology, it’s an explanation. An explanation of who I am, what I’ve been through, and what it’s like to come from where I come from and sit in the public eye.... From the beginning of my time as press secretary, I navigated the typically choppy waters of American politics.... And I have also trudged through thick, thick grief... For more than 18 months, I drove up to New York every weekend I could to see my mom.... As present as I was in organizing my mom’s [cancer] care, I still tried to maintain a sense of privacy when I visited her. I’d wear big sunglasses, a mask, and no makeup. Unable to help herself, my mom had already bragged about me to anyone who would listen. Yet the weight of it all felt like too much. I am used to heaviness.... But I was losing my grip. I told my mom I wanted to move to New York so I could help her full-time. 'You are not quitting your job,' she said.... Quitting the administration would hurt her more than my full-time caretaking would help....."

Writes Karine Jean-Pierre, in "Karine Jean-Pierre, President Biden’s Barrier-Breaking Press Secretary, Reveals Some Truths About Her Job/'I have kept details about my private life under lock and key,' she writes for Vanity Fair. 'Society doesn’t allow women of color to be vulnerable at work'" (Vanity Fair)(the mother's cancer was cured).

AND: Here's the new press secretary, who also faces the challenge of convincing you that her selection was merit-based:

"Americans are too ornery to fall for TikTok propaganda/Banning TikTok may be legally sound but not really necessary."

Writes Megan McArdle (at WaPo)(free-access link).

I am wary of Chinese control over such an influential app and, potentially, its user data. But the internet is spying on us all the time, and I presume the Chinese already get a hold of a lot of that data. As for the Chinese influence over what we see... the Chinese government will surely slip some subtler nudges in among the makeup tutorials and cat videos.... But if you think that kind of gentle sculpting is so effective, you need to explain why the more overt efforts of countless establishment institutions, including our major social media companies, failed to get the American public to mask up, lock down and repudiate Donald Trump. I suspect the Chinese propagandists will simply discover what Americans already know: We’re too ornery to be controlled by anyone, including an algorithm.

We are affected by speech, and speech is important because it affects us, but the way it affects us is infinitely complicated. It's cute to use the word "ornery," but it doesn't express what we really are, and it's deceptive to refer to "control," because even if we can't be "controlled," we are open and vulnerable to complex influence. I'm "ornery" enough to resist this assurance that speech doesn't matter. I defend freedom of speech because speech does matter. 

And it troubles me to see "makeup tutorials and cat videos." People who talk like that are revealing that they don't use TikTok. They don't know what it is. I could show you thousands of things that are not transitory fluff, but just as an example, let me show you this man:

"[Elle] Macpherson, 60, says she rented a house in Phoenix, Arizona, for eight months, where she 'holistically treated' her cancer..."

"... under the guidance of her primary doctor, a doctor of naturopathy, holistic dentist, osteopath, chiropractor and two therapists. She said: 'It was a shock, it was unexpected, it was confusing, it was daunting in so many ways and it really gave me an opportunity to dig deep in my inner sense to find a solution that worked for me.... Saying no to standard medical solutions was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But saying no to my own inner sense would have been even harder,' later adding she thought chemotherapy and surgery were too extreme."

From "Elle Macpherson refused chemotherapy after secret breast cancer diagnosis/Supermodel says she is in remission after being diagnosed seven years ago and rejecting traditional medicine" (The Guardian).

ADDED: The idea that surgery is extreme is subjective. How aversive to it should we be? It made me think of the newly normalized gender affirmation surgery, bariatric surgery, and the plastic surgery done to fight the perfectly ordinary effects of age.

And I happened to see this earlier today:

Amazing Mom

pic.twitter.com/lGXL89E6xR

— The Best (@ThebestFigen) September 1, 2024

"The support I found on this platform helped me face the toughest days..."

From a TikTok video that begins, "If you're reading these words right now, then I have died."

"Scientific papers are like someone’s dating profile on an app."

"They’re picking what pictures to show you and what stories to tell you. You don’t get to see the whole library of photos on their phone. Researchers are only presenting a sliver of what they’ve actually done. And just like a dating app on your phone, everything is inaccurate."

From "We’re Not Curing Cancer Here, Guys/Are leading scientists just making stuff up? Vinay Prasad breaks down the cancer research scandal" (The Free Press).

"The dreariest aspects of the 'woke' movement are partisanship, outrage, victimhood and an obsessively political view of the world."

"But just as politically correct comedians trade on stories of their own oppression, anti-woke comedians now delight in referencing their own cancellations — Gervais and Chappelle’s shows are full of tales about people who have attacked them on the internet and in real life.... The outrage of woke comedians at the immorality of their enemies is echoed by the ceaseless outrage of anti-woke comedians at the absurdity and stupidity of their enemies. Comedy should offend. Comedians should speak freely.... But offensiveness is not synonymous with wit. And the best comedy is anarchic, not partisan. Surprising, not predictable. The antidote to an age of political polarisation and outrage is not more of the same. That men as talented as Chappelle and Gervais have succumbed to the temptation is a testament to just how powerful those forces are."

Writes James Marriott, in "Sorry, anti-woke comedians, the joke is on you/The problem with Ricky Gervais is not that he’s outrageous, it’s that he’s not outrageous enough" (London Times).

Yes, having watched the new Netflix shows from Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle, I think this criticism is apt.

"The night before my surgery, feeling perhaps a bit of sadness at losing my identity as a 'large-breasted woman'..."

"... I took a last look at my breasts in the mirror and—on the advice of a friend—Marie Kondo’ed them. I thanked them for their (purely cosmetic) service, and bid them, in their current iteration, farewell. At the hospital, the surgeon twisted each of my breasts up as if he was about to cut bangs and marked them with a Magic Marker. This was, he explained, a French technique...."

Writes Xochitl Gonzalez, in "Me and My Bosom/I wasn’t ready for the 'Doña Body'" (The Atlantic).

After the surgery:

If you think Biden said "We ended cancer as we know it," I think you're not very good at understanding slurred speech.

Biden: "I said I'd cure cancer they looked at me like, why cancer? Because we can. We ended cancer as we know it." pic.twitter.com/RI5JqxyG3A

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 25, 2023

I believe he said "We could end cancer as we know it" [or "We can end cancer as we know it"]. There's slurring, but if you take it in context, he'd just said he would cure cancer because we can. There's sloppiness over who'd be doing this cancer curing, but everyone knows he can't personally cure cancer. He was just planning to oversee and encourage the work of others who were supposed to cure cancer (and who'd be trying to cure cancer whether Biden was providing incentives or not), but his reason for curing cancer is stated (simplistically) as something that we do because "we can." I think the slurred sentence is something of a repetition of that idea. He said we would cure cancer because "We could end cancer...."

The best argument for sticking to the other transcription — "We ended cancer" — is that he tacked on the words "as we know it." Those are weasel words. Any improvement in the treatment of cancer changes the experience of cancer and thus "ends" what we have "known" as cancer.

In any case, the President should enunciate, and Biden is awful at enunciation. This is very far from convincing me that the President is suffering from dementia. By the way, did you notice that we've ended dementia as we know it?

"[W]e just got back another blood result... My wife, Marla, and I say to each other, 'No matter what this shows, it’s perfect.'"

"Indeed, it showed a big jump in this blood marker, which wouldn’t be something to celebrate. It is what it is. It’s real. And what’s more fun than reality?"

Said Dr. Roland Griffith, quoted in "A Psychedelics Pioneer Takes the Ultimate Trip" (NYT). The "ultimate trip" refers to his dying (of cancer). 

"[Kirk] Hammett, who is Buddhist, will talk at length about consciousness, God, enlightenment, resonance, Nirvana."

"He believes that the work he does with Metallica is an extension of some sublime and omnipotent creative force. 'I put myself in this space where I take in all the creativity around me and I channel it to create more,' he said. His hope is that Metallica facilitates a healing sort of fellowship. 'We are so nondenominational,' he said, laughing. 'Come to the Church of Metallica. You’ll become a member and rejoice! You don’t have to direct anything at us. You can direct it at the experience that you’re having.'"

Writes Amanda Petrusich, in "The Enduring Metal Genius of Metallica/On the road with the band in its forty-first year" (The New Yorker).

"How is it possible that a disease characterized by coughing, emaciation, relentless diarrhea, fever, and the expectoration of phlegm and blood became not only a sign of beauty, but also a fashionable disease?"

Asks Carolyn Day in "Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease," reviewed by Allison Meier in "How Tuberculosis Symptoms Became Ideals of Beauty in the 19th Century/In Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease, Carolyn A. Day investigates how the fatal symptoms of tuberculosis became entwined with feminine ideals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries" (Hypoallergenic).

It helped that the wasting away of tuberculosis sufferers aligned with existing ideas of attractiveness. The thinness, the ghostly pallor that brought out the veins, the rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, and red lips (really signs of a constant low-grade fever), were both the ideals of beauty for a proper lady, and the appearance of a consumptive on their deathbed. If you didn’t have the disease, you could use makeup to get the pale skin and crimson lips, and wear a dress that slumped your posture....

The perception of a medical problem as beautiful is not an isolated quirk of the Victorian age. We do it today. Look around.

I'll just quote an old post of mine, from 2004, my first year of blogging:

"“From all sour faced saints, deliver me O’ Lord. I don’t want to be with a grouch, a crab, a crocodile in a moat...."

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More about the priest, Father Bill Holt, here. We're told "He’s famous for his 'Holt-isms' (little pieces of friendly priestly advice) and for sending thoughtful notes to encourage the brothers in their work."

"I want my father back."

@mandypatinktok

One of our favorite experiences from TikTok last year.

♬ original sound - Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn G