A couple of people have noted that our message traffic on the big Winedale
mailing lists has dropped a lot since Thanksgiving. This is understandable,
I think, because 2025 was an eventful, and frequently stressful year, even
though a lot of us managed to get together and commune and share time with
one another, which I very much appreciate.
(This is where Google AI is suggesting to me all sorts of bromides to
finish off this email, which may be a sign of how much progress AI still
needs to make in guessing what I might want to say!)
I do have a couple of things I want to share, though.
(a) HAMNET, which I first heard about as a novel from other alums (I think
maybe Susan Gayle Todd first brought it to my attention), is now a movie,
which I'm dying to see but which isn't yet in anything like wide release. I
think maybe I can arrange to see it this weekend--if I do, I'll report
back. (I know from second-hand reports that there's more of Shakespeare's
text in it than there is in the novel, and my thought is, how can that be
anything but good? Not that this is a criticism of the novel, though.)
(b) I wrote a little essay that seems to be getting some traction among
those who read me regularly, and so I thought I might share it with you
too. See below. Needs a good title.
------------------------
Multiply 260 by 0.667, and you get 173 and change. One year ago, I weighed
260 pounds (about 118 kg). This morning, I weighed very slightly less than
173 pounds. I want to emphasize here that although I’m pleased with this
progress, it would be a mistake to say that I’m “proud” of it—the success
in getting back down into the 170s is attributable to the American Pharma
Industry developing suitable drugs to address (and reverse) problems
created by the American Food Industry. (My ultimate goal, if you must know,
is probably somewhere around 160–I’m five-foot-eight, about an inch shorter
than I was in college, so not too terrible a decline in height.)
What I brought to the table (so to speak) was my willingness to find ways
to afford medications that my insurance would not yet cover. It may do so
now—will check at refill time. If you want to know what role my willpower
and resolve played, it’s this: I made the decision to prioritize fixing a
persistent health problem that dates from my early 20s. Although I had been
overweight from time to time before then, true obesity itself didn’t start
manifesting for me until about 1980. For a long time I thought it was
something particular to my own life that had changed. (I had graduated from
college, was trying to figure out next steps in work and education, wasn’t
always eating the best food, started drinking more—alcohol is a great
analgesic, and putting on weight quickly tends to increase one’s daily
aches and pains.) Did I exercise? Why, yes, and I also developed
significant muscle mass, which was helpful in moving around a much larger
version of myself. (It should be noted that the rise in gym memberships in
the USA tracks the obesity stats—Americans were investing in working out
more *at the very same time* that obesity was on its abrupt rise.)
But what I was slow to recognize was that the same problems I was having
(fairly rapid increase in weight, increasing experiments with dietary
change in the hopes of reversing the lurch into obesity—experiments that
ultimately weren’t successful and that may even have made things worse)
were not specific to me, but in fact were accelerating through the U.S.
population and then quickly afterwards in most of the developed world. The
global stats showed that this was happening everywhere in reasonably
prosperous or quickly developing countries soon after this obesity
acceleration manifested in the USA.
The chief candidate as a source of the problem seemed straightforward, a
quarter of a century after 1980: the industrialized production of food as a
product shaped as much by applied chemistry as by agriculture. One reason
Michael Pollan’s FOOD RULES and other writing on how to eat have continued
to be current for years even as various diet books have fallen by the
wayside is that they shift our attention to, inter alia, buying one’s food
around the edge of the supermarket—that’s where the more natural, and more
recently grown, produce at, e.g., Whole Foods and Safeway, lives.
But while following Pollan’s prescriptions (I’m using the word
metaphorically—he’s a science journalist, not a doctor) might help someone
avoid the sources of the obesity epidemic, it’s less successful in
reversing that epidemic. For someone like me—and here I still hesitate to
share that for a long time weighing in the mid-200s of pounds signified
success for me, because for one mercifully brief period in the late 1990s I
crossed the 300-pound line—more proactive interventions, including medical
interventions, seemed necessary. Part of getting my weight to move in the
downward direction was bariatric surgery (in late 2004), which certainly
helped keep me alive long enough to reach the era of Ozempic et al., but
which, as is the case with most weight-loss surgery, was only partially
successful in returning to non-obesity … or achieving it in the first
place. (Childhood obesity is a major thing now in the USA and
elsewhere—earlier in my lifetime, it wasn’t.)
So here I am in 2026, weighing at least a few pounds less than I did when
entering college in 1975, trying to make sense of where I am now. The guy I
see in the mirror is visibly older, but in most respects better looking and
fitter than I have been for most of my adult life. But I also have to
wonder what my life might have been like if I had never had this particular
health issue … well, “weighing me down” seems like an appropriate trope.
I hope to make up, in the time I have left, the progress in my professional
work that I might have achieved had I been healthier over most of the last
four or five decades. But I should stress that there have been a few ways
in which my path has been helpful to me professionally and personally.
First, I really have done an immense amount of avocational academic
research to get a handle on the problem—here I credit my undergraduate
education at UT Austin for building in me the habit of reading scientific
papers on the regular, rather than mere journalistic or other popular
accounts of what the research may or may not show. I also acquired a
certain amount of persnicketiness when it comes to experimental models, for
which I should credit Plan II philosophy (at UT Austin) for introducing me
to Karl Popper’s work specifically, and the philosophy of science
generally.
My work as a journalist and as a lawyer has also made me more careful about
sourcing what I post or publish, which is all to the good, even when the
topic in question is not food or medicine or even science generally.
But most important, I think, is that my inability to solve my particular
problems through application of willpower/resolve has made me more
sympathetic to other people who can’t just willpower their ways out of
their difficulties, which may be health-related or rooted in something
else. I listen better now, I think. Now if I could just trigger an epidemic
of better reading, better listening, and greater willingness to question
one’s own theories at least as much as one critically examines those of
others—that would be something I could really be proud of.
-----------
That's it! Hope to see you all again soon!
Love,
Mike