Singal-Minded with Jesse Singal

Donner Party memorial via me Hello! My hiatus is going well — thanks for asking. Below is a story I wrote for The Dispatch. Hope you enjoy, and please stick around for a brief after-thought below the story itself. I’m going to try to make a habit of adding something a little extra whenever I publish one of my Dispatch pieces here, like I did last time.

Local tradition holds that the volcanic plug on the horizon represents the future of Singal-Minded After this post goes up, I’m going to put Singal-Minded to sleep for roughly a month and a half. If you’re a paying subscriber, you don’t have to do anything — you won’t get charged while the newsletter is dormant.

New York Times health and wellness reporter Simar Bajaj has a new article about “The Return of Blaming and Shaming in Public Health,” as the headline puts it. It’s pegged to our esteemed Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., and discusses the relationship between stigma and public-health concerns like obesity and smoking.

One thing I did in May was go to a Substack event where they really went for it May flew by! Here are some of your best comments, with some responses by me. Jonathan Reale, on “On The New York Times’ White-Guy Discrimination Case (And Bubbles)”: The rest of that quoted section from the Klein article also could benefit from some “turnabout” perspective.

Last week I published an article originally titled “How WPATH And The Endocrine Society Thumbed The Scale Of Youth Gender Medicine Research.” I say originally because I’ve since nixed “The Endocrine Society” from the headline. I’ve also unlocked that article, which was paywalled when I published it. What follows will make a lot more sense if you read that one first.

Update, 5/29/2026: It turns out that there’s some real uncertainty over the role of the Endocrine Society here. See here for a more information on that.

I feel bad for the anonymous 23-year-old woman interviewed by the New York Post earlier this week.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing The New York Times on behalf of a veteran journalist who claims he was denied a promotion due to being a white male. Both the lawsuit itself and the response to it are revealing. A useful entry point is New York magazine’s short write-up, in Intelligencer, by features writer and media columnist Charlotte Klein.

You probably can’t tell but these SUPers in Pacific Grove, California are dressed like witches for some reason. It was a hectic month! I’m about to fly across the country again! There’s a lot going on and several deadlines collided last week, so you won’t see responses from me this time around. I apologize for that. You guys had a lot of good and though…

I’m late to this, but when the host of Jeopardy! name-checks you, how can you not write about it? It was a negative name-check, to be clear. In March, Jennings wrote on Bluesky, “Jesse Singal: ‘I don’t understand why all these experts with degrees keep disagreeing with me. So demoralizing. What could the explanation be??’ ” I need to engage in an annoying bit of pre-explaining (presplaining), because I deleted the tweet that precipitated all of this.