Mental Hellth

This is part three of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here, and part two here. Go forth and prosper or whatever!!!! A few years ago, a friend who likes to have fun and be gay went on a trip to Maine with some highly-educated 30-something straight people. They played Scrabble. They cooked locally-sourced food. They talked about possible future pregnancies. They had one or two glasses of natural wine in the evenings and then went to bed around 10pm.

While Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, an anthropologist and a professor at the University of Michigan, was doing fieldwork in Mexico City, studying the effects of chemical exposure, she happened upon a viewpoint that shook her world. In the working-class neighborhoods she was studying, addiction to drugs and alcohol wasn’t viewed as an inherently bad thing.

“Blast Furnaces,” 1969-93, by Bernd and Hilla Becher. This is part two of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here. There’ll be more parts to come. My first visit to Dia Beacon was 15 years ago. I went alone on a random weekday. The museum is located in a semi-rural town in upstate New York on the Hudson River.

ANXIETYLAND by Gemma Correll. Copyright @ 2026 by Gemma Correll. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Gemma Correll is an illustrator and cartoonist whose work often focuses on anxiety. In 2018, Correll had an anxiety attack that would not end—it lasted for weeks and weeks. Eventually, she ended up in the emergency room, and then an outpatient mental health program in an attempt to deal with her constant panic.

This is part one of a series on fostering one’s own agency. This one is free. The next ones won’t be. One of my favorite scenes in The Sopranos is in season three, when Carmela goes to a therapist for the first time. She’s attempting to figure out how to live with her husband’s misdeeds constantly on her mind; how to process the guilt and shame of her complicity, how to endure Tony’s constant violence, both towards other people and herself.

A chimpanzee looking at a crystal (see the end of this post). Hello! How is everyone today? The world, as usual, seems bad. And it is perhaps our duty to figure out why, or at least to figure out how to survive its badness. But often when we attempt to do this, we’re starting too far ahead. We debate ideas about capitalism and politics and gender and all the rest, and it goes nowhere. We yell at each other on the internet, we protest, we organize, and the world keeps getting worse.

Khameer Kidia has a very impressive resumé. He’s a physician, an anthropologist working at Harvard Medical School, and a Rhodes Scholar. He was educated in the kinds of Western, elite institutions that are responsible for the world’s understanding of mental health as a problem treatable at an individual, and often chemical, level. But through his work with queer people in his home country of Zimbabwe, Kidia’s worldview began to crack.

Let me put on my “I’ve been working in the media industry for 15 years hat” for a sec to break down how the trend cycle works in the news. And where better to start than with everyone’s favorite thing to love/hate: looksmaxxing. Looksmaxxing discourse followed the same media coverage cycle of so many internet subcultures.

Jason Gale is a senior Editor at Bloomberg News. He’s the author of the recently-released After Covid: The Health Impacts That Will Last Generations, a comprehensive look at how the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, and the myriad issues we still face from it. I wanted to talk to him about why we as a society are still in denial of the Covid’s effects, including the effects it’s still having on millions of people’s bodies and brains.

No frogs were harmed in the making of this image. I remember the moment in 11th grade. My friend and I climbing out of the subway station on the Upper West Side near our school, discussing, as we so often did, the state of the world and our place in it, and her turning to me and asking: why do so many adults abandon their politics and become cogs in the machine? Is it that they know more than us, or that they have it beaten out of them? I don’t know why, I told her. But I said I wasn’t worried.