Terry Chang

This May, UK Labour MP Emily Darlington led a parliamentary debate titled “Censorship of women’s health and wellbeing content online.” She was responding to an open letter by over 600 women’s health leaders on the systematic suppression of medically accurate women’s health content by digital platforms.

In the mid-1800s, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something simple and unsettling: in the same hospital, women giving birth in the ward run by midwives were far less likely to die than those attended by the physicians-run ward, by doctors fresh from the autopsy room. When Semmelweis had the doctors wash their hands before deliveries, the death rate dropped precipitously. The implication was uncomfortable, as it suggested that doctors themselves were spreading disease.

The modern workplace is built on a false premise that humans operate in straight lines. We reward consistency as if it were the highest form of performance. It isn’t. For over two decades, I’ve lived in New York City, the most grid-like city in the world. Blocks. Avenues. Right angles. Clear, efficient, navigable. With its towering skyscrapers, it’s a triumph of steel, glass, and straight lines.