When bureaucracy kills,
by Hana Schank, Bearing witness, 2026-09-01.

This week, the Hill published my essay on the US government’s policy of omitting car safety tests with anatomically accurate female dummies. After a car crash that nearly killed me and my family, I learned that car safety bias kills 10,000 women a year. Because I was working adjacent to the Biden administration at the time, and had direct access to power, I assumed I could right this wrong.

I first wrote this piece as a longer essay for a bigger publication, but unfortunately they are going through some growing pains, and sat on the piece for 6 months. I’m sending the original piece out to subscribers, because everyone needs to understand the full picture. Unless you are the size and shape of the average man in the United States in the 1970s, you are not safe in your car. When I began researching this topic, 10,000 a women a year died because of bad design. Six years later, that number has risen to 12,000.

We are almost through the Jewish month of Elul, when Jews work to repair the broken parts of ourselves and our world, in preparation for the High Holidays. Please help me fix what is broken by reading and sharing my story.

A tech prophet finally gets her second coming,
by Anna Merlan, Mother Jones, 2026-08-14.

The first thing to know about Cyberselfish, the chillingly prescient 2000 book about Silicon Valley that its author, Paulina Borsook, says “ruined my life” and caused a 25-year-long “curse” to befall her, is that it’s very, very funny. Cyberselfish, which Borsook cannot stand to name and instead calls “TDB” (short for “that damn book”), is a classic, fish-out-of-water tale of a journalist investigating a strange land. Except, in her case, as a California native, it’s the work of a fish regarding an invasive species that suddenly befouled the tank she’d been swimming in her whole life.

Her observations from the murky milieu of the dawning tech world are as hilarious as they are depressing; early in the book, for instance, Borsook recounts what happened after she wrote a satirical guide for the website Suck.com on dating men in tech. (Do profess Ayn Rand fandom, “don’t tell him about your best friend, the urban planner, who uses HUD money to develop low-income housing.”) After the piece was published, emails cascaded into her inbox.

“Guys were positive that I had been writing about them,” Borsook wrote in Cyberselfish. “Or about someone they knew (I hadn’t written about anyone in particular). Guys wanted to meet me for coffee, as I was obviously their dream girl (it was a joke, guys, and no, thank you). At last! A woman who understands me! No, more modestly, I was just someone who had been paying attention.”

Borsook, an author and poet, began working in Silicon Valley in 1981, first as a technical writer for software companies. As she freelanced for various tech outlets and from her perch as a contributing writer to Wired in its earliest years, she began to piece together, as she put it in Cyberselfish, “a picture of an emergent social and political subculture, one that can seem dangerously naive and, at its worst, downright scary.”

Today, just a glance around will confirm that said subculture is no longer “emergent,” but horribly, frighteningly, society-destroyingly dominant. Fittingly, Cyberselfish will be reissued in the US on September 15 by Tin House, an imprint of the independent publisher Zando, and in the UK later in the month. The three-decade plus history of the book traces back through a piece she wrote for this very magazine where she began to lay out its thesis. That essay, also titled “Cyberselfish,” ran in our July/August 1996 [issue][] below a crystal clear subhed: “Silicon Valley, one of the country’s biggest recipients of government largesse, would like to bite the hand that feeds it.”

“No sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys,” Borsook, now 72, told me on a recent video call, reflecting on the central question that animated the essay. “So why are they so hostile to it?”

As I post this, a GoFundMe campaign to provide some basic support for Borsook (who is permanently disabled, not leastwise from a traumatic brain injury caused by a gunshot wound suffered when she was a teenager) is a touch over 80% of the way to reaching its goal.

Borsook was pretty much entirely right about the dangers the ‘Tech Bros’ represented. As we gear up to, finally, fight them for control of the future, it’s still worth putting some energy into making things at least OKish for one of the first voices sounding out the warning.

Full disclosure: I have no relationship with Borsook, nor with Paul Carter (who is in charge of the GoFundMe campaign above). I’m not American, nor am I in the US. I’m just someone who was lucky enough to read Cyberselfish back in the day.

Female brains wake up from anaesthesia differently than male brains,
by Sneha Khedkar, The Scientist, 2026-08-05.

All over the world, doctors perform more than 300 million surgeries each year. While some procedures require local anesthetics, nearly 60,000 people go under general anesthesia each day in the United States alone, rendering them unconscious during surgeries.

While doctors must ensure that patients go under anesthesia for the procedure, it is equally important that they wake up after the surgery. Researchers have previously found that male and female animals respond differently to the general anesthetic ketamine, but they did not fully understand its underlying molecular basis.

Now, scientists led by Sandra Siegert, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria found that sex differences in ketamine recovery arise due to distinct dynamics of neurons and immune cells called microglia in male and female brains. Their findings, published in Science Advances, offer a deeper understanding of ketamine anesthesia recovery and highlight the need to study sex as a biological variable.

Zadie Smith on the courage to be more than yourself,
by Maria Popova, The marginalian, 2026-05-10.

The tyranny of our time is that, because the hero of the modern myth is the victim, our catalogue of ways to be wounded has swelled to untenable proportions. The arsenal of possible offenses is so immense that we are left in a state of paralyzing hyper-vigilance, ever on the defensive, ever trying to preempt grievance and avoid indictment.

Hi girls,

I'd like to know if you've ever experienced this and if you know why it happens.

I (F26)'ve always been flat-chested, but lately (since 1 month ago), even though I haven’t gained any weight around my waist, my breasts are getting bigger. It hurts because it feels like it's pulling; I've never felt this before. I don’t understand it. Do you know if this is a normal part of aging? I’m 100% sure I’m not pregnant.

Thanks for your feedback

I just got a new Speedo swimsuit for lane swimming. It’s a lovely lavender colour but I think the light colour is making the shape of my erect nipples underneath more obvious. My boobs are small so it probably isn’t that noticeable. But I wondered if anyone else has had this happen? In my other darker suit, I feel like I don’t notice it as much! The feminist in me is saying: ‘women have nipples, why do we have to hide them when men don’t?’ But also I can’t remember how normal it is for a swimsuit to show your nips. Anyway let me know what you think!

Fitting in anyway possible 🥹

As a woman who seems to have made it, what are the things you feel but still can’t quite put into words?

Hi girlies, so ever since I met my SO about a year ago. My body immediately felt gravitated towards this person sexually and physically. The first time it happened, I felt the tingling sensations down there. I have never gotten that way towards anyone since I was in my early teenage years. Mind you, back when I had my raging hormones at peak. I am in my late 20s now and when I met this individual, it felt like I was 14 again. And to this day, I still get that way for this individual.

Have y’all ever experienced something similar? What does that mean?

I’ve had long, thick hair for most of my life, and honestly, I never really liked it that much. I always thought it was just hard to manage and kind of annoying. I didn’t realize how much my brush was part of the problem. I’ve been using the same plastic hair brush for years. Probably close to a decade. Growing up, we only replaced a brush if it cracked or lost teeth, so it never crossed my mind that brushes were something you should update. I wasn’t doing anything special with my routine either. Same shampoo and conditioner for over a year. Same leave-in. Same vitamin E oil. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try a bamboo brush and a boar bristle brush after seeing people talk about them on alibaba reviews. I didn’t expect much, but the change shocked me. My hair feels smoother, shinier, and much softer. The frizz is way down, and my scalp doesn’t itch the way it used to. The wild part is that nothing else changed. Just the brush. I’ve seen brushes like these online, but I finally get why people care about this now. For the first time, I actually enjoy my long hair. It feels healthy, and that alone has been a huge confidence boost.

Doesn't matter the gender, I was told I was too feminine as a kid. I grew up in a very Catholic environment where I was told my femininity was too much, even though I was born a girl. This resulted in some very unhealthy things taking place in my life, and one of those things was me suppressing my femininity and being more masculine in my late school aged/early teen years, which made me very unhappy.

I've since gone no contact with the individuals who told me as a kid that I was too much, it wasn't parents but it was neighbors, pastors, educators, etc. (the latter is especially messed up, but it was an educator within a religious setting as well, not a public school).

Anyone have similar effects?