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My Unemployment in the Time of AI

On October 16th, 2024, I found myself unemployed. While some say unemployment can be a time to relax and catch up on sleep, this really wasn’t the case. My unemployment became a conditional liminal space, between stable pay that was without an expiration date (Odoardi et al. 2022). (more…) (read more...)

Softmaxxing Skepticism: How Looksmaxxing Culture Recruits the Mainstream

Sitting in a parked car, phone propped up on the dashboard, recording, he takes a bite of his Chipotle bowl between sentences about a metabolic drug meant to make him eat less. Almost three months into retatrutide, he’s not sure it’s worth it anymore. The drug is still locked in Phase III clinical trials, nowhere near FDA approval, meaning sellers have no legal standing to market it for human consumption (Eli Lilly and Company 2026). He tells his viewers that he briefly looked into the gray market.  (more…) (read more...)

Imagined Geographies: From Urban Expertise to Rural Health Intervention

Health interventions move across spaces and geographies that they themselves help to produce. I argue that health interventions organize relationships among places and people. They define where expertise is presumed to reside, who is expected to teach, and who is expected to learn. In doing so, they reproduce an imagined distinction between places even when everyday practice continually blurs those boundaries. This post contends that health interventions designed in Guatemala City do more than travel to communities across the country. They also produce an imagined geography in which urban spaces become associated with expertise, innovation, and authority, while predominantly Indigenous Maya communities are positioned as recipients of external knowledge. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with nutrition and health interventions, I show that this distinction, between the urban spaces of Guatemala City and rural spaces of Indigenous Maya Communities, repeatedly breaks down in practice as communities and fieldworkers, those directly responsible for (read more...)