I have two new books in progress:
The Health Supremacists
Historical Lessons On How “Make America Healthy Again” Works and How and Why We Should Resist It
[Book in progress]
As far as we know, the famously unfit Donald Trump does not guzzle muscle-pumping creatine shakes, avoid seed oils, practice intermittent fasting, or enjoy an anti-inflammatory cold plunge. He does not plant organic gardens on the White House grounds. He uproots them. For most of his public life, Donald Trump has reveled in a carnivalesque disdain for exercise and health eating. After nominating RFK Jr., the president displayed his love of junk food and flair for hazing rituals, forcing the anti-processed food crusader to devour a Big Mac on camera. In the press photos, Trump looked like a kid in a high-fructose corn syrup candy palace. RFK Jr. not so much.
And yet, Trump’s second term has been marked by an enthusiastic embrace of health and wellness influencers. Trump’s alliance with health and wellness influencers has baffled many onlookers. On the surface, it seems as unlikely as the serial adulterer and adjudicated sex offender’s embrace by “family values” Christians. And yet, the history of health and wellness in America reveals that MAHA is more the norm than the exception. Health and wellness have not, for the most part, been the purview of crunchy liberals or organic tofu progressives. More than anything, the history of health and wellness movements has been a calvalcade of eugenics, anti-immigrant fervor, conservative Christian morality, ultra-individualism, and prosperity gospels.
Like Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny for the Make America Healthy Movement, this book draws lessons from history to explain how a powerful alliance between authoritarian populism and “wellness” works. It’s a compassionate, even sympathetic account, that doesn’t try to debunk or MAHA or call-out the hypocrisies of its proponents. The battle against authoritarian populist health and wellness won’t be won on the field of facts. Instead, The Health Supremacists shows why MAHA’s stories about health, human nature, and food system reform resonate with so many people, including the author. At the same time, it reveals where these stories fall short and what kinds of alternatives we might offer.
Secrets of the Sargasso Monster
Living with the Strange Creatures of Climate Change and Ecosystem Destruction, Building Caribbean Futures in a Time of Seaweed
[Book in progress]
What happens when an unprecedented weather event drives a spectacularly diverse floating seaweed ecosystem—“The Golden Rainforest of the Sea”—onto Caribbean shores in 2011? And then this freak occurrence becomes a self-sustaining pattern, returning almost every year after that in increasingly large, increasingly destructive inundation events that smother sea life, snarl fishing, disrupt tourism, crash electrical grids and desalinization plants, deepen inequalities, and billow toxic gas, causing health problems for tens of thousands of the Caribbean’s most vulnerable residents? What happens when this life-giving and death-dealing creature begins to circulate in a route that precisely mirrors the Atlantic’s most haunted seaway, the Middle Passage?
This uncanny phenomenon has collapsed boundaries between environmental threat and ecological wonder that govern most disaster management and conservation work. And it has left many Caribbeans asking: Are yearly seaweed inundations yet another crisis making life in the region increasingly unlivable, or are they a gift—a gateway to a new future?
Secrets of the Sargasso Monster explores the strange and contradictory world of Sargassum natans and Sargassum fluitans, the only two seaweed species on the planet that live a completely free-floating nomadic life. “Sargasso” (shorthand for combinations of the two species) is the main constituent of what oceanographers, in 2018, dubbed “the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt” (GASB)—at its last peak in 2022, an 8,800-kilometer-long serpentine band of vibrant life weighing as much as 200,000 adult blue whales on an annual collision course with West African Brazilian, and Caribbean shores.