Save the pelvic floor, save the world

Save the Pelvic Floor, Save the World

I’m something of a global authority on gastric distress. Any WIRED story that mentions poop—you probably have me to thank. I was early to bidets. I’ve cured friends’ IBS in an afternoon. I once had a newsletter, many years before this one, where I reported on my bowel movements to, um, a select group of subscribers. It was called The Daily Digest, and don’t even try to Google it.

So I’ve known about the pelvic floor for years. Must’ve been, oh, 2015 when I first heard it whispered about. It was this … mysterious body part? Somewhere down there? Kind of a “floor” but also not? Nobody knew for sure. We didn’t even know if it actually existed—only that, if it did, it was quite possibly the key to everything. Perfect poops. General well-being. The stability and alignment of our very souls.

In the intervening decade, the whispers turned into shouts from the rooftop. SAVE THE PELVIC FLOOR, SAVE THE WORLD!!! And yet the mysteries remained. The more we talked about the pelvic floor, in fact, the less we seemed to know. I waited and waited for someone to do a proper investigation, to write the definitive piece. To get to the bottom, as it were, of this bottom-heavy part. Nobody did.

Finally, there was only one thing left to do: be the bathroom influencers we are, and assign the piece ourselves.

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A 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup

Five microns. That was one of the more important figures of 2020: Nearly all respiratory infections, including the novel coronavirus, are transmitted through coughs or sneezes, in droplets that are five microns or larger and fall quickly to the ground. At least, that was what the world’s major health organizations said. 

In 2021, science writer Megan Molteni endeavored to explain how the dogma guiding public health policy for decades was actually based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how particles behave in the air. Megan reported how, as Covid raged onward, researchers feverishly dug up evidence proving that particles 5 microns and larger could be aerosols, and raced to pinpoint the source of the droplet fallacy. Her story is such an effective and compelling distillation of the researchers’ findings and their consequences that the American Association for the Advancement of Science gave it Kavli Science Journalism Award. As it turned out, the great aerosol debate of 2020 was as much a lesson in history and human folly as it was in medical science. So this week, I’d like to hear from you about other instances in which bias and blind faith had grave consequences. Leave a comment below the article or send me an email at samantha_spengler@wired.com.

WIRED knows a thing or two about a good tech-centric yarn. So this week, we compiled a list of the best tech books for the Silicon Valley–obsessed people in your life. The diverse selection spans multiple decades and subjects, and includes such picks as the 1982 Pulitzer winner The Soul of a New Machine, about the dawn of the industry, and Parmy Olson’s overview of the AI arms race. Commenters piped in with their own submissions. One reader recommends More Everything Forever by Adam Becker, a book about how Silicon Valley leaders’ flights of fancy, like escaping death and building AGI, are about consolidating power, not preparing the world for the future. Another reader suggested Labyrinth, a novel by A.G. Riddle. “Aside from being an excellent thriller, it is a brilliant look into one of the possible outcomes of AGI,” they explain. “I thought I had thought through where AI is heading. Oh, so wrong was I.”

Tell us about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories. Write to samantha_spengler@wired.com, and include “CLASSICS” in the subject line.