I haven’t seen “The Odyssey” yet, but as a Latin minor who dabbled in Hellenism, I perked up when a brilliant piece of writing about the movie landed in my inbox this week. Elizabeth Dray, a urologist, connects the film and masculinity mythology to the recent announcement that the Pentagon will screen the testosterone levels of all servicemembers over 30. “The poet didn’t say ‘sing to me, Muse, of a man with optimized endocrine panels,’” she writes. I am a sucker for a piece that joins health policy, pop culture, and the Classics.
Recommendation of the week: If you’re interested in science journalism — and if you’re reading STAT, you must be! — don’t miss “The Best Science Stories and How They Work,” out now from the University of Chicago Press. It’s a compilation of some of the best science reporting from recent years, from outlets like Nature, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, annotated, with a Q&A with each author about how they reported and wrote the piece. It’s edited by Siri Carpenter, co-founder of The Open Notebook, the best resource out there for science journalists. (I’m biased — I was a senior editor there for several years — but I said that long before they started paying me.)
