I did not want to turn sixty. I didn\u2019t want to read that number on a card. I didn\u2019t want a party. I didn\u2019t want to mark the day at all.<\/p>\n
My therapist asked what was really<\/i> bothering me. It was, I realized, the flat smack of reality in the face. At fifty I could still convince myself I had another half of my life to live. At sixty, the math wasn\u2019t mathing. Moreover, whatever is coming next will include some version of tragedy\u2014my parents dying, my body breaking down, other losses. Who would be eager to face any of that?<\/p>\n
The fact that this particular birthday coincided with my thirtieth novel was bittersweet. I am about to embark on a massive book tour we are calling the \u201cChapters Tour\u201d\u2014celebrating not just my newest release but all the titles that came before it, in the same festive spirit as Taylor Swift\u2019s Eras Tour. It feels like a milestone because it is<\/i> one. I\u2019ve spent a literal lifetime building up a body of work and amassing readers. I\u2019m proud of my novels and humbled by the lives they\u2019ve touched and the conversations they inspired. Recently, at BookCon, I had a throng of readers waiting to get books signed and to tell me their <\/i>stories. \u201cI used to read your books hidden behind my chemistry textbook,\u201d said one middle-aged woman. Another told me how my books were what she shared with her mom, who\u2019d recently passed. Dozens of up-and-coming writers whose books I consume like candy came up to me, wide-eyed. \u201cI can\u2019t believe I\u2019m meeting you,\u201d one gushed. \u201cYou\u2019re an icon.\u201d<\/p>\n
At sixty, you can achieve icon status. No one gives you lifetime achievement awards when you\u2019re twenty, after all. Thirty books is no small accomplishment, either. But as wonderful as it is to be put upon a pedestal as Someone Who Has Been In The Business Forever, it also creates a gap between you and the younger authors in the thick of the scrum. As if you\u2019ve put in your time. As if your relevance is in the rearview mirror. As if you\u2019re done.<\/p>\n
Reader, I\u2019m not done.<\/p>\n
The more I examined the facets of my reluctance to turn sixty, the more I realized this was the crux of my problem. Physically and mentally, I am healthier than ever. I recently lost enough weight to enjoy seeing myself in a mirror instead of dreading it. I swim over a mile every day. I can do the NYT crossword puzzle without cheating. However, a sixty-year-old woman is not supposed to be in the prime of her life. According to society, to movie representations, to JD Vance, I should be finding myself a cardigan and sensible shoes, letting my hair go grey, and taking care of my grandkids\u2014because that is my only value to society. I shouldn\u2019t want to turn someone\u2019s head on the street. I should be baking cookies, driving at a snail\u2019s pace, and the only hard thing I should be sucking on is butterscotch candy. Even though I know looks are more than skin-deep, I still wanted confirmation that I could be attractive at this age, and attracted to others. Just before my birthday, I watched the Off Campus television series, a steamy saga about twenty-something college kids falling in and out of love and bed. At one point, I hit pause, wondering, Should I be enjoying this? Am I a creeper?<\/i> It\u2019s worth noticing there is a gender discrepancy between men who age and women who age. Calling someone a \u201csilver fox\u201d is a compliment; calling someone a \u201ccougar\u201d is not. We don\u2019t bat an eye when a sixty-year-old man shows up with a thirty-year-old woman on his arm. If the situation were reversed, though, there would be a lot of side-eye. A man who faces a midlife crisis is a clich\u00e9; a woman who does so is selfish and entitled.<\/p>\n
I am younger than a lot of my female friends, and when I confided in them that I was having a really hard time with this birthday, they offered advice. \u201cSixty was liberating,\u201d Jan told me. \u201cI have zero f***\u2019s left to give. I say whatever is on my mind. I mean, who\u2019s going to stop me at this point?\u201d That\u2019s definitely a perk, but it\u2019s one I\u2019ve enjoyed for many years. I have always been outspoken\u2014in my writing, in my politics, on my social media. There is indeed a freedom in not being so young that you worry about what everyone thinks of you, or parse every comment you utter. With age comes the luxury of being unapologetically yourself. A silver lining, if you will, for the silver-haired. And yet, it didn\u2019t make turning sixty any less devastating for me.<\/p>\n
About a month before The Big Day, I woke up with a revelation. What if, instead of dragging my heels toward sixty, I took ownership of it? What if I marked the occasion\u2014not as the start of a slow slide toward the end, but as an amalgamation of what has made me me<\/i>, and an acknowledgment of all this body has survived and experienced and learned? I was driving in the car with my husband. \u201cI\u2019m thinking about getting a tattoo,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I do not have any tattoos. I\u2019ve never wanted a tattoo. There was nothing I felt I had to commemorate on my skin permanently…until now. I told my husband my preliminary idea for a design.<\/p>\n
My husband glanced at me. \u201cOh,\u201d he said. \u201cBut what would I get?\u201d<\/p>\n
(This is what I mean about still being crazy in love with him. I still smile at the thought that he believed this had to be a couples activity.)<\/p>\n
I was still road-testing the idea, but I was hesitant. Did sixty-year-olds even get tattoos? Did I think it would make me seem young and hip? Or was I hedging because my mother has made it clear my entire life that tattoos are on her Absolutely Not list? \u201cYou can\u2019t be buried at a Jewish cemetery,\u201d she\u2019s always said, although I had no plans to be buried at a Jewish cemetery and in fact I am the one who owns the plot where she<\/i> will be buried one day, and it is also<\/i> not a Jewish cemetery. Did I realize the irony in being an almost-sixty-year-old woman worried about what her mom would think if I got a tattoo? Yes. Yes, I did.<\/p>\n
What if, instead of dragging my heels toward sixty, I took ownership of it? What if I marked the occasion\u2014not as the start of a slow slide toward the end, but as an amalgamation of what has made me me<\/i>.<\/p>\n
A few weeks later, I took a group of friends to New York City to celebrate one of their birthdays (66, and she was not nearly as freaked out about her birthday as I was about mine.) \u201cI think I\u2019m going to get a tattoo tomorrow morning,\u201d I announced at dinner. Saying it out loud made it feel more real.<\/p>\n
My friend Lanni, a cancer survivor with two tattoos, volunteered to be my emotional support buddy. We researched options near our hotel, combing over ratings and reviews.<\/p>\n
The next morning, we arrived at a tattoo parlor. The artist was in a separate room, arguing over a banking transaction on the phone with some customer service agent. We looked around at the religious iconography covering all the walls; the client waiting in front of us whose long, ZZ Top-style beard brushed his beer belly. Lanni grabbed my arm and yanked me down the five flights of stairs. \u201cNot this place,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Our second attempt was a tattoo parlor run by women. The only clients were a family of Italians arguing over which New York City design they were going to get to commemorate their visit. I showed the artist the drawing of what I wanted, and she nodded, and got to work.<\/p>\n
A half hour later, I left with a brand new tattoo on the inside of my left wrist. It\u2019s about \u00be\u201d tall, cobalt blue, like the ink from a pen. It\u2019s a pilcrow\u2014the paragraph symbol that is used in editing.<\/p>\n
I love it.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s elegant and tiny and I see it every time I sign something. To me, it means exactly what a pilcrow means when it\u2019s inserted into a manuscript:<\/p>\n
Same story; fresh start.<\/p>\n
When my birthday finally arrived, I celebrated with calls from my kids and gifts that made me laugh\u2014a hand-thrown bowl, a Little Mermaid shirt, a candle that says, \u201cFrom a distance, you don\u2019t look a day over 59!\u201d I did not have a sea change on my actual birthday; I still wasn\u2019t happy about turning sixty. Now, on the other side of the actual date, I\u2019m still mildly disgruntled. But when I look down at my wrist, there\u2019s a symbol that marks all I have accumulated and accomplished so far, and reminds me there\u2019s more to come.<\/p>\n
Please don\u2019t tell my mother.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image002.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
___________________________<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/hollow-bones-199x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Hollow Bones<\/a> by Jodi\u00a0Picoult is available from Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I didn\u2019t care about turning forty. When fifty rolled around, I celebrated. At 55, my neighbor took a picture of me under a matching speed limit sign and we both laughed. Then came sixty. Several months before my birthday I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31551,"featured_media":275839,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,11,43103],"tags":[1564,15324,3698,111685,13146,35512,16228,10879,1244],"class_list":["post-275406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-fullwidth-slider","category-memoir","tag-aging","tag-ballantine-books","tag-birthdays","tag-hollow-bones","tag-jodi-picoult","tag-milestones","tag-penguin-random-house","tag-random-house","tag-the-writing-life","story-type-aging"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19E2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/jodipicoult2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31551"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275487,"date":"2026-08-17T05:09:43","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T09:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275487"},"modified":"2026-08-24T09:48:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T13:48:47","slug":"on-good-fat-bad-fat-and-the-problems-with-bmi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-good-fat-bad-fat-and-the-problems-with-bmi\/","title":{"rendered":"On Good Fat, Bad Fat, and the Problems With BMI"},"content":{"rendered":" Today, the terms \u201cobese\u201d and \u201coverweight\u201d have precise medical definitions based on how much someone weighs relative to their height, but this is a modern formulation. Until recently, people knew their height but almost no one could measure their weight, so whether you were thin, plump, fat, stout, or corpulent was a judgment call. That began to change after the invention and spread of the penny scale in the late nineteenth century, so named because you paid a penny to find out your weight. Within a few decades, inexpensive bathroom scales were invented, and suddenly average people could learn their weight. An obvious next question was how much should they weigh?<\/p>\n The first scientist to address this question was a Belgian polymath named Adolphe Quetelet (1796\u20131874). Quetelet was uninterested in obesity and instead wanted to use recently developed spring-based scales along with new statistical methods to describe a \u201cnormal man.\u201d Since tall people generally weigh more than short people, what, he asked, is a typical weight for a given height? After collecting data on a sample of European men, he calculated that body weight (in kilograms) is usually proportional to the square of height (in meters). Thus two people with the same ratio of weight to height squared (kg\/m2) have effectively the same weight for a given height. This ratio was initially termed \u201cQuetelet\u2019s index.\u201d<\/p>\n That kind of miscategorization highlights BMI\u2019s most disturbing shortcomings: it is reductive, potentially misleading diagnostically, and stigmatizing.<\/p>\n Quetelet didn\u2019t intend his index to measure obesity, but after the invention and spread of mass-produced scales, insurance companies realized Quetelet\u2019s index could help them boost profits. If you are selling life insurance, you can make more money by charging more or denying coverage for people with a lot of extra body fat who might be more likely to die prematurely. The first standardized weight tables were thus developed by the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, which initially deemed anyone whose Quetelet\u2019s index was in the top 20 percent of a sample of seven hundred thousand policy holders too risky to insure.\u00a0For the next fifty years, insurance companies, not doctors, were the chief arbiters of corpulence.<\/p>\n Then in 1972, the influential American physiologist Ancel Keys wondered how well Quetelet\u2019s index predicts a person\u2019s body fat percentage. Using a sample of nearly 7,500 American men (less than 2 percent were Black and 14 percent were Asian), Keys and colleagues showed that Quetelet\u2019s index, which he renamed the \u201cbody mass index\u201d (BMI), correlates strongly with levels of body fat.11 Despite Keys\u2019s warning that the “characterization of persons in terms of desirable weight percentage has resulted in attributing to \u2018overweight\u2019 some tendencies to ill health and death that are actually only related to age,\u201d BMI became the worldwide standard for categorizing people\u2019s body fat levels. Today most healthcare providers and researchers classify everyone according to six categories set in stone by the World Health Organization (WHO):<\/p>\n Underweight: <18.5 kg\/m2 It\u2019s often said that an accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions, but I\u2019m not so sure. Just because a measure is accurate (or, for that matter, precise) doesn\u2019t mean you understand its meaning. Despite their widespread use for decades, BMI categories have serious flaws. One glaring drawback is that BMI doesn\u2019t measure what proportion of a person\u2019s weight is fat versus muscle, bone, or other tissues. Very muscular people are sometimes miscategorized as overweight.<\/p>\n In addition, percentages of fat and other tissues differ among individuals depending on age, sex, and race or ethnic background. An analysis of nearly twelve thousand Americans found that for the same level of body fat, age, and sex, the BMIs of Black Americans averaged 1.3 kg\/m2 higher compared to Americans of European descent, while the BMIs of Asians was between 1.9 and 3.2 kg\/m2 lower. That means BMI typically overestimates the percentage of body fat in Blacks and underestimates it in Asians. Based on percentage of body fat, a Black person with a BMI of 26 is likely to be miscategorized as overweight instead of normal.<\/p>\n If you ask (as I have) hunter-gatherers what they prefer to eat, more often than not the answer is meat, especially fatty meat.<\/p>\n That kind of miscategorization highlights BMI\u2019s most disturbing shortcomings: it is reductive, potentially misleading diagnostically, and stigmatizing. Research shows that labeling individuals as obese or overweight based on this single ratio can make them feel judged, marginalized, and devalued. What\u2019s more, even if someone\u2019s BMI accurately reflects their body fat percentage, BMI is not a complete measure of health.<\/p>\n At the very least, that also requires considering blood pressure, resting heart rate, cholesterol levels, blood sugar level, liver function, inflammation, and fitness. It\u2019s also overly reductionist to consider fat as just a substance you either have too much or too little of. Fat is a vital class of molecules that every cell uses; our bodies store fat in special cells, adipocytes, that have many functions. And to top it all, fat played a special role in human evolution. If we want to better understand obesity, we have to learn more about fat.<\/p>\n If you ask (as I have) hunter-gatherers what they prefer to eat, more often than not the answer is meat, especially fatty meat. Most wild animals are extremely lean, so hunter-gatherers crave the fat-rich parts of the body, including the marrow and liver. Like almost everyone, they think fat is delicious. They also appreciate that you need enough fat to be healthy, have children, and not be grumpy.<\/p>\n As a reminder, animals\u2014humans included\u2014store most of their energy as fat. Each fat molecule has three fatty acid chains that stick off like tines on a fork from a tiny glycerol molecule. Burning fat molecules in cells harnesses 9 calories per gram by retrieving energy from the bonds between the fatty acids\u2019 many carbon atoms, which are strung together like beads. Because fat is denser than carbs, it stores more than twice as many calories per gram, making it our primary repository of energy.<\/p>\n Fat makes life possible but has one salient constraint: it doesn\u2019t dissolve in water. As a result, we can\u2019t stockpile fat inside tissues the way we store carbs. Instead, most of our body fat stores need to be sequestered in adipocytes. Keep in mind that these cells aren\u2019t just little inflatable sacs of fat\u2014they are dynamic cells with a nucleus, DNA, and organelles. Among fat cells\u2019 many functions, they synthesize and secrete hormones and other molecular messengers that signal to the body how much fat they contain, whether they are shrinking or damaged, and much more.<\/p>\n At birth, we have about one billion of these fat cells, and by the time we reach adulthood, we have approximately ten to thirty billion. But there is variation. Women tend to have more fat cells than men, and people who are overweight or obese tend to have more fat cells than people who are classified as \u201cnormal\u201d weight, especially if they developed obesity during childhood and adolescence. Although 10 percent of fat cells are replaced every year, the total number stays relatively constant as adults age. Like balloons, fat cells swell or shrink as we gain or lose weight.<\/p>\n The relative constancy of fat cell numbers combined with their ability to change size and function has implications for the evolutionarily unusual state of being obese. Although you can\u2019t see or feel it, when fat cells store more fat than they should, they become damaged, like an overstuffed suitcase bursting at the seams. They also don\u2019t get enough oxygen. Damaged, deprived fat cells then synthesize and secrete chemical messengers (adipokines) that activate an immune response, triggering inflammation. That inflammation is a low-grade version of the hot, red swelling you get from a hangnail or a sore throat, but because it\u2019s in your fat cells, you don\u2019t feel it.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, fat cells are everywhere, and that inflammation can spread to nearly every nook and cranny of the body. Despite its pervasiveness, scientists didn\u2019t pay much attention to this kind of simmering, body-wide inflammation until modern technologies to measure it were developed. The ability to measure this sort of inflammation has been a game changer because if it persists for years, inflammation\u2019s effects are pernicious. Bit by bit, low-grade systemic inflammation attacks cells all over the body, causing them to malfunction.<\/p>\n One common form of inflammatory damage is to obstruct fat and muscle cells\u2019 ability to respond to the hormone insulin. As we will learn later, insulin is needed to transport sugar and fat molecules out of the bloodstream and into cells. Inflammation triggered by obesity gums up these actions, causing both blood sugar and cholesterol levels to rise silently, gradually, and imperceptibly, causing harm. One bad consequence is type 2 diabetes. Another is hardening of the arteries. Elsewhere, sustained low-grade inflammation impairs other kinds of receptors and tissues. Inflammation in the brain damages neurons, increasing the risk of Alzheimer\u2019s disease and other forms of dementia. Inflammation also increases the risk of cancers, osteoarthritis, asthma, inflammatory bowel disease, and other illnesses. And, scarily, this kind of inflammation is mostly imperceptible. It slowly and surreptitiously damages your body.<\/p>\n Whether we are normal weight or obese, shrinking fat cells induce powerful sensations of hunger and lethargy, countering efforts to lose weight.<\/p>\n To add insult to injury, the inflammation obesity causes also sets in motion a vicious cycle that can promote yet more weight gain. This happens because adipocytes produce hormones and other signaling molecules in response to how much fat they contain. The most important of these hormones is leptin, which signals to the brain information about the body\u2019s energy supply. When your fat cells are adequately stocked with fat, leptin levels are high, and your brain suppresses appetite. When your fat cells shrink as you burn fat, leptin levels drop, stimulating hunger.<\/p>\n Normally this system helps us maintain a nearly constant weight, but an insidious effect of low-grade inflammation is to damage the brain\u2019s leptin receptors. When this happens, the normal feedback system malfunctions like a broken thermostat. Even though an obese person\u2019s fat cells may produce enough leptin to suppress their appetite, the brain doesn\u2019t receive those signals, causing constant hunger. Hunger, in turn, fights against weight loss and possibly even spurs more weight gain.<\/p>\n And if that weren\u2019t bad enough, fat cells cause problems not only when they get too big but also when they shrink. As people lose weight by burning fat and their fat cells deflate, leptin levels nosedive, warning the brain that the body\u2019s energy stores are in decline. Whether we are normal weight or obese, shrinking fat cells induce powerful sensations of hunger and lethargy, countering efforts to lose weight. This response was presumably adaptive to prevent our ancestors from becoming underweight but is disastrous for today\u2019s dieters.<\/p>\n It makes sense that we evolved to detect and respond to declining levels of fat because having too little fat is ruinous for reproduction and deleterious for other functions. However, because obesity was so rare in our evolutionary history, we apparently never evolved adaptations to prevent us from storing too much fat. But how much is too much?<\/p>\n The philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803\u20131882) wrote that a \u201cfoolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.\u201d Emerson was complaining about politicians and theologians with inflexible opinions closed to new ideas and facts, but he might as well have been writing about how we have medicalized obesity. Consider that a five-foot, ten-inch person weighing 208.5 pounds has a BMI of 29.9 and is technically overweight, but if they gain half a pound, thus increasing their BMI to 30.0, they will suddenly be obese. And according to the American Medical Association, they then have a disease. In addition to being arbitrary, reductionist, and biased, classifying individuals as obese or overweight based on a single number ignores many complexities about body fat.<\/p>\n We are evidently best adapted to store enough but not too much.<\/p>\n \u201cA rose is a rose is a rose\u201d according to Gertrude Stein, but the same cannot be said of body fat. There are several different types of body fat, and they behave differently. The most consequential distinction is between fat that lies under the skin, termed \u201csubcutaneous fat,\u201d and fat in and around organs like the liver, termed \u201cabdominal fat\u201d (also called \u201cvisceral fat,\u201d \u201cbelly fat,\u201d or \u201cectopic fat\u201d).* We evolved to store mostly subcutaneous fat and have only a little abdominal fat. Abdominal fat, in addition, is more sensitive to hormones and has more blood vessels. In essence, abdominal fat is a readily accessed, short-term energy reserve for use in times of need. For this reason, during stressful situations like a famine or during conflicts when the body might require lots of extra calories, the brain directs cortisol levels to rise, which among other things causes the body to store more abdominal fat. That additional abdominal fat is an adaptation to help us cope with short-term food shortages or times when we need to be extra physically active.<\/p>\n But too much abdominal fat is a health concern. When abdominal fats cells over-swell, they ignite more chronic inflammation than do subcutaneous fat cells. Hundreds of studies have shown that individuals with higher levels of abdominal fat have elevated risks of developing inflammation-related illnesses, especially type 2 diabetes and heart disease.<\/p>\n The difference between abdominal and subcutaneous fat highlights a major concern about obesity along with a major limitation of BMI. While excess abdominal fat is more disease-causing than subcutaneous fat, BMI is calculated from just weight and height and thus fails to distinguish between these different fat types. That\u2019s a problem because subcutaneous fat deposits in places like the hips and buttocks don\u2019t cause as much inflammation as fat in muscles or in organs like the liver. For this reason, we should stop using just BMI to assess fatness and employ other measures to estimate fat distribution. Some hospitals have sophisticated scanners that can do this, but a simple way to estimate abdominal fat levels is to use a measuring tape. The ratio of a person\u2019s waist to hip circumference, or their waist circumference to height are pretty good estimators of their abdominal fat deposits. One can also look in the mirror: someone storing more fat in the abdomen than elsewhere, including the hips, will have more of an apple than a pear shape.<\/p>\n All things considered, let\u2019s be more thoughtful about how we measure and use body fat levels to assess someone\u2019s health or anything else about them. At the same time, while it\u2019s wrong to judge, stigmatize, or discriminate on the basis of weight, it\u2019s true that high levels of body fat, especially abdominal fat, increase a person\u2019s risk of many diseases. Even though BMI is a flawed measure for individuals, it is useful for assessing population-level associations between body fat levels and long-term health outcomes. Figure 14 shows the relationship between BMI and the risk of dying from any cause among more than 3.5 million women and men in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n Keep in mind that this analysis includes people of all races; it measures only longevity, not health; it doesn\u2019t distinguish between abdominal and subcutaneous fat; and it doesn\u2019t account for exercise, access to healthcare, and other factors. Despite these limitations, you can see the J-shaped relationship between BMI and the risk of all-cause mortality. People with BMIs below 18 and above 30 are at greater risk of dying. The graph also shows that having a little more fat is beneficial as people age. We are evidently best adapted to store enough but not too much.<\/p>\n That, in turn, raises a difficult question: If excess fat isn\u2019t good for us, why are humans so prone to storing too much?<\/p>\n __________________________________<\/p>\n From <\/em>Fed Up<\/a> by Daniel E Lieberman. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Daniel Lieberman Published by arrangement with Alfred A Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today, the terms \u201cobese\u201d and \u201coverweight\u201d have precise medical definitions based on how much someone weighs relative to their height, but this is a modern formulation. Until recently, people knew their height but almost no one could measure their weight,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7217,"featured_media":275489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43287,43092,43444],"tags":[73038,14811,63641,58355,27247,111676,10968,420],"class_list":["post-275487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-health","category-newsandculture","category-science","tag-bmi","tag-bodies","tag-daniel-e-lieberman","tag-diets","tag-fat","tag-fed-up","tag-health","tag-knopf"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Fl","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/bmi.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7217"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275771,"date":"2026-08-17T05:08:53","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T09:08:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275771"},"modified":"2026-08-18T09:53:01","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:53:01","slug":"rebecca-solnit-when-penelope-tried-to-spin-her-own-fate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/rebecca-solnit-when-penelope-tried-to-spin-her-own-fate\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebecca Solnit: Penelope Weaves Her Destiny"},"content":{"rendered":" \u201cThe Liquid Birds\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n P\u0113nelop\u0113 (\u03a0\u03b7\u03bd\u03b5\u03bb\u03cc\u03c0\u03b7) is usually understood to combine the Greek word p\u0113n\u0113 (\u03c0\u03ae\u03bd\u03b7), “weft<\/a>,” and \u014dps (\u1f64\u03c8), “face,” which is considered the most appropriate for a cunning weaver whose motivation is hard to decipher<\/em><\/p>\n Penelope finds when she unweaves the shroud\u2014 *<\/p>\n From long before the time of Homer until the recent past\u2014and in the present in some traditional societies\u2014turning an amorphous mass of wool into thread via spinning and then weaving that into fabric was both an important skill and a source of powerful metaphor. We still use some of those metaphors\u2014a thread is a connected series of exchanges by email, text, or on social media, and you can lose the thread of what you\u2019re saying. The word spinning was mostly used to describe that making of thread… then came other forms of twisting, all the way to spin doctors and spin control. The distaff that holds the unspun fiber became a term for the female or distaff side of a family or household and spinster became a term, eventually pejorative, currently being reclaimed, for an unmarried woman. The analogy between storytelling and turning the shapeless wool into thread or the thread into woven fabric is why spinning a tale and weaving a story are (perhaps now slightly archaic) ways of talking about narrative.<\/p>\n In Greek mythology the Moirai, or Fates, were three sisters, one who spun a human life as a thread, one who measured it, and one who cut it, making the connection between the linearity of thread and time explicit. (Norse mythology\u2019s Norns are another trio of women meting out human life via threads.) Penelope takes on the Moirai\u2019s power of controlling destiny by constantly rolling back the time in which she must choose a husband from among the suitors by unweaving at night what she wove by day. This makes her loom a device on which time goes both ways. Denied conventional power in a patriarchal society, she finds an unconventional form of it and spins her own tale rather than being subject to the fate the suitors intend to impose on her.<\/p>\n ______________________________<\/p>\n More of Rebecca Solnit\u2019s writing online can be found here<\/a>. \u201cThe Liquid Birds\u201d P\u0113nelop\u0113 (\u03a0\u03b7\u03bd\u03b5\u03bb\u03cc\u03c0\u03b7) is usually understood to combine the Greek word p\u0113n\u0113 (\u03c0\u03ae\u03bd\u03b7), “weft,” and \u014dps (\u1f64\u03c8), “face,” which is considered the most appropriate for a cunning weaver whose motivation is hard to decipher Penelope finds when she<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":400,"featured_media":275824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43101,43077],"tags":[5804,2465,111792,7514,28036,212,111791,12278],"class_list":["post-275771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-poem","tag-greece","tag-homer","tag-morai","tag-mythology","tag-penelope","tag-poetry","tag-spinning","tag-the-odyssey"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19JV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Penelope-Unraveling-Her-Work.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/400"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275412,"date":"2026-08-17T05:08:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T09:08:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275412"},"modified":"2026-08-18T09:29:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:29:33","slug":"everything-but-the-burden-greg-tate-john-henryism-and-the-cost-of-solidarity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/everything-but-the-burden-greg-tate-john-henryism-and-the-cost-of-solidarity\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything But the Burden: <\/br>Greg Tate, John Henryism, and the Cost of Solidarity"},"content":{"rendered":" Praise be to Akhenaten, to Cleopatra, to Ra, Sun Ra, Iris, Osiris and all the ancestors and ancestresses: <\/span>Flyboy in the Buttermilk<\/span><\/i><\/a>, by the late, great Greg Tate\u2014that posthumous Pulitzer Prize-winning polymorphous polymath, the heppest cat to ever done bee bop in the pages of the <\/span>Village Voice<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Vibe<\/span><\/i>\u2014is back in print.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Subtitled<\/span> Essays on Contemporary America<\/span><\/i>, this collection of 40 articles is as relevant today as it was when it was first published 25 years ago. Whether he was writing about sports, politics, music or art, Greg left an indelible mark on American arts and letters. Along with bell hooks (who died the same week as Greg in December 2021, both leaving black holes in the expository cosmos), Greg done changed the game for cultural criticism\u2014imbuing it with a Black down-beat street sense that could still soar higher than Miles hitting a high G on <\/span>Kind of Blue<\/span><\/i> or Alvin flying over floorboards in <\/span>Revelations<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n OK, that was my modest attempt to write in the style of Tate himself. But there\u2019s no competing. How can you compete with the G.O.A.T.? How can you compete with the brother who could bang out one sentence after another on the legacy of Wynton Marsalis in \u201cBaby Miles and Bay Wayne\u201d ( \u201cNeither freemen fuzhacks, nor funkateers, the Marsalis brothers, on evidence of the trumpeter\u2019s CBS debut, declare themselves adroit student archivists of acoustic jazz\u2019s last band of \u2018inside\u2019 futurists\u2019\u201d) and on Skip Gates in \u201cYo! Hermeneutics!\u201d <\/span>(\u201cMerely conceiving a poststructionalist version of this deteronomic tribal scroll is enough to make me feel like a one-man Harlem Renaissance\u2014at least until Thelonius asks if I\u2019m hip to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., blood up at Yale (Cornell by the time you read this) who guest-edited two issues of Black American Literature Forum<\/em> on the subject of semiotics and the signifyin\u2019 monkey\u201d<\/span>) alike?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n You <\/span>can\u2019t <\/span><\/i>compete. It\u2019d be like trying to beat old head LeBron at horse, or trying to get the ball away from young blood Yamal.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In being <\/span>himself<\/span><\/i>\u2014with all the burdens of Black genius that came with it\u2014Greg blasted the door off its fucking hinges<\/p><\/span><\/p>\n But here was the thing about Greg: as a critic, he could be sharp as a samurai sword slicing through skin (\u201cTo fully appreciate the sickness of [Michael] Jackson\u2019s savaging of his African physiognomy you have to recall that back when he wore the face he was born with, black folk thought he was the prettiest thing since sliced sushi.\u201d) He could praise a cat with the grace of Brunson making a three-pointer with four seconds to go (\u201cBefore he was cutting vinyl, George Clinton was cutting hair; before he got involved with the recorded process, my man was chemically processing hair-mixing down wave, curl, and conk jobs for all the slick splib hustlers that ran the streets of Plainfield\u201d) <\/span>and <\/span><\/i>he could merk that same man down to size (\u201cGeorge Clinton\u2019s <\/span>Computer Games<\/span><\/i> is a work of genius and a piece of shit\u201d) with an assassin\u2019s speed and the murderous meticulousness of Mbapp\u00e9 gutting a game with his god-given golden boot. Maybe not until earlier this month\u2014when our sister-with-a-white-mama-and-mister Emily Wilson played her bow and plucked her arrow into the neck of fellow Homeric interpreter, \u2018bruh Nolan, with so much force that her o\u2019dyssey <\/span>dyss track<\/span><\/a> crashed <\/span><\/a>the <\/span>London Review of Books<\/span><\/i> website like a Laestrygonian\u2019s lobbed boulder blowing a trireme to smitherines\u2014has anyone struck a fellow traveler with as much precision as Greg did when he wrote about bad art made by artists he loved.<\/span><\/p>\n And yet, as a writer amongst other writers, he was the sweetest guy\u2014and he was never competing with you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Even if he mentored you, he didn\u2019t try to make you write like him. He tried to make you sound like <\/span>you<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n In being <\/span>himself<\/span><\/i>\u2014with all the burdens of Black genius that came with it\u2014Greg blasted the door off its fucking hinges with all the G-force (and care) of afrofuturist Victor Glover piloting <\/span>Artemis II <\/span><\/i>towards lunar slingshot glory\u2026because he wanted you to be you.<\/span><\/p>\n No sir, no ma\u2019am, none of us who received his mentorship\u2014really, anyone who\u2019s filed culture for <\/span>Vulture<\/span><\/i> or <\/span>Gawker<\/span><\/i> or <\/span>BuzzFeed<\/span><\/i> or<\/span> Lit Hub<\/span><\/i> or the <\/span>Nation <\/span><\/i>in the last couple of decades\u2014would be <\/span>naaaaaaaaaaaan <\/span><\/i>without gregarious, luminous, generous Greg, and his downtown, no-clown, throw-down, new sound concertos about David Bowie, Sam Delaney, Don DeLillo, Dawn Suggs, <\/span>Daughters of the Dust<\/span><\/i> director Julie Dash, and\u2014of course\u2014the collection\u2019s eponymous \u201cflyboy in the buttermilk\u201d himself, <\/span>Jean-Michel Basquiat<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Like a runaway hack-hack-hacking through an antebellum field of sugarcane with a machete under a moonless midnight sky, Tate tore a new trail for us <\/span>all<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n *<\/span><\/p>\n Originally published in 1992, <\/span>Flyboy<\/span><\/i> has been out of print for many years\u2014something that bothered Greg terribly when I <\/span>interviewed him a decade ago<\/span><\/a> upon the release of <\/span>Flyboy 2<\/span><\/i>. It bothered me, too, as a professor: I always wanted to teach the original <\/span>Flyboy <\/span><\/i>in its totality and never got the chance. (If students of journalism could only study one book to teach them many concepts in a sole volume\u2014sentence construction, rhetoric, narrative control, dialogue, wordplay, humor, writing in your own voice, high theory, low theory, words as music, writing as rhythm, prose as poem, craft, <\/span>craft<\/span><\/i>, CRAFT\u2014 <\/span>Flyboy in the Buttermilk<\/span><\/i> would be a good contender.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Too many subjects of this wheezing colonial empire want a proximity to Blackness without any responsibility for what ails Black people.<\/p>\n Greg practiced criticism as love. Sometimes that was tough love, as when he dissed <\/span>Bad<\/span><\/i> in \u201cI\u2019m White! What\u2019s Wrong with Michael Jackson\u201d (\u201cProof that God don\u2019t like ugly, the title of Michael\u2019s new LP, <\/span>Bad<\/span><\/i>, accurately describes the contents in standard English\u2026 The only thing <\/span>Bad <\/span><\/i>has going for it is that it was made by the same artist who made <\/span>Thriller<\/span><\/i>.\u201d) Sometimes, that was the love of grief, as in <\/span>\u201cThe Man in Our Mirror,\u201d<\/span><\/a> an obituary for the ages banged out in a day. That cover essay, which I have read dozens of times over the last 17 years since I first pulled it out of a red <\/span>Voice <\/span><\/i>box on Cooper Square, is both a brutal cry of pain (\u201cMichael\u2019s death was probably the most shocking celebrity curtain call of our time because he had stopped being vaguely mortal or human for us quite a while ago, had become such an implacably bizarre and abstracted tabloid creation, worlds removed from the various Michaels we had once loved so much. The unfortunate blessing of his departure is that we can now all go back to loving him as we first found him, without shame, despair, or complication\u201d) and an indictment of corroded, commercial art in the US (\u201cWhat Black American culture\u2014musical and otherwise\u2014lacks now isn\u2019t talent or ambition, but the unmistakable presence of some kind of spiritual genius: the sense that something other than or even more than human is speaking through whatever fragile mortal vessel is burdened with repping for the divine, the magical, the supernatural, the ancestral.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n This is a running theme in Tate\u2019s work: reading people like Michael to read America (white and Black) to <\/span>itself<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n Too many subjects of this wheezing colonial empire want a proximity to Blackness without any responsibility for what ails Black people. (I can imagine what he might say about billionaire Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s billionaire beau, Jay-Z, teaming up with Target<\/a> as boycotters blackballed the retail behemoth for dismissing DEI<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Or, to riff on the title of another Greg Tate joint, when it comes to Blackness, too many Americans want \u201ceverything but the burden.\u201d<\/p>\n *<\/span><\/p>\n Released about a decade after <\/span>Flyboy<\/span><\/i>, 2003\u2019s <\/span>Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture<\/span><\/i> is an anthology of essays by the likes of Robin D.G. Kelley, Michaela Angela Davis, and Arthur Jaffa, and edited by Tate.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Riffing on Chief Parliamentarian of Funkadelic land, Tate told us, \u201cAs George Clinton likes to say, \u2018Without the humps, there\u2019s no getting over.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In other words: <\/span>to make art, you need some of the burden.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Greg credited the phrase which made up the title of his collection\u2014as he credited many thinsg\u2014to his mother, Florence, known to his readers as \u201cMama Tate.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The idea behind was simple, but powerful: White (and, as I build on Greg and Mama\u2019s argument in <\/span>The Overseer Class<\/span><\/i>, some \u201chistoric first\u201d Black people) wanted <\/span>everything <\/span><\/i>everyday Black folk got\u2026except for one thing:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n They wanted the music. Just as they wanted to enjoy the imperial nostalgia of Native American dreamcatchers without having to live on a genocide-created reservation, when it comes to Black culture, white people wanted <\/span>everything but the burden. <\/span><\/i>They didn\u2019t want the cost of being Black\u2014the health disparities, the racialized poverty, the redlining, the police state on your back.<\/span><\/p>\n And they sure as shit didn\u2019t want to <\/span>hear about (let alone suffer from) John Henyrism\u2014that very real way <\/span>Doc Sherman James proved<\/span><\/a> how the grim reaper comes-a-knockin\u2019 early for Black men due to the blood-pressure-and-heart-stress of racism. Named for the Negro folk hero who <\/span>died <\/span><\/a>trying to swing his hammer faster than a steam engine could, John Henrysism took my father at 67, just as it took <\/span>his <\/span><\/i>father at 57\u2014and just as it took Greg at 64. (Shortly after Greg died, the artist John Simms\u2014that brilliant brother behind <\/span>How to Hang a Confederate Flag<\/span><\/i><\/a>
\nNormal: 18.5\u201324.9 kg\/m2
\nOverweight: 25.0\u201329.9 kg\/m2
\nObese (Class I): 30\u201334.9 kg\/m2
\nObese (Class II): 35\u201339.9 kg\/m2
\nObese (Class III): >40 kg\/m2<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/fed-up-197x300.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
\nthat she was making for the father of her husband,
\nwho of course is absent and has been for years\u2014
\nthat when she undoes what she wove in this time
\nshe can unweave all time that has passed and by
\nweaving a different pattern can shift the present
\nand as she weaves warp through weft, thread by thread
\nshe finds mastery and after much practice can
\nunweave better than she ever wove, can unweave
\nher marriage back before she ever met the man
\ncan hover with threads added and subtracted
\nin the passion of their first years, make one night,
\none kiss, happen over and over, and then she can
\nunweave it all so that their marriage bed, famously
\nmade from a rooted tree, is not yet a bed, the tree
\nonly a sapling, crones become maidens, eagles, doves
\ndrop from the skies to find the nests they left
\nand the gulls, cormorants, terns likewise find
\nthe fragments of their old eggshells that begin to
\npull back together to hold the liquid birds within,
\nthe wool itself unspins and goes back to the flock
\nand the flock goes backward, wool shorter and shorter
\non their frames as they disgorge grass to the earth,
\nenough to replant the hillsides, as snow flies upward,
\nand rivers flow uphill, and she works time like a dj
\nscratching the record back and forth, revolutions
\ngiving way to the rhythms, lyric music to notes
\nclustering forward and backward; she masters time
\nand weaves and picks apart many endings, turnings,
\nweaves other lives for herself, lives for centuries
\nduring the decade she waits for his return, lives
\nas a priestess, as the beloved of the handsome sailor
\nwho came to shore when she was a girl, has daughters,
\nhas travels, studies, passions, strange woven patterns,
\nand then she lets it go and weaves his return,
\nweaves the massacre of the suitors, weaves the shroud,
\nand takes her knife and cuts the last thread, done,
\nand she knows this is not the only or the best
\nof all her destinies but that the pattern is good.<\/p>\n
\nFeatured art: \u201cPenelope Unraveling Her Work at Night\u201d by Dora Wheeler (1886)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n<\/span><\/i>And the art.
\n<\/span><\/i>And the style.
\n<\/span><\/i>And the cool.
\n<\/span><\/i>And the clothes.
\n<\/span><\/i>And the rhythm.
\n<\/span><\/i>And the hoops
\n<\/span><\/i>And the blues.
\n<\/span><\/i>They want the bee bop.
\n<\/span><\/i>And the hip-hop.
\n<\/span><\/i>And the scat-jazz,
\n<\/span><\/i>and church-soul.
\n<\/span><\/i>They even want
\n<\/span><\/i>Basquiat\u2019s strokes,
\n<\/span><\/i>\u00a0and Richard Pryor\u2019s
\n<\/span><\/i>off color jokes.
\n<\/span><\/i>They crave all this shit\u2014
\n<\/span><\/i>(and bag quite a bit)
\n<\/span><\/i>but for one thing:
\n<\/span><\/i>the burden!!!<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n