keep in mind that the number of people who get breast cancer during their contraceptive-using years is quite low, so a 25-30% increase may not actually be very many people.

It’s interesting but I’m not sure some of it makes sense. Progesterone-eluting IUDs are supposed to result in much less progesterone systemically than something like Depo-Provera. It seems like every ten years or so there’s a seesaw that changes estrogen/progesterone from miracle drugs to poison and then back again. Sigh. “further research is needed.”

Not to be super pedantic, but the word you want is “innervated.” “Enervated” means tired. Which it’s certainly possible the arms are as well, but I don’t think it’s what you meant.

I am so glad I read this book before I had kids because I could appreciate it as the harrowing work of art that it is without really understanding how parenthood would affect my reading. I have kids now, and my oldest is approximately the same age as the boy in the book, and I will never read it again.

It’s like Iain M Banks’s Culture novels, there’s a loose framework but every individual novel can be read as a standalone book.

1. if she seems cool, just eliminate the middleman and communicate directly with her. Your phone will work just as well as his.

2. your BF, as you’ve surmised, seems to be just not that into you. Do with that what you like.

Health insurance was probably a factor, but in general if your employer offers insurance they have to offer it to everyone in the company and the insurer can’t deny them. But until COBRA, there was no option to continue coverage after leaving, so if you needed insurance you basically had to make a jump.

I think it’s much more likely that it’s a combination of a few things:

1. there used to be real rewards for sticking with a company for decades in terms of pension and seniority. If you got a pension worth a third of your annual salary for the rest of your life after 20-30 years and you otherwise liked the work okay, there’s a real inducement to stick it out. Pensions are mostly a thing of the past now.

2. It was harder to hire (no LinkedIn or Indeed) and people didn’t move around as much, so promoting from within was more of a thing as applicant pools were smaller and more local.

3. the idea that you should stay somewhere for decades was ingrained in the boomer generation because it worked for them. Gen X not quite so much but it was a much smaller number of workers. And it’s kind of expected to jump around a lot in your 20s/early 30s while you’re finding a career. We’re only getting now to a point where the millennials are hitting 40 and are STILL jumping around frequently, because now optimizing long term financial security incentivizes maximizing salary and seniority over duration.

the small vessels in the retina do show signs of cardiovascular disease earlier than many of the bigger vessels. Optometrists and ophthalmologists are trained to look for “copper wiring” and “silver wiring” and tortuousity, and a lot of medical centers will do “tele-ophthalmology” for screening retinal exams for diabetic patients where a tech will take a picture of the back of your eye and an ophthalmologist will review it later.

The advantage of this software is presumably that the algorithm will be able to pick up subtle signs and translate it into a predictive model for heart disease, and to do it more quickly/practically than having an ophthalmologist review every image.