Rachel Fairbank

@sweetsciencewriter.bsky.social

Science journalist, with bylines in Nature, National Geographic, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Houston Chronicle. I cover a mixture of health topics, with a focus on conditions such as autism, ADHD, ME/CFS, POTS and Long COVID.

Parents talk a lot about the loss of a village for raising their kids, but we really have to talk more about what that village looked like. The village that we lost? Most of it was dependent on the unpaid labor of women, many of whom were trapped in abusive situations.

I’ve been doing some research lately, including tracking down my old birth records. I looked up my childhood pediatrician, to see if she is still alive. She’d be in her late 80s by now. Not only is she still alive, she’s organizing anti-ICE protests at her retirement home. Legend.

It’s an awful day when Susan ‘Laments Roe’s Fall But Doesn’t Regret Confirming Kavanaugh’ Collins is the more moral candidate in the race. I honestly don’t know what I’d be doing, if I was a Maine voter. It’s an absolutely awful place to be in.

The fact that Bryan Johnson, who spends two million a year and countless hours on his health, still developed an autoimmune disorder, is a reminder that a significant portion of our health is completely outside of our control.

As a chronic over-explainer, the hardest part about writing is just how ruthless I have to be about omitting unnecessary details. But…but…but…these details are IMPORTANT. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren’t. And if they aren’t, they absolutely have to get cut.

I finally got around to reading Yesteryear, the tradwife novel that everyone has been talking about, and boy, do I have some thoughts on it. I’m going to start this by saying that my upbringing was very tradwife-y. Think Ballerina Farm, without the money. A lot of this felt familiar.

“For years, the rallying cry was autism awareness. Increasingly, it’s autism acceptance. […] acceptance is harder. It means your autistic kid doesn’t have to perform neurotypicality to be loved, included or taken seriously.”

Voices: My daughter showed me a drawing. It changed how I see autism.

“For years, the rallying cry was autism awareness,” one Utah father writes in an op-ed. “Increasingly, it’s autism acceptance. That shift matters more than people realize.”

sltrib.com

It turns out that carrying a book onto the plane called “The Culting of America: What Makes a Cult and Why We Love Them,” can be quite the conversation starter. (This wasn’t a bad thing. I just didn’t really think about it before grabbing this particular book.) It was a good read, btw.

I'm seeing a lot of conversation about Belle Burden's Strangers that is starting to annoy me. Burden is an outlier in that she comes from a wealthy and connected family. Her story is common in the sense that her husband benefited from her unpaid labor, only to then claim that it had no value.

I recently posted a cat video to Tiktok which is gaining some traction, which means I’m starting to get comments from corporate accounts. Anyway, here is the video, for your viewing pleasure. My little void cat, Sabrina, is fond of giving me tap-taps whenever I work too hard.

Taking your pet to the vet can be such a wild experience. “Here is my pet, who has a very random symptom, and who can’t talk. Please figure out which of the 100+ things it could be, all while they are growling at you.”