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Subscription drive, day 5: Help keep the puns and pandemic news swirling, Ars Technica

Subscription drive, day 5: Help keep the puns and pandemic news swirling, Ars Technica

      Subscribe for this humble punster –

             

There’s nothing funny about COVID – , but we can still laugh at Goop together.

      

      

           

Maybe we should have seen it all coming. After all, the year began with Gwyneth Paltrow’s ridiculous lifestyle brand, Goop, releasing a six-episode Netflix series . Yep, Gwyneth Paltrow. The college-drop-out-turned-actor who couldn’t identify a vagina on a diagram while claiming to empower women with a smorgasbord of pseudoscience. The same self-proclaimed wellness guru who endorsed squirting coffee up your keister , shoving a rock into your hooha, and letting bees sting you .

In her Netflix series, the madness continued . Among other things, she praised a wizard chiropractor who manipulates people’s energy fields by pretending to do Taiichi near them — like a weird guy in your neighborhood park who wears parachute pants and always smells like sandalwood. (At least it’s a social-distancing-compliant method, I guess.)

It was disturbing enough that Goop is a multi-million-dollar business. With the production of a Netflix series, it seemed like humanity had hit bottom. But, boy, was that wrong. Instead, it was just a skid mark on our collective underpants — a pungent prelude to what was sliding out next.

As our attention quickly shifted to COVID – and its heartbreaking havoc, so did my coverage here at Ars . Beginning in early January , I started reporting on the mysterious outbreak that linked to a live-animal market in Wuhan. Since then I’ve been immersed in pandemic news, wading through the gush of data and events to try to provide thoughtful, measured, evidence-based reports to keep you as informed as possible.

Thanks to Ars

It’s an honor to do this work and I hope you’ve found it helpful — and maybe even a little comforting — in these extremely challenging, unsettling times. It’s my biggest hope for my work, in fact.

But, whatever success I’ve had at serving up useful coverage, it’s all thanks to Ars. I couldn’t do what I do anywhere else — and I know, I’ve worked at a lot of places.

At Ars, I have the freedom to cover topics in my beat when I want and how I want. I can dart from writing light-hearted pieces about the tech behind fart-tracking pills

to exposing

abuses in the pharmaceutical industry

to delving into bizarre medical cases – all on top of covering devastating pandemics with all the weight they demand.

And this extraordinary freedom comes with a truly amazing amount of trust and support. I can’t say enough good things about our managing editor Eric Bangeman and our Senior Science Editor John Timmer. They guide me, make sure I’m doing OK after weeks of grim pandemic coverage, offer help when I need it, and are always thoughtful and compassionate.

That said, this isn’t a walk in the park with weird Taiichi guy, either. They challenge me, too, as does the editorial board and the rest of the staff. They’re all creative, incredibly sharp, fun, inquisitive, and ambitious. They ask questions — lots of questions — and push me. They make me want to go extra miles.

In short, at Ars, I get to be the best version of me.

In normal times — with this mix of awesome — we do pretty well at keeping Ars going. But in these stinky times, our future is threatened. We need your help. If you can, please consider subscribing to help maintain this wonderful community.

And when all of this is over — when all of the curves have been flattened and all the storms have been weathered — I promise I’ll go back to my terrible toilet humor.

                                                    

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