Author and journalist Linda Marsa discusses America's public health crisis -- and what we can do to fix it.About this Event
Join us at Village Well Books & Coffee for a Q&A with Linda Marsa, who wrote The Cure For Everything with Dr. Michelle Williams. For decades, Americans have believed that medical breakthroughs – new drugs, technologies, and cures – are the key to longer, healthier lives. But the numbers point to a different reality: the United States now has the shortest life expectancy of any wealthy nation, despite spending more than any country on healthcare. That’s because our problem isn’t pathological – it’s the fact that we’ve abandoned public health.
About the participants:
Linda Marsa is a former Los Angeles Times reporter and a Discover contributing editor who covers medicine, health, and the environment. Her latest book, which she wrote with Dr. Michelle Williams, The Cure for Everything: The Epic Struggle for Public Health and a Radical Vision for Human Thriving, will be published in February. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Science Writing, and she has previously authored two books, most recently: Fevered: Why a Hotter Planet Will Harm Our Health and How We Can Save Ourselves.
Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer in Santa Monica, California. She’s written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Wired, National Geographic, The Guardian, and other outlets. Her work was featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2020 anthology and she currently serves as an adjunct professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
About the book:
The inspiring story of how we overcame a history of infectious disease, poisonous environments, and early death and unlocked an explosion in human potential—and a vision for the work ahead to optimize human flourishing in the twenty-first century.
Public health is an unusual discipline—a combination of science, sociology, politics, and logistics—with a simple goal: to create the conditions for human thriving. Despite a century of massive improvements in our health and quality of life, Americans—reeling from our disastrous pandemic response, epidemics of depression and isolation, and a failing healthcare system—are understandably distrustful of public health. But the true history of public health doesn’t just reveal one of the greatest feats in human history—our great escape from early death and infectious disease—it points toward a future of even greater improvements. The cure for everything? It’s all of us, working together for our collective health.
Michelle A. Williams, one of the country’s true innovators in public health, here tells the dramatic hidden history of public health in America: a story of how radicals and renegades—from W.E.B. Du Bois to Alice Hamilton to the activists of ACT UP—and the institutions and infrastructure we built together helped transform our world. As she takes readers through these dramatic stories, she draws out their deeper lessons. In the end, she makes a powerful argument that it is public health that should drive our country’s policies and politics—that if our policies fail to increase the health and well-being of everyone, regardless of race or economic status, we have failed as a society.
Here is a dramatic, sweeping history with a galvanizing vision for how we can address new threats and complete the unfinished business of public health.
Event Venue
Village Well Books & Coffee, 9900 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, United States
USD 0.00
