The She's A Beast StrongList of Important Things, 2023

This is not just a list of “good things I read this year.” Conservatively, I’ve read zillions of year end lists in my time as a writer and journalist. I linked a lot of stuff to read over the course of 2023. I spend a lot of time reading, and I always want to read more. In this way, on the internet, I am like a pig in slop.[^1] But I feel that we, I, spend too much time with my head fully submerged in the rushing stream of Content, when I need to be pulling it out once in a while to have a look around.

I also have certain subjects I want to read about—personal health, body science, wellness, our relationships to ourselves and food and movement and how they are mediated by institutions of power. But all these year-end lists I read all tend to cover the same subject-matter areas: business, culture, music (technically culture but they get a breakout because, who knows), film (ditto), tech (technically business), very occasionally “science, broadly.” Sports used to be a big one, but has basically died off. EYE I am always looking for a list of good reads about health stuff, wellness stuff, “offbeat” athletic stuff, but EYE can never find it. Why?

Despite that these health/body/fitness stuff meaningfully intersects all of the previous list’s areas, it constantly gets shafted. Despite that personal health touches every single one of our lives, coverage of it is not considered as serious of journalism as everything in the previous list. I suspect this has something to do with the reason that I don’t and have never hawked CBD gummies or alkaline drink powders or on Instagram, yet people continue to insist on calling me an “influencer.” Something, something, ladies’ concerns.

So this is the result of me pulling my head out of the stream, and looking around, and trying to identify this year’s health/body-related topics hat will remain significant. It is also, maybe more crucially, things that we will probably forget happened in a “doomed-to-repeat-history” way, that I think we could stand to make an effort to more clearly remember and take a moment to say, “hey, that sucked.”

So: Welcome to the She’s A Beast StrongList of 2023.