This tea comes to you amidst change.

 

I mean this literally. I have a box of the 2024 Rose Label tea, which is what I used to stop my bleeding a few weeks ago. I talked about its clotting properties but not its sipping properties at that time.

 

A few days after I sent that newsletter, I got an email from the Nepal Tea Collective saying they almost didn’t have any of 2025 Rose Label tea because the weather has been too warm and the bushes that produce it had remained dormant. Luckily, however, they found the same cultivar at a higher altitude and were able to produce a much smaller amount of the tea. The price was even higher, and I almost didn’t go for it, but in the end, directly supporting tea farmers impacted by climate change is very important to me, and the tea is good.

 

Several days after that message about climate change, Nepal underwent an extraordinary and sudden transformation: repressive bans on social media led to what is now being called the Gen Z protests against inequality and corruption. Children (and I consider everyone in Gen Z a “kid” at my age—I know many are adults, but I still feel that the generation is so young and promising and should be protected) died protesting. Government buildings burned. The government was toppled; a new prime minister was chosen on Discord. I got another message from the Nepal Tea Collective—one that mourned what had been lost, what had been burnt, but also one full of hope for what the future might hold.

 

The tea is lovely. It’s the kind of tea that feels like a breath of calm in a world. It has a rich, sweet taste that lingers with every sip. It’s not overly floral, but it does leave the impression of a garden on the tongue, redolent of sweet, fresh air and cool breezes on a warm day.

 

Things are changing. I do not feel confident saying how they are changing, but I feel confident of this: there will be more burning and more death. There will be more things lost to rising temperatures, both literal and metaphorical.

 

But we cannot draw a line between where we are now, where we were six months ago, and assume that things will keep going on at that rate. I can feel the weight of history on us at this moment. When it has finished, it will feel inevitable, but for now, we do not know how it will end.

 

In these times of fire and death, I choose to believe in hope. I choose to believe that things can turn out—that I do not know the how or the what, but that the place where we are will not, and cannot persist. That we can be better.

 

So long as I believe that, I will keep trying.

Rose Label Gold 2025 comes from the Nepal Tea Collective.

I can't remember when I first found out how scurvy worked.

 

It wasn't the time in grad school when my friend wanted to figure out how long it would take you to develop scurvy if you only ate food from departmental seminars (largely donuts and cookies: we were stymied by whether the lemon-filled donuts contained vitamin c in any real quantity). It was definitely after that.

 

I will make this description last for only this paragraph, and will avoid graphic description for the squeamish. Scurvy is a vitamin C deficiency, and when you don't have vitamin C, you can't maintain collagen. The scar tissue in your body is made of collagen. When you have scurvy, every old injury starts to unheal. The knee you skinned as a child. The cut on your hand from the time the knife slipped. The broken arm that you haven’t thought about in thirty-seven years.

This is not the only thing that happens when you have scurvy, but it is certainly the most evident and the most horrific: that the deeper into the disease you progress, the more old wounds show up to fester anew.

 

We are going through the national equivalent of scurvy. The scar tissue on every haphazardly healed national wound is receding and they are opening again. The work we have done to inch closer to healing is being undone in record time.

 

There are some people who believe that for the human race to survive, we must become multiplanetary. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I think that is putting the cart before the horse. In order for us to truly become multiplanetary, we must figure out how to stop reopening these old wounds for another round of festering in every-three-generation fascism cycles.

 

Fascism is many things: it is a strong dictator characterized by nationalistic tendencies, suppression of freedom of speech, and a need to scapegoat the vulnerable while robbing them of rights. It is a purposeful, national deficiency that weakens a country to the state where its wounds unmend and start to seep.

 

I don’t want to take the analogy too far, because the next question is: if that is what fascism is, what is its deficiency? Is there a vitamin that we need to make sure we are always taking, the thing that will keep us from constantly letting our scar tissue dissolve? And I don’t want to be too facile. I don’t think we can prevent fascism with the equivalent of crates of limes.

 

But there is, I think, one thing that strikes me. The true cause of fascism is not hatred or misinformation or any of those other things—those things are more symptoms than they are causes. The misinformation arises because there are people who find it lucrative to misinform. The hatred is rallied because strong, nationalistic leaders who don't want to make the nation better find hatred an easier rallying cause.

 

More and more, I think the cause of fascism is rampant inequality. Don't get me wrong: some inequality will likely always be with us. But there is a very real danger when a large number of people struggle above a massive abyss of homelessness and inadequate medical care and rising food prices on the one hand, and people with more money than they could spend if they blew a hundred thousand dollars every day for each day in all of human recorded history on the other. 

 

The people with all the money are going to do their best to try to corral the people with nothing to lose. That, I think, is at its heart the deficiency that has caused fascism: that a small number of people have no limits, and a much larger number of people have no future. When that happens, the people with no limits must find some way to control those who have nothing to lose: with their own anger, with invented dangers, with a crowd that they’re allowed to hate, because as long as people are hating, they are not thinking.

 

To that end, I think the fight against fascism must be a fight for equality. Equality may not be the vitamin that prevents fascism, but it is certainly a vitamin: one that gives people space, that gives them something to lose, and that allows us to see that we are better off healing wounds than deepening them.

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