Most Common Misdiagnoses in Women

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We’re Gina + Amy, dot-com OGs who continue to believe email is the killer app and human connection is queen. Curation and authenticity get tossed around a lot these days, but it’s genuinely what we’ve been doing since our first newsletter in 1999. We try things, then tell it like it is. Our first tagline was We Like. You Like. Hope you like today’s issue.

We recall a time in our twenties, dropping in on a friend’s grandparents. We conversed about their ailments, their bowel movements (or lack thereof), and the good old days. It was a heartwarming visit, but afterward we thought, holy Moses, that was a lot of time spent talking about bodily functions.

And yet here we are, decades later, whiling away an evening with friends talking about fiber, bone health, and swapping health hacks (and scares) until the wee hours, which for us these days means 10 pm. It got us thinking about how often women are notoriously misdiagnosed, and how wrong AI chatbots currently are at diagnosing a problem. So, before we get started on today’s letter we want to highlight Clinicians Who Care, a unique crowd-sourced list of people’s favorite doctors started by our Ally Dr. Bayo Curry-Winchell. If you love your doctors, add them here.

Love, G+A

P.S. We don’t paywall because we believe that if you enjoy THE WHAT, you’ll help keep us going. We celebrate our paid subscribers in The Wall of Fame.

THE BOOK. Contrapposto by Dave Eggers lives up to the “Ravishing” and “Extraordinary” reviews on its cover. We devoured it in a day and a half. It’s a masterful novel about art, artists, friendship, love, money, and meaning—and, to borrow another Italian art term, the chiaroscuro (interplay of light and dark) of its characters and ideas. Spanning decades between Cricket, a prairie-born artist who draws for its own sake, and Olympia, his worldly bestie with benefits who keeps trying to launch him, it asks again and again what great art is and who gets to decide. Days later we’re still turning it over in heads, which is what great art does. You carry it with you.

THE SHOW. Did you love Flight of the Conchords and Jermaine Greer? If so, you’ll adore Alice and Steve, a new show on Hulu that follows two fabulously immature fifty-somethings who have been friends forever and share a decades-deep bond that can survive anything—until it can't. We won't spoil what sends it spiraling, but the fallout is cringely uncomfortable and very funny. It’s not a perfect show by any means but Nicola Walker and Jemaine Clement are pitch-perfect, and creator Sophie Goodhart (Sex Education) are on to something.

THE WATCH. In the wrist wars, analog is winning the arm wrestle. The luxury watch market peaked at $85 billion in 2025 and is on track climb to $152B(!) by 2035. So dust off your Rollie and step away from those endless text pings and neurotic health dashboards. The more digital life gets, the more we crave what screens can't give us. Which is worth remembering every time someone insists AI will usurp human creativity and thought. The watch market suggests the opposite. When machine-made becomes ubiquitous, human-craftsmanship doesn't disappear … it becomes premium. Check out these indie watchmakers making a splash.

THE RETRO. Remember Bryan Ferry from Roxy Music? We were listening to Avalon the other day and his 1999 album As Time Goes By popped up in the queue, a compilation of covers from the 20s 30s and 40s. If you’re a fan of old timey standards and cabaret, this one’s for you.

We want to know what’s on your WHAT List?

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