Nora Holzinger

 For the people who aren’t living the life they dreamed. Courtesy of The Sunday Times Hannah Neelman, the pretty face of the Ballerina Farm social media accounts is a Julliard-trained ballerina and Mormon who married into the JetBlue dynasty and now lives on a farm in Utah with her eight children.  Lately, her videos have made their way through the YouTube algorithm to my feed, and they are a vision. She kneads sourdough on an antique butcher-block countertop, out the window are rolling green hills, the warm yellow sunlight lancing artfully through the window glass. All her cooking utensils are antique replicas made of metal, ceramic, and glass – a far cry from the plastic filled drawers of my own kitchen.  The next scene, a perfectly arranged plate of lemons nestled against three perfectly burnt pillar candles and an enamel colander filled with berries. Sometimes she’s not speaking at all and there’s inoffensive mid-century swing music playing over the video. Sometimes s...

This month’s global IT disruption is Y2K twenty-four years late. Does anyone else remember New Year’s Eve 1999? I don’t because I was a small child, but my father, who at the time was the systems editor for a west coast newspaper, remembers being at the office that night after accepting a retainer bonus and testing the main newspaper system for weeks, only to have to have nothing happen. No global computer crash, no grounded flights, no Armageddon. So, imagine my surprise upon arriving to my desk job at state government one warm July morning to find that about half of my floor had zero computer access. Thus unencumbered by the responsibilities of the workday, I sat around for eight hours and chitchatted with similarly effected colleagues. From my phone screen, I could see that this was not just our workplace, but flights, 911 operators, healthcare facilities. This is the Y2K fallout late-’90s doomsday preppers thought was coming, only about 24 years too late. However, this year’s Y2K i...

It’s clear to me that the US government has been studying anti-vaccination, and not just for public health reasons. Last month, Reuters reported that during the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 to 2021, the US military used fake anti-vaccination Twitter/X profiles to discourage COVID-19 vaccine uptake in developing nations, including the Philippines.  The Pentagon employed the most classic anti-vaccination talking points that I also found in my anthropological work among anti-vaxx and vaccine refusing parents in rural Arkansas right before the COVID-19 pandemic.  In the summer of 2019 (halcyon pre-pandemic times!), I spent about ten weeks living in a small rural community in the Arkansas Ozarks, conducting interview and visiting homes and community gathering places, in order to learn more about the manifestation of anti-vaccination in a rural setting. As a former unvaccinated child myself, I was curious about how rural vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination differed from the more...

 Halfway through an epidemiology conference session, the last of the day and an hour before dinner, something a presenter said jolted me out of my hungry stupor:  “A lot of AI innovation is going to come out of the Global South.” I had only half paid attention to this woman’s presentation on software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) via cell phone camera to scan and digitize handwriting from paper health forms in Malawi, when I was suddenly transported back to an undergraduate anthropology class and a book titled Theory from the South (2012).  This book, written by anthropologists Jean and (now-disgraced) John Comaroff, in part posits that the Global North (Europe and America) is actually evolving to be more like the Global South (Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia). The authors go on to argue that the Global South has been treated like a “laboratory” of capitalism – where new configurations of industry, labor, and regulatory environments are tested and honed be...

  “Is it safe to park a company car there? Should we come strapped?” my boss’s boss asked over Zoom. They were going to be driving down from Santa Fe for a meeting in Albuquerque and seemed genuinely concerned about their safety in an office park at 10AM on a Tuesday. On another occasion an Uber driver in Santa Fe said he would never drive unarmed in Albuquerque, unironically evoking the Wild West days of train robberies and cattle rustling. Every day, the silent gym TVs flash news of shootings, assaults, dead bodies found, indigenous women missing.  About eight years ago, when I lived in Baltimore City, I heard similar sentiments: “Aren’t you afraid, living alone?”, grimaces on the faces of friends when they learned where I lived, and waking up to “Are you okay?” texts whenever helicopters circled my block. I’d seen the headlines about the murder rates, passed the blood splattered bus shelters from the previous night’s tragedies, had Uber drivers chronically canceling trips a...

My name is Nora! I'm an epidemiologist and former anthropologist. I grew up in the DC area and was educated in Baltimore and Memphis, but now call New Mexico my home!  This blog is borne out of the desire to bring anthropology back into my life and to write "pop anthropology" articles.  You can also find me on Medium at https://medium.com/@nfholzinger