Hello. This is issue one.
Many years ago, someone dear to me introduced me to a song. Seven minutes of a calm voice telling a graduating class how their lives are going to go. “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”. If you’re roughly my age you already know it. If you’re not, look for Baz Luhrmann’s Class of 1999 Free to Wear Sunscreen. Worth the lookup, I promise.
I’ve played it on and off ever since. It carried me through some genuinely dark stretches, which is not where I planned to start issue one, but there it is.
Recently I went to look up who gave the speech, because ‘why not’.
Turns out, nobody ever gave the best graduation speech that never was.
It was never a speech at all
It’s a newspaper column. Mary Schmich, the Chicago Tribune, 1 June 1997, under the headline “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young”. It opens “Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97”, and it is still sitting there, free, on the Tribune’s site.
Within weeks it was being emailed around the world as Kurt Vonnegut’s commencement address at MIT. Vonnegut had never been MIT’s commencement speaker. Schmich picked up the phone and called him, and wrote the whole thing up that August. What he told her was: “It was very witty, but it wasn’t my wittiness.” I guess that’s a compliment.
MIT’s actual commencement speaker that June was Kofi Annan. As Schmich put it, he did not mention sunscreen. Why would he.
So the most quoted graduation speech (of my generation) was a columnist, published under somebody else’s name, delivered by email. Baz Luhrmann set it to music in Australia that same year, where it landed 16th in triple j’s Hottest 100. Two years later it went straight in at number one in the UK.
Mary vouched for one line
Then she does something I rarely do when dispensing unsolicited advice.
“If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.”
She vouched for one thing and openly disclaimed the rest.
So why not use science to ruin a perfectly good piece of art? … and no I am not actually going to ruin it. Let’s just have some fun with it. It is a claim you can check, and I could not find anyone who ever had, so I did.
**Sunscreen holds.** In 1992, five years before the column, 1,621 people in Nambour, Queensland were randomly assigned to daily sunscreen or to using it whenever they felt like it. Ten years after the trial ended, the daily group had 3 invasive melanomas against 11 in the other group. A separate arm found 24% less skin ageing over four and a half years. So wear your sunscreen or stay out of the sun kids.
One catch. When she wrote “proved by scientists” in June 1997, it wasn’t actually proved yet. The first randomised skin cancer result landed in August 1999, eleven weeks after the song was number one. The melanoma result took until December 2010. She was right about thirteen years before anyone could prove she was. … and the scientifically proven claim was maybe a bit of an overreach.
The lines she waved away did worse
**Stretch.** A meta-analysis of 25 randomised trials, 26,610 people, 3,464 injuries. Stretching came out at RR 0.963, which is nothing. Strength training cut injuries to under a third. Stretching is the only intervention in the whole analysis that did not work, and it’s the one that made the song.
**Get plenty of calcium.** Across 59 randomised trials, more calcium moved bone density by 0.6% to 1.8%, which the authors say is “unlikely to lead to a clinically significant reduction in risk of fracture”. In the four trials at lowest risk of bias, 44,505 people, there was no effect on fracture at any site. I still buy the pills. Try and stop me.
**Floss.** Cochrane called the plaque evidence “weak, very unreliable” in 2011. The 2019 replacement calls it low certainty and says the effects may not matter clinically. It also notes, quietly, that the little interdental brushes may beat the string. And the word “floss” appears once in the 2010 US Dietary Guidelines and zero times in the 2015-2020 edition. That comes from searching the documents themselves, not from the reporting about them. The 2010 hit proves the search works, so the zero is real.
Yet, not everything she disclaimed fell over. Be kind to your knees turns out to be close to literal: in one long-running US cohort, the lifetime risk of symptomatic knee osteoarthritis was 44.7%. Near enough a coin flip. Mine are still fine. Kind to them I was not.
The worry line came true the hard way
“The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.”
That shit is law of nature.
In April 1998, Gallup asked 1,007 Americans to name the most important problem facing the country. Crime and violence 20%. Moral and family decline 16%. Education 13%. Drugs 12%. The published table runs past 25 categories, down to things scoring 1%.
Recession scored an asterisk, meaning under 0.5%. Terrorism isn’t on it at all.
The song was number one in Britain in June 1999. The Nasdaq more than doubled after that, then lost 78% of its value by October 2002. Unemployment among recent American graduates went from 3.4% the month they graduated to 5.3% in February 2002.
And then September 11 2001.
The two things that shaped the next four years were, between them, under one percent of what Americans said they were worried about in 1998.
I didn’t look it up, but how many people on this world expected to spend most of 2020 /2021 locked up in their apartments? No graduation speeches that year.
She wasn’t psychic. She was describing how it works, and the Gallup table just shows it.
One more, since I went looking. The study this claim always traces back to is 29 people, all of them already in treatment for generalised anxiety disorder, who logged their worries for ten days. 91.4% of the predictions didn’t come true, and the most common score per person was 100%. Twenty-nine people. That’s the evidence base under the most repeated claim about worry there is. If somebody has a bigger one, send it, I’ll read it.
Eleanor Roosevelt did not say it either
The column contains the line “Do one thing every day that scares you.”
That line is now all over the internet as Eleanor Roosevelt. Schmich wrote about that too, in 2012: “a line from one of my 1997 columns is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don’t believe she did.” The Mandela Effect existing before he ever went to jail?
A column that went viral as somebody else’s words contains a line that went viral as somebody else’s words. Same woman, twice, fifteen years apart.
Which is what this newsletter is for
The advice was good. The credentials were fake twice over. It wasn’t a speech, it wasn’t Vonnegut’s, and its best line isn’t Roosevelt’s. But a generation of people have found the song’s message useful anyway, and still do. For many it doesn’t hit until now, almost 30 years later, and that’s a shame.
So that’s the thing I keep running into. There is rarely one truth, and almost never only one way. The evidence is usually fine. Where it goes wrong is the jump from “this was measured” to “therefore you”. Sometimes, like the sunscreen, the advice is right and the evidence under it was thinner than anyone repeating it knew. Sometimes you’ve been spending money on calcium for nothing. And sometimes a thing with no evidence behind it at all runs your life for twenty-odd years and turns out to be the best advice you ever got.
“But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.”
She put the delay inside the sentence. You can’t check that at 22. You can at 45. Why is that? Why wait 20 years?
The line I go back to is the plainest one in it. “The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.” I am testing that one in public at the moment.
The person that introduced me to the song, she isn’t in my life anymore. The song (and the memory of her) still are, and always have been. Some songs shape you, this one shaped me.
To be clear about this, because it is the whole reason I picked it: the song is amazing, and none of the above touches it. Whether the floss holds up was never the point. The point holds, and it does not matter which year you are looking back from. Things were not as bad as they seemed at the time, and you were not as fat as you imagined. But make no mistake, anybody that tries to tell you that things were ‘better’ when they were young is full of shit, they just successfully “forgot the bad parts”.
Wear sunscreen. We settled that. The rest of what you’re told, check yourself, and don’t wait 20 years.
So what is your calcium? The thing you keep doing because somebody said so and you never once checked. I am not going to tell you to stop. It is yours to find out, not mine to rule on. But reply and tell me what yours is, I would like to know.
There is a business-facing version of this on the DETGAAO blog, same sources, different argument: what is your calcium?.
