From WBEZ Chicago, this is nerdette. I'm Greta Johnson. We did it. We made it to another

weekend. Coming up, Mary Roach is going to talk to us about her new book Fuzz, and she

gives us the lowdown on counterfeit tiger penises. Yes, you heard me right. The thing is

though, the tiger's penis is very small. But first, it's our chat about the week that

was with two excellent panelists. John Paul Braimer writes an advice column for the

cut called Ola Papi. Ola Papi is also the title of his book, a memoir in essays, JPA. Hello.

We also have Helen Rosner who is a writer who talks about food among other things at the New

Yorker. Helen, hello. Hi. Happy to be here. Happy to have both of you. As always, lots of COVID news

this week. I think we should start there. Fizer is asking for official FDA approval of their vaccine

for five to 11 year olds. Thousands of public school employees in New York City got vaccinated

before the deadline there. Meanwhile, New Zealand has decided to give up on its goal of no one getting

COVID there. Something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is how I'm kind of just assuming

that everyone in my circles is vaccinated. And I think especially as my social circle sort of like

expand more and more, I'm realizing maybe that's not quite the case as much as I had assumed.

And I have a friend actually who recently told me that like someone she's been hanging out with

pretty intensely wasn't vaccinated. And it was until she explicitly asked that she found out.

And it just made me wonder, you know, is this something that y'all have been thinking about too,

JP? That was a that was a knowing noise you just made. No, everyone I know is vaccinated as far

as I'm aware. In fact, like sometimes we'll be waiting to go into a bar and the person without

any proof of vaccination and one horrible thing that I've been doing lately is taking a long pause

and widening my eyes and having my friends react as if I'm not vaccinated. They look at me and

they're like, there's no way, right? And I'm like, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fine.

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