The New Worlds Patreon is here to relieve your pain, by discussing painkillers both ancient and modern! Comment over there.

Drink up! The New Worlds Patreon’s tour of drugs continues on to another one so commonplace we don’t even think of it as a drug: alcohol, in all its myriad forms. Comment over there!

Wake up! My lovely patrons have voted; this month’s theme for New Worlds is “drugs,” and we’re starting off with coffee, tea, and other stimulants. (Yes, that coffee you’re drinking is a drug.) Comment over there!

I was fascinated when I found out that vaccination against disease goes back centuries further than I thought. So this week on the New Worlds Patreon, we’re talking about immunization — and how the technology to do it (at least for smallpox) is available in pretty much any century! Comment over there . . .

This didn’t go up on Friday, but better late than never: medical month continues in the New Worlds Patreon with germs and bad air! Competing theories for what causes disease, which overlapped just often enough to obscure the fact that one of them was wrong. Comment over there!

As befits the material, the topic of epidemics expanded wildly out of proportion with the rest of last week’s essay on disease in general — so this week, the New Worlds Patreon is talking about plagues and their effect on society. Grim stuff, but hugely influential in history, to a degree I think we sometimes underestimate in modern times. Comment over there!

My lovely Topic Backers for the New Worlds Patreon have selected “medicine” as this month’s theme — which was supposed to begin with a different essay, only halfway through writing it I realized that a) it needed to be two essays and b) I had also started in the wrong place. So we begin with disease itself, and the mind-boggling extent of its effect on our history and our world. Comment over there!

This week on the New Worlds Patreon, we wrap up the topic of travel (for now) with air travel, space travel, magic travel, and so forth. Comment over there!

And remember that patrons get extra bennies, like photos every week, ebooks, chances to vote in the topic polls, extra essays, and more. More details on Patreon!

The New Worlds Patreon tour through the subject of travel continues this week on the water! Which is a very different game from traveling over land, and everything from physics to religion gets involved. Comment over there!

I’m totally riffing off of “Paul Revere’s Ride” for this installment of the New Worlds Patreon. Since I need some principle on which to divide the topic of travel, I’m using the different modes by which we go: on land, by sea, and then . . . well, you’ll see. 🙂

So I’ve hung one lantern in the belfry-arch, to signal that land is up first. Comment over there!