Geronimus has recently released her first book, “Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society,” assembling insights from a nearly forty-year career researching the adverse health effects of racism and poverty. Telomeres help explain, Geronimus writes, how “people who endure chronic stressors and other forms of structural violence can biologically age faster than their peers.” Of Geronimus’s working-class, Yiddish-speaking father, who died early and “probably” lived in a prolonged state of stress, “one could certainly speculate” that weathering was the cause.