Daniel Engber | The Atlantic

Critics Love It. But Who Wrote It?

2026-04-15T13:15:06-04:00

On a recent morning at Rockefeller Center, NBC employees strolled through the crowd with copies of Upward Bound, the latest book-club pick from the Today show co-host Jenna Bush Hager. “It’s deeply heartfelt and moving,” Hager said, after holding up the debut novel from the 28-year-old Woody Brown, “and the reason it’s so authentic is that the author understands autism firsthand.”

That understanding is indeed profound. Brown’s autism is such that he can barely speak, and he communicates mostly by pointing to letters, one by one, on a laminated board. This is also how his novel, which is already a New York Times best seller, came to be. In the recorded interview that followed Hager’s introduction, Brown’s mother, Mary, sat beside him, holding the letter board and reading his tapped-out messages.

“I never thought there could be a life like this,” he spelled, after Hager asked him to reflect on the publication of the book. Upward Bound describes the different, sadder sort of life that could have been. “I had no way of letting people know who I was,” the character who is most like Brown says in the first chapter. “My intelligence was like the rock pushed up the hill by Sisyphus. I could never get it to the top.”

The real-life Brown spelled his way through high school and, with his mother at his side, earned his bachelor’s degree, with highest honors, at UCLA. Then he earned an M.F.A. in writing at Columbia and secured a two-book deal from Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Brown described what this was like by letter-pointing during the NBC interview.

But if you watch the footage closely, and at one-quarter speed, it doesn’t look like he is spelling anything at all. Brown’s finger can be seen, at several points, in close-up, from a camera just behind his shoulder—and what he taps onto the board seems disconnected from the sentiments that Mary speaks aloud.

Katharine Beals, a linguist affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania who has a son with autism, has studied Brown’s controversial method of communication since the early 2000s, and she has cataloged the ways in which it fails. She told me that she found the clip from NBC to be upsetting. Beals conceded that it can be hard in some cases to say whether such communication is real—but not in this one. “This isn’t subtle,” she said. “You can see that he’s not pointing to the letters.”

In the broadcast, Mary says: “To finally be in the room where learning was happening, I felt like I was in heaven.” But Woody’s finger seems to say: Tobgdhi nvza.

On YouTube, where the clip from NBC is posted, viewer comments are aggressive, ranging from ridicule to accusations of fraud. These are snap judgments based on a single, highly edited video; in the end, there is no way to prove or disprove from afar Brown’s capacity to write. But several professional organizations, including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, have issued formal warnings against the use of Rapid Prompting, a training method for communication from which Brown’s approach is derived. “There is uncertainty regarding who does the spelling,” ASHA says. And given that the method may mislead, “children and their families can incur serious harm.”

[Read: What we learned from autism’s first child]

I emailed Brown, directly and through his publisher, to request an interview and ask if he or his mother would explain the spelling process as it appeared on the Today show. I got an emailed statement back. “I can understand why people are curious—even skeptical—about my method of communication,” it said. The statement continues:

It is mysterious and confounding to see a severely autistic nonspeaker perform acts of scholarship and fiction writing if you don’t presume intelligence in a disabled person. I have been using the same green board since I was in middle school and I find the letters and colors very calming. A keyboard requires specific aim and is unforgiving of error. I have a distinct brain but imperfect aim. This may look chaotic but in this way I keep up a steady rhythm with my finger that helps me stay on track. I am no savant. I came to novel writing like most published authors. I have read many books, attended good colleges, and got my MFA in writing at one of the country’s best programs. The only difference is that I communicate in a different manner.

Mary Brown has elsewhere addressed the possibility that she is influencing or even formulating her son’s words. She told The New York Times that she works hard to verify that everything Woody wants to say, down to the punctuation mark, is faithfully captured by the letter board. This is why, by her account, he wrote his 188-page novel at a rate of just one paragraph a day.

I’ve done a lot of reporting on contested messaging like Brown’s, and I’ve had the chance to talk with many autistic people who can barely speak but who seem to spell out complicated messages with their parents’ help. A few of them were clearly able to produce at least some simple messages on their own. (In community parlance, they are known as “independent typers.”) I’ve heard from parents about how such communication has enabled them to connect with their children and provide a better life.

I’ve also seen the many ways in which this method can go catastrophically—and sometimes even criminally—amiss. In one case that I covered over several years, a college professor in New Jersey ultimately pleaded guilty to aggravated criminal sexual contact with a man who had been diagnosed with severe cognitive and physical disabilities. (She claimed that he’d spelled out his consent.) And my impression of the clip from the Today show was very much in line with Beals’s. The messaging looked more than just “chaotic.” It looked compromised.

Brown learned to spell words on a letter board from a woman named Soma Mukhopadhyay, who developed Rapid Prompting in the 1990s. The New Jersey case involved an earlier incarnation of the same approach, called Facilitated Communication, that works by having someone type into a keyboard, or point to letters on a board, with a helper at their side who grasps their hand or holds their arm. Upon its arrival in the United States, “FC” was celebrated as a means of liberation for nonspeaking autistic kids, whose hidden skills and inner life were suddenly revealed. In this magazine, I’ve described what happened next: FC users, working literally hand in hand with their classroom facilitators, started typing claims of sexual abuse. Many of those accusations proved to be unfounded, and parents were unjustly sent to jail.

Clinicians quickly came to understand that the method was susceptible to a very powerful “Ouija-board effect”: A facilitator could unwittingly deliver subtle and subconscious prompts—gentle pressure on a person’s wrist, perhaps—that shaped the outcome of the process. When the typers were subjected to formal “message-passing tests,” in which they would be asked to name an object or a picture that they’d seen while their helper wasn’t in the room, they almost always failed. Even kids who had produced fluid written work seemed incapable, under those conditions, of saying anything at all.

By 1994, the method was broadly disavowed. Yet a core group of true believers continued to promote its use. The New Jersey professor was among them. So was Mary Brown. In 2011, Mary posted on an autism-community website that her son’s use of facilitated communication had “helped him keep up at grade level.” The post has since been taken down, and FC has given way in recent years to its purportedly more reliable offshoots: Rapid Prompting and a similar approach called Spelling to Communicate. Now, instead of holding the speller’s hand, most facilitators hold the letter board instead. At first glance, the risk of influence seems less acute.

[Read: The telepathy trap]

Even so, spellers still require someone else’s constant presence for communication—and that leaves ample room for the Ouija-board effect. A speller’s aide may gently tilt the board in such a way that coaxes out the letters she’s expecting. Or her influence may be more direct: When I interviewed Mukhopadhyay last year, she told me that parents sometimes try to accelerate communication by guessing what their child means to say—like a human version of the “autocomplete” feature on a cellphone. I reached out to Mukhopadhyay again this week and asked her to explain the process shown in the Today show clip. “Sometimes spelling habits change over time, and film editing processes can be tricky,” she wrote in an email. “Spelling itself is a slow process.” She added, “You are free to interpret the video as you see fit—I cannot and would not ask otherwise.” Katie Anawalt, another Rapid Prompting expert who has worked with Brown, told me that “Woody uses multiple strategies and methods to communicate—not just one,” and that “what is shown in the video reflects the communication approach he and his mother have chosen for that particular moment.”

ASHA has described Rapid Prompting and Spelling to Communicate as bearing “considerable similarity” to FC and thus as “pseudoscience.” But a formal disavowal by experts simply isn’t what it used to be. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared himself a fan of these methods: Doubters are delusional, he said in 2021; they remind him of doctors who still deny the harms of childhood vaccines. In January, Kennedy appointed two letter-board users and an expert trainer in Spelling to Communicate to the federal government’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. Meanwhile, an audio series about nonspeaking autistic children who allegedly display their telepathic and clairvoyant powers via letter board has been listed among Apple’s most popular podcasts for more than a year.

Sales of Upward Bound are soaring too. Following the Today show segment, Brown’s book reached Amazon’s top-10 list for books of any kind. This was preceded by a platinum-level rollout that included starred advance reviews, awestruck and largely uncritical features in The New York Times and The Guardian, and testimonials from A-list novelists including Paul Beatty, Roddy Doyle, Rivka Galchen, and Mona Simpson. This is the kind of marketing that any debut literary author would kill to have.

Critics of Rapid Prompting and related methods are aghast. “This really feels like a crescendo,” Beals said. “It’s really, really out of control.”

Upward Bound is good. I recommend it. The novel takes the form of an interlocking set of stories about the clients and staff at a day-care center for adults with disabilities in Southern California. Its 12 chapters are written from the viewpoints of eight different characters. Their voices are engaging and distinct, and their efforts at communication—the tiny social cues they either catch or miss—are cataloged in careful detail. It’s as if the book were written to refute the classic notion that autistic people’s deficits result from a malfunctioning “theory of mind.” The book is, if nothing else, a master class in making sense of mental states—a perspective-taking flex.

For someone with Brown’s diagnosis—someone who was written off by the age of 3 as “mentally retarded,” according to his mother—this sort of literary output may seem astounding. Autistic people tend to be more literal-minded in communication than neurotypical people are; they have more difficulty picking up sarcasm, irony, or even idioms such as “Could you please give me a hand?” Studies find that struggles to engage with figurative language tend to scale with broader deficits—but Upward Bound would seem to give the lie to this correlation. In the book, Brown uses metaphors in much the way that any literate neurotypical person might: The adults in a room turn their heads in unison “like a den of meerkats”; a ray of sunlight is glimpsed “flaming off the pool”; people disappearing from view leave behind “a faint streak of loss.”

That a mostly nonspeaking autistic person should have produced those lines might be unusual, Matt Lerner, a professor who studies social development at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, told me, but it’s surely possible. He said that FC and FC-derived methods of communication can be suspect—that much has been shown through careful research—but that also, in some cases, they clearly work: “Two things are uncomfortably true at the same time.” Moreover, the old idea that a weak theory of mind defines autism is simply wrong. An autistic person might be highly skilled at perspective-taking but express it in a nontraditional way, and he might be highly capable of linguistic abstraction even if he has a disability in spoken language. “There is very much a route,” Lerner said, for such a person to write a book like Upward Bound.

[Read: What RFK Jr. doesn’t understand about autism]

And yet, history suggests that there is also a route for Brown’s letter board to convey someone else’s use of metaphor, someone else’s sense of character, someone else’s fine attunement to the art of narrative construction. According to her LinkedIn, Mary Brown holds a master’s degree in English literature from Northwestern, and for more than 20 years, until she quit her job in 2012 to care for Brown full-time, she evaluated movie scripts as a story analyst for Hollywood studios. She has been present at nearly every stage of Brown’s higher education, sitting with him in seminars, helping him write papers and stories, sharing his thoughts in class discussions. When the reporter from The Guardian asked Brown to describe his next book, Mary read his response: “It’s a bildungsroman about my search for camaraderie,” she said, before apologizing for the fact that she doesn’t even know how to say the word bildungsroman. (In a 2020 interview for a college publication, Brown spelled out with Mary’s help that he’d learned German by watching videos—and that he’d also learned Spanish, Hungarian, and Japanese.)

Was bildungsroman Brown’s word or hers? It’s an awful, awful question. To challenge his capacity for self-expression is to question who he is. To wonder if he has really written Upward Bound is to gesture at the false idea that those who cannot talk have nothing to communicate. But in the context of this book, championed as a vital work of art, acclaimed (and sold) for its firsthand authenticity, the question can’t be wished away.

Did Hogarth, Brown’s publisher, take any steps to verify the author of the text, maybe through a message-passing test of the kind that was deployed during the FC fervor of the early ’90s? Such scrutiny would have been uncomfortable but not without precedent. Less than two weeks before Brown’s book came out, a major publisher canceled the U.S. release of the horror novel Shy Girl after reviewing it for evidence of AI-generated text. (The author has denied using AI but said that an acquaintance who’d edited the novel had done so.) Hogarth would not say whether it had attempted to confirm Upward Bound’s authenticity, either before or after publication. The novel’s editor, David Ebershoff, told me via email that the book is “Woody’s” and that “it illuminates lives too often left out of society and literature. It does what some of my favorite books do—locates beauty and humanity in a place, and among a group of people, so many have underestimated and overlooked.”

The problem is, reasonable doubts about the book have been overlooked as well—by Penguin Random House and by the media outlets that have hyped it. (The dewy-eyed feature in the Times does provide, in passing, an attenuated paraphrase of ASHA's statement about Rapid Prompting.) Then there is the phalanx of established authors who have mentored Brown and endorsed his work. Those who responded to my questions told me that they’d found no reason to suspect that he had not written what they’d read. Rivka Galchen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and an associate professor at Columbia, worked closely with both Brown and his mother across four semesters. Although it had crossed her mind, at first, that his writing might be influenced, the worry vanished over time, based on what she saw. “I’m not a doofus,” she told me. And even if some doubts had lingered, she would have felt both unqualified and disinclined to investigate the question. “Do I have students whose girlfriends write their prose? Do I have students who use AI? I have no idea,” Galchen said. “I feel like I have to take it on faith.”

[Read: How AI is creeping into the New York Times]

Mona Simpson taught Brown in two classes at UCLA and supervised his senior project, an early draft of Upward Bound. “He has a natural instinct for the shape of a story,” Simpson told me. “I truly have no doubts about Woody’s authorship.” But over the course of our conversation, she acknowledged the vagaries of collaboration—the possibility of some interpretation at play: “It could be that they’ve worked together so long that she can intuit some of what he’s intending. I don’t know.”

To these writers and the other people who have vouched for him, Brown has two, interlocking sides: an outward-facing self who loves Thomas the Tank Engine cartoons and watches them even as he sits in class or speaks with a reporter, and an inward-facing one who knows five languages, has a natural feel for story structure, and is working on a new bildungsroman about camaraderie. At one point in the feature for The Guardian, the interviewer comments on the Japanese-train design on Brown’s T-shirt. Brown says that it represents a merger of his interests: “I love trains and Murakami,” he taps out with Mary’s help. “Hence Japanese trains. Murakami’s my favourite author.”

Upward Bound provides that answer in a longer form, linking the person we observe with the intellect that dwells within. It explains the seeming contradictions of autistic people’s minds; it tries to offer a glimpse inside their brains. “I want mostly for neurotypical people to see that we have inner lives so they are more inclined to treat us like human beings,” Brown spelled, when he was being interviewed for the Today show. (In the video, he appears to point to letters spelling Wdeha brjum.)

Brown also spoke about his mother in the interview; you can see it for yourself on YouTube. He jabs his finger at the letter board. Mary speaks the words.

“Without … her … there … is … no … me.”

Don’t Get Sucked Into the War on Lice

2026-03-29T10:53:35-04:00

The human-head louse has a ghostly quality. It tends to glimmer in and out of view, leaving only subtle signs and omens of its presence. Is that oblong speck an egg sac or a flake of dandruff? Was that a prickle on your scalp? Is it normal that your son is scratching just behind his ear? Maybe you have lice and he has lice, and you’ve all had lice for weeks. The possibility is frightening. The uncertainty leads to madness.

The louse evolved to be intrepid and sneaky. Its behavioral imperative is simple and relentless: “They are naturally negatively geotropic,” Ian Burgess, a medical entomologist who runs a company that tests insect-control products, told me. “They will always climb upwards towards the head.” He recalled a day when one must have fallen on his shoe during a comb-out in his lab. He was driving home that afternoon and noticed that the bug was sitting on his knee, apparently confused. “It had climbed to the highest point it could get, and it didn’t know where to go from there.”

Once the bugs ascend, they suck your blood and attach their eggs to the roots of your hair. Within a month or two, your skin might start reacting to the parasites’ saliva, and some degree of itching will ensue. But otherwise, a case of head lice has no ill effects. “To say the truth, head lice are not a real medical problem,” Kosta Mumcuoglu, a lice entomologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told me. Still, their presence is unwelcome, to say the very least. Emergency scalp checks, precautionary treatments, instant-onset symptoms of delusional parasitosis: “It is definitely a psychological, emotional problem,” Mumcuoglu said.

Mumcuoglu is an expert, but this was not a useful insight. I have two kids in elementary school. I am quite familiar with the psychological, emotional problem that is lice.

For decades now, experts have been trying to convince Americans that the plague of Pediculus humanus capitis is very mild, and that it doesn’t really merit drastic measures; for decades, too, parents have heard the opposite from schools, in the form of urgent letters saying lice have been detected and countermeasures are essential. Along the way, we’ve heard claims and rumors that the head-lice situation is deteriorating—that outbreaks are increasing, that drug-resistant superbugs are taking over. Yet the basic facts of lice remain the same. The parasites are programmed to get up to our heads. We are programmed to let them get inside our minds.

The modern lice wars got their start in Newton, Massachusetts. Deborah Altschuler’s son had lice, and his school implied that this was her fault—that a family like hers would not be welcome anymore. It seemed to her just then, in the early 1980s, that the school itself should have taken more responsibility, that its policies on lice should have been clearer. For that matter, shouldn’t everyone, from parents up to politicians, have been more informed about the problem?

The group she formed out of her home, first called Parents Against Lice and later the National Pediculosis Association, would advocate for aggressive lice-check protocols and more systematic rules for expelling kids from class. If this was not a movement to abolish lice, then it was at least an all-out bid for taking head lice seriously as a public-health concern. With the help of several entomologists at Harvard and the University of Massachusetts, Altschuler pressed the case. At one point, she proposed that head lice were a vector for the virus causing AIDS, spreading it from scalp to scalp. “I felt that AIDS was a wake-up call,” she told me. “We got lucky that it wasn’t insect borne, but it could’ve been.”

[From the September 1987 issue: AIDS and insects ]

Altschuler also worried that the common treatments of the time—various insecticide shampoos either used alone or, more distressingly, in combination—were causing harm to kids. In this and other ways, she was an early incarnation of the MAHA mom: incensed about the failings of the public-health establishment, inclined to do her own research, worried about toxic products and the companies that manufacture them. And in the ’90s, her approach to lice caught on. A new industry of lice consultants and lice-removal salons began to form. Altschuler herself became a known expert in the field. (Her proudest moment, she said, was speaking to the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board in 1992, not long after Operation Desert Storm.) Eventually she’d have a dozen people working for her association, taking about 100 calls a day and selling T-shirts with messages such as Keep your wits, not your nits and Don’t let your child become an egghead.

But even as this wave was gaining strength, a sort of countercurrent formed beneath it. One of Altschuler’s Harvard contacts, a public-health entomologist named Richard Pollack, had begun to worry that the newly fostered panic was unfounded. He knew that the bugs were harmless in themselves; more than that, he believed that they might be far less prevalent than many people suspected, especially the ones who had been reaching out to him with horror stories: “They were telling me that lice had become so common, so abundant, that I could go into any elementary school and collect thousands of them in a morning.” But when he followed up on this idea, and started doing field research on grade-schoolers’ heads, the results weren’t really that alarming. Misdiagnosis was indeed a rampant problem, and the people who were the most upset—the ones who’d put their families through repeated treatments—were the least likely, as he saw it, to actually have lice. “They were stuck in this vicious cycle,” he told me.

A folk entomology of head lice had taken hold, and it entailed a range of false beliefs. Pollack sometimes heard it said that lice could jump from one child’s head to another, and that they were infesting kids from classroom desks and rugs. None of this was true, he said; in general, contagion happens with only direct head-to-head contact—and a louse that falls off a kid at school will soon dry out, infesting no one else. (Mumcuoglu told me that parents needn’t worry about lice-infested furniture or bedding either.)

Even worse, for many schools and lots of parents, the mere presence of a nit, or even a nitlike object in a child’s hair, was prima facie evidence of a dangerous contagion. But a louse’s empty egg sac can remain adhered to growing hair for months, like a shell casing on a dormant battlefield. This is one reason why studies find little benefit from screening kids in class: False positives abound. In 2006, Mumcuoglu estimated that two-thirds of all lice treatments in the U.S. are given to children who don’t have an active infestation. And because many schools send kids home if they’re suspected of having lice, those false positives may add up to as many as 24 million lost days of school. (No one has tallied the time and tears wasted on unnecessary pillow quarantines and the bagging of stuffed animals.)

If Altschuler and her group hoped to raise awareness and concern, then Pollack sought, in part, to tone things down. The two of them had worked together in the ’90s, but inevitably they had a falling out. “Early on, I saw him as a wonderful ally and a helpful person to the cause,” Altschuler told me, “but then he started trying to become us, in his own way, with information that was inconsistent with ours.”

In particular, Pollack and the other head-lice moderates took aim at the unforgiving “no nit” policies in schools, which might exclude a child from the classroom on the basis of a single empty egg sac, and they were winning some important hearts and minds. In 2002, when the American Academy of Pediatrics put out its first clinical report on treating head lice, its authors called no-nit policies “detrimental” and “a response to infestations that is out of proportion to their medical significance.” Two years later, the nation’s school nurses—who have been focused on the scourge of head lice since their profession’s founding in 1902—followed suit. Eventually, some school systems would ease up too. In New York City, where I live, the public schools that service a million students had done away with no-nit policies by 2008.

These were salutary changes, to be sure. Fewer kids would be ejected from the classroom, and presumably some degree of lice-related learning loss was curbed. But the new guidelines did not eliminate the broader set of problems that the parasites create for children and their families. Even though some schools now tolerate nits on children’s heads during the school day, they still communicate aggressively with parents on lice-related matters, encouraging frequent checks at home and better-safe-than-sorry interventions.

No one ever articulates the rationale for treating the mere possibility of lice with more concern than a cold or even COVID. (No one ever gets a letter home from school saying A case of rhinovirus has been detected in your classroom.) But the thinking surely boils down to this: It’s icky to imagine that your child’s hair—and yours!—might at this very moment be aswarm with bloodsucking bugs. Once the lice have gotten to your head, and in your head, no amount of “Just calm down” can make them go away.

If the fear of lice can be recalcitrant, the lice themselves are even more defiant. “It’s an insect that is abnormally subjected to stresses on its survival,” Burgess, the entomologist who tests insect-control products, told me. A louse’s clawlike feet hold fast in both a shower and a swimming pool. Its physiology weathers perfumes and soaps and the bristles on our hairbrushes. And given time enough, its genome may adapt to shrug off almost any poison we apply.

You don’t need to hire experts to dislodge an infestation—humans have managed to delouse themselves since deep antiquity—but the process takes some work, along with proper information. I’m sorry to say that the latter isn’t always near at hand. The New York City schools, for instance, suggest that parents give their kids chemical treatments, naming two kinds in particular—permethrins and pyrethrins—that were obsolesced long ago by insect evolution. America’s head-lice problem will never improve, Mumcuoglu told me with some annoyance in his voice, so long as our institutions insist on making this mistake, particularly about permethrin. (In an emailed statement, the New York City Department of Health said that over-the-counter, permethrin-based products are “an accessible starting point for many families,” but other products may be necessary if “there is treatment failure or suspected resistance.”)

In fact, we do have many other ways of getting rid of lice, even so-called drug-resistant superlice. Ivermectin may not be an anti-cancer, anti-COVID wonder drug, but it’s miraculous at treating parasites: A topical ivermectin cream can likely cure your child of an infestation, and may be purchased over the counter. Ivermectin pills—which could be even more effective—can be prescribed off-label. (Dawn Nolt, the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ head-lice report, told me that ivermectin may be upgraded to a first-line treatment in the next update to the guidelines.) I happen to be partial to dimethicone, a lubricant that will coat a louse’s body and seal up the holes it uses to get rid of excess water. Since dimethicone’s effect on lice is physical instead of chemical, it may be less likely to provoke resistance over the long term. But Burgess, who first identified dimethicone as a lice-killer, warned me that he’s seeing signs of its waning potency. (Perhaps the louse’s body has been changing shape, he said, and their excretion holes are now harder to plug up.)

[Read: How ivermectin became right-wing aspirin]

And then, of course, there is the fine-toothed comb—a medical device that seems to have been in use by human populations for at least 5,000 years. (Archaeologists have found lice on human mummies, and lice combs in mummies’ tombs.) Combing, when performed with diligence, can sometimes be effective on its own accord, even if it’s also highly, highly inconvenient. Proper combing technique involves sectioning out and clipping up the hair in strips, then combing out each section repeatedly while inspecting for lice and nits that may be the size of sesame seeds. After that, one might need to repeat the entire procedure as soon as two or three days later. Strangely, the AAP guidelines say this process might be beneficial, head lice notwithstanding, in the sense that it allows “a caregiver and child or adolescent to have some close, extended time together.” Extended? Yes. Close? Please be serious. I asked Nolt why the AAP was spreading this absurd misinformation. “We were trying to have a silver lining,” she said.

But there is no silver lining, I’m afraid. In the end, the lice wars have only brought us back to where we started, and also where we’ve always been: worried, inconvenienced, and confused. Pollack says he’s proud of what his 40 years of advocacy accomplished—“an awful lot of kids stayed in school, rather than being sent home,” he said. But he also knows that certain head-lice myths have never gone away, and maybe never will.

When I spoke with Altschuler, she lamented the idea, sometimes floated by today’s head-lice experts, that head lice aren’t so important. “They are important for the people who have them,” she said. This, at least, is a scientific fact.

MAGA’s Animal Nationalism

2026-02-22T08:00:00-05:00

In the week before Christmas, while the U.S. Department of Justice was getting ready to release a trove of documents relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case, some of the nation’s most important public servants gathered for a meeting at the DOJ headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Two Cabinet secretaries were there, along with the attorney general. They had an important matter to discuss. The important matter was puppies.

A soft black puppy, for one. A baby yellow lab. A floppy noodlepuff with cream and caramel fur. Records of this meeting clearly indicate that each of these was in dire need of snuggling, as well as Cabinet-level scratches underneath its ears. But as representatives of America’s puppy politic, the animals were also due, per that day’s declarations, the full protection of the U.S. government. Brooke Rollins, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Pam Bondi would be joining up to lead a new “strike force” aimed at puppy mills, dog-fighting rings, and unscrupulous animal research. “We’re coming after you if you’re going after these babies,” Bondi warned, and then she squeezed the puppy in her lap for emphasis.

This is all good politics—both in the sense of being morally correct and of giving people what they want. (More than half of all adults oppose the use of animals for medical testing, for example, and surveys find that puppy mills are not, in fact, beloved institutions.) Yet the current administration is more determined on this front than any other president’s in recent memory. Since Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, he and his appointees have made a project of protecting animals from abuse. By December, they had already banned U.S. Navy testing on dogs and cats, ended monkey research at the CDC, curtailed the use of animals at the FDA, and promised to abolish every trace of work on mammals at the EPA by 2035. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy led the government’s attempt to save a flock of ostriches from being slaughtered up in Canada, and at the puppy summit, he declared that the entirety of his department, which includes the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, is now “deeply committed to ending animal experimentation.” In the meantime, though Trump hasn’t yet secured his own Nobel Peace Prize, he has received two official thank-yous from the activists at PETA.

[Read: Who would want to kill 314 ostriches?]

Trump is, of course, a man whose rise to power has been fueled by his denigration of people for being animal-like. The same politician who describes his political enemies as “vermin”—who claims that Somali gangs are roving Minnesota streets “looking for prey,” and who has said of some undocumented immigrants, “These aren’t people; these are animals”—also leads a government with a great concern for mice and rabbits. Some of the administration’s zeal for animal welfare is personal: Attorney General Bondi, for example, is so besotted by dogs that she has made a habit of bringing them to meetings dressed with bows, and Kennedy’s array of pets has reportedly included a pair of ravens and a free-ranging emu. It’s certainly not unusual for people to feel more affinity for animals than for certain other human beings. But the Trump administration’s PETA bona fides go beyond the predilections of its top officials, and hint at something more widespread in right-wing, nationalist politics.

Illiberal factions in Austria, Denmark, France, and Italy have all made a similar point of taking up the cause of animal welfare. In the United Kingdom, too, the scourge of animal abuse has been central to a nationalist project. Images of bloody bulls and butchered whales—portrayed as victims of the European Union’s moral laxity—were used to make the case for Brexit. Boris Johnson promised in his first speech as prime minister to “promote the welfare of animals that has always been so close to the hearts of the British people.” Even the Trump administration’s new “strike force” for going after puppy crime has its recent parallels in Europe, where zoophilic, far-right parties in both Sweden and the Netherlands have pushed for the creation of national “animal police” units.

This link, when it appears, can be “quite astonishing,” says Jakob Schwörer, a political scientist at Mälardalen University, in Sweden, who has analyzed the rhetoric of European party manifestos and social-media feeds. When he looked at the 2019 manifesto of Austria’s Freedom Party, a far-right group that has lately surged in popularity, he found that 7 percent of its sentences made positive reference to animal welfare—an extreme outlier, even in a data set that included materials from green parties, socialists, and other left-wing groups.

To some extent, such appeals may be strategic. “You can’t have an opposite position to it,” Schwörer told me, given the strong and nonpartisan appeal of not torturing animals. But according to his research, which he co-produced with Belén Fernández-García, a professor at the University of Granada, other groups at the illiberal fringe are either disinterested in animal welfare or take positions in support of culturally specific forms of animal exploitation. Schwörer noted that in Spain or Portugal, the right-wing nationalists might defend the right to hunt and hold a bullfight. Taken on the whole, he said, concern about the plight of animals is certainly not obligatory for Europe’s assorted far-right parties. But different rules may apply to countries such as Austria, France, and Italy, where the right-wing fringe has explicit fascist roots.

In fact, a particularly ferocious form of animal nationalism emerged in the spring of 1933, very shortly after Hitler first established his dictatorship. That April, the Nazi government banned the slaughter of warm-blooded animals without stunning. Six months later, it passed the most sweeping animal-welfare act of the time. The Animal Protection Law set careful rules for laboratory research, such that even a scientific study of a worm might be found against the law if it weren’t given anesthesia. The law also banned the force-feeding of poultry, the improper castration of piglets, and the general maltreatment or neglect, broadly defined, of any animals at all. Subsequent laws would add more detailed rules on how much space an animal must have while on a train or in a truck, and how it must be cooked. (The slow-boiling of lobsters was made illegal.)

Such policies were interwoven with the Nazis’ racist ideology. Jews and Romani—then known as “Gypsies”—were targeted for doing special harm to animals. The slaughter law was designed to banish kosher practices, and the pets of Jews were confiscated. Both groups were accused of eating hedgehogs, Mieke Roscher, a historian of human-animal relations at the University of Kassel, told me, as the lowly hedgehogs were in turn upheld as a symbol of the German people.

They are cruel to animals, but we are kind: This conceit is fundamental to the animal-nationalist idea. At the end of 2024, then-vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance spread the false rumor that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs. The lie was taken up by Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, and House Republicans, among other figures on the right, and Trump himself repeated it in a nationally televised debate. Sixteen months later, the federal government is preparing to send its paramilitary force of immigration agents into Springfield for a 30-day operation. “‘They’re eating the cats, and they’re eating the dogs’—that is right out of the playbook of fascism,” Roscher said. The hedgehogs have returned.

[Read: The real reason Trump and Vance are spreading lies about Haitians]

So have other echoes from the past. In her published work on the role of veterinarians in the Third Reich, Roscher quotes a journal article by a Nazi scientist who argues for applying eugenic principles to German farms, with the goal of creating “robust animals able to survive all hygienic conditions.” Selective breeding was used elsewhere in an effort to re-create lost species, such as the auroch and the tarpan, that were imagined as “primeval German game.” A similar fixation on the past, and on the lost purity of the natural world, has been central to the MAHA wing of Trump’s coalition. Last year, Kennedy proposed allowing bird flu to run rampant on the nation’s poultry farms, so as to kill off all the weakest chickens. Poultry experts say this plan would never work. Trump obsesses over bloodlines too. “Look, I am derived from Europe,” he said at Davos two weeks ago, in reference to his purebred European parents.

Animal nationalism has, in practice, a marked tendency to self-negate. The Nazis passed a law to limit animal experiments, then quickly scaled it back; Hermann Göring, though among the most aggressive of the Nazis’ animal protectionists (a contemporary cartoon shows him getting Sieg heils from a crowd of bunnies, frogs, and birds), was himself an avid hunter. In France, the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen—who is notably obsessed with cats—has talked up the healing power of touching animals (among other such positions) but will not forswear foie gras. And as Kenny Torella points out in Vox, despite the Trump administration’s play to be the great protector of the nation’s dogs and cats and guinea pigs, it has also undermined that goal—by scaling back enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, by suing states to overturn their laws on cage-free eggs, by disbanding the research team that tried to limit animal suffering, and so on. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Through a spokesperson, Bondi told me: “I have fought against animal abuse my entire career and will never stop working to prosecute the sick individuals who prey upon innocent animals.” A USDA spokesperson told me that his department “continues to push for stronger, more consistent enforcement” of the Animal Welfare Act, especially when it comes to dog-breeding facilities.)

[Read: What I learned from a steer named Chico]

This may seem confusing only if you think that in this context, protecting animals is necessarily an act of love. “That has nothing to do with it, nothing,” Roscher said. “It’s not about love; it’s not about liking.” It’s about something else instead—a reordering of social values. This comes through in Trump’s own professed affinity for animals, which seems to overlap exactly with his antipathy for windmills. “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!” he wrote in a social-media post on December 30, above a photo of a feathered carcass in the sand. Note the possessive. Our birds, our land—we protect these things because they are our property.

It turned out that the photo he’d posted did not, in fact, depict our national bird, and also hadn’t been taken anywhere in the United States. But these were just the details on the ground. The important thing to know was this: Something in the natural world was broken, and Trump alone would be the one to fix it.

Let’s Talk About RFK Jr.’s Workout Pants

2026-02-19T19:06:25-05:00

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A post on X claimed to be a simple message from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Stay active; eat well. But the 90-second video it shared, called “Secretary Kennedy and Kid Rock’s Rock Out Work Out,” seems designed to be bewildering. Here was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eating steak and doing preacher curls in his belted blue jeans and a pair of hiking shoes; and here he was again, stripping off his T-shirt to ride an exercise bike inside a sauna; and here he was a little later, strutting over to a cold-plunge tub (still in his blue jeans but with the belt removed); and here he went into the tub, sliding underwater in his dungarees.

Why was the HHS secretary bathing in a pair of pants? The video never provides an answer for this question, even as Kennedy plays pickleball, then mugs for the camera, then soaks in a Jacuzzi with a glass of milk, all while still in jeans. It’s just bizarre—a PSA that presumably has been dialed in by his staff to maximize its WTF effect. (The video has been viewed more than 13 million times and produced some 11,000 replies; HHS did not respond to a request for comment about the video or the jeans.) However his peculiar gymwear habit started, its present state is very clear: The secretary’s jeans are self-aware.

Kennedy’s proclivity for working out in belted denim long predates the knowing wink with which it’s now displayed. Take the summer’s “DOD-HHS Fitness Challenge,” for which Kennedy donned his favorite workout gear and did a bunch of pull-ups with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Or the viral clip of him from 2023, wearing jeans and boots and nothing else, squeezing out a final set on Venice Beach. I don’t believe that these show a man who lifts in jeans to maximize his clicks. I believe that they show instead a man who fits a waning archetype in fitness culture, a species that has for decades been endemic to the gym: Kennedy is a jeans guy.

I’ve worked out, off and on, for more than 30 years—and for all of that time, the jeans guys have remained a steady presence on the rubber floors. They are sometimes taciturn, sometimes chatty. They often pair their jeans with boots, as Kennedy will do, and with a T-shirt or a tank top or a hoodie. But lest you think he simply has no truck with any gym-specific gear, the jeans guy is sometimes spotted wearing padded lifting gloves, or a leather lifting belt across his Levi’s. At times, his social role will overlap with that of other weight-room regulars, not least of which is the gym grandpa, who hangs around and shoots the breeze and doles out tips on how to lift. However he appears, and however much he gabs, the jeans guy’s social status is the same: He’s an outsider. Rarely does one find a jeans guy paired up with a workout partner. “It’s usually like, ‘The jeans guy rides alone,’” Tolga Ozyurtcu, a historian of physical culture at the University of Texas at Austin, told me when I called him up to talk about this phenomenon.

Not everyone enjoys the company of the jeans guy. Some see him as a threat. Planet Fitness once made a point of banning denim in the gym, along with grunting, dropping dumbbells, and judging others. (Those who broke these rules could be punished with a “lunk alarm” and summarily kicked out.) But this discrimination feels as ill-considered as it is unfair: In my experience, jeans guys are harmless at the very worst, and at best, they add some needed color to a dreary landscape. In this way, the jeans guys are akin to other gentle curiosities, such as the shorts guys who alight on college campuses in wintertime, and the black chipmunks that scamper by from time to time in city parks.

What motivates the jeans guy? No one knows. He is, if nothing else, as inscrutable as a four-leaf clover. Ask him why he isn’t wearing shorts, and he will likely tell you that he chooses denim for efficiency. When Fox News’s Jesse Watters asked Kennedy in August to explain his favored workout gear, all Watters got was this: “Well, I just started doing that a long time ago because I would go hiking in the morning and then I’d go straight to the gym, and I found it was convenient, and now I’m used to it.” In the hope of getting more, I reached out to Ryan Calder, the fitness coach who spotted Kennedy on the incline bench in that viral video from 2023. Did Calder—who at the time was dressed, quite reasonably, in shorts—happen to ask Kennedy about his denim pants and boots? He did. “I asked him right then, you know, like, ‘So, you’re banging it out in jeans?,’” he told me. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, man, this is my efficient way. I only have 30 minutes. I don’t spend time changing clothes.”

A jeans guy’s self-report must be taken with a grain of salt—maybe even he cannot really fathom why he lives the way he does. Kennedy’s is no exception to this rule. In public appearances, he is almost always in a suit and skinny tie, so adding a daily interlude in workout denim would hardly seem to be a way of saving time. His habit may be instead a product of the workout culture he imbibed during his youth. “The jeans guy, it’s a thing. It’s a very definitive thing,” Conor Heffernan, a fitness historian at Ulster University, told me. “It’s a trope we’ve had since the ’80s.” The power lifters of the time, some of whom were connected to the biker subculture, adopted a “rugged, spit-and-sawdust aesthetic” in the gym, he said. This included denim. During the same period, glitzy photoshoots for bodybuilders also featured jeans, to match the styles of the time. Heffernan brought up a famous photo of Lee Haney, the eight-time Mr. Olympia, flexing shirtless in a pair of jeans above a steamy manhole cover in New York City. Perhaps the older jeans guys of today—Kennedy himself is 72—are nothing less than living fossils.

Their aesthetic may have faded out, but a younger set of jeans guys—ironic jeans guys—has since emerged in the fitness culture. Take the influencer-marathoner Truett Hanes: His brand is built on running very fast and very far … in jeans. He claims that this started as a goof, but it has turned into a business. He now represents a denim company, as well as a chafing cream. The idea of working out in jeans, partly silly and partly serious, is everywhere once you start to look for it. One gymwear brand, Raskol, launched a line of lifter jeggings in 2023 in shades such as “blue steele” and “pale thunder,” with a tongue-in-cheek campaign that had bodybuilders boasting of their pride at using PEDs—that is, “performance-enhancing denims.”

This self-mocking move may be just the prelude to a fuller jeans-guy renaissance, Heffernan suggested. After all, Raskol’s jeggings did sell out, he said. And this wouldn’t be the first time that a traditional signifier of masculinity crept back into mainstream culture by way of performative half jokes. The fashion for bushy beards, and beards’ association with authentic manliness, has followed this same trajectory from irony to earnestness during its various resurgences since the early 19th century. Now the same could be happening to denim workout pants: Today’s goof evolves into tomorrow’s masculine ideal. “I think irony moves into fashion very quickly in fitness,” Heffernan said.

For Kennedy, this process may appear to be going in reverse: His latest workout video shows that he’s in on the joke, that in 2026 he’s capable of pumping irony as well as iron, and that he can engage in what Heffernan described as “a very deliberate deployment of jeans.” But it also shows that there is a recipe, if not a cultural machinery, for rehabilitating out-of-date ideas. Not all of Kennedy’s eccentricities are as quaint as how he dresses in the gym, and there are many ways of going backwards in pursuit of health while pretending that you’ve found a way into the future. MAHA is nostalgia, sometimes with a smirk. The jeans guy dunks himself in water. The jeans guy is reborn.

The Bones of Children’s Mouths Are Being Wrenched Apart

2026-01-09T08:50:45-05:00

Every night before bedtime, my daughter tilts back her head so that a pair of metal plates inside her mouth can be cranked apart another quarter of a millimeter. We turn a jackscrew with a wire tip; it spreads the bones within her upper jaw. At times she groans or even cries: she says that she can feel the pressure up into her nose.

This is normal. My daughter is 9 years old. She has a palate expander.

So does her best friend, and, by her count, so does nearly one in four of the kids in her fourth-grade class. On Reddit’s r/braces forum, a practitioner based in Frisco, Texas, said he was surprised by “how many parents ask me, ‘Hey, does my child need an expander? Everyone else seems to have one.’” His colleagues seemed to notice something similar. “Everybody’s being told they have a narrow jaw, and everyone's being given an expander,” Neal Kravitz, the editor in chief of the Journal of Clinical Orthodontics, told me.

A generation ago, getting braces was a rite of passage into seventh grade. Today, the reshaping of a child’s smile may commence a few years earlier, at 7, 8, or 9 years old. At that point, the two sides of the upper jawbone haven’t yet joined together, a fact that is propitious for a different orthodontic process: instead of straightening, expansion. During this phase of life, when kids still have some baby teeth, a tiny dungeon rack may be wedged between a child’s upper teeth, then used to spread her upper jaw and—proponents say—introduce essential room for sprouting teeth.

The expander is an old device; debates about its use are hardly any younger. What seems to have been the first expander was described in 1860, in the journal The Dental Cosmos, by a San Francisco dentist named Emerson Angell. He wrote of “an apparatus, simple and efficient,” that he’d placed into the mouth of a young patient. Then he’d told her to expand it, day by day, by advancing a central screw—just as my daughter does today. But the journal’s editors were skeptical of Angell’s work. We “must beg leave to differ with the writer in the conclusion arrived at,” they announced in a prefatory note, foreshadowing a long disagreement within the field.

This concerned the merits of expansion versus those of extraction—whether a child’s jaw should be broadened to accommodate her teeth, or whether certain teeth should be pulled to accommodate her jaw. Around the turn of the 20th century, the influential orthodontist Edward Angle favored jaw broadening; he believed that all children should have their teeth intact, nestled in a capacious jaw, as exemplified by a human skull that had been ransacked from an Indian burial mound not far from where he practiced, which he called “Old Glory.” A few decades later, though, orthodontic research found that expanded jaws might still “relapse” into a narrow shape. By the 1970s, pulling teeth became the rule, Daniel Rinchuse, a Seton Hill University professor of orthodontics, told me.

This consensus was itself short-lived, he said—not because the field had come across some new and better mouth-expanding tech but because of fears about the supposed ill effects of doing too many extractions. Some dentists claimed that what was then the standard approach in orthodontics could even lead to painful disorders of the temporomandibular joint, or TMJ. In the face of these concerns, expanders made a comeback.

Eventually, some orthodontists started claiming that expanders had another major benefit—that prying open a child’s palate could improve her breathing and prevent sleep apnea. Some now recommend this airway-focused intervention not just for kids my daughter’s age but for toddlers too.

The basis for the trend was never really scientific, though. “Do expanders prevent obstructive sleep apnea? In capital letters: NO WAY,” Kravitz said. “There are endless research papers on this stuff.” The problem isn’t that expanders have no value, he continued; it’s that they’re clearly overused. According to Rinchuse, who co-edited the book Evidence-Based Clinical Orthodontics, the idea that extracting teeth will lead to joint disorders has never been proved. Indeed, no “high-quality evidence” supports expansion of the upper jaw for any reason, he said, except in cases where a child has been diagnosed with posterior “crossbite.” He said that, overall, orthodontic practice is less constrained by evidence than other fields of health care are, because the ill effects of bad decisions will be slight. As he put it, “In orthodontics, no one dies.”

Steven Siegel, the current president of the American Association of Orthodontists, acknowledged that some practitioners may be inclined to put a rack on every child’s palate: “There are some abuses,” he told me. But he also argued that the recent increase in expander use hasn’t really been dramatic, and that for the most part, the devices are used to positive effect. For people with a narrow jaw and crowded teeth, he said, expanders can prevent the need for extractions down the road; some kids, at least, could see improvements in their breathing. When I noted that I’d heard the opposite on both counts from Kravitz and Rinchuse, he responded that they simply disagreed. “I have great respect for both of them,” he said. “I would say that there is a controversy.”

For the record, my daughter is delighted by the treatment she’s received: In a recent family interview, conducted over breakfast, she described her course of orthodontics as “cool and fun.” Her orthodontist (who happens to be a former high-school classmate) has been thoughtful and communicative, and I’ve recommended her to several other families. Still, despite the fact that no one dies from orthodontics, one might also choose to avoid a treatment that costs several thousand dollars, has disputed benefits, and may cause modest pain—not to mention any moral injury that may accrue from tilting back your daughter’s head and cranking open metal plates to wrench her face apart.

And despite whatever caused expander mania, its existence can be jarring for a parent who grew up in the prior era of orthodontics. Indeed, the period during which this trend developed—from, say, the late 1980s until the early 2020s—happens to coincide with the stretch that intervened between my own entry into middle school and my daughter’s. For my fellow members of this cohort, expansion of the fourth-grade palate appears to be a strange and sudden social norm. During one visit to the orthodontist, my daughter and I found a handful of children about her age seated in a line of dental chairs, with technicians leaning over each of them to turn the screw of their expander. It was like we’d all gathered there for some initiation rite for children of the tribe that dwells on Cobble Hill in Brooklyn—a ritual of widening.

Not long after that, I called up Luke Glowacki, an anthropologist at Boston University who co-directs a research project in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, where body modifications—and dental modifications in particular—are not uncommon. He told me about social groups there and elsewhere in which a child’s teeth might be filed down to points or a person’s lower lip stretched out with a plate.

Is orthodontics any different? It presents itself as curative and scientific, but many orthodontists’ websites are replete with beauty claims as well: An expander may “protect your child’s facial appearance” or provide “enhancement to the facial profile.” Siegel said that a broadened palate gives “a more aesthetic width of the smile.” Kravitz said that it could help shrink the unattractive gaps inside a person’s cheeks—“dark buccal corridors,” in the language of the field.

In East Africa, dental and other body modifications carry similar ambiguities of purpose. Filing down a person’s teeth, for instance, or removing them altogether “may also be done for ostensible health reasons,” Glowacki said. Some body-modification rituals could be understood to ward off harmful spirits, for example. In other words, they’re prophylactic. Glowacki also told me about a Nyangatom woman he knows who has scars carved into both her shoulder and forehead. The former are purely decorative, but she’d received the latter on account of being sick.

Glowacki is a parent, too, and I asked him whether his training as an anthropologist affected how he thought about expanders or other anatomical procedures, such as ear piercing, that are carried out on children in the United States at industrial scale. “You’re not gonna find any society in the world that doesn’t modify their body in some way in accordance with their ideas of beauty or of health,” he said. “We’re doing what societies all over the world do.” If now I’ve paid an orthodontist to reshape my daughter’s mouth, maybe that’s just human nature.

The Future of Film Is Behind Us

2025-12-20T09:24:00-05:00

There’s a scene near the start of Avatar: Fire and Ash that sums up the premise of the franchise, and its approach to making movies: Jake Sully, a colonialist Marine reborn as a blue-skinned freedom fighter, is trying to persuade his wife (also an alien) to accept the human weapons he’s found at the bottom of the ocean. As a proud Pandoran, she won’t touch the cursed technologies of the “sky people.” So instead he starts to strap grenades onto her wooden arrows, Rambo-style. This can be their compromise, he says: the traditions that she loves, but optimized for kicking ass.

Over the past decade and a half, James Cameron’s three Avatar movies, all shot in three dimensions (and the latter two at a high frame rate), have meted out an argument for going big in film—for strapping on the most explosive new technologies in cinema and using them to blow our minds. That project worked, at first. And then it didn’t.

The original Avatar, released the week before Christmas in 2009, made $750 million in domestic ticket sales, plus another $2 billion around the world. It was the largest total ever netted by a single film, and enough to bend reality toward Cameron’s vision of the future. The industry rearranged itself to accommodate 3-D. New cameras were invented. New theater screens and televisions were ordered and installed.

In 2011, 3-D screenings accounted for nearly one-fifth of all ticket revenue in the U.S. and Canada—a couple of billion dollars in brand-new, rocket-on-an-arrow money. Suddenly, the most famous and successful directors in the world were working in 3-D: Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg, Alfonso Cuarón, Ang Lee, Martin Scorsese. For three years in a row, from 2011 to 2013, the Academy Award for Best Cinematography went to 3-D movies. Art-house auteurs were trying out the format too: Werner Herzog made a 3-D documentary; Gaspar Noé made a 3-D porn film; Jean-Luc Godard put out a deranged 3-D provocation. Wim Wenders swore he’d never make another movie flat.

For people in the business who were learning—and effectively inventing—how to shoot these films, those first few years were chaotic and exciting. Demetri Portelli, a camera operator in Toronto at the time Avatar came out, got the chance to work the double-lensed 3-D cameras for Resident Evil: Afterlife. He had to figure out what it took to shoot in stereo, he told me—how to modify the depth effect by pulling the lenses apart, and how to shape a 3-D space by controlling how he angled them together. As 3-D took off, so did his career. He found employment doing stereography at the Olympics, and then at basketball games airing on the briefly active cable channel ESPN 3-D. He got invited to fly out to England and serve as chief stereographer for Scorsese’s Hugo. (He told me that when he packed his gear, it still was smeared with fake blood from the Resident Evil shoot.) On his website and on social media, Portelli took to calling himself “3DDemetri.”

Then the bubble popped. The next big-budget 3-D film Portelli worked on, 47 Ronin, was a major flop when it came out at the end of 2013. “There’s nothing pretty or exciting about this movie,” the critic Wesley Morris wrote, noting in a parenthetical, “Inexplicably, it’s in 3-D.” By this point, the shock wave of excitement that Avatar had set off was subsiding. In 2014, 3-D screenings accounted for 14 percent of domestic box-office revenue, according to reports from the Motion Picture Association of America, down from 21 percent a few years earlier.

More important, the industry had all but given up on shooting in 3-D. Now conversion was the norm: A movie would be shot the normal way, with a single-lensed camera, then shipped off to a giant team of rotoscopers who would remake it as a 3-D film by going through and splitting up each image, piece by piece and frame by frame. Portelli had been traveling around the world, working with some of the greatest filmmakers, and now he found himself back home in Toronto and struggling to convince his studio contacts that using 3-D cameras was ever worth the time. “I felt like a vacuum salesman,” he said. “It was heartbreaking.”

I covered the 3-D boom from the start, and even early on one could see that the golden goose was cooked. It was clear that the marginal returns on 3-D screenings were rapidly diminishing. (Theaters that showed the 3-D version of a film were making less money, on average, than theaters that showed the 2-D versions.) I wondered what was going wrong. Had the theater chains nudged the cost of movie tickets just a bit too high? Had the practice of 3-D-ifying films in post ruined the experience? Or maybe the problem had to do with quality: Were 3-D movies simply getting worse?

Portelli brought up two more problems that may have short-circuited the boom. First, people weren’t seeing 3-D movies how they should be seen. In the early 2010s, he said, a lot of theaters weren’t set up to project them at the proper brightness. (Hugo came out in 2011, but Portelli said that even he never got a chance to see it properly until 2012. “I said, ‘Oh my God, I can see the whites of the eyes of the actors in front of me again!’”) The other, bigger issue, he said, was that too many 3-D filmmakers were trying to play it safe. Before he set out to England, some colleagues had instructed him to “be careful and make sure that you protect Martin Scorsese.” They didn’t want him to take a chance on overdoing the 3-D. It turned out that Scorsese didn’t want to be protected; according to Portelli, he often pushed to make the 3-D bigger and more fun. But that sense of fear—of not wanting to be seen as gimmicky—became a trap. Some directors leaned so far toward subtlety, and the alleged virtue of immersion, that people in the theater barely noticed the effect.

By the late 2010s, just a tiny handful of directors were still experimenting with the format. Most, like Werner Herzog, never shot 3-D again. But even those like Wenders, who’d sworn that he would only work in 3-D forevermore, have now gone back to making 2-D films. Ang Lee, who won a Best Director Oscar for his 3-D movie Life of Pi, tried to make the format more appealing by shooting at 120 frames per second. With Portelli’s help, he made the 3-D, high-frame-rate movies Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which came out in 2016, and Gemini Man, starring Will Smith, in 2019. Neither found an audience. Last year, in an interview with IndieWire, Lee appeared to turn his back on innovation. “The 3D is just too hard,” he said. “I’ll go back to the regular way, the old way of making movies.”

According to box-office data compiled by Comscore, a new, more modest baseline for the medium has now taken hold: These days, roughly 2 or 3 percent of new releases have a 3-D version, and they account for some 4 percent of all domestic ticket sales. The total numbers aren’t small—3-D screenings still bring in more than $300 million every year in the U.S. and Canada. But at this point, almost every single one of these 3-D movies has been converted to the format as an afterthought, in post.

For his part, Portelli is still experimenting with 3-D—a stereoscopic-video art installation that he helped create is now on display in Munich’s Haus Der Kunst—but he’s also put in work to rebuild his career in normal, 2-D cinema. He has deleted the nickname “3DDemetri” from his website.

The odd thing about all this is that the Avatar series, which almost single-handledly established the market for 3-D cinema, keeps rolling along. The second film, which came out in 2022, was colossally successful, making another $2.3 billion around the world. Perhaps the new one will be another megahit, even as the technology it champions has all but disappeared. James Cameron was among the first to use 3-D in this modern era. Now he is among the very last.

A War on Facts About Thanksgiving Dinner

2025-11-26T09:00:00-05:00

There’s a fairy tale about Thanksgiving that gets refuted every fall. Does eating turkey really make you fall asleep? When science writers check in with the experts, they always get the same response: No, no, no, and no. Also no and no.

These holiday debunkers tell you what the science says: Turkey meat is not a sedative. They tell you what the studies show: Drumsticks don’t produce fatigue. And then they take another step, however ill-advised: They lay out different reasons Thanksgiving dinner might be sleep inducing. Even as these stories bust the turkey-coma myth, they end up replacing it with other fables.

The trouble began nearly half a century ago. It started with warm milk—a sleep aid that was the subject of its own lightly flavored brand of science journalism. Was it true that a mug of milk could help you go to sleep? Yes, the experts said, because milk has tryptophan! This one amino acid worked something like a natural “sleeping pill,” a psychiatry professor told The New York Times in 1983. “Once again,” the Times said, “an old wives’ tale, the one about warm milk before bedtime, has received scientific support.”

Indeed, a tryptophanic fever was about to spread across America. By the end of the decade, tryptophan was being widely sold in supplements as a treatment for insomnia; an aid for beating jet leg; and also a fix for depression, PMS, and drug dependence. (Tryptophan was even talked about as a suicide preventive.) To explain its wondrous potency, scientists noted that when tryptophan made its way into the brain, it could be converted into the neurotransmitter serotonin. According to the thinking of the time, serotonin was the molecule of relaxation and well-being. Early studies seemed to show that it led to sleep.

Turkey, too, contains some tryptophan. Thus the sleepy-turkey myth was born. But even from the start, experts knew the theory had some complications. In the first place—as every Thanksgiving-myth-debunking article notes—turkey doesn’t have a lot of tryptophan. In fact, almost every other kind of meat has more. One serving of turkey breast contains 244 milligrams of tryptophan; one serving of clams contains 243. You’ll get less tryptophan from turkey, ounce for ounce, than you will from octopus or cheddar cheese. And in the second place, even taking high-dose tryptophan supplements doesn’t seem to do so much for sleep. (In 2017, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommended against the use of tryptophan as a treatment for insomnia on account of its “absence of demonstrated efficacy.”)

If only that could be the end of it. The early experts on the topic had laid out some other dietary theories of ensleepification. Tryptophan was soporific, the MIT neuroendocrinologist Richard Wurtman and his colleagues said, but its effects were limited by the degree to which it crossed the blood-brain barrier. Other nutrients from foods could get in its way. But Wurtman, who died in 2022, found that when you ingest a bunch of carbohydrates, the resulting spike of insulin can shunt away the amino acids that normally compete with tryptophan. As he saw it, carbs have a “sedating effect” in the human diet, by helping tryptophan to make its way from the gut into the brain. If it seemed as though a mug of warm, protein-rich milk was helping people get to sleep, that’s because they must also have been eating cake.

Wurtman was already floating this idea—let’s call it the sleepy-carbs hypothesis—in the early 1980s, and it has been repeated in the press ever since. Almost all articles about the turkey-coma myth now point at carbohydrate-heavy side dishes, the sweet potatoes and the pie, and claim that these Thanksgiving foods, not the turkey, really knock you out.

This merely swaps one highly suspect notion for another. Studies find that meals with lots of carbohydrates don’t really make you sleepy. (They may have some small effects on how you sleep, such as an increase in the time you spend in REM, the dreaming phase.) More to the point, the old idea that serotonin is a simple, sleep-promoting signal in the brain is fully out of fashion; later research found that serotonin may also be a potent source of wakefulness, and that its function in the sleep-wake cycle is both complicated and diverse.

Nutritionists may now be more inclined to look at melatonin, a hormone that is synthesized (like serotonin) from dietary tryptophan. One line of research looks at whether sour cherries or beefsteak tomatoes might be useful as a sleep aid, because these foods are known to be rich in naturally occurring melatonin. When taken as a supplement, melatonin seems to have a small effect on sleep onset and sleep quality; when taken as a tomato, it may also have some benefits. That said, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends against the use of melatonin as a treatment for insomnia for a similar reason that it recommends against tryptophan: insufficient evidence of clinically meaningful results.

In short, all the science here is pretty weak. Yet the turkey-myth debunkers pile on the speculations. The sleepy-carbs hypothesis is just the start. What accounts for post-Thanksgiving lethargy? Many experts blame the fact that we’re consuming so much food, and overeating makes you tired on its own. (Some even cite the old-fashioned and unlikely notion that heavy digestion deprives your brain of oxygen.) But the evidence that people are more inclined to fall asleep, for any reason, after pigging out—that they experience what’s known among the cognoscenti as “postprandial somnolence”—is equivocal, at best.

This is science—and this is science journalism—of the sort that only makes you dumber the more of it you read. Here are some other reasons you might feel tired after eating dinner on Thanksgiving: You have consumed some alcoholic beverages; you have traveled a long distance; you have gotten trapped in some exhausting conversation with your cousin’s wife. Also maybe this: Dinner time is over, and the sky is dark, and a lot of time has passed since the last time you were sleeping.

And allow me to lay out one final possibility: What if Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t even make you sleepy in the first place? Could the very basis for the turkey-coma myth, and for all of its debunkings, be a sham? I could find no data to suggest that the Thanksgiving-meal effect is real. “Nobody’s tested this,” Faris Zuraikat, a nutrition and sleep scientist at Columbia University, told me when I called him for this story. So here we are today, dressing up a folk belief about the holiday with pseudoscientific rationales. It’s a pointless and exhausting project. We should be thankful if it ends.

Who Would Want to Kill 314 Ostriches?

2025-11-12T07:30:00-05:00

Photographs by Alana Paterson

The police came at dawn. Karen Espersen watched them drive into the valley: more than 40 cruisers in a line. They were on a mission from the government. All of her ostriches must die.

Karen and her business partner, Dave Bilinski, were standing in the outdoor pens of their farm in the mountains of Canada’s West Kootenay. The fate of their flock had been taken up by right-wing media, and had become another front in a spiritual war. An angry group of their supporters, with signs and walkie-talkies, gathered on the property. They’d set up a barricade to slow the cops’ advance: several logs laid across the dirt near the turnoff from the highway.

The activists had been camping out for months; their numbers sometimes reached into the hundreds. They knew the government was saying that the ostriches had bird flu, but they were convinced that this was cover for some other, bigger scheme. The feds were conspiring with the United Nations and Big Pharma, they said. Small farmers’ rights were being trampled. But Dave and Karen’s birds had other, more powerful friends. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was making calls to Canadian officials; Dr. Oz had offered to evacuate the ostriches to his ranch in Florida.

Canada “respects and has considered the input of United States officials,” the nation’s deputy chief veterinary officer had said. But rules were rules, and birds were birds—even if they were the size of refrigerators. And so a convoy of police had been sent to occupy the farm. Law-enforcement drones were flying overhead. The electricity was cut off.

The farm’s supporters had already threatened local businesses that were renting equipment to the cops, saying they would shoot employees. Then someone claimed that they’d placed a bomb somewhere on the property.

At 7 a.m., while the police were stuck behind the logs near the highway, a man slipped out of sight, donned a balaclava, and grabbed a jerrican of fuel. He crept over to the next-door neighbor’s house and doused its front with gasoline. Not more than 50 yards away, a group of ostrich activists stood around a bonfire, streaming from their phones as they sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” When the neighbor came outside and tried to chase the would-be arsonist away, her screams for help were broadcast live on social media, above the sound of “Glory, glory, hallelujah.”

Alana Paterson for The Atlantic

Karen’s home on the farm. Karen and her business partner, Dave Bilinski, have raised hundreds of ostriches for decades.

For decades, Karen and Dave had been raising hundreds of ostriches on a 58-acre plot in the small town of Edgewood, British Columbia. They’d earned a living from the meat and hide and feathers, and from a moisturizing lotion that they made from rendered ostrich fat. They’d also welcomed tourists to the property, bused in through the Monashee Mountains on a farm safari. But in mid-December of last year, the flock at Universal Ostrich Farms was overtaken by disease. The young birds in particular were having trouble breathing. Mucus leaked from eyes and beaks. Some were clearly feverish: They were roosting in puddles, even in the cold.

Over the next few weeks, the birds began to die, one by one, and then in groups. Dave hauled their carcasses across the property and buried them in 10-foot holes. The vet was out of town, so Karen did her best to nurse the sick. But more than 20 died, so many that they didn’t fit into the pits. Dave had to stash the rest beneath a tarp.

Locals noticed what was going on; you could see ravens feeding on the carnage from the highway. On December 28, someone notified the sick-bird hotline set up by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which monitors and manages agricultural diseases. Now the government was asking questions. Was there standing water on the property? Were the ostriches outdoors? Had Dave been aware of any wild birds nearby?

In fact there was some standing water, and the ostriches were never not outdoors, and lots of wild ducks had alighted in their pond and now were poking in the flock’s straw bedding and leaving droppings by the food bowls. To the CFIA, it sounded like a recipe for bird flu. A pair of government inspectors showed up two days later, in masks and Tyvek suits, and swabbed a couple of the carcasses. Their test results came back on New Year’s Eve: The birds were positive for the “H5” part of H5N1, the deadly strain of avian influenza that has raged through North America in recent years. According to the Canadian authorities, and in keeping with the nation’s agricultural-trade agreements, the outbreak had to be stamped out. The birds would have to die.

Alana Paterson for The Atlantic

Ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farms

An ostrich is of course a grand and silly thing: more than six feet tall with giant eyes, a 350-pound sedan on muscled stilts. It chirps and booms and honks and grunts. It wags its tail and pulls the threads from your sweater. Some ostriches on Dave and Karen’s farm had names: Barney, Peter, Q-Tip, Sarah. One looked so much like Dave himself, with bushy white eyebrows, that it shared his name. Karen used to keep an ostrich as a pet—a Somali blue, the smaller kind—and she called it Newman because it liked to hop up on her couch and watch Seinfeld on TV. Her son remembers riding Newman like a pony.

Now Dave and Karen’s flock of charismatic megapoultry was a threat to public health. They tried to bargain with the government. They said the illness was subsiding. They argued that their older birds had never even gotten sick and might already be immune. They noted that the compensation they would receive for a cull—up to $3,000 per animal—wouldn’t be enough to cover their losses. And then Karen started spinning out a stranger story. Universal Ostrich Farms wasn’t just a farm, she told the CFIA; it was the site of cutting-edge research. She and Dave were working on a novel class of ostrich-based pharmaceuticals—medicines that could one day help rid the world of many different ills, including cholera, obesity, and COVID. The drugs might even put an end to bird flu itself.

H5N1 doesn’t pose a major threat to human beings—or, one should say, it doesn’t yet. The virus has not adapted to our airways. But a current strain has already made the jump from birds to dairy cattle, and more than 70 people in North America have contracted it through exposure to infected animals. Most human cases have been very mild. But around the time that Dave and Karen’s ostriches were getting sick, a teenage girl in their province was rushed to a pediatric ICU with failing lungs and kidneys. She had bird flu and nearly died.

Dave and Karen maintained that their birds were not a danger but a cure. Now that the survivors had been exposed to bird flu, Karen told the government by email, they’d be laying eggs that were full of bird-flu antibodies. That could be the key to something extraordinary: If those ostrich antibodies were extracted and sprinkled into feeders, she said, then wild ducks might inhale them and develop their own immunity. Treat enough birds this way, and the entire epidemic could be stopped.

Karen’s plan did not impress the experts at the CFIA, and to be clear: It isn’t sound. Extensive tests have not been run to show that ostrich antibodies protect other animals when they’re eaten or inhaled. Even if the antibodies were effective in some way, to stop the spread of H5N1 you’d have to load enough of them in feeders to shield the 2.6 billion migratory birds that cross the border into Canada each year. And CFIA scientists found no reason to believe that Dave and Karen’s ostriches would be a special source of antibodies, an agency spokesperson told me. The farm’s request for an exemption was denied.

Alana Paterson for The Atlantic

Dave and Karen told the Canadian government that their surviving ostriches would lay eggs that were full of valuable bird-flu antibodies.

But Karen’s email wasn’t entirely deluded, not in every detail. She and Dave had been in touch with Yasuhiro Tsukamoto, a scientist and the president of Kyoto Prefectural University, who has for years been pushing the idea that ostriches, and their powerful immune system, could be the basis for an industry in biomedicine—that the birds’ enormous eggs are factories for mass-producing antibodies in response to almost any pathogen. A single ostrich hen can make about a cup of these a year, Tsukamoto says, which might in turn be layered onto ventilation screens, painted into face masks, or used in ointments, sprays, and pills. A few such products have already been marketed in Japan, among them a soy sauce with ostrich antibodies for E. coli and a cosmetic line with ostrich antibodies for the germs that can lead to pimples.

Dave and Karen first learned about Tsukamoto’s work in March 2020, when he was inoculating ostriches with SARS-CoV-2 antigens. They did the same and hoped to sell their antibodies to a company producing masks. But they couldn’t land the deal, and ended up with freezers full of SARS-CoV-2-resistant egg yolks. A few years later, they’d moved on to something bigger: an ostrich diet pill, made from antibodies for the enzymes that digest sugar and starch. This could be a natural rival for Ozempic, they believed, sold as “OstriTrim.”

In November 2024, just around the time when all those wild ducks began to settle in their pond, Dave and Karen were finishing their business plan. They would partner with Tsukamoto’s licensee in North America, a company called Ostrich Pharma USA, and begin inoculating birds in early March. After that, the money would start pouring in. Within five years, the farmers’ business plan predicted, they’d clear $2 billion in annual sales.

But then an ostrich got a bloody nose and another one began to wheeze, and more were plopping down in icy water.

Katie Pasitney, Karen’s oldest child, grew up among the ostriches. She describes them as her family. So when Katie heard that the CFIA had ordered their destruction, she set out to raise hell. The birds themselves—those “big, beautiful babies,” she calls them—were natural mascots for a social-media campaign. In one early plea for help on Facebook, Katie put up a picture of a favorite ostrich from the farm. “Meet Sarah ♥️,” Katie wrote atop the post. “PLEASE HELP SAVE ME BEFORE I’M KILLED BEFORE FEB 1ST.”

By the end of January, Sarah’s fate had been taken up by right-wing media and online activists. Supporters began to gather at the farm. They built a campsite in the freezing cold and posted signs for Katie’s website, saveourostriches.com. People stopped by for the day and never left. A field kitchen was set up, porta-potties were installed, and volunteers were given jobs. They put up pictures of the ostriches, or wore them on their shirts and hats. At least one walked around in a full-body, feathered suit. At times there were 200 people in the field, just across the road from the ostrich pens.

The group was there to save the animals, but by and large, they weren’t PETA types. They knew Universal Ostrich Farms had long been in the killing business; in the mess tent, supporters were not averse to eating meat. They were less concerned with harm to living things than with the threat to human liberty. These were freedom activists—people who had joined the convoy protests that swept through Canada in 2022 to oppose vaccine mandates. What brought them back together in the valley of the ostriches was a trailing fury over government intrusion, and suspicion about the aims of public health.

Alana Paterson for The Atlantic

In interview after interview, Katie Pasitney has come to tears while talking about the ostriches.

In the front room of her mother’s house, Katie set up a makeshift media center, with seven laptops on the table and cords everywhere. A handwritten ON AIR sign was posted whenever she was being interviewed live. Reporters started showing up in person, too. In one conversation after another, Katie and the farmers argued that the virus had already run its course. By their accounting, the 69th and final bird had died from the disease on January 14. The remaining ostriches were healthy, they insisted, and their location was remote—85 miles from the nearest city. What benefit would come from killing them?

Meanwhile, Dave and Karen brought their case to court and won a stay of execution for the birds until they finished their appeal. As winter turned to spring, the conflict reached a stalemate. The CFIA announced that no more inspectors would be coming to the farm, because of the risk of infection by the birds, and of interference by the protesters. Its staffers were getting threats by phone and email.

Then one night at the end of March, someone showed up with a gun. The birds were sleeping in their pens, some with upright necks, in the ostrich way. In the hours before sunrise, Katie and the farmers said, one was shot just below the ear. Dave and Karen found the carcass in the morning, lying in a pool of blood. The assassinated bird was Sarah, the one from Katie’s Facebook post.

A couple of days later, one of the farm’s supporters posted a musical tribute to the fallen ostrich on social media, called “Feathers of Resistance (Sarah’s Song).”

Out in the fields ’neath Edgewood skies,
She walked with grace with ancient eyes.
Not just a hen but hope in stride,
Her blood held truth they tried to hide.

“A sniper’s bullet ended her life, but not her story,” the poster wrote.

Alana Paterson for The Atlantic

The greeting booth for the encampment on the farm. Supporters built their campsite in the freezing cold, installed porta-potties, and took on jobs. At least one supporter walked around in a feathered suit.

After Sarah’s death, a deeper sense of dread overtook the valley. The farm began to fortify. Trip lines were laid around the ostrich pens and hooked up to bear bangers to scare away intruders. Supporters equipped themselves with walkie-talkies. And Dave and Karen started sleeping in the ostrich pens.

Katie’s interviews and Facebook streams grew more conspiratorial. The supporters had been seeing government drones flying overhead at night, she told a podcast host in May. Karen, too, was obsessing over hidden plots. The farm’s website had malfunctioned in December, out of nowhere, even though she was sure that she’d set up the domain to auto-renew. Could it have been a government-associated hack? Could all of this have been a plan to stop her antibody business—to “squish our science,” as she later put it to me? Could it be that certain institutions were trying to hide the fact that H5N1 bird flu wasn’t really all that dangerous?

Two months after the shooting, a second bird was murdered in its pen. Karen said she heard a drone flying overhead between 1 and 2 a.m., and then she saw an “Army-sized” device flying overhead, as big as the hood of a vehicle. Some folks from the encampment said they saw it too, while sitting by the fire. There was a silent flash of light, and moments later, Karen found one of the biggest roosters on the farm, an ostrich called Joey, with a hole through its head. This time the wound was vertical, starting near the crown and ending 18 inches down the neck. The drone may have been equipped with a gun, Karen told me. Maybe a silencer, too. Dave wondered if it might have been a laser.

John Catsimatidis, a billionaire supermarket magnate and New York City radio personality, took a particular interest in the story of the ostriches. Toward the end of April, he invited a special guest onto the air: his old friend Bobby Kennedy. The secretary of Health and Human Services had come to talk about his plan for fighting autism, but near the end of the segment, Catsimatidis grabbed the chance to bring up the “awstriches,” as he calls them in his thick New York City accent. “Mr. Secretary, one last thing,” he said. There were these special birds in Canada, with a “natural healing process,” and now they were in danger because Big Pharma wanted them dead.

“I support you 100 percent,” Kennedy responded. “I’m horrified by the idea that they’re going to kill these animals.”

The cause was a natural fit for Kennedy. The anti-vaccine organization that he once chaired, Children’s Health Defense, had already aired an interview with Katie on its video channel in March. And Kennedy himself has often railed against government overreach in efforts to control potential outbreaks. Earlier that spring, Kennedy had declared that the U.S. and Canada’s policy of stamping out H5N1-infected chickens should be stopped. The survivors—the ones with naturally acquired immunity—could be used to repopulate poultry farms with hardier stock, he said. (Experts warn about the dangers of letting the virus spread unchecked; vaccinating poultry makes a lot more sense, two bird-flu scientists told me.) Kennedy also seems to have an affinity for large, flightless birds. He has kept at least one emu as a pet on his property in California.

One late night in May, Katie awoke to a call. At first she was confused, she said, but then she heard Kennedy’s raspy voice; the secretary was on the line with Catsimatidis. Some days later, as the sun set across the Monashees, Katie stood among the farm’s supporters in the field and choked back sobs as she prepared to read from a letter that Kennedy had written to her government. “We are respectfully requesting CFIA to consider not culling the entire flock of ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farm,” it said. The letter was signed at the bottom by three of the most important public-health officials in America: not just Kennedy but also FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya. (HHS did not respond to questions for this story.)

Katie’s “Save the Ostriches” campaign had until this point attracted hippies, libertarians, and anti-vaxxers, as well as local politicians in her province. Now it had the U.S. government.

Alana Paterson for The Atlantic

Protest signs are posted around Universal Ostrich Farms.

I arrived in Edgewood a few weeks later, having come along the same twisting highway that the CFIA inspectors had used when they first drove out to test the ostriches almost six months earlier. As I pulled into the driveway, I could see the birds peering at my rental car from inside their large enclosures.

I checked in with a volunteer in a makeshift booth, and he handed me an Ostrich Sheriffs sticker. A Canadian flag hung from the fence at the edge of the encampment, along with handmade posters: STOP the MURDER of 399 OSTRICHES. Save Ostrich Science (S.O.S.). If your child got sick in your family, would you kill the whole family?

Jim Kerr, an ostrich-farm supporter with a long beard, took me on a tour of the premises. Kerr is known among right-wing activists in Canada for his livestreamed protest videos, and for the soap-bubble-blowing art car that he drives to freedom convoys. Kerr explained that the supporters had an action plan for when the feds arrived. Dave and Karen would go into the pens and stand among the birds. Volunteers would block the road and send up drones to document everything that happened. They’d had a dry run just a few weeks before I came, when someone thought they saw a line of SUVs, all white, coming down the road. The sentries notified the camp; barricades went up; three women lay down on the highway. It turned out to be a false alarm.

When I sat down with the farmers in the kitchen, Karen put out plates of sandwiches and cookies, and then she, Dave, and Katie launched into the story that they’d told so many times before, to politicians and supporters and the press. Katie, in particular, sometimes seemed to speak about the farm on autopilot, winding back to certain formulations about “giving small farmers a seat at the table” and the need to protect the “future of farming.” But still her voice would catch and the tears would flow, even in what must have been her thousandth telling.

Her connections with right-wing and extremist figures were expanding. She told me that she would soon be headed to a “Truth Movement” conference down in West Palm Beach, where she would share a stage with several noted anti-vaxxers, as well as Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader. And she let me scroll through a run of texts that she’d received in recent weeks from Mehmet Oz, who, like Kennedy, had gotten drawn in to her cause by Catsimatidis. Oz, the celebrity doctor who is currently the head of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, had suggested that he could bring the ostriches to Florida, but that wasn’t possible on account of the cull order. “I have spread the word widely and cannot understand why they cannot let me take these beautiful birds,” he wrote to Katie in one message. (Oz did not respond to a request for comment.)

Again and again, the farmers said the Canadian government’s response to their outbreak made no sense. Plainly they were right in some particulars. Why couldn’t the CFIA just test the birds again, to see if the virus was still present? The government had claimed that this was impossible, that its inspectors would have no way to gather swabs from several hundred dangerous animals that can run at the speed of a moped, without handling facilities of any kind on-site. But I’d heard otherwise from independent experts. Adriaan Olivier, an ostrich-industry veterinarian in South Africa, told me that high-volume testing could be done. South Africa has been dealing with bird-flu outbreaks on ostrich farms for years, he said, and could manage the screening of even several hundred adults in one day.

Then again, I could also see—really, anyone could see—that Dave and Karen had been flouting basic rules of biosafety on the farm. At first, they hadn’t told the government that their birds were sick. And their “quarantine” was barely that. The same farm dogs that nosed around my feet inside the kitchen were also running in and out of ostrich pens. After Dave and Karen fed the birds, they sprayed each other down with disinfectant, but they didn’t change their clothes or remove their shoes. And the volunteers were clearly handling the eggs and feathers.

Those who had been around the farm the longest hadn’t simply been exposed to H5N1—they’d been infected. The farmers mentioned this offhandedly. Not long before my visit, Katie had tested positive for H5N1-specific antibodies. Dave and Karen had also turned up positive, as had one of their earliest supporters, a woman who’d arrived at the farm in January. No one could remember having any symptoms, though, and Katie wasn’t willing to concede that she or any of the others had caught the virus from the ostriches.

The conversation circled back to the phone call from December that had prompted the government’s investigation—the tip-off to the sick-bird hotline. The farmers said it must have come from the woman who lives next door, Lois Wood. If it hadn’t been for her, none of this would have happened.

Alana Paterson for The Atlantic

I spoke with Lois, a 72-year-old widow and volunteer firefighter, by phone a few days later. She lives just up the road from the ostrich farm. She can see the pens from her front yard. She said the situation had gotten out of hand. For months, the activists had been tormenting her: shining headlights in her yard, yelling out her name, tailing her when she was on her way to fire practice. “Finally—finally—somebody wants to hear the other side,” she told me.

Lois claimed that she never reported the sick birds to the CFIA: She’d tried to call, but no one answered, and she didn’t leave a message. But everyone could tell that the ostriches were dying, she said, and the CFIA was right to get involved.

Elsewhere in the town of Edgewood, the fight to save the ostriches has brought out skeptics of the cause. Jim McFarlane, a local cattle rancher who has known Dave since they were kids, told me that, like Lois, he’d had enough. Dave has been “a total fucking bullshitter all his life,” he said. He asked me what I thought about the story of the murdered ostriches—the ones that supposedly were shot in the head in the middle of the night. “I mean, come on,” Jim said. “I’m a hunter, and you’re going to go out there in the middle of the night and shoot at a little fucking ostrich head when you’ve got a 300-, 400-pound body there?”

It’s true: An ostrich head is like a Q-tip protruding from a very large piñata. The idea of aiming for it, at least while sneaking in the dark, seemed preposterous. Yet Dave and Karen insisted that not one but two birds had been killed like this. Jim thinks that Dave and Karen might have killed the birds, that maybe they were trying to draw attention to the farm for the sake of more donations. Lois had another theory: What if the birds were still sick? What if the outbreak hadn’t ended, and the farmers didn’t want the government to know? (Both ostrich murders are still under investigation, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. When I brought the claim to Dave that he’d shot the birds himself, he told me, “That’s insane.”)

The matter of the ostrich shootings is one of many that have been taken up by a local Facebook group, “Edgewood—Uncensored,” in which a group of grumpy neighbors and others in British Columbia debate the ostrich farm and what they deem to be its hidden motives. They obsess over every open question and apparent inconsistency, such as who really called the CFIA about the sick ostriches, and how many birds were really in those pens. Some even wondered if the so-called standoff was a piece of theater, concocted by the government and its contacts in Big Pharma. Maybe no one ever really planned to cull the birds. After all, hadn’t Dave and Karen been involved in biotech? Hadn’t they injected ostriches with COVID?

If Katie, Dave, and Karen had built their movement from the bricks of outrage and suspicion, then those bricks were also being hurled against their walls. Paranoia had sustained them to this point, but paranoia was a force that they couldn’t quite control.

Alana Paterson for The Atlantic

Dave Bilinski leaves the ostrich pens to avoid arrest on September 23.

I drove out to the farm again in late September. The line of police cruisers had snaked into the valley just a few days earlier, and I could see the marks of occupation. The property was divided at the edge of Langille Road. Yellow tape stretched across the northern side, at the entrance to the pens, and officers were taking shifts on guard. Just across from them, the farm’s supporters had put up a set of wooden bleachers so they could try to watch and record everything that happened. An inscription had been carved into the top row: In Appreciation: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Some of the birds had been dedicated too: There was now an ostrich Charlie Kirk, an ostrich Dr. Oz, an ostrich Donald Trump.

I’d arrived at a moment of uneasy calm. Not so long before, every sign had suggested that the standoff was about to end. After many hours’ worth of yelling and negotiations, the police had seized the pens; Karen and Katie were driven off in handcuffs, and briefly held. The CFIA had put up a wall of hay bales in the field, presumably to hem in the flock and hide the coming slaughter. But hours later, just as Dave and Karen were finishing a group prayer, their lawyer called to say that the Supreme Court of Canada had intervened. The justices were considering whether they would hear the case, and that meant the ostriches would not be killed just yet. Everyone agreed that this intervention was divine.

Now the camp was far more crowded than it had been in June. No one took my name and phone number, or handed me a badge, when I arrived. Near one corner of the pens, I met a man named Thomas, who was taking footage of the Mounties with a camcorder. “I hate cops,” he said. “If one of those guys got a bullet to the head, I wouldn’t shed a tear.” Thomas told me that he’d been incarcerated for assault and fraud, but that his days as a criminal were over. “I don’t condone violence,” he said, “but I’ve started to think some violence might be necessary when there’s no other way to make people pay attention.”

Over at the house, Dave and Karen were meeting with the police department’s liaisons. Dave looked as though he hadn’t slept for days. His ears were bloody from the ostrich pecks that he’d sustained during his vigil in the pens. When I asked him what he’d do if the cull was carried out, he cried into his hand. If the ostriches were killed, Dave and Karen would have nothing left. They may no longer be eligible for compensation for the loss of the birds, according to the CFIA rules. They also owe tens of thousands of dollars to the government in fines and legal expenses. In the meantime, they’d been deprived of revenue for months, and the farm had already been facing heavy debts when all of this started. “There’s no recovery from this,” their lawyer, Umar Sheikh, told me.

Next door, in the grass outside Lois’s double-wide trailer, the smell of gasoline still lingered. When she came outside to say hello, I saw that she had bruises on both arms, cuts on her face, and a black eye. She’d only stopped the would-be arsonist by chance, she said: She’d come out to feed one of her cats and there he was, reaching into his pocket, as if to grab a lighter. She’d lunged at him, bit him on the elbow, and kicked him in the groin. Then he punched her in the face and fled. The police identified their suspect by the tooth marks on his arm.

The man was a freedom-convoy veteran, Karen’s son told me, who’d warned the others in the group that he planned to go to jail before this all was over. Both Katie and her mother claimed, at least at first, that the attempted arson never really happened—that the whole thing was a setup by the members of the local “hate group” who had criticized the farm online.

I asked Lois if she felt unsafe. She told me that she’d gone to stay with a friend on the night after the attack, but had come back to the farm to tend to her cats and her tomatoes. She said that there were a lot of cops around for protection, but also that she didn’t see herself as having many options. “People say, ‘Well, you should do a civil suit against them for slander, libel, whatever, harassment,’” she told me. “I say, ‘I could not bear to do that. Can you imagine going up against Katie? You wouldn’t win.’”

Moving out of Edgewood didn’t seem to be an option, either. Lois’s property, her 120 acres in the valley, was all she had, and who would ever buy it now? She was living on the site of a bird-flu quarantine. Fair or not, she was just as trapped as Dave and Karen. “I keep thinking it’s going to be over,” she said. And then it never is.

Alana Paterson for The Atlantic

Karen Espersen and a supporter embrace after Karen’s release from arrest for refusing to vacate the ostrich pens.

An end did come at last, six weeks later. On November 6, the Supreme Court decided not to hear the farmers’ case. The Notice of Requirement to Dispose of Animals issued by the CFIA more than 10 months earlier was reinstated for the final time. Shortly after nightfall, once the police had cut their floodlights and sealed off Langille Road, gunshots started ringing out behind the hay bales. At first there were a dozen, then many dozens more, as hired marksmen fired on the flock from platforms.

Katie squatted at the border of the pens, pulling at the fence and screaming, “Make it stop.” Karen stood beside the line of officers who blocked the road. “They’re killing my babies,” she said.

By the next morning, the cull was over. All of the ostriches—314 of them, by the government’s final count—were dead.

It was gray and it was cold in the valley. Autumn had returned: one full cycle of the seasons from the day Dave and Karen’s birds first began to falter in the slush. Waves of wild ducks were passing overhead once more. Since the start of fall, the bird-flu virus has again been spilling over into poultry flocks in North America. Another 8 million birds have been killed on U.S. farms in recent months, and 3 million more in Canada.

While construction vehicles shoveled up the ostrich carcasses and dumped them into trucks, the farm’s supporters gathered for a vigil, in person and online. It had been 297 days, they claimed, since any of the birds were sick. Whether this was true no longer mattered. The outbreak on the Universal Ostrich Farms had reached its end; yet even now, no one could agree about the nature of the threat. Had the poultry been a risk to public health? What about the farmers, who never thought the rules applied to them? And what about the government, which chose annihilation over compromise? Any middle ground was now awash with blood. Some kind of danger had been present in those pens; that was clear enough. Now that danger is stamped out.

‘I’m Not Quite Sure How to Respond to This Presentation’

2025-06-27T21:14:00-04:00

Updated at 4:50 p.m. ET on June 29, 2025

The past three weeks have been auspicious for the anti-vaxxers. On June 9, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. purged the nation’s most important panel of vaccine experts: All 17 voting members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which sets recommendations for the use of vaccines and determines which ones must be covered through insurance and provided free of charge to children on Medicaid, were abruptly fired. The small, ragtag crew of replacements that Kennedy appointed two days later met this week for the first time, amid lots of empty chairs in a conference room in Atlanta. They had come to talk about the safety of vaccines: to raise concerns about the data, to float hypotheses of harm, to issue findings.

The resulting spectacle was set against a backdrop of accelerating action from the secretary. On Wednesday, Kennedy terminated more than $1 billion in U.S. funding for Gavi, a global-health initiative that supports the vaccination of more than 65 million children every year. Lyn Redwood, a nurse practitioner and the former president of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that Kennedy used to chair, was just hired as a special government employee. (She presented at the ACIP meeting yesterday.) A recently posted scientific document on the ACIP website that underscored the safety of thimerosal, an ingredient in a small proportion of the nation’s flu vaccines, had been taken down, a committee member said, because the document “was not authorized by the office of the secretary.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told me in an email that this document was provided to the ACIP members in their meeting briefing packets.)

What’s clear enough is that, 61 years after ACIP’s founding, America’s vaccination policy is about to be recooked. Now we’ve had a glimpse inside the kitchen.

The meeting started with complaints. “Some media outlets have been very harsh on the new members of this committee,” said Martin Kulldorff, a rangy Swedish biostatistician and noted COVID contrarian who is now ACIP’s chair. (Kuldorff was one of the lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial proposal from the fall of 2020 to isolate seniors and other vulnerable people while reopening the rest of society.) In suggesting that he and Kennedy’s other appointees are opposed to vaccination, Kulldorff said, journalists were misleading the public, weakening trust in public health, and fanning “the flames of vaccine hesitancy.”

This was, in fact, the most pugnacious comment of the two-day meeting, which otherwise unfolded in a tone of fearmongering gentility. Robert Malone, a doctor and an infectious-diseases researcher who has embraced the “anti-vaccine” label and published a conspiracy-theory-laden book that details government psyops against the American people, was unfailingly polite in his frequent intimations about the safety of vaccines, often thanking CDC staff for their hard work and lucid presentations. With his thick white beard, calm affect, and soldierly diction—Malone ended many of his comments by saying “Over” into the microphone—he presented less as a firebrand than as, say, the commanding officer of a submarine.

When Malone alluded to the worry, for example, that spike proteins from the mRNA-based COVID vaccines linger in the body following injection, he did so in respectful, even deferential, language, suggesting that the public would benefit from greater study of possible “delayed effects” of immune-system activation. The CDC’s traditional approach—its “world-leading, rigorous” one, he clarified—might be improved by examining this question. A subject-matter expert responded that the CDC has been keeping tabs on real-world safety data on those vaccines for nearly five years, and has not detected any signs of long-term harm.

Later, Malone implied that COVID or its treatments might have, through some unspecified, bank-shot mechanism, left the U.S. population more susceptible to other illnesses. There was a “paradoxical, sudden decrease” in flu cases in 2020 and 2021, he noted, followed by a trend of worsening harm. A CDC staffer pointed out that the decrease in flu during those years was not, in fact, a paradox; well-documented shifts in people’s health behavior had temporarily reduced the load of many respiratory illnesses during that same period. But Malone pressed on: “Some members of the scientific community have concern that they’re coming out of the COVID pandemic—exposure to the virus, exposure to various countermeasures—there may be a pattern of broad-based, uh, anergy,” he said, his eyes darting up for a moment as he invoked a term for a diminished immune response, “that might contribute to increased severity of influenza disease.” He encouraged the agency to “be sensitive to that hypothesis.”

Throughout these and other questions from the committee members, the CDC’s subject-matter experts did their best to explain their work and respond to scattershot technical and conceptual concerns. “The CDC staff is still attempting to operate as an evidence-based organization,” Laura Morris, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, who has attended dozens of ACIP meetings in the past and attended this one as a nonvoting liaison to the committee from the American Academy of Family Physicians, told me. “There was some tension in terms of the capacity of the committee to ask and understand the appropriate methodological questions. The CDC was trying to hold it down.”

That task became more difficult as the meeting progressed. “The new ACIP is an independent body composed of experienced medical and public health experts who evaluate evidence, ask hard questions, and make decisions based on scientific integrity,” the HHS spokesperson told me. “Bottom line: This process reflects open scientific inquiry and robust debate, not a pre-scripted narrative.” The most vocal questioner among the new recruits—and the one who seemed least beholden to a script—was the MIT business-school professor Retsef Levi, a lesser-known committee appointee who sat across the table from Malone. A scruffy former Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer with a ponytail that reached halfway down his back, Levi’s academic background is in data modeling, risk management, and organizational logistics. He approached the proceedings with a swaggering incredulity, challenging the staffers’ efforts and pointing out the risks of systematic errors in their thinking. (In a pinned post on his X profile, Levi writes that “the evidence is mounting and indisputable that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death”—a position entirely at odds with copious data presented at the meeting.)

Shortly before the committee’s vote to recommend a new, FDA-approved monoclonal antibody for preventing RSV in infants, Levi noted that he’d spent some time reviewing the relevant clinical-trial data for the drug and another like it, and found some worrying patterns in the statistics surrounding infant deaths. “Should we not be concerned that maybe there are some potential safety signals?” he asked. But these very data had already been reviewed, at great length, in multiple settings: by the FDA, in the course of drug approval, and by the dozens of members of ACIP’s relevant work group for RSV, which had, per the committee’s standard practice, conducted its own staged analysis of the new treatment before the meeting and reached consensus that its benefits outweighed its risks. Levi was uncowed by any reference to this prior work. “I’m a scientist, but I’m also a father of six kids,” he told the group; speaking as a father, he said, he personally would be concerned about the risk of harm from this new antibody for RSV.

In the end, Levi voted against recommending the antibody, as did Vicky Pebsworth, who is on the board of an anti-vaccine organization and holds a Ph.D. in public health and nursing. The five other members voted yes. That 5–2 vote aside, the most contentious issue on the meeting’s schedule concerned the flu shots in America that contain thimerosal, which has been an obsession of the anti-vaccine movement for the past few decades. Despite extensive study, vaccines with thimerosal have not been found to be associated with any known harm in human patients, yet an unspecified vote regarding their use was slipped into the meeting’s agenda in the absence of any work-group study or presentation from the CDC’s staff scientists. What facts there were came almost exclusively from Redwood, the nurse who used to run Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that at least one citation from her posted slides had been invented. That reference was removed before she spoke yesterday. (HHS did not address a request for comment on this issue in its response to me.)

The only one of Kennedy’s appointees who had ever previously served on the committee—the pediatrician Cody Meissner—seemed perplexed, even pained, by the proceedings. “I’m not quite sure how to respond to this presentation,” he said when Redwood finished. He went on to sum up his concerns: “ACIP makes recommendations based on scientific evidence as much as possible. And there is no scientific evidence that thimerosal has caused a problem.” Alas, Meissner’s warnings were for nought. Throughout the meeting, he came off as the committee’s last remaining, classic “expert”—a vaccine scientist clinging to ACIP’s old ways—but his frequent protestations were often bulldozed over or ignored. In the end, his was the only vote against the resolutions on thimerosal.

Throughout the two-day meeting, Kuldorff kept returning to a favorite phrase: evidence-based medicine. “Secretary Kennedy has given this committee a clear mandate to use evidence-based medicine,” he said on Wednesday morning. “The purpose of this committee is to follow evidence-based medicine,” he said on Wednesday afternoon. “What is important is using evidence-based medicine,” he said again when the meeting reached its end. All told, I heard him say evidence-based at least 10 times during the meeting. (To be fair, critics of Kuldorff and his colleagues also love this phrase.) But the committee was erratic in its posture toward the evidence from the very start; it cast doubt on CDC analyses and substituted lay advice and intuition for ACIP’s normal methods of assessing and producing expert consensus. “Decisons were made based on feelings and preferences rather than evidence,” Morris told me after the meeting. “That’s a dangerous way to make public-health policy.”

This story originally misquoted Robert Malone’s use of the term anergy as energy.

There Is No Dignity in Capitulation

2025-05-22T11:42:00-04:00

Updated at 5:02 p.m. ET on May 23, 2025

American Masters, an award-winning documentary series in its 39th season on PBS, promises to tell “compelling, unvarnished stories” about the nation’s most important cultural figures. The program’s most recent story, though—Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, about the cartoonist-author of Maus, the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel depicting the Holocaust, and a self-described “poster boy for books being censored”—seemed to need a bit more varnish on its approach to Donald Trump. In April, two weeks before it aired on PBS stations, a 90-second segment of the film in which Spiegelman referred to the president’s “smug and ugly mug” was cut from the film at the behest of public-media executives. (The details of this incident were first reported by Anthony Kaufman for Documentary magazine.)

PBS has been under attack by the Trump administration since January. By the time Disaster Is My Muse was aired in shortened form, the network was already under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, and the White House had a plan to claw back $1.1 billion in federal funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which passes money on to PBS. “Their attempt at preemptively staying out of the line of fire was absurd; it wasn’t going to happen,” Spiegelman told me this week. “It seems like it would be better to go out with dignity.”

Alicia Sams, who co-produced the film, told me that she received a call from the executive producer of American Masters, Michael Kantor, at the beginning of April. It was less than a week after a contentious congressional hearing in which the network was accused of being a “radical left-wing echo chamber” that is “brainwashing and trans-ing children.” According to Sams, Kantor said that Disaster Is My Muse would need one further edit before it could be shown: The filmmakers had to remove a short sequence where Spiegelman reads aloud from the one of the few comic strips about Trump that he’s ever published, in a zine associated with the Women’s March in 2017. There was no opportunity for negotiation, Sams said. The filmmakers knew that if they refused, they would be in breach of contract and would have to repay the movie’s license fee. “It was not coming from Michael,” she told me. “It was very clear: It was coming from PBS in D.C.”

[Read: PBS pulled a film for political reasons, then changed its mind]

Kantor deferred all questions to Lindsey Horvitz, the director of content marketing at WNET, the producer of American Masters and parent company of New York’s flagship PBS station. (Sams told me that in her understanding, WNET leadership had agreed with PBS about the cut.) Horvitz provided The Atlantic with this statement: “One section of the film was edited from the theatrical version as it was no longer in context today. The change was made to maintain the integrity and appropriateness of the content for broadcast at this time.” A PBS spokesperson said, “We have not changed our long-standing editorial guidelines or practices this year.” (The Atlantic has a partnership with WETA, which receives funding from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)

Molly Bernstein, who co-directed Disaster Is My Muse with Philip Dolin, said this was “absurd.” She told me that the team had already been through discussions with PBS over how to make the film compliant with broadcast standards and practices. A few profanities are spoken in the film, and some images from Spiegelman’s cartoons raised concerns, but the network said that these could stand as long as the film aired after 10 p.m., when laxer FCC rules apply. “We were delighted that was an option,” Bernstein said. A bleeped-and-blurred version of the film would not have worked. “It’s about underground comics. It’s about transgressive artwork.”

The team did make one other change to the film, several months before its broadcast: Some material featuring Spiegelman’s fellow comic-book artist Neil Gaiman was removed in January after a series of sexual-assault allegations against Gaiman were detailed in a cover story for New York magazine. (Gaiman denies that he “engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.”) The filmmakers say they did this on their own, to avoid distractions from the subject of the film. But they also said that Kantor told them PBS would likely have had that inclination too.

In any case, to say the snipped-out material about Trump was “no longer in context today” is simply false. Spiegelman’s commitment to free speech is central to the film. So are his repeated warnings about incipient fascism in America. (“That’s what I see everywhere I look now,” he says at one point.) They’re also clearly relevant to the forced edit of the broadcast. Indeed, the censored clip was taken from an event involving Spiegelman in June 2022 called “Forbidden Images Now,” which was presented in association with an exhibit of Philip Guston paintings that had itself been postponed for political reasons after George Floyd’s murder, presumably on account of Guston’s having made a motif of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen.

[Read: Don’t look away from Philip Guston’s cartoonish paintings of Klansmen]

Just a few months before that lecture, Spiegelman learned that Maus had been removed from the eighth-grade curriculum in McMinn County, Tennessee, on account of its rough language and a single panel showing the naked corpse of his mother following her suicide. “The tendencies brought up by this frantic need to control children’s thoughts,” Spiegelman told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi in 2023, are “an echo of the book burnings of the 1930s in Germany.”

The filmmakers told me that Spiegelman’s free-speech run-in with the county school board was instrumental in persuading WNET to back Disaster Is My Muse. “When Maus was banned, interest in Art and the relevance of his story increased,” Sams said. Only then did American Masters pledge its full support, licensing the film before it had even been completed, and supplying half its budget. In the lead-up to its broadcast, PBS also chose to highlight Spiegelman’s focus on the First Amendment in its promotional materials. The network’s webpage for Disaster Is My Muse describes him as “a pioneer of comic arts, whose thought-provoking work reflects his ardent defense of free speech.” (Neither PBS nor WNET would explain how a decision had been made to censor footage from a documentary film that is in no small part about censorship.)

A broader “context” for the edit can be found in PBS’s other recent efforts to adjust its programming in deference to political considerations. As previously reported in The Atlantic, not long before Kantor’s call with Sams, PBS quietly shelved a different documentary film, Break the Game, that was set to air on April 7, apparently because it had a trans protagonist. The film, which is not political, was abruptly placed back on the schedule within two hours of my reaching out to PBS for comment. (The network did not respond to questions about why Break the Game’s original airdate had been canceled.)

If these efforts were meant to forestall pressure from the White House, they have roundly failed. Two weeks after Disaster Is My Muse aired—with its reference to Trump removed—the president attempted to dismiss three of five board members at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A few days after that, he issued an executive order directing the board to terminate all funding, both direct and indirect, to NPR and PBS. (Both moves are being challenged.) But just imagine how much harder the administration would be going after PBS if Trump had seen the clip about his “smug and ugly mug”!

“This seems like volunteering to pull the trigger on the firing-squad gun,” Spiegelman told me. The end of Disaster Is My Muse includes some footage from a 2017 free-speech protest on the steps of the New York Public Library, where Spiegelman read out the lyrics of a Frank Zappa song: “And I’m telling you, it can’t happen here. Oh, darling, it’s important that you believe me. Bop bop bop bop.” The political climate has only gotten worse since then, he said. “There’s no checks and balances on this. This is severe bullying and control, and it’s only going to get worse.”

This article originally misstated Ali Velshi's first name.

Trump Thinks He Knows What Started the Pandemic

2025-05-20T12:05:00-04:00

The lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins comes in many forms. Here is Donald Trump’s: A scientist in Wuhan walked outside to have lunch, maybe with a girlfriend or something. “That’s how it leaked out in my opinion, and I’ve never changed that opinion,” the president said earlier this month at a press event. Whether something like this really happened was, until this year, a subject of lively debate. These days, it’s being presented as official history. Yes, COVID did come out of a Chinese lab, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters shortly after Trump’s inauguration. “We now know that to be the confirmable truth.”

Of course, we don’t really know that, and they don’t know it either. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has convened yet another lab-leak investigation at Trump’s behest (after many other intelligence assessments led to split results), could only dance around the matter in an interview with Megyn Kelly earlier this month. Has some new and final proof been found? Kelly asked. Gabbard responded: “We are working on that with Jay Bhattacharya,” the director of the National Institutes of Health, “and look forward to being able to share that hopefully very soon.” (Gabbard’s office did not reply to a request for comment.)

Any hedging on the matter of pandemic origins represents a standard view among the experts: We simply aren’t sure. In reporting on this question for the past few years, I’ve spoken with some scientists and pandemic-origins investigators who are confident the coronavirus came out of a Wuhan lab, and with some who say they’re nearly certain that the virus spread to humans from a market stall. I’ve also heard from many others whose appraisals of the odds fall somewhere in between. Their only common ground may be the single plain acknowledgment that the evidence we have is incomplete.

But, despite the well-established data gaps—and in willful disregard of them—the lab-leak theory has become a MAGA theorem. Adherence to it is now a central tenet of the Trump administration: a shibboleth for loyalists, an animating grievance, and, in recent weeks, a stated rationale for punitive reforms. Earlier this month, when the White House proposed an $18 billion cut to the nation’s budget for biomedical research, the lab-leak theory—described as “now confirmed”—was given as a pretext.

There are many reasons to regret this shift toward artificial certainty, starting with the fact that whatever nuance now attached to the topic of pandemic origins has been hard-won. For much of 2020, a different bullheadedness prevailed: Invocations of the lab-leak theory were often tarred as right-wing propaganda, or even racist lies. At the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, “there was a clear and almost overwhelming leaning towards natural origin,” David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist and former member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity who has long maintained that a laboratory origin is more likely, told me. This bias weakened over time, as the theory came to have more distance from the Trump administration, and more suggestive bits of circumstantial evidence accrued. In the spring of 2023, the COVID-19 Origin Act, which demanded the declassification of all lab-leak-related intelligence, passed without a wisp of opposition, and in 2024, Relman himself was detailed to the White House as a senior adviser working on pandemic preparedness. “There was a palpable shift to the middle,” he said.

But this equanimity has proved to be short-lived. According to the new administration and its supporters, the laboratory origin is presumptively correct. On covid.gov, which until last month offered only basic patient information (“If you test positive for COVID-19, talk to a doctor as soon as possible”), LAB LEAK now appears in jumbo font across the top—with Trump himself emerging from the gap between the B and L, as if he’d just leaked out himself. “The true origins of COVID-19,” the government website says, beside his foot.

Declaring fealty to this point of view has now become a sacred rite within the GOP, not unlike endorsement of the claim that the 2020 election was a fraud. Plenty of Trump’s most senior appointees have averred that COVID started in a lab. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem described it as “the truth.” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has claimed that a laboratory origin is a “no-brainer,” and described it falsely as “now the leading theory among scientists.” Bhattacharya said at an NIH town hall on Monday that he believes the coronavirus was released from a lab, and that it derived from U.S.-funded research. The DHS, FDA, and NIH did not reply to requests for comment.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has staked out the most extreme position of the bunch, publicly declaring that “SARS CoV-2 is certainly the product of bioweapons research.” As of January, the entire U.S. intelligence community disagreed with this assessment. In an email, an HHS spokesperson told me that Americans “will no longer accept silence, censorship, or scientific groupthink” and “deserve the truth.”

In the background, too, the administration has looked to bring other hard-liners on the lab-leak theory into the fold. Robert Kadlec, for instance, has been nominated for a role at the Department of Defense. A veteran of the first Trump administration who was instrumental in the management of Operation Warp Speed, he is also the author of a report that argues SARS-CoV-2 might have been developed by the Chinese military as a bioweapon that could lower American IQs by fogging up our brains with long COVID. (Kadlec told me that he doesn’t think COVID would be a major part of his portfolio, if he were confirmed—but “it will have relevance with the biosurveillance work that may be done,” he said.)

A former senior scientist at NIH told me about two others whose potential roles in government have not previously been reported. The first is Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, and a dogged advocate for more vigorous investigations of the lab-leak theory and tighter restrictions on virology research. Chan confirmed to me that she is in discussions for a role at the NIH. “I haven’t committed to anything,” she told me, “but I do feel like now that we’ve reached this point, I feel that this is probably the most important thing that I should be doing in my life—doing as much as I can to help the U.S. government prevent future catastrophic lab leaks.”

The former NIH scientist, who requested anonymity in order to preserve professional relationships, also said a contract was under consideration for Bryce Nickels, a Rutgers geneticist and Bhattacharya’s friend and former podcast co-host. Nickels has been notably aggressive on the lab-leak theory, and as an advocate for better oversight of research that could lead to the production of more dangerous pathogens. In his posts on social media, Nickels has called Anthony Fauci a “monster” and maintained that the U.S. is in the business of developing “bioweapon agents.” (Nickels did not reply to questions for this article.)

In principle, the arrival of this lab-leak coterie in Washington could have marked a useful shift in the study of pandemic origins. If the old guard in public health was at times inclined to paper over uncomfortable debates, this new one might be zealously transparent. Chan, for instance, told me that she’d like to see investigators take a closer look at documents and correspondence from EcoHealth Alliance, the NIH-funded nonprofit that was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and spend more effort trying to nail down the very first cases of disease in China. She also thinks the government should release more details of the intelligence community’s assessments, which might explain why different agencies and offices have come to different answers as to what is most likely to have occurred. (The FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy lean toward a laboratory accident of some kind. Five others, including the National Intelligence Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency, are inclined the other way.)

But this administration seems unlikely to make much progress on this front. If anything, its policies and proclamations have only made the subject more intractable. Even before Trump took office, many scientists were reluctant to engage with the topic, for fear of being drawn into what has been a very public and vituperative debate. Now that worry must be multiplied a hundred times. In recent months, the NIH has terminated grants that run afoul of the government’s positions on diversity and gender, and shut off funding to entire research universities. It will soon end the system that U.S. researchers use to share grant funding with foreign collaborators, and has begun suspending collaborations overseas. The risks of stepping out of line have never been so salient.

In the meantime, new government restrictions inspired by the lab-leak theory could serve to make it even harder to fill in the remaining details of what happened in Wuhan. Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who has published a string of papers laying out an aggressive case for the market origin, told me that he’d like to see more sampled DNA from wild populations of civets, raccoon dogs, and bamboo rats throughout China. But this sort of work would require close collaboration with Chinese researchers, at just the time when those collaborations are being scrutinized or canceled.

“The administration is developing a very adversarial relationship with the scientific and technical communities,” Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher and professor at King’s College London, told me. “It’s not a facts-based discussion. There are facts from one side, but not from the other side.” This climate will tend to undermine the work of encouraging more prudence in the labs of those who study risky pathogens, she said. As for the COVID-origins debate itself, she does not expect a satisfying answer. “I think it’s kind of a lost cause.”

Either way, by tying budget cuts and other new restrictions to the lab-leak theory, the administration seems intent on punishing an enormous swath of biomedical researchers for the actions of the tiny handful whose work could even theoretically be tied to the pandemic. “This is the most enormous case of baby and bathwater that I have ever seen,” Relman told me. “The baby is just being shoved down the drain.”

Katherine J. Wu contributed reporting.

PBS Pulled a Film for Political Reasons, Then Changed Its Mind

2025-04-18T09:05:00-04:00

On March 25, the veteran film producer Erika Dilday spoke at a documentary conference in Copenhagen, on a panel addressing the many challenges, political and otherwise, that now face nonfiction-film distribution. “Even though it’s terrifying, it’s also incredibly energizing,” Dilday, the executive director of the nonprofit that produces PBS’s long-running, Emmy-winning series POV, told the audience. “I’m ready to paint my face, tie a band around my head, and crawl through the mud to try to save our ability to show independent content on public media.”

In the background, though, the fight was not going well. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, public media has been under heavy threat from legislators and the administration; plans are in the works for Congress to claw back $1.1 billion in federal funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. At a House DOGE subcommittee hearing the day after Dilday spoke in Copenhagen, the chair, Marjorie Taylor Greene, accused PBS of “brainwashing and trans-ing” America’s children. Dilday herself had already seen how the situation was playing out on TV schedules. At the end of February, she’d heard from PBS that the release of Break the Game, a film from POV’s current slate about a trans video gamer’s relationship with fame and her fans, would be postponed indefinitely. By all appearances, the network was obeying in advance. (The Atlantic has a partnership with WETA, which receives funding from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)

Dilday passed along that news to the film’s director, Jane M. Wagner, in a February 24 phone call, Wagner told me. She said that the call included Chris White, an executive producer at POV and American Documentary, the nonprofit that Dilday leads. The film would not be shown as planned on April 7, they explained, because executives at PBS were worried about Break the Game’s transgender themes and the risk of further political backlash. “PBS is our platform, and we have to respect their directive,” Wagner says White told her. (Neither Dilday nor White responded to multiple requests for comment on this story.) Two days later, Dilday sent Wagner an email that confirmed the details of their phone call, including PBS’s concerns about political backlash. “I am so sorry about this,” she wrote.

[Mark Leibovich: It’s not easy being (Marjorie Taylor) Greene]

At some point in the days that followed, the webpage for the film on PBS.org was taken down, along with an associated reading guide. On April 7, PBS rebroadcast a 2022 film about a man with disabilities in what had been Break the Game’s original slot. Wagner was devastated. She’d spent six years making the documentary, and paid for most of its production on her own. The network’s decision to abandon it didn’t even make sense to her on its own terms. “The administration is going to come for public broadcasting because they reject the notion of public broadcasting in general,” she told me when we spoke last week. “It doesn’t matter what you show.”

In any case, PBS quickly changed its mind last Friday afternoon, around the time that I reached out for comment on the film’s withdrawal. Less than two hours after I’d emailed the network, Wagner received a message from White at POV: “Wanted to let you know that PBS has just come back to us with a confirmed Break the Game airdate of June 30,” he wrote. A network spokesperson eventually shared the same news with me directly: “‘Break the Game’ is part of POV’s summer season line-up, and it will air in June,” she wrote in an email sent on Tuesday morning, adding in a follow-up that “a slot for this program had been identified in June to commemorate Pride Month.” PBS did not respond to questions about why Break the Game’s original airdate had been canceled, or why the new one had been assigned so quickly after I’d requested comment.

“It’s not hard to connect the dots here,” Wagner told me. It was “painfully clear,” she said, that PBS had switched positions on the film in an effort to “avoid public scrutiny and accountability.” Certainly, the back-and-forth suggests that PBS executives are not exactly crawling through the mud in defense of independent filmmaking. When the network’s president and CEO, Paula Kerger, was asked at the DOGE subcommittee hearing to defend PBS’s other trans-themed documentaries, she gave a tepid, practiced answer: “These are documentary films that are point-of-view pieces that are part of our primetime schedule for adults.” Of course, she could have said the same about POV and Break the Game: The series is literally named Point of View, and the film’s original broadcast slot had been set for 10 p.m., during the prime-time schedule for adults. The fact that the network still chose to disappear Wagner’s movie—and then to re-appear it later on, still without an explanation—suggests that the institution is at sea. Self-censorship may be easy to undo, but it’s also easy to avoid in the first place. PBS seems to have created this scenario of its own accord, and now it’s showing that it doesn’t even have the courage of its lack of convictions.

“I never would have described myself as a political filmmaker, or as a social-justice filmmaker, or even as a journalistic filmmaker,” Wagner told me. Indeed, PBS’s decision to withhold Break the Game appears to be a function of its timing: The original April 7 airdate would have come a bit too soon after the DOGE subcommittee hearing. A few of the documentary films that have already aired during the current season of POV, before Trump’s second inauguration, are explicitly left wing. Twice Colonized, which was broadcast last October, tells the story of an Indigenous-rights activist from Greenland (of all places) who, according to the synopsis, “works to bring her colonizers to justice.” That film’s discussion guide, which remains available on PBS.org, invites viewers of the film to think about how they understand the terms cultural erasure, institutional racism, and mental colonization. Another film on the current slate, Who I Am Not, which premiered in December, tells the story of an intersex South African beauty queen and an intersex activist.

Break the Game is neutral by comparison: It neither depicts activism nor advances an ideological position. POV’s producers pitched the film as “a sharp, compassionate exploration about the darker side of online gamer culture” in a draft press release. The film tells the story of Narcissa Wright, a virtuosic gamer and habitual livestreamer known for her record-setting speedruns of The Legend of Zelda and other games, who lost a major portion of her online fan base after she came out as trans. At first, Wagner figured that she’d capture Wright’s attempt to win back fans by setting a new speedrun record: The film would be “the Rocky of the digital world,” Wagner said. She thought it was going to end with Wright at a gaming convention, getting “a standing ovation and being accepted.” But the finished product—which comprises mostly animated sequences and footage from Wright’s webcam—has less to do with a famous gamer’s comeback (which doesn’t really materialize) than with her relentless, sometimes self-destructive push to find connection online. Wright’s experience as a trans woman provides the central context for the film, but it isn’t quite its subject matter.

[Adam Serwer: The attack on trans rights won’t end there]

“The movie is kind of two movies,” Alex Eastly, another gamer who appears in the film, told me. The first movie is about Wright’s relationship with her mother, Eastly said: “That’s the emotional core of the film.” The other movie, she said, “is about how trans people become a lightning rod for a lot of displaced frustration with the world at large.” (Wagner plans to stream the film on Twitch on Monday night.)

Eastly told me that she wasn’t surprised when she learned that the film had been bumped for political reasons. “This isn’t an issue specific to PBS. This is society-wide,” she told me. Wagner said that although she’s not a political filmmaker, “I still believe in speaking truth to power.” What had happened, she said, left her feeling “existential devastation.”

The episode calls to mind a similar controversy from more than 30 years ago involving PBS and POV, when a documentary short called Stop the Church was abruptly dropped from the network’s programming two weeks before its scheduled broadcast in the summer of 1991. The film was about a raucous demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, where more than 100 people were arrested for protesting Cardinal John O’Connor’s positions on abortion and the AIDS crisis. PBS executives decided that airing the documentary, which took a mocking tone toward the Catholic Church, would be overly provocative, given that another POV film—Tongues Untied, about the lives of Black gay men—had produced a controversy of its own just the month before and had gotten dropped from the schedules of some member stations. PBS executives had stood behind that film, even as it was cited on the floor of Congress as evidence of the network’s political agenda. But standing up for Stop the Church wasn’t worth the risk, they thought, of incurring yet another rhubarb over taxpayer-funded programming and more public pressure on local stations. They told POV that they wouldn’t air the film, Marc Weiss, the creator of the series and its executive producer from 1986 to 1997, told me. POV had little chance of fighting back, as far as he could tell, and doing so would have been unwise: A second scandal in a row could easily have led to the series’ cancellation. “It was a calculation, and I’m not proud of it,” he said.

Whatever outrage that decision fostered was soon forgotten, as POV and PBS were celebrated for their courage in defending Tongues Untied. But contemporary critics such as Arthur Kropp, the president in 1991 of the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way, did see the dustup as a portent way back then. “This is the kind of censorship you can’t fight—self-censorship,” Kropp, who would die from AIDS a few years later, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “This is the first indication of where we’re heading.”

The Evermaskers

2025-04-01T15:47:49-04:00

“It breaks my brain sometimes,” Dennis Rosloniec told me. For half a decade now, the 44-year-old media technician and mountain biker from Green Bay, Wisconsin, has done everything he can to understand the risks of getting COVID. He’s read the published studies. He’s looked at meta-analyses. And here’s the truth as far as he can tell: Each time he’s infected, the chances that something really bad will happen to his body ratchet up a little higher.

Dennis is not immunocompromised. He doesn’t have a chronic illness. He’s not obese or hypertensive or unvaccinated. He’s just a thoughtful autodidact, the kind of guy who references both The Simpsons and the Stoics as he talks. “I’m a fairly large, fit, white dude, for lack of a better term,” he said. But even now, in 2025, Dennis Rosloniec is afraid of COVID. Someone else might say he’s strangely so.

Dennis is still masking quite a bit. He’s wary of attending indoor social gatherings unless they seem especially important. And he’s been taking sundry extra measures to protect himself, based on fledgling research that he’s either heard about or read online, since 2020, when he bought a tube of ivermectin, the antiparasitic drug that was repurposed as a highly suspect COVID treatment, “out of anxiety” while awaiting the vaccines. Later on, he tried iota-carrageenan nasal spray, which he used as a hedge against COVID infection until “the science became sort of iffy on it.” These days, he keeps a bottle of cetylpyridinium-chloride mouthwash in his desk, so he can gargle when he thinks he might have been exposed. And he’s got a prophylactic nasal rinse, which, actually, he’s come to sort of like for reasons that don’t have much to do with COVID. “I breathe better through my nose when I use it.”

As a masker—and as a mouthwash guy and a nasal-rinser—Dennis knows he’s out of step with almost everyone he sees in person. “You feel pressure from the world,” he told me. “It makes you question, Is this really worth it?” But he also knows that certain others share his sense of caution, or even worry more than he does. He interacts with them online, on message boards for “COVID conscious” conversation. Theirs is a kind of shadow world where the fears and obligations felt by everyone in early 2020 never really went away, and lockdowns still persist in private.

Members of these groups say they’re only doing what they’ve always done since the start of the pandemic: In the parlance of the boards, they’re “still COVID-ing.” But some are also going further to protect themselves than they did in 2020, and seeking out new strategies for staying safe. They share tips online for how to fit their N95 masks, or for taping filters to the spouts of snorkels so they can safely visit indoor pools. They talk about the challenges of COVID-conscious parenting, and meet up for COVID-conscious church events on Sunday Zooms. They share lists of COVID-conscious therapists who would never try to tell you that you’re too afraid of getting sick, or that your risk perception is distorted, or that the problem here is not the world’s but your own.

The pressure that they feel from others used to be a little worse. Not so long ago, just the sight of someone in a mask was read as a reproach, a sanctimonious demand that lockdowns should continue for us all. Or maybe it was taken as “a reminder of how awful the last few years had been,” Lauren Wilde, a COVID-conscious therapist in Washington State, told me—“of how many people had died, of how much it sucked to get COVID.” But now that tension has started to subside. When people walk around in masks in 2025, or insist on having lunch outside even in the dead of winter, they find that their cautious habits earn them fewer angry looks. They’re less reviled than they used to be. They’re more often just ignored.

Amid the nation’s mass indifference, their isolation has only gotten more intense. Their epistemic bubble has been shrinking too. This used to be the group that was most attuned to what “the science” said; the ones who paid attention to the dots painted on the sidewalk, six feet apart. In the past few years, as official rules for social distancing have been revoked, they’ve had to make up new ones for themselves. As standard COVID medicines grew ever more expensive, they’ve had to scour for alternatives. And as basic research on the virus hit a wall, they’ve had no choice but to do their own. “The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said last week, as local health departments braced themselves for funding cuts.

The COVID-conscious people have not abandoned science, Dennis told me. It’s the opposite: They’ve come to think that science has abandoned them.

If the evermaskers seem a little weirder every year, that’s because, in many ways, they haven’t changed at all. At a basic level, their COVID-conscious attitudes may not be so far from the mainstream. Twenty-one percent of Americans still think of the disease as “a major threat” to public health, according to a recent poll from Pew Research Center. Thirty-nine percent say we’re not “taking it seriously enough.” But if 50 million to 100 million adults harbor such concerns, very few are doing much about them. Masking rates were once as high as 88 percent; now they’re close to nil.

For those who still maintain their masking habit—4 percent, says Pew—the whiplash in social norms has been a shock. When masking mandates went away for public transportation, in the spring of 2022, viral videos showed people cheering as they ripped the fabric off their face. Wilde told me she remembered feeling how “it was like, nothing has actually changed, apart from the fact that someone with authority has said you don’t have to do this anymore. COVID is still risky; it’s still a new disease; we don’t know what happens 10 years after you’ve had it.” Why was everyone so quick to abandon those concerns?

The coronavirus never stopped its killing rampage: Hundreds of Americans die from it every week, even now in March of 2025, when the pandemic emergency is over and the virus is theoretically offseason. Nearly 50,000 people died from COVID in the U.S. last year, too. (The disease remains among the nation’s leading causes of death, on par with traffic accidents and suicides.) Yet even those alarming figures seem to matter less to COVID-conscious people than the vaguer risk of long-term complications. “It’s less about death, because if you die that sucks but you’re dead,” said Tess, a 35-year-old public-health researcher who asked to use her first name only, so that her professional work would not be connected to her COVID advocacy. “It’s disability. It’s living through it.” Tess told me that she already has long COVID, with brain fog and some loss of function in her lungs. “I want to maintain whatever health I have, and not make it worse,” she said.

Nancy, a 69-year-old woman who runs two weekly Zooms for COVID-conscious people from her home, and who requested to be identified by only her first name out of concern for her privacy, said that she and many members of her groups were less afraid of death than of a “reduction in our quality of life.” “Some of the data shows that if you keep catching it over and over and over again, that your chances of developing long COVID increase,” she told me, “and it also gradually weakens your immune system.”

[Read: Long COVID could be a ‘mass deterioration’ event]

Other data tell a different story, though. Some studies do suggest an ever-growing threat of long-term symptoms with each new SARS-CoV-2 infection. But according to the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics, which did perhaps the most thorough tracking of long-COVID rates through late 2022, the risk of long-term complications had been going down with reinfection. And although the coronavirus has produced several major spikes of new infections across the past five years, the proportion of those in the U.S. who report having disabilities has been either stable or increasing at a steady pace (depending on which agency’s data and definitions you consult). That means it hasn’t tracked each COVID wave the way that deaths have. According to one sensible interpretation, the risk of long-term disability was greatest early on in the pandemic, but long COVID’s threat, like the threat of COVID overall, has been fading over time.

The truth, or its best approximation, may be, to some extent, irrelevant. How any given person will perceive a threat is “a deeply psychological phenomenon,” Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia and the author of The New Psychology of Pandemics, told me, and one that is “influenced by values, your past history, your medical history, and your mental-health history.” (In the U.S., at least, people’s sense of risk from COVID, in particular, also has a strong connection to their politics.) Unless someone’s COVID-cautious habits have been causing major problems in their life, there’s no point in trying to discourage them, Taylor said. “I would let people choose their level of comfort with threats. That’s their decision.”

Yes, the evermaskers have assessed the costs and benefits of keeping up precautions. And yes, they say they’re happy with the trade-off, despite the many people who claim to know they’ve chosen wrong.

“There are some things that I miss,” Tess told me. “I miss a good punk-rock show where we’re all sweaty in the pit and that kind of stuff. That’s not necessarily something I’m gonna do now, but I have an approximation of it when I go to an outdoor punk show and I let everybody else go in the pit.” Nancy told me that she and her husband still have active social lives. They converse with neighbors from a distance: “We just holler and say hi to each other. It’s not like we’re living as monks or something, in total isolation.” And then she has all the people from her Zoom groups. “I think I have more friends now than I ever had in my life,” she said.

Certain challenges persist. Private or domestic disagreements over COVID-conscious choices—how to navigate the holidays, what to say to friends, which rules apply to kids—never go away. Nancy and her husband have two grown children and nine grandkids, all of whom have “gone on” from COVID, as she puts it. “There’s always a child that’s sniffling or coughing and you don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “We don’t like to make a big deal about it, so if we meet with them, we usually meet outside and do things outside together, but it’s hard.” Tess said she separated from her husband last year, in part because at one point he’d taken off his mask at work without telling her, got infected, and then passed along the illness. “Somebody who, literally, I just got married to, who I’m supposed to trust, lied to me, took away my agency, and got me sick,” she said. But moving out has not been easy: Any roommate she might find would need to share her views on COVID safety. (For now, she’s still living with her ex in a small apartment in the Bronx.)

Politics provide another potent source of conflict. Many COVID-conscious people are progressives and identify as advocates for those with disabilities. On Instagram, calls for staying COVID safe may be tethered to appeals to anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Zionism. For a set of people who feel a broader sense of crisis in America and despair at recent actions of the U.S. government, these concerns are additive. Having to accept the risk of getting COVID, Wilde told me, is just one more way “to feel like someone is trying to force something on you that you don’t want.”

A version of that complaint was once associated with people on the opposite end of COVID caution: those who resisted lockdowns and refused to wear masks. They voiced frustration, like the evermaskers do today, at a government that neglected their concerns, and at a public-health establishment that failed to meet their needs. Like the evermaskers, they felt forced to find their own approach to staying safe while other people yelled that they were wrong. I asked Wilde if she thought there might be some affinities between her own mindset and the one of parents who are opposed to vaccination, still another group of those who have come to trust their own judgment more than the government’s. “There’s a lot of overlap there. There just is,” she said. “That isn’t to say the people who are anti-vax have valid points at all. It’s just saying—and I say this a lot to the people I work with—being human is really hard.”

People tend to make it easier on themselves by remaining settled in the cultural mainstream. Those who break from that current may end up drifting past the limits of what’s agreed upon by scientists. Wilde gargles mouthwash when she feels at risk of an exposure to COVID; she also uses a nasal spray. She understands the weakness of the evidence—published trials of the cetylpyridinium-chloride mouthwash, for example, have found only the barest hints of its potential as a prophylactic—but what other tools does she have at her disposal? “Maybe these things don’t have any impact at all,” she said. Still, they’ve helped her get through some scary situations—and when it comes to scary situations, she treasures any help at all.

Dennis has a similar attitude. “Does it do anything? I’m not convinced,” he said of the mouthwash. “But, you know, it’s something that I can do.” He doesn’t trust everything he sees on COVID-conscious message boards, but at the very least, they let him know that other people in the world see risks the way he does. That’s important in itself. He said he took a recent flight to Ireland, and a small contingent of people were masking on the plane. One couple even tried to kiss each other with their masks in place. “Their faces did this high-five kind of thing … I was like, That’s really sweet. It just made me smile,” Dennis said. “We’re human beings, we want to belong to a tribe, right? We want to feel that sense of belonging.” Five years ago, it felt like everyone was in his tribe; it felt like all Americans were together in their fear of the unknown. Now that fear provides a rarer bond: togetherness in eccentricity, the communion of avoiding crowds.

At the NIH, Intolerance Will No Longer Be Tolerated

2025-03-06T21:40:00-05:00

In October 2020, Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, sent an email that maligned a colleague. A few days before, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, had, with two others, put out a statement—the Great Barrington Declaration—calling for looser public-health restrictions in the face of the pandemic. In place of lockdowns, the statement contended, the nation could simply let infections spread among most of the population while the old and infirm remained in relative isolation. Collins, like many other scientists, thought this was a dangerous idea. Bhattacharya and his co-authors were “fringe epidemiologists” whose proposal needed a “quick and devastating” rebuttal, Collins wrote in an email that later came to light through a public-records request. Collins doubled down on this dismissal in a media interview a week later: “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he told The Washington Post. “This is not mainstream science.”

So where are these two now? Collins abruptly ended his 32-year career at the NIH last week, while Bhattacharya is Donald Trump’s pick to take over the agency. The turnabout has created a pleasing narrative for those aggrieved at scientific governance. “It’s remarkable to see that you’re nominated to be the head of the very institution whose leaders persecuted you because of what you believed,” Jim Banks, a Republican senator from Indiana, said at Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing yesterday. For Bhattacharya, a man who has described himself as the victim of “a propaganda attack” perpetrated by the nation’s $48 billion biomedical-research establishment, Collins’s insult has become a badge of pride, even a leading qualification for employment in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The “fringe” is now in charge.

Last year, when Collins was asked by a House committee about his comments on the Great Barrington Declaration, he said he was alarmed that the proposal had so quickly made its way to his boss, Alex Azar, who was then the secretary of Health and Human Services. Now that role is filled by another figure from the fringe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and presumably, outsider scholars such as Bhattacharya—a health economist and a nonpracticing physician with a predilection for contrary views—will have greater sway than ever. (Bhattacharya declined to be interviewed for this story. Collins did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Science, to succeed, needs free speech,” Bhattacharya told the committee during the hearing. “It needs an environment where there’s tolerance to dissent.” This has long been his message—and warning—to the scientific community. In Bhattacharya’s view, Collins helped coordinate an effort to discredit his and others’ calls for an alternative approach to the pandemic; Collins’s role at an institution that disperses billions of dollars in research funding gave him a frightening power to “cast out heretics,” as Bhattacharya put it in 2023, “just like the medieval Catholic Church did.”

Now he means to use the same authority to rectify that wrong. In his opening remarks yesterday, Bhattacharya vowed to “create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement respectfully.” What this means in practice isn’t yet clear, but The Wall Street Journal has reported that he might try to prioritize funding for universities that score high on to-be-determined measures of campus-wide “academic freedom.” In other words, Bhattacharya may attempt to use the agency’s billion-dollar leverage in reverse, to bully academics into being tolerant.

These aspirations match up with those of his allies who are riding into Washington as champions of the underheard in science. Last month, Kennedy promised in his first speech to his staff that he would foster debate and “convene representatives of all viewpoints” to study chronic disease. “Nothing is going to be off-limits,” he said. Marty Makary, the nominee for FDA commissioner, has talked about his experience of the “censorship complex” and bemoaned an atmosphere of “total intolerance” in public health. Consensus thinking is oppressive, these men suggest. Alternative ideas, whatever those might be, have intrinsic value.

[Read: Revenge of the COVID contrarians]

Surely we can all agree that groupthink is a drag. But a curious pattern is emerging among the fringe-ocrats who are coming into power. Their dissenting views, strewn across the outskirts of conventional belief, appear to be curling toward a new and fringe consensus of its own. On the subject of vaccines, for instance, there used to be some space between the positions of Kennedy, the nation’s leading figure casting doubt on the safety and benefits of inoculations, and Bhattacharya. Kennedy has made false claims about the dangers of the mRNA-based COVID shots. Bhattacharya, meanwhile, once called the same vaccines “a medical miracle—extremely valuable for protecting the vulnerable against severe COVID-19 disease.” (He even criticized Anthony Fauci for downplaying the benefits of COVID shots by continuing to wear a mask after being immunized.)

Bhattacharya has in the past been tolerant of others’ more outrageous claims about vaccines. But that neutrality has lately drifted into a gentle posture of acceptance, like a one-armed hug. Under questioning from senators, he said that he is convinced that there is no link between autism and the MMR vaccine (and that he fully supports vaccinating children against measles). But he also floated the idea that Kennedy’s goal of doing further research on the topic would be worthwhile just the same. Last July, despite his past enthusiasm for mRNA-based COVID-19 shots, Bhattacharya said that he was planning to sign on to a statement calling for their de-authorization, because they are “contributing to an alarming rise in disability and excess deaths.” Kennedy has petitioned for the same, on the same grounds. (There is, in fact, no meaningful evidence that the vaccines have caused a spate of excess deaths.) In a post on X, Bhattacharya explained that he’d been hesitant to take this step at first, because some groups might still benefit from the vaccines, but then he came to realize that pulling the vaccine will create the conditions necessary for testing whether it still has any value.

[Read: The inflated risk of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest]

On this and other issues, the dissenting voices have started to combine into a chorus. The lab-leak theory of COVID’s origin provides another case in point. In yesterday’s hearing, Bhattacharya described scientific experts’ early dismissal of the possibility that the coronavirus spread from a lab in Wuhan, China, as “a low point in the history of science.” That’s an overstatement, but the criticism is fair: Dissenting views were stifled and ignored. But here again, what started as mere endorsement of debate has evolved into a countervailing sense of certainty. Although there’s still plenty of reason to believe that the pandemic did, in fact, begin with the natural passage of the virus from an animal host, the most important details about the pandemic’s origin remain unknown. Yet the fringe is nearly settled on the alternative interpretation. Bhattacharya has said that the pandemic “likely” started in a lab (a position that has been endorsed, albeit with low or moderate confidence, by almost half of the government agencies that have looked into it). Makary called the theory “a no-brainer.” And RFK Jr. published a 600-page book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, in support of it.

Based on the Senate’s Republican majority and the precedent of Kennedy’s confirmation, Bhattacharya is almost certain to sail through his Senate vote, and in short order. His prospects of delivering on his mission, though, are hazier. Some of his positions are already being undermined by the Trump administration’s prior actions. According to a new report in Nature, the agency is terminating hundreds of active research grants that may be construed to have a focus on gender or diversity, among other topics. Some work may be permitted to continue as long as any “DEI language” has been stripped from associated documents. This is hardly the “culture of respect for free speech” that Bhattacharya promised yesterday. Other, basic workings of the NIH have been dismantled under the second Trump administration: Approximately 1,200 employees have been fired, grant reviews have been frozen, and policies have been declared that would squeeze research funding for the nation’s universities. Bhattacharya is about to take the levers of power, but those levers have been ripped from their housing, and the springs removed and sold as scrap.

[Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

When pressed on these developments yesterday, Bhattacharya kept returning to a single line: “I fully commit to making sure that all the scientists at the NIH, and the scientists that the NIH supports, have the resources they need.” Whether he’d have the authority or know-how to do so remains in doubt. “Dr. Bhattacharya doesn’t really understand how NIH works, and he doesn’t understand how decisions are made,” Harold Varmus, who ran the agency in the 1990s, told me shortly after the hearing ended. As for Bhattacharya’s goals of promoting free speech among scientists and nurturing cutting-edge ideas for research, Varmus said that the problem has been misdiagnosed: Whatever conservatism exists doesn’t really come from the top, he said, but from the grant-review committees and the scientists themselves. “It’s exasperating for me to see what is about to happen,” he told me, “because this guy should not be in my old office.”

For what it’s worth, Bhattacharya has also shared other ambitious plans. He aims, for instance, to make science more reliable by incorporating into NIH-funded research the dreary work of replicating findings. “Replication is the heart and soul of what truth is in science,” he said during the hearing. That might help solve a pressing problem in the sciences, but it would also be a very costly project, started at a time when research costs are being cut. Under current conditions, even just the basic job of running the NIH seems pretty stressful on its own. Bhattacharya has, by his account, experienced lots of stress in recent years due to the many efforts to discredit him. His confirmation may not bring him full relief.

The Telepathy Trap

2025-03-03T07:00:00-05:00

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Mia is a teenage girl from Mexico who can read her mother’s mind. Akhil is a young man in New Jersey who is seeing things through other people’s eyes. And Lily parleys brain-to-brain with friends who are far away from where she lives in Georgia. According to The Telepathy Tapes, a 10-part audio series that is now one of the most popular podcasts in America, Mia, Akhil, and Lily are nonspeaking people with autism who have a special skill: They’re savants for ESP.

Some nonspeaking children with autism end up learning to use language when they get a little older. Others may use sets of cards with pictures to communicate. But Mia, Akhil, and Lily, whose last names aren’t given in the podcast, are “spellers,” which means that they express themselves, with other people’s help, by pointing to a letterboard or typing on a screen. Proponents of this method say that it unlocks its users’ hidden gifts and proves their competence. An abiding faith in spelling has been expressed in documentary films, TV news reports, and best-selling books. But The Telepathy Tapes takes that faith one step further. Spelling is not just inspirational, the show suggests; it redefines the limits of perception and reality.

However grandiose this mission, to call the podcast “scrappy” would be to oversell its polish: Hosted and created by the documentary filmmaker and self-described “science nerd” Ky Dickens, The Telepathy Tapes’ editing is choppy and its music sounds homemade. The scientific tests that it describes, which aim to prove that Mia and the others really do spell out their parents’ thoughts, are of dubious design. Yet the show has been a fixture since December on the Apple charts for audio, and was nominated for an iHeartMedia Podcast of the Year award; production just began for an associated documentary film. Dickens declined interview requests and did not answer emailed questions for this story, but last week she was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, where she spoke for two and a half hours about her podcast. “I’m sure you’ve opened up a lot of people’s minds to this,” Rogan said to her with admiration. “This could be a profound change in, just, society as a whole.”

But for people who may be less inclined than he to accept the podcast’s story at face value—those who have what Dickens and her subjects call a “materialist mindset”—another sort of message might be coming through. The Telepathy Tapes is more interested in showing off the extraordinary talents of its subjects than in engaging with skeptics. The show responds with moral outrage to any evidence that might cast doubt on ESP, or indeed on spelling itself, as if disbelief could only ever be a form of ableism. But in assuming a reality where reading minds is possible and astral planes can be traversed, it misses something more compelling: Humans really do possess a superpower for connection, with unpredictable effects.

Okay, so Mia is supposedly a telepath: Show her mother a number or a picture, and Mia will tell you what it is. On The Telepathy Tapes, Dickens tests this skill with the help of a psychiatrist, paranormal investigator, and anti-vaccine campaigner named Diane Hennacy Powell: “The crew, myself, and Dr. Powell were meticulous about making sure this test was bulletproof.” They set up at a rented house in Glendale, California. At Powell’s instruction, a wall mirror is removed and a TV screen is covered up, so that Mia, who is also wearing a “really intense and very dark” blindfold, can’t catch sight of any cue in their reflection. Before each trial of the number test, Powell opens up an app that generates random digits and taps it not just once but many times, to make sure that “it was super random.”

The podcast’s long, initial description of this testing process leaves out one important factor: how Mia’s spelling works. Video clips of the experiments (which are posted to the podcast’s website behind a $9.99 paywall) show that every time she reaches to the letterboard, her mother grasps her chin or puts a finger on her forehead, and also holds the board herself. The contact is nonstop. I’ve seen the same dynamic many times before in my own interviews with spellers and have learned that even gentle touch, or minor movements of the letterboard, can be a source of subtle and subconscious cues. In this way, Mia’s mother could be guiding Mia’s spelling and nudging it toward certain answers, whether they’re aware of it or not.

I first learned about this method of communication in 2014 while reporting for a story, published in The New York Times Magazine, on the case of Anna Stubblefield, then a philosopher of race and disability at Rutgers University, who had taught a student’s brother—a nonspeaking man diagnosed with severe physical and cognitive disabilities—to type into a keyboard as she held his hand. In the months that followed, the man’s inner life, and his prodigious talents, appeared to be suddenly let loose. He started taking college classes. He published a peer-reviewed, academic paper. He made plans to move into his own apartment.

The man also fell in love with Stubblefield, at least according to the typed-out messages. And she fell in love with him. Eventually they started having sex. His consent was given via spelling, which he could do only with her support (and that of certain others). A criminal trial followed, on the premise that the messages were fake—or rather, that Stubblefield herself had been their author, perhaps unwittingly. If that were true, it meant their love affair had been a story of her own creation—that she’d somehow managed to seduce herself, through the pressure she was placing on his hand. Stubblefield wound up pleading guilty to aggravated criminal sexual contact and serving close to two years in jail. (Nick August-Perna’s documentary film about this case, Tell Them You Love Me, was a Netflix hit last year.)

The form of communication that Stubblefield was teaching had been invented in Australia in the 1970s by a woman named Rosemary Crossley to help a nonspeaking girl with cerebral palsy who was languishing inside a state-run home. Crossley, who died in 2023 (and with whom I spoke for many hours), claimed to have discovered that the girl and others in the home could spell out words on a letterboard if their arms were being held a certain way. “I was acting as a responsive item of furniture,” Crossley wrote in a 1980 memoir, “not moving her arm but simply facilitating her own movement.” This method would be called “facilitated communication,” or FC.

[Read: The battle over a controversial method for autism communication]

By the early 1990s, FC had been imported to America and declared a miracle. News outlets covered its astonishing success, as kids who had been diagnosed with low IQs and never spoken in their lives appeared to have their minds unlocked by Crossley’s method. The movement had the spirit of an uprising. Every child whose inner life FC revealed was a challenge to the system that had failed them; their messages were taken as a source of liberation, whether from actual imprisonment in institutions or from the softer tyranny of meager expectations.

But from the very start, this story lent itself to other readings too. Children with autism made a spate of sexual-abuse allegations via keyboard that could not be corroborated, and seemed to be untrue. And certain aspects of FC just came off as fishy. Kids who had barely gotten any education were able, all at once, to communicate through text. Some went on to college. How could they have learned so much, so quickly? When similar doubts had been raised in Australia, Crossley offered some unlikely explanations—for instance, that the kids she’d worked with learned addition and subtraction by watching Sesame Street, as her book explains, then figured out multiplication and division, as well as how to work with fractions, on their own.

As FC spread throughout U.S. education, skeptics mobilized to run double-blind experiments and determine whether spelling really works. In one often-used test, researchers showed a picture to a speller while his or her supporter or facilitator wasn’t in the room; then they’d have the speller write out, with the facilitator’s help, what they’d seen. Few, if any, such experiments succeeded. Under these controlled conditions, the same kids and young adults who were writing poetry in school appeared unable to declare that they’d just seen a picture of a sandwich. This suggested that they were not actually—or not entirely—the authors of the words they’d been typing. Rather, their messages had been channeled from the people who were touching them, or holding up the letterboards, in the same way that people using a Ouija board can spell out messages without realizing they’re doing so.

As of 1994, it’s fair to say, the method was debunked. The American Psychological Association came out against its use—“studies have repeatedly demonstrated that facilitated communication is not a scientifically valid technique,” it said. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and lots of other professional groups agreed. But FC never really went away. Instead, its users floated off into the fringe, where any criticism could be tossed into the sea. The message-passing tests had been unfair, adherents told me, because they made spellers angry or confused. Why should the spellers have to acquiesce to “scientific” inquiries, their families and facilitators asked, when they’ve already shown they have a voice?

Certain users of FC—it’s hard to know how many—really can communicate, to some extent, without another person’s touch. I’ve seen this for myself: I met a few typers who could spell out words completely on their own, though the messages they produced with others’ help had much greater fluency. But such cases appear to be exceptional. For most spellers—nearly all of them, perhaps—message-passing is a challenge even when they aren’t being made uncomfortable. At a conference held in Syracuse, New York, in 2014, I observed a friendly class on how to pass this sort of test. Every speller in the room was told to pull an object from a bag—a toy car, a crayon, a sock—while their facilitators looked away. Could they then type out what they’d seen? They could not. This mattered little to the parents at the conference, who told me that they simply didn’t worry much about the so-called science. You could puzzle over tables in someone’s published meta-analysis, one kid’s mom explained, or you could keep on talking to your son.

The Telepathy Tapes is well aware of all this history; it just rejects it. The scandals of the 1990s arose from the errant work of “untrained, or barely trained facilitators,” the podcast says, rather than from FC itself. Since then, the old mechanical keyboards have mostly been swapped out for iPad screens, plastic boards, and letter stencils, as part of newer versions of the method such as Rapid Prompting and Spelling to Communicate. Whatever it might now be called, FC remains as unreliable as ever, according to a 2018 statement from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. But Dickens claims the opposite, and argues that the research purporting to discredit spelling has fallen out of date. “The accusation that most spellers are not actually communicating, that someone is pushing their hand around or moving around the letterboard, is unabashedly, unequivocally false,” she says on the show. As one parent tells her: “The thing is, Ky, we can’t all be lying.”

Indeed, the podcast goes so far as to invert the question that skeptics started asking in the ’90s: whether spellers were capable of sharing information that their facilitators didn’t know. The Telepathy Tapes asks instead whether spellers might have access to information that only their facilitators know. Or put another way: Can they read their facilitators’ minds?

If anything could prove that facilitators are at risk of substituting their own ideas for those of the people they intend to help, this should be it. And yet Dickens and her subjects have drawn the opposite conclusion. The parents seem delighted by their children’s ability to read their minds, not suspicious of it. Some do end up feeling a bit unnerved, Dickens says, by the fact that they can no longer hide birthday presents from their kid, or protect their private thoughts. But instead of taking that supernatural knowledge as a hint that spelling is unsound, they conclude that ESP is real.

The faction of facilitators who have landed on the same belief dates back to the 1990s too. One important, early advocate for FC suggested that users might have access to “vestigial psychic abilities.” Arthur Golden, who appears on the podcast and has said that he began communicating telepathically with his nonspeaking, autistic son in April 1994, told me that many who were getting trained in the method at that time reported having similar experiences. But Crossley and the other prominent advocates for FC shut down this sort of talk, perhaps because they worried it could only undermine their method’s credibility. To this day, many in the spelling world rebuff supernatural claims: On the podcast, parents say that they’ve been “shushed” in online forums, or “shut down” from sharing their experiences at conferences. On Rogan’s show, Dickens called it all “a big cover-up.”

Soma Mukhopadhyay, who created the Rapid Prompting method, told me that a perception of “telepathy” may arise from the fact that facilitators will at times predict what a speller wants to say, just like your cellphone does while you’re typing in a text message. Mukhopadhyay said that attributing this effect to psychic powers won’t help autistic children in the long run, but she shied away from telling people what to do or think. “I wouldn’t ask the parents not to believe in telepathy,” she said. “Everyone is a grown-up. Everyone can do what they want.” Diane Hennacy Powell, the psychiatrist who consulted on the podcast’s experiments and who has published a book about ESP, was more direct. “I am more conservative than Ky about the scientific conclusions and don’t believe telepathy has been sufficiently proven,” she told me via email. “She is a filmmaker and not a scientist, so it’s important to acknowledge our different perspectives.” (Powell also said she could not discuss the matter in more detail because of a nondisclosure agreement.)

The telepathic spellers, then, are on the fringe’s fringe, shunned by both spelling’s critics and its true believers. And as The Telepathy Tapes moves along, Dickens and her subjects’ claims become even further unmoored from any dock posts of common sense. Spellers whom Dickens first describes as merely having ESP are soon credited with even more amazing powers and “uncanny knowings,” such as detecting cancer and finding ways to cure it. By the end of the series, Dickens—who repeatedly declares herself a “skeptic”—has explained that spellers may project themselves into alternative dimensions; that they can speak with angels; that they visit friends in dreams and prophesy disaster. “Could the government utilize these individuals?” she said to Rogan last week. “It’s a fair worry.”

Any suspicions one might have about spelling’s authenticity are submerged into the same phantasmagoric narrative. What explains these kids’ stunning breadth of knowledge? Naturally, they did their coursework in the great beyond. One of the podcast’s telepaths is said to have “instantly learned everything there was to know about The Great Gatsby” during a nightly visit to a “school in heaven.” And Akhil, the young man in New Jersey, is said to be sharing messages from long-dead relatives—“a very common gift” among the “spiritual savant” spellers, according to the podcast.

[From the August 1918 issue: Dead Authors]

Someone else might take the latter as another sign that spelling works by leveraging a Ouija-board effect—given that here it’s being used, just like a Ouija board, to communicate with ghosts. But Akhil does appear to be doing something unique among the spellers whose tests have been filmed and posted on the podcast’s website. After many years of practice spelling with his mother, he now appears to do so independently, typing on an iPad keyboard without ever being touched at all, and with no one’s hand on his device.

But a closer look suggests that his mother is still guiding him, even though she may not realize it. She does not touch him, but she is highly active all the same: She issues words of encouragement and makes other sounds; she flutters her hands in concert with his typing; and she adjusts her posture while he’s reaching for the screen, as if her body were a joystick. One of the video clips shows an experiment in which he spells out mariposa. You can see his mother in the background, leaning to the right as Akhil’s finger moves in that direction to type out i-p-o; and then moving leftward, as his finger does the same, for s-a.

If such cuing, rather than the spirit realm, is the source of Akhil’s messages, then one must still acknowledge that he has extraordinary talents. For this mode of spelling to “work” as well as it does, Akhil would need to possess an exquisite sensitivity to his mother’s subtle cues; he’d have to be so attuned to her every gesture and expression, that even chirps and leans and flutters could serve as radar signals, directing him to specific letters on the screen. In other words, he’d need to have special access to his mother’s mind.

This is not telepathy, but it is connection—a connection so intense that I don’t think it would be far off to call it love. A different, reckless version of this bond was at the center of the Stubblefield trial. When my story on that case was published, I quickly came to understand that readers were responding to the romance, real or not, that formed its core. A flock of artists’ emails quickly landed in my inbox, pitching plans for heartfelt adaptations: movies, operas, poems. The story has “everything we are looking for,” one French film producer said: “love, desire, manipulation and mystery.”

“We have a deep drive to connect and know each other,” Dickens says at one point in her series. But the podcast shows this instinct is a complicated gift. Humans are virtuosic at creating bonds; we’re savants for filling space with meaning. But we’re also zealous at defending them. Pointing at a letterboard, aided by a gentle touch, can seem to open up a window on another person’s mind. That effort at communion is a holy, humanistic act. But its magic can be isolating, too, by conjuring relationships that don’t exist, and marooning us within a universe where anything is real.

A Secret Way to Fight Off Stomach Bugs

2025-01-14T13:04:22-05:00

Influenza cases have been surging. RSV activity is “very high.” Signs of COVID have been mounting in sewer water, and norovirus, too, is spawning outbreaks like we haven’t seen for at least a dozen years. You might even say that America is in the midst of a “quad-demic,” although I really hope you don’t, because “quad-demic” is not a word that anyone should say.

With that in mind, here are The Atlantic’s tips and tricks for steering clear of any illness during this year’s terrible quad-demic. What are The Atlantic’s tips and tricks? They are soap.

Consider the norovirus, a real terror of a pathogen, just a couple dozen nanometers in length, with its invasive acids tucked inside a protein coat. Exposure to fewer than 100 particles of norovirus can leave you with several days’ worth of vomiting and diarrhea. Those particles are very, very hard to kill.

Douse them in a squirt of alcohol, and, chances are, they’ll come through just fine. One study looked at a spate of norovirus outbreaks at nursing homes in New England during the winter of 2006–07, and found that locations where staff made regular use of hand sanitizers were at much greater risk of experiencing an outbreak than others in the study. Why? Because those other nursing homes were equipped with something better.

They had soap.

Research finds that soap is good at cleaning things. At least 4,000 years of history suggest the same. Soap works because its structure mixes well with water on one end and with oils on the other. The latter, hydrophobic side can hook into, and then destroy, the membranes that surround some microbes (though norovirus isn’t one of them). Molecules of soap also cluster up in little balls that can surround and trap some germy grime before it’s flushed away beneath the tap. And soap, being sudsy, makes washing hands more fun.

Not everyone endorses washing hands. Pete Hegseth, whose good judgment will be judged today in his confirmation hearing for secretary of defense, once said that he hadn’t washed his hands in 10 years. He later said this was a joke. After that, he started hawking bars of soap shaped like grenades. The man who picked him is, of course, more than avid in his washing-up; Donald Trump is known to use his Irish Spring down to the sliver.

For all his love of soap, Trump also seems attached to hand sanitizer: His first administration kept Purell supplied just outside the Oval Office, per Politico. This would have helped keep him free of certain pathogens, but not all of them. When scientists compare different means of removing norovirus from fingertips, they find that none is all that good, and some are extra bad. Commercial hand sanitizers hardly work. The same is true for quaternary ammonium cations, also known as QACs or “quats,” which are found in many standard disinfecting products for the home. My local gym dispenses antiseptic wipes for cleaning the equipment; these are tissues soaked in benzalkonium chloride, a QAC. Quats may work for killing off the germs that lead to COVID or the flu, but studies hint they might be flat-out useless against norovirus.

[Read: Can’t we at least give prisoners soap?]

The science of disinfecting stuff is subtle. And a lot of what we thought we knew about killing off norovirus has turned out to be misguided. It’s very hard to grow a norovirus in the lab, so for a while, scientists used another virus from the same family—feline calicivirus, which can give a cat a cold—as a stand-in for their experiments. This was not a good idea. “Feline calicivirus is a wimp compared to human norovirus,” Lee-Ann Jaykus, an expert on food virology at North Carolina State University, told me. Her work has shown, for example, that bleach works pretty well at disinfecting feline virus in the lab, and that the same is true for a mouse norovirus that is often used in these experiments. But when she and colleagues tested human-norovirus samples drawn from patients’ fecal specimens, the particles seemed far more resistant.

You know what works better than hand sanitizers or QACs at getting rid of actual human norovirus? I’ll bet you do! It’s soap.

Or maybe one should say, it’s washing up with soap. A letter published in The Journal of Hospital Infection in 2015 by a team of German hygienists followed up on earlier work comparing hand sanitizers with soap and water, and argued that the benefits of the latter were mechanical in nature, by which the hygienists meant that simply rubbing one’s hands together under running water could produce an analogous effect. (They also argued that some kinds of hand sanitizer can inactivate a norovirus in a way that soap and water can’t.) Jaykus’s team has also found that the hand-rubbing part of hand-washing contributes the lion’s share of disinfecting. “It’s not an inactivation step; it’s a removal step,” she told me. As for soap, its role may be secondary to that of all the rubbing and the water: “We use the soap to make your hands slippery,” Jaykus said. “It makes it easier to wash your hands, and it also loosens up any debris.”

[Read: Wash your hands and pray you don’t get sick]

This is faint praise for soap, but it’s hardly damning. If washing at the sink disinfects your hands, and soap facilitates that process, then great. And soap may even work in cases where the soap itself is grimy—a bathroom situation known (to me) as “the dirty-bar conundrum.” Some research finds that washing up with soap and contaminated water is beneficial too. Soap: It really works!

But only to a point. I asked Jaykus how she might proceed if she had a case of norovirus in her household. Would she wash her hands and wipe down surfaces with soap, or would she opt for something stronger?

She said that if her household were affected, she’d be sure to wash her hands, and she might try to do some cleaning with chlorine. But even so, she’d expect the worst to happen. Norovirus is so contagious, its chance of marching through a given house—especially one with kids—is very high. “I would pretty much call my boss and say I’m going to be out for four days,” Jaykus told me. “I’m sorry to say that I would give up.”

Maybe we should add that to our list of tips and tricks for getting by in January: soap, for sure, but also, when your time has come, cheerful acquiescence.

Thermometers Are Hot Garbage

2025-01-03T10:00:00-05:00

Germs are in the air again: Indicators show that the winter wave of flu and COVID is finally under way. Are you on the verge of getting sick? Am I? My 5-year-old does feel a little warm to me; his sister seems okay. Maybe I should take their temperature?

Maybe I should not. Here’s my resolution for the year ahead: I will not take their temperature. No parent should be taking temperatures. Because doing so is next to useless. Home thermometers are trash.

The thermometer I have is the kind you point at someone’s head. Clearly it’s a scam. At times, I’ll pull the trigger and the number that I get seems almost right. At other times, the readout is absurd. I know when it’s the latter case because, as a human being, I possess a sensate hand. Evolution has deployed a field of thermo-sensing cells on the glabrous surface of my skin, and I’ve found that when these are laid against the forehead of my child, they may produce the following diagnosis: He is hot. Or else: He seems normal. No further probing is required.

I bought my noncontact fever gun in 2020, during what was, in retrospect, a fever-screening fervor, when thermal bouncers were deployed at concert halls and other venues to test your forehead from however far away. I think we all knew in our hearts that this was silly, even those of us who thought the fever guns might be better used in other circumstances. But to call the practice “silly” may have been too kind.

The published evidence on fever guns is damning. One study from the FDA compared their readings, as produced under ideal conditions, with those from oral thermometers; it found that they were often grossly out of whack. The very best-performing models, according to this research, were able to detect a threshold fever—100.4 degrees Fahrenheit—about two-thirds of the time; the very worst could never make the proper diagnosis. Another study, led by Adrian Haimovich, who is now an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, identified visits to emergency departments in which patients had received both forehead temperature checks and readings with oral or rectal thermometers. The forehead guns were successful at identifying fevers in fewer than one-third of cases.

But let’s not single out the gun, which was to some extent a product of its COVID moment. The standard infrared tympanic probe—which takes a temperature quickly in the ear—is also, in important ways, a waste of time. “I was an ER doc practicing full time when these tympanic thermometers came out,” Edmond Hooker, a professor of health-services administration at Xavier University, told me. He quickly came to think they didn’t work: “I would have a kid come back who was so hot, I could fry an egg on their forehead, and the tympanic thermometer had said 98.6 or 99.” So he started running tests. A paper from 1993 found that the ear thermometers were missing children’s fevers. Another of his studies, conducted in adults, found that the devices were dangerously miscalibrated. (More recent research has raised similar concerns.)

Oral thermometers are fairly accurate, but they present some challenges for use with small children. Rectal probes are the most precise. As for armpit readings, those are also pretty unreliable, Hooker told me. I began to ask him about another means of checking temperature, the light-up fever strip that my parents used to lay across my forehead, but he wouldn’t even let me finish the question. “Absolutely worthless! Your mother was better,” he declared. “That’s what my other study showed: Mom was pretty damn good.”

His other study: Having demonstrated that ear thermometers were ineffective, Hooker decided to compare them with human touch. A parent’s hand—nature’s thermometer—did pretty well: It correctly flagged some 82 percent of children’s fevers, versus the tympanic probe’s 75 percent. Parents’ hands were more prone to overdiagnosis, though: Among the kids with normal temperatures, nearly one-quarter felt warm to their parents. (The false-positive rate for ear thermometers was much lower.)

Many such experiments have been conducted now, in health-care settings all around the world: so much effort spent to measure our ability to diagnose a fever with nothing more than touch. (In medical lingo, this practice is properly—and ickily—described as “parental palpation.”) As a rule, these studies aren’t large, and they may be subject to some bias. For instance, all of the ones that I reviewed were carried out in health-care settings—Hooker’s took place in an emergency department—so the participants weren’t quite “your average kids who might or might not have a cold.” Rather, it’s likely that those kids would have had a higher baseline rate of being feverish, and their parents might have been unusually prone to thinking that their children were very sick.

Some researchers have tried to look at all the little studies of parental touch in aggregate, and although this can be an iffy practice—pooling weak research won’t make it any stronger—these studies do yield about the same result as Hooker’s when taken on the whole: Parents’ hands have a solid sensitivity to fever, of nearly 90 percent, but their specificity is low, at about 55 percent. Put another way: When a kid does have a fever, his parents can usually detect it with their hands, but when he doesn’t, they might mistakenly believe he does.

The latter isn’t great, given that a kid with a fever is supposed to stay home from school or day care. In that case, a thermometer could provide a helpful (moderating) second opinion. But taken as a measure of the risk to your child’s health, palpation should be good enough. The very hottest children—the ones whose infection may be most imperiling—are also the least likely to be misdiagnosed by touch: If your kid’s head feels like the side of a convection oven, then you’d almost certainly say he’s sick, and you’d almost certainly be correct. (And you’d be correct to call his doctor.) As for the borderline conditions—a temperature of, say, 101 or 99 or 100.4—your hand won’t name his fever with as much precision as a good thermometer would. But the added benefit that thermometer provides, both to your child’s health and to your peace of mind, is next to nothing.

It’s important to remember that the very definition of a threshold fever is arbitrary and subject to the ancient scientific law of Hey, that sounds like a nice, round number. Converted into Celsius, 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit comes out to an even 38 degrees. The established “normal” temperature of 98.6 degree Fahrenheit maps on to 37 degrees Celsius. (In truth, the temperatures of healthy, older adults will range from 98.9 to 99.9 degrees throughout the day, as measured with an oral thermometer.) Under normal conditions, a measured fever is nothing more than a single aspect of a broader picture that informs the course of treatment, both Haimovich and Hooker told me. An elderly patient with symptoms of a urinary-tract infection might receive a more comprehensive course of antibiotics if she also has a fever, Haimovich said; the heightened temperature suggests that an infection may have spread. But a kid who has a mild fever and is otherwise okay won’t need any treatment. Some evidence suggests that a light fever may even fortify an immune response; so in principle, slightly elevated temperatures should be left alone unless your child is uncomfortable, in which case, maybe ibuprofen? (Conversely, a kid whose temperature is “only” 99 but who seems listless and confused should probably be seen.)

Haimovich said he has small children, so I asked him how he checks their temperature—does he ever feel their head? “Oh, yeah,” he said. He told me that his wife seems better at detecting fever than he is, which fits with known neurophysiology: Some research suggests that women’s hands are more sensitive to warmth than men’s, on average. One study, though, done at a hospital in Canada, found that dads are just as good as moms at detecting fever with their hands. (The moms were much more likely to believe that they possessed this skill.) Other research has examined whether having multiple children—and thus perhaps having more experience feeling heads—might also be a factor. The answer is no. This suggests that sussing out a child’s fever is not so much a practiced art as a basic fact of our perception.

As for Hooker, he said he doesn’t even own a thermometer. He has four kids, and he used to feel their heads all the time. “They’re now all grown adults,” he told me. “They all survived me and my lack of concern for fever.” He advises parents not to waste their money on fancy thermometers that probe the ear or forehead. “Just buy an ice-cream cone for your kid; it’s a lot better,” he said. “And if you really feel you need to know your child’s temperature—if it’s an infant—go up their butt” with a rectal thermometer.

Infants are a special case: Tiny babies with any sort of fever could need treatment right away. But for parents who are beyond that stage, your plan of action will be easy: I will not take their temperature. No parent should be taking temperatures. Just place your hand against their forehead, or use your lips instead. Perhaps your child has a fever. Or maybe he just needs a kiss.

Ozempic Killed Diet and Exercise

2024-12-09T09:47:25-05:00

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has some thoughts about Ozempic. According to the nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the government should not provide the drug for millions of Americans, but instead address obesity and diabetes by handing out organic food and gym memberships. Like many of RFK’s statements, these ideas have elicited some outrage. Their basic premise, though—that Americans should control their weight by eating better and getting exercise—could not be more mainstream.

But this commonsense philosophy of losing weight, as espoused by RFK, the FDA, and really almost any doctor whom you might have asked at any time in recent memory, has lately fallen out of step with the scientific evidence.

Lifestyle interventions have been central to the nation’s decades-long attempt to curb its rates of chronic illness. Eat less, move more: This advice applies to almost everyone, but for those who have obesity or are overweight—about three-quarters of the adult population in the U.S.—dieting and exercise are understood to be among the most important methods to improve their health. Even now, when doctors have access to Ozempic and related GLP-1 medications, which deliver lasting weight loss and a host of life-extending benefits without the need for surgery, changes to behavior still take precedence. Formal treatment guidelines for obesity have affirmed RFK’s approach, more or less, and argued that “lifestyle therapy remains the cornerstone of treatment.” And according to the government, the drugs themselves are fit for use only “as an adjunct” to a reduced-calorie diet and increased physical activity.

This insistence on the status quo has begun to seem a little strange. It’s long been known that prescribing dieting and exercise simply isn’t that effective as a treatment for obesity. People may slim down enough, at least initially, to prevent or help control type 2 diabetes, said Tom Wadden, an obesity researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has been involved in clinical trials of both lifestyle modifications and GLP-1 drugs as treatments for obesity. But he told me that amount of weight loss will not reverse sleep apnea or prevent heart attacks or strokes.

For people with severe obesity today, even the modest benefits of dieting and exercise seem moot. Over the past few years, clinical trials of Ozempic and related drugs have shown that the “cornerstone” of treatment adds almost nothing to these medicines’ effects on people’s body weight.

The mere possibility that dieting and exercise no longer matter like they used to has produced its share of awkwardness within the field. “I’m going to answer carefully,” David Saxon, an obesity specialist at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, said when I brought this up with him last spring. “I don’t want you to quote me saying, ‘He doesn’t think lifestyle is important.’” For older anti-obesity drugs, he said, the evidence in favor of prescribing dieting and exercise first (and in addition) is very clear: In clinical trials, patients who received a lifestyle intervention in addition to the drugs lost twice as much weight as those who didn’t.

[From the June 2024 issue: Ozempic or Bust]

But the data tell a different story for the newer drugs, Saxon and other doctors told me. In most of the clinical research on GLP-1s, patients get the medicine in combination with a modest lifestyle intervention: monthly, 15-minute check-ins with a counselor, for example, and advice to cut back on calories and do a couple hours’ worth of exercise, like walking, every week. In one of the large trials of Wegovy, called STEP 1, this approach produced a weight loss among participants of about 15 percent of their body weight. Another trial of Wegovy, called STEP 3, tried something more: Participants were offered biweekly check-ins with a registered dietitian, and they spent their first two months on the drug consuming very-low-calorie meal replacements. Evidence suggests that, in the absence of Wegovy, all of this extra coaching would make a major difference to people’s health. But for people on Wegovy, the benefits were negligible: Those enrolled in the STEP 3 trial lost an average of 16 percent of their body weight, just a hair more than the people in STEP 1 lost. “That speaks to the point that maybe the intensive lifestyle program is not necessary with these new medications,” Saxon said.

He’s seen this play out within the Veterans Affairs system, where he also works. Patients on the older, less potent anti-obesity drugs were expected to participate in an ongoing lifestyle-modification program with monthly check-ins, Saxon told me. Now that he and his colleagues are prescribing GLP-1s, “we don’t really mandate that anymore,” he said, “because we see that even without it, people are maintaining their weight loss with these newer meds.” Eduardo Grunvald, the medical director of the weight-management program at UC San Diego Health, told me that he had the same impression. “The bottom line is that you don’t necessarily need intense lifestyle intervention for these drugs,” he said when we spoke in March.

Even so, obesity specialists, including Saxon, haven’t given up on dieting and exercise. But the field has begun to reevaluate the nature of such guidance. “We need to figure out what it’s going to look like,” Sue Yanovski, who co-directs the Office of Obesity Research for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, told me. Since last year, a series of reviews, editorials, and perspective papers, mostly published in obesity journals, have explored this very question. One paper, for instance, argued that instead of aiming to produce a “quantity” of weight loss, obesity specialists should now emphasize its “quality.” A co-author on that paper, the Wake Forest University obesity doctor and epidemiologist Kristina Lewis, told me that GLP-1 drugs don’t make dieting and exercise irrelevant at all; in fact, they free up patients “to focus on lifestyle intervention in a more refined way,” by clearing out cravings and tabling the need for counting calories. People on Ozempic, she said, and their doctors, too, can start to think about switching to a wholesome diet, being more active, getting more sleep. All of these interventions will be beneficial regardless of your weight.

This all sounds very reasonable, but in a broader context, it also feels like a concession. For decades now, the most ardent critics of the weight-loss industry and of its associated doctors have been saying something similar: Healthy behaviors can and should be decoupled from the single-minded goal of making people smaller. Now, ironically, the tenets of this movement, which came to be known as “Health at Every Size,” are being adapted for the treatment of obesity.

But if lifestyle interventions are meant to have the same benefits for people diagnosed with obesity as they would for anyone, how special is their role in treatment? Lewis and other doctors told me that people on Ozempic might still need some tailored dieting and exercise advice, because rapid weight loss can create specific health needs. For instance, clinical trials found that people on GLP-1 drugs were losing lots of muscle and bone as their bodies shrank in size; in fact, these and other fat-free tissues accounted for 25 to 40 percent of their total weight loss. To mitigate any added risk of weakness or fractures that might result, some experts now suggest that people on these medications should eat more protein and engage in more resistance training than they might in a traditional lifestyle intervention.

[Read: The science behind Ozempic was wrong]

Advice on muscle-building diets and workouts could end up as part of standard care for people on Ozempic. “On a rational basis, I would say that we should be doing this,” Wadden, who was a member of the research team for the STEP 1 and STEP 3 trials, told me. Still, he acknowledged that the evidence for this approach isn’t yet complete. Wadden has been studying lifestyle interventions for people with obesity for decades. Some of that work found that adding resistance training and aerobic exercise to very strict diets did nothing to prevent the disappearance of lean body mass. The people who did these workouts were “really swimming against the current” of the effects of rapid weight loss, he told me. Other obesity researchers have contested the very idea that muscle loss is a problem to begin with. A recent paper from the Journal of the American Medical Association argues that the link between physical frailty and GLP-1 drugs is not supported by the data, and observes that if more than half the weight someone on Ozempic sheds is fat, then they’re sure to end up with a higher muscle-to-fat ratio than they had before.

[Read: The ‘peak obesity’ illusion]

Doctors still don’t fully understand why people on GLP-1s lose so much weight to begin with. Ozempic may be working, on its own, to foster different ways of eating, Wadden told me. “The drug changes your diet dramatically without a lot of conscious effort,” he said. “How does it change? We don’t know.” People on the drug may end up eating less across the board, while sticking to whatever diet they had before: One Pop-Tart for dinner, let’s say, instead of five. (In that case, meetings with a dietitian would be very helpful.) But the drugs might also work to shift people’s tastes. “So all of a sudden you like more fruits and vegetables,” Wadden said, “and you like lean proteins.” Similar questions may apply to exercise: The mere fact of losing lots of weight could lead someone to engage in more physical activity, regardless of their access to a gym or time spent with a trainer. The studies that might sort this out haven’t yet been run.

Wadden, like many other doctors, remains convinced that dieting and exercise should continue to be the standard therapy for people who are overweight or who have moderate obesity. But for people with more weight to lose—the tens of millions of Americans whose BMIs are higher than 35, let’s say—he now believes the rules are changing. For this group, he said, “I don’t think lifestyle modification is any longer the cornerstone of obesity treatment.”

What have you experienced while taking GLP-1 drugs? Share your story with us.

(By writing to us, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use your response, which we may edit for length or clarity. You are also agreeing that The Atlantic’s reporters may contact you at the address provided to discuss whether you would be willing to be interviewed.)

We’re About to Find Out How Much Americans Like Vaccines

2024-11-20T07:30:00-05:00

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee to be the next secretary of Health and Human Services, is America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic. An advocacy organization that he founded and chaired has called the nation’s declining child-immunization rates “good news,” and referred to parents’ lingering doubts about routine shots as COVID-19’s “silver lining.” Now Kennedy may soon be overseeing the cluster of federal agencies that license and recommend vaccines, as well as the multibillion-dollar program that covers the immunization of almost half the nation’s children.

Which is to say that America’s most prominent vaccine skeptic could have the power to upend, derail, or otherwise louse up a cornerstone of public health. Raising U.S. vaccination rates to where they are today took decades of investment: In 1991, for example, just 82 percent of toddlers were getting measles shots; by 2019, that number had increased to 92 percent. The first Trump administration actually presided over the historic high point for the nation’s immunization services; now the second may be focused on promoting vaccines’ alleged hidden harms. Kennedy has said that he doesn’t want to take any shots away, but even if he were to emphasize “choice,” his leadership would be a daunting test of Americans’ commitment to vaccines.

In many ways, the situation is unprecedented: No one with Kennedy’s mix of inexperience and paranoid distrust has ever held the reins at HHS. He was trained as a lawyer and has no training in biostatistics or any other research bona fides—the sorts of qualifications you’d expect from someone credibly evaluating vaccine efficacy. But the post-pandemic era has already given rise to at least one smaller-scale experiment along these lines. In Florida, vaccine policies have been overseen since 2021 by another noted skeptic of the pharmaceutical industry, State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. (Kennedy has likened Ladapo to Galileo—yes, the astronomer who faced down the Roman Inquisition.) Under Ladapo’s direction, the state has aggressively resisted federal guidance on COVID-19 vaccination, and its department of health has twice advised Floridians not to get mRNA-based booster shots. “These vaccines are not appropriate for use in human beings,” Ladapo declared in January. His public-health contrarianism has also started spilling over into more routine immunization practices. Last winter, during an active measles outbreak at a Florida school, Ladapo abandoned standard practice and allowed unvaccinated children to attend class. He also seemed to make a point of not recommending measles shots for any kids who might have needed them.

Jeffrey Goldhagen, a pediatrics professor at the University of Florida and the former head of the Duval County health department, believes that this vaccine skepticism has had immense costs. “The deaths and suffering of thousands and thousands of Floridians” can be linked to Ladapo’s policies, he said, particularly regarding COVID shots. But in the years since Ladapo took office, Florida did not become an instant outlier in terms of COVID vaccination numbers, nor in terms of age-adjusted rates of death from COVID. And so far at least, the state’s performance on other immunization metrics is not far off from the rest of America’s. That doesn’t mean Florida’s numbers are good: Among the state’s kindergartners, routine-vaccination rates have dropped from 93.3 percent for the kids who entered school in the fall of 2020 to 88.1 percent in 2023, and the rate at which kids are getting nonmedical exemptions from vaccine requirements went up from 2.7 to 4.5 percent over the same period. These changes elevate the risk of further outbreaks of measles, or of other infectious diseases that could end up killing children—but they’re not unique to Ladapo’s constituents. National statistics have been moving in the same direction. (To wit: The rate of nonmedical exemptions across the U.S. has gone up by about the same proportion as Florida’s.)

All of these disturbing trends may be tied to a growing suspicion of vaccines that was brought on during COVID and fanned by right-wing influencers. Or they could be a lingering effect of the widespread lapse in health care in 2020, during which time many young children were missing doses of vaccines. (Kids who entered public school in 2023 might still be catching up.)

In any case, other vaccination rates in Florida look pretty good. Under Ladapo, the state has actually been gaining on the nation as a whole in terms of flu shots for adults and holding its own on immunization for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis in toddlers. Even Ladapo’s outlandish choice last winter to allow unvaccinated kids back into a school with an active measles outbreak did not lead to any further cases of disease. In short, as I noted back in February, Ladapo’s anti-vaccine activism has had few, if any, clear effects. (Ladapo did not respond when I reached out to ask why his policies might have failed to sabotage the state’s vaccination rates.)

If Florida’s immunization rates have been resilient, then America’s may hold up even better in the years to come. That’s because the most important vaccine policies are made at the state and local levels, Rupali Limaye, a professor and scholar of health behavior at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Each state decides whether and how to mandate vaccines to school-age children, or during a pandemic. The states and localities are then responsible for giving out (or choosing not to give out) whichever vaccines are recommended, and sometimes paid for, by the federal government.

But the existence of vaccine-skeptical leadership in Washington, and throughout the Republican Party, could still end up putting pressure on local decision makers, she continued, and could encourage policies that support parental choice at the expense of maximizing immunization rates. As a member of the Cabinet, Kennedy would also have a platform that he’s never had before, from which he can continue to spread untruths about vaccines. “If you start to give people more of a choice, and they are exposed to disinformation and misinformation, then there is that propensity of people to make decisions that are not based on evidence,” Limaye said. (According to The New York Times, many experts say they “worry most” about this aspect of Kennedy’s leadership.)

How much will this really matter, though? The mere prominence of Kennedy’s ideas may not do much to drive down vaccination rates on its own. Noel Brewer, a behavioral scientist and public-health professor at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, told me that attempts to change people’s thoughts and feelings about vaccines are often futile; research shows that talking up the value of getting shots has little impact on behavior. By the same token, one might reasonably expect that talking down the value of vaccines (as Kennedy and Ladapo are wont to do) would be wasted effort too. “It may be that having a public figure talking about this has little effect,” Brewer said.

Indeed, much has been made of Kennedy’s apparent intervention during the 2019 measles crisis in Samoa. He arrived there for a visit in the middle of that year, not long after measles immunizations had been suspended, and children’s immunization rates had plummeted. (The crisis began when two babies died from a vaccine-related medical error in 2018.) Kennedy has been linked to the deadly measles outbreak in the months that followed, but if his presence really did give succor to the local anti-vaccine movement, that movement’s broader aims were frustrated: The government declared a state of emergency that fall, and soon the measles-vaccination rate had more than doubled.

As head of HHS, though, Kennedy would have direct control over the federal programs that do the sort of work that has been necessary in Samoa, and provide access to vaccines to those who need them most. For example, he’d oversee the agencies that pay for and administer Vaccines for Children, which distributes shots to children in every state. All the experts I spoke with warned that interference with this program could have serious consequences. Other potential actions, such as demanding further safety studies of vaccines and evidence reviews, could slow down decision making and delay the introduction of new vaccines.

Kennedy would also have a chance to influence the nation’s vaccine requirements for children, as well as its safety-and-monitoring system, at the highest levels. He’d be in charge of selecting members for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations on vaccines that are usually adopted by the states and result in standardized insurance coverage. He’d also oversee the head of the CDC, who in turn has the authority to overrule or amend individual ACIP recommendations.

Even if he’s not inclined to squelch any determinations outright, Kennedy’s goal of giving parents latitude might play out in other ways. Brewer, who is currently a voting member of ACIP (but emphasized that he was not speaking in that capacity), said that the committee can issue several different types of rulings, some of which roughly correspond to ACIP saying that Americans should rather than may get a certain vaccine. That distinction can be very consequential, Brewer said: Shots that are made “routine” by ACIP get prioritized in doctor’s offices, for instance, while those that are subject to “shared clinical decision-making” may be held for patients who ask for them specifically. Shifting the country’s vaccination program from a should to a may regime “would destroy uptake,” Brewer told me.

Those would seem to be the stakes. The case study of vaccine-skeptical governance that we have in Florida may not look so dire—at least in the specifics. But Kennedy’s ascendancy could be something more than that: He could steer the public-health establishment off the course that it’s been on for many years, and getting back to where we are today could take more years still.

The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger

2024-11-19T11:00:00-05:00

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For anyone who teaches at a business school, the blog post was bad news. For Juliana Schroeder, it was catastrophic. She saw the allegations when they first went up, on a Saturday in early summer 2023. Schroeder teaches management and psychology at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. One of her colleagues—a star professor at Harvard Business School named Francesca Gino—had just been accused of academic fraud. The authors of the blog post, a small team of business-school researchers, had found discrepancies in four of Gino’s published papers, and they suggested that the scandal was much larger. “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” the blog post said. “Perhaps dozens.”

The story was soon picked up by the mainstream press. Reporters reveled in the irony that Gino, who had made her name as an expert on the psychology of breaking rules, may herself have broken them. (“Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings,” a New York Times headline read.) Harvard Business School had quietly placed Gino on administrative leave just before the blog post appeared. The school had conducted its own investigation; its nearly 1,300-page internal report, which was made public only in the course of related legal proceedings, concluded that Gino “committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” in the four papers. (Gino has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.)

Schroeder’s interest in the scandal was more personal. Gino was one of her most consistent and important research partners. Their names appear together on seven peer-reviewed articles, as well as 26 conference talks. If Gino were indeed a serial cheat, then all of that shared work—and a large swath of Schroeder’s CV—was now at risk. When a senior academic is accused of fraud, the reputations of her honest, less established colleagues may get dragged down too. “Just think how horrible it is,” Katy Milkman, another of Gino’s research partners and a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. “It could ruin your life.”

Juliana Schroeder (LinkedIn)

To head that off, Schroeder began her own audit of all the research papers that she’d ever done with Gino, seeking out raw data from each experiment and attempting to rerun the analyses. As that summer progressed, her efforts grew more ambitious. With the help of several colleagues, Schroeder pursued a plan to verify not just her own work with Gino, but a major portion of Gino’s scientific résumé. The group started reaching out to every other researcher who had put their name on one of Gino’s 138 co-authored studies. The Many Co-Authors Project, as the self-audit would be called, aimed to flag any additional work that might be tainted by allegations of misconduct and, more important, to absolve the rest—and Gino’s colleagues, by extension—of the wariness that now afflicted the entire field.

That field was not tucked away in some sleepy corner of academia, but was instead a highly influential one devoted to the science of success. Perhaps you’ve heard that procrastination makes you more creative, or that you’re better off having fewer choices, or that you can buy happiness by giving things away. All of that is research done by Schroeder’s peers—business-school professors who apply the methods of behavioral research to such subjects as marketing, management, and decision making. In viral TED Talks and airport best sellers, on morning shows and late-night television, these business-school psychologists hold tremendous sway. They also have a presence in this magazine and many others: Nearly every business academic who is named in this story has been either quoted or cited by The Atlantic on multiple occasions. A few, including Gino, have written articles for The Atlantic themselves.

Francesca Gino (LinkedIn)

Business-school psychologists are scholars, but they aren’t shooting for a Nobel Prize. Their research doesn’t typically aim to solve a social problem; it won’t be curing anyone’s disease. It doesn’t even seem to have much influence on business practices, and it certainly hasn’t shaped the nation’s commerce. Still, its flashy findings come with clear rewards: consulting gigs and speakers’ fees, not to mention lavish academic incomes. Starting salaries at business schools can be $240,000 a year—double what they are at campus psychology departments, academics told me.

The research scandal that has engulfed this field goes far beyond the replication crisis that has plagued psychology and other disciplines in recent years. Long-standing flaws in how scientific work is done—including insufficient sample sizes and the sloppy application of statistics—have left large segments of the research literature in doubt. Many avenues of study once deemed promising turned out to be dead ends. But it’s one thing to understand that scientists have been cutting corners. It’s quite another to suspect that they’ve been creating their results from scratch.

[Read: Psychology’s replication crisis has a silver lining]

Schroeder has long been interested in trust. She’s given lectures on “building trust-based relationships”; she’s run experiments measuring trust in colleagues. Now she was working to rebuild the sense of trust within her field. A lot of scholars were involved in the Many Co-Authors Project, but Schroeder’s dedication was singular. In October 2023, a former graduate student who had helped tip off the team of bloggers to Gino’s possible fraud wrote her own “post mortem” on the case. It paints Schroeder as exceptional among her peers: a professor who “sent a clear signal to the scientific community that she is taking this scandal seriously.” Several others echoed this assessment, saying that ever since the news broke, Schroeder has been relentless—heroic, even—in her efforts to correct the record.

But if Schroeder planned to extinguish any doubts that remained, she may have aimed too high. More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied. The rot in business schools runs much deeper than almost anyone had guessed, and the blame is unnervingly widespread. In the end, even Schroeder would become a suspect.

Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected—and it was one that she herself had helped write.

The work, titled “Don’t Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety,” was published in 2016, with Schroeder’s name listed second out of seven authors. Gino’s name was fourth. (The first few names on an academic paper are typically arranged in order of their contributions to the finished work.) The research it described was pretty standard for the field: a set of clever studies demonstrating the value of a life hack—one simple trick to nail your next presentation. The authors had tested the idea that simply following a routine—even one as arbitrary as drawing something on a piece of paper, sprinkling salt over it, and crumpling it up—could help calm a person’s nerves. “Although some may dismiss rituals as irrational,” the authors wrote, “those who enact rituals may well outperform the skeptics who forgo them.”

In truth, the skeptics have never had much purchase in business-school psychology. For the better part of a decade, this finding had been garnering citations—about 200, per Google Scholar. But when Schroeder looked more closely at the work, she realized it was questionable. In October 2023, she sketched out some of her concerns on the Many Co-Authors Project website.

The paper’s first two key experiments, marked in the text as Studies 1a and 1b, looked at how the salt-and-paper ritual might help students sing a karaoke version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” in a lab setting. According to the paper, Study 1a found that people who did the ritual before they sang reported feeling much less anxious than people who did not; Study 1b confirmed that they had lower heart rates, as measured with a pulse oximeter, than students who did not.

As Schroeder noted in her October post, the original records of these studies could not be found. But Schroeder did have some data spreadsheets for Studies 1a and 1b—she’d posted them shortly after the paper had been published, along with versions of the studies’ research questionnaires—and she now wrote that “unexplained issues were identified” in both, and that there was “uncertainty regarding the data provenance” for the latter. Schroeder’s post did not elaborate, but anyone can look at the spreadsheets, and it doesn’t take a forensic expert to see that the numbers they report are seriously amiss.

The “unexplained issues” with Studies 1a and 1b are legion. For one thing, the figures as reported don’t appear to match the research as described in other public documents. (For example, where the posted research questionnaire instructs the students to assess their level of anxiety on a five-point scale, the results seem to run from 2 to 8.) But the single most suspicious pattern shows up in the heart-rate data. According to the paper, each student had their pulse measured three times: once at the very start, again after they were told they’d have to sing the karaoke song, and then a third time, right before the song began. I created three graphs to illustrate the data’s peculiarities. They depict the measured heart rates for each of the 167 students who are said to have participated in the experiment, presented from left to right in their numbered order on the spreadsheet. The blue and green lines, which depict the first and second heart-rate measurements, show those values fluctuating more or less as one might expect for a noisy signal, measured from lots of individuals. But the red line doesn’t look like this at all: Rather, the measured heart rates form a series going up, across a run of more than 100 consecutive students.

DATA FROM “DON’T STOP BELIEVING: RITUALS IMPROVE PERFORMANCE BY DECREASING ANXIETY” (2016), STUDY 1B (Charts by The Atlantic. Based on data posted to OSF.io.)

I’ve reviewed the case with several researchers who suggested that this tidy run of values is indicative of fraud. “I see absolutely no reason” the sequence in No. 3 “should have the order that it does,” James Heathers, a scientific-integrity investigator and an occasional Atlantic contributor, told me. The exact meaning of the pattern is unclear; if you were fabricating data, you certainly wouldn’t strive for them to look like this. Nick Brown, a scientific-integrity researcher affiliated with Linnaeus University Sweden, guessed that the ordered values in the spreadsheet may have been cooked up after the fact. In that case, it might have been less important that they formed a natural-looking plot than that, when analyzed together, they matched fake statistics that had already been reported. “Someone sat down and burned quite a bit of midnight oil,” he proposed. I asked how sure he was that this pattern of results was the product of deliberate tampering; “100 percent, 100 percent,” he told me. “In my view, there is no innocent explanation in a universe where fairies don’t exist.”

Schroeder herself would come to a similar conclusion. Months later, I asked her whether the data were manipulated. “I think it’s very likely that they were,” she said. In the summer of 2023, when she reported the findings of her audit to her fellow authors, they all agreed that, whatever really happened, the work was compromised and ought to be retracted. But they could not reach consensus on who had been at fault. Gino did not appear to be responsible for either of the paper’s karaoke studies. Then who was?

This would not seem to be a tricky question. The published version of the paper has two lead authors who are listed as having “contributed equally” to the work. One of them was Schroeder. All of the co-authors agree that she handled two experiments—labeled in the text as Studies 3 and 4—in which participants solved a set of math problems. The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino’s at Harvard Business School.

From the start, there was every reason to assume that Brooks had run the studies that produced the fishy data. Certainly they are similar to Brooks’s prior work. The same quirky experimental setup—in which students were asked to wear a pulse oximeter and sing a karaoke version of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”—appears in her dissertation from the Wharton School in 2013, and she published a portion of that work in a sole-authored paper the following year. (Brooks herself is musically inclined, performing around Boston in a rock band.)

Yet despite all of this, Brooks told the Many Co-Authors Project that she simply wasn’t sure whether she’d had access to the raw data for Study 1b, the one with the “no innocent explanation” pattern of results. She also said she didn’t know whether Gino played a role in collecting them. On the latter point, Brooks’s former Ph.D. adviser, Maurice Schweitzer, expressed the same uncertainty to the Many Co-Authors Project.

Plenty of evidence now suggests that this mystery was manufactured. The posted materials for Study 1b, along with administrative records from the lab, indicate that the work was carried out at Wharton, where Brooks was in grad school at the time, studying under Schweitzer and running another, very similar experiment. Also, the metadata for the oldest public version of the data spreadsheet lists “Alison Wood Brooks” as the last person who saved the file.

Alison Wood Brooks (LinkedIn)

Brooks, who has published research on the value of apologies, and whose first book—Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves—is due out from Crown in January, did not respond to multiple requests for interviews or to a detailed list of written questions. Gino said that she “neither collected nor analyzed the data for Study 1a or Study 1b nor was I involved in the data audit.”

If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder’s audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino’s suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest. “The goal was to protect the innocent victims, and to find out what’s true about the science that had been done,” Milkman told me. But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren’t linked to Gino. That would mean Schroeder had another colleague who had contaminated her research. It would mean that her reputation—and the credibility of her entire field—was under threat from multiple directions at once.

Among the four research papers in which Gino was accused of cheating is one about the human tendency to misreport facts and figures for personal gain. Which is to say: She was accused of faking data for a study of when and how people might fake data. Amazingly, a different set of data from the same paper had already been flagged as the product of potential fraud, two years before the Gino scandal came to light. The first was contributed by Dan Ariely of Duke University—a frequent co-author of Gino’s and, like her, a celebrated expert on the psychology of telling lies. (Ariely has said that a Duke investigation—which the school has not acknowledged—discovered no evidence that he “falsified data or knowingly used falsified data.” He has also said that the investigation “determined that I should have done more to prevent faulty data from being published in the 2012 paper.”)

The existence of two apparently corrupted data sets was shocking: a keystone paper on the science of deception wasn’t just invalid, but possibly a scam twice over. But even in the face of this ignominy, few in business academia were ready to acknowledge, in the summer of 2023, that the problem might be larger still—and that their research literature might well be overrun with fantastical results.

Some scholars had tried to raise alarms before. In 2019, Dennis Tourish, a professor at the University of Sussex Business School, published a book titled Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research. He cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they’ve encountered fabricated or falsified data. Even that alarming rate may undersell the problem, Tourish told me, given all of the misbehavior in his discipline that gets overlooked or covered up.

Anonymous surveys of various fields find that roughly 2 percent of scholars will admit to having fabricated, falsified, or modified data at least once in their career. But business-school psychology may be especially prone to misbehavior. For one thing, the field’s research standards are weaker than those for other psychologists. In response to the replication crisis, campus psychology departments have lately taken up a raft of methodological reforms. Statistically suspect practices that were de rigueur a dozen years ago are now uncommon; sample sizes have gotten bigger; a study’s planned analyses are now commonly written down before the work is carried out. But this great awakening has been slower to develop in business-school psychology, several academics told me. “No one wants to kill the golden goose,” one early-career researcher in business academia said. If management and marketing professors embraced all of psychology’s reforms, he said, then many of their most memorable, most TED Talk–able findings would go away. “To use marketing lingo, we’d lose our unique value proposition.”

It’s easy to imagine how cheating might lead to more cheating. If business-school psychology is beset with suspect research, then the bar for getting published in its flagship journals ratchets up: A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out. Such incentives move in only one direction: Eventually, the standard tools for torturing your data will no longer be enough. Now you have to go a little further; now you have to cut your data up, and carve them into sham results. Having one or two prolific frauds around would push the bar for publishing still higher, inviting yet more corruption. (And because the work is not exactly brain surgery, no one dies as a result.) In this way, a single discipline might come to look like Major League Baseball did 20 years ago: defined by juiced-up stats.

In the face of its own cheating scandal, MLB started screening every single player for anabolic steroids. There is no equivalent in science, and certainly not in business academia. Uri Simonsohn, a professor at the Esade Business School in Barcelona, is a member of the blogging team, called Data Colada, that caught the problems in both Gino’s and Ariely’s work. (He was also a motivating force behind the Many Co-Authors Project.) Data Colada has called out other instances of sketchy work and apparent fakery within the field, but its efforts at detection are highly targeted. They’re also quite unusual. Crying foul on someone else’s bad research makes you out to be a troublemaker, or a member of the notional “data police.” It can also bring a claim of defamation. Gino filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Harvard and the Data Colada team not long after the bloggers attacked her work. (This past September, a judge dismissed the portion of her claims that involved the bloggers and the defamation claim against Harvard. She still has pending claims against the university for gender discrimination and breach of contract.) The risks are even greater for those who don’t have tenure. A junior academic who accuses someone else of fraud may antagonize the senior colleagues who serve on the boards and committees that make publishing decisions and determine funding and job appointments.

[Read: Francesca Gino, the Harvard expert on dishonesty who is accused of lying]

These risks for would-be critics reinforce an atmosphere of complacency. “It’s embarrassing how few protections we have against fraud and how easy it has been to fool us,” Simonsohn said in a 2023 webinar. He added, “We have done nothing to prevent it. Nothing.”

Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred. (Harvard Business School’s head of communications, Mark Cautela, declined to comment.) Her efforts to address the issue through the University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Research Integrity likewise seemed fruitless. (A spokesperson for the Wharton School would not comment on “the existence or status of” any investigations.)

Retractions have a way of dragging out in science publishing. This one was no exception. Maryam Kouchaki, an expert on workplace ethics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and co–editor in chief of the journal that published the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper, had first received the authors’ call to pull their work in August 2023. As the anniversary of that request drew near, Schroeder still had no idea how the suspect data would be handled, and whether Brooks—or anyone else—would be held responsible.

Finally, on October 1, the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper was removed from the scientific literature. The journal’s published notice laid out some basic conclusions from Schroeder’s audit: Studies 1a and 1b had indeed been run by Brooks, the raw data were not available, and the posted data for 1b showed “streaks of heart rate ratings that were unlikely to have occurred naturally.” Schroeder’s own contributions to the paper were also found to have some flaws: Data points had been dropped from her analysis without any explanation in the published text. (Although this practice wasn’t fully out-of-bounds given research standards at the time, the same behavior would today be understood as a form of “p-hacking”—a pernicious source of false-positive results.) But the notice did not say whether the fishy numbers from Study 1b had been fabricated, let alone by whom. Someone other than Brooks may have handled those data before publication, it suggested. “The journal could not investigate this study any further.”

Two days later, Schroeder posted to X a link to her full and final audit of the paper. “It took *hundreds* of hours of work to complete this retraction,” she wrote, in a thread that described the flaws in her own experiments and Studies 1a and 1b. “I am ashamed of helping publish this paper & how long it took to identify its issues,” the thread concluded. “I am not the same scientist I was 10 years ago. I hold myself accountable for correcting any inaccurate prior research findings and for updating my research practices to do better.” Her peers responded by lavishing her with public praise. One colleague called the self-audit “exemplary” and an “act of courage.” A prominent professor at Columbia Business School congratulated Schroeder for being “a cultural heroine, a role model for the rising generation.”

But amid this celebration of her unusual transparency, an important and related story had somehow gone unnoticed. In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she’d blown the whistle on herself.

That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she’d found “an issue” with one more paper that she’d produced with Gino. This one, “Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-Control,” came out in 2018 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; its author list overlaps substantially with that of the earlier “Don’t Stop Believing” paper (though Brooks was not involved). Like the first, it describes a set of studies that purport to show the power of the ritual effect. Like the first, it includes at least one study for which data appear to have been altered. And like the first, its data anomalies have no apparent link to Gino.

The basic facts are laid out in a document that Schroeder put into an online repository, describing an internal audit that she conducted with the help of the lead author, Allen Ding Tian. (Tian did not respond to requests for comment.) The paper opens with a field experiment on women who were trying to lose weight. Schroeder, then in grad school at the University of Chicago, oversaw the work; participants were recruited at a campus gym.

Half of the women were instructed to perform a ritual before each meal for the next five days: They were to put their food into a pattern on their plate. The other half were not. Then Schroeder used a diet-tracking app to tally all the food that each woman reported eating, and found that the ones in the ritual group took in about 200 fewer calories a day, on average, than the others. But in 2023, when she started digging back into this research, she uncovered some discrepancies. According to her study’s raw materials, nine of the women who reported that they’d done the food-arranging ritual were listed on the data spreadsheet as being in the control group; six others were mislabeled in the opposite direction. When Schroeder fixed these errors for her audit, the ritual effect completely vanished. Now it looked as though the women who’d done the food-arranging had consumed a few more calories, on average, than the women who had not.

Mistakes happen in research; sometimes data get mixed up. These errors, though, appear to be intentional. The women whose data had been swapped fit a suspicious pattern: The ones whose numbers might have undermined the paper’s hypothesis were disproportionately affected. This is not a subtle thing; among the 43 women who reported that they’d done the ritual, the six most prolific eaters all got switched into the control group. Nick Brown and James Heathers, the scientific-integrity researchers, have each tried to figure out the odds that anything like the study’s published result could have been attained if the data had been switched at random. Brown’s analysis pegged the answer at one in 1 million. “Data manipulation makes sense as an explanation,” he told me. “No other explanation is immediately obvious to me.” Heathers said he felt “quite comfortable” in concluding that whatever went wrong with the experiment “was a directed process, not a random process.”

Whether or not the data alterations were intentional, their specific form—flipped conditions for a handful of participants, in a way that favored the hypothesis—matches up with data issues raised by Harvard Business School’s investigation into Gino’s work. Schroeder rejected that comparison when I brought it up, but she was willing to accept some blame. “I couldn’t feel worse about that paper and that study,” she told me. “I’m deeply ashamed of it.”

Still, she said that the source of the error wasn’t her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused. She said that two RAs, both undergraduates, had recruited the women at the gym, and that the scene there was chaotic: Sometimes multiple people came up to them at once, and the undergrads may have had to make some changes on the fly, adjusting which participants were being put into which group for the study. Maybe things went wrong from there, Schroeder said. One or both RAs might have gotten ruffled as they tried to paper over inconsistencies in their record-keeping. They both knew what the experiment was meant to show, and how the data ought to look—so it’s possible that they peeked a little at the data and reassigned the numbers in the way that seemed correct. (Schroeder’s audit lays out other possibilities, but describes this one as the most likely.)

Schroeder’s account is certainly plausible, but it’s not a perfect fit with all of the facts. For one thing, the posted data indicate that during most days on which the study ran, the RAs had to deal with only a handful of participants—sometimes just two. How could they have gotten so bewildered?

Any further details seem unlikely to emerge. The paper was formally retracted in the February issue of the journal. Schroeder has chosen not to name the RAs who helped her with the study, and she told me that she hasn’t tried to contact them. “I just didn’t think it was appropriate,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it would help matters at all.” By her account, neither one is currently in academia, and she did not discover any additional issues when she reviewed their other work. (I reached out to more than a dozen former RAs and lab managers who were thanked in Schroeder’s published papers from around this time. Five responded to my queries; all of them denied having helped with this experiment.) In the end, Schroeder said, she took the data at the assistants’ word. “I did not go in and change labels,” she told me. But she also said repeatedly that she doesn’t think her RAs should take the blame. “The responsibility rests with me, right? And so it was appropriate that I’m the one named in the retraction notice,” she said. Later in our conversation, she summed up her response: “I’ve tried to trace back as best I can what happened, and just be honest.”

Across the many months I spent reporting this story, I’d come to think of Schroeder as a paragon of scientific rigor. She has led a seminar on “Experimental Design and Research Methods” in a business program with a sterling reputation for its research standards. She’d helped set up the Many Co-Authors Project, and then pursued it as aggressively as anyone. (Simonsohn even told me that Schroeder’s look-at-everything approach was a little “overboard.”) I also knew that she was devoted to the dreary but important task of reproducing other people’s published work.

As for the dieting research, Schroeder had owned the awkward optics. “It looks weird,” she told me when we spoke in June. “It’s a weird error, and it looks consistent with changing things in the direction to get a result.” But weirder still was how that error came to light, through a detailed data audit that she’d undertaken of her own accord. Apparently, she’d gone to great effort to call attention to a damning set of facts. That alone could be taken as a sign of her commitment to transparency.

But in the months that followed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that another theory also fit the facts. Schroeder’s leading explanation for the issues in her work—An RA must have bungled the data—sounded distressingly familiar. Francesca Gino had offered up the same defense to Harvard’s investigators. The mere repetition of this story doesn’t mean that it’s invalid: Lab techs and assistants really do mishandle data on occasion, and they may of course engage in science fraud. But still.

As for Schroeder’s all-out focus on integrity, and her public efforts to police the scientific record, I came to understand that most of these had been adopted, all at once, in mid-2023, shortly after the Gino scandal broke. (The version of Schroeder’s résumé that was available on her webpage in the spring of 2023 does not describe any replication projects whatsoever.) That makes sense if the accusations changed the way she thought about her field—and she did describe them to me as “a wake-up call.” But here’s another explanation: Maybe Schroeder saw the Gino scandal as a warning that the data sleuths were on the march. Perhaps she figured that her own work might end up being scrutinized, and then, having gamed this out, she decided to be a data sleuth herself. She’d publicly commit to reexamining her colleagues’ work, doing audits of her own, and asking for corrections. This would be her play for amnesty during a crisis.

I spoke with Schroeder for the last time on the day before Halloween. She was notably composed when I confronted her with the possibility that she’d engaged in data-tampering herself. She repeated what she’d told me months before, that she definitely did not go in and change the numbers in her study. And she rejected the idea that her self-audits had been strategic, that she’d used them to divert attention from her own wrongdoing. “Honestly, it’s disturbing to hear you even lay it out,” she said. “Because I think if you were to look at my body of work and try to replicate it, I think my hit rate would be good.” She continued: “So to imply that I’ve actually been, I don’t know, doing a lot of fraudulent stuff myself for a long time, and this was a moment to come clean with it? I just don’t think the evidence bears that out.”

That wasn’t really what I’d meant to imply. The story I had in mind was more mundane—and in a sense more tragic. I went through it: Perhaps she’d fudged the results for a study just once or twice early in her career, and never again. Perhaps she’d been committed, ever since, to proper scientific methods. And perhaps she really did intend to fix some problems in her field.

Schroeder allowed that she’d been susceptible to certain research practices—excluding data, for example—that are now considered improper. So were many of her colleagues. In that sense, she’d been guilty of letting her judgment be distorted by the pressure to succeed. But I understood what she was saying: This was not the same as fraud.

Throughout our conversations, Schroeder had avoided stating outright that anyone in particular had committed fraud. But not all of her colleagues had been so cautious. Just a few days earlier, I’d received an unexpected message from Maurice Schweitzer, the senior Wharton business-school professor who oversaw Alison Wood Brooks’s “Don’t Stop Believing” research. Up to this point, he had not responded to my request for an interview, and I figured he’d chosen not to comment for this story. But he finally responded to a list of written questions. It was important for me to know, his email said, that Schroeder had “been involved in data tampering.” He included a link to the retraction notice for her paper on rituals and eating. When I asked Schweitzer to elaborate, he did not respond. (Schweitzer’s most recent academic work is focused on the damaging effects of gossip; one of his papers from 2024 is titled “The Interpersonal Costs of Revealing Others’ Secrets.”)

I laid this out for Schroeder on the phone. “Wow,” she said. “That’s unfortunate that he would say that.” She went silent for a long time. “Yeah, I’m sad he’s saying that.”

Another long silence followed. “I think that the narrative that you laid out, Dan, is going to have to be a possibility,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a way I can refute it, but I know what the truth is, and I think I did the right thing, with trying to clean the literature as much as I could.”

This is all too often where these stories end: A researcher will say that whatever really happened must forever be obscure. Dan Ariely told Business Insider in February 2024 : “I’ve spent a big part of the last two years trying to find out what happened. I haven’t been able to … I decided I have to move on with my life.” Schweitzer told me that the most relevant files for the “Don’t Stop Believing” paper are “long gone,” and that the chain of custody for its data simply can’t be tracked. (The Wharton School agreed, telling me that it “does not possess the requested data” for Study 1b, “as it falls outside its current data retention period.”) And now Schroeder had landed on a similar position.

It’s uncomfortable for a scientist to claim that the truth might be unknowable, just as it would be for a journalist, or any other truth-seeker by vocation. I daresay the facts regarding all of these cases may yet be amenable to further inquiry. The raw data from Study 1b may still exist, somewhere; if so, one might compare them with the posted spreadsheet to confirm that certain numbers had been altered. And Schroeder says she has the names of the RAs who worked on her dieting experiment; in theory, she could ask those people for their recollections of what happened. If figures aren’t checked, or questions aren’t asked, it’s by choice.

What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. “The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth,” Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. “It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it.”

Pablo Delcan

Some degree of disillusionment was common among the academics I spoke with for this story. The early-career researcher in business academia told me that he has an “unhealthy hobby” of finding manipulated data. But now, he said, he’s giving up the fight. “At least for the time being, I’m done,” he told me. “Feeling like Sisyphus isn’t the most fulfilling experience.” A management professor who has followed all of these cases very closely gave this assessment: “I would say that distrust characterizes many people in the field—it’s all very depressing and demotivating.”

It’s possible that no one is more depressed and demotivated, at this point, than Juliana Schroeder. “To be honest with you, I’ve had some very low moments where I’m like, ‘Well, maybe this is not the right field for me, and I shouldn’t be in it,’ ” she said. “And to even have any errors in any of my papers is incredibly embarrassing, let alone one that looks like data-tampering.”

I asked her if there was anything more she wanted to say.

“I guess I just want to advocate for empathy and transparency—maybe even in that order. Scientists are imperfect people, and we need to do better, and we can do better.” Even the Many Co-Authors Project, she said, has been a huge missed opportunity. “It was sort of like a moment where everyone could have done self-reflection. Everyone could have looked at their papers and done the exercise I did. And people didn’t.”

Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, she said. “The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we’ll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

“On my optimistic days, I believe it.”

“Is today an optimistic day?”

“Not really.”

This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “The Fraudulent Science of Success.”

The ‘Peak Obesity’ Illusion

2024-10-18T07:30:00-04:00

Taken on its own, the number is astonishing. According to the CDC, as of August 2023, 40.3 percent of U.S. adults—some 100 million people—met the clinical definition for obesity. But this same estimate, which is based on National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey numbers gathered between 2021 and 2023, also seems remarkably low compared with prior readouts. For the first time in more than a decade, NHANES data hint that our obesity epidemic is no longer growing.

The new estimate is almost two percentage points lower than the government’s previous one, which covered the period from 2017 to 2020 and suggested that 41.9 percent of Americans had obesity. The apparent drop has set off a wave of optimism: A recent editorial in The Washington Post, for instance, celebrated the fact that “the obesity crisis might have plateaued or begun to ease,” and in the Financial Times, the data journalist John Burn-Murdoch used his own analysis of the NHANES data to argue that America is already several years beyond its point of peak obesity. Both outlets suggest that this apparent change in public fortune has resulted from the spread of powerful new drugs for treating diabetes and obesity: Ozempic, Mounjaro, and the rest.

The past few years have certainly brought dramatic changes—historic breakthroughs, even—to the treatment of weight-related chronic illness. GLP-1s seem to be effective at improving people’s health, and they’re clearly capable of causing major weight loss. According to a survey conducted by KFF at the end of April, 6 percent of all American adults are currently on these medications, and as supply shortages ease and drug prices come down, that proportion is likely to increase—by a lot. It only stands to reason that, at some point before too long, their effects will be apparent in our public-health statistics. But are they now, already? For all the expectations that are attached to the present age of GLP-1s, the past should be a source of caution. This is not the first time that obesity’s relentless spread has seemed to be abating, and it’s not the first time that such news has fit into a tidy narrative of progress in public health. And so far, at least, claims of peak obesity, like predictions of “peak oil,” have been prone to falling flat.

Not so long ago, the NHANES data appeared consistent with a different source of hope. Starting back in 2008, analyses began to show, first in children and then in adults, that obesity rates were leveling off. “Americans, at least as a group, may have reached their peak of obesity,” The New York Times asserted in 2010; two years later, NPR reported that “the nation’s obesity epidemic appears to have hit a plateau.”

Then, as now, experts had a convenient story to explain the numbers. Barack Obama’s administration was working to realize his campaign promise that the nation’s excess weight could be reduced, if not erased, by targeting what was by then described as America’s “toxic food environment.” Revised nutrition labels put a spotlight on “added sugars,” new rules for food assistance promoted eating fruits and vegetables, insurers were encouraged to set up wellness programs, and chain restaurants were required to post the caloric content of their meals.

For a time, this new approach—based less on treating individuals than fixing social policy—appeared to be effective. Food manufacturers committed to improving the formulations of their products. Americans stopped drinking so much soda and consuming so much sugar overall. And, sure enough, NHANES data were showing that the number of people with obesity had stabilized. This seemed connected, at the time. “We’ve halted the progress of the obesity epidemic,” William Dietz, an obesity physician-researcher who was then a CDC official, told the Times. Dietz, who had played a central role in creating the idea that obesity was an “epidemic” in the first place, chalked up that achievement to increased awareness of the problem and improvements to school-lunch programs.

Yet this progress turned out to be short-lived. In retrospect, the obesity-rate “plateaus” during those years now appear to be a trend-line blip, if not a statistical mirage. That’s not to say the CDC’s analyses were mistaken. The survey’s error bars were wide, and in those years, any increase in the numbers was not statistically significant. But over time a clear and upward drift became unmistakable. As of 2004, NHANES data showed that about one-third of American adults qualified as having obesity. By 2018, the proportion had moved past 40 percent.

Now Cynthia Ogden, the CDC’s branch chief for NHANES analysis, and her colleagues are reporting another flattening, set against a decades-long increase. Once again the error bars are wide, which is why the CDC’s data brief asserts that the apparent drop in the obesity rate, from 41.9 percent to 40.3 percent, is better understood as a new plateau. “We’re not going up at the same level as we did,” Susan Yanovski, a co-director of the NIH Office of Obesity Research, told me, “but I don’t think we can necessarily say that it’s a real decrease.” In the meantime, the new data clearly show that the rate of severe obesity among U.S. adults has continued to increase.

If we are indeed at a new plateau for Americans generally, then its cause is not yet clear. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital who has been skeptical of earlier “peak obesity” claims, told me that new drugs such as Ozempic certainly should be having some effect by now. “Even if a notable minority is taking the drugs and losing weight, that’s going to alter the shape of the curve, the prevalence rates, and related statistics,” he said. “So it would be surprising, and very depressing, for us not to see any impact of these extremely costly drugs by this point.” Burn-Murdoch, who seems to be working from the same assumption, points out that the recent improvement in obesity numbers looks better among people with college degrees than anyone else. This is just what you might expect, he argues, because the uptake of GLP-1 drugs is generally associated with education.

Yet if the Ozempic effect really were showing up in NHANES data, you’d also expect it to appear first in women, who are much more likely than men to be taking GLP-1s for obesity. This is not borne out in the data: America’s obesity rates appear to have come down (or leveled off) more quickly for men in the past few years. We also don’t know how many Americans were actually taking the drugs at the time of the latest surveys. I asked Ogden when she might expect the drugs to start moving the needle: What proportion of Americans would have to be taking GLP-1s for the national obesity rate to change? “That’s a good question,” she said. “All we can say is what these estimates show us right now, and that we really do need more data to see what’s really happening.”

Yanovski was similarly wary of ascribing any recent changes in the trend to GLP-1s. She suggested that other factors might be at play: fewer people eating out; reduced sugar consumption; shrinkflation in the food industry, which results in smaller average portion sizes. (In principle, COVID might have been a factor too, because the disease is much more deadly for those with severe obesity. In that case, though, you’d expect the number of Americans in that category to have dropped, when in fact it has gone up.) And both Yanovski and Ludwig have long been floating the possibility that, even if the food environment remains as toxic as ever, the effects could start to wane as a function of biology. Almost half the variability in body weight is genetic, Yanovski told me, and that fact in itself could put a ceiling on the long-term trend. “You reach a level in which the population, everybody who is at risk for developing obesity, has already done so,” Ludwig said.

The final possibility is that this new “plateau” will soon reveal itself to be yet another narrow step on a staircase that is always going up—just another artifact of noise, or else a temporary aberration. Having covered these reports for 15 years, I feel safe in saying that some degree of pessimism should be the default setting.

Then again, having covered these reports for 15 years, I’ve never seen an intervention as dramatic as Ozempic, in terms of its power and popularity. Earlier this year, I profiled Barb Herrera, a woman who has had obesity throughout her life, and has tried almost every intervention to reverse it: diets, fen-phen, bariatric surgery. In 2022, her body mass index was measured at 75; after many months of taking GLP-1 drugs, she has lost 255 pounds. If Herrera were included in the next NHANES survey, she’d be recorded with a BMI of less than 28—below the diagnostic threshold for obesity—and classified as “overweight.”

How many other Americans have crossed that line? We’ll soon find out. The next NHANES data surveys are slated to begin in January, Ogden told me, with the first results due back in early 2027, including, this time, information on people’s use of prescription drugs. If the nation has really passed the point of peak obesity—and if the GLP-1 drugs really are responsible—then we’ll know soon enough.

Does Kamala Harris Believe in Evolution?

2024-09-12T06:45:00-04:00

On a presidential-debate stage 17 years ago, a moderator posed what was then a kind of gotcha question: “Do you believe in evolution?” he asked John McCain. The senator froze for a moment before delivering a “yes.” Then, after several other candidates expressed their disagreement, he clarified: “I believe in evolution,” he said, “but I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there.”

Not a single synthetic theory that explains the history of life was floated during Tuesday night’s debate—not even one! In fact, the moderators hardly asked the candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, about any scientific issues whatsoever. It’s 2024, just a year and change since the formal end of the coronavirus pandemic, and another global pathogenic threat is already looming. Also, we’re living through the hottest stretch of years that’s ever been recorded. Certainly, scientific topics such as these matter to the public interest at least as much today as they did in previous elections. Yet aside from Trump’s desultory defense of his administration's response to COVID—“we got gowns; we got masks”—pandemic policy was not mentioned, and the subject of climate change emerged only in the 87th minute of a 90-minute live event.

Otherwise, our would-be presidents’ thoughts on science policy and innovation simply didn’t make the cut. They were asked to talk about the economy, abortion, immigration, and the war in Ukraine, but not how they would handle the next emerging virus, or what they think about immunization policy, or why a military operation first deployed during the Trump administration spread anti-vaccine propaganda overseas. The moderators made no reference to technology at all. They did not discuss AI. This debate, likely the only one these two candidates will have, was unscientific, through and through.

Not so long ago, topics like these were considered core to the project of the presidency. If the evolution question could be asked in 2007—if it could even be a litmus test—that’s because the country was in the midst of a debate over whether public schools should be allowed, or forced, to teach biblical accounts of the Creation. Soon after McCain laid out his theory of the divine canyon-maker, Barack Obama was faced with a similar challenge at a live CNN event. “If one of your daughters asked you—and maybe they already have—‘Daddy, did God really create the world in six days?,’” a moderator asked him, “what would you say?” Obama gave a waffling reply: “My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true,” he said. “Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don’t presume to know.”

Such questions, however awkward, got at something big: how America would teach its future citizens to understand the very fact of our existence, and whether science or religion should be paramount in public life (or what the balance of the two should really be). During that campaign cycle, an entire grassroots effort would emerge to cajole both Obama and McCain into having a full debate on scientific questions. Those efforts eventually coalesced into the nonpartisan group Science Debate. Its supporters were numerous and impressive—lots of Nobel laureates, along with several scientists who ended up as senior members of the Obama administration. Noting that science formed “the basis of some of the thorniest public policy issues in recent history,” two of the group’s key organizers, Lawrence Krauss and Chris Mooney, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that fall that “a presidential debate on science would help voters determine who among the candidates is up to the task of dealing with whatever comes next.”

However gamely the candidates would answer questions on phylogeny and the Big Bang, they did not agree that scientific topics deserved a nationally televised debate. But Obama and McCain did give written answers to a set of 14 questions, laying out their attitudes on matters such as how to foster innovation, protect the oceans, manage stem-cell research, and, yes, guard against the next pandemic. In 2012, the major candidates again submitted statements in response to Science Debate. (And again, pandemics made the list of topics for discussion: “I will empower the private sector to pursue the breakthroughs that will equip society” to prevent them, Mitt Romney wrote.)

By 2016, Science Debate had to press its case, enlisting a group of adorable children to ask the candidates whether they would share their views on “fixing our climate,” “the dying honeybees,” and “wobots and jobs,” among other matters of national importance. They got some written answers, in the end, not just from Trump and Hillary Clinton, but also from Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Ironically, this time around, the pandemic question was downplayed, but the candidates did give answers on the matter of scientific integrity. “Science is science and facts are facts,” Trump wrote at the time. “My administration will ensure that there will be total transparency and accountability without political bias.”

Trump would not exactly be locked into an ironclad adherence to empirical reality; a few years later, he was literally redrawing his administration’s hurricane forecasts, as if to bend the very atmosphere in service of his pride. Of course the statements Science Debate had elicited were never binding, and Trump (or whoever on his campaign actually wrote those answers) may well have lied about the fact of whether he believes that facts are facts. But they symbolized a way of thinking, or at least the pretense of a frame of mind. As a scientist might say, they were data. And even if the answers weren’t always enlightening, they got plenty of attention, which is noteworthy in itself. Not so long ago, a presidential candidate would or could be held accountable, at least to some extent, for their views on ocean health, the internet, vaccination, or cosmology.

In 2020, a dozen years after it began, Science Debate ran aground. Both candidates that year refused to answer any of its questions. Even Joe Biden, who campaigned explicitly on the promise of a scientific restoration—his victory speech would promise “to marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time”—could not be bothered to engage. COVID was still raging, and the candidates did discuss pandemic policy (as well as climate change) during their regular debates. “We got the gowns. We got the masks,” Trump said back then, almost exactly as he did this week. But at the same time, in the fall of our most recent election—when science was so clearly tied to urgent policy conundrums, when acting on the data (whatever that entailed) was both tricky and divisive, and when public-health measures could lead to riotous protest—our potential presidents were also moving on from the very notion that science policy, in the broader sense, ought to be thrashed out.

Science Debate, which was eventually folded into the National Science Policy Network, now has more diffuse goals about engaging candidates at all levels to answer a science-policy questionnaire. It hasn't shown any signs of seriously trying to extract answers from the presidential candidates in 2024. The website where the project started, ScienceDebate2008.com, is a sketchy Russian news site. (Among its posted stories are “There Is No Place to Store Sugar in Russia,” by a “graduate student,” and “How to Exchange Currency in Kharkov at a Favorable Rate.”) ScienceDebate.com has also gone offline, and the group’s social-media presence even in this election year has been almost nonexistent.

This week’s debate added another note of confirmation: A long stretch of treating science like it matters, for America and for presidential politics, has reached its end.

Your Air Conditioner Is Lying to You

2024-08-09T07:00:00-04:00

My electric bill last month was disgusting. I’ve kept my window air-conditioning units on for hours every day, and now I have to pay the price: the most expensive month of cooling that I’ve ever had. If there ever was a time to press my AC’s MONEY SAVER button, it would be now. But I don’t think I will, not this summer and not ever—because money-saver mode has always struck me as a sham.

In the murky world of home air-conditioning, “money saver” may go by different names. Some models have an ECO button, to signal that it’s more economically—or ecologically—sound. Others go with ENERGY SAVER. However it’s described, the benefit this setting claims to offer—a cheaper way to reach and hold your set-point temperature—seems too good to be true. If it were really possible to keep my living room at 72 degrees in money-saver mode, just like I do with normal cooling, then why should any other AC modes exist? (Wouldn’t they be a MONEY WASTER, by definition?) But if there is, in fact, some hidden trade-off here—if, for instance, using money-saver mode doesn’t really bring my living room all the way to 72 degrees, or keep it at that temperature—then the whole thing feels like misdirection. Why not just turn up the thermostat a few degrees myself? Wouldn’t that be like putting it in money-saver mode the old-fashioned way?

These were just my idle speculations, though, based on summers past. I had no idea how money-saver mode really worked. I had only my personal experience, on those days when I’d left my ACs on that setting by accident or aspiration, and made my family endure a trial afternoon of more “efficient” cooling. The outcomes of these experiments were never very good: By all accounts, rates of sweating and complaining in the home were markedly increased. With the MONEY SAVER button pressed, our living room felt somewhat HOTTER than we’d hoped—which made us CRANKY and UNCOMFORTABLE. So this summer, I set out to learn the secrets of the mode. What I’ve found has only made me more suspicious than I was before.

[Read: I bought a CO2 monitor, and it broke me]

Eco-friendly modes for air conditioners were not always ubiquitous. I know the brown, faux-wood-paneled Fedders unit in my parents’ bedroom didn’t have one; you could turn its dial only toward “high cool” or “low cool,” and adjust the speed of the fan. The key moment in the MONEY SAVER–ing of America’s ACs seems to have arrived in the fall of 2013, when manufacturers had to meet new criteria for their room air conditioners to receive an Energy Star certification. (You may see that program’s rectangular logo, a selling point that signals higher efficiency and lower bills, on some of your appliances.) Each new Energy Star–certified AC would have to include an extra-efficient operating mode, according to the updated rules, and that mode would have to be engaged automatically whenever the appliance was switched on. This latter point was important: An energy-saver mode wouldn’t just be present in all Energy-Star ACs—it would be the default.

The point here was to cut back on ACs’ energy consumption, but the rules themselves went only so far. They said that when an air-conditioner was operating in energy-saver mode, its fan would have to be shut off, for the most part, unless its compressor was also active. (In a unit’s normal cooling mode, the fan might be left on even when it isn’t doing anything to cool the room.) This may save a bit of money, but it’s pretty small potatoes, because the fan accounts for just a small proportion of an AC unit’s energy consumption. Beyond that, manufacturers had leeway to determine other details of how a money-saver mode might work. “We tried to build in a little bit of flexibility,” Amanda Stevens, who was then the EPA’s product manager for Energy Star home appliances, told me. (She’s now at Eversource, an energy provider in New England.) I asked Stevens why, if money-saver mode really did improve efficiency at little or no cost to thermal comfort, she and the EPA hadn’t pushed harder, so that it would be the only mode available on air-conditioners. “It’s a valid question,” she said.

AC manufacturers didn’t seem that eager to provide me with more detail. I reached out to a few of the bigger ones. After a couple of weeks’ delay, GE told me that in its units’ eco mode, the fan turns off when the compressor is offline, in keeping with the Energy Star specifications. In response to multiple requests for information, Electrolux, which owns the Frigidaire brand, finally sent me a similar explanation and a link to an Energy Star fact sheet. But the Frigidaire website gives a different explanation to appliance owners: An AC in energy-saver mode turns off when the set-point temperature is reached, it says, then tests the air every 10 minutes to determine whether it should turn on again. (Presumably an AC will also cycle on and off in normal mode, to maintain the set-point temperature.) Midea never responded to my inquiries.

“There’s not a standardized definition of this eco mode or energy-saver mode,” Jordan Clark, an HVAC-systems expert at Ohio State University, told me when I reached out to him in desperation. He confirmed my hunch that the details vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. Some models might merely switch off the fan as required and leave it at that. He suspects that others also slow down the rate at which they cool a room. That could make an air conditioner more efficient, he told me, while limiting the total amount of heat it can remove. Given 2024’s particularly frequent and intense heat waves, your window unit may end up struggling to reach the set point that you want, he said: “This is probably not the time when you would want to put it into that eco mode.”

[Read: The global temperature just went bump]

Elliott Gall, a building-sustainability expert at Portland State University, told me that he’s been curious about the high-efficiency setting on his own central-AC system. As far as he can tell, when the system is in normal mode, it calculates the average temperature inside his house, as measured across three sensors located in different rooms. Then the system turns on or off as needed, to keep the average at his chosen set point. In eco mode, however, he’s found that the system seems to focus on the sensor in his den, which tends to be several degrees cooler than his children’s bedroom upstairs. As soon as the den reaches the target temperature, the whole system shuts down. “It really seemed like it was just kind of playing games with multiple readings,” Gall told me.

These were just the one-off explanations, though. Almost everyone I spoke with for this story, including Clark and Gall, brought up a different—and slightly more insidious—idea. Some AC models, they told me, might go about money-saving by running on a wider, warmer range of temperatures. In this scenario, your AC unit would be engaged in a gentle sleight of hand. When a unit runs in normal cooling mode with a set point of 72 degrees, it might allow the air inside the room to fluctuate between, say, 71 and 73. The AC’s compressor would cycle on and off in order to maintain a temperature within that range; in engineering terms, this is known as a “dead-band control.” With money-saver mode engaged, the dead band might be stretched up a bit, perhaps to 74. “It’s a little bit sneaky,” Clark told me. “It ends up being a little bit hotter in your room for more of the time, but hopefully you don’t notice that because it’s only one degree and not all the time.”

Sneakiness aside, these controller shenanigans will provide some modest energy savings, Stefano Schiavon, a professor at the Berkeley College of Environmental Design, told me. And in his view, they would not have ill effects on people’s comfort. Schiavon told me that he’s not even sure anyone would notice temporary bumps in indoor air temperature from 73 to 74 degrees. (In a study done in Singapore, Schiavon showed that you can get away with raising the set-point temperature in an office by 5 degrees, and save a huge amount of energy, so long as workers also had control of nearby ceiling fans, which are far less energy-intensive than air conditioners.) Other experts, however, seemed to find the whole idea a bit distasteful. “There is no net gain from this. You save some energy by accepting less comfort,” Reinhard Radermacher, the director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Energy Engineering, told me. In this scenario, an AC in money-saver mode isn’t operating with more efficiency so much as providing less cooling. “The expectation is that maybe you don’t notice it, or it’s not bad enough that you do something about it,” Radermacher said.

The ACs that I have at home may not employ any of these tricks. It’s possible that their money-saver modes work only and exactly as required by the Energy Star specifications. (I can certainly hear their fans switch off between each cooling cycle.) But either way, the effects of running them this way are unmistakable: It’s hotter in the house. And the fact that money saver goes on by default is irksome of its own accord. I want to save money on my air-conditioning, but I can accomplish that by turning up the number on my thermostat. That’s not only more transparent; it’s more precise and economical, and better for the planet too. It’s more “eco,” if you will.

“Playing with the dead band may provide some savings, but not major, I would say,” Schiavon told me when I asked whether money saver might allow a drift in temperature around 72 degrees. Why not suck it up and leave your room a little warmer to begin with? Earlier, Schiavon had paused to give me some advice: “A side note, 72 is very low. You can keep your room at a much higher temperature than that.”

What a Year on Ozempic Taught Johann Hari

2024-06-07T11:33:39-04:00

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In the fall of 2005, Johann Hari, then a young columnist for The Independent who was struggling with his weight, described a trip he said he’d taken to a wellness spa in the foothills of the Carinthian Alps. After spending just four days there on a cleansing diet that consisted almost entirely of drinking tea—Hari could not bear to stay a moment longer—he’d lost seven pounds. “The cravings for lard had leeched [sic] out of my system,” he marveled in his write-up, noting that he hadn’t yet regained the weight.

Hari tells this Alpine-detox story once again in Magic Pill, his fourth and latest book, released last month—but the anecdote now appears to hold a different lesson. Instead of maintaining his new diet, he seems to relapse: “When I got home, I felt like a failure,” he now says of the very same experience. “Where, I wondered, was my willpower?”

The new book’s title is a slanted reference to Ozempic (which doesn’t come in pill form), and to the new class of anti-obesity medications that is already reshaping health care for tens of millions of Americans. Many of Magic Pill’s 250 pages describe these drugs’ amazing benefits and potential harms; most of the rest are devoted to a workmanlike review of certain social causes of obesity, and how they might one day be reversed. Some portions of this story have been told in other places—Hari makes ample references to other well-known books. But his account brings an element of human drama that few could match, even when it’s just rehashing others’ work. That drama is the author’s own: Above all else, Magic Pill describes Hari’s everlasting struggle to control himself. Whether purposefully or not, he has produced a revealing record of his shame.

Why does Hari feel ashamed? For one thing, he’s on Ozempic. Hari doesn’t really need to take Ozempic, but he’s on it nonetheless: That’s the premise of the book, as laid out from the start. He decided, “quite abruptly” as he puts it in the introduction, to begin injections. It was 2022, and his pandemic BMI had risen to a hair over 30, just high enough to qualify for a prescription. Going on it “was a snap decision,” he explains, “and later I realized I was driven by impulses I didn’t fully understand at the time.” A methodical examination of those impulses unspools from there: Across the book’s 12 chapters, Hari will ask himself why he can’t just stop eating. Why should he need the help of a powerful drug to lose weight? Where, he’ll wonder again and again, is his willpower?

There are scientific answers to those questions, and also there are moral ones. “Taking Ozempic was a betrayal of my values. Every time I injected myself, I felt fraudulent,” he writes. A few pages later, he elaborates: “If I am totally honest, at some level, I believed that by taking these drugs, I was cheating.” This inner sense of crookedness is meant to stand in for a more expansive one. If he’s a victim of his impulses, then we all are as well. Why can’t any of us stop eating? Whatever happened to our willpower? And if Hari feels uneasy injecting himself with artificial self-restraint, then society should feel the same. We’ve made a religion, more or less, out of limitless consumption; we’ve allowed our diets to be overrun with processed, packaged foods. Now we’re rolling back the ill effects of too much eating with yet another branded product. Doesn’t this approach to public health feel a little bit like cheating? Isn’t it a form of fraud?

This line of thinking holds a special resonance for Hari, who has, in other contexts, shown a catastrophic lack of self-control. In fact, his history as a journalist would seem to offer special insight into the battle between the id and the superego. As a columnist for magazines and newspapers—and as the guy who wrote about the Alpine weight-loss trip almost 20 years ago—he was once a lauded journalist. Hari’s work “combines courageous reporting and forceful writing with honest analysis,” announced a judge who awarded him the Orwell Prize in 2008. But Hari’s career appeared to reach an early end a few years later, when some of his work was found to be conspicuously dishonest. In 2011, he was outed as a plagiarist, and then for making vicious accusations about his rivals through a sock-puppet account on Wikipedia. “I did two wrong and stupid things,” Hari wrote in his final column for the Independent, under the headline “A personal apology.” He promised to step away from writing for a while so that he could study journalism, and that when he finished he’d be more scrupulous than he’d ever been before, footnoting all his work and posting audio of all his interviews. “I hope after a period of retraining, you will give me the chance,” he said.

That chance arrived a few years later, when Hari reappeared with a best seller, Chasing the Scream, on the social causes of addiction, and a viral TED Talk—which has now been viewed 21 million times—on the same topic. He’s since written three more pop-science books, all of which are variations on this theme. In 2018, he published Lost Connections, another best seller, about depression, anxiety, and, to some extent, the nature of addiction. Hillary Clinton blurbed that one, and Ezra Klein had Hari on his podcast. After that was Stolen Focus, in 2022, about technology, distraction, and the limits of the will. Hari got another blurb from Clinton (among other celebrities), and spent another hour as a guest on Klein’s show. And now this year we have Magic Pill, Hari’s book about obesity, overeating, and, once again, the limits of the will.

Which is to say, all of Hari’s writing since his comeback has been concerned—one might even say obsessed—with self-control and self-destruction; and with the interplay of forces, from without and from within, that may lead us into ruin. They present as social commentary, and also as self-help, and further as a meditation on the links between the social and the self. As Klein put it on his podcast, the books compose “a little subgenre taking conditions and afflictions that we individualize and arguing for their social roots.”

Hari tends to use himself to illustrate those conditions and afflictions, however they arise. According to his books, he’s been hooked on stimulants; he’s also been strung out on antidepressants, dependent on his phone, and addicted to fried foods. He says he has a family history of drug dependence, and of mental illness, and also of obesity. In other words, Hari lives in just the way we all do: caught between desire and self-blame. His books describe dysregulation. They’re also a product of it.

Back in 2015, when Hari gave his first post-scandal interview, he described himself, in a joke, as a “recovering former columnist.” His work since then does read like one extended chronicle of a struggle for sobriety—particularly when it comes to sticking to the facts. Hari’s books remind you in a hundred different ways that he’s on the wagon as a journalist. He posts the audio from many of his interviews, just as he promised he would, and he piles on the endnotes. “I went on a journey of over forty thousand miles. I conducted more than two hundred interviews across the world,” he boasts in the introduction to Lost Connections. “I went on a 30,000-mile journey … In the end, I interviewed over 250 experts,” he says in Stolen Focus. And now, apparently having rushed a bit for Magic Pill: “I went on a journey around the world, where I interviewed over a hundred experts.”

But showing off is not the same as showing discipline. In spite of Magic Pill’s 394 endnotes (including those published on the website for the book) and 318 posted clips from interviews, and notwithstanding the pair of fact-checkers whom Hari thanks in his acknowledgments, the book is strewn with sloppy errors. Some of these have already been made public. When a British restaurant critic named Jay Rayner, described by Hari as having lost his love for food after going on Ozempic, pointed out on X last month that this was “complete and utter bollocks,” Hari admitted his mistake: “I apologise to Jay for getting this wrong, & am gutted I & my fact-checkers missed it,” he wrote. Then his proffered explanation—that he’d meant to cite the experience of the film critic Leila Latif when she was on Ozempic—ran aground as well. “I’m not, nor have I ever been, on semaglutide,” Latif chimed in just hours later.

A few weeks ago he posted fixes for another seven errors from the book on his website, in response to an email from a journalist. (A detailed roundup of those mistakes has since been published in The Telegraph.) I came across a bunch of other glitches in my reading of the book. In one instance, Hari writes about an evening long ago when he heard about a restaurant in Las Vegas where the servers doled out spankings to anyone who didn’t clean their plate. According to the book, that conversation happened in the late 1990s or early aughts, but the restaurant in question—called the Heart Attack Grill—didn’t open in Las Vegas until 2011. This tiny error makes no difference to the story Hari tells, but lots of tiny errors, set against the backdrop of the author’s ostentatious rigor, tell a story of their own. In a chapter on the scourge of ultra-processed foods, Hari talks about the slurry of defatted beef that is sometimes called “pink slime,” suggesting that it got this name from a food executive. This is precisely not the case. (Food executives sued the guy who coined that phrase, along with the news outlet that reported it, for defamation.) When Hari writes about the big reveal of findings from a major trial of Ozempic’s use for losing weight, he sets the scene on “one day in 2022.” The reveal occurred in 2021. And when he describes a study of mothers who have been taught “responsive parenting” techniques, he says their children ended up half as likely to become obese or overweight as those of other parents. (Hari puts the word half in italics, to emphasize the size of the effect.) But this finding was not statistically significant, according to the published work to which he is referring. “Differences between study groups were modest,” it says.

When reached by email, Hari acknowledged two of these mistakes and insisted that the other two were spurious. Some food executives did end up uttering the words pink slime, he said. (This was only in the course of responding to the PR crisis that the coinage had produced.) He also said that he’d drawn the stat about responsive parenting from a different paper that came out of the same research project, which was published two years earlier than the one cited in the endnotes of his book. (The text in Magic Pill clearly refers to the findings of the more recent paper.)

I’m worried by this indolence with details, from a (once again) successful writer whose commitment to the truth was formerly in question. But I was disconcerted, too, by Hari’s careless use of language. He’s a lovely writer when he wants to be: As a columnist, his early work—filled with fizzy, funny formulations—was a pleasure to consume. Now he sometimes writes as though he’s dishing day-old cream of wheat. “Then a breakthrough came from totally out of left field,” reads one characteristic section opener. The scientists in Magic Pill are said to have “aha moments,” “light-bulb moments,” and moments as “in a game show, where you realize you’ve won the jackpot”; and many of their reported quotes—which Hari tends to give at snippet-length—are comically banal. “That was unbelievably exciting,” an endocrinologist tells him, in reference to the FDA’s approval of a diabetes drug. “When you have obesity as a child, it’s very difficult to become un-obese,” another source explains.

[Read: Ozempic or bust]

He’s also shameless about recycling his work. “I’d like to briefly restate a little of what I wrote,” he offers at one point, as the setup for a two-page run-through of a scene from Lost Connections. In other places, second-hand material gets passed off as something new. “If I was a sandwich, you wouldn’t want to eat me,” he says he told his trainer in Magic Pill, after learning that his body-fat percentage was up to 32. He made the same incomprehensible joke about his body-fat percentage, using almost the same words, in the story about his visit to the Austrian health spa from 2005: “If I were a sandwich, nobody would eat me. Except me.” He also used it in a column from 2010: “If I were a sandwich, nobody would eat me except me.”

Some stretches of Magic Pill are so caked over with cliché that you can’t help but wonder if Hari might be doing it on purpose. He writes about a time when “something unexpected happened,” and then another time when someone “stumbled on an unexpected fact,” and a third when a lot of people started to “notice something unexpected.” This formulation—someone noticed something—keeps coming back: We hear from people who have variously “noticed something weird,” “noticed something odd,” “notice[d] something disconcerting,” “noticed something striking,” “noticed something peculiar,” or simply “noticed something” (which occurs multiple times on its own).

Some people are so rich they’re said to have fuck-you money. As I read through Magic Pill, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is this Hari’s fuck-you prose? But then something else occurred to me: Ironically, and despite its tendency toward sloppiness, this is Hari’s writing on a diet. Sure, he used to tell his stories with panache, but that was the old Johann Hari—the fried-chicken-eating Johann Hari, the pill-popping Johann Hari, the plagiarizing Johann Hari. Now he’s on a strict regimen of bullet points. He’s skimmed the oil from his writing and doubled down on adding fiber.

Why else would he insist on keeping track of all the miles that he’s traveled for each book? Why else would he be calculating (and reporting!) the numbers of his interviews? And why else would Hari feel the need to enumerate his every thought and argument as if it were a meal to be recorded in a food-tracking app? Magic Pill, like all his other books, is preoccupied with numbered lists. He can’t seem to stop himself from tallying: the five reasons we eat; the seven ways that processed foods will undermine your health; the 12 potential risks of taking drugs like Ozempic; and the five long-term scenarios that these drugs may yet produce. Was this just another form of laziness? He’s counting calories, of course; he’s showing you his work is made from whole ingredients. This is journalism on a detox cleanse. This is how you write for sustenance instead of pleasure. And this may be what you do when you’re a recovering former columnist.

“I work hard to make my books both factually accurate and transparent,” Hari told me in his emailed response. “Because of some things I did that were unambiguously wrong 14 years ago, I am held to a high standard, and I embrace that high standard.” But few efforts at self-discipline can last for long, as Magic Pill itself explains.

The book describes a long history of research showing that losing weight by eating less is often ineffective. “When I injected myself with Ozempic for the fifth month in a row, I thought of all the diets I had tried over the years, all the times I had tried to cut out carbs or sugar,” Hari writes. “I wondered if all those diets had been a sad joke all along, and this was my only option now.” As a journalist, he also ends up straying from his regimen: From time to time, and in place of conversations with his expert sources, Hari slips into a looser and more entertaining style. He talks about his friends, for instance, and describes the conversations they’ve had about Ozempic. Hari’s pals, unlike his sources, tend to speak in long and lively monologues that just happen to encapsulate the themes of Magic Pill. “How much is this really about improving your health?” asks a friend whom he decides to call Lara. “I don’t think, for you, it is. Not really. Not primarily. I want you to stop, and really think about it.” She goes on:

I’ve known you for twenty-five years, and you’ve never been happy about how you look. You look good. I’ve always thought you looked good. But you don’t think you do. So you’re taking this drug—and all these huge risks—to conform to a particular look, an approved look, the most socially approved look. That’s why you’re doing it. You want to be thin. Those people at that Hollywood party you went to, where you learned about this drug for the first time, and you texted me all excited—they weren’t doing this to boost their health. They were already healthy. They had private chefs to cook them the healthiest possible food. They see a personal trainer every day. They were doing it to be unnaturally thin. You aren’t taking these risks to have a healthy heart. You’re taking them to have cheekbones.

Lara continues in this vein, with very minor interjections from the author, across five pages of the book. This reads like Hari’s writing on a binge, unchecked by endnotes or the need for posting audio from interviews. (The bits about his friends come with no citations.) And he’s in binge mode, too, when he’s telling stories from his past, like the one about the wellness trip to Austria. Certain rigors now appear to be suspended, and the facts get kind of doughy.

[Read: Ozempic patients need an off ramp]

For instance, when Hari first wrote about his visit to the Alpine clinic, for The Independent in 2005, he said that he was met at the entrance by a man. In Magic Pill, it’s “a woman dressed in an elaborate nineteenth-century Austrian peasant costume.” (When reached by email, Hari blamed this gender inconsistency on a typo in the first version, which turned she into he.) The same woman comes back later in the retold version of the story, still in her elaborate peasant costume, where the original version refers only to a “nurse.” Hari says in Magic Pill that multiple staffers at the clinic were in these silly peasant outfits. The version from The Independent—from which entire paragraphs have otherwise been borrowed word for word—mentions none of them. (“It’s normal, when writing an article, to leave out some minor descriptive details, and to include them when you have more space later,” Hari told me in the email.)

Similar adjustments can be found in Hari’s other reheated anecdotes. He starts the book with one about a trip he took to KFC on Christmas Eve in 2009, where all the members of the restaurant’s staff surprised him with a giant Christmas card addressed “to our best customer,” which included personal messages from each of them. He told the same story a few years ago in Lost Connections, and before that in an Independent column in 2010. But the original version takes place on December 23, not Christmas Eve; “You are our best customer” is a thing that’s said out loud, not written on a card, and there’s no mention of any personal messages from anyone at the restaurant. (Hari acknowledged that he’d made an error on the date, and told me that he’d be “happy to correct this.”) If these stories have been lightly edited, all the changes were of course unnecessary. Perhaps the clinic sounds a little sillier with the staff in dirndls, and the story of the card from KFC lands a little better when it plays out on Christmas Eve. But why would Hari bother to adjust these minor details when he’s taking such pains in other ways to demonstrate his scruples?

Hari’s subject matter and his execution seem to come together in these moments. He’s explained the social and environmental causes of compulsive overeating, and he’s appealed to all the ways in which behavior can be shaped by past experience. In recent years he’s done the same for drug abuse, depression, and distraction. After nearly losing his career for taking liberties with facts, Hari has gotten famous as a chronicler and social theorist of our lack of self-control. But however it’s presented, his struggle to constrain himself still appears to be ongoing. Johann Hari keeps wondering what happened to his willpower. Four books into his comeback, we all might wonder just the same.

Did Something Happen to Our Necks?

2024-05-09T17:55:00-04:00

It used to be that whenever someone on TV or in a movie fell off the roof or had a skiing mishap or got into any sort of auto accident, the odds were pretty good that they’d end up in a neck brace. You know what I mean: a circlet of beige foam, or else a rigid ring of plastic, spanning from an actor’s chin down to their sternum. Jack Lemmon wore a neck brace for a part. So did Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Roberts, and Bill Murray. For many decades, this was pop culture’s universal symbol for I’ve hurt myself.

Now it’s not. People on TV and in the movies no longer seem to suffer like they used to, which is to say they no longer suffer cervically. Plastic braces do still crop up from time to time on-screen, but their use in sight gags is as good as dead. In the meantime, the soft-foam collar—which has always been the brace’s most recognizable form—has been retired. I don’t just mean that it’s been evicted from the props department; the collar has been set aside in clinics too. At some point in the past few decades, a device that once stood in for trauma and recovery was added to a list of bygone treatments, alongside leeches and the iron lung. Simply put, the collar vanished. Where’d it go?

The story naturally begins in doctors’ offices, where a new form of injury—“whiplash”—started to emerge amid the growing car culture of the 1940s and the early ’50s. “It is not difficult for anyone who travels on a highway to realize why the ‘painful neck’ is being produced daily in large numbers,” two Pennsylvania doctors wrote in 1955. Following a rear-end collision, a driver’s body will be thrown forward and upward, they explained. The driver’s neck will flex in both directions, “like a car radio aerial.”

The damage from this jerking to and fro could not necessarily be seen in any medical scan. It was understood to be more of a sprain than a fracture, causing pain and stiffness in the neck that might spread into the shoulder. Many patients found these problems faded quickly, but for some of them—maybe even half—the discomfort lingered. Whiplash in its graver forms led to dizzy spells, sensory disturbances, and cognitive decline (all of which are also signs of mild traumatic brain injuries). And it could leave its victims in a lasting state of disability—chronic whiplash, doctors called it—characterized by fatigue, memory problems, and headaches.

[Read: Chronic whiplash is a mystery]

From the start, standard whiplash treatment would include the wearing of a soft appliance: a foam collar to support the patient’s head and stifle excess movement. But the underlying problem had a squishiness about it too. If the damage to the neck was invisible to imaging, how was it causing so much misery? Some doctors guessed that the deeper, more persistent wounds of whiplash might be psychic. A paper on the problem published in 1953, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggested that the chronic form of whiplash might best be understood as neurosis—a “disturbing emotional reaction” to an accident that produces lasting ailments. These early whiplash doctors didn’t claim that their patients were malingering; rather, they argued that the underlying source of anguish was diverse. It might comprise, in various proportions, damage to the ligaments and muscles, brain concussion, and psychology. Doctors worried that these different etiologies were hard to tease apart, especially in a legal context, when “the complicating factor of monetary compensation,” as one study put it, was in play. (These uncertainties persist, in one form or another, to this day.)

A clinical unease colored how the neck brace would be seen and understood by members of the public. For about as long as it was used for treating whiplash, the collar held opposing meanings: Someone had an injury, and also that injury was fake. In The Fortune Cookie, the Billy Wilder comedy from 1966, a cameraman (played by Lemmon) gets knocked over at a football game and then persuaded by his sleazy lawyer—a guy called “Whiplash Willie”—to pretend he’s gravely hurt. They’re planning to defraud the big insurance companies, and Lemmon’s plastic neck brace will be central to the act.

Indeed, the stock setting for the collar, soft and hard alike, has always been the courtroom. When Carol Brady finds herself before a judge in an episode of The Brady Bunch from 1972, the “victim” of her fender bender, Mr. Duggan, hobbles into court with an ostentatious you-know-what. “A neck brace—do you believe that?” she asks. Of course you don’t; that’s the point. Mr. Duggan tells the judge that he’s just come from the doctor’s office, and that he has whiplash. (He puts the stress on the word’s second syllable: whipLASH. The condition was still new enough, back then, that its pronunciation hadn’t fully settled.)

[Read: No one in movies knows how to swallow a pill]

Concerns about unfounded civil suits multiplied in the ’70s and ’80s, thanks in part to what the law professor Marc Galanter would later term the “elite folklore” of seemingly outrageous legal claims, stripped of context and diffused throughout the culture by mass media. There was the woman who said she’d lost her psychic powers after getting a CT scan, the worker at a convenience store who complained that she’d hurt her back while opening a pickle jar, the senior citizen who sued McDonald’s after spilling coffee in her lap. And then of course there was the granddaddy of them all: the whiplash faker in a neck brace—the Mr. Duggan type, familiar from the screen.

Car-insurance premiums were going up and companies were pointing to exaggerated whiplash claims from drivers whose “soft injuries” could not be verified objectively. Financial motives did appear to be in play for certain plaintiffs: In Saskatchewan, where a no-fault system of insurance had been introduced and most lawsuits for pain and suffering were eliminated, the number of whiplash-based insurance claims appeared to drop. (Similar correlations have been observed in other countries too.) In the early 1990s, the New Jersey Insurance Department even staged a series of minor accidents involving buses wired up with hidden cameras—they’d be rear-ended by a slowly moving car—to test the prevalence of fraud. The department’s investigators found that Whiplash Willie–style lawyers quickly swooped on passengers to cajole them into making claims of damage to their neck and back.

By this time, the neck brace’s mere appearance in a movie or TV show would be enough to generate a laugh. It just seemed so silly and so fake! In the courtroom, insurance companies and other businesses grew less inclined to settle whiplash cases, Valerie Hans, a psychologist and law professor at Cornell, told me. Instead they’d try their luck, and mostly find success, in jury trials. To find out why, Hans and a colleague did a formal survey of potential jurors’ attitudes about such injuries in 1999, and found that the presence of a neck brace on a plaintiff might only make them more suspicious. Fewer than one-third believed that whiplash injuries were “usually” or “always” legitimate.

[Read: Whatever happened to carpal tunnel syndrome?]

If the soft neck brace was already well established as a joke on television and a liability in court, the medical establishment soon turned against it too. A series of randomized controlled trials of whiplash treatments, conducted in the 1990s and 2000s, all arrived at the same conclusion: Usage of the soft foam collar was “ineffective at best,” as one evidence review from 2010 described it. At worst, it could be doing harm by preventing patients from engaging in the mobility and exercise programs that seemed more beneficial.

A broader shift away from telling patients to keep still, and toward assigning active interventions, was under way in medicine. Bed rest and other forms of immobilization were falling out of favor in the treatment of back injuries, for example. Concussion doctors, too, began to wonder whether the standard guidance for patients to do nothing was really such a good idea. (The evidence suggested otherwise.) And uncertainty was even spreading to the other kinds of cervical orthoses, such as the stiff devices made of foam and plastic called trauma collars, which remain in widespread use by EMTs. These are meant to immobilize a patient’s neck, to help ensure that any damage to their upper spine will not be worsened. But their rationale was being questioned too.

In 2014, a team of doctors based in Norway, led by the neurosurgeon Terje Sundstrøm, published a “critical review” of trauma-collar use. “For many years, the cervical collar was the symbol of good health care, or good pre-hospital care,” Sundstrøm told me. “If the patient wasn’t fitted with one, then you didn’t know what you were doing.” But he described the evidence of their benefits as “very poor.” His paper notes that at least 50 patients have their necks immobilized for every one that has a major spinal injury. Trauma collars can interfere with patients’ breathing, according to some research, and their use has been associated with patients’ potential overtreatment. They’re also quite uncomfortable, which may agitate some patients, who could then make just the sorts of movements that the EMTs are, in theory, trying to prevent.

In short, despite trauma collars’ near-universal use since the 1960s, no one really knows how much they help, or whether they might even hurt. Sundstrøm said that his own health-care system gave up on using trauma collars a dozen years ago, and has yet to see a single injury as a result. Official guidelines for the emergency use of cervical braces have lately been revisited in a small handful of countries, but Sundstrøm does not expect major changes to take hold. “I don’t think there will ever be really good studies for or against collars like this,” he said, in part because cervical spinal injuries are very, very rare. For the same reason, we may never even know for sure whether collars are appropriate for patients whose cervical fractures have been confirmed in the hospital. “There hasn’t really been any interest in this research topic either,” he told me. Instead, doctors just rely on common sense about which interventions are likely to be helpful.

So the use of rigid trauma collars is likely to persist regardless of uncertainty. In health care, that’s more the norm than the exception. Research is difficult, the human body is complex, and tradition rules the day. Lots of standard interventions, maybe even most of them, aren’t fully known to do much good. Viewed against this backdrop, the soft foam collar—rarely useful, always doubted, often mocked—may finally have flipped its meaning. For years it stood for fakery and false impressions and also, ironically, for a lack of proper evidence in medicine—for a failure of support. Now it may signify the opposite. By disappearing from the movies, the courtroom, and the clinic, this form of neck brace has become a rare example of a lesson duly learned. It shows that science can correct itself, every now and then. It shows that progress may be slow, but it is real.