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Columbia University faces one of the most consequential choices of its nearly three-century history this week. The Trump administration has given the school a deadline of tomorrow to make a series of concessions in exchange for keeping $400 million in federal funding. Columbia has not publicly signaled what it will do, but The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the university was close to yielding to the demands. That would be a disaster for Columbia, for American higher education, and for the United States.

In a letter earlier this month, the Trump administration sought to dictate how the university disciplines students involved in pro-Palestinian protests last year, structures its disciplinary processes, handles masking on campus, and runs its admissions. It also demands that the university begin the process of placing its Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years,” a process where universities put departments that have failed to govern themselves under the supervision of some university official outside the department.

These demands are ostensibly about addressing anti-Semitism on Columbia’s campus. Anti-Semitism is a genuine problem at the school, but these are not genuine fixes. This is an attempt by the federal government to take control of an elite private university that it sees, correctly, as a bastion of liberalism. The gambit against the MESAAS department makes this especially clear; as a member of the American Association of University Professors’ academic-freedom committee told the Associated Press, “Even during the McCarthy period in the United States, this was not done.” These demands come as the Trump administration is also seeking to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the protests at Columbia last year and a legal permanent resident. The government has still not charged him with any crime.

In their defense, Columbia’s leaders are right to be worried about the threat of a funding cut. As my colleague Ian Bogost has explained, American higher education as we know it depends greatly on federal money. This is not a matter of charity: The nation benefits heavily from research and education. The $400 million ransom here comes on top of other cuts to federal funding for universities. Yet many experts don’t think that the government’s threats would stand up to legal challenge.

University leaders may also agree with some of the diagnoses the federal government has made about its admissions or disciplinary practices, but these are problems for the university to handle itself. (One bleak possibility right now is that administrators would rather let the federal government take the blame for changes they want to make than face backlash from students, donors, faculty, or alumni.)

Surrendering to Donald Trump, however, would be a serious error. The first impact would be on Columbia itself, which would be granting control to an administration that has been frank about its desire to knock universities down a few notches. Concession would probably provoke outrage from faculty and students, which could cause tumult, could harm the university’s reputation, and—crucially—is likely to only invite further attacks from the White House. It’s a death spiral waiting to happen.

Columbia should know this better than most schools. When House Republicans assailed it over the Gaza-war protests last year, President Minouche Shafik bent over backwards to answer their concerns. It satisfied no one. She lost the confidence of the university community and resigned in August. The ritual bloodletting did not appease the right, as the current pressure campaign shows, but rather emboldened it. The White House is already looking past Columbia to its next target, the University of Pennsylvania, and if these sorties are successful, other colleges will be next.

This is a consistent pattern when people and institutions seek accommodation from this president in order to protect themselves. There’s no such thing as an armistice with Trump; there’s only ever a temporary truce.

In 2016, the Republican Party as a whole opted to indulge Trump’s candidacy, on the premise that he couldn’t possibly win the nomination. When he did, leaders decided to work with him, on the premise that he was inexperienced and policy-ignorant and could be manipulated to serve their ends. Instead, he has conducted a full-scale takeover, remaking the GOP platform in his image, purging opponents, and turning the Republican National Committee into an arm of his business.

In that 2016 race, Chris Christie was the first rival candidate to endorse Trump and assist him. That won him a job leading the Trump transition—until he was unceremoniously fired, became the butt of cruel Trump jokes, and emerged as a prominent Trump critic, once it was too late.

Senator Mitch McConnell also chose to work with Trump and defend him, including some of his baseless claims about the 2020 election being stolen. He seemed to believe that indulging Trump would help further his own priorities. McConnell did get scores of conservative judges appointed, but he also kept taking flak from Trump, and coddling the president helped foment the January 6 insurrection. After the riot, McConnell was furious but glad to be done with Trump. “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” he told the reporter Jonathan Martin. “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

But McConnell didn’t want to take the political pain of pushing his caucus to convict Trump after his impeachment. The result? Trump is back as president, and McConnell is casting lonely, symbolic anti-Trump votes as he prepares to leave the Senate. House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy initially blasted Trump behind closed doors after January 6, but then quickly flew to Mar-a-Lago to make amends. Yet Trump did nothing to save McCarthy from an internal revolt, and he was deposed as speaker.

Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo ran or considered running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, but both eventually endorsed Trump. Haley practically begged to stump for him. Once elected, Trump promptly shut both out of his new administration and later yanked a security detail assigned to Pompeo because of death threats from Iran—stemming from Pompeo’s work as secretary of state under Trump. Many business executives lined up behind Trump in this election as well, hoping he’d be good for the economy. Instead, they’ve gotten gyrating markets and fears of a recession.

Foreign leaders have also tried to get on Trump’s good side. France’s Emmanuel Macron has been very effective at building a friendly relationship with the U.S. president as a way of fortifying his interests. As a reward for that effort, Trump has slapped large tariffs on Europe, threatened to bail on NATO, and turned his back on Ukraine, a major European priority. It’s no wonder that Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was willing to spar with Trump in the Oval Office. Stand up to Trump and he’ll punish you; act conciliatory and he’ll do it anyway.

Back in 2019, the journalist Andrew Sullivan warned against accommodating Trump. “We are appeasing an angry king,” he wrote. “And the usual result of appeasement is that the angry king banks every concession and, empowered and emboldened by his success, gets more aggressive and more power hungry.”

As it happens, Columbia was founded in 1754 as King’s College. An imprudent choice now could result in the school becoming the de facto fief of an aspiring angry king.

Related:

The cost of the government’s attack on Columbia Franklin Foer on Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem

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The unbelievable scale of AI’s pirated-books problem Peter Wehner: Trump’s appetite for revenge is insatiable. Dr. Oz is now the grown-up in the room.

Today’s News

Donald Trump signed an executive order today that is set to dramatically shrink the Department of Education, but the department would still continue some functions, such as administering student loans, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Tens of thousands of articles on Pentagon websites were removed or flagged for removal to comply with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to erase “diversity” content. According to CNN, which obtained a database showing which content has been or could be purged, these articles cover topics including Holocaust remembrance, Jackie Robinson’s military service, and breast-cancer awareness. The Pentagon has since restored some of the removed pages. A Georgetown University researcher on a student visa was detained by federal immigration authorities over alleged ties to a senior adviser to Hamas, which his lawyer denies.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The Reagan administration offers a cautionary tale about cost-cutting zeal crashing up against the reality of how government works, David A. Graham writes.

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The Particular Joy of Watching Film Lovers Geek Out

By Paula Mejía

At this year’s South by Southwest festival, in Austin, film premieres weren’t the only major events. The buzziest affair, arguably, took place inside a truck: a facsimile of the Criterion Collection’s fabled office closet, bursting with select editions of its deep and idiosyncratic film catalog. For three minutes each, movie lovers could enter the Criterion Closet truck to rifle through the company’s expansive archive of canonical works, plucking DVD and Blu-ray copies to purchase and take home.

Read the full article.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.

Listen. On Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin talks about the bird-flu tipping point with our science writer Katie Wu and an egg farmer who’s already dealt with millions of deaths in his flocks.

Watch—and question. Everything TV taught you about autopsies is wrong, Samuel Ashworth writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

One of the great weaknesses of the Donald Trump presidency is its failure to learn or heed history. (If you are or know a member of the administration, consider spending some time in our archive!)

“His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was ­really limited,” former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson complained of the president in 2021. “It’s­ really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.”

This limited historical knowledge can produce ironic results. When Trump allies brag that the president has brought “the best and the brightest” to the White House, the phrase is apt, but not in the way they mean: That expression entered common parlance when David Halberstam used it as the title of his classic book about how an earlier wave of academically gifted but inexperienced staffers came from private industry to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, just like Elon Musk’s crew at the U.S. DOGE Service, and blundered into catastrophe.

The Atlantic’s archive contains another cautionary tale, from a generation later, for the Trump administration. “The Education of David Stockman” is a story of cost-cutting zeal and ideological certainty crashing up against the harsh reality of how politics and government work. (I was reminded of this parallel by a Substack newsletter from the publisher and journalist Peter Osnos, a former Atlantic contributor.) Musk is not the first person to believe that if you’re smart and ruthless enough, you can bend the U.S. budget to your whim.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the presidency and sought to bring in a new age of fiscal austerity while also increasing the Pentagon’s budget. Supply-side economics, which essentially argued that tax cuts would pay for themselves by inducing economic growth, was just coming into vogue, and fiscally conservative dogma about tax cuts requiring budget cuts was out. The man in charge of reconciling all of Reagan’s promises was David Stockman, a former Michigan representative, whom Reagan named to lead the Office of Management and Budget. The question the new administration faced was: “How is it possible to raise defense spending, cut income taxes, and balance the budget—all at the same time?” Part of Stockman’s education was the revelation that it was not.

Stockman agreed to a series of embargoed interviews with William Greider, then an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post and later a prominent progressive economics commentator; he died in 2019. Over the course of eight months, in 1981, the men met regularly for breakfast at the Hay-Adams hotel, across from the White House, under an agreement that their conversations about the administration’s new policies would be made public later—“after the season’s battles were over.”

Like Musk today, Stockman was able to use the strong support of the president to move quickly and overwhelm members of the Cabinet or Congress who might have objected. “Stockman’s agency did in a few weeks what normally consumes months; the process was made easier because the normal opposition forces had no time to marshal either their arguments or their constituents and because the President was fully in tune with Stockman,” Greider wrote.

But Stockman couldn’t overcome math. Once you account for defense spending (which Reagan wanted to increase), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ and federal retirees’ benefits, and interest payments on the national debt, he could mess around with only 17 percent of all federal spending in order to balance the budget. “One might denounce particular programs as wasteful, as unnecessary and ineffective, even crazy”—that sounds a lot like Musk lately—“but David Stockman knew that he could not escape these basic dimensions of federal spending,” Greider wrote. Today, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, excluding the same programs leaves roughly 21 percent of the budget to play with, but the basic challenges are the same. When Musk promised to find at least $1 trillion in cuts to the roughly $7 trillion federal budget, he was either lying or ill-informed.

Stockman also had to contend with the economic effects of his proposals. When staffers fed Reagan’s plan for slashing taxes and hiking defense spending into a computer model, the results were dire. If the numbers were made public, Greider wrote, “the financial markets that Stockman sought to reassure would instead be panicked. Interest rates, already high, would go higher; the expectation of long-term inflation would be confirmed.” Sounds familiar.

As the year went on, Stockman seemed to become thoroughly disillusioned. “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” he told Greider. “You’ve got so many different budgets out and so many different baselines and such complexity now in the interactive parts of the budget between policy action and the economic environment and all the internal mysteries of the budget, and there are a lot of them. People are getting from A to B and it’s not clear how they are getting there.” His candor got him in trouble. He was, in his own words, “taken to the woodshed” by Reagan after the story’s publication.

Today, Musk insists that he and his team are smarter than everyone else in the government, yet they keep making mistakes caused by their hubris or their lack of understanding, to say nothing of their penchant for spreading lies and misinformation. “One of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention,” Musk said at a recent Cabinet meeting. Although Musk claimed that the program has been restored, The Washington Post has reported otherwise. Musk also keeps trying to take credit for cuts DOGE isn’t making—in one case, a contract that expired 20 years ago. Stockman did the same: The Reagan administration sought credit for cuts made by Jimmy Carter.

The big difference is that Stockman, though an ideologue, actually cared about the government functioning well. Musk and his presidential patron have not demonstrated the same impulse. Today, the global economy seems on the verge of major changes: Free trade is losing favor, Pax Americana is fading, and what comes next is unclear. Stockman saw peril in moments such as this. “Whenever there are great strains or changes in the economic system, it tends to generate crackpot theories,” Stockman told Greider. The warning has aged well.

President Donald Trump has upended the global geopolitical order in place for more than 70 years with major economic consequences that have only begun to be felt, and which won’t help the U.S., according to economist David McWilliams.

Read more...

Glezmann is the third US citizen released by the Taliban since January, as part of agreements brokered by Qatar.

The first time that Mehmet Oz was questioned by the Senate, in June 2014, the atmosphere was not inviting. He’d been hauled in to defend his habit of promoting unconventional supplements for weight loss, including green coffee beans, raspberry ketones, and an Asian tropical fruit called garcinia cambogia, on his daytime-television talk show. “I don’t get why you need to say this stuff,” Claire McCaskill, the Missouri senator who chaired the hearing, told him. “Because you know it’s not true.”

Last Friday, Oz was back before the Senate, this time to be questioned as President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In the interim, despite a turn to politics that included an unsuccessful bid to join the Senate himself, Oz has stayed the course: selling stress-relieving shrubs on social media, for instance, and leveraging his mother’s Alzheimer’s to pitch herbal remedies. Now a physician who was once described by other doctors in an open letter as demonstrating “an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain” may soon be tasked with regulating the health insurance of more than 150 million Americans. But the context of his return to Washington has cast the former TV star in a new, more flattering light: Next to some of the other appointees to the Department of Health and Human Services, even Dr. Oz seems safe and normal.

I’ve had a front-row seat for Oz’s unlikely transformation from maligned to mainstream. In 2013, when I was still in medical school, I launched a public effort to censure him. His exuberant pitches for unproven remedies were harming patients, I contended. I asked medical societies to do more to combat the spread of misinformation. My efforts were rebuffed at first; doctors were worried about infringing on free speech and criticizing professional colleagues. To buttress my campaign, I started collecting anecdotes from viewers of The Dr. Oz Show describing potential harm caused by his advice.

Oz did not respond to any of these efforts at the time. (He also did not respond to a request for comment on this story.) His initial dressing-down in Congress followed soon after, and then in 2015, I helped a group of medical students and residents cajole the American Medical Association into writing guidelines for ethical physician conduct in the media. Oz himself remained unchastened after this previous run of bad press, though. “We will not be silenced. We will not give in,” he told his TV viewers in 2015, while accusing one group of critics of having industry ties and denying that he ever promoted treatments for personal gain. In short, he embraced his reputation as a wellness guru and anti-establishment truth teller—the sort of person who would find a natural home in the “Make America healthy again” movement that has been popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Oz is likely to join Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services—and assume control of my parents’ health insurance, among so many others’—in the weeks ahead. That prospect would have terrified me in the 2010s, when I first watched him testify before the Senate. But when I saw him do so for a second time on Friday, he no longer struck me as a major threat. Rather, he looked like an anachronism: a charming celebrity physician with a penchant for theatrical claims. In the face of the Trump administration’s chaotic razing of the nation’s biomedical infrastructure, Oz’s brand of hucksterism seems relatively mild, even quaint.

Perhaps that’s why the Senate showed so little interest in his history of hawking suspect treatments. Even Democrats went pretty easy with their questions. Senator Ron Wyden accused Oz of having engaged in “wellness grifting,” and Senator Maggie Hassan said he’d backed “unproven snake oil remedies,” but this was not a central focus of the hearing. “There are many things I said on the show,” Oz said in response. “I take great pride in the research we did at the time to identify which of these worked and which ones didn’t.”

Instead of grilling Oz on his questionable supplement endorsements, the legislators mostly used their time to lobby for niche policy fixes, and Oz in turn displayed an expertise in health-care policy that seemed worthy of his Wharton MBA. He was fluent on the topics of pharmacy benefit managers, prior authorization, insurance payment models, and the Affordable Care Act. He came out in favor of work requirements for Medicaid—a conventionally conservative approach—while also making sure to show some sympathy for health-care consumers, calling the insurance companies that profit from excessive upcoding “scoundrels who are stealing from the vulnerable.”

This all came off as rather serious and boring, in the way that such a hearing really should come off. Compare that with the nomination hearings for Kennedy: When questioned by the Senate, he botched basic facts about Medicare and Medicaid, refused to admit that vaccines don’t cause autism, and accused committee members of being shills for pharmaceutical companies. Dave Weldon, who was Trump’s pick to run the CDC, didn’t even make it to his hearing, which was also scheduled for last week. Why Weldon’s nomination was withdrawn is not exactly clear, but it’s possible he made the error of being slightly too transparent about his suspicions of standard childhood vaccines. When positioned next to Kennedy and Weldon, or to Trump’s picks to run the NIH and the FDA, Oz seems quite conventional. He clearly stated that the measles shot is both safe and effective, while doing little to attach himself to the angry COVID contrarianism expressed by Kennedy and other nominees for leadership at HHS. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

So now we seem to have arrived at the strange moment when a celebrity TV doctor with no significant experience in public administration, a physician who once suggested that pineapple chunks and chia seeds were reasonable treatments for sciatica, can present himself as an unusually rational and stable candidate for leadership in the nation’s public-health establishment. Oz may even become an advocate for a more conventional approach to health-care policy in a department that is now run by someone who touts the benefits of treating measles with cod liver oil. Improbably, the “green coffee beans” guy is poised to be the grown-up in the room.

Experts say Trump is testing vulnerabilities in existing refugee law. The outcome could be transformative.

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Back when Rahm Emanuel was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, the idea that a political operative once nicknamed Rahmbo could be a viable candidate to succeed his boss would have seemed a little far-fetched. But when Emanuel suggested to Politico last week that he was considering a run, what was previously unimaginable suddenly made some sense. Emanuel, also a former mayor of Chicago, has a reputation for being a bulldozer. He has little time for niceties. He articulates his ideas in bombastic and often quite pungent sentences. As the former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, who spent years working closely with Emanuel, has said, “He understands how to win and speaks bluntly in an idiom that most folks understand.” That’s the nice way to put it. His style is tough, and tough is what the Democrats seem to be looking for.

Whether or not he has a real shot, Emanuel is very politically astute, and he understands that this might be his moment. The same could be said of Andrew Cuomo, who is running for New York City mayor. When challenged over his tarnished record—the small matter of having resigned as governor over numerous allegations of sexual harassment—he is counterpunching with his record of hardheadedness. (Cuomo has denied wrongdoing but has said he is “truly sorry” for instances that were “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation.”) “We don’t need a Mr. Nice Guy. We need a Mr. Tough Guy,” Representative Ritchie Torres said in his endorsement of Cuomo. Last month, speaking to donors, the former governor said he saw Donald Trump as a “bully in the schoolyard.” And Cuomo knows how to handle bullies. “He puts his finger in your chest,” Cuomo said. “And if you take one step back, he’s going to continue to put his finger in your chest.” You put a finger in his chest, Cuomo seemed to imply, and he’ll break it.

“What if the path to Democratic Party renewal was always just to bring back the biggest assholes, like Rahm and Andrew Cuomo?” the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, a Trump supporter, posted on X.

As Emanuel might have put it, maybe it takes an asshole to fight one. At least that’s what polling is picking up. A new NBC survey found that 65 percent of Democrats want their lawmakers to oppose Trump even if it leads to gridlock, compared with 32 percent who are willing to broach some compromise. (These numbers were practically flipped when the same question was asked roughly this far into Trump’s first term.) And in a poll conducted by Ruffini, 57 percent of Democrats said they approved of Representative Al Green’s cane-waving disruption of Trump’s recent congressional address.

[David A. Graham: America’s Andrew Cuomo problem]

This desire for roughness has erupted into scathing anger over the past few days, finding its target in Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose style is more Mr. Beloved Uncle With a Stain on His Shirt than Mr. Tough Guy. Schumer decided not to block the Republicans’ spending bill, thereby avoiding a government shutdown. His reasons were legitimate; not only would Trump relish the chance to blame the shutdown on the Democrats (surely schumer shutdown bumper stickers were already being printed), but a shutdown would give Trump the power to close government agencies and programs he deemed “nonessential”—Schumer worried specifically about food stamps—and the pain would have been counterproductive to Democratic interests. The argument for a shutdown was simpler: Do something, anything. Many Democratic lawmakers argued that signing on to the spending bill would make them look as if they were acquiescing to DOGE’s power grab. Even Nancy Pelosi, a longtime Schumer comrade, called his decision “unacceptable.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries offered the Capitol Hill equivalent of a shiv in the back when he was asked whether the Senate needed new leadership. “Next question,” he said.

I’m sympathetic to Schumer, who was thinking about the actual implications of a shutdown beyond the performance and the politics. But he is in the wrong movie. Democrats are desperate for someone to start poking their own finger into Trump’s chest. The only problem is that they have no leverage at the moment; the shutdown was pretty much the only sand congressional Democrats had to throw in the gears. How else could they show their constituents their fighting spirit?

Toughness, as a value, has long been a fixture in American politics—but it has been inescapable since 2016. In interview after interview following the latest election, voters told reporters that Trump’s pumping fist, raised seconds after July’s assassination attempt, sealed the deal for them. Even before the incident, he was often styled in MAGA social media as, yes, Rambo.

Trump’s style has worked for him, and it makes sense that Democrats, who are dejected and more unpopular than ever, are looking to answer mano with mano. Commentators are already forecasting a liberal version of the Tea Party movement, the grassroots backlash to Obama’s win in 2008 that coalesced around the idea that establishment Republicans were too weak to fight him. The movement was short on actual policy, besides a desire to kill the Affordable Care Act and cut taxes and regulations. What it had plenty of was anger—against elites, against the perceived foreignness of America’s first Black president, against a globalizing world. Behind the anger was a push for toughness, and in that arena, the Tea Party bore fruit: The 2010 midterms brought in a wave of more ideologically rigid congressional members. It elevated bullying as an end in itself, and set the stage for Trump.

I’m not sure toughness will work for candidates who merely attempt to mirror Trump’s modus operandi. For one thing, Democrats seem to have less patience for the kind of shamelessness and blame-shifting that are the president’s trademark. Emanuel and Cuomo are on the comeback trail precisely because they have already offended Democratic voters through Trumpian behavior. When he was mayor of Chicago, Emanuel was widely condemned for mishandling the police shooting of a Black teenager, Laquan McDonald, in part by delaying the release of damning dashcam footage for more than a year. The resulting ill will played no small part in his decision not to run for reelection in 2019. As for Cuomo, some say the directive his administration issued early in the coronavirus pandemic, requiring nursing homes to accept patients who had tested positive, greatly spread the virus and caused death. Then a New York state audit found that Cuomo had underreported those deaths by as much as 50 percent. The sexual-harassment allegations added fuel to a Democratic backlash that was already in motion.

[Rahm Emanuel: How not to lose to Donald Trump]

Even when it comes to style, Democrats need to beware of copying and pasting. When Tim Walz, the former vice-presidential candidate, drops his aura of midwestern nice to call Elon Musk a “dipshit” and a “South African nepo baby,” as he did in front of an audience the other day, it just sounds a little strained and ridiculous. Take also Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and currently a very possible contender for the Democratic nomination for president in 2028. In a much-mocked effort to show his ability to cut it in the manosphere, he has been hosting a podcast and has brought on right-wing figures including Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon as guests.

The Bannon episode looked like a split screen of styles. Bannon talked over and through Newsom’s questions, goading the governor at certain points, gently mocking him at others. Newsom brought none of this heat, starting many sentences with “I appreciate that” no matter what provocations Bannon had just uttered. At one point, they found convergence in their hatred of Musk, arguing only over which one of them was more culpable for empowering the tech titan. Newsom tried to land his blows—“You seriously want Starlink to take over the FAA?”—but he was no match for Bannon’s snarling. Even in jeans and an open-collared shirt, Newsom looked like he’d be more comfortable at a French Laundry dinner party than on a pugilistic podcast.

Democrats would be better off finding their own model of toughness—not one that extols aggression and strong-arming. Maybe they should channel, as the Democratic strategist James Carville suggested, the fighting technique of the older Muhammad Ali: rope-a-dope. Absorb punches until Trump tires himself out or, more likely, the American people get tired of all the chaos and disruption. This might be what Schumer has in mind.

Or maybe there is another kind of toughness, something more like the wiliness of a survivor. When you have no leverage, when your party is polling at 27 percent approval, you also have nothing to lose. The way to counter the destructiveness of DOGE, if you can’t literally stop it, is to put out a barrage of creative ideas, to flood the zone with stuff that will inevitably be better than anything Trump or Musk has to offer. Democrats believe in government, so they tend to govern better, while Republicans are better at campaigning, because they oppose it. This strength is hard to show off when you’re not actually in power, but maybe what’s called for is a shadow Cabinet, like those organized by British opposition parties, with the Democrats demonstrating, day after day, what they could do if they were in charge. The writer Timothy Snyder suggested something like this in January, arguing that it might “remind us of how much better things can be.”

To crib Isaiah Berlin’s famously overused metaphor, Democrats are foxes and Republicans (especially MAGA ones) are hedgehogs. The hedgehog’s advantage is to have one core narrative that explains everything, and hammer it with force, whereas the fox knows many things, and can think a few steps ahead. In politics, being a fox is not always preferable or easy, especially in a media environment that loves itself a hedgehog. But it has also proved to be a winning approach before. Bill Clinton and Obama were, let’s remember, successful foxes; they knew how to juggle priorities, how to code switch, how to parry a punch. It’s precisely in such a fallow moment that it makes sense for Democrats to rediscover this other kind of toughness.

Finding someone to out-Trump Trump might look like an expedient solution to an immediate problem. But it also means fighting a war that the Democrats have already lost.

From 'radical lunatic', to 'unhinged' and 'unfair', Trump never holds back when showing disapproval of US judges.

Mark Carney should not tip his hand while fighting a trade war with Trump.

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Top U.S. health official Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently mused about a novel way to contain bird flu, which is to let it “run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it.” Just to be clear, this could involve millions of birds dying slower, more horrible deaths. Just to be more clear, this would not be the recommendation of most scientists, because it would only give the H5N1 virus that causes bird flu more opportunities to evolve, which it’s already doing at what experts see as an alarming rate. So far, the outbreak has caused one human death in the United States and several others overseas.

There was a moment last year when bird flu was detected in a small number of cattle herds and could have been contained more easily, but the U.S. government basically missed that moment. Now birds, cows, and the rest of us could be at the mercy of government officials who are suspicious of mainstream science.

What’s the tipping point, when we might need to change our daily behavior? Who is coming up with broader solutions? What do Kennedy and others mean when they call for more “natural” solutions?

And how is it possible that we may be worse prepared than we were before COVID? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Greg Herbruck, an egg farmer who’s already dealt with millions of deaths in his flocks, and the Atlantic science writer Katie Wu.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Last year, on the day before Easter—America’s most egg-centric holiday—Greg Herbruck lost 70 hens.

Now, to lose several chickens on a large-scale farm—not that big a deal. Just part of the process, which Greg knows because he’s the CEO of the largest egg producer in Michigan and the 10th largest in the country. His family’s been in the business for more than three generations.

So Greg knows his chickens.

Greg Herbruck: I love talking about my hens.

Rosin: Yeah.

Rosin: Greg has known chickens his entire life.

Herbruck: When I was in college, we had 200,000 hens at that time. And I used to tell my buddies, I know 200,000 chicks, but I only got one phone number. (Laughs.)

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Rosin: But losing 70 hens in one day? That was unusual. And then the next day, that number went up.

Herbruck: The next day, that barn was over 700.

Rosin: And then the day after that—

Herbruck: And that next day, that barn had 10,000 dead.

By Thursday, another one of our farms, about five miles away, went positive. And then the following week, our third site, in Ionia County, was confirmed positive. And so within right around a week, our three large farms in Michigan were all positive.

Rosin: How many birds did you lose since that Easter Day weekend total?

Herbruck: Just in about seven, eight days, 6.5 million.

Rosin: 6.5 million.

Herbruck: Yeah.

Rosin: Wow.

Herbruck: It’s a fear. But then the reality of it happening? It’s just like, Oh my goodness. They’re all gonna die.

[Music]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

By now, you don’t have to be the CEO of an egg farm to know about bird flu. It’s all over the news, and possibly showing up at your local supermarket.

News montage: There’s a shortage on eggs happening, and the bird flu is to blame … The Department of Agriculture says eggs are about double the price from January of 2024 … The average price of a dozen large, grade-A eggs jumped 65 percent, while overall food prices rose just 2.5 percent.

Rosin: Both Costco and Trader Joe’s have put restrictions on how many eggs you can buy. Other grocery stores have, too, depending on the location.

Last month, Waffle House put a 50-cent surcharge on every egg it sells, which seems like a new tier to the Waffle House disaster index. If it hits a dollar, we are officially in the Bad Place.

But it’s not just about the cost of eggs. Bird flu has been spreading to mammals. Cows have been dying. Some farm workers have been getting ill. And then in January:

Gayle King America’s first death from this illness has now been reported from the state of Louisiana.

Rosin: Scientists are starting to talk about a pandemic worse than COVID lurking. So I asked staff writer Katie Wu—

Katie Wu: Hello.

Rosin: —who covers all things science for us at The Atlantic, to make me feel better.

Rosin: So basically, I want you, Katie, to just tell me it’s going to be okay. No. I’m just kidding.

Wu: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Just say it’s gonna be fine. Everything’s going to be fine.

Rosin: I was kind of kidding, although she never explicitly said everything was going to be okay.

I did want to ask Katie, though, about how concerned we should actually be, on a scale of one to 10: one being, like, Don’t worry at all, and 10 being, We are canceling the NBA Finals.

[Music]

Wu: I think about this a lot. And I think we’re probably still in the middle ranges here, depending on all else that is going on, because I think also relative threat is important here. You know, five, six is fair, but I think much more important is the fact that that number has ticked steadily up since this time last year.

Rosin: Ah, okay.

Wu: And I think that is really telling. It says that the threat is growing and that there’s not necessarily anything stopping it from ratcheting upward, closer to 10. And the other thing is that we had time to contain it and keep it at a two or three, and never let it get beyond that. And we did not.

Rosin: Okay. So what would avoiding it have looked like? What could we have done in that critical moment?

Wu: Yeah, so to be clear, the moment I’m referring to: Last spring was the first time that the U.S. detected this virus in dairy cattle. And I’ve started referring to that moment as the “cow-tipping point.”

Rosin: (Laughs.) That’s pretty bad. That’s a good mom joke, dad joke.

Wu: I’m sorry. (Laughs.) At that time, it was really detected in just a small number of herds [such] that the government could have really intervened. They basically could have done more to keep the virus from spreading to other herds.

Instead, they kind of let business proceed as usual and dairy cattle move all over the place throughout their lifetime. They gave the virus more opportunities to spread. That should have been five-alarm-fire level of: We need to ratchet up this response and make sure that the virus does not move any further than it already has. And that did not happen.

Rosin: Got it. Okay. Let’s say for some reason—maybe this is a sci-fi scenario; maybe this is biologically realistic; we’ll get into that—but if it became suddenly zoomed to a realistic threat, it sounds like you’re not sure that we’d be ready.

Wu: Oh, absolutely not. And I think the right question to be asking is: How prepared would we be if this truly escalated to that point? And the answer is: not at all. Like, not even a little bit. It’s impossible to say with any kind of certainty, Oh, there’s exactly, you know, a 14.7 percent chance this is going to turn into a pandemic. Or, There’s exactly a 72 percent chance that we’re going to see this spreading from human to human in a sustained way. We can’t know those things. A lot of this is about randomness, about how we continue to respond, about just vagaries of the virus that people don’t fully understand yet.

I think what needs to be happening is more on the prevention side and more about preparedness, which are two things that the U.S., especially when it comes to infectious disease, is just catastrophically bad at.

Rosin: Interesting. I have this sense that because of COVID, we would be better at it. We’ve been down this road, and it was only five years ago, so the infrastructure is in place, and somebody just flips a switch and, Here we go.

You know, we’re not going to wake up one morning and be told, This is upon us. Don’t go back to work. But it sounds like that’s not how it’s rolling out.

Wu: No. I think in a lot of ways, we’re even worse prepared now than we were at the start of the COVID pandemic, for several different reasons: I think, in part, because the public is still really fatigued from having to respond to all of that—there was a lot of trust in public health and science eroded during that time—and I think because of the nature of the slow burn of all this, just slowly percolating through animals, affecting certain farm animals, maybe sort of affecting some aspects of the food supply.

But for the most part, it’s not that difficult to ignore that this entire situation is going on, and I think that makes it much easier for people to, in general, just keep tuning this out. It’s become normal to hear just slight murmurings about bird flu in the news and then to move on with your day. We didn’t have that luxury with COVID. It was forced upon everyone. Everyone’s lives changed radically and almost instantaneously. And now there’s just this general sense of, Oh, a lot of stuff is wrong, but I don’t have anything to worry about yet, when this is exactly the time to be doing something about it, so things don’t get catastrophically worse.

And I think from the federal-government side, there absolutely has not been enough of a response, and I don’t know how much of that is issues with resources being drained from COVID and that still being an ongoing threat; changes in leadership that are introducing, maybe, ideological barriers to being more prepared; and also, maybe some sense of, Well, we don’t want to overalarm people and be accused of overblowing this threat. It’s a really tough balance to strike, and I certainly feel for the people who are trying to communicate those messages, but I would not argue that the national response has been adequate.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So we’re journalists, and it’s our job to help inform people. So why don’t we try and bridge the gap as best we can. What is bird flu?

Wu: So it is a flu that has originated, as far as we can tell, in birds, hence the name: bird flu. That’s kind of how these things are named. And it is a flu virus, so it is related to the seasonal flus that pass through our population every year. But because this is primarily a version of the flu that is really well adapted to birds, and that’s where it spent most of its time evolving, it is not yet the kind of flu that is going to pass really easily from person to person.

But the reason that this is scary is we have seen this particular version of bird flu jump into mammals, including mammals that interface a lot with humans (i.e., dairy cows). And the fact that this virus is making those moves, jumping across those species barriers, like, huge species barriers—I’m not talking duck to pigeon; I’m talking birds to mammals—that’s a massive jump in terms of biology and the type of host that this virus can manage to infect and spread between. So the possibility that the virus will keep evolving and become a real threat to humans is really just growing every day.

Rosin: Okay. You’ve mentioned a few times the jumps and the sort of ratcheting up. What’s the rough timeline of events? Like, as someone who’s tracking this, I just want to understand: Is it very fast? How has it gone? Has it been over the course of 30 years or five years? What’s the timeline?

Wu: So there are probably two relevant timelines here. The first is, just to remind people, that this particular version of bird flu that scientists also call H5N1—you might hear about other bird flus, but this is a very specific one that we’re talking about right now. Scientists have known about this for decades, and it has, for most of that time, stayed primarily in birds. Very occasionally, it was causing some problems in people when it was transmitting directly from birds into people. These included poultry workers, people working very closely with wild or domesticated birds. And it would cause sickness, sometimes very severe sickness, in people.

But what is happening on a much more accelerated timeline is, all of a sudden, after decades of still mostly being a bird virus and causing limited problems in people—limited in terms of spread—this virus is now jumping across species barriers into animals like us very, very, very frequently. And this has only happened in the past couple of years. And to see those types of changes—those types of unprecedented jumps on a much shorter timeline—has made a lot of scientists nervous.

They don’t know what this virus is fully capable of in an evolutionary sense. And it may actually even depend on the subtype of this particular bird flu that is moving around. There are actually already two subtypes of H5N1 that have been detected in people. The one that seems to be jumping into people from birds, for instance, seems to be causing much more severe illness so far than the one that’s jumping into people from cattle. And so it depends on all these different biological factors, which scientists are still figuring out. But I guess the scary part of that is: We don’t fully know what the average human sickness with this particular bird virus is going to look like.

Rosin: But it has shown up in humans, right? So what do we know so far about what it could look like?

Wu: Right. So let me again split that into the two categories that we roughly know about so far. So the most common cases in the U.S. so far have still been in dairy workers who appear to be catching the virus directly from the infected dairy cattle that they’re working with.

And it seems like a lot of this is through exposure to the cow’s milk. As they’re milking them, maybe the milk gets sprayed onto their face, gets in their eyes, might be inhaled as the milk sort of aerosolizes into the air. And most of those cases do seem pretty mild on the spectrum of things. People are getting conjunctivitis—effectively, pink eye. They do have, maybe, some respiratory symptoms, but it’s pretty quick to resolve. There haven’t really been too many really serious cases when the virus seems to be jumping over from cattle.

But a slightly different version of the virus is also jumping over from poultry, and those cases have been severe. This virus, since it started spilling intermittently into people in the 1990s, has caused multiple deaths worldwide. But if we’re looking just at deaths in the U.S., it has only been one so far, and I hope it stays that way.

Rosin: I mean, this is probably obvious, but an important line that everybody’s watching is the jump into humans. There are tragedies when a chicken dies—both economic and otherwise—when cows die, other mammals die. But people are tracking the line into humans.

What’s happening internally? What does that look like internally, and how has that happened in the past? How is the virus transmuting?

Wu: Let me start by explaining what the virus would effectively have to accomplish to start spreading from person to person, and for there to be, like, huge epidemic or pandemic potential here.

So for a virus to successfully spread between people, it has to be able to get into our cells, make more of itself inside of them, get back out of those cells, and then get out of that host—that person—and spread to someone else, and then do the same thing, over and over and over and over again.

A virus that’s super well adapted to doing basically that whole process in birds is going to have to figure out how to do all that stuff in a totally new set of cells. And so this virus will have to check off a lot of evolutionary boxes to adapt itself to us: It has to bind successfully to our cells. It has to get into our cells. It has to avoid specific parts of our immune system that might be different from a bird’s immune system. It has to survive stably in our airways, and then get expelled out of those airways and survive long enough in the air to get into another person. That is a pretty long, complicated process, and it’s actually not totally clear if the virus’s genome is totally capable of making all those changes.

But the more times that it has the opportunity to infect our cells, basically to infect a person, the more opportunity it is going to have to stumble upon the right number of combinations, if they exist, to start that process, if that makes sense.

Rosin: Yes. Totally. I read a quote that because of dairy workers, the virus—as this person put it—has more shots on the goal. So I guess that’s what you’re describing, just, like, more chances to figure out how to adapt.

Wu: Right. I think what is really important to remind people of here is that just because this is currently a bird-adapted virus does not mean it’s going to stay that way. Like, you can sort of imagine: If you keep throwing a bouncy ball against a wall, it’s going to keep bouncing off. Unless there’s a fundamental change in the composition of that ball, it’s not gonna stick to that wall permanently.

But in this case, we are throwing a ball that won’t necessarily stay bouncy. That ball is changing constantly and randomly, and it’s totally possible that it will get sticky on its own.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: what happens when the ball sticks.

[Break]

Rosin: Now that I understand better, I’m going to ask you a very I’m-your-friend-at-the-party kind of question. So in my current profession, I don’t work with birds. I’m not a dairy farmer.

But you read things like, Oh, you could get it from a bird feeder, or, It might be in food products. What is the kind of thing you would tell your average friend to do or not do? Are there any such things? Your average friend who’s not a dairy worker.

Wu: I’d say most people still don’t have to change their day-to-day behavior. I would certainly encourage everyone to continue paying attention to the news and to take things like seasonal-flu vaccines seriously. We can come back to that in a moment. But I don’t think people generally have to worry about what they’re eating or the local birds that they see in the park.

The two exceptions I can think of to that is if you are a raw-milk drinker—

Rosin: (Gasps.) I was just going to ask you about raw milk! Like, what is it about raw milk?

Wu: (Laughs.) Yes. I would like you to stop.

Rosin: Yes. (Laughs.)

Wu: I mean, it’s hard because it’s not like I am guaranteeing a threat, but we know that dairy workers have very likely been infected by interacting with raw milk. The virus has been detected in active form in milk coming out of infected cows. That milk gets sprayed in the face. It gets in the eye. It gets in the nasal passages—whatever, however it’s doing that. Milk is concerning.

Now, most of the milk in the U.S. is pasteurized, and that includes dairy products like cheeses and yogurts. The vast majority is pasteurized, which means it is heated and treated so that infectious agents are killed. That’s the whole point of that process, and so that stuff is safe. It’s people who are very explicitly going out of their way to buy raw milk that has not been treated in such a fashion that are at higher risk right now.

Rosin: Right. And obviously, don’t touch a dead bird.

Wu: Definitely not.

Rosin: Yeah.

Wu: If your cat is bringing that home, first keep your cat indoors, and second, please don’t touch that bird. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Interesting, okay. Oof. I feel seen. I do not keep my cat indoors. I’m sorry.

Okay. I want to talk about the government response, which you mentioned up top. In a different circumstance, I would trust that there were infrastructures somewhere that you could turn on, as I said. But we now have Robert Kennedy Jr., who’s overseeing Health and Human Services and is a person who’s skeptical of the usual epidemiological tools that we use to control viruses, like masking and, especially, vaccines.

From your reporting, what have you found the Trump administration doing or saying that pricks up your ears when it comes to bird flu? What are you tracking about what they’re doing?

Wu: Yeah. And I mean, to be fair, this does stretch back to actions that were taken—or, more accurately, not taken—during the Biden administration. You know, not a lot, frankly, has happened from the federal government, so some of the comments that I make will kind of stretch backward in time, as well, to before the Trump administration took over.

I think from the start, even when this was starting to spread among mammals over the past two and a half years, the response from the federal government was pretty muted. That was especially the case when this started to be detected in dairy cattle. That should have been a huge, huge, huge red flag. This was not typical. It hadn’t happened before for this particular bird flu. And that is an animal that is in really close proximity to us, shares a lot of biology with us.

That is kind of the moment that a lot of experts told me should have been the most clear inflection point—the point at which the government should have really, really cracked down on this issue and been able to do something about it. But because they didn’t—at the time, there wasn’t enough testing; there wasn’t enough outreach to farm workers who were in close proximity to the virus—because they sort of let that moment go and allowed the virus to spread to more and more dairy herds, the situation has now become so much more difficult to contain. And some researchers are worried that we might never be able to really get rid of this virus on this continent.

Rosin: So are you saying these conversations aren’t happening, or that there isn’t necessarily a strategy in place? Because I saw in one of your stories that the government has disputed that its response was too slow or inadequate.

Wu: I mean, I’m sure conversations are happening. I’m sure someone in the government would argue that that is the case, but definitely not enough. And I think one really challenging space to be talking about right now is still vaccines, not just because there aren’t obvious answers there about how and when and to whom and in what species to deploy those vaccines. That’s certainly controversial, even among scientists who have worked in this field for a very long time.

But also, because our new HHS secretary doesn’t have the best track record with vaccines, and certainly not with advancing the most important public-health narrative, which is collective action for the public good. Right now, everything I am hearing from HHS is about personal choice, individual liberty, and just letting things flow naturally, and hoping for the best.

Rosin: Yeah. A person seeing this train coming down the tracks, like, what I think about is the sort of general anti-scientific-establishment sentiment—this mistrust of the scientific establishment, which is not just in certain members of the administration but spread among the public during COVID, as you mentioned.

What happens if the train crashes and we still are living in that moment? Like, what does natural mean? When you hear that, what goes through your head?

Wu: I guess my reaction to that is: What level of natural are you willing to accept? I would say that in human history, there were and still are, depending on what part of the world you live in, periods of human existence where it was perfectly natural to not see your child live to the age of 1. Is that the kind of natural that we want to see?

There have been periods where it was natural to see bacterial infections completely take over a person’s body and kill them, and that was just the expected outcome because we weren’t using antibiotics. Or it was natural to expect bloodletting to be a sufficient medical intervention. There are things that have been natural over the course of history that aren’t necessarily what has served us best as a species. Medical interventions are arguably not the most natural thing in the world, just because we have invented them and not simply allowed them to manifest themselves into existence.

But, I mean, is naturalness necessarily optimized? I certainly don’t think so. That is part of the reason that innovation is so important. We are racing ahead of biology to make sure that we are keeping as many people healthy as possible. That’s the whole point here.

Rosin: Yeah. This is such an important point you’re making, because I used to think of people who had tremendous tolerance for “natural” as being of certain religious sects, who don’t believe in medical intervention, and so you’d have a real reason and framework and worldview that would have you be extremely committed to natural, even if your child died, say, which is the ultimate test.

But during COVID, I mean, there were plenty of people who did not vaccinate their children, and children died. I mean, that did happen during COVID, so it is really hard to say what the American tolerance is for natural right now.

Wu: Right. And I think it is also important to say that I feel like people end up homing in on really strict definitions of natural that I feel like draw these really false boundaries on what can be allowed. I actually find vaccines to be incredibly in tune with what the human body, quote-unquote, “naturally does,” because the whole point of a vaccine is to basically nudge the immune system into mounting a protective response that it would otherwise mount if it encountered that disease, the pathogen causing that disease.

It’s not like we’re putting an artificial device in someone’s body and leaving it there—also important for other medical interventions. But I guess what I’m saying is: It’s not the most unnatural intervention out there. That’s the beauty of it. Vaccines are very much an intervention that is about teaching a person to fish instead of just handing them a fish for the day. It’s teaching the body to mount a sustained defense that it can use again in the future. It’s a nudge. It’s not a forced coup of someone’s body.

Rosin: That is such a lovely description of a vaccine and such an interesting pushback. I really hadn’t thought of that.

You looked into the current measles outbreak. What does the government’s response to that tell you about how this administration might respond to a potential bird-flu outbreak?

Wu: Yeah. That is one of the things that has me most concerned. Let me just start off by saying that the MMR vaccine—the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, especially the measles component—is one of the best vaccines we have. It’s so safe, so effective. That vaccine is the intervention that is most single-handedly responsible for eliminating measles from this country. And yet there has been a really muted response from the federal government.

This is one of the largest outbreaks we’ve had in the past couple of decades, since measles was eliminated. Already, a 6-year-old unvaccinated child died, and that should not be happening. These are the kinds of things that were supposed to be gone and over forever. And yet, it took the CDC a month to issue its first public statement on the outbreak. In that, there wasn’t even a direct urging for parents to get their kids up-to-date on the measles vaccine.

Kennedy, who is the head of HHS, which oversees the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, has basically said, Sure. Vaccines are an option, but really, really pressed at least as hard, if not more hard, on alternative ways to combat measles, such as, you know, nutrition, steroids, antibiotics. There is really only one answer to the question of what can prevent measles and what can stop an outbreak, and that’s vaccines.

And I am just not hearing that message from the government. There should be a clear order of priority here, and that is not being followed.

Rosin: Right. That actually is worrisome. I mean, the way you just laid that out—that is worrisome. It should have been, No. 1: Get your child vaccinated. And maybe No. 2: This is an emergency. And that wasn’t the attitude particularly.

Wu: No. It wasn’t. And I think what may make this even more difficult if we get into a bad situation with bird flu is, our baseline for measles vaccination was 95 percent uptake for a very long time. And that is what we need. Our baseline with flu vaccination is, like, 40 to 50 percent uptake, depending on the year. There are people who happily get other vaccines who don’t get the flu vaccine.

I don’t know how people are going to react if we get into that situation and they’re asked to vaccinate. Also, we know that the flu vaccine is not as effective as the measles vaccine. That is just simply a product of how quickly these viruses change and the nature of immunity to them. I worry that those differences will make it even more difficult for misinformation to seep through and for people to take their cues from the government and really run with them in the event of a flu pandemic. It could get so much worse so much more quickly.

Rosin: Right. So with COVID, there was a day, you know? Will we know when we’ve reached the tipping point? Will it be totally obvious to us? Like, there’ll be giant headlines in the newspaper? Or it won’t be totally obvious?

Wu: I think it depends on what we consider the tipping point. Arguably, there is kind of a biological tipping point when the virus starts spreading from person to person. That won’t be noticed in real time or, at least, it’s highly unlikely, right? The virus would have to start doing that, and then scientists would catch it because it has already started happening. And we may never know the day that that starts happening, if it ever does.

Then I think there is kind of the public-consciousness tipping point, which is going to just have to be the more relevant thing. To draw the comparison to COVID, we still don’t know exactly how, exactly when, what animal first passed it to a human, what exactly happened after that. And we probably will never know. That stuff is gone. Scientists learn that information retroactively, and they can’t go back in time and recreate that timeline. What we do know is: Public attention started focusing on the pandemic in the months that followed. And that’s what I would expect here.

But I think the most important takeaway here is that that inflection point—the one that would command public awareness—hasn’t yet happened, which means there’s still time to act. And I think that requires people to hold two realities in their brain at once: One is about the present moment, during which the risk to most of the public is still low. But the second thing that people have to hold in mind is: That won’t necessarily stay true.

[Music]

Rosin: Katie, thank you for joining us.

Wu: Thank you so much for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: By the way, after we taped with both Katie and Greg Herbruck—the poultry CEO—we heard news that RFK Jr. was suggesting that, instead of culling chickens who were sick, farmers should maybe let bird flu, quote, “run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it.”

Basically: Let the virus run its course.

We asked Greg what he thought of that plan, and he told us this via email, quote: “Letting an outbreak run through the flock in an uncontrolled manner is not a practical or humane solution and would lead to needless suffering while increasing the risk of AI”—meaning Avian Influenza—“spreading to other species and animals, and ultimately putting humans at greater risk.”

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Erica Huang and fact-checking by Sara Krolewski.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/podsub. That’s theatlantic.com/podsub.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.