In the two-plus years that COVID vaccines have been available in America, the basic recipe has changed just once. The virus, meanwhile, has belched out five variants concerning enough to earn their own Greek-letter names, followed by a menagerie of weirdly monikered Omicron subvariants, each seeming to spread faster than the last. Vaccines, which take months to reformulate, just can’t keep up with a virus that seems to reinvent itself by the week.

But SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary sprint might not be the only reason that immunity can get bogged down in the past. The body seems to fixate on the first version of the virus that it encountered, either through injection or infection—a preoccupation with the past that researchers call “original antigenic sin,” and that may leave us with defenses that are poorly tailored to circulating variants. In recent months, some experts have begun to worry that this “sin” might now be undermining updated vaccines. At an extreme, the thinking goes, people may not get much protection from a COVID shot that is a perfect match for the viral variant du jour.

Recent data hint at this possibility. Past brushes with the virus or the original vaccine seem to mold, or even muffle, people’s reactions to bivalent shots—“I have no doubt about that,” Jenna Guthmiller, an immunologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me. The immune system just doesn’t make Omicron-focused antibodies in the quantity or quality it probably would have had it seen the updated jabs first. But there’s also an upside to this stubbornness that we could not live without, says Katelyn Gostic, an immunologist and infectious-disease modeler who has studied the phenomenon with flu. Original antigenic sin is the reason repeat infections, on average, get milder over time, and the oomph that enables vaccines to work as well as they do. “It’s a fundamental part,” Gostic told me, “of being able to create immunological memory.”

This is not just basic biology. The body’s powerful first impressions of this coronavirus can and should influence how, when, and how often we revaccinate against it, and with what. Better understanding of the degree to which these impressions linger could also help scientists figure out why people are (or are not) fighting off the latest variants—and how their defenses will fare against the virus as it continues to change.

The worst thing about “original antigenic sin” is its name. The blame for that technically lies with Thomas Francis Jr., the immunologist who coined the phrase more than six decades ago after noticing that the initial flu infections people weathered in childhood could bias how they fared against subsequent strains. “Basically, the flu you get first in life is the one you respond to most avidly for the long term,” says Gabriel Victora, an immunologist at Rockefeller University. That can become somewhat of an issue when a very different-looking strain comes knocking.

In scenarios like these, original antigenic sin may sound like the molecular equivalent of a lovesick teen pining over an ex, or a student who never graduates out of immunological grade school. But from the immune system’s point of view, never forgetting your first is logically sound. New encounters with a pathogen catch the body off guard—and tend to be the most severe. A deep-rooted defensive reaction, then, is practical: It ups the chances that the next time the same invader shows up, it will be swiftly identified and dispatched. “Having good memory and being able to boost it very quickly is sometimes a very good thing,” Victora told me. It’s the body’s way of ensuring that it won’t get fooled twice.

[Read: Annual COVID shots mean we can stop counting]

These old grudges come with clear advantages even when microbes morph into new forms, as flu viruses and coronaviruses often do. Pathogens don’t remake themselves all at once, so immune cells that home in on familiar snippets of a virus can still in many cases snuff out enough invaders to prevent an infection’s worst effects. That’s why even flu shots that aren’t perfectly matched to the season’s most prominent strains are usually still quite good at keeping people out of hospitals and morgues. “There’s a lot of leniency in how much the virus can change before we really lose protection,” Guthmiller told me. The wiggle room should be even bigger, she said, with SARS-CoV-2, whose subvariants tend to be far more similar to one another than, say, different flu strains are.

With all the positives that immune memory can offer, many immunologists tend to roll their eyes at the negative and bizarrely moralizing implications of the phrase original antigenic sin. “I really, really hate that term,” says Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. Instead, Bhattacharya and others prefer to use more neutral words such as imprinting, evocative of a duckling latching onto the first maternal figure it spots. “This is not some strange immunological phenomenon,” says Rafi Ahmed, an immunologist at Emory University. It’s more a textbook example of what an adaptable, high-functioning immune system does, and one that can have positive or negative effects, depending on context. Recent flu outbreaks have showcased a little bit of each: During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, many elderly people, normally more susceptible to flu viruses, fared better than expected against the late-aughts strain, because they’d banked exposures to a similar-looking H1N1—a derivative of the culprit behind the 1918 pandemic—in their youth. But in some seasons that followed, H1N1 disproportionately sickened middle-aged adults whose early-life flu indoctrinations may have tilted them away from a protective response.

[Read: COVID science is moving backwards]

The backward-gazing immune systems of those adults may have done more than preferentially amplify defensive responses to a less relevant viral strain. They might have also actively suppressed the formation of a response to the new one. Part of that is sheer kinetics: Veteran immune cells, trained up on past variants and strains, tend to be quicker on the draw than fresh recruits, says Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. And the greater the number of experienced soldiers, the more likely they are to crowd out rookie fighters—depriving them of battlefield experience they might otherwise accrue. Should the newer viral strain eventually return for a repeat infection, those less experienced immune cells may not be adequately prepared—leaving people more vulnerable, perhaps, than they might otherwise have been.

Some researchers think that form of imprinting might now be playing out with the bivalent COVID vaccines. Several studies have found that the BA.5-focused shots are, at best, moderately more effective at producing an Omicron-targeted antibody response than the original-recipe jab—not the knockout results that some might have hoped for. Recent work in mice from Victora’s lab backs up that idea: B cells, the manufacturers of antibodies, do seem to have trouble moving past the impressions of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein that they got from first exposure. But the findings don’t really trouble Victora, who gladly received his own bivalent COVID shot. (He’ll take the next update, too, whenever it’s ready.) A blunted response to a new vaccine, he told me, is not a nonexistent one—and the more foreign a second shot recipe is compared with the first, the more novice fighters should be expected to participate in the fight. “You’re still adding new responses,” he said, that will rev back up when they become relevant. The coronavirus is a fast evolver. But the immune system also adapts. Which means that people who receive the bivalent shot can still expect to be better protected against Omicron variants than those who don’t.

Historical flu data support this idea. Many of the middle-aged adults slammed by recent H1N1 infections may not have mounted perfect attacks on the unfamiliar virus, but as immune cells continued to tussle with the pathogen, the body “pretty quickly filled in the gaps,” Gostic told me. Although it’s tempting to view imprinting as a form of destiny, “that’s just not how the immune system works,” Guthmiller told me. Preferences can be overwritten; biases can be undone.

Original antigenic sin might not be a crisis, but its existence does suggest ways to optimize our vaccination strategies with past biases in mind. Sometimes, those preferences might need to be avoided; in other instances, they should be actively embraced.

For that to happen, though, immunologists would need to fill in some holes in their knowledge of imprinting: how often it occurs, the rules by which it operates, what can entrench or alleviate it. Even among flu viruses, where the pattern has been best-studied, plenty of murkiness remains. It’s not clear whether imprinting is stronger, for instance, when the first exposure comes via infection or vaccination. Scientists can’t yet say whether children, with their fiery yet impressionable immune systems, might be more or less prone to getting stuck on their very first flu strain. Researchers don’t even know for certain whether repetition of a first exposure—say, through multiple doses of the same vaccine, or reinfections with the same variant—will more deeply embed a particular imprint.

It does seem intuitive that multiple doses of a vaccine could exacerbate an early bias, Ahmed told me. But if that’s the case, then the same principle might also work the other way: Maybe multiple exposures to a new version of the virus could help break an old habit, and nudge the immune system to move on. Recent evidence has hinted that people previously infected with an early Omicron subvariant responded more enthusiastically to a bivalent BA.1-focused vaccine—available in the United Kingdom—than those who’d never encountered the lineage before. Hensley, at the University of Pennsylvania, is now trying to figure out if the same is true for Americans who got the BA.5-based bivalent shot after getting sick with one of the many Omicron subvariants.

Ahmed thinks that giving people two updated shots—a safer approach, he points out, than adding an infection to the mix—could untether the body from old imprints too. A few years ago, he and his colleagues showed that a second dose of a particular flu vaccine could help shift the ratio of people’s immune responses. A second dose of the fall’s bivalent vaccine might not be practical or palatable for most people, especially now that BA.5 is on its way out. But if next autumn’s recipe overlaps with BA.5 in ways that it doesn’t with the original variant—as it likely will to at least some degree, given the Omicron lineage’s continuing reign—a later, slightly different shot could still be a boon.

Keeping vaccine doses relatively spaced out—on an annual basis, say, à la flu shots—will likely help too, Bhattacharya said. His recent studies, not yet published, hint that the body might “forget” old variants, as it were, if it’s simply given more time: As antibodies raised against prior infections and injections fall away, vaccine ingredients could linger in the body rather than be destroyed by prior immunity on sight. That slightly extended stay might offer the junior members of the immune system—lesser in number, and slower on the uptake—more of an opportunity to cook up an Omicron-specific response.

In an ideal world, researchers might someday know enough about imprinting to account for its finickiness whenever they select and roll out new shots. Flu shots, for instance, could be personalized to account for which strains babies were first exposed to, based on birth year; combinations of COVID vaccine doses and infections could dictate the timing and composition of a next jab. But the world is not yet living that reality, Gostic told me. And after three years of an ever-changing coronavirus and a fluctuating approach to public health, it’s clear that there won’t be a single vaccine recipe that’s ideal for everyone at once.

Even Thomas Francis Jr. did not consider original antigenic sin to be a total negative, Hensley told me. According to Francis, the true issue with the “sin” was that humans were missing out on the chance to imprint on multiple strains at once in childhood, when the immune system is still a blank slate—something that modern researchers could soon accomplish with the development of universal vaccines. Our reliance on first impressions can be a drawback. But the same phenomenon can be an opportunity to acquaint the body with diversity early on—to give it a richer narrative, and memories of many threats to come.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Staff writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Anne Applebaum is uniquely qualified to plumb the American influence on Brazil’s “January 6 moment,” the insurrection on Sunday by supporters of the country’s far-right former president, Jair Bolsonaro. I called Anne to discuss her article about how antidemocratic revolutions can be contagious, and the diplomatic path forward for the United States.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The “buy now, pay later” bubble is about to burst. John Hendrickson: Why I dread saying my own name Suddenly, California has too much water.

Autocracy International

Kelli María Korducki: In your essay, you use the term Autocracy International to describe a global cohort of antidemocratic influencers that includes figures from Donald Trump’s universe. Who are these people, and how do they factor into the Brazil riots?

Anne Applebaum: It’s mostly an online phenomenon. They operate in different languages—French; Dutch; Spanish; Italian; English, obviously; German—and they borrow one another’s memes and rhetoric. But they have some in-person meetings hosted by different religious and far-right groups as well. The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—which is, of course, an American organization—held a meeting in Mexico in November, and a number of members of the Latin American antidemocratic right met there, including Eduardo Bolsonaro, the ex-president’s son, along with some Hungarians and several Americans; Steve Bannon joined by video. Already, at that meeting, Bannon was claiming that the Brazilian election had been stolen—a theme he has been repeating on his podcast for weeks, even before the results were known.

Kelli: You also write that even though Bannon certainly played a role in what happened in Brasília this week, the most powerful American influence was ultimately the example of what happened in D.C. on January 6.

Anne: The Brazil event was, in many ways, a kind of copycat riot. Look at what happened in the run-up to the Brazilian election: Bolsonaro essentially said, as Trump did, If I lose, it’s because the results have been falsified. And after the election, like Trump, he refused to [concede defeat]. He refused to attend the inauguration; in fact, he left the country. He’s now in Florida, at least as far as we know, not too far from Trump, and conceivably even in touch with him. And some of the language that he’s used, and some of the language that his followers have used, is clearly an imitation of what they read in the United States. The most important hashtag that was circulating in Brazil last week was #BrazilianSpring, in English, as if this were an Arab Spring–style uprising against dictatorship—whereas, in fact, it’s an uprising against an elected leader.

Public buildings have been attacked in Brazil before, so it’s not the first time this has happened. But the comprehensive nature of it—that it was the Congress as well as the Presidential Palace as well as the Supreme Court, that it involved using security barriers to break windows—this is, again, an imitation of what happened on January 6. That date, in the U.S., had an additional significance, which was that it was supposed to block the process of the change of presidential power. The Brazil attacks didn’t have that element but instead seem to have been timed to the anniversary of January 6.

Kelli: You close your essay by arguing that the U.S. should be proactive in supporting the Brazilian government’s investigations into the attacks. Why is this important?

Anne: If it turns out that Steve Bannon or Jason Miller or any of the other far-right propagandists who may have been supporting the idea of a coup in Brazil were involved or are indicted by the Brazilian government, then I think we should cooperate, and we should extradite them. If Bolsonaro turns out to be in the United States escaping justice—it’s not clear right now what his position is—then we should consider deporting him as well.

Above all, we should make it clear that these kinds of investigations are legitimate. We think they’re legitimate in Brazil, and we think they’re legitimate in the U.S. The faster they can happen and the faster these kinds of movements can be shut down, the better.

It’s very important that this riot, just like the riot at the Capitol on January 6, be shown to be a failure. This is not how you change power. It doesn’t work; it backfires. It has a terrible impact on those who started it. And, to the degree that there was any American financial or propaganda support for it, we should help in tracking down people who were involved.

Related:

Brazil’s ‘January 6 moment’ is a warning. What Trump and his mob taught the world about America (2021)

Today’s News

Leaders of the Nassau County Republican Party called for Representative George Santos to resign over the lies he has told about his personal life.

A Federal Aviation Administration system failure this morning delayed thousands of flights across the United States.

Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that the head of Russian forces in Ukraine was demoted after three months on the job.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Science has a crummy-paper problem, Derek Thompson writes. Up for Debate: Singapore is a lab-grown-meat utopia, Conor Friedersdorf notes. Will the rest of the world follow?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Gregory Halpern / Magnun

The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe

By Dacher Keltner

What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world—is often associated with the extraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plain with a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding the tiny finger of a newborn baby. Awe blows us away: It reminds us that there are forces bigger than ourselves, and it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered.

But you don’t need remarkable circumstances to encounter awe. When my colleagues and I asked research participants to track experiences of awe in a daily diary, we found, to our surprise, that people felt it a bit more than two times a week on average. And they found it in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity, a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them back to a first love.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The meaning of Dry January The speeches that saved the Golden Globes Photos: Despite protests, a German coal mine expands.

Culture Break

The Atlantic; Getty; HBO Max

Read. When you’re feeling alone, these eight books will make excellent companions.

Watch. Single Parents, on Hulu, a short-lived series with breezy plots and youthful energy by the creator of New Girl.

Or check out another of our 13 feel-good shows to watch this winter.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Anne has written extensively about authoritarianism and global antidemocratic movements, both for The Atlantic and in several of her books. In her most recent book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, she devotes an entire chapter, “Cascades of Falsehood,” to social media’s role in spreading far-right, pro-authoritarian conspiracies around the world.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Last week, Spiegel International reported on a country where carnivores can already legally dine on meat that is produced from the stem cells of animals. As the article put it:

Just imagine for a moment that you could save the world with chicken nuggets. All you would have to do is just eat them. Your teeth would sink into real meat, yet no animal would have lost its life for your meal. It will have been grown in the laboratory from a single chicken cell. Imagine that there would suddenly be enough meat from the laboratory to feed everybody in the world. Hunger would be a thing of the past. The land now used to grow corn for animal feed could be repurposed, perhaps even for a forest that could draw CO2 out of our atmosphere. Industrial livestock farming would no longer be needed.

To be sure, solutions that sound so simple should be approached with caution. But there is a place where the utopia described above isn’t as far away as it might sound. Where such laboratory chicken can be tasted and where the nuggets are being served up on real plates.

That place is Singapore.

There’s lots more at the link, including a review of lab-grown “chicken.” And still more fodder on synthetic meat from Virginia Postrel. What do you think about meat grown in a lab? Would you eat it? Will your grandchildren? Will we ever stop eating non-laboratory-grown animals?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of NoteDenying Treatment to the Imprisoned

Convicted criminals are among the most hated figures in most societies––and uncoincidentally, they suffer some of the most egregious injustices perpetrated by the state in America. Solitary confinement is often inhumane. Prisoners are sexually assaulted at inexcusable rates. And a Stat News investigation documents another practice that I find indefensible: the systematic withholding of lifesaving medical care from prisoners with hepatitis C.

Nicholas Florko’s report begins with John Ritchie, who was serving a 20-year sentence for armed robbery in Missouri when he sought a 12-week course of treatment that would cure his condition:

Ritchie begged repeatedly for the medicine ... The prison system knew he was getting sicker and sicker—it documented his deteriorating condition in his health records. The prison’s doctors wrote frequently he would benefit from hepatitis C treatment. But officials still denied him, in the same way a STAT investigation documented prisons around the country are still denying thousands of others the cure. So the virus infecting Ritchie’s blood continued to replicate, scarring his liver until it was so damaged that it could hardly function. Eventually he was diagnosed with liver cancer, a common complication of untreated hepatitis C. Now, the prison argued, he was too sick for the drugs to work. They refused him again. He died in June 2021 at the age of 64, nearly five years after his first request for medication.

STAT’s investigation found that 1,013 people died of hepatitis C-related complications in states’ custody in the six years after the first cure, a Gilead antiviral drug called Sovaldi, hit the market in late 2013. This tally, based on an analysis of 27,674 highly restricted death records, has never before been reported. Many of those 1,013 people were not serving life sentences; they would likely have had the chance to return home, reapply for jobs, and reconnect with parents, spouses, and children—or, in Ritchie’s case, his one grandchild, Gabe. Many should not have died. In fact, the treatment for hepatitis C is a modern medical marvel. The scientists who paved the way for its discovery won a Nobel Prize. Public health experts say it’s possible to cut hepatitis C deaths to virtually zero, and effectively eliminate the virus as we’ve done with smallpox or polio.

This article reminds me of a proposal I’ve been meaning to air despite the fact that it is almost certain to anger many and seems unlikely to be politically viable: much as Washington, D.C., and various territories have nonvoting members in the House, I think there should be a nonvoting House member who represents the interests of incarcerated people in the United States.  

When Educators and Parents Disagree

This week I published an Atlantic article about what ought to happen when parents and educators disagree about how to handle the gender identity or expression of very young children. It begins with a case study taken from the premier journal of early-childhood educators:

Meet Michael, a 4-year-old who “usually comes to school in jeans and a T-shirt but always goes to the dress-up area as soon as he arrives and puts on a dress or skirt.” The preschooler is the subject of a 2019 case study in the education journal Young Children’s “Focus on Ethics” column, a recurring feature about how educators ought to respond in fraught situations––in this real case, a parent objecting to their child’s gender expression.

Take off that skirt, Michael’s mother tells her child one day while volunteering in the classroom. She orders him instead to put on firefighter gear, a cowboy hat, or “something that boys do,” the authors Stephanie Feeney, Nancy K. Freeman, and Katie Schaffer recount. Later, the parent tells the teacher, Ana, that Michael “plays female roles at home and shows little interest in toys and activities typically associated with boys.” She asks Ana to prohibit Michael from playing with “girl stuff” at school. “Ana also has observed that Michael strongly prefers playing with girls,” the authors add, “and chooses activities that are stereotypically feminine, like having tea parties and wearing dress-up clothes that have lots of ribbons and sequins. He also frequently tells the other children that he is really a girl and that he wants to be called ‘Michelle.’”

What should Ana do?

The National Association for the Education of Young Children, which publishes Young Children, has a Code of Ethical Conduct that directs teachers to “recognize and respect the unique qualities, abilities, and potential of each child”; to “develop relationships of mutual trust and create partnerships with the families we serve”; and to “acknowledge families’ childrearing values and their right to make decisions for their children.” In essence, this case study explores what ought to happen when those obligations are in conflict.

In the case study’s telling, Ana has an ethical obligation to side with the child. For my own viewpoint, click through and read the rest, because I want to focus here on some reader responses.

D.M. writes, “I just wanted to echo my agreement with what I’d call your position of ‘principled ethical humility.’ We *know* what our principles are in general, and we should stick to them, but we shouldn’t pretend to have all the answers. This is a brand-new area of ethics, it’s really fraught among *all* cultures, and it’s OK to pause and appreciate that instead of making absolutist pronouncements.”

An anonymous reader who teaches high school in New England reports struggling with the issue of kids wanting to keep their gender identity from their parents.

He emailed:

There are wonderful things about the school: the kids are very intelligent, they explore their passion and care about their classes, and the community is accepting of everyone. However, there is a strange paradox where students are simultaneously seen as helpless children who deserve month-long extensions on assignments, a minimum grade of 50% on missing work, and hours and hours of social/emotional learning while also given radical self-determinism in how they present themselves, which teachers must hide from their families. There have been a number of policy decisions related to gender identity that have made me uncomfortable.

I want to provide a window into my school's policy:

1. I’d estimate 25% of all students identify as trans or gender non-conforming. Perhaps the number is higher, but it is certainly not lower. Many of these kids have never gotten a medical diagnosis; some even make no effort to present as the opposite gender yet insist on using different names and pronouns. The majority of these students are white females.

2. I have students who have changed their name/gender identity multiple times throughout a semester. It became pretty exhausting to keep up with.

3. Many students insist on being called a different gender than they present as with the plea “do not tell my parents.” School policy is to use their legal first name and assigned gender at birth in conversations with their parents while simultaneously using the student’s preferred pronouns in all internal school communication.

This seems to be a ticking time bomb.

There are absolutely students who suffer from gender dysphoria and have made the appropriate medical/social arrangements with their families. However, these students are few and far between, and the vast majority of students that identify as gender non-confirming have done so with no medical/psychological intervention.

Without medical or psychological intervention, students live one way at school and another way at home. I cannot imagine how traumatizing and confusing that must be. There is little dialogue or communication about how to handle these situations. Instead, we accept a radical tolerance, often at the expense of struggling teenagers’ mental health. To me, hiding such important and consequential decisions from parents seems entirely unethical. But there has been virtually zero pushback from staff, most of whom I think agree with these policies.

The gender identity issue is a sensitive topic. Treating it as something as inconsequential as a nickname will lead to disastrous results for a generation already struggling with mental health to the degree that is crippling. As you said, this rigidness is not the way forward, especially if medical professionals are not involved. I am uncomfortable and worried about the liability of working in this environment. Unfortunately, I will leave this school—and possibly education—after this school year.

Michael articulates one view of the relationship between educators and parents:

Is defying the parents ever an ethical choice? It could be, in rare cases when a judge decides to remove the children from their parents’ custody. This course is reserved for extreme cases of abusive parenting. Otherwise the only ethical choice is to cooperate with the parents. Remember that the educators are not co-parents, they are essentially agents hired by parents (directly or through taxation) to attend to their children while the parents focus on the day job. If an educator notices some problem with the child, it is their duty to inform the parents, and—optionally—to offer their professional opinion on how to fix it.

Now if the parents insist on the educator doing something that the teacher finds unacceptable, e.g. forcing the child to drink milk or calling the child by a name that causes a distress to the child or disruption to the others, the educator should have an option of denying the family access to child care. That way the parents could seek to fix the problem themselves, find a therapy or specialized care facility or do homeschooling. Using your words, usurping parental rights is not an ethical choice, nor is it legal due to fiduciary duty of the educator.

I suspect some readers agree and others would describe the relationship very differently.

Jaleelah would defer less to parents as a general matter:

I can’t tell what your actual stance on parental rights is, but I strongly disagree with the premise that parents morally have any kind of final say (apart from input about severe health conditions) over what goes on in their children’s public classrooms. Consider the following “ethical dilemma.” A 4-year-old girl comes to school wearing a religious veil and takes it off upon entering the classroom. Her mother notices one day and instructs the teacher to make her put it back on. When the teacher approaches the girl, she starts crying about how she doesn’t believe in God.

What should the teacher do?

What is the difference between this situation and the trans one? In both cases, a child has understandable preferences about their identity and their preferred clothing. In both cases, a parent wants a teacher to overrule these preferences on the basis of religious belief. Much of the language you use in your article to describe the potential outcomes of the trans kid applies to the atheist kid too. “A teacher has no way to know for sure whether any preschooler or kindergartener will grow up to be atheist or otherwise non-religious.” How does this uncertainty justify forcing the kid–—or at least humouring the request to force the kid—to try out the parent’s preferred religion?

Personally, I think children deserve the same rights to belief and expression as adults. This view is shared (at least in theory) by nearly every country in the world: the US was one of the only UN members to refuse to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children who grow up in an environment that teaches them their parents’ and communities’ political and religious beliefs have authority over their own grow up to be adults who believe it is justified to pass laws restricting expression in schools and universities.

I confess that I don’t have fully formed views about the rights of children at various ages, but I don’t think it is tenable to proceed as if American or Canadian children “deserve the same rights to belief and expression as adults.” An adult can decide, say, that all doctors are quacks, that eating vegetables is for suckers, and that they’re going to stand on a street corner and denounce women to all passersby. A parent would be derelict in their duty if they didn’t compel their 6-year-old to visit the pediatrician, eat all the required nutrients, and cut out the name-calling. I do believe that children possess some rights, including some expressive rights, but deciding exactly when kids are owed deference strikes me as complicated.

Great Expectations

A longtime teacher of teenagers joins the conversation about sports by lamenting the unrealistic fantasies they can stoke:

I lost count of the number of kids who had the attitude, “why do I need an education? I’m going to be the next Kobe Bryant/Derek Jeeter/Patrick Mahomes/Lionel Messi!” A majority of male students labored under the idea that their future was as a famous, rich, pro athlete. When you tried to point out the statistical improbability of this happening, they always assumed they were the exception that proved the rule.

Then there were the parents. I had one student, a really great kid, friendly, helpful, eager, who struggled academically. When teachers or counselors would try to address his struggles with his parents, his father would deflect with, “he’s going to QB for UCLA, who cares about his grades!” Never mind that his grades would be a problem for any college, much less UCLA––this kid was 5’5”, was not in the running to QB the high-school team, and would get killed by the guys on a college team. He loved welding. He’d come to class with art pieces he’d created. I hope he got to pursue that passion.

One more kid: actual star of the high school team. In 11th grade, he was in line to be the lead QB. Instead, he spent most of that season on crutches after a twisted knee in practice required multiple surgeries. This kid had lots of options, given his relative strength academically, but so much of his focus that year was on trying to get healthy again. We as a society need to get better at managing kids’ expectations about their purpose.

A Low Point for the Catholic Church

In The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig writes on Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church’s child-molestation scandal:

This was and is the sort of darkness not seen for centuries, a historic catastrophe. It affected its direct victims, their families and loved ones, the parishes and dioceses that became responsible for settling with them, the parishioners who now had to salvage their faith. The world—and the Church—post-crisis can feel like a place too violent, too exploitative for the vulnerability of enchantment. Perhaps the pope emeritus saw the magnitude of the damage himself, and perhaps his retreat came nearest to acknowledging it.

How heavy the toll is—how it colors the Church’s recent history with a streak of predatory menace, how it demands an accounting for itself even in moments of celebration and loss for the Church, how it irrevocably complicates simple lay faith. The summary Catholic novel of the post-crisis era may well be Mary Doria Russell’s prescient The Sparrow, whose protagonist cries out before a council of his brother priests: “I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God. And I was raped.” To speak of the Church now is always to speak after the crisis; to write about the faith now is always to grapple with this ghastly inheritance. But where there remains something whatsoever to be said, there remains some hope, and some capacity for redemption. That belief may at last be the very one upon which the entire faith survives.

Provocation of the Week

In Nature, Emily Sohn defends the colonoscopy against a recent study that questioned its effectiveness at preventing deaths:

Colonoscopy is much less common in Europe, in part owing to questions about whether the test is too invasive and expensive to be worth recommending, says Michael Bretthauer, a gastroenterologist at the University of Oslo. To address these questions, he and his colleagues planned a randomized trial of colonoscopies. Starting in 2009, they recruited more than 84,000 people aged 55 to 64 from Norway, Poland and Sweden. Some were invited to get screened. Others received their usual health care but no such invitation. With about ten years of follow-up data, Bretthauer and colleagues released their attention-grabbing results in October 2022, seemingly suggesting that colonoscopies had a smaller benefit than expected.

There was just an 18% reduction in the risk of developing cancer among those who had been invited to get colonoscopies, and no significant reduction in the risk of death. But the study itself offered layers of interpretation that cast colonoscopies in a more favourable light. Overall, only 42% of people in the group that had been invited to get colonoscopies actually got one. If the compliance rate had been 100%, the researchers’ analysis showed, the test would have reduced cancer risk by 31%—from 1.22% to 0.84%—and it would have reduced the risk of death from colorectal cancer by 50%—from 0.3% to 0.15%.

Those benefits are significant, says Chyke Doubeni, a family doctor and colonoscopy researcher at the Ohio State University in Columbus, and there are reasons to think that they could be larger in other circumstances, especially in populations that experience disproportionately high rates of the disease. And despite the huge scale of the European study, ten years of follow-up is a relatively short period of time for colorectal-cancer development, says Amy Knudsen, who studies disease simulation models to inform cancer-care policy at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston. “I think we’re only going to see the impact of colonoscopy increase the longer we follow up,” she says. The European study is continuing to track participants.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

Okay, here comes our waiter. I stare at the silverware. He clicks his pen. I’m always the last to order. Sometimes my mom tries to help me by tossing out what she thinks I want.

“Cheeseburger, John?”

“... Yyyy-uhh ... yyyueaah,” I force out.

If I’m lucky, there are no follow-up questions. I’m rarely lucky.

“And how would you like that cooked?” the waiter asks.

“... ... ... ... Mmm-muh ... mmm-edium.”

His face changes. I want it medium rare, but R’s are hard, so I cut myself off.

“And what kind of cheese?”

Vowels are supposed to be easier, but I can never get through that first sound. I skip it altogether and go right for the consonant.

“... Mmmmmuh ... ... muhm-merican.”

Now our waiter understands that something is wrong. He shoots a nervous glance at my mom, who fires back a strained smile: Everything is fine. My son is fine.

“Okay, next question,” he says with stilted laughter. “Curly fries or regular?”

I want regular, but remember, R’s are hard. Unfortunately C’s are hard too. I’m trapped. I try a last-second word switch. Bad idea.

“... Eeeeeeee-uh ... eeee-uh ... ... eeee-uh, eei-ther.”

I close my menu and push it forward.

“And to drink?”

Nearly every decision in my life has been shaped by my struggle to speak. I’ve slinked away to the men’s room rather than say my name during introductions. I’ve stayed home to eat silently in front of the TV rather than struggle for a brief moment at a restaurant. I’ve let the house phone, and my cellphone, and my work phone ring and ring and ring rather than pick up to say hello.

“... Huh ... huh ... huh ...”

I can never get through the H.

I understand that my stutter may make you cringe, laugh, recoil. I know my stutter can feel like a waste of time—of yours, of mine—and that it has the power to embarrass both of us. And I’ve begun to realize that the only way to understand its power is to talk about it.

When I was first diagnosed with a speech impediment, in the fall of 1992, stuttering was viewed as something to be fixed, solved, cured—and fast!—before it’s too late. You don’t want your kid to grow up to be a stutterer.

[Read: An ‘absolute explosion’ of stuttering breakthroughs]

Few experts can even agree on the core stuttering “problem”—or how to effectively treat it, or how much to emphasize self-acceptance. Only since the turn of the millennium have scientists understood stuttering as a neurological disorder. But the research is still a bit of a mess. Some people will tell you that stuttering has to do with the language element of speech (turning our thoughts into words), while others believe that it’s more of a motor-control issue (telling our muscles how to form the sounds that make up those words).

Five to 10 percent of all kids exhibit some form of disfluency. Many, like me, start to stutter between the ages of 2 and 5. For at least 75 percent of these kids, the issue won’t follow them into adulthood. But if you still stutter at age 10, you’re likely to stutter to some extent for the rest of your life.

Stuttering is really an umbrella term used to describe a variety of hindrances in the course of saying a sentence. You probably know the classic stutter, that rapid-fire repetition: I have a st-st-st-st-stutter. But a stutter can also manifest as an unintended prolongation in the middle of a word: Do you want to go to the moooooo-ooo-oovies? Blocks are harder to explain.

Blocking on a word yields a heavy, all-encompassing silence. Dead air on the radio. You push at the first letter with everything you have, but seconds tick by and you can’t produce a sound. Some blocks can go on for a minute or more. A bad block can make you feel like you’re going to pass out. Blocking is like trying to push two positively charged magnets together: You get close, really close, and you think they’re about to finally touch, but they never do. An immense pressure builds inside your chest. You gasp for air and start again. Remember: This is just one word. You may block on the next word too.

Stuttering is partly a hereditary phenomenon. A little over a decade ago, the geneticist Dennis Drayna identified three gene mutations related to stuttered speech. We now know there are at least four “stuttering genes,” and more are likely to emerge in the coming years. But even the genetic aspect is murky: Stuttering isn’t passed down from parent to offspring in a clear dominant or recessive pattern. Even when it comes to identical twins, only one of them might stutter.

The average speech-language pathologist, or SLP, is taught to treat multiple disorders, including enunciation challenges (think of someone who has trouble articulating an R sound) and swallowing issues. Yet many therapists are ill-equipped to handle a multilayered problem like stuttering. Of the roughly 150,000 SLPs in the United States, fewer than 150 are board-certified stuttering specialists. Even today, the medical community is divided over how to effectively help a person with a stutter. Many teachers don’t know how to deal with it either. It’s lonely. We’re told that 3 million Americans talk this way, but it doesn’t feel that common. You may have a sister or dad or grandparent who stutters, but in most cases, there’s only one kid in class who stutters: you.

My kindergarten teacher, Ms. Bickford, was the first person to notice an issue with my speech. One afternoon she brought it up with my mom, who called our pediatrician, who referred her to a speech pathologist, who determined that I indeed had a problem but couldn’t offer much in the way of help. We waited for a while, hoping it would get better on its own. It got worse. My next option was to see the multipurpose therapist in the little room at school.

I attended a Catholic elementary school in Washington, D.C. My parents could afford it only because my mom cut a deal with the principal: She’d volunteer as the substitute nurse in exchange for discounted tuition. On the days she showed up at school for duty, I’d head to the nurse’s office in the basement and eat lunch with her on a laminated placemat. I loved those afternoons. But to get down there to see her, I had to walk past the little room. I hated that room. Every time I entered that room, I felt like a failure.

There’s the knock. Kids stare as I stand to leave class. I walk down two flights of slate steps, turn the corner, and enter the little room. Everything in the little room is little: little table, little chair, little bookshelf. The decor is infantilizing. I’ve always been tall and gangly. At 7, my knees barely fit under the table. Most little rooms are peppered with the same five or 10 motivational posters: neon block letters, emphatic italics, maybe an iceberg or some other visual metaphor to explain your complex existence. This little room has a strange brown carpet that I stare into when the school therapist brings up my problem. She’s careful never to use the word stutter.

Okay, let’s start from the beginning.

There’s a stack of books on the table that are meant for people younger than me. Most sentences in these books are composed of one-syllable words. The vowels on the page are emphasized—underlined or in bold—a visual cue for me to stretch out that sound. Today we’re going to practice reading “car as “cuuuuhhhh-aaarrr.” This is embarrassing. I know what car sounds like. I know how other people say car. Doing this exercise makes me feel like an idiot; not only do I have trouble speaking, but now it seems like I can’t read. Every time I block on the C, I sense a pinch of frustration from across the table. But maybe I’m imagining it. After enough attempts, I can read one whole sentence in a breathy, robotic monotone.

“Thuuuhhhh cuuuuhhhh-aaarrrr drooooove faaaaaaast dowwwwwn thuuuuhhhhh rrroooaaaad.”

For some reason, this way of speaking is considered a monumental success. I think the way I just read that is more embarrassing than my stutter. But I have to keep doing it, because it’s the Big Rule: Take your time.

[Read: Doctors are failing patients with disabilities]

Have you ever told someone who stutters to take their time? Next time you see them, ask how take your time feels. Take your time is a polite and loaded alternative to what you really mean, which is Please stop stuttering. Yet a distressing amount of speech therapy boils down to those three words.

In his influential 1956 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the sociologist Erving Goffman argued that in every social interaction, we are playing a part on an invisible stage. We want people to like us, to believe in us—no one wants to be labeled a fraud. Each time we speak, we may earn someone’s respect or lose it. We go to great lengths to sound smart, because we know that strong communicators are deemed worthy of esteem. Alex Trebek’s peerless ability to enunciate phrases during his 37-year run on Jeopardy transformed him into an icon. You can probably hear Trebek’s voice in your head right now: the clarity, the dignity, the confidence, the poise. America loved Trebek because, among other things, he was very good at saying words.

Stutterers, by contrast, are often portrayed in pop culture as idiots, or liars, or simply incompetent. In the 1992 comedy My Cousin Vinny, people wince as the stuttering public defender blocks horribly throughout his opening statement. One juror’s jaw drops in shock. (Austin Pendleton, a stuttering actor, played the part to an almost vaudevillian degree—something he later regretted; he’s said the performance “haunts” him.) In Michael Bay’s 2001 soapy blockbuster, Pearl Harbor, crucial seconds are wasted on the morning of December 7, 1941, because Red, a soldier who stutters, can’t speak under pressure. Red stumbles around the barracks gritting his teeth, trying to force out the news: “The JJJJ-JJJaps are here!” He eventually says it, but it’s too late: Enemy gunfire pierces the room where his friends are sleeping. Thanks to Red and his stupid stutter, more people than necessary have now died at Pearl Harbor.

A person who stutters spends their life racing against an internal clock.

How long have I been talking?

How long do I have until this person walks away?

When you’re a kid, there’s a quieter, slower, more insidious ticking:

Am I going to beat this before it’s too late?

After I wrote about Joe Biden’s stutter in 2019, I began digging deeper into my own personal history with the disorder. One day I tracked down my second-grade teacher, Ms. Samson, and asked if she remembered anything about the way I spoke.

[From the January/February 2020 issue: Joe Biden’s stutter, and mine]

“I love the fact that you’re writing about this and putting it out there, because, gosh, from a teacher’s point of view, there’s not a lot—I mean, I wasn’t trained …” She searched for the words. “I wasn’t told how to handle this.”

Back then, we didn’t have a cafeteria—we’d eat lunch in our classroom. Ms. Samson kept a little radio on the corner of her desk. At lunchtime, she’d tune in to WBIG Oldies 100, and the space in front of the whiteboard would become the second-grade dance floor. Each afternoon was like a kids’ wedding reception, and I couldn’t wait for it to start. I’d wolf down my turkey on white then push back my chair and dart to the front of the class. I knew that the station’s midday DJ, Kathy Whiteside, had queued up a total hit parade: the Four Tops, the Supremes, the Temptations, Sam and Dave. This was an ideal time to work on my Running Man, or to whip out an invisible towel and do the Twist.

When Ms. Samson cranked her radio, my shoulders dropped and my lungs felt full. We looked like doofuses up there in our khaki pants or plaid skirts, but we were a unit of doofuses. This has special meaning when you’re the class stutterer. An hour ago I was flustered and out of breath, pushing and pulling at a missing word, feeling that familiar sweat drip down the back of my neck. Now I’m just another kid doing the swim to “Under the Boardwalk.” One day I sashay over to Michelle B. We giggle at each other. A new song starts. Jackie Wilson’s voice lifts me higher and higher. Then the music stops and I crash back to Earth.

“Your face would turn blotchy. Really, really red,” Ms. Samson told me. “You would cut your comments short because it was just too much work, or you figured, I lost the audience. But your impulse to participate—that’s how I knew: He’s thinking. He’s thinking and he wants to talk. That was the hardest part.”

This is the tension that stutterers live with: Is it better for me to speak and potentially embarrass myself, or to shut down and say nothing at all? Neither approach yields happiness. As a young stutterer, you start to pick up little tricks to force out words. Specifically, you start moving other parts of your body when your speech breaks down.

I still do this, and I hate it. I don’t know why it works, but it does: When I’m caught on a word, I can get through a jammed sound much faster if I wiggle my right foot. Blocked on that B? Bounce your knee! Unfortunately these secondary behaviors quickly become muscle memory. Sometimes they morph into tics. They also have diminishing returns: A subtle rub of your hands in January won’t have the same conquering effect on a block in February. So that means you’re stuttering for seconds at a time and moving other parts of your body like a weirdo. It’s exhausting. The curse of these secondary behaviors is that they can be just as uncomfortable as your stutter.

Eventually, I stopped going to the little room and began seeing a new speech therapist once a week at a clinic after school. Every Wednesday, Dr. Tom would bound into the waiting room and greet me with a high five. He grew up in a big Mississippi family and spoke with a warm country drawl. He oozed patience.

This arrangement was immediately better: no more leaving class, no more kids’ books. Dr. Tom’s philosophy was to pair fluency-shaping strategies with things I’d encounter in my daily life, like board games. We tore through hours of Trouble, pressing down on the translucent dome to make the imprisoned die pop. As I moved my blue men around the board, I’d practice techniques to try to smooth out my speech. If we read passages out loud, we’d use my actual homework.

Dr. Tom’s go-to technique was a popular strategy called “easy onset.” It’s a spiritual cousin to “cuuuuhhhh-aaarrr,” but with more emphasis on the first sound of a word. The objective is to ease into the opening letter with a light touch, stretch the vowel, then shorten your exaggeration over time. No two stutterers struggle with the same collection of sounds, but every stutterer is haunted by specific vowels and consonant clusters. Many who stutter come to dread the act of saying their own name. People say their names more frequently than any other proper noun, after all, and stutterers tend to be extra disfluent when we meet new people.

My jaw locks when I go to form the J in John. I typically enter a long, painful block, then bark out the word at full volume: … … … … … … … … JOHN! Sometimes my J manifests as a rapid repetition, like a machine gun, or a Buick that won’t start: Jjjjjjjjjjjjjjohn. I’ve wasted whole afternoons fantasizing about what life might be like with another name. Why didn’t my parents choose Michael? All I’d have to do is thread that M to the I. The second syllable plops out, like a raindrop on a creek. Michael. I’ve said Michael so many times that it’s lost all meaning: Michael, Michael, Miiiichael. (Of course, if I were Michael, I’d probably block on the M.)

Stuttering is an invisible disability until the moment it manifests. To stutter is to make hundreds of awful first impressions. And an awkward exchange between two people affects not just the person being awkward, but the person forced to deal with said awkwardness. A stutterer may enter a room full of “normal” people and temporarily pass as a fellow “normal,” but the moment they open their mouth—the second that jagged speech hits another set of eyes and ears—it’s over. As Erving Goffman notes: “At such moments the individual whose presentation has been discredited may feel ashamed while the others present may feel hostile, and all the participants may come to feel ill at ease, nonplussed, out of countenance, embarrassed, experiencing the kind of anomy that is generated when the minute social system of face-to-face interaction breaks down.”

One phrase leaps out at me there: “may feel ashamed.” This assumes that the shame will pass. I wish I could pinpoint the moment when shame changed from something that periodically washed over me to something I began lugging around every day like a backpack.

Some days Dr. Tom and I would sit on the floor in front of a big mirror and study the movements of our mouths. This was harder than it sounds. The mirror ran the length of the wall, and there was nowhere else to look: I had to watch myself stutter. One day I sat close enough, with my eyes just a few inches away from the surface, that I could make out shadowy figures in a dark room on the other side of it. Discovering this was a little like learning the truth about Santa Claus: You mean everyone knows but me? There was a hidden microphone somewhere in our room. The space on the other side had little speakers to transmit our voices. (You’ve seen this on a million cop shows.) I asked Dr. Tom who was in there watching us, and he told me: Occasionally, graduate students observed our sessions, and that was a good thing, because we were teaching them how to be therapists themselves. Other days, the shadowy figure was my mom.

I don’t blame her for watching. That’s what the doctors told her to do. I have sympathy for the parents of children who stutter. You want nothing more than for your kid to live a happy and successful life, and this new thing, this ugly problem, seems to threaten that. There’s also the aforementioned race against time: With each passing year, true fluency becomes harder to attain. Many health insurers don’t cover speech therapy, preventing people with limited funds from having the chance to work with experts. And yet, even many parents who have the means—those who dutifully shuttle their kids to appointments—leave with flawed advice:

Remind them to use their techniques! Tell them to take their time!

We stutterers anticipate our blocks well before they occur. We know how our brains and lungs and lips confront every letter of the alphabet. We know what we look like, what we sound like, what we make shared spaces feel like. We know that our stutter hasn’t gotten better, and that maybe it’s getting worse. We sense that most nights you, Mom and Dad, pray for it to go away. We know you believe you’re helping. We don’t know how else to tell you this: You’re not.

When a person of authority tells a young stutterer to “use your techniques,” they are confirming the stutterer’s worst fear: No one is listening to what you say, only how you say it. Enough of this makes you not want to talk at all. Fluency techniques may work in a therapy room, but, in most cases, they’re extremely hard to deploy in the real world. Speaking like a robot is not natural.

[Read: Learning to love stuttering]

“I could see you using strategies—you were doing things with your breath,” Ms. Samson told me. “And probably you had practiced whatever it was so much, and just couldn’t live up to what you knew you could do. I could see the defeat. You would put your head down and sort of walk back to your desk.”

What would it take for me to let go of that feeling? More than two decades later, I finally had a glimpse of an answer. If I was going to make peace with the shame of stuttering, I’d have to abandon the illusion that natural fluency might one day come, that my “two voices” would magically merge. I’ll always have a voice in my head that reads this sentence, and a much different voice that reads it out loud. I don’t like that fact about myself. But I don’t have to keep fighting it.

This article has been adapted from John Hendrickson’s forthcoming book, Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

We should be living in a golden age of creativity in science and technology. We know more about the universe and ourselves than we did in any other period in history, and with easy access to superior research tools, our pace of discovery should be accelerating. But, as I wrote in the first edition of this newsletter, America is running out of new ideas.

“Everywhere we look we find that ideas … are getting harder to find,” a group of researchers from Stanford University and MIT famously concluded in a 2020 paper. Another paper found that “scientific knowledge has been in clear secular decline since the early 1970s,” and yet another concluded that “new ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did.”

In the past year, I’ve traced the decline of scientific breakthroughs and entrepreneurship, warned that some markets can strangle novelty, and investigated the domination of old movies and songs in the film and music industries. This year, a new study titled “Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive Over Time” inches us closer to an explanation for why the pace of knowledge has declined. The upshot is that any given paper today is much less likely to become influential than a paper in the same field from several decades ago. “Our study is the first to show that progress is slowing down, not just in one or two places, but across many domains of science and technology,” Michael Park, a co-author and professor at the University of Minnesota, told me.

The researchers relied on a metric called the Consolidation-Disruption Index—or CD Index—which measures the influence of new research. For example, if I write a crummy literature review and no scientist ever mentions my work because it’s so basic, my CD Index will be extremely low. If I publish a paradigm-shifting study and future scientists exclusively cite my work over the research I rendered irrelevant, my CD Index will be very high.

This new paper found that the CD Index of just about every academic domain today is in full-on mayday! mayday! descent. Across broad landscapes of science and technology, the past is eating the present, progress is plunging, and truly disruptive work is hard to come by. Despite an enormous increase in scientists and papers since the middle of the 20th century, the number of highly disruptive studies each year hasn’t increased.

Why is this happening?

One possibility is that disruptive science is becoming less productive as each field becomes more advanced and the amount of knowledge new scientists have to acquire increases. This is sometimes called the “burden of knowledge” theory. Just as picking apples from a tree becomes harder after you harvest the low-hanging fruit, science becomes harder after researchers solve the easiest mysteries. This must be true, in some cases: Calculating gravity in the 1600s basically required a telescope, pen, and paper. Discovering the Higgs boson in the 21st century required constructing a $10 billion particle collider and spending billions more firing subatomic particles at one another at near–light speed. Pretending these things are the same is not useful.

A related theory is Johan S. G. Chu’s concept of “durable dominance”—a phenomenon where highly competitive fields create a small number of dominant winners. Chu and the University of Chicago scholar James Evans found that progress has slowed in many fields because scientists are so overwhelmed by the glut of information in their domain that they’re reading and riffing on the same limited canon of famous papers. It’s more or less the same principle as a weekend couch potato overwhelmed by streaming options who opts to just watch the top-ranked TV show on Netflix. In both science and streaming, a surplus of options might be entrenching a small number of massive hits.

When I spoke with the disruption paper’s co-authors last week, they seemed interested in explanations beyond the burden-of-knowledge theory. “If the low-hanging-fruit theory were sufficient, then I think we’d expect to see the oldest fields stagnate most dramatically,” said Russell Funk, a co-author and professor at the Carlson School of Management. “But the fact that the decline in disruption is happening across so many fields of science and technology points to something broader about scientific practice, and the corporatization of science, and the decline of scientific exploration in the last few decades.”

In other words, if science is getting less productive, it’s not just because we know too much about the world. It’s because we know too little about science itself. Or, more specifically, we know too little about how to conduct research in a way that gets the best, most groundbreaking results.

According to the rules of modern academia, a young academic should build status by publishing as many papers in prestigious journals as she can, harvest the citations for clout, and solicit funding institutions for more money to keep it all going. These rules may have been created with the best intentions—to fund the most promising projects and ensure the productivity of scientists. But they have created a market logic that has some concerning consequences.

First, these rules might discourage truly free exploration. As the number of Ph.D. students has grown, National Institutes of Health funding has struggled to keep up. Thus, the success rate for new project grants has mostly declined in the past 30 years. As grants have become more competitive, savvy lab directors have strategically aimed for research that seems plausible but not too radical—optimally new rather than totally new, as one researcher put it. This approach may create a surplus of papers that are designed to advance knowledge only a little. A 2020 paper suggested that the modern emphasis on citations to measure scientific productivity has shifted rewards and behavior toward incremental science and “away from exploratory projects that are more likely to fail, but which are the fuel for future breakthroughs.” As attention given to new ideas has decreased, science has stagnated.

Second, at the far extreme, these incentives might create a surplus of papers that just aren’t any good—that is, they exist purely to advance careers, not science.

“I definitely think there’s something to the idea that there are just a lot more bullshit papers out there,” Funk told me. Rather than blame individual scientists, he said the fault lies in a system that encourages volume over quality: “There are journals, which I’d consider predatory journals, that make researchers pay money to publish their papers there, with only symbolic peer review, and then the journals play games by making the authors cite articles from the same journal.”

Funk’s predatory-journal story reminded me of the dark side of Moneyball: When any industry focuses too much on one metric, it can render the metric meaningless and warp the broader purpose of the industry. Just as we are living in a platinum age of television—more quantity but perhaps not more quality—we seem to be in a platinum age of science, in which the best you can say about the industry is that there certainly seems to be more of everything, including crap.

A year ago, I pitched the idea of an abundance agenda, arguing that the U.S. suffers from a scarcity mindset in health care, housing, and beyond. The crisis in science offers an interesting test of this thesis in that researchers are struggling with a superabundance of knowledge and studies. It’s a useful reminder that abundance is not a sufficient end point; rather, it’s an input. Science may have a deficit of disruption precisely because the industry doesn’t know how to navigate its crisis of plenty—too much knowledge to synthesize, and too many papers bolstering their authors’ reputation without expanding the frontier of science.

Edward Slingerland is a philosophy professor who wrote a book arguing that alcohol has helped humans create the world as we know it. But this January, he’ll be forgoing alcohol—at least for half of the month.

Slingerland, the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, is, for the first time, participating in Dry January, the annual tradition where drinkers go sober for the first month of the year. (Slingerland is doing just half the month.) In doing so, he’ll join a growing number of Americans (according to one poll, as much as one-fifth of the population) who participate in the annual campaign, which originated in the United Kingdom a decade ago.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: America has a drinking problem]

I reached out to Slingerland because I was curious to know what he made of the annual movement—and what it says about modern society. After all, as chronicled in Drunk, humans have spent thousands of years and countless brain cells trying to get wasted. Why are so many people now voluntarily abstaining, albeit temporarily? Does Dry January speak to something larger about our culture’s ever-evolving relationship with booze?

We discussed that and more over a beer. (Just kidding. This was over Zoom and by telephone.)

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: What do you make of Dry January as a cultural phenomenon?

Edward Slingerland: I think it’s a response to a recognition of the danger of alcohol. Alcohol is a dangerous substance. But for most of our history, alcohol had built-in safety features.

First, there were limits to how strong alcohol was. Then we invented distillation and disabled that safety feature. This happened in the West relatively recently, like, 1600s to 1700s. So we now have alcohol in this incredibly dangerous form that we just aren’t equipped to deal with biologically.

And then the other safety feature is that all cultures that use alcohol have very elaborate—both formal and informal—rituals or cultural norms that help people drink safely. Typically, your access was mediated socially: It was in ritual context or at least some sort of feasting-meal context. Historically, it’s unprecedented to have private access to alcohol. Only relatively recently do we have this ability to drive our SUV to a drive-through liquor store, load it up with cases and cases of vodka, bring it home, and just have it in the house.

I call these two dangers the dangers of distillation and isolation. I think things like Dry January are ways for people to try to reassert some kind of control—to reestablish some safety features.

Nyce: There’s some evidence to suggest that Gen Z has a different relationship with alcohol. Do you think a change can happen that quickly—that within, say, 20 to 50 years, depending on how you measure, a generation could develop a very distinct relationship with the substance?  

Slingerland: Absolutely. I mean, look at the way that attitudes toward tobacco have changed. I think the Gen Z thing is partly that alcohol is not as cool, because it’s what your parents or your uncle drinks. And so cannabis is cool—or microdosing psilocybin. But I think these are actually a bit of a fad.

I refer to alcohol as the king of intoxicants because it’s far and away the dominant intoxicant that’s used across the world throughout history. And there’s a good reason for that. It’s got some real downsides: It’s physiologically really harmful, and quite addictive physically. But then you get all of these features that make it an ideal social drug: It’s very easy to dose; it has very predictable effects across individuals; it’s easy to make; it goes well with food. We’ve had cannabis, for instance, for a very long time—probably at least 6,000 years, maybe longer. There’s a reason that when you go to a restaurant, you’re given a wine, not a cannabis, list.

With Gen Z, there’s this idea that alcohol isn’t cool, but it’s going to be difficult for them to find a functional substitute for it.

Nyce: Do you expect alcohol to be dethroned any time soon as sort of the king of substances?

Slingerland: No way. There’s just inertia, and it has a cultural significance as well. It’s really hard to imagine that in France, for example, they’re going to start serving food with cannabis on the side and not local white wine that’s been paired with the local food for hundreds of years. You see wine traditions co-evolving with culinary traditions in various parts of the world. And that co-evolution is really hard to undo.

Nyce: In Drunk, you describe many of the positive benefits of alcohol. So I was curious what you make of Dry January, whether you just see it as a check on the negative—or if you had any concerns about it, given the way that alcohol has helped us build civilizations and helped with creativity.

Slingerland: I think it’s a quite healthy attempt to check rising consumption. January is the beginning of the year. People have just been through the holiday season, where they’ve been probably drinking quite heavily at parties and family gatherings. So it just makes sense.

During Dry January, if you’re not drinking alcohol, you’re going to lose some of the functional effects. You’re going to lose the creativity boost and social bonding. But it makes sense to endure some costs occasionally if you need to course correct.

For instance, problem drinking during the pandemic became really serious. Once you up your consumption, it’s very, very hard to dial back down. And probably the most effective way to do that is a kind of hard stop for a bit to just let your physiology reset.

Nyce: With the pandemic in particular, as you say, there’s been a problem of overconsumption, but at the same time, there’s also been a lot of loneliness. It almost feels like alcohol—in moderation—could help us with the latter. How do you think about the overconsumption problem versus the social benefits?

Slingerland: It’s tricky. The pandemic was basically a natural experiment that you would never get human-subject approval for: Let’s see what happens if no one’s allowed to leave their house, but they can order a case of tequila from their local taqueria. It was the extreme version of drinking in isolation, which was really unhealthy. People tried to keep using alcohol in a social way with things like Zoom cocktail hours, but that didn’t work very well.

There’s a new study out by researchers including University of Pittsburgh’s Michael Sayette, one of the leading alcohol researchers. In face-to-face social interactions, alcohol is very helpful. It relaxes people. It makes them less self-conscious. It makes them bond better with other people. They found that in online interactions, it actually has a reverse effect. It makes you more self-conscious. In in-person interactions with alcohol, you get a mood increase that lasts afterwards—a kind of afterglow. You get the opposite with online drinking.

When I’m interacting with you right now on Zoom, I can see myself, which wouldn’t be the case if we were in person. You just focus on yourself in a way that is not good for your mood and for the smoothness of the social interaction.

Nyce: If you were to create a user guide to alcohol, what would be in it?

Slingerland: Mimic healthy cultures. So there are some cultures that have healthier drinking practices than others. Anthropologists refer to Northern versus Southern European drinking cultures. Northern drinking cultures tend to be binge drinkers; they drink hard alcohol primarily, often in groups of just men by themselves, women by themselves. Alcohol is forbidden to kids. It’s kind of taboo. The purpose of drinking is to get drunk.

[Read: America’s favorite poison]

Anglophone college culture is kind of the worst version of this, because it’s kids without fully developed prefrontal cortices doing it, and they’re drinking distilled liquors. If you want to design the unhealthiest drinking culture possible, it would be college drinking culture.

Whereas if you look at Southern European cultures like Italy or Spain, they’re drinking primarily wine and beer. They’re always drinking in the context of a meal, so it’s always around a meal table. It’s in mixed company—kids and grandparents and parents. To drink to the point of being visibly drunk is embarrassing and actually kind of shameful.

Nyce: If you had to name or describe this era of America’s relationship with alcohol, how would you do so?

Slingerland: I don’t know if this is a catchy name, but “cautious” is how I would characterize it. You think of the ’50s Mad Men era—it was just full speed ahead, three-martini lunches. I think now people have become more aware of the dangers of alcohol and the downsides. And so we’re just more wary or cautious when it comes to alcohol than we used to be.

Nyce: And how has studying and writing about it changed your perception of your own drinking? Do you think about the research when you go to imbibe with family and friends?

Slingerland: All the time. Yeah. I think about it constantly.

Nyce: Does it ruin the experience for you?  

Slingerland: I appreciate it more in some ways, because I am not just enjoying it phenomenologically as a person, but at a meta level, I can step back and think, Oh, this is what’s happening functionally. But I’ve changed my behavior in certain ways in response to my research.

Nyce: What ways are those?

Slingerland: One thing is I’ve never really liked beer, but I’ve started drinking beer occasionally. I had a get-together—like, a kickoff event for this new postdoc on this big project that I run. In the past, I would have ordered a couple of bottles of wine for the table, because that’s what I like—I prefer wine. But instead, I got beer, because one takeaway from my research is that lower-alcohol-content beverages are better. It’s easier in a social situation to drink and continue drinking and not worry about your consumption.

Most of the social benefits of alcohol that I talk about in the book come from moderate levels of intoxication—so, like, 0.08 blood-alcohol content, or about where you should not be operating heavy machinery. If you’re drinking, like, a 4 percent lager or something, you can drink that pretty much all night and never get past .08. If you want to deliver ethanol to the human brain, beer is the safest way to do that. So I started actually making a place for beer in my life where I never did before.

Nyce: Have you ever done Dry January? Or ever considered it?

Slingerland: Never in the past. But my partner and I decided last week we’re going to do Half-Dry January. We live long distance from each other, and we’re apart for two weeks of January. We’re going to do a Dry January when we’re apart so that we can indulge when we’re together.

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