Gas stoves are a new front in the culture wars. This month, an errant comment from a bureaucrat caused a full-blown conservative panic over whether such stoves would be banned, eventually prompting a White House statement that effectively walked the whole thing back.

Amid all this posturing, a more practical concern is getting lost: How much does gas actually matter when it comes to cooking? Are there some dishes that just can’t be made on electric stoves?

I called up J. Kenji López-Alt—a chef, a New York Times columnist, and the author of The Food Lab and The Wok—to discuss. While we chatted, López-Alt cooked on his gas stove in the background. But don’t take that as an endorsement: He told me that the stove came with his house, but that if he were to build a kitchen from scratch, he’d probably opt for an induction range.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: How much does the type of stove actually matter?

J. Kenji López-Alt: I would say for 99 percent of what home cooks—and even restaurant cooks—are doing at home, especially in the Western tradition, the heat source doesn’t matter much. All of your heat is being transferred to your food through the medium of a pan. A hot metal surface is a hot metal surface.

[David A. Graham: The gas-stove debate exemplifies the silliest tendencies in American politics]

One of the things that I think people who are used to cooking on gas appreciate about a gas burner is that it has nearly instant response times. When you turn it up, the flame gets bigger, and the heat gets hotter. And it’s a very visual confirmation of what you’ve done.

Induction has a very fast response as well. It’s a little bit slower than gas, because usually you’re cooking on a glass surface that will retain some heat—rather than just the air that dissipates under gas flame. With electric, you have very slow response time, because the coil will take a long time to heat up and cool down. So of the three, gas and induction are really high, as far as responsiveness goes. Electric coil is more difficult to use.

Nyce: Why do you think people get so grumpy over non-gas stoves?

López-Alt: Technology has changed. Induction is a heck of a lot better than electric coil. It’s extraordinarily efficient as far as energy use goes. With gas and heating coils, a lot of the heat that you’re creating actually dissipates into your kitchen, whereas with induction, the heat generated is literally in the surface of the pan itself. So all of the energy that you’re using goes into the pan.

Your modern induction cooktops are just a lot better than what people might think of as far as what you can get from a non-gas range. Electric coil is just a lot harder to control than either induction or gas.

Nyce: But if you have the right cook at the helm, can you make equally good food on electric?

López-Alt: As with anything, it’s a matter of getting used to it. There are some things that you can’t do. For example, when you’re stir-frying, or searing a chicken breast, and then making a pan sauce, you want to be able to adjust the heat on the go.

To be able to do that on an electric coil, you have to shift the pan on and off the element, because if you just leave it there and turn the dial, the coil is still going to be blazing hot for a long time. So you might end up hurting your chicken skin.

That’s one of the difficulties of electric coils. But some of the best restaurants in the world use solely induction.

Nyce: What are the styles of cuisine—and the specific foods—where it really would be hard to give up gas?

López-Alt: So certainly, some types of wok-cooked dishes, particularly ones that rely on that smoky wok hei flavor that comes from the aerosolized oil actually igniting in the gas flame, like a Cantonese-style chow fun. Or fried rice, for example, would have that sort of smoky flavor that you can’t get out of induction. But for most wok cooking, you don’t need it. There’s plenty of homestyle dishes that don’t have that flavor. For my Wok book tour, I brought around an induction wok cooktop. And it works just fine.           

People have this idea that you can’t cook on a wok without a gas flame. But most of the recipes in my book work just fine without one. There are very few specific recipes where that gas flavor—that smoky flavor of burnt oil—is an important part of the seasoning of the dish.

What I often recommend to people who have electric or induction is, if you want to cook something like a beef chow fun, the way you can do it is to get a portable butane-gas range. And the few times that you want to make that dish, you can pull that out, put it under your hood, or take it outside. And then you have a little portable gas thing, even though the rest of your kitchen is all induction.

My house came with a gas range. If I were to design my kitchen from scratch, I would probably go induction these days.

[Read: The why of cooking]

So that’s wok cooking. For other cuisines … so, for example, today I’m making sopes, so Mexican. And for the salsa I’m making, you need to char peppers on a gas flame. That’s part of the flavor. So I’ve put the peppers directly over the gas flame and let them really char, until the outside gets blackened.

Nyce: Could you also use a butane blowtorch for something like that?

López-Alt: For sure. In fact, there’s a technique I wrote about in my book where, if you want wok hei without a gas flame, you can get a butane torch. Essentially, you can stir-fry noodles, for example, and then spread them out onto a sheet tray, and then just use a butane torch. Pass it over them a few times, and you’ll see the oil kind of snap and crackle and char a little bit. Then put it back in the wok and finish stir-frying it. And you get that flavor that way. So there are definitely work-arounds.

Nyce: So if there are practical solutions for a lot of this stuff, do you think this debate—and the strong reactions that people have to news like this—is a little overblown?

López-Alt: For sure. I wrote online for many, many years. And I remember, any time you changed the fonts or the color scheme on the site, or had a redesign, people went nuts. People just hate, hate, hate change. And they especially hate when change is forced upon them by an outside party.

Nyce: Even if it’s good for their health.

López-Alt: You remember when the smoking ban came in, right? And people lost their minds. And then, like, two years later, it’s like, “Oh, I can go out and not have to inhale all this secondhand smoke and come home stinking.”

People who really cook a lot of, say, Cantonese dishes or certain types of Mexican food, things that really, really require that gas flavor and that direct interaction with the flame—they’re going to find workarounds. As far as restaurants go, I’m not sure, but I really hope that there are exemptions carved in place for restaurants that require wok ranges, for example. It would be insane and unfair to tell Chinese restaurants they can’t use wok burners anymore. But I think there are always industry exemptions for mandates like this, at least for any well-planned ones.

Nyce: Is there anything else from a practical perspective that you would want a home cook to know as they navigate a potential future change from gas to induction?

López-Alt: The biggest difference between cooking on the two for me is just the lack of visual feedback. Every stove is going to be slightly different, even if they all have dials from one to 10. With gas, I can see, This one’s got a really big burner that’s shooting a huge flame when I turn it to 10. Whereas with induction, who knows what that means?

It’s always better to follow visual and auditory cues written into recipes as opposed to ones like “medium for 10 minutes.” Really pay attention to what your food is doing, and correlate that to the settings on the stove. That way, you can rely on those settings instead of the visual feedback you used to rely on of the size of the flame.

Gas stoves are a new front in the culture wars. This month, an errant comment from a bureaucrat caused a full-blown conservative panic over whether such stoves would be banned, eventually prompting a White House statement that effectively walked the whole thing back.

Amid all this posturing, a more practical concern is getting lost: How much does gas actually matter when it comes to cooking? Are there some dishes that just can’t be made on electric stoves?

I called up J. Kenji López-Alt—a chef, a New York Times columnist, and the author of The Food Lab and The Wok—to discuss. While we chatted, López-Alt cooked on his gas stove in the background. But don’t take that as an endorsement: He told me that the stove came with his house, but that if he were to build a kitchen from scratch, he’d probably opt for an induction range.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: How much does the type of stove actually matter?

J. Kenji López-Alt: I would say for 99 percent of what home cooks—and even restaurant cooks—are doing at home, especially in the Western tradition, the heat source doesn’t matter much. All of your heat is being transferred to your food through the medium of a pan. A hot metal surface is a hot metal surface.

[David A. Graham: The gas-stove debate exemplifies the silliest tendencies in American politics]

One of the things that I think people who are used to cooking on gas appreciate about a gas burner is that it has nearly instant response times. When you turn it up, the flame gets bigger, and the heat gets hotter. And it’s a very visual confirmation of what you’ve done.

Induction has a very fast response as well. It’s a little bit slower than gas, because usually you’re cooking on a glass surface that will retain some heat—rather than just the air that dissipates under gas flame. With electric, you have very slow response time, because the coil will take a long time to heat up and cool down. So of the three, gas and induction are really high, as far as responsiveness goes. Electric coil is more difficult to use.

Nyce: Why do you think people get so grumpy over non-gas stoves?

López-Alt: Technology has changed. Induction is a heck of a lot better than electric coil. It’s extraordinarily efficient as far as energy use goes. With gas and heating coils, a lot of the heat that you’re creating actually dissipates into your kitchen, whereas with induction, the heat generated is literally in the surface of the pan itself. So all of the energy that you’re using goes into the pan.

Your modern induction cooktops are just a lot better than what people might think of as far as what you can get from a non-gas range. Electric coil is just a lot harder to control than either induction or gas.

Nyce: But if you have the right cook at the helm, can you make equally good food on electric?

López-Alt: As with anything, it’s a matter of getting used to it. There are some things that you can’t do. For example, when you’re stir-frying, or searing a chicken breast, and then making a pan sauce, you want to be able to adjust the heat on the go.

To be able to do that on an electric coil, you have to shift the pan on and off the element, because if you just leave it there and turn the dial, the coil is still going to be blazing hot for a long time. So you might end up hurting your chicken skin.

That’s one of the difficulties of electric coils. But some of the best restaurants in the world use solely induction.

Nyce: What are the styles of cuisine—and the specific foods—where it really would be hard to give up gas?

López-Alt: So certainly, some types of wok-cooked dishes, particularly ones that rely on that smoky wok hei flavor that comes from the aerosolized oil actually igniting in the gas flame, like a Cantonese-style chow fun. Or fried rice, for example, would have that sort of smoky flavor that you can’t get out of induction. But for most wok cooking, you don’t need it. There’s plenty of homestyle dishes that don’t have that flavor. For my Wok book tour, I brought around an induction wok cooktop. And it works just fine.           

People have this idea that you can’t cook on a wok without a gas flame. But most of the recipes in my book work just fine without one. There are very few specific recipes where that gas flavor—that smoky flavor of burnt oil—is an important part of the seasoning of the dish.

What I often recommend to people who have electric or induction is, if you want to cook something like a beef chow fun, the way you can do it is to get a portable butane-gas range. And the few times that you want to make that dish, you can pull that out, put it under your hood, or take it outside. And then you have a little portable gas thing, even though the rest of your kitchen is all induction.

My house came with a gas range. If I were to design my kitchen from scratch, I would probably go induction these days.

[Read: The why of cooking]

So that’s wok cooking. For other cuisines … so, for example, today I’m making sopes, so Mexican. And for the salsa I’m making, you need to char peppers on a gas flame. That’s part of the flavor. So I’ve put the peppers directly over the gas flame and let them really char, until the outside gets blackened.

Nyce: Could you also use a butane blowtorch for something like that?

López-Alt: For sure. In fact, there’s a technique I wrote about in my book where, if you want wok hei without a gas flame, you can get a butane torch. Essentially, you can stir-fry noodles, for example, and then spread them out onto a sheet tray, and then just use a butane torch. Pass it over them a few times, and you’ll see the oil kind of snap and crackle and char a little bit. Then put it back in the wok and finish stir-frying it. And you get that flavor that way. So there are definitely work-arounds.

Nyce: So if there are practical solutions for a lot of this stuff, do you think this debate—and the strong reactions that people have to news like this—is a little overblown?

López-Alt: For sure. I wrote online for many, many years. And I remember, any time you changed the fonts or the color scheme on the site, or had a redesign, people went nuts. People just hate, hate, hate change. And they especially hate when change is forced upon them by an outside party.

Nyce: Even if it’s good for their health.

López-Alt: You remember when the smoking ban came in, right? And people lost their minds. And then, like, two years later, it’s like, “Oh, I can go out and not have to inhale all this secondhand smoke and come home stinking.”

People who really cook a lot of, say, Cantonese dishes or certain types of Mexican food, things that really, really require that gas flavor and that direct interaction with the flame—they’re going to find workarounds. As far as restaurants go, I’m not sure, but I really hope that there are exemptions carved in place for restaurants that require wok ranges, for example. It would be insane and unfair to tell Chinese restaurants they can’t use wok burners anymore. But I think there are always industry exemptions for mandates like this, at least for any well-planned ones.

Nyce: Is there anything else from a practical perspective that you would want a home cook to know as they navigate a potential future change from gas to induction?

López-Alt: The biggest difference between cooking on the two for me is just the lack of visual feedback. Every stove is going to be slightly different, even if they all have dials from one to 10. With gas, I can see, This one’s got a really big burner that’s shooting a huge flame when I turn it to 10. Whereas with induction, who knows what that means?

It’s always better to follow visual and auditory cues written into recipes as opposed to ones like “medium for 10 minutes.” Really pay attention to what your food is doing, and correlate that to the settings on the stove. That way, you can rely on those settings instead of the visual feedback you used to rely on of the size of the flame.

When someone is accidentally shot and killed on a film set, who is responsible: the actor holding the gun, the person who handed it to him, or the professional charged with managing the movie’s weaponry? Last week, New Mexico prosecutors proposed an answer: all three.

The actor Alec Baldwin will be charged with involuntary manslaughter for the fatal shooting of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armorer—the person who manages the set’s firearms and their related safety protocols—also faces charges. Meanwhile, Assistant Director Dave Halls, the person who reportedly handed Baldwin the gun moments before the incident, has taken a plea deal on a charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon, according to prosecutors.  Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed have denied responsibility for Hutchins’s death.  

I spoke with Thomas Pimentel, a Massachusetts-based armorer, twice over the phone about the charges, the state of the armorer position in the movie industry, and whether Hollywood should stop using guns on film sets altogether.

Our conversations have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Just right off the bat, what did you make of these charges?

Thomas Pimentel: I’m happy about it. This never should have happened. It was definitely preventable. I am married with children, and I’m an armorer. So when I hear that someone gets killed because of negligence, and they leave a mom behind and they leave children behind, it’s horrible.

[Read: Why Hollywood can’t quit guns]

Nobody should lose their life over make-believe. They shouldn’t. You should expect a level of professionalism and safety in whatever workplace that you’re in. And it was unacceptable.

Nyce: Obviously, there are multiple people being charged here. Do you have any opinion about who’s responsible?

Pimentel: Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer, was inexperienced. There was live ammunition on the set. That’s just absurd.

And the assistant director never should have been handling any of those firearms or the props. That’s the armorer’s job.

Nyce: In a lawsuit, Gutierrez-Reed claims she was not in the building at the time of the shooting because she wasn’t notified that a gun was being used. What do you make of that?

Pimentel: You can probably chalk that up to them having a half assed production, is what it sounds like. This sounds like another one of the many mistakes or oversights that happened on this project.

Nyce: So, in your experience, the armorer should be the only person, other than the actor, handling the gun?

Pimentel: One hundred percent. When the armorer wakes up in the morning, those guns and the ammunition should be under lock and key. Everything should have been inventoried the night before. They look at their call sheet; they know what they need. They’ll normally have a cart that has the weapons for that particular scene locked up with keys that only they have on their person. They’ll transport them to set when they’re called to set. They’ll open up those cases. For a rehearsal, a lot of times, they will bring out the guns. Now, a lot of times you can do a rehearsal without guns.

Nyce: Baldwin was rehearsing when this happened, right?

Pimentel: Right. But the thing is, if they had not used them in rehearsal and then used them in the actual scene, would he have shot her then? Who knows. But it’s just another layer of protection that’s put in place.

When you’re ready to go, the actors stand on their marks. Firearms are called in. The armorer will walk in with the firearms and put them in the actor’s hands. If they need to fire the guns, the armorer will chamber a round into whatever gun needs to be fired. And he will say “This weapon is hot” right to the actor’s face. Of course, this is after your typical safety briefings that they have every single day and before every single scene is shot with firearms, to let everyone know that firearms are on set.

Nyce: According to court documents reviewed by The New York Times, Halls, the assistant director, is alleged to have announced “cold gun,” indicating that the weapon did not contain live rounds. And the District Attorney who filed the charges against Baldwin claimed that the actor didn’t check the gun. One of Baldwin’s lawyers issued a statement maintaining that the actor “had no reason to believe there was a live bullet in the gun—or anywhere on the movie set.” The statement said Baldwin “relied on the professionals with whom he worked, who assured him the gun did not have live rounds.” What’s your reaction to those statements?

Pimentel: So first of all, if the assistant director was the one who handed him the pistol, there was no professional involved who knew anything about firearms. So that’s hugely concerning.

[Stephen Gutowski: Guns—even props—are not toys]

Baldwin has been doing this long enough. He’s been in a lot of movies, action movies and things like that. If someone hands him a gun, what’s stopping him from looking down and looking through that chamber and saying, “oh, I got rounds in here”? “Why are we dealing with rounds? Are they dummy rounds? Can I inspect the dummy rounds myself?" He’s totally okay to ask that.

Nyce: Do you think safety is partially the actor’s responsibility?

Pimentel: Of course it is. If you do a movie about Ford versus Ferrari, you’re going to drive cars. You get in a race car, and you learn how to drive race cars. You do everything that you have to do to get as competent and proficient in that particular field as possible. Handling firearms is no different.

Anybody that uses guns in a movie should have to go through the exact same training and licensing process that people like me go through: background checks by the FBI, local and state police, insurance, things like that.

Nyce: Gutierrez-Reed’s lawsuit alleges that Baldwin ignored a request to schedule a “cross draw training.” Baldwin is not named as a defendant in Gutierrez-Reed’s suit. What do you think about that allegation?

Pimentel: Anybody who’s fired a real gun from a holster knows that it’s not a skill that you can just pick up in an afternoon, and certainly not with an antique firearm. That is something that you practice thousands of times over and over and over again.

Nyce: But can you train someone?

Pimentel: You absolutely could. As an actor, that part of your job is to make it believable. So why wouldn’t you want to give it your best foot forward?

It’s funny to me how there are so many rules, especially in filmmaking. If there’s going to be a candle on a table in a scene, I kid you not: They will have a briefing about the fire risk that day. And they will have a fire marshal on set for a candle. It’s so amazing to me, especially nowadays, because you can do so much with technology. Everyone’s seen a good flickering LED candle.

It’s make-believe. I think it’s part of the old Hollywood system. Ever since they’ve made films, they’ve used real guns with blanks in films. And it’s just the thing that people continue to do. And believe me: There are tons of productions that still, to this day, use real guns with blanks all the time, and they do it safely. Those are the people that people should be looking at and consulting, asking, “How do you stay so safe?”

Nyce: So is it a training problem, or would you ever see a world in which they remove real guns from movies altogether?

Pimentel: (Laughs.) I don’t know.

Nyce: Is that putting your profession on the line?

Pimentel: Oh, no, no. I don’t do anything with blank-firing guns anymore. I stopped working with blank-firing guns probably 10 years ago.

Nyce: Why did you do that?

Pimentel: Because it’s a hassle. The only guns that we use are airsoft guns and replica guns. And later on, in postproduction, we put in the smoke and the sound and the shells ejecting from the sides. That’s what they’re doing in films anyway. If you have a real gun on a set, a machine gun, and you’re firing blanks out of it, not only do they take the sound out and put in a new sound in postproduction; they put muzzle flash. And they’ll touch up the spent rounds that are coming out the side. So why would you even do all that? Well, it doesn’t make any sense, right?

There’s a show on CBS and Paramount+ called SEAL Team, and they show these guys having these intense firefights and explosions. They do that every week. They manage to pull all that stuff off, and they do it well and safely. So there are ways that you can do it. Does it enhance the production? It totally does. One of the best shoot-outs in movie history is this intense bank-robbery scene from the movie Heat, with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. It’s an incredible scene. And one of the things that makes it so realistic is because everyone on that set, all the actors involved, can hear it. They can feel it. There is something to be said for immersing people in things like that.

I’ve seen it a lot, too, where you hand an actor a gun that doesn’t make any noise, and they have to pretend. And a lot of these movies use airsoft guns that don’t make any sounds. And the actors are supposed to be firing these guns, and no one’s blinking at all. They’re just standing there.

Nyce: That sounds like an acting problem.

Pimentel: Ahh, yes! Thank God somebody finally said it. You’re absolutely right. Which goes back to my original point: These people are so concerned with “My character’s left-handed, so I have to spend six weeks eating soup with my left hand.” There are so many microscopic details that they pay attention to, and yet they gloss over firearm safety and realistic acting with firearms.

[Kimberly Wehle: The best hope for fixing America’s gun crisis]

There aren’t people on a film set whose job it is to come in and say, “Don’t do that.” It’s very difficult to because of the hierarchy. An armorer can come in and handle weapons, but good luck trying to speak up when you hand an A-list celebrity a pistol, and he puts his finger on the trigger and he’s not supposed to. I’ve been there: “You can’t say anything to them in front of the rest of the crew. It’ll be embarrassing.”

Nyce: But that’s why they hired you!

Pimentel: Well, you can say that about dozens of positions.

Nyce: Sounds like a power dynamic.

Pimentel: There’s so much of that involved. Not everybody is paying attention to what they should be doing in their job. It’s everywhere in every department.

Nyce: How do you design a system to protect those people from themselves and harming others?

Pimentel: Exactly. (Laughs.)

Nyce: No, I’m serious.

Pimentel: Oh, I know.

Nyce: The point of having an armorer there is for safety. If the power dynamics on set are not great and making it hard for an armorer to do their job, is it worth it to reform that job? Or should that job just not exist?

Pimentel: I think it absolutely should be reformed. Boy, I’ll tell you, the contracts for working on a movie set have changed dramatically post-#MeToo, which is great.

But nothing has changed in the industry on firearm safety because of what happened with Alec Baldwin. The day that happened, people were calling for—not only did they not want guns in movies, they didn’t want guns at all. All the celebrities came out, and they were tweeting about it. But they’re gone now. They’re on to something else, and nothing has changed.

The day after Damar Hamlin collapsed during what began as a normal game on Monday Night Football, the radio host Garrett Bush was frustrated.

Bush had watched as other commentators offered “thoughts and prayers” and speculated about when the game would be rescheduled. But all that seemed inconsequential to Bush. Here was a young man, he thought, who may never play football again. Beyond Hamlin’s health and well-being, there were more quotidian reasons to worry too: Hamlin hadn’t played long enough for his NFL pension to vest, and Bush wondered about his financial future—whether, should he be permanently disabled, Hamlin’s family would be able to afford a life’s worth of medical bills.

In a six-minute clip that has now been viewed more than 8 million times on Twitter alone, Bush rails against the deal players get in NFL contracts. “You know what the NFL will tell you?” he says. “‘We’ll look out for the people like him.’ No you won’t.”

In the video, Bush admits to being “pissed off” as he talks about previously announced cuts to former players’ disability pay during collective bargaining and the medical-review board that the NFL could use to deny disability benefits even if Social Security deems a player permanently disabled.

[Nate Jackson: I saw horrific things when I played in the NFL]

The NFL and the NFL Players Association declined to comment on Bush’s comments, according to the Financial Times. The following week, the NFL announced that it would reportedly honor Hamlin’s contract through the end of the season, rather than slicing his pay because of his absence from the field. Hamlin was also discharged from the hospital. I caught up with Bush to discuss the world’s reaction to his comments—and why he thinks it’ll take a strike for players to get the leverage needed for fairer contracts.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Just watching that clip—you’re visibly emotional. Why does this topic elicit such an emotional reaction for you?

Garrett Bush: I’m sort of conflicted. On one hand, football has done a lot for me as an individual. I played football in high school and in college. I earned a full football scholarship at Ohio University. I understand what good can come out of football. Some of my best friends in the world are people that I played with. And football teaches you a lot of things. It teaches you about time management and that sometimes life isn’t fair—that if you work really hard, you’re not guaranteed to win.

But also, on the other hand, I’ve had 17, 18 surgeries. I’ve had neck surgery three times. I’ve had back surgery. I have a pain-management doctor I go to now. I know exactly what it is to be injured.

The business of football is different from the sport. And the business is very lucrative for ownership. I don’t feel like those who profit from football do a good enough job of taking care of their players, especially when they have catastrophic injuries.

Nyce: Did it surprise you, how big the reaction to your comments was?

Bush: Yeah, it’s still kind of shocking, to be truthful. I have people calling me from my childhood. One of my classmates who lives in South Africa was like, “Oh my goodness, you’re trending in South Africa.” I’m like, Wow, that’s crazy.

I was surprised by it because I thought that everyone knew these things. I thought everyone knew that football players don’t get guaranteed contracts and that you’re not eligible for a pension plan unless you play a certain amount of years. And that, even if you do get disability, you have to go before a council in order to continue to show that you are permanently disabled.

It just goes to show you the conflicted nature of the game. Football by far is the most impactful game and one of the biggest TV and entertainment enterprises in this country. And yet, we know that football is dangerous. We kind of don’t want to know how dangerous, because it’s our guilty pleasure. We know that the players make a lot of money—more than we make—so it’s kind of like, Eh, well they’re rich. We rationalize a lot of it. And when you do that, you just push some of these issues off of the table.

Nyce: How do you think these contracts will get fixed? Do you think the responsibility is entirely on the owners?

Bush: No, no. The NFL Players Association bears a lot of blame. The Players Association does not do a good enough job of representing its players. They incentivize the players to go against their own best interests. Some of the things that they vote on are these collective-bargaining agreements that impact veterans and people who are already retired. And those veterans don’t have an opportunity to vote on their own future. So you can be disabled; you can be retired; you could have CTE. But the youngest players vote on what happens to your already settled pensions, your already settled disability payments.

[Mark Leibovich: The dark pageant of the NFL]

Also, if you’re a young player, there’s no guaranteed contracts. So thoughts and prayers are really cool, but Damar doesn’t get paid unless he’s playing in the game. And due to him being injured, he’s not guaranteed his full salary.

Nyce: What did you make of the news that the Bills are going to honor Hamlin’s contract through the end of the year? Do you think that’s enough?

Bush: No. They are very intelligent. The Bills and the NFL were in a tough spot. I’m so happy Hamlin’s out of the hospital now, and I’m glad he’s back in Buffalo and getting better. Yes, it’s a nice gesture to pay for this year. I believe that he still is not guaranteed a contract next year. And that deal is something unique to him.

You got thousands of players that something like this could happen to at any time, and the league needs to figure out a way to do something on behalf of all the players, so that they can rest assured that if something happens to them, their families can take care of their medical costs or still be able to put their kids through college.

Nyce: How do we fix it for everyone?

Bush: Well, this is the catch-22. The only way the NFL will ever bend to a point is through litigation. We learned that with CTE and the concussion lawsuits. Also, public sentiment is key, people saying, “Listen, this is not right.”

Baseball’s contracts are guaranteed. Basketball’s contracts are guaranteed. Hockey’s contracts, guaranteed. The NFL is the most lucrative revenue-wise. They’re getting billions in television rights. And they still don’t even offer guaranteed contracts for the players who are putting themselves on the line.

I think you start to see what public sentiment can do. After my comments, all of a sudden, the Bills and the NFL make an announcement that is unprecedented.  

Until the players who have voting capabilities say they’re going to strike for better benefits—and threaten to hold out for a whole entire year, this is going to continue. Because at this point, the league has all of the leverage. The Players Association has given them so much. It is going to take a strike to get some of this leverage back.

Nyce: What would you say to a critic who argues that these players knew the risk when they signed up?

Bush: Well, I would argue that the players really don’t know all of the risks when they sign up. CTE is a thing that the league denied for 20 years.

Decades ago, in the Midwest, many people that worked in coal factories got black lungs or developed certain cancers or respiratory diseases. And we didn’t know about those until scientists looked at it.

Wherever there’s a job, as an employer, it’s your job to take care of your employees, whether that’s physically, mentally, or socially. There’s a certain standard that you need to meet. There were times when steel mills didn’t have women’s restrooms. So someone would say, “That’s not right. You have to have women’s restrooms.” “Hey, you have to be wheelchair-accessible for those who have disabilities.” “You can’t have open sexual harassment in the workplace.”

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Damar Hamin’s tragedy, anti-vaxxers’ gold]

So to those people who say openly, “Well, they know what they’re getting into,” you can give case-by-case examples of the ways society has advanced. And when you get new knowledge and information that suggests that you should protect people at a higher level, I think it’d be dumb to say, “We’re just going to continue to do it because it’s something we’ve always done.”

Nyce: So I’m going to admit that I’m not a person who watches football. That night, when the accident happened, my initial instinct was, Why do we do this? I know you said you’ve been feeling a little conflicted about football more generally. I was wondering: Why should we continue to play football if the risk is so high?

Bush: That’s a very great question.

I think people live vicariously through football players and athletes. I still don’t understand fandom that much. Like, why am I so enthralled in watching the Cleveland Browns, when it gives me nothing back? I think it just comes down to competition and tribalism. In our society, in the United States, we have to pick a side. Are you going to be a Republican or a Democrat? Do you like Walmart or Target? Is it Batman or Superman? And I think sports are one of the last and best places where you can do that at a very high level. You get to see violence; you get to see drama; you get to be mad at the refs.

The NFL is really great at narratives. When Damar comes back and plays, think about how many tickets they’ll sell. Place’ll be sold out. Think about how many jerseys they’ll sell. It’s a very strong hook.

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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When the Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field on Monday night, I was watching a cartoon with my 3-year-old son. When that ended, my son began playing with magnets on the floor, and I switched over to the game. Instead of football, I witnessed a frantic scene. A “routine football hit”—just like the thousands I had been involved in as a professional player—had left a 24-year-old man lying motionless on the grass, an EMT’s hands clasped above his sternum, trying to save his life.

Nearly nine minutes of CPR happened on that field as Hamlin’s teammates circled him and watched. The look on their faces told the real story: They believed they were watching their brother die—something most football players never consider as a possibility. An injury? Sure, we’ve all seen plenty of them. But not a fatality. It was shocking. So, frankly, was the fact that the NFL adjourned the game. The game always goes on.

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Damar Hamlin’s tragedy, anti-vaxxer’s gold]

Once, I was knocked momentarily unconscious in a nationally televised game. The trainer rushed out, and I came to while he was still holding my head and neck. I knew the cameras would be on me, so I moved my arms and legs around to let my mother know that I wasn’t paralyzed. I’m fine, Ma! No biggie!

Neither of my parents was wild about me pursuing football. When I was in middle school, they made a rule that I couldn’t play until high school, hoping that I’d lose interest. No such luck. I was already a head-over-heels football devotee. I had heroes. I collected football players’ cards. I watched every game. I read the sports page. I had the hats, the starter jackets, the jerseys. And I reveled in the mythology of the tough-guy football player who was willing to risk it all. Ronnie Lott, a safety for my beloved San Francisco 49ers, was given the choice of a season-ending finger surgery or finger amputation. He told them to cut it off. That’s how much football meant to him. Oh, how I longed to be involved with something that meant that much to me.

As soon as freshman year rolled around, I signed up, and the blood began to flow immediately. First from blisters and welts, then from gashes. It became clear after one day of football practice that pain would be a constant. Every play involved an action that caused an inflammatory process in my body. Bang. Crack. Smack. Hard plastic helmets with metal face masks sinking into supple flesh and bone. Crack.

“That doesn’t hurt, does it?”

“Of course not!”

Pretending not to be hurt is the norm. You just hit me as hard as you could, and guess what? It didn’t hurt! Half of football is enduring pain. The other half is inflicting it. But as a prepubescent freshman with no football experience, I was absorbing more than I was dishing out. One late-fall day at practice, I chased a pass across the middle of the field and was cracked in the temple by a pubescent sophomore. I crumpled to the ground and just lay there for a few minutes before being helped to the sideline. It must have taken me too long to get there.

“Hurry up, Jackson!” Coach yelled. “We’re burning daylight!”

I watched the rest of that practice and sat out the next week—clearly, in retrospect, concussed. But everyone else kept playing. The game always goes on.

A few years later, when I was a starting safety on varsity, the opposing quarterback was hit so hard by our linebacker, and at such a unique angle, that his chin strap snapped and his face mask was pushed through his upper lip into his mouth. He came to rest at my feet, spitting out chunks of flesh and teeth. An ambulance came onto the field and loaded him in, then drove off the field and out a side gate. It was driving along the other side of the fence, not yet out of sight, when the opposing team’s offense broke the huddle and stepped to the line of scrimmage. The game always goes on.

I played in college: more injuries. I played in the NFL: more injuries. In 2007, as a tight end for the Denver Broncos, I watched the Buffalo Bills player Kevin Everett collapse to the ground after another “routine football hit.” He had a fracture and dislocation in his cervical spine. “He looks dead,” my teammate said to me, half-joking, the both of us believing, as we all did, that although we were risking injury, no one was going to die out there.

Everett was on that field for about 15 minutes before he was finally loaded in an ambulance and taken away. His departure elicited a powerful ovation from the crowd, but as soon as that ambulance disappeared into the tunnel, the anticipatory murmur returned to the at-capacity crowd. Those spectators were there for a reason. The whistle blew and the game resumed. The game always goes on—with or without you.

Never was this more clear than when my career ended for good. When all of the contusions, blisters, torn muscles, dislocated fingers, separated shoulders, and cracked ribs were healed. When no one was coming to hurt me anymore. When doctors no longer stood in a circle to watch me work, waiting for me to drop. When I no longer had to be my best. When I became just like everyone else—watching the fight from the sidelines.

Of all the pain I had endured on the football field, nothing hurt as bad as watching the game go on without me.

[Mark Leibovich: The dark pageant of the NFL]

That 2007 Broncos helmet sits on a shelf at my house. There are three stickers on the back: No. 81, that’s me. No. 29—that was my teammate Damien Nash, who died that off-season after collapsing at a charity basketball game at his old high school. And No. 27—that was my teammate Darrent Williams, who also died that off-season, in the wee hours of New Year’s morning, shot dead in a stretch limo. The Broncos let us keep our helmets at the end of every season. I’ve given most of them away, but this one is special to me.

There’s another sticker on that helmet, too. It’s small, rectangular. It appears on every football helmet in America—high school, college, and professional. It reads:

WARNING: No helmet can prevent serious head or neck injuries a player might receive while participating in football. Do not use this helmet to butt, ram or spear an opposing player. This is in violation of the football rules and such use can result in severe head or neck injuries, paralysis, or death to you and possible injury to your opponent.

No one ever pointed that sticker out to me. It’s small enough to miss, so I never actually read it until I was done playing. My son surely doesn’t read it when he asks me to put the helmet on his head. He’ll stagger around under its weight, giggling, blissfully unaware of what I’ve done in that helmet and what’s been done to me.

As the ESPN broadcasters struggled in the unscripted aftermath of Damar Hamlin’s injury, I struggled with a question of my own. When people ask me if I’ll let my son play football, I always say: “We’ll see what he’s good at. I want him to pursue his interests.” Because what kind of father would keep his child from chasing his dreams?

But seeing the heartbroken faces of Hamlin’s teammates, who, 15 minutes prior, were living out their own dreams as professional football players; and seeing Hamlin himself—a beloved teammate, a model of hard work, and only 24 years old—laid out on the field, fighting to survive a “routine football hit,” I had to ask myself: Would a good father let his son play a game that always goes on?

On Monday, the Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed from cardiac arrest during an NFL game. Nearly right away—with little information about Hamlin’s condition publicly available—vaccine-disinformation purveyors hopped onto Twitter to promote the myth that athletes are dying because of the coronavirus shot.

By Tuesday, according to data from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that studies disinformation and online hate, tweets containing the phrase “died suddenly” (which the group labels an “anti-vaxx trope”) had quadrupled, numbering almost 17,000—four times the daily average of about 4,000.

I spoke over the phone to the CCDH’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, to talk about the entire episode—and how it compares with previous vaccine-disinformation campaigns on Twitter. Ahmed did not hold back when discussing “the sociopathic, predatory nature of these people who prey on tragedy to spread bullshit.” (As of this writing, Hamlin remains in critical condition.)

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Can you talk to me a little bit about what you saw after the Hamlin collapse—what the volume of the anti-vax disinformation looked like online?

Imran Ahmed: First of all, it’s worth saying that anti-vaxxers have proven extremely opportunistic—parasites, really, who feed on the algorithmic salience of breaking news and current events to amplify their own narrative.

We have seen consistently that every time a high-profile death has occurred, very quickly, anti-vaxxers have jumped on and said, Yes, that happened because of the vaccine, and here’s the information about it. Right now, they’re trying to promote the anti-vax documentary Died Suddenly.

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

This is about gaming social-media platforms. They don’t actually care about the narrative content of the idea that a 24-year-old footballer who was vaccinated some time ago suddenly collapsed on the pitch. What they care about is the mathematical amplification that is theirs to enjoy, despite the fact they promote false information all the time, breaking the rules of the platforms. Platforms do not allow the deliberate spread of deadly disinformation. Nevertheless, these people are allowed to continue.

Nyce: Talk to me about how died suddenly became an anti-vaccine trope.

Ahmed: The idea that people are going to die as a result of the vaccine has always been a central charge. Anti-vaxxers only have three charges. One was that COVID’s not that bad. The second is that vaccines are bad. A third is you can’t trust doctors. There were only ever three themes that underpinned all the memes.

This is a classic example of the “vaccines are bad” type. And they’ve been saying for a long time that vaccines are going to kill people. What has proven to continue to be effective messaging is that in that short space between someone dying of unclear causes and the official medical examiner or coroner deciding what was the cause of death, anti-vaxxers will immediately jump in and use that space in which there is uncertainty to say, “The vaccine did it.” Of course, it takes a couple of days for doctors or coroners to work out what exactly happened. This isn’t about other people being bad at getting information out. This is about bad actors weaponizing those moments in which science is doing its job, which is trying to gather evidence. And they are really happy to weaponize the deliberate pace of science in order to sow disinformation.

Nyce: And how do we combat that kind of disinformation?

Ahmed: Really simply: Don’t give them the world’s most powerful communications platform to spread this stuff. There is no way to combat it. This is an asymmetric battle, because disinformation is designed to be non-falsifiable. So how do you falsify in the absence of actual medical information in that period? How do you falsify that they died of a vaccine? Of course it’s implausible. You’re not going to spend every moment of your day trying to debunk the overwhelming tidal wave of bullshit that comes from anti-vaxxers.

It’s an asymmetric battle, because they can flood the zone with lies faster than we could possibly debunk them. So this is not a debunking job. This is a [question of] why are people who systematically break the rules of platforms allowed to continue to do so? And the reason why is because it draws attention. And for social-media platforms, they are in an unholy battle right now to hold on to the ill-gotten revenue generated by the attention given to deliberate disinformation.

Nyce: Obviously, right now Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and the policy changes he has made to moderation, is a hot topic. Did anything about the way that this unfolded on Twitter surprise you? Do you think it would have been different had Elon not been in charge?

Ahmed: No, it wouldn’t have been different. This is not an Elon Musk question. Twitter has always been atrocious at dealing with anti-vax disinformation. And it took a long time for them to act, for example, on the Disinformation Dozen that CCDH wrote about in early 2021. Twitter is an incredibly badly run company, and it has been for a long time. It has never had sufficient moderation staff to be able to deal with things.

What Twitter’s playbook used to be was to tell everyone that they’re trying their best. Elon, in one respect, is much more honest about it. He’s doing nothing, and he’s saying, Yeah, I’m doing nothing, mate.

Nyce: With this particular incident, how much were the usual suspects involved? You mentioned the Dozen that you all had reported on in 2021.

Ahmed: These are all familiar bullshit artists. One of them is the Twitter account for the movie Died Suddenly.

Nyce: I’m not sure how many people know this: Died Suddenly is a viral documentary. And that phrase and that hashtag are considered anti-vax and have become a meme in that community?

Ahmed: It’s the hashtag chosen by the producers of this movie, which alleges that people who die suddenly are dying because of the vaccine.

My wife and I are hoping to have children in the next couple of years. And when you become a parent, you start to think about, What if we bring this thing into the world that is wonderful, and it dies in the first year of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome? And it’s like someone coming along and preying on that anxiety, and telling you, “No, no, that’s because of the vaccine, these sudden deaths. The doctors have been lying to you—they’re in a big cabal. They’re killing your child.”

It is the sociopathic, predatory nature of these people who prey on tragedy to spread bullshit, and it is so depressing that anyone would help them—let alone some of the biggest companies in the world, which are not just facilitating but helping to monetize and often knowingly enabling this kind of parasitic behavior.

Nyce: You all reported that the number of “died suddenly” tweets quadrupled after the incident on Monday night. How does that compare to other similar disinformation campaigns around prominent people either having cardiac episodes or dying?

Ahmed: The baseline was different when the pandemic was active, because there was a high baseline. So this is a sudden resurgence of activity. We haven’t seen this kind of resurgence recently. Their messages are taking advantage of the weakened immune system in social media and in particular on Twitter. Because Twitter really has no immune system and is completely immunocompromised. It’s now ridden with disinformation actors pushing disinformation narratives, making it an incredibly uncertain environment to get information from. Because you don’t know who’s posting what and for what reason.

[Tom Barlett: The vaccine scientist spreading vaccine misinformation]

And the truth is that because of the way the algorithms work, at a really simple level, disinformation has the advantage on social-media platforms, because it receives engagement from people who support it and people who oppose it and people who are fact-checking it. And the problem is that these narratives then start to build trends of their own.

Nyce: A lot of people were really surprised by how quickly the anti-vax stuff started cropping up after Hamlin’s collapse on Monday night. Were you surprised by the timeline at all?

Ahmed: No, no. They’re really fast, because, look, they don’t have to worry about coming up with facts. They just have to come up with a lie. You can be the best cardiac surgeon in the world. You could be watching, and you would have no idea what happened. But for someone selling lies—I could make up something. “It was an invisible horse. It trampled him. Didn’t you see it? It was an invisible horse. I’m sure. I could hear it. I couldn’t see it, obviously, because it’s invisible, but I could hear it. Go back and listen to it really carefully. The crowd is very loud, but there’s definitely an invisible horse.” I mean, this sort of junk is very easy to make up.

And by the way, saying he died because of a vaccine is as ludicrous as saying he died because of an invisible horse. It is profoundly ludicrous to me, because more than two-thirds of the world’s population has taken the vaccine—billions of people.

New Year’s resolutions are a time for reflection—a chance to think about the limited time we have on this Earth and how to use it wisely.

Oliver Burkeman is a writer who focuses on this nexus of mortality and productivity. He is the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (4,000 weeks is about the length of the average American’s life span). I caught up with him to discuss New Year’s–resolution making and breaking, and why you should consider not setting your resolutions until mid-January.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Do you think New Year’s resolutions are worth making, considering we’re all going to die, as your book posits so bluntly?

Oliver Burkeman: [Laughs.] I don’t think the fact that we’re all going to die means that setting intentions for personal changes is automatically a bad thing. Confronting how short our lives are, and how limited our time is, is actually a sort of precondition for doing meaningful things, including making personal changes. It helps you get a lot of clarity about which kinds of resolutions are really worth using your precious time on and which are not.

[Arthur C. Brooks: New Year’s resolutions that will actually lead to happiness]

I do think that in the culture of New Year’s resolutions, there’s a really heavy dose of perfectionism—a sense in which it’s all about starting completely afresh and being completely perfect in some area of life from this day forward. I don’t think fresh starts like that are actually possible, and I don’t think aiming to make them is the healthiest way to change.

Nyce: A lot of the most popular resolutions are around money and eating and losing weight. Do you think those are worth considering, given our finite amount of time on the planet?

Burkeman: I don’t think it’s a question of the subject matter. Anything could be the most important thing for a given person to focus on.

Nyce: Are you totally topic agnostic? Like, if your goal is to eat more cupcakes in 2023, go for it?

Burkeman: I suppose I’m not 100 percent topic agnostic. There are some activities where it’s pretty hard to suggest that they would be a part of anybody’s meaningful life. But I’m pretty topic agnostic. The crucial question we have to ask ourselves is why we’re doing things. It’s so obviously the case that more physical exercise can improve the quality of some people’s lives. But it’s also so obviously the case that there are people who are punishing themselves in some way or another through exercise.

I do think that probably one of the pitfalls of New Year’s–resolution culture is that it encourages us all to buy into the idea that you need to make some big change in order to be a minimally acceptable, worthwhile person. And that doesn’t leave any room for the thought that maybe you’re more okay than you thought. Maybe you don’t need to change in some particular way. Maybe reconciling yourself to certain ways that you are is a more powerful thing.

A psychotherapist called Bruce Tift has this really interesting thought experiment: Whatever it is that you dislike most about yourself—your short temper or your lack of self-discipline—just imagine if that thing was going to be with you in some form ’til the end of your life. What if you were never going to change the thing about you that you so desperately long to change? I think, for a lot of people, that’s quite a liberating thought. What possibilities might open up if you knew that you weren’t going to change that thing?

Nyce: I feel like so much of your book is about freeing yourself from the productivity trap—understanding that there are infinite choices you can make in a life, and not feeling guilt that you don’t answer every email and cross every item off your checklist. And yet, New Year’s resolutions are almost all about that.

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Burkeman: I think, if you look into the deep motivations driving them, often, it’s like, 2023 is finally going to be the year that I transcend the human condition—the year I overcome the temptation to eat junk food, with more self-discipline than any human ever could have. It’s like, “Well, it’s not going to be the year that you transcend the human condition.” Because nobody ever can.

Nyce: Talk to me a little bit about what resolutions might make sense if we were to stop treating our lives as though they are something to be tamed.

Burkeman: It’s helpful for resolutions to be resilient—ones that you’re going to be able to stick with even when life doesn’t run as perfectly as you planned. I like the idea that Dan Harris, the meditation writer and podcaster, talks about, which is resolving to do things “day-ish”—the notion that you can make your plan for change a lot more sustainable if it’s not so rigid that one missed day spells failure.

The other thing is just to remember that the difference between not doing anything at all and doing 10 minutes a few times a week is absolute. It’s the same idea as “the best kind of workout to do is the one you’re actually going to do.” If it happens to not be the ideal physical regimen according to science right now, that couldn’t matter less.

I don’t think there’s anything helpful about resolutions that put you at war with yourself. Often, it’s basically just a resolution to, like, shout even louder at yourself this year until you finally do the things that you think you ought to be doing. That kind of internal combat never works in the end, because you start to resent the person who’s yelling at you to do all these things—even if that person is yourself.

Nyce: Are there any anti-resolutions, let’s call them, that you would consider having people make?

Burkeman: There’s something appealing about the idea of just postponing New Year’s resolutions until the first week or two of January. Otherwise, you get past the incredibly symbolic January 1 date, and it’s like, Well, any hope I had of changing in 2023 is gone; I’ve already failed.

[Read: The best time-management advice is depressing but liberating]

It’s also important not to let the idea of changing your personality get in the way of just actually doing things differently. Probably many people have done the kind of thing where they are like, I’m going to start being the kind of person who keeps in touch with old friends. Every week, I’m going to reach out to two friends who I haven’t talked to for ages. And it actually ends up being a disincentive to just getting in touch with one friend today. This notion of changing our habits can be an obstacle to just right now, today, once doing a thing. If you’re daunted by becoming a runner or becoming a meditator, just go for a run; just sit down and meditate.

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