When the news first broke that George Santos, the freshman Republican representative from Long Island, had lied on his résumé, my first thought was, Well, of course—he’s a politician. As the scope of the lies grew, however, my evaluation changed: not a politician, but a con artist.

It’s a difference that I’ve stressed repeatedly in the years since I published a book about con artists. Branding anyone who misrepresents something or lies a bit as a con artist might be convenient, but if we do so, the term loses all meaning. For con artists, lying is a way of being. It reaches past exaggeration or misrepresentation into a prevailing disconnect from reality.

Santos’s long list of fabrications brings to mind some of the most prolific con artists of the past century. His educational history is made up: no attendance at Horace Mann, as far as anyone can tell. No Baruch, no NYU. In fact, no college degree at all. Though you have to admire his penchant for specifics—top 1 percent of his (nonexistent) Baruch class! (For one of many historical analogues, see Ferdinand Waldo Demara, a.k.a. the Great Impostor. Demara, a high-school dropout, made a habit of claiming others’ credentials as his own, including Ph.D.s, M.D.s, and any other degree he could get a hold of.) Nor do Goldman Sachs or Citigroup have records of Santos working there. (For a historic tour de force of fake employment histories, see Clark Rockefeller—real name, Christian Gerhartsreiter—who was not only a fake Rockefeller but also a claimant to quite the nonexistent business pedigree.) And that’s merely a sampling of Santos’s lies.

[Read: Why Americans get conned again and again]

How does someone in the public eye ever hope that deceptions of this magnitude will go undetected? What explains con artists’ impulse to deceive, repeatedly, even as the fictions they tell become harder to maintain? These questions have fascinated psychologists for years—and we’re beginning to find answers.

In three years of research on con artists—interviewing them, spending time with them, submitting them to psychological questionnaires, and reading any available psychological literature on them—I found that con artists tend to exhibit some combination of the so-called dark triad of personality traits, which have been studied in deceptive behavior more broadly: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Although psychopathy tends to get a lot of attention—few things are as eye-catching as the word psychopath—the trait that, to me, exemplifies the psychology of the con, and explains the hubris behind a pyramid of lies as high as Santos’s, is narcissism.

Narcissism in the case of the confidence artist is not narcissism in the sense that you and I might use when talking about someone who feels that the world revolves around them. It’s an almost pathological hubris; the thought that you haven’t gotten caught yet, so you never will get caught. The sense that, out of everyone, you deserve it the most, whatever it might be. True narcissism lets you rationalize all manner of sin; it’s self-delusion taken to an extreme.

Narcissism breeds, as well, a self-reinforcing cycle: The more you lie, the more entitled you feel—and the more qualified. In 2019, an international group of psychologists—Francesca Gino of Harvard, Wiley Wakeman of the Stockholm School of Economics, and Celia Moore of Bocconi University, in Italy—ran a series of studies that looked at cheating’s effects on self-image. Would people who cut corners on a task feel more or less confident in their skills afterward? The results were somewhat counterintuitive: Subjects who lied about their performance on a series of matrix problems actually felt more competent afterward. I must be good at this! Look at how well I did! (Ignore, for a moment, that I inflated my results.)

[Read: Can you spot a liar?]

The psychologists also went a step beyond the typical laboratory games to a pursuit more directly relevant to Santos: lying on a résumé. Participants were given a task—apply for a job using supplied credentials—and would receive a bonus if their application was deemed to be in the top 25 percent of all applicants. The trick was that each of the supplied credentials could be twisted or misrepresented, if the applicant so desired. Oxford Brookes University could become the University of Oxford. A two-week executive-education program at Harvard could become an actual degree from Harvard. And second-class honors could be inflated to first-class honors. A full 35 percent of participants chose to misrepresent themselves on at least one of their credentials—and the ones who did reported feeling significantly more competent at the end than those who had accurately conveyed their qualifications. It’s the extreme of dressing for the job you want—to the point where you begin to believe you’re more qualified for that job than those who worked for it.

The result is a perverse dynamic. The more a person like George Santos misrepresents himself and cons others for his own gain, the more entitled he feels to keep going. Why should I resign when I’m the most qualified for the job? The con artist, at least to some degree, comes to believe his own lies. One recent series of studies found that people who were confronted with evidence of self-deception—believing themselves to have performed better than they actually did, and better than the average person, on a series of trivia questions—not only failed to acknowledge their self-delusion but began to see others as the ones prone to it. (Cue Santos’s recent interview with Piers Morgan, in which the representative mostly deflected responsibility for his lies.)

Of course, it’s not enough to lie and justify your conning to yourself. You have to convince others to believe in you. I’ve argued that there’s a con for everyone: Not everyone will fall for every con, but anyone can fall for a con that’s well suited to them. The master con artist knows how to pick the right victims and the right venue—and then how to sell his story most effectively.

Here, Santos chose well. Politics is an area where shades of gray aren’t just tolerated; they are the norm. So if anyone ever catches you in a lie, it’s easy enough to explain it away. Add to that Santos’s choice of district—on Long Island, where there was little competition (he ran uncontested for the Republican nomination) and an element of time pressure (last-minute changes in the district-map lines thwarted would-be challengers)—and you have a perfect stage for even the biggest lies to go largely ignored.

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: A resigned politician’s advice for George Santos]

Even in the ideal arena, how do you get others to put their trust in you? Con artists seem to intuitively grasp what psychology researchers know: We tend to trust people who appear and act similarly to us. (Some studies have grouped people together in relatively arbitrary ways, like whether they over- or underestimated the number of dots in a picture or whether they preferred art by Kandinsky or Klee, finding that participants were kinder to those they thought were like them.) Santos claimed to be Jewish, for instance, when he ran against Jewish opponents—and presumably wanted to capture that voter demographic. (He later claimed he had said he was “Jew-ish,” rather than “Jewish.”)

When all else fails, emotion, emotion, emotion. The more emotional we are, the more likely we are to give someone the benefit of the doubt and put our logic aside. Santos’s mother dying because of 9/11 was apparently false. Some of his employees dying in the Pulse nightclub shootings was also apparently false. His grandparents surviving the Holocaust, again, appears to have been fabricated. As Demara, the master con artist, once put it, Americans want to be liked more than they want to be right. We’d rather err on the side of sympathy than distrust. My heart goes out to the victim of tragedy—and if I suspect he’s making it up, I’ll keep it to myself.

Sure, there are calls for Santos to resign, and a House ethics investigation could be coming, to look into multiple complaints about his behavior. “A sick puppy,” Senator Mitt Romney called Santos at the State of the Union. And yet he’s still in Congress, head apparently not bowed in shame.

George Santos is, at the moment, still a sitting member of Congress. He somehow manages this despite having been caught fabricating parts of his résumé; despite telling weird, at times disturbing lies (such as 9/11 having “claimed [his] mothers life”); despite having been accused of running multiple dog-related scams; despite calls for him to step down; despite a federal investigation into his finances; and despite a scolding from Mitt Romney at the State of the Union. According to one poll late last month, 78 percent of Santos’s constituents believe he should resign. And yet, Santos insists that he will not (though he has owned up in part to “embellishing” his résumé).

How does a politician decide whether to cling to office or let go? To get an insider’s understanding of the process, I called up Jeff Smith, a former Democratic Missouri state senator who resigned his post in 2009 upon pleading guilty to obstructing justice. Smith admitted to lying to investigators in a campaign-finance-related inquiry, and spent a year in prison for it.

[Read: George Santos, the GOP’s useful liar]

Nowadays, Smith told me he regularly fields calls from panicked politicians hoping for advice on navigating scandal. His playbook tends to lean toward the practical—staying out of jail, fixing one’s marriage—and the occasional reminder that perhaps there is more to life than holding public office.

We chatted by phone last Monday afternoon, discussing the Santos case specifically and whether the resignation calculus for any given politician has changed at all since the election of Donald Trump.

Our conversations have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Do you think resignation is a decision, or is it forced upon you?

Jeff Smith: Well, in my case, it wasn’t a decision. I resigned because I had pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. And once I made that decision, there was no decision about resigning, because, legally, I wouldn’t be allowed to serve. I definitely hear from a lot of elected officials who are going through challenges not unlike the one that I went through.

Nyce: Do you? Do you run a “should you resign?” consulting business on the side?

Smith: [Laughs] I wish I got paid for it. I would probably be retired by now if I charged by the hour, because I hear from a lot of political figures around the country who are experiencing stuff like this.

Nyce: What do you say? What’s in your playbook?

Smith: The No. 1 thing I say is that if what they’re alleging is true, how you go down determines whether or not you can get back up. If you go down saying, “The Feds framed me; my political opponents framed me; everybody was out to get me,” then, in most cases, it’s going to be very difficult for you to come back from that, because you went down lashing out at everybody else instead of taking responsibility for your mistakes. If you drag all the people who backed you into a fight and then information emerges that portrays you in a negative light, then you’ve used up that reservoir of goodwill.

Nyce: When you advise people, what are the factors you look at? Public-opinion polls, viability for the next election?

Smith: What’s the evidence against you? What’s going to come out? What are they going to find when they dig deeper? A lot of people who reach out are at the very front end of this. They’ve gotten a call from the FBI, they’ve gotten a call from a reporter, and they’re freaking out.

Nyce: Do you calm them down? Or do you say, “Yeah, you should be freaking out”?

Smith: It depends. Everyone’s got a different situation. I’ve definitely had some where I’m like, “Look, man, you’re going to be fine.”

Nyce: If Santos came to you today, what would you advise him?

Smith: I would say, “As a human being, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you decided to get into this to help people and make a difference and stand up for the things you believe in. But if you’re honest with yourself, you know that you’re not effective in doing that right now. And I don’t envision that changing.”

Nyce: How do you think about the duty to constituents in these situations?

Smith: No one’s going to take you seriously when you go into their office and say, “I’ve got a bill to help the survivors of 9/11. And I’m wondering if you’ll co-sponsor it.” No, they’re not going to co-sponsor your bill right now, because you’re a national embarrassment.

That’s what the legislative process is. It’s going around and saying, “Mr. Speaker, can you refer my bill to a committee? Mr. Chairman, can you give my bill a hearing?” All you’re doing is asking all these people for these things, and you can’t do it with any effectiveness if you’re a laughingstock.

[David A. Graham: The George Santos saga isn’t (just) funny]

Santos can’t represent his constituents in the way they deserve to be represented. But I understand from a legal perspective why someone would be loath to resign at this juncture. It’s very simple: If you decide to negotiate a plea deal, that’s something you can give them—the resignation of your office. And so a lot of people will cling to the office. There’s an element of selfishness to it, but it’s probably a wise legal strategy—to hold on to that office so you have something to bargain with.

Nyce: What’s something about resignations that most people from the outside don’t realize? What’s it like to be in the inner circle? Or be the person resigning?

Smith: Well, if you’re the principal, you’ve definitely got a lot of people who refuse to believe that you did anything wrong—who are telling you to fight it. Especially in my circumstance. I lied about a campaign postcard—about whether I was aware that one of my aides gave information about my opponent’s attendance record to a third party who put out a campaign postcard. When I was in the very final days, I couldn’t really talk about it with people. But with the very few people that I did discuss it with, it was like, “Why would you resign over that? Compared to what other people get away with?”

Most people who are your closest intimates will believe that you can do no wrong, and those are not the best people to be receiving advice from, because you have to be coldly rational in those moments. It’s very easy and very tempting psychologically, because you are facing this terrible crisis and you’re beaten down, and then you’ve got these people who are your closest allies. And they sometimes are telling you, “No way. We worked so hard for this. We can’t just give it all up.” They’re not necessarily the best people to be taking counsel from. That’s why you should hire a good attorney, because in most cases, you’re in legal jeopardy.

I definitely had some people suggesting, “Oh, you can beat these charges. It’s a fucking postcard.” It’s very tempting to take that advice. But it would’ve cost me millions of dollars to defend myself in court, and there was a good chance I would have lost. And if I’d lost, I’d have gone away for, like, five years instead of, like, a year. You’ve got to put out a matrix and do the math and look at the probabilities and take the emotion out of your decision. That’s my advice.

Nyce: Do you think the resignation calculus has changed in the Trump era?

Smith: Sure. You see a guy that does a dozen things that would have been career-ending for any politician in modern American political history. And he is just like Houdini. Trump changed the rules, and people continue to try to test the boundaries to see if the new boundaries apply to them too. Some people have survived things that nobody thought survivable before Trump. But I’m not persuaded that we’ve seen a permanent change.

[Steve Israel: How a perfectly normal New York suburb elected a con man]

I agree with what Mitt Romney said about Santos. What he’s done has shown him to be totally beneath the standards of being in Congress. But what do those standards even mean? Like, Marjorie Taylor Greene is in Congress. What standards do we have? Every standard of qualifications and decorum and civility has been thrown out the window.

Nyce: I’m not a psychologist by any means, but, just reading Santos’s tweets, he doesn’t necessarily seem to be behaving like a politician under siege. What do you make of his cavalier attitude?

Smith: His attitude is nothing like what I encounter. Most people who reach out to me are distraught. They’re like, “How did I make this mistake, and how can I put the pieces back together? And can I save my career? Can I save my marriage? Can I save my freedom?” I try to help people see that there’s a lot more to life, and that there’s not necessarily redemption—it depends on your case—but there’s satisfaction and happiness on the other side, even though it’s hard to see that in the moment.

Nyce: Do you have any sympathy or empathy for Santos?

Smith: Not much. Because there’s no discernible evidence of a core belief in anything other than his own destiny to be famous. When I hear folks tell me their story, it’s like, “Okay, well, you got into this because you cared so much about X, Y, Z, and then you went astray.” When I see Santos, all I see is a lust for stardom and prominence.

More than 350,000 Tesla vehicles are being recalled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration because of concerns about their self-driving-assistance software—but this isn’t your typical recall. The fix will be shipped “over the air” (meaning the software will be updated remotely, and the hardware does not need to be addressed).

Missy Cummings sees the voluntary nature of the recall as a positive sign that Tesla is willing to cooperate with regulators. Cummings, a professor in the computer-science department at George Mason University and a former NHTSA regulator herself, has at times argued that the United States should proceed more cautiously on autonomous vehicles, drawing the ire of Elon Musk, who has accused her of being biased against his company.

[Andrew Moseman: The inconvenient truth about electric vehicles]

Cummings also sees this recall as a software story: NHTSA is entering an interesting—perhaps uncharted—regulatory space. “If you release a software update—that’s what’s about to happen with Tesla—how do you guarantee that that software update is not going to cause worse problems? And that it will fix the problems that it was supposed to fix?” she asked me. “If Boeing never had to show how they fixed the 737 Max, would you have gotten into their plane?”

Cummings and I discussed that and more over the phone.

Our conversations have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: What was your reaction to this news?

Missy Cummings: I think it’s good. I think it’s the right move.

Nyce: Were you surprised at all?

Cummings: No. It’s a really good sign—not just because of the specific news that they’re trying to get self-driving to be safer. It also is a very important signal that Tesla is starting to grow up and realize that it’s better to work with the regulatory agency than against them.

Nyce: So you’re seeing the fact that the recall was voluntary as a positive sign from Elon Musk and crew?

Cummings: Yes. Really positive. Tesla is realizing that, just because something goes wrong, it’s not the end of the world. You work with the regulatory agency to fix the problems. Which is really important, because that kind of positive interaction with the regulatory agency is going to set them up for a much better path for dealing with problems that are inevitably going to come up.

That being said, I do think that there are still a couple of sticky issues. The list of problems and corrections that NHTSA asked for was quite long and detailed, which is good—except I just don’t see how anybody can actually get that done in two months. That time frame is a little optimistic.

It’s kind of the Wild West for regulatory agencies in the world of self-certification. If Tesla comes back and says, “Okay, we fixed everything with an over-the-air update,” how do we know that it’s been fixed? Because we let companies self-certify right now, there’s not a clear mechanism to ensure that indeed that fix has happened. Every time that you try to make software to fix one problem, it’s very easy to create other problems.

Nyce: I know there’s a philosophical question that’s come up before, which is, How much should we be having this technology out in the wild, knowing that there are going to be bugs? Do you have a stance?

Cummings: I mean, you can have bugs. Every type of software—even software in safety-critical systems in cars, planes, nuclear reactors—is going to have bugs. I think the real question is, How robust can you make that software to be resilient against inevitable human error inside the code? So I’m okay with bugs being in software that’s in the wild, as long as the software architecture is robust and allows room for graceful degradation.

Nyce: What does that mean?

Cummings: It means that if something goes wrong—for example, if you’re on a highway and you’re going 80 miles an hour and the car commands a right turn—there’s backup code that says, “No, that’s impossible. That’s unsafe, because if we were to take a right turn at this speed … ” So you basically have to create layers of safety within the system to make sure that that can’t happen.

[Emma Marris: Bring on the boring EVs]

This isn’t just a Tesla problem. These are pretty mature coding techniques, and they take a lot of time and a lot of money. And I worry that the autonomous-vehicle manufacturers are in a race to get the technology out. And anytime you’re racing to get something out, testing and quality assurance always gets thrown out the window.   

Nyce: Do you think we’ve gone too fast in green-lighting the stuff that’s on the road?

Cummings: Well, I’m a pretty conservative person. It’s hard to say what green-lighting even means. In a world of self-certification, companies were allowed to green-light themselves. The Europeans have a preapproval process, where your technology is preapproved before it is let loose in the real world.

In a perfect world—if Missy Cummings were the king of the world—I would have set up a preapproval process. But that’s not the system we have. So I think the question is, Given the system in place, how are we going to ensure that, when manufacturers do over-the-air updates to safety-critical systems, it fixes the problems that it was supposed to fix and doesn’t introduce new safety-related issues? We don’t know how to do that. We’re not there yet.

In a way, NHTSA is wading into new regulatory waters. This is going to be a good test case for: How do we know when a company has successfully fixed recall problems through software? How can we ensure that that’s safe enough?

Nyce: That’s interesting, especially as we put more software into the things around us.

Cummings: That’s right. It’s not just cars.

Nyce: What did you make of the problem areas that were flagged by NHTSA in the self-driving software? Do you have any sense of why these things would be particularly challenging from a software perspective?

Cummings: Not all, but a lot are clearly perception-based.

The car needs to be able to detect objects in the world correctly so that it can execute, for example, the right rule for taking action. This all hinges on correct perception. If you’re going to correctly identify signs in the world—I think there was an issue with the cars that they sometimes recognized speed-limit signs incorrectly—that’s clearly a perception problem.

What you have to do is a lot of under-the-hood retraining of the computer vision algorithm. That’s the big one. And I have to tell you, that’s why I was like, “Oh snap, that is going to take longer than two months.” I know that theoretically they have some great computational abilities, but in the end, some things just take time. I have to tell you, I’m just so grateful I’m not under the gun there.

Nyce: I wanted to go back a bit—if it were Missy’s world, how would you run the regulatory rollout on something like that?

Cummings: I think in my world we would do a preapproval process for anything with artificial intelligence in it. I think the system we have right now is fine if you take AI out of the equation. AI is a nondeterministic technology. That means it never performs the same way twice. And it’s based on software code that can just be rife with human error. So anytime that you’ve got this code that touches vehicles that move in the world and can kill people, it just needs more rigorous testing and a lot more care and feeding than if you’re just developing a basic algorithm to control the heat in the car.

[Read: The simplest way to sell more electric cars in America]

I’m kind of excited about what just happened today with this news, because it’s going to make people start to discuss how we deal with over-the-air updates when it touches safety-critical systems. This has been something that nobody really wants to tackle, because it’s really hard. If you release a software update—that’s what’s about to happen with Tesla—how do you guarantee that that software update is not going to cause worse problems? And that it will fix the problems that it was supposed to fix?

What should a company have to prove? So, for example, if Boeing never had to show how they fixed the 737 Max, would you have gotten into their plane? If they just said, “Yeah, I know we crashed a couple and a lot of people died, but we fixed it, trust us,” would you get on that plane?

Nyce: I know you’ve experienced some harassment over the years from the Musk fandom, but you’re still on the phone talking to me about this stuff. Why do you keep going?

Cummings: Because it’s really that important. We have never been in a more dangerous place in automotive-safety history, except for maybe right when cars were invented and we hadn’t figured out brake lights and headlights yet. I really do not think people understand just how dangerous a world of partial autonomy with distraction-prone humans is.

I tell people all the time, “Look, I teach these students. I will never get in a car that any of my students have coded because I know just what kinds of mistakes they introduce into the system.” And these aren’t exceptional mistakes. They’re just humans. And I think the thing that people forget is that humans create the software.

Last week, 3,171 COVID deaths were reported in the United States. In the past seven days, an average of 13 COVID deaths were reported each day in Los Angeles County, California, the country’s most populous county. Although this February’s death rate is lower than that of the previous two, COVID patients are still fighting for their lives.

Isabel Pedraza is the director of the intensive-care unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, overseeing the care of some of the hospital’s sickest patients. Someone treated in her unit may have had a heart attack, been in a traumatic accident, or be battling COVID on a ventilator.

Pedraza told me that this winter, her unit is seeing fewer COVID cases than expected. (Patients with non-life-threatening COVID cases—the majority of those in the hospital—are treated by her colleagues “on the floor,” where they aren’t monitored quite as closely.) As for the patients who do wind up in the ICU with COVID, she told me, treating them is much less stressful than when the virus first arrived. By now “it’s a lot less chaotic,” she said. “It feels like we have a path and an algorithm, and ways that we know we can save people.” At the same time, Pedraza said, more people are coming into her unit severely ill for other reasons—such as kidney and heart problems—than before the pandemic began.

Pedraza offers a first-person perspective from a hospital ICU and shares why she wishes people would be a little more considerate of others, even when mask mandates aren’t in place.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Who is still getting hospitalized for and dying of COVID? What are you noticing?

Isabel Pedraza: The most striking thing to me is that, although they’re not anywhere near the peak that we had in 2020 or early 2021, the numbers of sick patients generally that we’re seeing in the ICUs are definitely much higher than we saw pre-pandemic. But we’re not seeing as much COVID as we expected.

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: The very real lesson America has learned from COVID]

But we are definitely getting some patients. It’s usually people who are most at risk for severe disease: the elderly, people who have lots of medical conditions—liver disease, kidney disease, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, immunocompromised, all of those things. The past few people I’ve had have been unvaccinated. But you also see people who haven’t received the bivalent booster, or who received their third or fourth dose maybe a year ago and have a lot of other organ disease.

Today, the people in the ICU are the sort of the people that you would expect to see there, as opposed to two years ago, when you had plenty of people who really had no known risk factor for being there.

Nyce: How does this year compare with the past two years?

Pedraza: It’s a lot less chaotic. We are treating patients now with a lot more evidence. In the beginning, everybody was sort of trialing different therapies to see what worked best. And then we started to get data late in 2020 that helped show that things such as steroids actually have a mortality benefit. So it feels a lot clearer and a lot calmer, and a lot less anxiety provoking than it did at the beginning.

We have a lot more patients who are not COVID positive who are coming in really sick. The numbers in the unit are much higher than they were pre-COVID, and everyone is extremely ill.

Nyce: With respiratory viruses?

Pedraza: Everything. It’s not just respiratory viruses; it’s a higher level of acuity for all illnesses. It’s not just here—we’re seeing it across the country. I’m not sure what the explanation is for that.

Nyce: When you say “illnesses,” are you talking about viral infections, bacterial infections, and the like? Or does it include if someone has a chronic heart problem that’s flaring up?

Pedraza: It’s everything we would normally see in an ICU, just greater in numbers and more severely sick—somebody with a history of congestive heart failure coming in with an exacerbation of that heart failure, somebody with liver disease coming in decompensated, somebody with end-stage kidney disease coming in really, really hypertensive. This is a lot more than we’ve seen. And I don’t know if that’s just the backup from people not going to doctor’s offices in the past couple of years or something else.

Nyce: You were saying that some of your patients in the ICU are unvaccinated. What is it like treating them?

Pedraza: Well, by the time you get to the ICU, patients are patients, and people are seeking help. And it’s really not the time or the place to pass judgment. And COVID is not unique: I certainly, in past years, have had patients dying of influenza who have the same guilts. I’m sure that on the floor, it may be a different thing. In the ICU, the cases are a lot more extreme.

I also see patients in the long-COVID clinic that we’ve set up here, and I’ve had a good number of patients who have suffered significant problems with long COVID and still don’t want to get a vaccine. It’s weird to have people seeking you out to help them with their symptoms or with saving their lives, people who listen to your medical advice and trust you there—but who think that you’re lying to them when you tell them a vaccine could be lifesaving. It’s a bit demoralizing.

Nyce: Has the progression of the illness changed at all this winter? Any changes in when you’re getting patients coming to the ICU or how long they’re there for?

Pedraza: They still follow the same timeline as to when they end up developing the lower-airway disease. Omicron is thought to have less propensity to go into the lower airway, so maybe that’s part of the reason we’re not seeing as many people end up in respiratory failure. But there are a lot more patients on the medical floor than there are going to the ICU.

Nyce: We started this pandemic with a big emphasis on supporting health-care workers. How is staff morale now?

Pedraza: I think it’s easier now because there isn’t that sense that you’re risking yourself and your family every time. At least now you’re vaccinated; your family is vaccinated. A lot of hospitals, including this one, have tried to provide psychological or well-being services [to their staff]. I think people are just tired because it doesn’t seem to let up quite as much as we wish it did.

We lost a lot of staff, especially nursing staff, as did every medical center across the country. I think this was probably because of the level of moral injury that was sustained, because while the rest of the world was making sourdough bread, they were spending their days—especially nurses who were at the bedside—watching people die, despite everything they were doing. Then to have people so angry about being asked to do the minimum possible to protect their fellow Americans—I really think it burned a lot of people out.

Nyce: What do you wish that the general public knew about what it’s like to treat COVID and other respiratory diseases this winter?

Pedraza: It can feel disheartening to know that certain things are preventable. If someone had just been vaccinated, or if the people around them had been vaccinated, or if somebody had worn a mask, maybe the transplant patient would still be alive, or maybe the person fighting cancer would still be alive. You wish that people would think about the way their actions have real-world effects on others.

Nyce: Obviously, there are people who believe anti-vaccine disinformation. But setting that category of people aside, I’m curious: What would you say to the people who are sort of in the middle, who are like, “Life has to go on”? Who are not necessarily radicalized—maybe they’re vaccinated and keep up to date with their shots. But they’re also like, “We have to enjoy one another’s company. We have to combat the loneliness epidemic.”

Pedraza: I wish that we could go back to a time where we could just follow public-health recommendations. I certainly don’t judge people when I’m out and about for not wearing a mask, because it has not been a recommendation yet. In the hospital, people get upset because they’re asked to wear a mask—that I have less tolerance for. Or on a plane—that is such an easy place to give other people your illness or to catch an illness.

I wish that, in the absence of a public-health department recommending masks, people would just think more of others. If you’re in an Uber or someplace where you’re really close to people, you don’t know what those other people are dealing with. You don’t know if they’re undergoing chemotherapy or if they have a loved one at home who’s sick.

And I definitely would love it if people would not be judgmental of people who are wearing masks. We’re not a bunch of—what do they call it, snowflakes? I have actually been wearing masks since 2019, because I have been treated for breast cancer.

Nyce: How do you think you’ll remember this winter versus the other seasons of COVID?

Pedraza: It feels like we have a path and an algorithm, and ways that we know we can save people. A couple of years ago, even last year, there were still questions. We went from not having any idea of how to manage this to really having good ways of managing it, and being able to improve outcomes.

Nyce: It’s got to be so wild to be on the front lines of that, while it’s happening. I can’t imagine what it was like—to be building the airplane while flying.

Pedraza: That’s a very good way to put it—flying the airplane while learning how to fly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime, thankfully—hopefully—experience.

Nyce: And now it feels like the airplane is pretty much built? With maybe some pieces still missing around long COVID?

[Jennifer Senior: What not to ask me about long COVID]

Pedraza: Yeah. It feels like you know how to fly the plane, and you’re pretty sure how to keep people from falling down the chute. And you can’t understand why some people are voluntarily jumping off the plane. But at least you know how to get people safely on the ground if they choose that. And, I guess the analogy would be, there’s the frustration of seeing some people being pushed out of the plane by people who don’t care about getting them sick.

“Sometimes a journey must end for a new one to begin,” the Panic! at the Disco lead singer Brendon Urie wrote in an Instagram post last month announcing the band’s separation after 19 years. Urie, the band’s only remaining original member, said that he and his wife were expecting their first child (who has since been born), and that, going forward, his focus would be on family.

Bands break up all the time, of course, and for the artists involved, that can mean pursuing a solo career or side passions, or retiring altogether. But big bands aren’t just artists, especially not in 2023; they are sometimes full-out companies, complete with operations and social-media managers. And in the age of big festivals, reunions seem a part of life.

So what’s the difference between a band calling it quits and just taking a few years off to spend time with family before suiting up for a splashy Coachella reunion? What goes into a breakup? I called up Nabil Ayers, a drummer turned record-label executive, to ask. Ayers is the president of Beggars Group, a collection of record labels, and the author of the memoir My Life in the Sunshine.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: When you hear that a band is breaking up, what do you think is happening on the back end business-wise?

Nabil Ayers: A band is like a company, and often is a company. Once a band reaches a certain level, they incorporate or they make a partnership agreement.

It’s hard to totally know, because there is no real standard boilerplate for what that looks like. There are bands where there are four equal members and they’re all partners and that’s that. And there are other bands where the primary singer or songwriter is the company and the other people are all hired members who can come and go. And there’s a separate agreement with them. And there’s everything in between.

[Read: When emo grows up]

Nyce: It’s not like a regular job, where you give your two weeks’ notice.

Ayers: But in some bands it is. It’s like, “You’re the hired bass player, and we don’t want you to play with us anymore. You’re out tomorrow.” Or if you want to quit, you can quit.

Take a band like Journey, for instance. Steve Perry, the singer—who actually also isn’t the original singer but is definitely known as the singer from the band’s biggest years—leaves the band and goes on to a great solo career. Journey still exists with somebody else singing. I always wonder in cases like that: Is that person an equal member? My guess is that he’s not. But there’s no way to know what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s entirely possible that Steve Perry is still making money from Journey’s touring business, if he is a partner in Journey.

Nyce: I imagine that no matter what—even if the band never does anything else ever again—the company has to continue on in some form to distribute royalties.

Ayers: That side of it—the records, the publishing, the songwriting ownership—is fairly straightforward because records are a document of something that happened. You recorded this. It came out. We sell it. The people who worked on it and played on it are paid according to whatever the splits are that were agreed upon during that time. Journey gets a new singer; that doesn’t change who recorded “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

What’s harder and more complicated is the live stuff, the touring stuff. If Journey plays a show tonight, does Steve Perry get a piece of that? I have no idea. If they’re selling T-shirts with artwork of the album he was on, what does that mean? I don’t know that there’s a standard thing. I think it really depends on what was agreed upon.

Nyce: What do you make of the concept of a breakup versus just not recording another album?

Ayers: That’s funny. I’m in at least two bands that never broke up, which I guess means I’m still in them, but we haven’t played for 15 or 20 years. We just kind of stopped playing, which is the best way to break up. It’s great.

The official breakup is a funny thing. It can be seen as a marketing thing, of course, because the official reunion, as we all know, is an incredible marketing moment. Everyone looks at LCD Soundsystem—a great band, but the period between breakup and reunion was pretty fast. It has obviously worked really well for them and their fans, so it’s hard to criticize. But it was almost a short-enough cycle that they certainly could have not done it, and no one would have necessarily thought anything had happened.

Nyce: What do you think the role of fans is here, particularly with the internet?

Ayers: It’s so huge. It’s never been more tangible. Before social media, it was harder to know what the demand was. Now if you’re a band that breaks up and you feel like it, you can just scroll through whatever social-media platform you feel like and see how many people wish you would play again. It’s right there in front of you. This is not just for huge bands. There are small bands that do all these things—reunite and do small club tours or a one-off gig.

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Weirdly, Taylor Swift is extremely close to creating a true metaverse]

Nyce: With festival culture as big as it is, reunions feel inevitable. What do you think the practical function of a band breakup in 2023 is?

Ayers: It’s hard to be in a band. It’s hard to live in a van or a bus or a hotel or whatever with the same people for years. There’s something to a clean break, saying, “We don’t want to do this anymore. Let’s stop. Let’s announce that. Let’s let the world know, and we can all be free to do whatever we want.”

That’s a very altruistic version of it, but I think there are people who actually feel this way. People that say, “We have to stop doing this. It’s not healthy; we don’t like each other. Let’s stop.” Doing that can sometimes allow people space to try their other things and realize, Oh, wow, that was actually really fun. And wow, look at all the fans that love us. Look at that incredibly lucrative festival offer. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Sometimes that cycle is real—not calculated. Couples get divorced and remarried. It’s the same reason relationships break up.

Nyce: You don’t think they’re being cynical? You don’t think on the Panic! back end, they’re eyeing Coachella 2030?

Ayers: Well, you didn’t ask me about Panic! You asked me about bands. (Laughs.)

I’m not going to speculate on them specifically. I want to think the best. I’ve been there. I don’t think breakups are always that calculated. Of course, there are people who are more calculating and have a 10-year plan, like, “Okay, if we break up now, we’ll chill for a couple of years, then reunite.” But I don’t think most people go that far. I think for a lot of people, it’s really hard and really emotional and happens for a real reason. It’s so much harder to be in a band than most people realize.

The Maryland State Capitol building is older than America. It is the only state capitol to have also served as the nation’s capital; in the country’s earliest days, Congress met in its chambers. To work in Annapolis is to operate in the shadow of history. So maybe that explains why, 246 years into the American project, one state lawmaker sees his four-day-workweek bill as carrying on in the tradition of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. That, or it’s just a good hook.

“The Framers put in ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,’” Vaughn Stewart, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, told me, emphasizing that last one. “This is really a larger conversation about where we are as a country, and whether we need to ask ourselves, for the first time in almost a century, if there is something better than living to work.”

The very buzzy—but actually kind of modest—bill would create what is effectively a five-year experiment with a four-day workweek, creating $750,000 in tax credits for Maryland businesses per year over five years in exchange for them shortening their hours and handing over data to the state on how it goes. “It’s going to be really hard for me to persuade my colleagues that the time is now for this idea if the only data we have come from Scotland,” Stewart explained to me. “That’s just not going to be as persuasive as if it comes from Scotland, Maryland.” (Yes, that’s a real place.)

[Read: Kill the 5-day workweek]

Despite the practical approach, Stewart is a hardcore believer in the four-day workweek as the future. When I got on the phone with him last week, we spoke about the bill, work’s place in American life, and how surviving cancer shifted his perspective.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Give me the elevator pitch for this bill. Why should it get passed?

Vaughn Stewart: There has been an explosion of studies in the past year or two about the idea of companies reducing work hours. And the results of those studies have been, in my view, stunning. The employees loved working fewer hours. But what was really surprising is that the companies themselves reported greater productivity and ultimately greater profits. At the same time, companies outside of the context of an experiment are also choosing to make this shift.

So the elevator pitch is: Given the obvious success of reducing work hours that we’re seeing in businesses across the country and across the world, it only stands to reason that Maryland should try this out.

Nyce: Why Maryland?

Stewart: Well, Maryland is where I live, so I can’t put it in state legislation anywhere else. (Laughs.)

Nyce: Fair, but do you think Maryland is a particularly good candidate for this?

Stewart: Yeah, I think so. One of Maryland’s nicknames is actually “America in Miniature.” This idea has been studied in the United States to some extent but has been studied more heavily in Europe. The point of the bill is to get data that’s more local and more relevant to us. You can make the case that Maryland—because it has so many different slices to it and so many different parts and so many distinct cultures and economies—is more representative of the entire United States than most other states.

Nyce: And why solve this in the public sector? If the incentives are there, why not let the private sector figure it out and move that way naturally?

Stewart: That’s happening to some extent. But two things: One, I think having the public sector get involved serves as a gentle nudge in this direction. Inertia is a powerful force.

Second, it’s not so much that the public sector is getting involved in private businesses as it is that we’re paying companies using tax credits to collect data for us and share the data. At the end of the five-year pilot project, we’ll have this trove of data that we can use to gauge whether this was successful.

There have been four-day-workweek bills in the U.S. House and in California that essentially required companies to pay overtime after 32 hours. That’s a really clean and also free way for the government to go about this. But it’s also extremely heavy-handed. I think probably the reason those bills haven’t gone anywhere is that companies come out in full force to rail against government intervention in the marketplace.

What’s unique and new about this approach that we’re trying in Maryland is that we’re not forcing any companies to do anything they don’t want to do. Rather than going to the hearing for the bill with every industry group cursing my name, hopefully I can go to the bill hearing with all of them standing beside me.

[Derek Thompson: The five-day workweek is dying]

Nyce: We’re talking a lot about the practical politics of this. How much of a philosophical believer in the four-day workweek are you?

Stewart: I’m a believer. I definitely think that we need more Maryland-specific data if we’re going to make any future steps or commit any more money to it. But ultimately, I’m not a neutral observer—I’m not a social scientist; I’m an advocate for this.

Nyce: But you have to play the game a little?

Stewart: Yeah, of course. I mean, it’s not a game. We need to make forward progress. If we want to convince people—workers, other policy makers, business owners—that this is the way forward, we need more study results that are specific to relevant communities.

It’s going to be really hard for me to persuade my colleagues that the time is now for this idea if the only data we have come from Scotland. That’s just not going to be as persuasive as if it comes from Scotland, Maryland, and Berlin, Maryland, and Cambridge, Maryland.

Nyce: There are a lot of European-named cities in Maryland.

Stewart: I just rattled them out like that too; I’m actually kind of impressed with myself.

I’m not at all a dispassionate observer of this. I very much think that this is the way of the future. This is the original American dream. The thought was always that we were going to continue to be more and more productive and work less and less. But at a certain point, we stalled out.

It was extremely radical when Henry Ford moved to a five-day workweek. People were shocked. People even called it anti-biblical, because the Bible said there was only one rest day. The labor movement took this as their cause célèbre, and over a grinding series of decades, they were able to force states and the federal government to institute a five-day week as a matter of law. But it’s been 100 years. Somewhere in the ’80s or ’90s, we got sort of off track. Now you hear more about, like, the #grindset than anything about reduced work hours.

Nyce: So you’re really viewing this in the long arc of American labor history. Do you ever have any personal doubts?

Stewart: I do think that there’s one big question mark with this idea, at least for right now, which is: How do we make sure that the effects reverberate across the economic spectrum? Because right now, with the exception of maybe some hospitals cutting hours for nurses, the companies that have made this step so far are Kickstarter, Shake Shack, Shopify. Typically, white-collar employees are the ones benefiting from more flexible schedules and reduced schedules,—just like how in the pandemic, white-collar employees benefited from more flexible time and flexibility to come into the office, whereas blue-collar workers didn’t get that break. They still had to go in every day and punch a clock, even if it meant that they were going to expose themselves to getting sick.

The tricky thing here is that there’s a difference between salaried workers and hourly workers. And we’ve got to figure out a way to make sure that this bill—or this movement—doesn’t become something that is felt most viscerally by people that already are doing pretty well. We want to make sure that this is an economy-wide transformation, that if it helps any group in particular, it helps those who are working-class the most—because they’re the ones who have borne the weight of America’s overworked culture for the past several decades.

Nyce: Are there any criticisms of the bill that you just flat out don’t agree with?

Stewart: First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever introduced a bill that is just this broadly popular. There was a poll on this issue recently and 92 percent of Americans like the idea of reducing work hours.

You don’t really hear a lot of good-faith criticisms. Probably the criticism that is valid, but that I just don’t agree with, is the sort of quasi-libertarian idea that the state of Maryland just shouldn’t care about this—that we shouldn’t meddle in the affairs of private businesses. There’s nothing more fundamentally connected to a Marylander’s quality of life than how much free time they have. So the idea that that would not be in the purview of policy makers to me is insane.

But even more than that, it’s hypocritical. I’ve heard from several colleagues who, when past tax cuts or tax credits for corporations have come up, couldn’t have been more enthusiastic to give those away. But now all of a sudden they’re crying libertarian.

Nyce: Why do you think that is?

Stewart: This bill is connected with the idea of improving the day-to-day lives of regular people. And I think for people who are ideologically committed to comforting the comfortable, it’s an anathema that they would support something that cuts costs for companies but through the lens of trying to make workers’ lives a little bit more whole.

Nyce: Like your colleagues at the statehouse?

Stewart: Yeah. I have colleagues in the other party who applauded, for example, when President Donald Trump cut taxes for corporations. Now, I don’t have any indication there’s going to be widespread Republican opposition to this bill. But I have heard a couple of quotes in the media from some of my colleagues who seem like maybe they’re going to oppose this on the grounds of laissez-faire capitalism—let the markets work.

But honestly, I haven’t really heard very much pushback at all about this. There has been an explosion of interest in the bill.

This is my fifth year in the General Assembly. This bill has attracted more attention from my colleagues, from interest groups, and from the media than every other bill I’ve ever put in has combined. And, like, 95 percent of the interest has been positive.

Nyce: We talked through one philosophical criticism from libertarians about the role of the state. That’s pretty much their whole gig. I wonder if there’s a practical criticism here: Why is this something Maryland should spend money on versus all the other issues that are facing the state at any given time?

Stewart: That’s a tough one. If the bill doesn’t pass, I think that’s what will doom it. Because even though we have a budget surplus in the state of Maryland, it certainly is the case that anytime you want to spend money, you’ve got to compete with every other priority under the sun. And I’m sure some of those priorities are more pressing and more important than this bill.

But this is only $750,000 of tax credits. This is not going to break the bank in the grand scheme of the state budget. And I would add that there’s scarcely anything more important to humanity than free time.

Nyce: Well … like, health. Maybe “not dying of the coronavirus.”  

Stewart: Sure. Yeah, I mean, “not dying.”

The Framers put in “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Certainly life is important. We want you all to be healthy. Liberties are important as well, obviously, and all the different freedoms we enjoy and making sure that those hold true. But pursuit of happiness is something that is also really important. This is really a larger conversation about where we are as a country, and whether we need to ask ourselves, for the first time in almost a century, if there is something better than living to work. America once stood for better ideals than just eternally increasing wealth and everlasting consumerism.

The reason I get so fired up about this is I’ve actually had cancer twice.

Nyce: I’m so sorry to hear that.

Stewart: No, no, I appreciate it. And I’m all good now. It kind of puts it in perspective—all the different tropes and truisms and clichés about realizing that nobody’s guaranteed tomorrow. I think when you have that experience at such a young age, you realize how important time is. Time is a gift. And so the idea that there would be a bill but also a larger movement about reclaiming some of that time for ourselves—because it’s finite for all of us—I think that that has some real power for a lot of people. Whether they have gone through an illness or an accident or they’ve watched a parent or a grandparent get older, I think people realize somewhere deep in their bones that their time is valuable. And they want to reclaim some of it for themselves.

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.

Don’t be fooled by the unsettling elegance of the phrase toilet plume. It describes the invisible cloud of particles heaved by a toilet when flushed, and was once feared to be a vector for COVID-19. My colleague Jacob Stern recently revisited the toilet-plume panic for The Atlantic, writing that although this early-pandemic fear hasn’t been substantiated, there are still other reasons to beware of the open lid. I called him to find out more.

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

How Florida beat New York The bizarre relationship of a “work wife” and a “work husband” Originalism is going to get women killed.

Beware the Plume

Kelli María Korducki: You write that toilet plume has been a subject of scientific inquiry for quite some time. How did COVID enter that conversation, and when did it leave that conversation?

Jacob Stern: I’m not totally sure what the initial spark for it was. But as you say, people have been thinking about toilet plume for a shockingly long time. The earliest papers go all the way back to the 1950s. There’s also a history that I didn’t even get into in this article, of toilet-related public-health panics—many of them completely unjustified—having to do with either the civil-rights movement or the AIDS epidemic. And so, in some sense, it was deeply unsurprising that in this moment of fear and uncertainty, there would be a toilet-related panic around the coronavirus.

Kelli: I remember that panic. I had a friend who was convinced she was going to get COVID after an upstairs neighbor’s toilet overflowed, sometime in that scary first year of the pandemic. What do you think set off worries like this one?

Jacob: If you go back and look at when the big news articles about toilet plume were published, those were back in June 2020. There was a study published around that time, which I think was one of the instigators for this whole panic suggesting that toilets might be, as one of the newspapers put it, flinging coronavirus all over the place. And then there were another couple of waves of panic.

In my article, I mention a review paper from December 2021 [which found “no documented evidence” of viral transmission via fecal matter] that kind of dispelled the myth. But plenty of academic papers aren’t particularly noticed by the public. So I don’t think that, in the public imagination, that paper made all that big a dent.

Kelli: You point out in your article that even though the potential COVID connection was overblown, we should still be a little afraid of toilets.

Jacob: The basic takeaway is that even if it seems like toilets are not a vector of COVID transmission, there are still all sorts of other pathogens that are really unpleasant to have to deal with. In the case of toilet plume, gastrointestinal viruses such as norovirus are the main worry. And those, we know, are transmitted via what are called fecal-oral routes. Those are still a concern, as far as toilet plume goes. If you don’t want a stomach bug, it’s still worth worrying about.

Kelli: This may be too much information, but although I’ve read your article, I’m still kind of convinced that I caught COVID last year from a public bathroom. I can’t think of any other possible exposures in the infection time frame. Is my position defensible?

Jacob: I would say your position is defensible, yes. Despite the fact that it seems like toilet plume itself was not a huge driver of COVID transmission, there are obviously lots of other human beings in public bathrooms, all of whom are quite capable of transmitting COVID via respiratory pathways. So it seems totally plausible that you might have gotten COVID in the normal way, from someone else’s breath, and that just happened in the public restroom.

Kelli: Has your writing and reporting on this subject changed your behaviors around flushing?

Jacob: Yes, for sure. Even before I started reporting this story, the toilet-plume discourse had penetrated enough that I was already much more careful about always closing the lid on a toilet than I had been previously. Now I not only do that myself but get annoyed at family members and friends when they fail to do so. I’ve become pretty self-righteous about it.

I will also say that, when I have one on me, I will now wear a mask in a public restroom, which is certainly not something I would’ve especially gone out of my way to do before. After writing this story, putting on a mask for the three minutes I’m in a restroom—even if I’m not wearing one otherwise—seems like a great move rather than a pointless one.

Related:

Whatever happened to toilet plumes? Should everyone be masking again?

Today’s News

The World Health Organization warned of a “secondary disaster” for survivors of the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria in the face of forecasted snow and cold-weather conditions, in addition to a lack of power, water, and communications. The State Department announced that the Chinese spy balloon shot down by the U.S. military last weekend was capable of collecting electronic-communication signals. A Southwest Airlines executive testified at a congressional hearing about the airline’s holiday crisis, in which thousands of flights were canceled.

Evening Read

Faraz Hyder / Getty; The Atlantic

‘Scar Girl’ Is a Sign That the Internet Is Broken

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

The scar first appears on Annie Bonelli’s TikTok on March 18, 2021. In the video, she is in a car, earbuds in, lip-synching to the song “I Know,” by D. Savage. The mark on her cheek is blurry and soft, like a smudge of dirt. She is bobbing her head underneath a caption about how it feels when someone accidentally likes a social-media post that’s more than a year old. The lyrics offer the answer: “You say you hate me but you stalk my page, you fucking hypocrite,” Bonelli mouths.

The comments section is filled with thousands of people pretty much admitting to doing just that. For nearly two years, hordes of sleuths have fixated on Bonelli’s face, united in a mission that has sent them scrolling through years of the teenager’s TikTok videos and back to this video in particular, where her mark is visible for the first time. They want to know the truth: Is the pretty, blond 18-year-old’s facial scar real, or did she fake it for online attention?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The masterpiece no one wanted to save What ChatGPT can’t teach my writing students The tech giants want what the NFL has.

Culture Break

Claudette Barius / Warner Bros.

Read. A new poem by Cortney Lamar Charleston.

“In grief and despair, / it is the soul that is heavy and the bones that are weightless.”  

Watch. Magic Mike’s Last Dance, in theaters, is intimate and emotional without losing any of the franchise’s signature heat.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

The science journalist Betsy Ladyzhets returned to the subject of toilets and infectious disease last week, writing about the CDC’s recent move to potentially mine COVID-19 data from airplane-lavatory wastewater in airports across the country: “Airplane-wastewater testing is poised to revolutionize how we track the coronavirus’s continued mutations around the world, along with other common viruses such as flu and RSV—and public-health threats that scientists don’t even know about yet.” It’s worth a read.

I would also be remiss not to reiterate Jacob’s final plea in our discussion: Close your toilet lids before flushing. “If this conversation does even a little bit of good for the cause of closing lids, then it will have been worth it,” he said.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.