Liz Truss praised her successor Rishi Sunak for describing China as “the biggest long-term threat to Britain”.

Elizabeth Holmes isn’t fooling anyone. Well, almost anyone.

The convicted fraudster and founder of the defunct medical start-up Theranos, is waiting to begin an 11-year sentence in federal prison. She received this punishment for misleading investors about her lab-in-a-box technology, which she claimed could run hundreds of tests on a few drops of blood. In reality, when Theranos’s Edison device wasn’t exploding, it was delivering unreliable results to frightened patients. Holmes’s fall from grace—she was once the youngest self-made woman billionaire—has been described over and over again. But there’s still a little more blood left in this stone.

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a profile of Holmes—which included the first interview she’s given since 2016. The author, Amy Chozick, suggests that she was charmed by Holmes, the devoted family woman. Chozick writes that Holmes is “gentle and charismatic,” and “didn’t seem like a hero or a villain. She seemed, like most people, somewhere in between.” This flattering or at least ambivalent tone was not well received. The Axios editor Sam Baker picked the article apart on Twitter. The emergency-medicine physician Jeremy Faust called it “credulous drivel.” Journalists and doctors alike argued that the Times had erred by helping Holmes rehabilitate her image.

When mistakes happen in the health-care system, doctors try to trace their origin to broken processes. Errors are addressed at the system—not individual—level: If a patient receives an incorrect dose of a medicine, for instance, the blame doesn’t necessarily fall on the nurse who administered it or the physician who prescribed it. The entire drug-delivery process, from pharmacy to bedside, is carefully inspected for unsafe practices. The media—and their content-delivery process—have been going through a similar postmortem over the Theranos debacle. Before John Carreyrou broke the bad news about the company at The Wall Street Journal, reporters were happy to write flattering profiles of Holmes with only the most rudimentary caveats. Even the Journal praised her before it damned her. But the Times’ latest visit to Holmesville suggests that this unsafe practice is still in place.

[Read: Theranos and COVID-19 testing are mirror-image cautionary tales]

As a pathologist—a doctor who specializes in laboratory testing—I’ve been following the Theranos story since the beginning. Holmes’s rise and fall is the most glamorous scandal to hit my field in some time: Most are more body-parts-in-the-back-of-a-pickup than celebrity-stuffed financial crimes. Just last week, I was giving a grand-rounds talk about Theranos. Loopholes in laboratory regulation and widespread ignorance of how blood testing works had caused medical professionals and the public to fall for diagnostic scams, I told the academics in attendance. Toward the end of the lecture, I posed a question: Have the media learned their lesson after enabling Holmes’s charade?

Much has changed about science reporting in the years since Holmes’s disgrace. I’ve watched the media’s discussion of novel health technologies grow more nuanced and leery. Major news outlets now go out of their way to emphasize the precariousness of early study findings. I’ve been getting more calls from journalists who seek a skeptical perspective on some new lab test or scientific finding. But there are cracks in the media’s armor. The weakest component is the headline: You can still declare all manner of decisive breakthroughs, as long as you append “scientists find” to the title. Another persistent problem is that medical controversies are reported out study by study. Back-and-forth articles about contested areas offer ready-made drama but little clarity. (Masks help prevent COVID; wait, they don’t work at all; never mind, now they do again.) When doctors evaluate the latest research, we recognize that some methods are more reliable than others. Wisdom comes from learning which results to ignore, and scientific consensus changes slowly.

But journalists’ most stubborn instinct—the one they share with Holmes—is to lean into a good story. It’s the human side of science that attracts readers. Every technical advance must be contextualized with a tale of suffering or triumph. Holmes knew this as well as anyone. She hardly dwelled on how her devices worked—she couldn’t, because they didn’t. Instead, she repeatedly told the world about her fear of needles and of losing loved ones to diseases that might have been caught earlier by a convenient blood test. Of course reporters were taken in. The next entrepreneur to come along and tell a tale like that may also get a sympathetic hearing in the press.

Holmes understood that almost everyone—journalists, investors, patients, doctors—can be swayed by a pat narrative. She’s still trying to get ahead by telling stories. In offering herself up to the Times as a reformed idealist and a wonderful mother, Holmes adds to a story that was started by her partner, Billy Evans. As part of Holmes’s sentencing proceedings last fall, Evans wrote a multipage letter to the judge pleading for mercy, which was accompanied by numerous photos of Holmes posing with animals and children. “She is gullible, overly trusting, and simply naive,” Evans wrote about one of the great corporate hucksters of our era.

Journalists are still telling stories about her too, for better or for worse. Holmes is not naive, nor are most readers of The New York Times. While last weekend’s “a hero or a villain” coverage may be said to have betrayed the patients who were harmed by her inaccurate blood tests, and the memory of a Theranos employee who died by suicide, it is also just another entry in the expanded universe of Holmes-themed entertainment. There are books and podcasts and feature-length documentaries. A TV miniseries about Holmes has a score of 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (“Addictively engrossing!” “Consistently entertaining!”) Surely some of those who now bemoan the Times’ friendly treatment have consumed this material for less-than-academic reasons.

The prosaic details of a convicted cheat’s domestic life aren’t really news, but they are interesting—because the character of Elizabeth Holmes is interesting. So, too, are her continued efforts to spin a narrative of who she is. But with such well-trodden ground, the irony is built right in. You know that Holmes is a scammer. I know it. On some level, The New York Times seems to know it too; the article runs through her crimes and even quotes a friend of Holmes’s who says she isn’t to be trusted. This isn’t character rehabilitation; it’s content. We’re all waiting to see what Liz gets up to next. Have the media learned their lesson? The real test will arrive when the next scientific scammer comes along, and the one after that—when their narrative is still intact, and their fraud hasn’t yet been revealed. At that point, the system for preventing errors will have to do its work.  

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.

Today, The Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickerson won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting, and two of our staff writers were named finalists. I’ll say a bit more about these journalists’ extraordinary work below.

First, here are four new Atlantic stories that are worth your time:

The billion-dollar Ponzi scheme that hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury The wedding trend couples love and guests hate The free-returns party is over. King Charles is going to be disappointed.

A Pulitzer for a Consequential Story

Once again, I am seizing temporary control of this newsletter from Tom Nichols to share with you some exciting news about The Atlantic: Our staff writer Caitlin Dickerson has won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her definitive account of the secret Trump-administration policy that separated migrant children from their parents. And more good news: Staff writer Elizabeth Bruenig was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, and Xochitl Gonzalez was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. This is the third consecutive year that The Atlantic has won a Pulitzer Prize, and earlier this spring, we received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the top prize of the American Society of Magazine Editors, for the second year in a row.

Caitlin’s story, one of the longest and most complicated pieces of reporting The Atlantic has published across its 166-year history, has its origins in 2017 and 2018, when she was still a reporter for The New York Times, uncovering evidence that the Trump administration was forcibly separating migrant children from their parents. The reporting of Caitlin and others eventually forced the government to admit that the program existed. But, as Caitlin writes, “we knew that the full truth about how our government had reached this point still eluded us.”

Knowing that there was still so much more to uncover, I asked Caitlin to join The Atlantic in order to tell the full truth of this callous policy. She conducted more than 150 interviews over the course of her 18-month investigation, and she reviewed tens of thousands of internal documents—some of them leaked to her, others turned over by the government only after a multiyear lawsuit supported by The Atlantic. Though rebuffed in many of her attempts to reach Trump-administration sources—as well as current staff at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Justice Department—Caitlin persisted and, over time, persuaded scores of them to go on the record. She chased former Trump-administration officials, door-stopping them when necessary. She conducted interviews, unprecedented in their depth, with top Trump-administration officials, including Kirstjen Nielsen, the former secretary of homeland security. She spoke with one of only two on-the-ground witnesses to the separations ever to talk on the record.

Caitlin was able to counter the constant denials, lies, and gaslighting of certain members of the Trump administration by discovering the truth behind their obfuscations. And she cut through thickets of bureaucracy and federal immigration rules to uncover what actually happened—to the point where, incredibly, she sometimes had to explain to certain government officials the origins and consequences of their own policies. From this, Caitlin—with the support and guidance of her editor, Scott Stossel—wrote the definitive narrative of how this cruel Trump-era policy came to be. And she revealed how it would be reinstated if Trump is reelected.

About Elizabeth Bruenig’s work, which has earned her a place in the pantheon of our profession’s greatest investigative journalists: Her reporting has captured the brutal reality of the death penalty in America—and led Alabama to impose a temporary moratorium on executions. I think about Liz’s work the same way I think about Caitlin’s: indispensable, eloquent, brave. Liz’s run of groundbreaking coverage began last summer, when she attended the autopsy of Joe Nathan James, whom Alabama had executed several days earlier. Liz reported that James’s body was a testament to what he’d endured: not merely death but a brutal, torturous end, his arm sliced open multiple times in an apparent effort to establish venous access via “cutdown”—a procedure not allowed by Alabama’s own death protocol. Had Liz not been present for that autopsy, evidence of the state’s efforts would have quite literally been buried.

Liz’s reporting on James’s fate opened dramatic new lines of reporting. Alabama had previously rebuffed all of our requests to attend executions as press. What it could not deny were requests from death-row inmates themselves, who started listing Liz among their personal witnesses. Alabama went to extraordinary lengths to prevent Liz from reporting on this story—not merely by trying to prevent her from witnessing executions, but apparently by going so far as to set up a cellphone-jamming tower outside Holman prison to prevent inmates from texting with her on the phones they hid from prison authorities. Liz’s stories are worth reading and rereading. Her reporting will change the world.

And there’s Xochitl Gonzalez, whose writing catalogs with moral force, intimate eloquence, and unexpected humor the ways in which inequality shapes identity, and how gentrification warps the physical and emotional terrains of our lives. One of Xochitl’s particular talents is bringing to life economic and political issues such as gentrification. She is brilliant at describing what gentrification feels like. It’s not just about rent and real estate; it’s more personal and visceral than that. In “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?,” she describes gentrification as a sonic phenomenon—silence as something expected from and imposed on working-class communities by wealthier newcomers.

Days like today remind me that I work with the most talented corps of journalists in America. We’re grateful for your support.

Related:

Caitlin Dickerson: “We need to take away children.” Elizabeth Bruenig: Dead to rights Xochitl Gonzalez: Why do rich people love quiet?

Today’s News

President Joe Biden will meet with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other congressional leaders this week about the debt limit. A driver allegedly plowed his car into 18 pedestrians at a bus stop in Brownsville, Texas. Iran executed two men for blasphemy. Last year, the number of executions in the country rose by 75 percent.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Annie Lowrey and the sociologist Jacy Reese Anthis discuss whether AI can be sentient. Up for Debate: Readers weigh in once more on the gender debate.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Juanjo Gasull

My High-School Haters

By Paul Greenberg

One spring morning, high-school students started tweeting at me.

“@4fishgreenberg, when is the last time you have eaten Bluefin Tuna?”

Another wanted to know about the “most unique places you have been on your studies/fishing trips.” A science teacher had assigned my book Four Fish and found me on social media. She’d had the clever idea that it might be fun for her students to “engage” with a real author online. Because a whole classful of book purchases makes my publisher happy, I dutifully tweeted back.

But then the bad tweets came.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Mob justice at the Supreme Court Why Biden’s new school-sports rule matters The criminal-justice system and the election are not going to get along.

Culture Break

Claudette Barius / HBO

Read. “Disaster,” a new poem by Tsitsi Jaji.

“He hugs the loving tree, ever literal. / My first betrayal was birthing him.”

Watch. The most recent episode of Succession (streaming on HBO Max), which highlights the sad, sad life of Tom Wambsgans.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

May 8, 2023—The Atlantic’s staff writer Caitlin Dickerson has won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism for the September 2022 cover story, “‘We Need to Take Away Children,’” an exhaustive investigation that exposed the secret history of the Trump administration’s policy to intentionally separate migrant children from their parents; the incompetence that led the government to lose track of many children; and the intention among former officials to separate families again if Trump is reelected. Her reporting, one of the longest articles in The Atlantic’s history, laid out in painstaking detail one of the darkest chapters in recent U.S. history, exposing not only how the policy came into being and who was responsible for it, but also how all of its worst outcomes were anticipated and ignored. The investigation was edited by national editor Scott Stossel.

Two other staff writers were Pulitzer finalists: Elizabeth Bruenig in Feature Writing, for her relentless and groundbreaking reporting into Alabama’s deeply troubling incompetence on death row, which prompted a temporary moratorium on executions in the state, and Xochitl Gonzalez in Commentary, for her writing in the magazine and in the Brooklyn, Everywhere newsletter that the Pulitzer Board wrote “explore how gentrification and the predominant white culture in the United States stifle the physical and emotional expression of racial minorities.”

This is the third Pulitzer Prize for The Atlantic, and the third consecutive year in which the magazine has won the prize. Staff writer Jennifer Senior won last year for her cover story, “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind,” which looked at one family’s heartbreaking loss in the 9/11 attacks and their struggle to move on. Ed Yong was awarded a Pulitzer in 2021 for his defining coverage of the coronavirus pandemic and how America failed in its response to the virus.

In awarding Dickerson journalism’s top honor, the Pulitzer Board cited: “A deeply reported and compelling accounting of the Trump administration policy that forcefully separated migrant children from their parents resulting in abuses that have persisted under the current administration.”

The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote to staff: “This is a wonderful moment for everyone, but particularly for Caitlin, Liz, and Xochitl. There is much to say about their talents, and the talents of their editors. This is also a very proud moment for all of you who worked on these stories. Caitlin’s piece, one of the longest and most complicated stories The Atlantic has published across its 166-year history, required the unflagging work of a good portion of our comparatively small staff—from the copy-editing and fact-checking teams to our artists and designers and lawyers. Our ambitions outmatch our size, but I’m proud to say that our team rises to every challenge.”

Dickerson’s investigation exposed that U.S. officials misled Congress, the public, and the press, and minimized the policy’s implications to obscure what they were doing; that separating migrant children from their parents was not a side effect of the policy, but its intent; that almost no logistical planning took place before the policy was initiated; that instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep families apart longer; and that the architects of the legislation will likely seek to reinstate it, should they get the opportunity. Over 18 months, Dickerson conducted more than 150 interviews––including the first extensive on-the-record interviews on this subject with Kirstjen Nielsen, John Kelly, and others intimately involved in the policy and its consequences at every level of government––and reviewed thousands of pages of internal government documents, some of which were turned over only after a multiyear lawsuit.

The Atlantic’s journalism has helped its readers make sense of the world’s most complicated issues and shined a light on injustices the world over. The magazine earned the top honor of General Excellence at the National Magazine Awards in 2022 and 2023, and was named Digiday’s Publisher of the Year in 2022. This journalistic excellence has been paired with growth across the company, including record subscriber growth for the third straight year; the publication of the magazine’s entire archive, dating back to 1857, online for the first time; the return of in-person events, including The Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C.; and the launch and publication of the first six books in a new imprint, Atlantic Editions, with the independent publisher Zando, collecting the work of Atlantic writers and editors.

Liz Renshaw captured the family having fun on the trampoline in her back garden.