The medical story about Ozempic is straightforward and satisfying. A drug designed to treat diabetes had a game-changing application for weight loss. But it has plenty of caveats: You have to take it indefinitely. It doesn’t work for everyone. It has side effects. It’s at the moment unbelievably expensive and rarely covered by insurance. But it works. People can lose a significant percentage of their body weight and keep it off—safely. In the history of spotty and dubious weight-loss drugs, this one is a genuine medical breakthrough.

But the cultural story is more complicated. In the last few years, the culture has finally started making a little bit of progress with fat-shaming. For example, WeightWatchers downplayed the word “weight” in its name and started talking more about health and wellness and developing a positive mindset. Ad campaigns started using models of all shapes and sizes. A lot of women find these models beautiful and are finding their own bodies beautiful too.

This progress is new, and fragile. And the introduction of a miracle weight-loss drug could easily upset all of that. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, science writer Olga Khazan and I imagine it’s 20 years from now. Insurance covers Ozempic. It’s affordable. It’s pretty widely available. In this future, have we become a lot less judgemental about obesity? Or does the decision to have whatever body you want come to be seen as a problem?

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Here is a full transcription of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There’s a story about the new drug Ozempic that people like to tell. It’s a story of a once-in-a-generation medical breakthrough, of how a drug to treat diabetes became a game-changing new drug for weight loss. Now, there are plenty of caveats. You have to take it indefinitely. It doesn’t work for everyone. There are side effects. It’s, at the moment, unbelievably expensive and barely ever covered by insurance. But it works. People can lose a significant percentage of their body weight and keep it off. And they can do it safely.

This medical story is straightforward and celebratory and satisfying.

But there’s another story: the cultural story, which is way more complicated. In the last few years, the culture has finally started to make a little bit of progress with fat-shaming. For example, WeightWatchers downplayed Weight in its name and started talking more about health and wellness and developing a positive mindset. Models who were not rail thin started showing up everywhere, not just in Dove ads. And a lot of the young women I know make a point to talk about how beautiful these models are and how beautiful their own bodies are.

This whole thing feels new, and it’s delicate. And now here comes this miracle weight-loss drug that could upset all of that. And the more I try and imagine a future where Ozempic is commonly available, the more I wonder how this medical miracle and our recent progress around body image live together, and if they can live together.

So as I was thinking about all that, the first person I wanted to talk to was Olga Khazan. She’s a rare writer who can see where medicine and culture clash. And she’s reported on Ozempic for The Atlantic.

Hi, Olga.

Olga Khazan: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: So I am excited to have the cultural conversation. But first, some basics. What is Ozempic?

Khazan: Ozempic is a brand name for a drug called Semaglutide, which basically just mimics the digestive hormone that we all have, which slows digestion. And it also tells you that you’re full.

Rosin: And what makes it so revolutionary? Why do people say, Oh, this is a game changer?

Khazan: The idea of, like, a magic pill for weight loss has been with us for a while, but they’ve always been not effective or dangerous. This is really the first one where the side effects—usually like nausea and diarrhea and things like that—people feel like they can tolerate for this benefit of weight loss, and they’re really effective. People lose a substantial percentage of their body weight, and they’re able to keep it off as long as they keep taking it. And we really haven’t had those two magic ingredients so far in the weight-loss space.

Rosin: Two magic ingredients, meaning (1) people lose weight, and (2) they keep it off.

Khazan: That’s right. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have lost weight on diets, and I’m not trying to minimize that, but it’s pretty widely known that with dieting, you only lose a small percentage of your body weight, maybe something like 5 percent or so. And a lot of people end up gaining that back. And for a lot of obese people, they actually find that their metabolism changes, so their body kind of fights the weight loss. So they tend to hold on to this excess weight, and it just becomes more and more difficult the further you get into obesity. Of course, weight-loss surgery is effective, but this is something that, it’s not a major procedure. You don’t have to go under. You don’t have to eat these tiny meals for the rest of your life. You do have to inject it for now, but people would prefer that.

Rosin: I mean, really, you describe it—it does kind of sound too good to be true. I understand it is true, but it is interesting that they suddenly swept in this thing that clears out all the problems that people have been struggling with for so long.

Khazan: Yeah, and I mean, I don’t want to minimize the fact that there are side effects, and a lot of people can’t tolerate them. And according to this one obesity doctor that I talked to, they don’t work for everyone everyone. Like, I think there’s always some percentage of the population that’s not going to respond. And of course, the big, huge caveat with these is that they are super-duper expensive if your insurance doesn’t cover them. So in a sense, they’re a magic pill, but only if you can afford it.

Rosin: Is it reasonable to assume that sometime in the near future it will be more widely accessible?

Khazan: I have asked this question of every expert I talked to, like, When will it be covered by insurance? Generally, things tend to move from not covered to covered. So I do think it’s reasonable to expect that soon these will become covered by insurance.

Rosin: I guess I’m just trying to imagine if there is a future where these are widely available, and then the way we talk about weight loss kind of changes in the culture.

Khazan: Yeah, I mean, this is super sensitive and also hard to predict. And it’s something that these weight-loss companies that I’ve been talking to tiptoe around because their whole thing is helping people who want to lose weight. But there was sort of a period of time where expressing a desire to lose weight was not—how do I put this? Expressing a desire to lose weight was not—

Rosin: Cool.

Khazan: It was not cool. Yeah, I guess, cool. But it was also just kind of frowned upon. Like, there was just this era—I want to say, like, 2017 to 2020—where it was seen as gauche to be, like, I’m on a diet. People stopped dieting. You know, the CEO of WeightWatchers around that time was like, Healthy is the new skinny.

Rosin: This is what I want to talk about. Let’s back up.

Khazan: Sure.

Rosin: I think I want to start at the founding of WeightWatchers.

Khazan: Okay. (Laughs.)

Rosin: 1963. Because it happened in Queens, and I grew up in Queens. And Queens has so few moments of glory. Back in the early WeightWatchers era, what was the talk or idea around weight loss?

Khazan: So WeightWatchers really started as America was still partly in this era of shame around being overweight. Things kind of transitioned from Being thin is morally good to Being fat is shameful. You had these, like, support groups that held public weigh-ins, and they would force their members who hadn’t lost weight to stand in what they called a pig line. So according to a 1963 Life magazine story, during meetings, women would pin cardboard pigs on the non-losers, meaning people who didn’t lose weight, and serenade each other with ”We are plump little pigs who ate too much fat, fat, fat.”

Rosin: Oh, my God.

Khazan: Yeah.

Rosin: And this was like a sisterly, support-group situation?

Khazan: This was a support group. It’s, like, truly, deeply offensive.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. Wow.

Khazan: So we get to the ’60s, and this is when this housewife named Jean Nidetch invites six friends to her house and they talk about their weight struggles. She finds this to be really helpful, to just, like, have this informal group where you can share your experiences. She eventually loses 72 pounds, and so she kind of establishes this idea of having a real support group, not a mean, shamey one, where people encourage each other and help each other to lose weight in this more supportive environment.

Rosin: Was the underlying idea there still a kind of value or moral judgment around weight, so that even if it wasn’t quite so mean, there was this idea that fat is ugly or bad or something? Like, what was the language like in that era?

Khazan: Yeah, it was, I would say, less mean. But definitely she was not like, I just want wellness or I’m happy with my body. She wanted to lose weight.

Rosin: Right.

Khazan: And she would carry around a photo of her, like, former self when she was heavier. And she would be like, I pray that I never forget where I came from—

Rosin: Oof!

Khazan: Because it was, like, so bad to be overweight.

Rosin: Yeah.

Khazan: So definitely in this WeightWatchers era, people were still losing weight, and they were not just, like, doing yoga and being body-positive. So that’s kind of where it all originated.

Rosin: Okay, so what happens next?

Khazan: So because dieting isn’t very effective, I think a lot of people got frustrated with this encouragement to diet and exercise. And, I mean, there was a time when I was reporting a lot on obesity, and I would actually go to doctors’ appointments with people. And the doctor would tell them to lose weight, and they would be like, I don’t know how or I can’t. And they would be like, Well, have you tried diet and exercise?

Rosin: Also, Doctor, like, do you think I didn’t think of that?

Khazan: Right. Right

Rosin: Like it’s a novel idea you just came up with?

Khazan: Yeah, it’s, like, a little bit condescending. And so I think people kind of were like, I’m not going to put up with this anymore. And then the industry took a cue, I guess, from the general population. And so you had magazines who were like, We’re going to stop using phrases like “bikini body.” Lean Cuisine—this was a weird one—started offering a browser extension that actually blocks the word diet from your web pages.

Rosin: Interesting.

Khazan: Which is weird because it’s Lean Cuisine.

Rosin: Right? It is, kind of, diety food.

Khazan: Yeah, and you really had body positivity take off. And the idea of a diet really just seemed kind of outdated.

Rosin: So if dieting fell out of fashion, what new things sprung up?

Khazan: Yeah, so it’s very interesting. Right around this time in 2018, WeightWatchers starts calling itself WW. But, at the same time, you still have people who want to lose weight. So you have things starting up like Noom, which is this weight-loss app. And it does show you how to diet and how to eat foods that will keep you full longer, and helps you track your food and count your calories and things like that. But it also took this psychological approach where it would tell you, like, There’s no such thing as good and bad foods and You should move joyfully and Just because you mess up one day doesn’t mean that your diet is ruined. So it does a lot of, like, therapy coaching alongside telling you that grapes are healthier than raisins. And I know a lot of people who lost weight on Noom, and it seems to be pretty effective.

Rosin: Yeah, I remember when I was first looking through Noom and being really surprised at how different the language was. You know, they talked a lot about health and wellness and body positivity, but it was really hard to tell if people who were going to Noom just still had those same old anxieties about being thin—and if these companies sort of knew that and maybe were just coloring it over in more acceptable language so people felt better using it.

Khazan: I think that’s for everyone to draw their own conclusion. So I will say that, like, WeightWatchers, they stopped requiring their members to have a weight-loss goal. They stopped doing the before-and-after photos that they were kind of very famous for. You pick goals when you sign up for WeightWatchers, and one of them was developing a positive mindset. Meetings started to be called “workshops.” I don’t really know why that’s better than “meetings,” but they did that.

Rosin: More professional, maybe.

Khazan: Right? But they were still offering a point system and ways for people to lose weight. It was still a weight-loss program. So I think they just picked up on this sentiment in the culture that dieting is sort of passé, and they were like, What can we do—we’re a weight-loss company—that fits with this new sentiment that people have around dieting, but still fundamentally helps people lose weight?

Rosin: And there were periods that were a genuine opening up in the culture, like a change in models, like catalog models, just general models. Like, there was a broadening of types of bodies that you would see on screen or in magazines that everybody would agree could be called “beautiful.”

Khazan: Oh, totally. Yeah, I mean, and you had, like, the Dove commercials. Those famously, like, included size-10 women, which was, like, revolutionary at the time. (Chuckles.) So, yeah, there was a lot of positive stuff that came out of that time. Some of the shame around being fat, thankfully, went away. But there is this enduring, fundamental problem, which is that obesity is associated with a lot of bad health effects, and doctors in particular were still working on that.

Rosin: Now you’re separating the cultural issues from the medical issues, the medical issues being that obesity specifically—not overweightness, but obesity specifically—is associated with certain health outcomes.

Khazan: Obesity was and continues to be a big problem. It can cause diabetes, liver disease, heart disease, cancers, sleep apnea. It can shorten your lifespan. I mean, it continued throughout this time of body positivity to be something that doctors consider to be a huge health risk.

Rosin: I understand. So you could think of it as a symptom that might lead to other symptoms, but there isn’t any moral value attached to it.

Khazan: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s where things got really twisted. It’s that obesity did acquire a moral valence because, I think, a lot of people wrongly saw it as something you could completely control with what you ate. And if you just swapped out your Big Mac for carrot sticks, you wouldn’t be obese anymore. But realistically, that’s not what a lot of obese people are doing. They’re eating right and exercising, but they can’t lose weight anyway. So in some ways it’s better to think of obesity in a medical way, because it’s a medical condition.

Rosin: What are the American numbers on obesity, and how have they changed over all these decades that we’ve been talking about?

Khazan: It went from 13 percent of Americans were obese in the ’60s to 42 percent are obese now. So it is a really big medical problem. And we somehow have to muddle through and find a balance between treating obesity and helping people lose weight, if they want to, without shaming people who are obese or making them feel fat or lazy or somehow “less than,” just because they’re obese. I do think that this era of Semaglutide puts a new focus on the fact that if you’re, you know, severely overweight or obese, there is something you can do about that.

Rosin: When we come back, what happens when these medical imperatives and cultural shifts collide?

[Music]

Rosin: Imagine it’s 20 years from now. Insurance covers Ozempic. It’s affordable. It’s pretty widely available, not just to treat diabetes and obesity. We don’t live there yet, but you can tell it’s coming because of what happened this spring with WeightWatchers.

Khazan: These same companies that are sort of like, There’s no good and bad foods and You haven’t messed up; you just had a slip up and Wellness is more important than weight and Healthy is the new skinny, are now saying, Do you want some Ozempic?

Rosin: Yeah.

Khazan: Yeah, so both Noom and WeightWatchers have launched these services where you can be paired with a doctor. And if you qualify, which means if you’re obese or you have diabetes or other conditions, you can be prescribed these weight-loss drugs. And it doesn’t cover the cost of them, of course, which is substantial. So you would sort of do your Noom and your psychological behavior change, but also you would be injecting yourself with Ozempic.

Rosin: And to you, what was the significance of that announcement?

Khazan: Well, it’s an awkward pivot, right? Because you’ve been saying, All you have to do is follow our guidelines. You just have to count your points and keep going to meetings, and it’ll work or You just have to follow Noom and, you know, log your meals, and it’ll work. And suddenly it’s sort of like, Well, but if you want a little something extra, here it is. And I think anytime there’s an admission that the old approach has failed, and Here’s actually what’s better, it is a little surprising.

Rosin: Because there’s nobody explicit about that.

Khazan: Well, yeah. And I mean, the WeightWatchers CEO, Sima Sistani, said, There are people who join this program and lapse from our program because it didn’t work for them. And we have to be honest about that. And we now know better. And so we should do better. And so they’re kind of saying, like, We have to admit that, for some people, just regular WeightWatchers doesn’t work. So it is—it’s a huge admission, and it’s a huge step for them to be offering these drugs.

Rosin: I mean, on the one hand, saying We know that our program doesn’t work for a lot of people feels liberating. Like, there’s a way in which it acknowledges that obesity is a problem completely separate from willpower—we all acknowledge that. It’s a little bit like the change in framework we had with Prozac.

Khazan: Yeah, Prozac is a really good analogy, because in this day and age, I don’t think people would really shame someone who’s like, I have depression and I take Prozac. You wouldn’t be like, Well, have you just, you know, tried to be happy?, you know, or whatever.

Rosin: But it was more that when Prozac was first introduced, it sort of switched the framework so that you didn’t necessarily have to think about psychodynamic therapy and sort of dig deep into your past. You at least had another model, which can be treated in this separate chemical way. So there’s kind of a bright line between you and it. It just externalizes the situation.

Khazan: Yeah, I mean, and that’s something the new medical director also pointed out to me, which is that, like, some people are just genetically predisposed to have insulin resistance. That can lead to abnormal fat storage and a dysregulated appetite. And there’s just not a lot that you can do when your body is actively working against you to keep you from losing weight.

Rosin: Let’s say Ozempic-like drugs are widely available. A lot of people start to know people who are taking Ozempic and think about it and talk about it in this way. Can you imagine a scenario in which that actually changes this underlying, lingering bias against fatness?

Khazan: I really hope so. I mean, because once you have a medication that works really well for something like obesity, and everyone kind of acknowledges that if you take this, you will lose a substantial amount of weight very quickly, I do think some of the moralizing around it will go away. Because the problem with diets is that they are very moralistic—like, forcing people to eat carrots or whatever instead of what they actually want to be eating, it has, like, a “should” and “shouldn’t” quality that is a little like telling people to just be happy. Like, I think that, you know, once these become more popularized, hopefully it will lead more people to see obesity as a medical condition, which, again, I think is a positive thing.

Rosin: So that’s the positive. The positive is that we move into a world where we have a completely different medical framework for obesity, and it slowly erodes the stigma around being fat. Now, maybe the difficult thing—like, one thing I wonder about is if it actually hardens our intolerance of fat if you just won’t get with this program.

Khazan: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a real risk of that. To use an example of my own that’s not obesity, I do have anxiety, but I’m not on antianxiety medication. But every time I go to the doctor and check anxiety on the form, they’re like, Lexapro! Here you go. Like, Here, why don’t you take it? No, seriously, take it. And it doesn’t matter how many times I say, like, I want to try other things, like, whatever, I’m meditating. They’re like, Well, we have a pill. Like, you could just take it. And it’s very hard to push back against the medicalization of something. And I do think that there is a potential for that for people who don’t want to take it for whatever reason, can’t tolerate it—again, there are side effects. Maybe it doesn’t work for them. Maybe insurance doesn’t cover it. Maybe they just have other things they want to focus on than losing weight. I think there is a risk that we’ll get to be like, Well, you know, your biggest problem is obesity, and why don’t you just, you know, inject this into yourself already?

Rosin: Right. Right. I mean, and this—what you described about your relationship with doctors and anxiety, it is a discipline for you to maintain a complicated relationship with your anxiety in the same way as, I think, it might really take a lot of work and be a discipline to maintain a complicated relationship with your body.

Khazan: Yeah, I mean, right now the obesity doctor—or one of them that I talked to for this—he was saying he does not just, like, write a prescription for everyone who comes by. You really have to be obese, which is, like, above a certain BMI threshold. So if you were just a little overweight, that’s not really going to qualify you. But I think in the future it might come to a point where these drugs are so widely available that someone who’s just overweight, not obese, can get their hands on them and basically use them, probably.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Khazan: So you will not see as many people who are obese. And so, therefore, being a little overweight will start to look, maybe, a little more conspicuous among your social group, or whatever else, and that you might start to put some pressure on that endocrinologist to write that prescription already. I think there is the possibility of that happening, but at the same time, obesity is, like, such a huge medical problem that if we do have a way to get people to not be obese—and it’s relatively low-key and they can tolerate it well and it’s, like, widely available—I have trouble not seeing that as a good thing.

[Music]

Rosin: Well, Olga, thank you very much. That was very helpful in thinking through the future.

Khazan: (Laughs.) No, thanks so much for having me on.

In a rare interview, Spotify boss Daniel Ek talks to the BBC about AI, regulation and Harry and Meghan.

The streaming giant quashes a theory that listening to a song on repeat will rake in the royalties.

When a group of German hackers breached a Tesla, they weren’t out to remotely seize control of the car. They weren’t trying to access the owner’s WiFi passwords, nor did they want a way to steal credit-card numbers from a local electric-vehicle charging network.

Their target was its heated seats.

The Tesla in question was equipped with heated rear seats, but the feature is hidden behind a paywall and activated only after the driver forks over $300. To get around that, three Ph.D. students from Technische Universität Berlin, along with an independent researcher (and the  Tesla’s owner), say they physically tampered with the voltage supply that powers the car’s infotainment system. This allowed them to essentially glitch the computer, in the process gaining access to the rear heated seats free of charge. By “jailbreaking” the car, they were also able to access many of its internal systems and private user data. “We are not the evil outsider, but we’re actually the insider, we own the car,” one of the researchers told TechCrunch last month ahead of a cybersecurity conference where they presented their findings. “And we don’t want to pay these $300 for the rear-heated seats.”

As part of the move toward electric cars, most automakers are copying Silicon Valley’s playbook and making drivers pay monthly or yearly fees to unlock new features. Sometimes those features are fairly basic, like a remote starter; in other cases they’re more advanced, like autonomous parking assistance. Accessing them typically requires just a few taps on a car’s touchscreen or its related smartphone app, the same way you might subscribe to anything else online. It’s part of why the new generation of cars is often described as “smartphones on wheels”: Cars now offer various downloadable apps, automated driver assistance, and even integration with platforms such as Spotify and TikTok. But more digital features that connect your car to the internet provide openings for data theft, tampering, and other cybersecurity risks that simply have not existed on the roads until now.

Car hacking may call to mind action-movie-like scenes of millions of Teslas being remotely seized by terrorist groups and commanded to drive into hospitals. That’s thankfully far-fetched. The bigger risk is to personal and financial information related to various digital add-ons and connected features, which are essentially unavoidable with modern EVs—as is the requirement that you pay for them over time. Mercedes-Benz will unlock more horsepower for up to $90 a month, BMW lets its cars’ safety cameras record 40-second snapshots of video for $39 a year, and Ford’s BlueCruise hands-off driver-assist feature is now $75 a month. Many major automakers have big plans for this approach, if they don’t already offer them: Ford just made a big executive hire from Apple to grow future subscription revenue, while General Motors plans to offer more than 50 such features by 2026. And rather than conveniently listing these costs online, some automakers have you find out via the car’s infotainment system itself.

Understandably, these moves have not gone over well with the car-buying public. A BMW plan to charge $18 a month for heated seats (it’s always heated seats, somehow) in countries including the United Kingdom and Korea proved so unpopular that BMW just announced it will be dropping the idea entirely. The company still plans to offer subscriptions for software such as automated parking help, and Jay Hanson, a BMW spokesperson, told me that such subscriptions offer drivers a level of flexibility they’ve never had before. “A customer may choose to add a feature that was not specified when the vehicle was originally ordered,” he said, “or experiment with a feature by purchasing a short-term trial before committing to a purchase.”

There is another explanation for the pivot to subscriptions. Although subscription features aren’t exclusive to electric cars, they are inextricably tied to the EV revolution. Developing and building EV batteries is staggeringly expensive—less a “shift” and more a total reinvention of the industry costing hundreds of billions of dollars. And because EVs generally have far fewer mechanical components than gas cars, they require very little maintenance, meaning that car makers, suppliers, and dealers are poised to lose a significant amount of revenue made from selling parts for repairs. One Hyundai executive told me earlier this year that the company wants 30 percent of future profits to come from software, downloadable features, in-car entertainment, and other subscription features.

Nature finds a way, and so do hackers. Putting these features behind a paywall could encourage tampering from owners looking to get stuff for free, just as some smartphone owners jailbreak their devices. One of the German Tesla hackers, Christian Werling, told me in an email that he anticipates a rise in tactics like the ones they used. “I would be surprised if [other Tesla owners] didn’t adapt similar techniques to ours,” he said. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment, though Werling said that the team shared its data with Tesla, as is the norm for benevolent “white hat” hackers. “They did respond to our findings and were grateful for the heads-up,” he said.

But surely most EV owners aren’t going to bother jailbreaking their $50,000-plus car, even if they have the technical expertise to do so. The bigger threat, experts told me, is remote software hacks from malicious actors. Each time a car gets a new touchscreen app or subscription feature, it provides a potential way in for hackers who are after your credit-card information, personal data, and more. Let’s say you pay your car company $20 a month for something like those much-maligned heated seats, and this includes the ability to remotely warm them up on cold days through a smartphone app. An intrepid hacker could use various tools or techniques to find a security vulnerability in that app and remotely log in. From there, they might be able to access the credit card you use to pay for those heated seats, or tamper with other functions on your car that are tied to the smartphone app. They might discover ways in from forums such as Reddit, the deep web, or even publicly available databases, and then try something that worked on one car with another brand. Or they might launch a distributed denial-of-service attack on one of the communication systems these digital car features depend on.

The potential risks are amplified because of the countless third-party companies that automakers rely on for hardware and software alike. The German researchers were able to jailbreak their Tesla because of a vulnerability in the processor that powers the car’s touchscreen, made by the company AMD. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.) Last year, the cybersecurity researcher Sam Curry and his cohorts found a way to unlock, start, and honk the horn of scores of Nissan, Honda, Infiniti, and Acura vehicles because they all used a common provider of internet-connected features, SiriusXM Connected Vehicle Services. Cars may especially be a target of hacks because of the massive amounts of personal and location data that they now collect. “Cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy,” a recent report from the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation concluded. Depending on what exactly gets breached, a car hacker could see where your home or office is or where you go to spend your money, or even have a window into much more personal matters, such as whether you drove to an abortion clinic.

This is not to say that car hacking is now a daily fact of life with EV ownership. An Israeli cybersecurity and data-management company called Upstream, which monitors millions of cars across the world, reported that of 1,173 publicly reported car cyberattacks they examined since 2010, almost 23 percent happened in 2022, tracking with the rise of connected features in cars. Exactly how big of a problem this might become remains unclear, though Vyas Sekar, a Carnegie Mellon professor who has studied car cyberattacks, told me a major concern is that the connectedness of modern cars also increases the “scalability” of threats. “If the attacker finds a weakness,” he said, “they can compromise a large number of connected cars simultaneously without much cost or effort.” Last year, a 19-year-old discovered a vulnerability in a popular third-party program that lets Tesla owners access their data, allowing him access to dozens of Teslas worldwide. He was able to control the cars’ windows, doors, and horn, and even obtain the owners’ email addresses.

The threat of cyberattacks is not new for tech companies; it’s part of why your phone is always bugging you to upgrade its operating system. But now an industry that spent a century building gasoline engines has to be in the cybersecurity business too, and it’s not necessarily going well. Upstream’s VP of data, Shachar Azriel, told me that auto companies can take months to respond to vulnerabilities. “I worry the industry isn’t agile enough,” he said. “These companies don’t know how to move fast here.” I reached out to several car companies—including Tesla, Ford, Toyota, and BMW—to ask about their cybersecurity operations, and only BMW and Toyota would comment on the record. Even then, the carmakers shied away from specifics. Hanson, the BMW spokesperson, said the German automaker has an automotive-security division that works to prevent both hacking and jailbreaking. “This division uses all available, state-of-the art measures to ensure our digital products are guarded from external threats in the best possible way,” he said.

For individual drivers, security likely means making sure that your car’s software is up-to-date just as you would with your phone, or even being judicious about where and how you dole out credit-card information—something that doesn’t bode well for the multitude of apps required for EV charging. But most of us still think of our cars in terms of filling up gas, oil changes, and rotating tires, not data privacy. If the auto industry wants drivers to see cars as “smartphones on wheels”—and pay the same way—it’s got to be prepared for the worst. That, or we learn to just skip the heated seats.

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.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is the staff writer and author Mark Leibovich. Mark has recently written about the long-shot presidential candidate who has the White House worried, and how Moneyball broke baseball.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Streaming has reached its sad, predictable fate. Hip-hop’s fiercest critic A knockout technique for achieving more happiness

The Culture Survey: Mark Leibovich

Mark wrote a little introductory note for our newsletter readers, so I’ll attach that here before we get to his culture-survey responses:

Okay, I will admit to just rereading a bunch of these recent culture surveys and marveling at how well-read, well-watched, and well-listened some of my Atlantic colleagues are. Intimidating! They set such a high and considered bar. Now allow me to lower it.

In comparison, my tastes are a hodgepodge of high-low delights that I pick up from random films, TV shows, or social-media feeds, which then lead me down various other rabbit holes. In other words, my tastes tend to be a meandering mess, depending on my moods, whereabouts, chemical intakes, endorphin bursts, and general exposures (or maybe I just flatter myself, and some algo-god is reading this from a Menlo Park lair, laughing like hell).

Here’s an example from an hour ago: I was driving my daughter to school, hopped up on espressos and flipping around on SiriusXM. Thankfully, Franny (my daughter) shares my quickness to punch the presets, my need for better options at all times, and my jumpy attention span (shorter version: ADHD). I happened to land on the ’80s-on-8 station and somehow found myself hooked on a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac” by Natalie Cole (!). Who knew that existed? I didn’t until this morning, and wouldn’t you know it, the song stuck to my predilection lobes like bubble gum. Then, for some reason, the DJ—the former MTV VJ Mark Goodman—felt the need to come on and trash Natalie’s effort. Totally bogus, dude. And wrong.

This also reminded me that I once had tea with Nat King Cole’s widow, Maria, sometime in the ’90s, at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, where she happened to be living. Lovely woman, since departed. I have a cool story about Mrs. Cole too, which I started to tell Franny, but she was by then deep into her phone.

Anyway …

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I’m writing this on the first weekend of the NFL season. There’s a reason most of the top-rated television shows every single year are NFL games. America’s most successful sports league is such a juggernaut, and I’m definitely part of the problem. Why problem? Because, among other things, football is morally precarious, causes incalculable damage to its players’ bodies and brains, and is run and owned by some of the worst people in the world, nearly all of them billionaires.

Even so, I will definitely tune in to a bunch of games this weekend, with generous bowls of Trader Joe’s kettle corn and reheated leftover pad thai on my lap. Which is a great segue into …

A favorite story I’ve read recently in The Atlantic: One of the teams that kicked off the season Thursday night, the young and promising Detroit Lions, is the subject of a great romp by the long-suffering, lionhearted Tim Alberta. The story is packed with poignancy, hitting many levels and themes: futility and resilience, legacies and character, fathers and sons. Also, faith rewarded: Lions 21–Chiefs 20. [Related: The thrill of defeat]

I’m going to cheat and suggest another article from The Atlantic, even though I read an early version and it is not yet online: next month’s cover story, by my desk-neighbor and pal Jenisha Watts. I have truly never read a story like this in my life, ever, and can’t even begin to describe the wonder of its triumph, or the triumph that is Jenisha, whom I am so proud to know.

The television show that I’m most enjoying right now: Daisy Jones and the Six (on Amazon Prime Video). A total joy. L.A. in the ’70s, road trips, and “you regret me, and I regret you” (that’s a lyric). Speaking of which …

Best work of nonfiction I’ve read recently: The Daisy Jones title cut is “Dancing Barefoot,” by Patti Smith, which led me to Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, which I purchased at my favorite local independent bookstore, Politics and Prose, because screw Amazon, even though it gave us Daisy Jones. (Like football, it’s complicated. Or maybe not.)

Aside: Riley Keough, if you or your reps are reading this, I want to interview you.  MLeibovich@TheAtlantic.com.

An author I will read anything by: Christopher Buckley. The maestro’s been on my mind lately because I just finished Make Russia Great Again, an utterly hilarious Trump-era novel. And yes, there actually is a “Trump-era novel” genre (another pearl being The Captain and the Glory, by Dave Eggers).

I’ll also mention that Buckley once reviewed one of my books, and it was pretty much the highlight of my life—and damn right I’m linking to it.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Worst Person in the World and Licorice Pizza. These were two of the few movies I’ve seen in theaters since (or during) the pandemic, both of which I rewatched on a long flight this summer. Each got into my bones, in their own wanderlusting, generationally particular way. The Norwegian film Worst Person is better than anything the Oslo Chamber of Commerce could ever have spawned (salmonlike!). It also led me to Todd Rundgren’s glorious song “Healing,” which has been feeding my heart ever since.

As for Licorice (again, L.A. in the ’70s), the film blissfully reacquainted me with a long-lost friend of a song, “Let Me Roll It,” by Paul McCartney and Wings. We’ve kept in touch since via Spotify, usually while I’m on my stationary bike, which I try to ride every day in an attempt to mitigate the various erosions of being in my 50s. Speaking of aging and life cycles and the transience of it all … [Related: Licorice Pizza is a tragicomic tale of 1970s Hollywood.]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. The title is also the last line of the poem, and is now the last entry in this scavenging of serendipity. May the golden wisdom of these words stay, eternally.

The Week Ahead

A Haunting in Venice, Kenneth Branagh’s supernatural mystery film (in select theaters Friday) The Vaster Wilds, a new novel by Lauren Groff (out Tuesday) How I Won a Nobel Prize, a novel by Julius Taranto (out Tuesday)

Essay

Bob Berg / Getty

The Album That Made Me a Music Critic

By Spencer Kornhaber

Smash Mouth has long been, as its guitarist, Greg Camp, once said, “a band that you can make fun of.” The pop-rock group’s signature hit, 1999’s “All Star,” combines the sounds of DJ scratches, glockenspiel, and a white dude rapping that he “ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.” Fashionwise, the band tended to dress for a funky night at the bowling alley. And over nearly three decades, Smash Mouth has remained famous partly because of the flatulent cartoon ogre Shrek.

But the affection Smash Mouth commands is serious—the result of music so simultaneously pleasing and odd that it could rewire a young listener’s brain. In fact, the sad news of the death of original front man Steve Harwell at age 56 has me wondering if the band’s 1999 album, Astro Lounge, is the reason I’m a music critic. Most people can point to songs that hit them in early adolescence, when their ears were impressionable but their interest in other people’s judgment was still, blessedly, undeveloped. Smash Mouth’s second album, the one with “All Star,” came out when I was 11. Every goofy organ melody is still engraved in my mind, and today, the album holds up as an ingeniously crafted pleasure capsule.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

“Some have yoga. I have Montaigne.” Fiction on trial Okay, the 1980s Lakers were great—what else? How men muscled women out of surfing A constantly rebooting children’s franchise that’s actually good A rom-com franchise that needs to end The problem Olivia Rodrigo can’t solve

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Elon Musk’s latest target hits back. The China model is dead. Can Poland roll back authoritarian populism?

Photo Album

This picture, taken on September 2, 2023, shows a player scoring a try during Water Rugby Lausanne by jumping into Lake Geneva from a floating rugby field. The match was part of a three-day tournament organized by LUC Rugby that gathered more than 240 players in Lausanne, Switzerland. (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty)

The World Tango Championship in Argentina, a scene from the 80th Venice Film Festival, a cricket game in Afghanistan, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters.

One thing we crave after our collective pandemic experience is certainty. If a potentially powerful new variant is out there, we need some answers about it: How fast is its evolution? Will it spread as quickly and widely as Omicron? And will the vaccine be effective against it?

In this episode, I talk with Atlantic science writers Katie Wu and Sarah Zhang. They know a lot, and they are very honest about all the things they don’t know. A few scenarios are possible, from Omicron replay to somewhat bad to shrug. They give us their best educated guesses, based on years of deep reporting on COVID. If we face another pandemic, will we be better prepared this time? The answer to that one, I’m afraid, is probably not. What we do have more of, though, are excellent metaphors. Sarah put it to me this way:

I think my favorite metaphor is a dog chasing a rabbit. You can think of the virus as a rabbit. It’s just running around all over the place. The virus is constantly evolving; it’s always becoming a little bit different. And our immunity’s playing a little bit of catch-up.

People keep saying, “When is the virus going to stop evolving?” Well, the rabbit can just kind of keep running forever, even if it’s just running in circles. So the virus is never going to stop evolving, and our immune system is always going to be playing catch-up. And that’s basically what happens with flu every year. And I think that’s probably where COVID is going to settle.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode.

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. There’s something that happens to me when I see the word COVID in a headline. My brain freezes. It’s like a tiny background panic that stops me from doing what I want to do, which is click on the headline, read the story by a smart science writer, find out what’s going on with COVID so I can know how to live my life.

I know a lot of people in this situation. So today’s conversation is our attempt to slow down and understand some things—some basic things—like this new COVID variant that experts seem concerned about, the updated vaccine that’s about to come out, when and where to mask or not mask

But I also want us to get a broader perspective. Because humans and viruses have lived together for hundreds and thousands of years. And we’ve only had COVID for a few. So I’m talking to two Atlantic science writers, Katie Wu and Sarah Zhang. Hi, Katie.

Katie Wu: Hi. Good to be here.

Rosin: Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Zhang: Hello.

Rosin: Hi. So just this morning, I was on a walk with a friend. I was telling her that we were going to tape an episode about COVID, and she said, “Oh, my daughter has COVID.” And I bring that up because, just anecdotally, it seems like all of a sudden, everybody once again knows somebody who’s tested positive in the last few weeks.

So, Katie, I’m wondering: Are we in a kind of mini wave that we seem to have every summer?

Wu: It’s a great question, and honestly I could give you an answer, but it’s likely to differ from the next person’s answer and the next person’s answer, ’cause there is still no universal definition for what a wave is. Cases are definitely increasing, but they’re not super, super high, so what do we call this?

I think the trend is there, but whether or not to call it a wave is an existential question. Suffice it to say there’s more COVID now than there was a few weeks ago.

Rosin: That’s—maybe we need more metaphors, like it’s a wavelet, or, because a wave, I imagine, is not an official scientific term. Well, maybe this isn’t the right word, but why do we seem to get these summer spikes?

Wu: This is a really complicated question because it’s really about: Is COVID seasonal? We’re used to thinking about a bunch of other respiratory viruses, including classically the flu, as being, you know, cold-weather diseases.

Like, oh, fall is when you get your flu shot in advance of winter, which is respiratory-virus season. And we have seen for the past three and a half years that COVID has kind of, well, gone bananas every winter, but it has had these summer bumps, too—even sometimes risen in the spring or the fall.

It just doesn’t stick to a single season, and there’s just not enough information at this point for experts to definitively say, “Okay, that probably means it’s not seasonal. This is going to be a year-round thing, and that’s going to just kind of suck in perpetuity”—or you know, this disease is still quite new.

It’s been around for less than four years, and maybe eventually it will be more predictable. I think a lot of experts kind of lean toward the latter: that this probably will be a cold-weather disease. But there’s really not a guarantee of that. We don’t even fully understand why diseases that are known to be predictably seasonal are predictably seasonal, which is kind of a mind-boggling thing. So the fact that cases are rising now could be anything from, oh, you know, a lot of people are congregating indoors, but that’s not a full explanation ’cause we’re indoors. A lot of the year in different parts of the country, it could be that it’s been a while since a lot of us have been infected, and so immunity is collectively kind of at a low point.

It could be that our circadian rhythms are a little bit different in the summer versus winter, and that affects how our immunity works. It could just be, we just happen to get a new batch of variants. It could be all of the above. It could be none of the above. It’s messy.

Rosin: Now, Sarah, the last time there was a major new variant was almost two years ago—that was Omicron. Now there’s another variant that has Omicron-like superpowers. What is this new variant, and how bad could it get?

Zhang: Yeah, so this new variant is called BA.2.86, which is a name that rolls right off the tongue. Uh, the reason scientists sort of got really interested in this a couple of weeks ago is that, as you were saying, it was kind of like a big evolutionary jump—like Omicron was two years ago. It had something like more than 30 mutations in its spike protein, which is really huge and, before Omicron, a totally unprecedented thing to see. So scientists were like, Hey, this really looks really different based on what we know. It’s probably going to be pretty good at evading our existing immunity.

Rosin: And why is it important to know how many mutations a virus has? Why is that a measure of anything?

Zhang: Yeah, the more mutations it is, the more different the virus looks, right? So the more different it is, the harder it is for our immune system to recognize it. It’s like if a virus went away and put on a whole new outfit and then you’re like, “Hey, is that like something I’ve seen before? Or is that something totally new?” So it’s just a little bit harder for our immune system to recognize and to kind of get a jump on to start defending against.

Rosin: Got it. Okay, so the idea is our immune system is single-minded: “I recognize you. I can fight against you.” But if it’s slightly different, it literally doesn’t recognize it.

Zhang: Yes.

Rosin: Okay, so we were saying this one has a lot of mutations but not quite enough to deserve its own Greek letter.

Zhang: Well, the actual question right now is it has a lot of mutations. It can probably hide from our immune system in some way, but the question now is: While it’s really changed itself, does that mean it’s also just less good of a virus?

They kind of have this trade-off. The more they change their spike protein, the harder it is for our immune systems to recognize it. But then maybe they also kind of break their spike protein a little bit. Maybe it’s just not as good.

Rosin: Sarah, when you say a virus is good, you mean it’s effective, like it spreads quickly?

Zhang: Yeah, it’s fit. It’s very good at spreading from person to person.

Rosin: Did you say “fit?” Like the way the British say “fit,” like a virus can be “fit”?

Zhang: (Laughs.) I don’t know if this virus is that attractive or sexy. It’s actually bad for us if it’s very fit. Evolutionary biologists talk about the fitness of an organism, right? Like survival of the fittest. So think about the “fittest” virus as the one that’s going to sweep around the world and take over.

Rosin: I love it. I didn’t know that. So looking into fall, we’ve got this possibly bad BA.2.86. What’s the worst-case scenario? And then everything down from there?

Zhang: Yeah, I mean the worst-case scenario is this looking a lot like an Omicron-level jump. Could this be another Omicron? This particular variant doesn’t seem to be growing as explosively as Omicron was back in 2021, so I think the worst-case scenario is starting to look less and less likely, which is good for us humans.

The next scenario, which is probably more likely at this point is: Maybe this new variant does have some sort of advantage over the other variants currently circulating, but it’s not that big. So it ends up kind of behaving like a lot of the other variants we’ve seen over the past two years.

The third possibility is that while we do see really mutated viruses prop up from time to time—often in people who have chronic infections who are immunocompromised—in most cases, they don’t really spread anywhere further than that person. This one clearly is able to spread to some extent, but maybe it’s actually not that good and eventually it just fizzles out and dies on its own. I think these latter two scenarios are looking more likely than the worst-case scenario, but we still don’t really know exactly which future we’re living in yet.

Rosin: So the viruses may be coming for us. Health experts are tracking it better, but we ourselves are in a very different place than in November 2021 when Omicron emerged. It’s true we have a lot more immunity, but a lot less testing, a lot less vigilance from a public-health perspective. We’re not hanging on every word, rushing to get the vaccine. It’s just a very different mindset. So even though these variants seem a lot less powerful, we are a lot more indifferent. And I’m wondering, Katie, where that leaves us from a public-health perspective.

Wu: It is a great question, and I think this is the question on most public-health experts’ minds right now. For me personally, it does make me a little bit nervous, because we have sort of settled into this weird steady state now. All the variables you’ve just identified, it’s going to take a lot for them to change drastically.

We’ve kind of hit this plateau of immunity. Most people at this point have been infected or vaccinated or both. And so there’s this kind of base layer of immunity that’s tamping down severe disease, but yeah, at the same time, people are behaving, for the most part, as if it were 2019. And it’s going to take a lot for that to change. There’s a lot of behavioral inertia right now.

And so with these forces kind of acting against each other, what the rest of this year looks like could be kind of a preview for how COVID continues to affect our society in the years coming forward. Small things may continue to change, and things may continue to settle, especially that seasonality component we were talking about before.

But, certainly, to see hospitalizations rising at this point—it doesn’t necessarily bode well for the winter. And the concern is: We’ve learned so much about how to stop this virus from spreading super fast through the community, and there’s not a lot of willpower left to take those measures at this point, even when cases start to rise.

Rosin: And last fall, we got the bivalent vaccine, which protected against both the original strain of the virus and the Omicron variant. Now, I understand, we have a new vaccine coming soon. What do we know about it?

Wu: Yeah, so, this is kind of an exciting change. This will be our first ever version of the COVID vaccine here in the U.S. that does not contain any of the original strain. Which makes good sense. That original strain has not been around for years. We probably don’t really need to be putting that in our vaccine. For comparison, we update our flu vaccines pretty much every year. We’re not still putting in strains from, like, the ’70s.

The vaccine is updated to be within the Omicron family, which is still the family that is bothering us now, even though the virus has undergone a lot of evolution within that family. So this should be a closer match to whatever is the dominant strain this fall.

I think there is a little bit of concern that, because we have gotten a lot of these subvariants that have changed significantly, it’s not going to be a perfect match. People probably will still get infected if they encounter the virus after getting vaccinated. But this should give people’s protection against severe disease a boost, and that matters a lot.

Rosin: What is the guesswork involved in deciding which vaccine you’re going to administer in the fall? There’s always guesswork, right?

Wu: Right. There is always guesswork, and part of it is a timing issue. When we select strains to include in fall flu vaccines—and now fall COVID vaccines, which seems like a norm going forward—those decisions are being made in February or maybe, at the latest, June, depending on which vaccine you’re talking about.

Even with a pretty tight timeline, you need to give manufacturers time to test out those doses, manufacture them, ship them out, make sure pharmacies have them in stock, and then start administering them. That’s months of delay. The virus doesn’t care about our vaccine schedule. It is going to be doing whatever benefits it in the meantime.

And so, if that means evolving new strains, producing new family members within this Omicron family, that is what it’s going to do, and that is what it has done. There will probably be a little bit of that Russian-roulette phenomenon with COVID going forward as well. These viruses just move too quickly, evolutionarily speaking.

But the upshot is that it is still going to be a way better bet to get the vaccine anyway, because it is going to refresh your immune system’s conception of the virus, rather than sticking with last year’s model.

Rosin: I mean, all the language around viruses is really like video games: It has certain powers. We try and get in ahead of it. We try to get it. I wonder: How do you conceptualize it as people who write about it a lot? Is it like a video game? A race? A war? What’s your favorite category of metaphor?

Zhang: I think my favorite metaphor is a dog chasing a rabbit. You can think of the virus as a rabbit. It’s just running around all over the place. The virus is constantly evolving; it’s always becoming a little bit different. And our immunity’s playing a little bit of catch-up.

People keep saying, “When is the virus going to stop evolving?” Well, the rabbit can just kind of keep running forever, even if it’s just running in circles. So the virus is never going to stop evolving, and our immune system is always going to be playing catch-up. And that’s basically what happens with flu every year. And I think that’s probably where COVID is going to settle.

Rosin: Mm-hmm! Katie, do you have one?

Wu: I love Sarah’s dog-and-rabbit metaphor. I also really like a textbook-student metaphor.

So you can picture your immune system as a student learning. As knowledge evolves, textbooks do have to get updated. Refreshing your immune system with a booster is kind of like updating a textbook and handing it to a student in advance of an exam. It is updating them with the most recent knowledge.

We know that knowledge changes. We know that we have to refresh our memories and the longer we go without reviewing material, the more easily it’s going to fade from our brains, the longer it’s going to take to remind ourselves of it if someone hands us a pop quiz.

So I like to think of annual vaccinations like flu, and probably COVID, as doing practice tests or as reading the most up-to-date versions of textbooks in advance of big exams, which is respiratory-virus season.

Rosin: I have to say, now I feel kind of like the loser in class, because mine was a video-game metaphor, and yours was like a textbook and a sort of beautiful animal dance.

Wu: (Laughs.)

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: I feel like we’ve covered the fall. We understand how to get ourselves ready for the fall, but then there’s the rest of our lives. Both of you have mentioned, in different ways, COVID becoming flu-like. So if you step back—because the stance of new wave, new variant, new vaccine, it’s pretty familiar—are we right to think it is becoming flu-like, and how should we think about that?

Zhang: Yeah, so the short answer is yes, it is becoming more flu-like. But. And the reason I say “but” is because there are still a lot more people dying of COVID than they are dying of flu every single year.

If you look at just how many people are getting COVID and dying of it, it’s about the same as flu on an individual basis. If you get it, your chance of dying of it is probably similar to flu. But the difference is that it’s still a lot more infectious than flu is. It’s infecting a lot more people. So even though your percent is the same, you just have a much larger denominator. So more people are still dying of COVID.

I think there’s the question then of, in the long term, will this change? When we’re very young, our immune systems are encountering new viruses all the time. And they’re generally pretty good at dealing with a new virus that it’s never seen before, because when you’re a baby, you’re born with a blank slate and you have to learn how to deal with every single virus out there. But as we get older, our immune systems just become less agile. They’re less good at learning about a new virus. And that’s the reason COVID was so deadly and why it’s so deadly still, particularly to people who are older. So even though everyone who is older most likely has been infected or vaccinated at this point, they were not infected or vaccinated for the first time when they were very young.

We don’t really know what the equilibrium of this virus is until everyone who’s alive had encountered this virus for the first time when they were very young. Maybe that will get better. It does seem like the older you are when you encounter this virus the first time, the less good, generally, your immunity will ever be.

Of course, since this virus just emerged a few years ago, we still have a large percentage of our population fall under that. In 50 or 100 years, that’ll be really different. And that may mean this virus just becomes a lot more routine than it is right now.

Rosin: Interesting. I feel, Katie, like that just puts us back in the same logic, which is: Protect granny. Like, the reason you should wear a mask is because you could infect someone older whose immune system is much less strong than yours is. And then we’re right back to two years ago.

Wu: Right. “Protect the elderly; protect the immunocompromised,” I think, will continue to be a very resounding goal for COVID mitigation going forward. I think one more thing I would add on about the “flu-ness,” or lack thereof, of COVID is: Long COVID remains this really big question mark.

As we sort of progress through the generations and as the virus starts infecting people for the first time, younger and younger, maybe long-COVID incidence will drop. Or as more people get vaccinated, long COVID will become less of a thing.

But that’s not necessarily a guarantee. We know that the long-term consequences of COVID are still much more common and much more severe and debilitating than anything we have seen with flu in recent memory. So I think we do need to figure out how we’re going to address that going forward. And figure out this seasonality question as well.

Rosin: Yeah, the hundred-year arc you mentioned is really interesting and helpful, because one of the tensions of the moment is: We want to be done. We’re emerging from a long pandemic. It feels more stable. But it’s so early in the life of this virus that anybody intelligent you have a conversation with will say, “We just don’t know enough.”

Zhang: Yeah, I know. Three and a half years feels so, so long. But on a scientific timescale, on a timescale of evolution, it’s really just the blink of an eye. I mean, we’re really still at the very beginning of humanity’s relationship with SARS-CoV-2. And where that goes in the end, we don’t know. We just have so few data points to extrapolate from.

Rosin: The last thing I’m going to ask about is the infrastructure. The Biden administration ended the public-health emergency in May, which means we are in a “nonemergency” season of COVID if we enter a season of COVID. Does that change anything? Was that a good idea?

Wu: Oh gosh, that’s a tricky question to answer. I think it was a fair decision for the time. I think crisis-level management from up top is not designed to last forever. This had to end at some point. I think it was arguably a bumpy off-ramp. I remember speaking to a lot of researchers at the time who felt like they were just kind of being dropped without a really good landing pad.

And I think there will be a lot of differences that, subtly or not so subtly, pop up this winter, like what are hospitals going to do around masking? What are schools going to do around testing? How are we going to handle a big influx of cases if that happens without automatic federal support for supplies? That sort of thing.

We are now reverting back to a business-as-usual system where a lot of different institutions are trying to manage the situation on their own. And what’s likely to happen is kind of a patchwork of outcomes. We’re figuring it out for ourselves. Which is tricky to square with public health, right? We want to do things for the greater good, but what happens if one place has fewer resources than another? Will there be worse outcomes there? And is that a fair allocation of what we have on a national scale?

The goal is not to go back to 2019, but the goal is also not to stay in peak 2020 forever in terms of our response.

Rosin: Right. And the way you just put it made me feel like we’re actually not incorporating the lessons. That everybody’s out there on their own—that doesn’t seem great. Why can’t we apply the lessons in some clever way?

Wu: It’s a great question. I think the why is tricky, but what I will say is that there’s been a lot of discussion about the very typical panic-neglect cycle in public health. When new threats arise, we often end up scrambling to meet them head-on as if we’ve never encountered these same threats before—reinventing the wheel, constantly running into the same mistakes, finally mounting some responses, getting through the end of the crisis, everyone goes back to normal, and it’s as if the past however-many years have been erased. There’s not a systems-level rearrangement. There’s no infrastructural change. There’s no added resilience in the system, in most cases.

And that does set us up worse for the next crisis. It sort of erodes stability over time. I think that’s the long-term concern here. Yes, COVID is very much still a big issue, but we have mostly made it through the absolute worst of this. And that’s good, but what next? This will not be our last pandemic. This won’t even be our last big outbreak of this year.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. So, if we’re going to be generous, we’ll say that everyone needs a breather and then they’ll turn to long-term resilience. That’s the best-case scenario.

Wu: That would be great, but it sure is easier to do nothing.

Rosin: Yes, it is always easier to do nothing. Okay, last thing. I remember during the height of the COVID-era, the articles that everybody read a lot were when they asked experts: “What are you doing?” So I’m going to ask you. What are you doing? Would you go to a big wedding? Would you go to a big party unmasked? How are you going about your life? And is it any different than you were six months ago?

Wu: I am currently kind of in my middle-ground state. I am seeing friends. I’m traveling, but when I get on a plane or into the Uber that I’m taking to the airport, I will be wearing a mask. I’m going to an event with a lot of people, but it’s going to be outdoors, so I won’t be masking there.

And apart from that, I’m trying to take each event as its own isolated case: Am I seeing someone who is older and a little immunocompromised, like my mom? I’m going to act very differently around her than I would around a young, healthy friend. And I think that’s the kind of thing that I’ve gotten more or less used to doing. I was a little more chill a few months ago, but since cases have gone up, I’m trying to be vigilant, especially because I am about to be seeing some vulnerable people. As we approach the holidays, it’s them I’m keeping in mind more so than myself.

Rosin: Sarah?

Zhang: I have a somewhat specific virus situation, which is that I have a daughter in day care who is getting me sick approximately every other week. (Laughs.) I have been sick, I think, six times in the past three months. So I think, from my perspective, I don’t think I’m going to treat COVID much differently than all of these other viruses she’s bringing home.

Because even if I sealed myself in a hermetic bubble, went about my life, and then picked up my daughter from day care, I’m still going to get sick. But, that said, if I am sick, I am not going to come into the office. If I have to go somewhere like a pharmacy, I would wear a mask. I might start masking on the subway just because it’s such a dense and, frankly, often smelly place anyways, so I don’t feel like wearing a mask on the subway is a big ask.

And if I’m going to visit anyone, I always disclose that I’m sick and say, “Would you like me to stay home?” If I’m visiting my parents especially, I will try not to be sick around them. But I think for me, there are just so many viruses that I’m going to be sick with—and this is just my personal situation—that I am just going to be vigilant like that with every single one.

Rosin: Right, so to each his own. Basically, make good decisions, but you can make them particular to your situation. Well, Katie, Sarah, thank you so much for joining me and guiding us through this moment

Wu: Thank you for having us.

Zhang: Yeah, thank you for having us.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was engineered by Rob Smeirciak and fact-checked by Stephanie Hayes. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid, and our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday.